SOURCE: Lehmann, Sophia. “‘And Here [Their] Troubles Began’: The Legacy of the Holocaust in the Writing of Cynthia Ozick, Art Spiegelman, and Philip Roth.” Clio 28, no. 1 (fall 1998): 29-52.

In the following essay, Lehmann examines the role of creative imagination in constructing historical representations of the Holocaust in three works of Holocaust literature—Maus, The Shawl, by Cynthia Ozick, and The Ghost Writer, by Philip Roth.

The absence of direct experience or at least of a cultural ambiance that could render the unlived experience familiar, as well as a paralyzing sense of the enormity of the unexplored event, impeded—and eventually shaped—the assimilation of the Holocaust into American, and particularly into American-Jewish, literature.¹

The theological uses to which the Holocaust has been put by an assimilated American Jewish community are so diverse that the Holocaust has begun to replace the Bible as the new text that we must...