Professor Sven-Erik Rose travels to Berlin, Germany this November to accept the 2026 Eva Reichmann Book Prize for his book, Making and Unmaking Literature in the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna Ghettos (Brandeis University Press, 2025).
“The Eva Reichmann Prize encourages us to think with these writers who thought and wrote from within the genocide, even as it devastated their people, culture and language,” said Rose, a professor of German and Comparative Literature in the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis.
Making and Unmaking Literature in the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna Ghettos, published in Association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, is the first study devoted to how these authors grappled with the destitution of ghetto existence by writing within, at the limits of, and against an array of literary scenarios, tropes, plot lines and generic conventions.
"His work offers a unique, fresh, and compelling insight into the history of the Holocaust and how we understand it," wrote the awarding jury. "The jury was impressed by how Rose systematically incorporates the literary voices of murder victims into the controversial debate about the culture of remembrance, which in turn defines the limits of what we remember."
Rose’s readings of these literary works reveal how authors asserted their humanity by insisting on writing works of literature. In such radically dehumanizing circumstances, however, their recourse to established literary genres was not naive. Rather, ghetto authors brilliantly meditated on the grotesque incongruities between established literary models and the extreme conditions of ghetto existence.
They wrote realist social novels, detective stories, gothic horror and modernist literature. While contending with starvation, disease, desperate housing conditions and the looming threat of being murdered, the inhabitants of ghettos in Poland nonetheless made them sites of rich Jewish cultural production.
“The recognition of my book by the Eva Reichmann Book Prize jury is far more profoundly a recognition of the relatively little-known Yiddish authors whom I engage with in the book, who wrote literary works while interned in Nazi ghettos in pre-war Poland,” Rose said. “In literary and metaliterary keys, these authors thought deeply, desperately and brilliantly about the nature of cultural forms and traditions and their endangered place within them.”
Rose's first book, Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848 (Brandeis University Press, 2014) was awarded the Association of Jewish Studies’ Jordan Schnitzer Book Award for Philosophy and Jewish Thought.
The Eva Reichmann Prize comes from The Center for the Study of Antisemitism (ZfA) at Technische Universität Berlin, where Rose will accept the award and give a lecture on Nov. 9.
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