Relocating Yiddish voices: Narrative disfigurement and the “almost-lost” story in Edgar Hilsenrath’s holocaust novel Jossel Wassermanns Heimkehr

Abstract

My contribution to this special issue investigates how Holocaust survivor and German-Jewish author Edgar Hilsenrath’s 1993 novel Jossel Wassermanns Heimkehr (“Jossel Wassermann’s Homecoming”) adopts a narrative practice of voicing Yiddish-speaking Holocaust victims in a post-Holocaust context for the purpose of imagining fictional alternatives to the historical violence inflicted upon them. Using a narrative strategy that I term the “almost-lost” story, Hilsenrath creates a narrative universe in which Yiddish voices, if not the actual Yiddish speakers, can be collected and saved as “anti-data” by disembodied “Quasselstimmen” (German for “chatty voices”). Coupled with strategic narrative interruptions that surface through iterations of narrative disfigurement, Hilsenrath gives rise to narrative possibilities for Jewish resistance within the scope of a literary text. I demonstrate how attentive readers can identify through Hilsenrath’s highly complex narrative a signature for reconsidering the confluence of imaginative fiction and Holocaust history, emphasizing the reader’s ethical dilemma in encountering this history, while also considering how fiction can point us in new directions as we endeavor to pry open and better understand the full scope of atrocities committed against humanity in search for a renewed commitment to humanity and justice in the aftermath of genocidal violence.