By Or Rogovin

Created in the Image? Holocaust Perpetrators in Israeli Fiction

McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024, ISBN:  978022802210X, 282 pages.

The turn of the twenty-first century saw the rise of a brand of fiction that centres the experience and perspective of the perpetrator, thereby humanizing this character and granting it the capability to evoke our empathy. The vast scholarship published on this phenomenon, however, fails to consider Israeli writing, and with it some of the most complex characterizations of Holocaust perpetrators, imagined from the unparalleled position of a nation that was shaped from its very birth by the legacy of Holocaust victimhood and survival. In Created in the Image? Or Rogovin situates Israeli literary responses to the Holocaust in the canon of perpetrator fiction for the first time. Since the state’s establishment in 1948, perpetrator characterization in Israeli fiction has demonstrated a remarkable development that corresponds to changing circumstances, from the Eichmann trial to the First Intifada. While early examples depicted perpetrators stereotypically and minimally – as seen in Ka-Tzetnik’s demonic and bestial Nazis in Salamandra and in the amorphous persecutor figures in Aharon Appelfeld’s stories – since the mid-1980s these characters have been created in the human image, as nuanced and multidimensional individuals. The turning point came with Herr Neigel, the sensitive and self-contradictory commandant in David Grossman’s See Under: Love (1986), followed by likewise multifaceted and humanized perpetrators in fiction by A.B. Yehoshua, Savyon Liebrecht, and Amir Gutfreund. Anchored in theoretical and comparative perspectives, Created in the Image? presents a groundbreaking analysis of the poetic mechanisms, moral implications, and historical contexts of this paradigm shift in the Israeli literary response to the Shoah.