The Mutilated Body: The Representation of the Feminine Body in Female Holocaust Survivors’ Memoirs

Liliane Steiner, Ph.D  
Principal Research Assistant, The Arnold and Leona Finkler Institute of Holocaust Research, Bar- Ilan University, Israel. Hemdat College of Education..

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Abstract

The female experience of the Holocaust delineates loss, de-feminization, and desecration of the feminine Jewish body. Abject and silence impose their conceptual framework on female Holocaust memoirists, resulting in a fragmentary representation that allows a partial glimpse into the (inner) past-experience of these female survivors. In a feminist act, these survivors settle scores with their perpetrators and subtly recount the story of the perpetual assault inflicted upon the Jewish feminine body during the Holocaust and, in many cases, during the post-war period. This study aims to stress the poetics of this writing, that I call the poetics of catastrophe.

Keywords: silence, abject, settling of scores, poetics of catastrophe, feminine body.