SOURCE: Linafelt, Tod. “‘None Survived or Escaped’: Reading for Survival in Lamentations 1 and 2.” In Surviving Lamentations: Catastrophe, Lament and Protest in the Afterlife of a Biblical Book, pp. 35-61. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Linafelt examines elements of the dirge and lament in the first two chapters of the Book of Lamentation, deeming these sections “literature of survival.”

In my happier days I used to remark on the aptitude of the saying, “When in life we are in the midst of death.” I have since learnt that it's more apt to say, “When in death we are in the midst of life.”

—A survivor of the Belsen concentration camp

There are two kinds of discoveries in literary matters: the work that is complete in its very incompletion—an incompletion ineluctably carried to term—and the work that has come only halfway toward its...