The Holocaust's Uneasy Relationship With Literature
The Atlantic
By Menachem Kaiser
Literature and the Holocaust have a complicated relationship. This isn't to say, of course, that the pairing isn't a fruitful one--the Holocaust has influenced, if not defined, nearly every Jewish writer since, from Saul Bellow to Jonathan Safran Foer, and many non-Jews besides, like W.G. Sebald and Jorge Semprun. Still, literature qua art--innately concerned with representation and appropriation--seemingly stands opposed to the immutability of the Holocaust and our oversized obligations to its memory.
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The Beleaguered Cambodians
The New York Review of Books
By Margo Picken
More than thirty years after an estimated two million people died at the hands of Pol Pot's regime of Democratic Kampuchea, trials of senior Khmer Rouge leaders and those most responsible for the deaths are at last taking place in Cambodia. On July 26, the first to be tried, Kaing Guek Eav, commonly known as Duch, was sentenced to thirty-five years in prison for war crimes and crimes against humanity--a sentence that he and the prosecution have since appealed. Duch directed Security Prison 21, also known as Tuol Sleng, where at least 14,000 prisoners, mostly Khmer Rouge cadres and officials, were tortured and killed.
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