Shoah Dreams (Narrating the Irreparable)

This book explores the striking range of dreams recounted by Shoah survivors who give narrative form to their traumatic experiences. Dreams are ambiguous and contradictory; their relationship to reality is unsteady. Dream experiences feature overwhelming sensory and bodily perceptions, and their aesthetic autonomy transforms waking life and thought into unsettling images. All of this makes dreams a fertile mode of storytelling in the face of the Shoah’s unspeakability.

Each of the dream texts collected in this book speaks a singular language. Yet systematically comparing writings from different languages and cultures reveals recurring patterns: dreams of thwarted homecomings, of impeded storytelling, of murdered relatives appearing alive, and of abrupt return to the camps.

What emerges is an extraordinary panorama of themes and narratives used in attempts to articulate the Shoah through writing. The texts reveal themselves to be a paradoxical cultural practice of reparation—individual and collective—by which irreparable experiences are processed through the act of telling.