Holocaust writing in Canada has taken a number of forms. Survivors have created a large catalogue of memoir—in print, on video, professionally and privately published. Major Yiddish writers, most notably Chava Rosenfarb, have turned their own experiences into historically detailed fictional tableaux. Since the 1960s, writers with no personal contact with the events of the war have grappled with its legacy, including its impact on the popular imagination. A.M. Klein’s The Second Scroll is a rare early case. Published in 1951, it provides a fictional retelling of a mass murder in Ukraine, which Klein likely heard about in his family home via reports from European emissaries. After Klein, Leonard Cohen, and then to a deeper extent, Mordecai Richler, engaged with the scope of postwar trauma, historical amnesia, as well as the possibility of an unhealthy obsessive relationship with Holocaust history and memory.
Nicholas Maes’s Dead Man’s Float can be...
Norman Ravvin’s recent novel is The Joyful Child (Gaspereau Press, 2011). Previous books include a story collection, Sex, Skyscrapers and Standard Yiddish (Paperplates Books, 1997), and a volume of essays entitled A House of Words: Jewish Writing, Identity and Memory (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997). He lives in Montreal.
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