Women's Holocaust Writing

S. Lillian Kremer is a professor of English at Kansas State University. She is the author of Witness through the Imagination: Jewish-American Holocaust Literature.

"[Kremer] succeeds in bringing together portraits of women from a diversity of nationalities, cultures and social classes, and analyzing what distinguishes the work of those who write out of personal experience from those who bear witness through the imagination only. . . .She weaves into her critical discussions not only historical documentation but psychological and sociological studies, feminist and literary theories, as well as the reflections of the authors whom she interviewed. . . . A luminous study. . . . As the spectre of anti-Semitism looms again in Europe and America, the question is how a society deals with difference—all difference of ethnicity, gender, national identity. In this context, reading this complex, scholarly, readable book becomes even more necessary."—Women's Review of Books "Though similar in terms of hunger, cold, fear, and mistreatment, women's ordeals in the camps and ghettos and in hiding were and still are different from men's. This gendered distinction is the essence of this book. Kremer is the first scholar to explore this important topic, and what she reveals contributes much to Holocaust studies."—Choice "In giving the women writers and their characters the serious, thoughtful attention they deserve, Kremer both dignifies the subject and draws attention to these outstanding texts; at the same time, her own work adds yet another illustration to the contribution women writers can make to Holocaust study." —Studies in American Jewish Literature "An extraordinary book. It conveys in rich detail the accounts of three writers who experienced the Holocaust firsthand and four who, as American Jews, powerfully explored the Holocaust through fiction."—Criticism