The Escapist: Fantasy, Folklore, and the Pleasures of the Comic Book in Recent Jewish American Holocaust Fiction

In three recent books by young Jewish American writers, Nathan Englander\u27s For the Release of Unbearable Urges (1999), Jonathan Safran Foer\u27s Everything is Illuminated (2002), and Michael Chabon\u27s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), each author uses fantasy to represent the Holocaust or to thematize the problem of its representation. In these writers\u27 hands, fantasy can point to the difficulty of directly accessing historical experience, it can be a medium for representing Jewish folk culture before the Holocaust, and it can even provide pleasure and escape through its diversions. In Englander\u27s story The Tumblers, the famous Fools of Chelm are transplanted into a Nazi environment and miraculously survive. In Everything Is Illuminated, Foer uses magical realist devices to give shape to his imaginary shtetl, Trachimbrod. Chabon\u27s Kavalier & Clay is exceptional in presenting fantasy as a means of therapeutic escape from history. Chabon most directly confronts the problem of representation through non-realist techniques, and strikingly, he sets up a defense of popular escapism as a quintessentially American artistic response to the Holocaust