Authors

Aleksei Surin¹;  ¹ Bar-Ilan University, Israel

Discussion

Grigory Kanovich (1929-2023) and Elena Makarova (b. 1951) are Russian-Israeli writers who stand out in contemporary Russophone literature for their unwavering focus on the Holocaust. Kanovich, long based in Lithuania until his immigration to Israel in 1993, began addressing the Holocaust of European Jewry in his works during the Soviet era. Starting in the 1970s, he authored eight novels and over a dozen novellas, creating a vivid literary representation of Jewish Lithuania. His works memorialize the Lithuanian Jewish community, devastated by the Holocaust, with traces of their presence embedded in the very landscape of Vilnius and beyond. Kanovich's writing is deeply intertwined with geography; he is an explorer of Jewish space, meticulously gathering fragments of memory and weaving them into his narratives. 

 Elena Makarova, who has lived in Israel since 1990, has curated numerous exhibitions on the Holocaust and its artistic representation in museums around the world. She is the author of both historical studies and fictional works that explore the Shoah. In contrast to Kanovich, her poetics are deeply rooted in the concept of time. In her documentary novels Friedl ("Фридл") and The Guide of the Lost ("Путеводитель потерянных"),  she delves into the lives of Holocaust victims and survivors, revealing the indelible traces they have left on the continuum of time and existence. Her writing strives to loosen the shackles of the past, enabling the voices of those silenced by the Holocaust to resonate in the present.

In this presentation, I will compare the literary approaches of Kanovich and Makarova, focusing on how their distinct uses of the philosophical categories of space and time shape their representations of the Holocaust. By exploring these lenses, I will demonstrate how their works illuminate the disruption in history, ethics, and epistemology caused by the Holocaust.