COML282 - Mod Heb Lit & Film Trans: the Holocaust in Israeli Literature and Film

In the first decade of the new millennium, the so called “Second Generation”, children of Holocaust survivors reached maturity. Only in their 40s and 50s they finally began confronting and reconstructing their parents’ experiences, as well as their own nightmarish childhoods. These include striking narratives Our Holocaust by Amir Gutfreund and Corner People by Esty G. Hayim as well as films like Walk on Water. The third generation is also returning to the forbidden story with prize winning films like The apartment. The quintessential Holocaust narrative The Diary of Anne Frank appeared in 1947, one year prior to the establishment of the Jewish State. Nevertheless, Israeli culture &quot;waited&quot; until the public trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 to hesitantly face the momentous catastrophe. The Zionist wish to forge a &quot;New Jew&quot; motivated this suppression, at least in part. Aharon Appelfeld’s stories were the first Holocaust-related works to enter the modernist literary scene in the 1960s, followed by the cryptic verse of Dan Pagis, a fellow child survivor. It was not until 1988 that this practice of concealing the past was broken, when two Israeli-born pop singers, children of survivors, released the watershed documentary Because of That War. This course will follow and analyze the transformation of Israeli literature and cinema from instruments of suppression into a means of processing this national trauma. While Israeli works constitute much of the course's material, European and American film and fiction play comparative roles.<br />
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