ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 offers a close reading of De joodse messias (2004) by the Dutch-Jewish author Arnon Grunberg. Focusing on the novel’s critique of Holocaust victimhood as a sacred and defining feature in contemporary Jewish identity, Lensen shows how Grunberg’s meta-mnemonic thrust consists in a satirical depiction of anti-Semitic revisionism and philosemitic phantasies. The novel’s relevance as a fiction of meta-memory, so Lensen argues, lies both in its concern for identity politics in the context of World War II memory and in its provocative assessment of the Jewish-Orthodox community’s Holocaust victimhood through its form. By means of irony, absurd humor, hyperbole, the grotesque, and a fantastical plot, De joodse messias aims to undermine the gravity of contemporary discourses about the Holocaust. As a result, Lensen situates the novel within a larger tendency in contemporary Jewish literature, which Matthew Boswell has termed ‘Holocaust impiety’. The novel challenges particularly sentimental or sanctimonious approaches to the genocide to loosen rigid definitions in which Jewish identity continues to be linked to Holocaust victimhood – not only in an attempt to redefine this identity, but also to alert readers to the political misuses this victimhood is prone to in our contemporary society.
