The Escapist: Fantasy, Folklore, and the Pleasures of the Comic Book in Recent Jewish American Holocaust Fiction

Abstract

In three recent books by young Jewish American writers, Nathan Englander's For the Release of Unbearable Urges (1999), Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated (2002), and Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), each author uses fantasy to represent the Holocaust or to thematize the problem of its representation. In these writers' hands, fantasy can point to the difficulty of directly accessing historical experience, it can be a medium for representing Jewish folk culture before the Holocaust, and it can even provide pleasure and escape through its diversions. In Englander's story "The Tumblers," the famous Fools of Chelm are transplanted into a Nazi environment and miraculously survive. In Everything Is Illuminated, Foer uses magical realist devices to give shape to his imaginary shtetl, Trachimbrod. Chabon's Kavalier & Clay is exceptional in presenting fantasy as a means of therapeutic escape from history. Chabon most directly confronts the problem of representation through non-realist techniques, and strikingly, he sets up a defense of popular escapism as a quintessentially American artistic response to the Holocaust.

Tales from Over There: The Uses and Meanings of Fairy-Tales in Contemporary Holocaust Narrative

“…The Wisps of Ardisht -that clan of artisan smokers in Rovno who smoked so much they smoked even when they were not smoking, and were condemned by shtetl proclamation to a life of rooftops as shingle layers and chimney sweeps (16).…”

Trauma, Ethics and Myth-Oriented Literary Tradition in Jonathan Safran Foer's "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close"

“…Manzanas and Benito (2002: 1-21) also offer an illuminating analysis of the role of cultural borders in North America that they later extend to a consideration of magical realism as a transnational product characteristic of postcolonial societies (2003: 125-159). As Brian elements in this tradition in his novels The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex (Collado-Rodríguez 2005 and2006) and Foer himself openly resorted to the same mode in his first novel, Everything is Illuminated (see Behlman 2004). Although in a more conceited manner, in his second novel such mythic mode helps us understand why fantasy as a whole -not only the one reflected through Oskar's focalization of the narrative -is also an important ingredient in a book that reviewers frequently understood as a realist example of post-September 11 trauma fiction.…”