Yehuda Amichai Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Robert Alter

SOURCE: "Confronting the Holocaust," in After the Tradition: Essays on Modern Jewish Writing, E. P. Dutton and Co., 1969, pp. 163-80.

In the following essay, Alter discusses three novels of the post-Holocaust period—including Amichai's Not of This Time, Not of This Place—that attempt to reconcile survivors of modern Judaism with the horrors of the Holocaust.

Most people in our time have the face of Lot's wife, turned toward the Holocaust and yet always escaping.—Yehuda Amichai

With all the restless probing into the implications of the Holocaust that continues to go on in Jewish intellectual forums in this country, and at a time when there has been such an abundance of novels—even some good novels—by American Jews, it gives one pause to note how rarely American-Jewish fiction has attempted to come to terms in any serious way with the European catastrophe. Alfred Kazin, among others, has argued that no one can...
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