1st Edition

Holocaust, War and Transnational Memory Testimony from Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Literature

By Stijn Vervaet Copyright 2018
196 Pages 4 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

196 Pages 4 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

196 Pages 4 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

Until now, there has been little scholarly attention given to the ways in which Eastern European Holocaust fiction can contribute to current debates about transnational and transgenerational memory. Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav literary narratives about the Holocaust offer a particularly interesting case because time and again Holocaust memory is represented as intersecting with other stories of... Read more

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part I The Generation of Survivors

1. Holocaust Testimony in Socialist Yugoslavia

2. Staging the Holocaust in the Land of Brotherhood and Unity: Đorđe Lebović’s Holocaust Dramas

3. Ilija Jakovljević’s Poetry of Testimony

Part II The 1.5 Generation

4. Writing the Subject after the Holocaust: Konstantinović’s Ahasver, or Treatise about a Beer Bottle

5. The Gulag and The Holocaust in Danilo Kiš’s A Tomb for Boris Davidovich

Part III The Second and Third Generations

6. Entangled Histories: Family Memories and the Representation of the Holocaust in the Work of David Albahari

7. Berlin Encounters: The Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s through the Lens of the Holocaust

8. Between Local and Global Politics of Memory: Holocaust Remembrance in Contemporary Serbian Prose Fiction and Film

Concluding Remarks

Biography

Stijn Vervaet is an Associate Professor in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian and Balkan Studies in the Department of Literature, Area Studies, and European Languages at the University of Oslo, Norway.

"Stijn Vervaet’s ground-breaking study not only fills the gaps in the existing literature on the topic, but also opens up new vistas and asks pertinent questions which will serve as signposts for many researchers in years to come. This valuable book deserves a wide readership and a careful reading."

Zoran Milutinović, University College London, UK

"In Holocaust, War and Transnational Memory, Vervaet creates an archive of Yugoslav literary works in order to trace the complexities, ambiguities and unexpected turns of Holocaust memory. While the argument is about the Yugoslav context, Vervaet’s masterful reading contributes to wider debates about testimony, witnessing and legacies of historical trauma."

Emil Kerenji, Applied Research Scholar at The Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, USA