ESSAY CEMETERY

Through the title character in his novel Elizabeth Costello , J.M. Coetzee explores the moral responsibilities of the writer. In Chapter Six of that novel, Elizabeth reads a book about the attempts of German soldiers on Hitler’s life. She is struck by a fictional passage in which a hangman taunts the plotters he is about to execute. Elizabeth finds the passage vivid and terrifying; she feels it is evil. Elizabeth feels some of the evil must have transferred to West through the mere act of imagining and writing the hangman’s words, and likewise to the novel’s readers. “I do not want to read this, she said to herself; yet she had gone on reading, excited despite herself. The devil is leading me on.” In The Sublime and the Beautiful , Edmund Burke defines the sublime. The sublime, he posits, is “the strongest emotion that the mind is capable of feeling” (Ch. 1.7). It is evoked by feelings of pain or danger. Most interestingly, pain that is far enough removed from danger elicits pleasure. ...

Rosa lives in Miami, Florida in a decrepit hotel for which Stella pays rent. She is retired after having axed her own junk shop vusiness. She writes letters to Stella to remain on good terms with her, and to Magda. She imagines Magda is alive. She writes her in Polish which she considers far superior to either English or Yiddish. She finally leaves her room to do some laundry at a Laundromat, where she meets Simon Persky, a Jew who left Poland before the War. She feels she is superior to him because he speaks Polish and English. He insists on courting her even though she behaves nastily towards him. She gets a package that she assumes is Magda's shawl, sent her by the reluctant Stella who has been taking psychology classes and regards Rosa's attachment to the shawl as unhealthy. Instead, it is a book sent her by Dr. Tree, a psychologist doing research on Holocaust survivors. Rosa resents being treated as a clinical subject rather than a human being. Rosa thinks Persky has taken...

In the latter half of the twentieth century, several Jewish American writers have taken on the task of representing the Holocaust and its victims in their art. Even though Isaac Bashevis Singer, Art Spiegelman and Cynthia Ozick are did not experience the Holocaust themselves, several of their works center on this sensitive issue. Through their short story, graphic novel and novella they explore the difficulty of writing about a topic that is for them as American Jews both near and distant, and raise issues regarding American society's treatment of Holocaust victims. Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus embodies the artist's struggle with depiction of the Holocaust on several levels. First, such a struggle is inherent the narrative's very form. For the depiction of a Holocaust story, Spiegelman chose the graphic novel, a medium he associates himself in the novel with the lighthearted fun of Walt Disney's cartoons (in a conversation with Vladek). Even though the su...

The Shawl Rosa, her infant daughter Magda and her niece Stella are in a concentration camp. They are all starving and malnourished. Rosa no longer lactates and Magda has been sucking on it as a source of comfort and, it seems to Rosa, nutrition, and consequently it seems sacred and magical to Rosa. Stella takes the shawl away, upon which Magda walks out of the barracks where Rosa has hidden her, ostensibly looking for the shawl. Rosa deliberates whether to get Magda or the shawl first. She gets the shawl but a Nazi soldier notices Magda and hurls her against an electric fence. Rosa, fearing for her life, does not move. She "drank Magda's shawl until it dried". Cynthia Ozick

Themes ·        Hunger and malnourishment ·        Physical alteration ·        Hatred of Stella ·        Superstition regarding the shawl ·        Aryan appearance ·        Shawl as a source of comfort ·        Decrepitude ·        Rosa's hypocrisy toward Stella ·        Contempt toward old age ·        Superiority of Polish ·        Snobbery and elitism ·        Miami and old people equated with the concentration camps and Jews – but self deluded and voluntary ·        Chauvinism ·        Criticism of psychology ·     ...