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• W4313194688 abstract "Reviewed by: Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontextual Reading by Leona Toker Sarah J. Young Toker, Leona. Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontextual Reading. Jewish Literature and Culture. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 2019. xii + 281 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $90.00; $40.00. The literature of the Holocaust has generally attracted more critical and public attention than the body of texts by survivors of the Stalinist Gulag. Leona Toker, who has been at the forefront of the study of the latter for more than thirty years, brings the two together to mutually illuminating effect in the present work. Her ‘intercontexual’ approach, using texts and examples from one system to explicate issues in writings from the other, is sensitively applied to conduct measured and frequently persuasive comparisons. She argues that the use of hunger as a controlling mechanism was a comparable feature in the functioning of both camp systems, without implying equivalence between the Nazi concentration camps, the fundamental aim of which was to produce death, and the Stalinist hard labour system, in which death was, rather, an ‘unregretted by-product’ (p. 127). As in much of Toker’s critical oeuvre, the Kolyma Tales of Varlam Shalamov are placed at the centre of this study, alongside commentary on the Gulag memoirs and fiction of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Evgeniia Ginzburg, Julius Margolin, Georgii Demidov, Lev Kopelev and others, to form the core of the comparison with the works of Holocaust survivors, with a particular focus on Primo Levi, Elie Weisel and Ka-Tzetnik 135633 (Yehiel De-Nur). Two introductory chapters cover the history of both camp systems and the traditions of writing they engendered among survivors, as well as the methodology the study employs. The main chapters address the depiction of the effects of hunger disease on the bodies and consciousnesses of camp inmates; representing the monotony and repetitiveness of forced labour; the challenges of rendering death, as ubiquitous event and singular experience that is immune to narration from within; the possibilities, forms and potential of resistance in extremis; the theological and philosophical significance of suffering and the impossibility of faith in the camps; the end — literal or [End Page 364] figurative — of the camp systems; and the role of survivors’ guilt, especially in the context of survival because another prisoner has died. The conclusion addresses ethical questions more broadly, including the ethics of dissent, of readership and of literary criticism. Toker’s development of her intercontextual reading leads to some genuinely compelling interpretations. A good example is the focus on the question of indifference to life and death in the chapter on the Muselmann, the ‘completely exhausted, partly demented, nearly dead human being’ (p. 88) of Nazi concentration camps, and the similar figure of the dokhodiaga (goner) in the Stalinist Gulag. Drawing on analysis of hunger disease by doctors in the Warsaw ghetto and medical studies of starvation in the Leningrad blockade, Toker argues that the apathy imputed by many survivors to those suffering from extreme depletion in the camps was, rather, a symptom of the disease, which left victims unable to express their feelings facially. In the memoirs, this becomes ‘a defense against the pain of empathy’ (p. 93) that implicates the reader as much as the goner’s fellow inmates. By contrast, Shalamov’s stories, including ‘Sententia’ (1965), do not identify the goner with the other, but seek to depict the inner life of prisoners on the verge of death, and the possibilities of alternate modes of perception engendered by this state. Toker later returns to the same story and the identification of anger as the final emotion remaining to the goner to elucidate very effectively Weisel’s allusions to the story of Job. While there is much to take away from such interpretations, the study does not quite manage to sustain the relevance of its intercontextuality to the end, and thus reveals some limitations to the comparison. Particularly problematic in this regard is chapter eight, ‘End Games’, which struggles to persuade the reader that the texts in question can elucidate each other in the same way as the earlier material. At issue here is the very different context..." @default.
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• W4313194688 date "2022-04-01" @default.
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• W4313194688 title "Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontextual Reading by Leona Toker" @default.
• W4313194688 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/see.2022.0022" @default.
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