Examines the effect of the Holocaust on traditional attempts to explain the Jewish people's sufferings while retaining the concept of covenant with God. also examines its influence on the self-image of American Jewry. Analyzes the works of Elie Wiesel, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, and Cynthia Ozick, among others, and suggests that awareness of a covenantal concept of Judaism is a criterion for authentic Holocaust literature. Adopts the definition of the Holocaust as a unique event - the plan to exterminate an entire nation, and describes various approaches to theological problems raised by the Holocaust.

Victoria Aarons and Alan L. Berger show that Holocaust literary representation has continued to flourish well into the twenty-first century-gaining increased momentum even as its perspective shifts, as a third generation adds its voice to the chorusof post-Holocaust writers. In negotiating the complex thematic imperatives and narrative conceits of the literature of third-generation writers, this bold new work examines those structures, tropes, patterns, ironies, disjunctions, and overall tensionsthat produce a literature that laments unrecoverable loss for a generation removed spatially and temporally from the extended trauma of the Holocaust. Aarons and Berger address evolving notions of "postmemory"; the intergenerational and ongoingtransmission of trauma; issues of Jewish cultural identity; inherited memory; the psychological tensions of post-Holocaust Jewish identity; the characteristic tropes of memory and the personalized narrative voice; issues of generational dislocationand anxiety; the recurrent antagonisms of assimilation and historical alienation; the imaginative re-creation and reconstruction of the past; and the future of Holocaust memory and representation. --Back cover.