Jews' Goy Toy Gets $1.5 Million For "Universalizing the Holocaust"

Eric J. Sundquist. "The deeper I got into this, the more intrigued I became how much African-Americans had borrowed from the American Jewish experience."

Do the bidding of the Jews and get paid handsomely....At the expense of your dignity of course.

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America's richest prize in the humanities, worth $1.5 million, has been awarded to the scholarly son of a Swedish-American carpenter for a three-year project on the impact of the Holocaust on American literature.

In a study far more than mere ivory-tower research, Eric J. Sundquist argues that English-language books - original, in translation or as film scripts - are largely responsible for "Americanizing" and universalizing the Holocaust in the world's consciousness.

First widely recognized for explaining the role of black writers and culture in American literature, Sundquist expanded his purview in his most recent work, Strangers in The Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America. Last month, the book received the Weinberg Judaic Studies Institute Award from the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania.

During a nearly two-hour interview at his UCLA office, Sundquist traced the three "generations" of Holocaust literature.

In the first generation, immediately following World War II, eyewitnesses, survivors and contemporaries laid the historical groundwork. In the 1960s and '70s, the second generation explored the philosophical and theological aspects of the Shoah. Since the end of the last century, a third generation of "post-modern and experimental" writers has added comedy, satire and even irreverence to the body of Holocaust literature.

One goal of Sundquist's three-year project is to draw a complete "map" of these generational changes.Another aim is to probe what impact the works of American writers, far removed from the crematoria, as well as translations into English, have had in shaping Holocaust literature.

Sundquist believes that the very act of translation has helped to transform the Holocaust from a specific Jewish tragedy into a more "Christianized," and therefore universal, experience.

"Take Elie Wiesel's book Night, which was first written in Yiddish, then translated into French, and from French into English. It has probably been read by more Americans than any other Holocaust memoir and thus has become part of American literature," Sundquist said. "But in the process of making the book more accessible to a wider audience, the original Sabbath became Sunday and Shavuot became Pentecost."

Similarly the film The Pawnbroker, about an embittered Holocaust survivor in New York, is "loaded with Christian iconography and symbolism," he said.

Perhaps the most intriguing part of Sundquist's analysis is how the literary vocabulary of the Holocaust has been adapted and taken over by other victimized people.

In black literature, Sundquist said, "the organizing example was the biblical Exodus, but since World War II, this has been overshadowed by the Holocaust as the main paradigm." One striking example is Toni Morrison's Beloved, which implicitly likens the African slave trade to the Holocaust in her epigraph, "To the 60 million."

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