ABSTRACT
The problem many find, with literary fiction about the Holocaust, is that it is
fiction. The thought that governs our discomfort with the idea of Holocaust
fiction is primarily a moral one; but one with epistemic implications lurking
in its depths. We feel ourselves under a duty to those who suffered, to confront
as best we can the unvarnished facts of their suffering, and to refrain, above all
things, from embroidering them, falsifying them, with any admixture of our
own concerns. Here, more than anywhere else, we feel, we need forms of
writing that can stand, as Aharon Appelfeld puts it in the epigraphic passage
above, as ‘‘the authentic expression of reality.’’ And literary writing, we imply,
fails that test: it is not, whatever other virtues it may possess, an authentic
expression of reality.
