Homecomings after the Holocaust: comparing the survivor/eyewitness generation and postmemory perspectives in Czech prose fiction

This article examines literary representations of Holocaust survivors’ return to the Czech Lands in 1945, a long-overlooked motif in Czech fiction. It traces a major narrative shift through a comparative reading of survivor/eyewitness-authored and postmemory works. While early narratives cast survivors as passive figures marked by resignation and shaped by gendered, often eroticized frameworks, postmemory novels often contrast this by confronting postwar hostility, systemic injustice, and state-sanctioned dispossession with emotional precision and structural clarity. Drawing on contemporary theories of Holocaust literature, gender studies, and shifting historiography, this article explores the reimagining of survivor agency. It further considers the affective and spatial dynamics of return, where sensory detail and disorientation signal deeper ruptures in memory and belonging. Finally, it demonstrates how popular genre fiction employs the aesthetics of Holocaust kitsch.