After thanking the audience for braving the weather to attend the lecture, Dr. Alan Rosen began with a single question: “What can literature give us that history cannot?” Rosen spoke directly to the audience members and waited for people to gather the courage to speak. Some responded that literature is more subjective and can give more insight to the emotions. A literature professor in the back responded that literature has an aesthetic quality that can attempt to make sense out of history. Another person in the middle said that literature can connect the experience of the reader to the experience of the victims. Rosen did not express disagreement.

According to Rosen, literature has special qualities that distinguish it from objective fact. Rosen said that literature more clearly highlights the experience of the victims of the Holocaust in ways that history, which has been constructed out of Nazi documentation, failed to do. Rosen presented excerpts to highlight the deep cultural contexts of these stories that would not be apparent to non-Jewish readers.

“Today here, tomorrow not… was translated from the Yiddish ‘Today here, tomorrow there’,” Rosen said. According to Rosen, this phrase from the poem “I Lie in this Coffin” is an expression that affirms control to God in times of uncertainty among the European Jewry. He said that the poet Abraham Sutzkever, writing this poem while in the Vilna ghetto, was taking refuge in the simplest, and at times, the most grotesque things.

Rosen explained that the poems were a type of diary that documented the victims’ experience of the Holocaust. “You can take everything… but you cannot take our words, they will live forever,” Rosen said candidly of why the victims had spent so much energy on writing.

Dr. Rosen presented a reading from a Hasidic storyteller, giving more cultural context. Storytelling in the Hasidic tradition was often used to bring divine meaning to even the darkest tragedy. According to Rosen, the deepest tragedy in Jewish culture is the loss of a family member and the greatest pleasure is gaining insight about Scripture. The story, documented by Yaffa Eliach, tells the experience of a Hasidic Rabbi gaining insight about the Scripture through witnessing the death of a young boy’s twin brother.

At the close of the lecture, Rosen stayed afterward to answer questions. The audience lingered. “I’ve never been exposed to Holocaust literature,” said John Fish, a student of Seton Hill University.

Rosen’s lecture highlighted works that gave a voice to the victims. As the number of living Holocaust survivors slowly tapers, “it will be the artists and scholars responding to the Holocaust that will pass on our knowledge of it,” Dr. Dennis Jerz, associate professor of English, said.

This program was sponsored by the National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education of Seton Hill University.