Aharon Appelfeld and the Problem of Holocaust Fiction

The problem many find, with literary fiction about the Holocaust, is that it is fiction. The thought which governs our discomfort with the idea of Holocaust fiction is primarily a moral one; but one with epistemic implications lurking in its depths. We feel ourselves under a duty to those who suffered, to confront as best we can the unvarnished facts of their suffering, and to refrain, above all things, from embroidering them, falsifying them, with any admixture of our own concerns. Here, more than anywhere else, we feel, we stand in need of forms of writing which can stand, to borrow Aharon Appelfeld's phrase in the epigraphic passage above, as "authentic expressions" of reality. And imaginative fiction, we imply, fails that test is not, whatever other virtues it may possess, an "authentic expression" of reality. I was first led into the line of thought developed here by a chapter in Berel Lang's brilliant and searching enquiry into the intellectual roots of the Holocaust, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide. In Chapter 6 of that work, Lang deploys a rather impressive version of the