Individuality Through Objects and Literature in Holocaust Memory

Norine Zapata, the administrative assistant for the Center, handed me an article this morning from the University of Chicago Magazine (Volume 99, Number 5, May-June 2007).

It deals with the impersonal impressions of the Holocaust derived from satistics and piles of objects, such as eyeglasses or suitcases.

“Those piles of objects don’t speak of the lives of their owners. They speak of their death. Shoes, eyeglasses, bones: these speak of death.”

Literary theorist Bożena Shallcross, an associate professor of Slavic languages & literatures, uses literature to transform the role of these objects. “Very often poems do not talk about human fates, but only about objects,” she says. “They enumerate them, they list them, they show them, they describe them from a personalized perspective.”

Just like in non-Holocaust-related literature, an object is never just an object; it is a symbol, a metaphor. Rather than discrediting objects, then, Shallcross reemphasisizes their importance on an individual level.

Read the whole article here.