“Trees of Witness”: Posthuman Representations of the Holocaust in American Poetry

Abstract Through the lens of contemporary ecopoetics, this article focuses on three post-Holocaust female authors who explore their Jewish-American identity through a poetic reflection on the Shoah and its aftermath that places nature at the heart of their narratives. This article examines Elizabeth Rosner’s connection to bodies of water in Gravity (2014), Cheryl J. Fish’s advocacy for environmental justice in The Sauna Is Full of Maids (2021), and Lyn Lifshin’s imagined Holocaust landscapes in Blue Tattoo (1995). Though these poets remain ontologically and experientially distanced from the Shoah in different ways, they perceive their Jewish-American identity as deeply intertwined with the Holocaust. Their works do not merely instrumentalize nature as a symbolic device but adopt it with agency in order to emphasize an underlying sense of responsiveness and interspecies empathy that offers significant ramifications on identity and trauma. This article examines how their posthuman poetic reconfigurations of the events render nonhuman agents as bearers of memory, mediating the experiences of victims during the war and subsequent generations’ efforts to confront the unassimilable past. This discussion contributes to the dialogue between environmental humanities and Holocaust studies, providing new possibilities for understanding ecocide and genocide, past and present injustice, and gender and oppression.