Over seventy years after the fallout of the Nazi genocide, depicting the Shoah continues to serve as a subject of widespread debate. Balancing the aesthetics of representation with historical accountability poses unique challenges to both readers and writers of Holocaust literature. In its extensive considerations of time and place, in its troubling of the conventional limitations of the Canadian novel, and in its suggestive possibilities both inside and outside of the ethnic mainstream, the genre is one of ample opportunity — a prospect that entails enormous responsibility. The difficulty of finding the appropriate language to represent the horrors of the Shoah is the central subject of this thesis, which focuses on interpretive responsibility in Mavis Gallant’s “The Pegnitz Junction” (1973). It situates the novella in both a theoretical and Canadian literary context, examines Gallant’s understanding of the ethics of aestheticizing the event, provides a full-length study of the story, and attempts to fill some of the gaps in critical scholarship by drawing attention to the multidimensionality of the text’s portrayal of a post-Auschwitz world. I look closely at how Gallant’s work prompts a suspension of logic and normalcy, and in turn reconceptualizes the novella insofar as its indirection causes her readership to contemplate whether Holocaust responsibility is, in the words of D.G. Myers, “to be shared by [readers], despite the fact that they are not to blame” (270). I suggest that the novella is a medium in which refusal to provide logical explanations for the Holocaust through aesthetic representation not only allows audiences to ponder the implications of humanity’s capacity to preserve and erase historical memory, but also causes them to consider how human beings ought to respond responsibly to the ramifications of historical trauma. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

In his 1987 essay "Canadian Poetry After Auschwitz," Michael Greenstein argues that A.M. Klein's mock-heroic poem, The Hitleriad (1944), ultimately fails to portray the severity and tragedy of the Holocaust because "it lacks the necessary historical distance for coping with the enormity" of the event (1). Greenstein's criticism is interesting because it suggests that in order for a writer to adequately represent the horrors of a traumatic event like the Holocaust it is "necessary" for him to be distanced from the event. While Greenstein specifically addresses historical (or temporal) distance, Canadian authors writing about the Holocaust have also, inevitably, had to negotiate their geographical and cultural distance from the historical event as well. Not surprisingly, their works tend to be immensely self-reflexive in nature, reflecting an awareness of the questions of authority and problems of representation that have shaped critical thinking about Holocaust literature for over half a century. This dissertation examines the role that distance has played in the creation and critical understanding of representative works of Canadian Holocaust literature. It begins with an extensive analysis of the poetry and prose of geographically-distanced poet A.M. Klein, whose work is unique in the Canadian literary canon in that it mirrors the shifting psychological state of members of the Canadian Jewish community as news of the Holocaust slowly trickled into Canada. This is followed by a discussion of the Holocaust texts of Irving Layton and Leonard Cohen, both of whom experimented with increasingly graphic Holocaust imagery in their works in response to the increasingly more horrifying information about the concentration camps that entered the Canadian public conscience in the 1960s. The dissertation then turns its attention to the uniquely post-memorial and semi-autobiographical works of two children of Holocaust survivors, Bernice Eisenstein and J.J. Steinfeld, before focusing on the Holocaust works of Timothy Findley and Yann Martel, both of whom produce highly metafictional novels in order to respond to the questions of appropriation and ethical representation that often surround works of Holocaust fiction created by non-Jewish writers. The dissertation concludes with an analysis of Anne Michaels' novel Fugitive Pieces—a text that addresses all three types of distance that stand at the center of this dissertation, and that illustrates many of the strategies of representation that Canadian writers have adopted in their attempts to negotiate, highlight, erase, and embrace the distance that separates them from the Holocaust.