This project constitutes a sustained attempt to investigate the correlation between testimony and landscape. My inquiry focuses on post-World War II fiction that engages the catastrophe of Shoah in terms of a corporeal and topographical remnant. As such, it aims to engage the effaced originary event as it emerges in the post-memory narrative. The imaginative reconstruction by the second- generation witness is driven by the need to know the spatial and temporal enclosure of trauma. Landscape and topography figure prominently in my research, because post-memory looks for traces, demands a narrative map. In each of these texts, translation is a rebirth mechanism, and in each case, when translation fails and the semiotic process breaks down, the body becomes event---testimony becomes corporeal. This project also examines the way post-war authors have internalized the redrawn boundaries of nations, fleshing out the narratives only the traces of which remain. The texts of this genre attempt to speak the horrors aloud, not only to speak the horror on the behalf of the witnesses, but also to situate themselves in the event they were powerless to effect. The nature of witness testimony as translation becomes most evident when the novel itself undergoes the process of translation from one language into another. My dissertation engages the mimesis of narrative translation and the act of second-generation testimony, demonstrating that translation and topography function as active modes of memory.

I elaborate on my theoretical position in detail in Chapter 1, before pursuing a close reading of Victor Koz'ko's Trial in Sloboda , Primo Levi's short story "The Servant," Elie Wiesel's The Golem: the Story of a Legend As Told by Elie Wiesel , Bernard Otterman's Golem of Auschwitz and finally, Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated.