A number of European authors who survived concentration camps, ghettos, and besieged cities in the middle of the twentieth century chose not to write straightforward memoirs or testimonials but instead to fictionalize their experiences. By manipulating narrative time and point of view and altering biographical facts, these writers produced literary texts that challenge common notions of what constitutes an appropriate representation of collective trauma. How might such works provide a deeper understanding of historical truth than the facts alone? What does the literature of the camps reveal about present-day spaces of confinement?

Worlds Apart explores the ethics of representation by reading the works of writers who use the techniques of literary fiction to depict survival in these precarious spaces. Benjamin Paloff traces the complex relationship between fact and truth in these texts, disentangling writers' individual experiences from fictional elements that universalize that experience and, in so doing, show the camp to be an institution of the present. Touring the unusual genre conventions of these works, he weighs crucial questions about what constitutes "truth" in historical representation, literature, and the popular imagination. Reading across Czech, French, German, Polish, Russian, and Yiddish, including lesser-known and untranslated works, Paloff considers portrayals of the Shoah, the Gulag, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the blockade of Leningrad. Bold, nuanced, and rich in comparative insight, Worlds Apart argues forcefully for the moral urgency of recognizing that the camp is not simply a historical artifact but a basic institution of contemporary society.

About the Author
Benjamin Paloff is professor of Slavic languages and literatures and of comparative literature at the University of Michigan. His books include Lost in the Shadow of the Word: Space, Time, and Freedom in Interwar Eastern Europe (2016) and The Politics: Poems (2011), and he has translated many works from Polish, Czech, Russian, and Yiddish.

Reviews
Worlds Apart is brilliantly written - accessible, creative, articulate and complex. * Times Literary Supplement *
A brilliant comparatist, Paloff articulates a new theory of genre of literature of the camps and besieged cities. He teaches us to abandon our Anglo-American obsession with the fact vs. fiction divide: only fictionalization can convey an experiential reality that inflicts such epistemological violence on the subject. Urgent reading for a world in which the camps, invisibly, persist. -- Emily Van Buskirk, author of Lydia Ginzburg's Prose: Reality in Search of Literature
Navigating challenging terrain with intellectual rigor and ethical responsibility, Worlds Apart points to new ways of reading works that capture the truths of life in extremis through fictional means. Sensitive to norms, genres, and cultural contexts, the book reframes fundamental questions about representation and representability. Paloff's lightly worn erudition, unerring sense for just the right question, and polemical verve are spellbinding. Not a dull moment in this bold and utterly original book. -- Edyta M. Bojanowska, author of A World of Empires: The Russian Voyage of the Frigate Pallada



Book Information
ISBN 9780231215107
Author Benjamin Paloff
Format Hardback
Page Count 272
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press