From Publishers Weekly
The Holocaust cannot be recounted in terms of heroic dignity, moral courage or triumph of the human spirit; the Nazis' systematic murder of six million Jews, among millions of others, makes concepts such as resistance or moral growth largely inapplicable. This central theme pervades Langer's gripping, often profound essays, all of which have been published in scholarly journals in the last decade; the pieces scrutinize accounts of the Holocaust in survivors' and victims' testimonies, memoirs, fiction, films and plays. Langer, whose Holocaust Testimonies won a National Book Critics Circle award in 1991, praises Cynthia Ozick for her unflinching representation of the Nazi genocide, but he argues that Bernard Malamud's "conventional moral vision" insulated him to the enormity of Nazi evil. Langer also rips William Styron's portrayal, in Sophie's Choice, of Auschwitz commandor Rudolf Hoess, who, in Langer's reading, almost seems "a man otherwise decent and polite" when he wasn't killing Jews and Poles. He perceives a "language of consolation" in Steven Spielberg's film Schindler's List, and anlayzes strategies of mitigation or frank confrontation in Primo Levi, D.M. Thomas, Peter Weiss, Aharon Appelfeld, Tadeusz Borowski, Viktor Frankl and others. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
In this superb collection of essays, Langer (Holocaust Testimonies, Yale Univ. Pr., 1991) offers a penetrating analysis of how many Western intellectuals and writers have sought to come to terms with the Holocaust. He argues that they have created, in their novels, stories, and films, a morally manageable version of the Holocaust rather than an unadorned yet honest view of mass murder without historical parallel. His pieces cover a wide range of topics such as the relationship of the Holocaust to time and memory, its portrayal in popular culture, its dimensions in literature, and the ways in which the Holocaust has reshaped our sense of history. He is at his best in an essay on Cynthia Ozick, whom he regards as one of the few writers who has honestly sought to imagine in her work the genuine moral depths of the Holocaust. Also first-rate is his essay on the Americanization of the Holocaust on the stage and in films. For all collections.Mark Weber, Kent State Univ. Lib., OhioCopyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
In a statement that boldly indicates his approach to the Holocaust, Langer says, "Despite its candid representation of the ordeal of Jews during World War II, even a blunt film like Schindler's List decides to leave us with memories of a healing wound rather than a throbbing scar." According to Langer, too many historical and cultural representations of the Nazis' murders try, by portraying the Jewish victims as dignified martyrs, to introduce the notion of spiritual redemption into accounts of atrocities that need to be confronted without moral oversimplification. In his assessments, Langer analyzes many of the novels about the death camps, tellingly criticizing William Styron and Bernard Malamud and praising Cynthia Ozick as well as Polish author Tadeusz Borowski for their depictions of the era. Describing historical studies of the Holocaust, Langer objects to the use of "abstract formulas like `the murder of 6 million'" and says accounts of the destruction of European Jewry should be told in graphic detail to present and future generations. A horribly bleak, undeniably important book. Aaron Cohen


From Kirkus Reviews
With a highly sensitive but unsparing eye, these essays argue that new moral and linguistic categories are required in order to respond properly and honestly to the reality of the Holocaust. Langer (English/Simmons College), who won a National Book Critics Circle award for Holocaust Testimonies ( 1991), asserts that ``language preserves a semblance of order that disintegrates'' in the reality of the mass slaughter of Jews. Analyzing the ways in which people have tried to understand or represent the Holocaust, he looks at oral testimony, diaries, memoirs, and fiction, including works by writers like William Styron and Bernard Malamud for whom the Holocaust is an important but not necessarily central theme. Langer also examines some portrayals of the Holocaust on American TV, stage, and screen, eloquently resisting attempts to sentimentalize Holocaust victims, resisters, or survivors. Above all, he insists that the Holocaust represents a ``rupture'' in the images and values of modern Western culture, several times approvingly quoting Jean Am‚ry's observation that ``no bridge led from death in Auschwitz to Death in Venice.'' Langer's only questionable contention is that ``Auschwitz introduced the realm of the unthinkable into the human drama.'' What, one wonders, of the mass deaths of millions during WW I's trench warfare or Stalin's murder of as many as 30 million in the USSR during the purges? Generally, however, Langer writes superbly. He has a gift for simple yet resonant phrasing: Of fictional survivors such as Aharon Appelfeld's Great Barfuss and Cynthia Ozick's Rosa, he writes that they are emotionally and spiritually ``dead while alive'' and thus ``amputated from time.'' Langer applies his insightful, razor-sharp pen to others' works about an event that, he convincingly maintains, carries neither lesson nor moral but instead overpowers memory, mocks the pretensions of civilization, and leaves an absurd, irredeemable legacy. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Book Description
In the face of the Holocaust, writes Lawrence L. Langer, our age clings to the stable relics of faded eras, as if ideas like natural innocence, innate dignity, the inviolable spirit, and the triumph of art over reality were immured in some kind of immortal shrine, immune to the ravages of history and time. But these ideas have been ravaged, and in Admitting the Holocaust Langer presents a series of essays that represent his effort, over nearly a decade, to wrestle with this rupture in human values--and to see the Holocaust as it really was. These penetrating and often gripping essays cover a wide range of issues, from the Holocaust's relation to time and memory and its portrayal in literature to its use and abuse by culture and its role in reshaping our sense of history's legacy. In many, Langer examines the ways in which accounts of the Holocaust--in history, literature, film, and theology--have extended, and sometimes limited, our insight into an event that is often said to defy understanding itself. Admitting the Holocaust is a powerful view of this catastrophe that is candid and disturbing, and yet hopeful in its belief that the testimony of witnesses--in diaries, journals, memoirs, and on videotape--and the unflinching imagination of literary artists can still offer us access to one of the darkest episodes in the twentieth century.

ANNOTATION

These penetrating and often gripping essays cover a wide range of issues, from the Holocaust's relation to time and memory to its portrayal in literature to its use and abuse by culture to its role in reshaping our sense of history's legacy. Includes writings by Cynthia Ozick, Bernard Malamud, and William Styron.

FROM THE PUBLISHER