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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)

The field of coping has become more developed during the past decades but there is still a lot to be discovered and discussed. Theories of developmental psychology describe the possibility to map a general developmental structure of how the human mind expands. The aim of this study is to contribute to further research in whether there is a reason why we cope the way we do in relation to age. The questions answered in this study was, what coping two girls, whom lived during the Holocaust, used and how the coping found, were possible to interpret from theories of developmental psychology. In order to answer the questions asked a method called Template Analysis Style and three different theories have been applied. The main theory is about coping by Kenneth Pargament and the other two are theories of developmental psychology out of the cognitive perspective by Jean Piaget and the psychosocial perspective by Erik H. Erikson. The conclusion made by this study is that it is possible to associate and interpret the result found in the material from the two individuals with developmental psychology. However, more studies are needed before it is possible to make any kind of generalizations.

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Master of Philosophy (MPhil) / My thesis was designed to shed light on the numerous ways in which a small group of forty three orphaned Holocaust survivors adapted to their new lives in Australia, whilst keeping their preferred Jewish practices. I have attempted to explain the reasons for their choices in doing so. The majority abandoned their belief in the existence of God but felt obliged to keep, preserve and manifest a Jewish identity. This was achieved by celebrating some Jewish traditions. A few retained both belief in God and Jewish practices. All interviewees were born between 1927 and 1932. They originated from seven European countries and came from homes where the degree of Jewish observance varied. They survived the Holocaust whether incarcerated, in hiding or rescued by early Kindertransporte. The education and schooling of all the interviewees had been disrupted as a consequence of the Holocaust. A few continued their studies and completed tertiary education at university or technical college. The remainder embarked on acquiring various skills, which eventually assisted them in their occupation. My research demonstrates that the level of education or professional skills bear no correlation to the level of religiosity. The interviewees who came from acculturated backgrounds, continued with corresponding Jewish practices in their adult years. Belief in God had played no major role in the lives of their parents. However, practice of certain rituals had been integrated into their Jewish identity. Transporting these rhythms to Australia caused no difficulty for these interviewees in their post-war lives. A considerable transformation of Jewish rites and rituals occurred amongst the interviewees, who came from shtetls. Their previous unswerving belief in God had been challenged, so that it was either weakened or, in many cases, vanished. The adherence to Jewish traditions and laws had diminished. Many relinquished observation of the laws of kashrut. The Sabbath was no longer observed and revered as it had been in the pre-war years. The contrast of such entrenched Jewish traditions from shtetl lives to suburban life in Australia in the 1950s was too great. A significant difference emerged within the group of six interviewees, who kept their belief in God. Their backgrounds were Modern Orthodox. They came from larger towns or cities in three countries. Education had played a crucial part in their early life. Learning, in conjunction with adherence to religious traditions and laws had shaped their childhood and upbringing. The retention of faith and Orthodox traditions correlated with their love of learning. Modern Orthodox practices could be more easily maintained than the traditions followed in shtetls. All forty three interviewees kept their Jewish identity in one form or another. As Jewish identity can be explained in terms of religiosity, ethnicity, culture and nationalism, this continuity was possible. Survivors, who lost their belief in God, were able to continue with Jewish rituals, traditions and life cycle events as part of their ethnicity or culture. There is no doubt that for the large majority of the interviewees, the Holocaust affected their religious life. Losing their parents and siblings as a result of the Holocaust shattered their beliefs and resulted in an abandonment of their previously held beliefs and trust in God. As a consequence, changes occurred in their Jewish identity. They considered themselves as Jews, without adhering to any religious form. However, they were not prepared to relinquish all traces of Jewish identity. The memories of their lost families proved too treasured to allow them to abandon all Jewish ties. It is my conclusion that the rhythms of Jewish life constituted a defining factor in the re-building of their shattered lives after the Holocaust. They provided a framework which allowed and maintained the continuity of Jewish existence, their belief in God and Jewish rites and rituals. For those interviewees who abandoned their belief in God, Jewish rites and rituals served to provide identification with Jewish peoplehood and culture. However, many of the teenage survivors practised these rhythms and rituals in a secular/cultural manner, rather than emanating from a belief in God. These reactions reflect the complexity of Jewish identity in the modern and post modern world.

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This dissertation investigates two of W.G. Sebald’s novels, "Die Ausgewanderten" and "Austerlitz" as examples of a unique kind of Holocaust fiction by a non-Jewish German author. Sebald’s fiction represents a radically different German depiction of the Holocaust and its effects on Jewish victims, as it deconstructs critical discourse and debates about the Holocaust in Germany, establishing an ethical approach to Jewish suffering and the idea of coming to terms with the Nazi past in the German context. Through the narrative structure, ambiguity and the language of the German narrators, what I term its language of uncertainty, Sebald’s fiction avoids appropriating the Jewish voice as well as identifying with Jewish Holocaust victims and survivors, while giving voice to the underrepresented Jewish perspective in contemporary German literature. In addition, this dissertation examines competing discourses on representation, victimization and memory in regard to the Nazi past and views Sebald’s work as a critical response to these discussions. Indeed, Sebald’s fiction moves the discussion beyond the trope of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (“mastery of the past”), which has for so long dominated discussion of the Holocaust in Germany, towards a reconsideration of the victims, whose voice has been marginalized in the focus on the non-Jewish German handling of the Nazi past. / text

Holocaust Memory for the Millennium fills a significant gap in existing Anglophone case studies on the political, institutional and social construction of the collective memory of the Holocaust since 1945 by critically analysing the causes, consequences and 'cosmopolitan' intellectual and institutional context for understanding the Stockholm International Forum on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research (26th January - 28th January 2000)

Cricket in a Fist is composed of seven stories about a secular Jewish family settled in Canada. The central character, Ginny Reilly, is raised by her mother and grandmother, who emigrated from the Netherlands after surviving the Holocaust. When she is thirty-seven, Ginny suffers a head injury that causes temporary memory loss and a permanent personality change, and she becomes a self-help guru. Following a cultural crisis such as the Jewish Holocaust, a family may disconnect itself from cultural memory, and a family without cultural memory, like an amnesiac patient, must reformulate a sense of identity. As the characters in Cricket in a Fist grapple for an unblemished identity in Canada, they try to dismiss their unruly history. Analogously, the conscious formation of self is the basis of Ginny’s self-help philosophy, which urges wilful forgetfulness as a means to cast off all traces of irresolvable ambiguity and traumatic memory.

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