Reviewed by:

• New Directions in Jewish American and Holocaust Literatures: Reading and Teaching ed. by Victoria Aarons and Holli Levitsky
• Joe Kraus (bio)

This ambitious collection aims to give a glimpse at how contemporary scholarship in Jewish American and Holocaust Studies is addressing the trauma of the twentieth century as survivors dwindle and we lose the immediacy of direct witness. Several of these essays lay out an anxiety over what it means for narratives of the Holocaust and—less urgently but still compellingly—narratives of the immigrant experience to pass from first-person accounts to second- and now third-generation chroniclers. Organized into a two-part structure, one half of the book addressing challenges of reading the literature and the other to teaching it, the whole demonstrates how an expanded understanding of midrashic reading can address that anxiety and point to revitalized ways of reading the literature.

Many of the individual essays offer approaches to literature at risk of being increasingly challenging without survivors to mediate it. Phyllis Lassner, as an extension of work she’s admirably pursued for years, considers the particular challenge in the narrative of hidden children survivors who represent a vanished culture that they themselves must learn aspects of secondhand. Aimee Pozorski focuses on how the “trope/figure” of Anne Frank has been made to serve particular ends at the price, perhaps, of the identity of the girl herself. And Jessica Lang offers strategies for teaching third-generation Holocaust writers, including David Bezmogis, Erika Dreifus, and Eduardo Halfon, as a way of reasserting the urgency of the events they depict for students today. [End Page 210]

Other essays explore strategies for reconstructing our approaches to literature that, through familiarity, risks losing elements of its initial witnessing power. In a striking essay, Naomi Sokoloff demonstrates how we might read the Shema as a literary text, one that, while part of the daily reflection of any practicing Jew, flashes poetic and contemporary insights. Zygmunt Mazar writes of his success in using the sometimes controversial William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice when he teaches in a Polish context, arguing that the potential for “de-Judaizing” the Holocaust is counter-balanced by the novel’s capacity to evoke empathy. And Eric Sundquist opens the collection with a harrowing exploration of the metaphor of “Black Milk,” of Jewish mothers who are denied the capacity to nurse their infants. Applying his typically astute lens, Sundquist restores a horror to the experience that makes for difficult reading but admirably demonstrates the work it takes to remember and bear witness.

But, most insistently, the collection addresses the implicit challenge of remembering the profound trauma that has shaped the American Jewish experience amid new waves of cultural violence. Many of these essays acknowledge the shadow of 9/11 and its aftermath as altering the experience of reading and teaching, and a few of the more recently written ones further acknowledge the specter of the verbal—and too-often physical—violence unleashed with the election of Donald Trump. In a period that philosopher Lee McIntyre and others refer to as a “post-truth” moment, the challenge of keeping alive the experience of the Holocaust is perhaps greater than it has been since the initial wave of recognizing that it took place at all.

In that light, Sandor Goodhart defines midrash as responding “to a gap or tear in the primary text in such a way that it constitutes a material extension of that text” (128). In so doing, he asserts that, as in tikkun ha’olam, there is a Jewish obligation to finish the unfinished story we experience. That implies an ethics of reading but also—as Monica Osborne in particular underscores in her contribution—a philosophy of textual limit. Put simply, the story is incomplete without its reader, and our challenge in every age is to keep our reading fresh.

Several of the essays, then, consider that precise question: how can we flesh out meaning from such “gaps” while still doing justice to the truth of the original work. Goodhart himself...

审核人：

• 美国犹太人和大屠杀文学的新方向：阅读和教学编辑。维多利亚·亚伦斯和霍莉·莱维茨基
• 乔克劳斯（生物）

这个雄心勃勃的收藏旨在让我们一睹犹太裔美国人和大屠杀研究的当代学术如何解决二十世纪随着幸存者的减少和我们失去直接见证的直接性所带来的创伤。其中几篇文章表达了对大屠杀叙事的焦虑，以及——不那么紧迫但仍然令人信服的——移民经历的叙事从第一人称转移到第二代和现在的第三代编年史。本书分为两部分，一半是解决阅读文学的挑战，另一半是教授文学，整体展示了对中式阅读的扩展理解如何解决这种焦虑，并指出阅读文学的复兴方式。

许多单独的文章提供了文学方法，在没有幸存者调解的情况下，它面临着越来越具有挑战性的风险。菲利斯·拉斯纳 (Phyllis Lassner) 作为她多年来令人钦佩地追求的工作的延伸，考虑了隐藏儿童幸存者的叙事中的特殊挑战，他们代表了一种消失的文化，他们自己必须学习二手货的各个方面。艾米·波佐斯基 (Aimee Pozorski) 专注于安妮·弗兰克 (Anne Frank) 的“比喻/人物”如何以牺牲女孩本人的身份为代价服务于特定目的。杰西卡·朗提供了教授大屠杀第三代作家的策略，包括大卫·贝兹莫吉斯、埃里卡·德雷弗斯和爱德华多·哈尔丰，以此重申他们为当今学生描绘的事件的紧迫性。[第210页结束]

其他文章探讨了重建我们文学方法的策略，通过熟悉，可能会失去其最初见证力量的元素。在一篇引人注目的文章中，娜奥米·索科洛夫展示了我们如何将《示玛》作为文学文本来阅读，尽管它是任何实践犹太人的日常反思的一部分，但它闪烁着诗意和当代的洞察力。齐格蒙特·马扎尔 (Zygmunt Mazar) 描述了他在使用有时有争议的威廉·斯泰隆 (William Styron) 的《苏菲的选择》 ( Sophie's Choice) 方面取得的成功当他在波兰语环境中授课时，他认为小说唤起同情心的能力抵消了大屠杀“去犹太化”的潜力。埃里克·桑德奎斯特 (Eric Sundquist) 以对“黑牛奶”隐喻的悲惨探索开场，犹太母亲被剥夺了喂养婴儿的能力。Sundquist 运用他典型的精明镜头，恢复了阅读困难的经历的恐怖，但令人钦佩地展示了记住和见证所需的工作。

但是，最坚定的是，该系列解决了在新的文化暴力浪潮中记住塑造美国犹太人经历的深刻创伤的隐含挑战。其中许多文章承认 9/11 的阴影及其后果改变了阅读和教学的体验，而一些最近撰写的文章进一步承认了由唐纳德特朗普选举。在哲学家李·麦金太尔（Lee McIntyre）和其他人称之为“后真相”时刻的时期，保持大屠杀经历的挑战可能比最初承认大屠杀发生以来的挑战更大。

有鉴于此，Sandor Goodhart 将 midrash 定义为“以构成该文本的实质性扩展的方式对主要文本中的空白或撕裂做出回应”（128）。在这样做时，他断言，就像在tikkun ha'olam 中一样，犹太人有义务完成我们所经历的未完成的故事。这意味着阅读伦理，而且——正如莫妮卡奥斯本在她的贡献中特别强调的那样——一种文本限制的哲学。简而言之，没有读者的故事是不完整的，我们每个时代的挑战都是让我们的阅读保持新鲜。

然后，有几篇文章考虑了这个精确的问题：我们如何才能从这些“差距”中充实意义，同时仍然公正地对待原著的真实性。古德哈特本人...