ABSTRACT
To the strains of the theme tune of the acclaimed Italian film La vita e bella, the couple begin to perform a Holocaust-themed ice-dancing revue that features pretend shooting, guard dogs barking, and that ends with the sound of machine gun fire. The Holocaust scholar Saul Friedlander astutely links contemporary debates about adequate and respectful Holocaust representation to the rise of postmodernism. Holocaust Fiction is thus moving away from the sanctioned narrative of what Gillian Rose provocatively terms ‘Holocaust piety.’ Holocaust commemoration in contemporary society, it seeks to show, is constantly moving, changing, and evolving – and rightly so. In the case of the Holocaust, the ‘emptiness’ is the literal void that has been left by the deaths of over six million murdered Jews and by the eradication of the East European Jewish Shtetl culture, suitably highlighted by Foer through the complete destruction of the village of Trachimbrod.
