{"product_id":"fantasies-of-witnessing-postwar-efforts-to-experience-the-holocaust-9780801442537","title":"Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust","description":"\u003cp\u003eFantasies of Witnessing explores how and why those deeply interested in the Holocaust  yet with no direct  familial connection to it  endeavor to experience it vicariously through sites or texts designed to make it \"real\" for nonwitnesses. Gary Weissman argues that far from overwhelming nonwitnesses with its magnitude of horror  the Holocaust threatens to feel distant and unreal. A prevailing rhetoric of \"secondary\" memory and trauma  he contends  and efforts to portray the Holocaust as an immediate and personal experience  are responses to an encroaching sense of unreality: \"In America  we are haunted not by the traumatic impact of the Holocaust  but by its absence. When we take an interest in the Holocaust  we are not overcoming a fearful aversion to its horror  but endeavoring to actually feel the horror of what otherwise eludes us.\" Weissman focuses on specific attempts to locate the Holocaust: in the person of Elie Wiesel  the most renowned survivor  and his classic memoir Night; in videotaped survivor stories and Lawrence L. Langers celebrated book Holocaust Testimonies; and in the films Shoah and Schindlers List. These representations  he explains  constitute a movement away from the view popularized by Wiesel  that those who did not live through the Holocaust will never be able to grasp its horror  and toward re-creating the Holocaust as an \"experience\" nonwitnesses may put themselves through. \"It is only by acknowledging the desire that gives shape to such representations  and by exploring their place in the ongoing contest over who really knows the Holocaust and feels its horror  that we can arrive at a more candid assessment of our current and future relationships to the Holocaust \" he says.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45960487272501,"sku":"ByrdShop_0801442532","price":79.14,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780801442537.jpg?v=1788288779","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/fantasies-of-witnessing-postwar-efforts-to-experience-the-holocaust-9780801442537","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}