ABSTRACT
Aharon Appelfeld, one of the best-known writers of Holocaust fiction, says thatwe should “keep literature out of the fire zone.” Though there’s something legitimate about the survivors’ desire to tell their stories, there seems to be something illegitimate for those who were not there to tell stories as if they were. James Young has suggested that in order to fend off this criticism, novelists from the generations after Auschwitz make use of the “trope of the document” by mimicking the historical and documentary prose of the eyewitness (see Chapter 3, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust). But as we saw in the previous chapter, there are some real questions as to whether or not such a “trope of the eyewitness” doesn’t backfire on the author.
