Making and Unmaking Literature in the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna Ghettos

A study of literature written by Jewish authors while interned in Nazi ghettos emphasizes how authors processed their horrific experiences through poetry and prose. So much Holocaust-era writing was destroyed, and for the most part, we have no way of knowing what was lost along with the very lives of authors.Most of the texts discussed in this book were buried in biscuit tins or milk cans in the Warsaw ghetto’s Oyneg Shabes Archive, the massive archival project that documented Jewish life in Poland under German occupation.Making and Unmaking Literature in the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna Ghettos shows that we cannot take the survival of such works for granted.It also demonstrates that literature was not an aesthetic offshoot of life within Nazi ghettos, but an intrinsic part of it, both in the reading and writing habits of starving inhabitants and in the ways that literature shaped the perception and reception of their realities. Rose delves into work written from within Nazi ghettoes.While