Description
Book SynopsisThe vulnerability of material objects as Holocaust texts
Trade ReviewShallcross's book is a significant contribution to current discussions of the Shoah, providing important insights into a broad range of themes that linger at a core of our debates.
* H-Poland *
Shallcross's illuminating study . . . underlines the way objects can relay information in a subliminal, almost visceral, but ambivalent way.
* Russian Review *
In analyzing the artifacts of writers who took up the ethical and precarious charge of testifying to the destruction engulfing and surrounding them, Shallcross has written an important book.
* H-Judaic *
Shallcross's book is intelligent, articulate . . . and for all its lucid and detached analysis, deeply moving. It is itself now a document of the Holocaust, at once concerned with the desperately important business of vivifying the past and those who constituted it.
* American Historical Review *
Here, as aptly as she has in her previous work, Shallcross looks at depictions of the depths of suffering through the 'dispossession' of belongings when a prisoner entered a concentration camp. This is a brilliant analysis. ...Highly recommended.October 2011
* Choice *
Shallcross . . . is to be congratulated for bringing to the attention of the world these literary remnants by translating these Polish-lanaguage testimonies and interpreting them with great learning and skill.
* Chicago Jewish Star *
Table of ContentsThe Totalized Object: An Introduction
On Jouissance
1. A Dandy and Jewish Detritus
2. The Material Letter J
On Waste and Matter
3. Holocaust Soap and the Story of Its Production
4. The Guilty Afterlife of the Soma
On Contact
5. The Manuscript Lost in Warsaw
6. Things, Touch, and Detachment in Auschwitz
Coda: The Post-Holocaust Object
Acknowledgments and Permissions
Notes
Bibliography
Index
