Angry young man / Tadeusz Borowski -- The alchemist / Primo Levi -- The kabbalist in the death camps / Elie Wiesel -- The anti-witness / Piotr Rawicz -- The art of the self / Jerzy Kosinski (or the prankster)? -- Child of Auschwitz / Imre Kertesz -- A story for you / Thomas Keneally, Steven Spielberg -- The ghost writer / Wolfgang Koeppen -- The effect of the real / W.G. Sebald -- Willing executioners / Bernhard Schlink -- Identity theft : The second generation -- The third generation
Summary
What is the difference between writing a novel about the Holocaust and fabricating a memoir? Do narratives about the Holocaust have a special obligation to be 'truthful'--that is, faithful to the facts of history? Or is it okay to lie in such works? In her provocative study A Thousand Darknesses, Ruth Franklin investigates these questions as they arise in the most significant works of Holocaust fiction, from Tadeusz Borowski's Auschwitz stories to Jonathan Safran Foer's postmodernist family history. Franklin argues that the memory-obsessed culture of the last few decades has led us to mistaken
