Keeping History at Bay: Absent Presences in Three Recent Jewish American Novels
Journal: Modern fiction studies
Year: 2011

This essay discusses the impact of the Holocaust on three novels written by third-generation Jewish American authors: Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud &amp; Incredibly Close , and Nicole Krauss's The History of Love . Each novel, it is argued, carries Derridean traces of the Holocaust and its victims: the bombing of the Ukrainian village of Trachimbrod, the Jewish victim Simon Goldberg, and the Jewish Polish author Bruno Schulz haunt these texts as absent prese