Poetics, Phantasms, and the Ethics of Holocaust Representation: Isaac Bashevis Singer and American Fiction

Abstract This article attempts a comparative reading of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story Di Kafeteriye (“The Cafeteria” [1968]) in the context of Holocaust representation in American literature. Although set in New York and depicting the fraught relationship between two European Jews who, by the lights of Holocaust commemoration in that era, were not Holocaust survivors, the meaning and imagery of the Holocaust suffuse the story. To represent the Holocaust, Bashevis conceives of the event as a phantasm in the imaginations of his characters; similarly phantasmatic representations characterize the Holocaust fiction of writers such as Edward Lewis Wallant (The Pawnbroker [1961]) and Saul Bellow (Mr. Sammler’s Planet [1970]), as well as in essays by Randall Jarrell and Theodor W. Adorno. By contrast, one seldom encounters phantasms in the Holocaust fiction of survivors such as Chava Rosenfarb, Avrom Sutzkever, or Elie Wiesel. The phantasm as a device is a choice—one that in the example of Bashevis’s story or Adorno’s critical theory has resulted in serious and provocative literature—but in contemporary literature it can also distort the memory of the Holocaust by instrumentalizing it, thereby depriving survivors of agency.