Abstract

The author describes the issues raised for him by team-teaching a course on the Shoah that aimed to incorporate familial, historical, and rhetorical perspectives. Considering firsthand testimonies, songs written by camp inmates, renderings of others’ stories such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and works of fiction and poetry by writers without firsthand experience of the Shoah, he is ultimately led to wonder whether the stories of those who underwent such experiences stand utterly outside critique and appropriation and may demand of us instead only that we never forget.