AMERICANIZING HOLOCAUST AS A METAPHOR IN THREE WORKS BY THE POST-WORLD WAR II JEWISH-AMERICAN AUTHORS MILLER, MALAMUD, AND ROTH

    Jewish-American fiction is a reaction as well as a product of its authors’ experiences in the United States, the world’s most culturally kaleidoscopic society.   This paper, as its title suggests, studies the procedure of Americanizing the Holocaust as one of the World War II gravest events by means of metaphorical symbolism in three fictional works written by the post-World War II Jewish American novelists, Miller, Malamud and Roth. While almost all Holocaust writing has approached its subject directly and frontally, those writers dealt with it symbolically and metaphorically, rarely confronting it directly. The aim of the metaphorical approach of the Holocaust is the introduction of the suffering of the main Jewish characters into the mainstream of the American culture by means of universalistic and humanistic presentation of that suffering. However, this humanistic message is exclusive as it is only the non-Jewish sympathizing character—even to the extent of conversion into Judaism—that is deemed humanistic. After this Americanization of the holocaust as a metaphor, academic curricula are not void of the study of the Holocaust which has become a staple mark in the collective public awareness far more important than any other national event.