French Literature Reviews - 2026
A. D. Rosenman Les Alphabets de la Shoah
History, Politics and Society
[Click here to read the review in the journal Acta Fabula]
Anny Dayan Rosenman
Les alphabets de la Shoah. Survivre. Témoigner. Ecrire.
Preface by Annette Wieviorka
CNRS Editions
March 29, 2007
ISBN: 978-2-271-06488-2
240 p.
25€
Publisher's blurb:
This study addresses the questions raised by genocide testimony on an individual as well as a collective level, and more broadly within our culture. It focuses essentially on major testimonies concerning the Shoah: Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski, Germaine Tillion, Jorge Semprún, Dan Pagis, Paul Celan, Claude Lanzmann, and Theodor Adorno. It aims to "unfold" three intersecting yet distinct figures: the survivor, the witness, and the writer. A perceptive essay that, beyond the Shoah, contributes to the debate on genocide and its representation, and the writing of the unrepresentable.
Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Imre Kertész, Anna Langfus, Jean Améry, or Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah: so many narratives wrested from silence, from mass death, and from the drive to dehumanize humankind. This book offers a resonant reading of these texts, questioning the wounds, the painful contradictions, and the vital stakes that run through all testimonial writing on genocide. Emerging from this reading are three figures born of disaster, overlapping yet distinct: the survivor who has returned from the dead like Lazarus; the witness who, through their very being, attests to the truth of their narrative and experience at the risk of being consumed by it; the writer-survivor, struggling with words, at times lending their voice or pen to dead voices that pass through them. Alongside them stands the Other of testimony—a figure of listening and transmission when they agree to traverse these alphabets of pain and the courage to speak, which constitute for them, as for us, the alphabets of the human.
Anny Dayan Rosenman is a Senior Lecturer in Literature at University Paris VII-Denis Diderot. Her research focuses on testimony and the role of traumatic memory in the construction of collective identities.
Anny Dayan Rosenman's study examines how literature confronts the limits of representation through the foundational testimonies of the Shoah. Analyzing works by Primo Levi, Jorge Semprún, Paul Celan, and others, the book investigates the complex intersections between historical trauma and literary form. It addresses the vital stakes of writing about extreme violence, tracing how authors struggle to articulate mass death while preserving the singularity of individual experience. This volume contributes significantly to broader scholarly debates surrounding memory studies, ethics, and the cultural transmission of historical catastrophe.
The book will be of particular value to scholars, students, and readers interested in twentieth-century literature, Holocaust studies, and the philosophy of testimony. By focusing on the triad of the survivor, the witness, and the writer, Rosenman offers a nuanced framework for understanding how texts negotiate the paradoxes of bearing witness to the unrepresentable. Her analysis provides essential tools for engaging with trauma narratives and reflects on the broader ethical responsibilities of reading and listening to the voices that emerged from the ruins of genocide.