Women's life writing after holocaust: challenges and strategies

This thesis focuses on the writing practices of some female Holocaust survivors as the strategies against the challenges in Holocaust history and literature which exclude and efface the women’s perspective, through the literary analysis of two Holocaust memoirs, Rena’s Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz by Rena Kornreich- Gelissen and I Have Lived a Thousand Years: Growing Up in the Holocaust by Livia Bitton-Jackson. Despite the differences in these memoirs regarding the memoirists’ authorship status, memoirs’ literary tone and minor themes revolving around the personal Auschwitz experiences, their similarities in terms of maximizing the self-representation and producing self-knowledge with motivation and aim to organize a shared consciousness and discursive communities after the Holocaust become prominent as the various strategies in Holocaust writing. By looking at the selfrepresentation in these memoirs not only under the influence of public discourse but also constructed in connectedness to other women and the use of the opportunities of historical and literary writing practices, this study offers that women’s Holocaust writing does not only bear witness to the gender-related atrocities but also claims the visibility of women’s perspective and helps women construct their identities in literature after a dark past targeting women with violence and humiliation. By making content, thematic and discourse analysis over these two memoirs, through this study, I aim to open a discussion on women’s Holocaust writing which might not have pre-determined and rule-bound features and which might be questioned whether it is transforming and transforme