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Jewish Literature, Mattering, Wasted Life, Religion and Religious Conflict…

- - - - All the characters in this novel go through an extremely traumatic experience that changes the way that they think. If we look at Aunt, Evelyn. She was an avid Lindbergh supporter, she was friends with his wife and she married the rabbi that went on public television to convince the country that he [Lindbergh] was not anti-semitic. After the riots, Lindbergh going missing, and her husband getting arrested, she had to find a way to cope with the fact that she is partly to blame for his rise to power, which is her trauma. Sheldon's mother died because Evelyn sent her down to Kentucky. She also has to learn how to cope with the cultural trauma of her people being murdered. In order to cope with this trauma, she convinces herself that the Lindberghs were not Anti-Semitic and that they were being used by the Nazis. If she didn't convince herself of this, she would have stayed stuck in her trauma and her guilt.
        
        The Plot Against America - Philip Roth
        
        Though none of the characters in this novel experience world war two the way that the characters in the other novels that deal with this topic do (after all, this is an alternate history), the characters still experience the trauma of the Shoah, and many do end up becoming ghosts. Alvin joined the Canadian military because he wanted to go to fight against Nazis and the genocide that was happening in Europe. The war was very traumatizing for him and so it, unsurprisingly, changed who he was. When he came back from Canada he spent a long time being a shell. He slept and stayed at home, sometimes going out to gamble with friends, but he wasn't working or participating with the family a lot. He was not really living, he was just passing through moments in his life.
  - - - Survival in Auschwitz - Primo Levi
        
        Primo Levi describes the two types of people that lived in the camps, the drowned and the saved. The drowned are those who are unable to abandon their morals and all they know to survive, thus they are those who die. The saved are those who do adapt to the camps and give up their morals to live. Those who kept their morals are those who gave up their lives and so a horrible decision had to be made.
        
        Levi survived the camps, he would thus classify themselves as one of "the saved" and throughout his life, he begins to wonder whether he was one of the saved, or were those who died but kept their morals the ones who were saved. In the essay "Shame" he grapples with this question and talks about trying to make a life for himself after surviving the camps. He survived the camps, but he isn't alive. At least, not in the same way that he was before it. At least part of him died in the camps and now he became a ghost of himself, floating through the world. How could he try and live life as he did before the Shoah like it never happened? Even though he left Auschwitz, Auschwitz never left him and it is something he can never move past. So he becomes a ghost, a shell of who he was before that happened.
- - - - Enormous Changes at the Last Minute - Grace Paley
  - - - The Tenants of Moonbloom - Edward Lewis Wallant
- - - - A Horse Walks into a Bar - David Grossman
        
        Dov is very admitted throughout the novel that he believes that he is dead. He tells it to the medium near the beginning of the novel then he spends the remainder of the novel proving it. He talks about how he wished his mum was the parent who died, and then when he found out it was his mum he felt guilt as though he was the one who killed her. He argues that that is the moment where he died, where he essentially killed himself, because how could he continue to live after wishing a parent dies? By wishing that he stopped being alive, because - for him - a living person would never wish something so awful to happen to someone. So he spends the rest of his life feeling as though he is a ghost.