Creating Holocaust Memory as an Intergenerational Hybrid Literature

A history of Holocaust literature confronts many challenges, including the 80-year outpouring of diaries, memoirs, autofiction, poetry, and imaginative fiction in many languages and its vast geographical spread of countless forms of terror perpetrated in concentration and death camps, ghettoes, and hiding. This chapter will demonstrate how a generational approach highlights the reflexive movements of Holocaust literature between the narrating present and the shaping force of fragmented memory and how an amalgam of literary genres coalesces to create and transmit Holocaust memory as a jagged genealogy, a transnational, intergenerational hybrid Holocaust literature. A survey of literature by First-, Second-, and Third-Generation writers will be followed by a study of Emuna Elon’s 2016–2020 novel House on Endless Waters that encompasses ethical and esthetic questions about Holocaust representation raised by each generation.