Holocaust literature started even before the mass killings themselves, with Jewish poets, novelists, and essayists reacting to the rise of Nazism and the war, and it continues to the present day. At first, many representative authors were survivors, but, with the passage of time, new generations of writers came to engage with the reality of the Holocaust, either as descendants of survivors themselves, or simply as human beings wrestling with one of humanity’s greatest calamities. Traversing poetry, diaries, memoirs, and novels, this chapter tracks the evolution of Holocaust literature, its expansion into a global vernacular, and the ways in which diverse authors have sought to deploy language to process mass slaughter.

It is unsurprising that the legacy of the Holocaust was central to postwar Europe, but it is striking that the Holocaust became no less important in postwar America. It can be argued that the Holocaust has been “Americanized.” This phrase was initially deployed as a pejorative by critics who decried what they saw as the commercialization and trivialization of Holocaust memory. In some cases, they even argued that Holocaust memory was instrumentalized in the service of specific political agendas – support for Israel and the consolidation of a specifically Jewish identity in a multicultural America. At the same time, given the size and diversity of the Jewish diaspora in the USA, there was no way the Holocaust could not become central to American-Jewish self-understanding and, therefore, become a core part of American culture more broadly.

Roth’s fiction is, for the most part, set in America, in the years following World War II. None of his works are directly situated during the Holocaust, but many of his works are gounded in allusions to that tragedy. This chapter will situate a discussion of those allusions within a larger discussion of the problematic ways in which the Holocaust has in large part come to define Jewish identity, a subject taken up by Roth in works like Portnoy’s Complaint and The Ghost Writer. There, Roth pushes back on associations between Jewishnesss and victimization, but also acknowledges the necessity of contending with the Holocaust as an integral part of collective Jewish identity, thus opening up a conversation continued in more recent works like Nathan Englander’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.”

This chapter discusses Roth's literary influences, and explores how Roth himself negotiates multiple forms of influence. It acknowledges the impact of specific predecessors and contemporaries on Roth's work, such as Kafka, Bellow, Malamud, James, and others, while also exploring less-often acknowledged literary influences such as Anne Frank, Virginia Woolf, and Joyce Carol Oates.