Beyond Imagination: Canadians Write About the Holocaust

Norman Ravvin’s novel Café des Westens won the Alberta Culture New
Fiction Award.

Beyond Imagination gathers responses to the Holocaust by Canadian
historians, journalists, poets, humorists, and novelists. The writers
speak from both personal and professional experience, making for a
rather eclectic collection. A few of the pieces included are far and
away more assured and original than the others, and make the volume
worth reading. One of these is Michael Marrus’s measured discussion of
the historian’s task, and of the difficulty of “finding the right
language, expressing oneself in the right idiom” when addressing the
Holocaust. Another, Larry Zolf’s “The Great Yiddish Mouthpiece,”
in a wholly different vein, shows that humor need not be considered an
inappropriate mode of address, if it is linked to an authentic personal
engagement with the subject at hand. Miriam Waddington’s haunting
story “Klara and Lilo” and Morley Torgov’s portrait of a gathering
of upscale Torontonians employ the kind of unpredictable narrative that
exemplifies how the oblique approach of fiction can offer effective
techniques for investigating difficult subject matter. And the
volume’s one non-Canadian contribution—Alan Bullock’s
“Afterword: Hitler and the Holocaust” —is a model document of
thoughtful, sharply revealing historiography. The much-anthologized
poems included here, by Irving Layton and Leonard Cohen, sit rather
uncomfortably in this company, but encountering them in an unusual
setting helps one read them anew.

Although almost all the contributors share similar backgrounds and,
with the exception of Layton and Naпm Kattan, represent the generation
born shortly before World War II, Beyond Imagination presents an
interesting array of Canadian voices.