There are thou­sands of books that rep­re­sent the Holo­caust, but can, and should, the act of read­ing these works con­vey the events of geno­cide to those who did not expe­ri­ence it? In Tex­tu­al Silence, lit­er­ary schol­ar Jes­si­ca Lang asserts that lan­guage itself is a bar­ri­er between the author and the read­er in Holo­caust texts — and that this bar­ri­er is not a lack of sub­stance, but a defin­ing char­ac­ter­is­tic of the genre.

Holo­caust texts, which encom­pass works as diverse as mem­oirs, nov­els, poems, and diaries, are tra­di­tion­al­ly char­ac­ter­ized by silences the authors place through­out the text, both delib­er­ate­ly and uncon­scious­ly. While a read­er may have the desire and will to com­pre­hend the Holo­caust, the pres­ence of ​“tex­tu­al silence” is a force that removes the expe­ri­ence of geno­cide from the reader’s analy­sis and imag­i­na­tive recourse. Lang defines silences as omis­sions that take many forms, includ­ing the use of ital­ics and quo­ta­tion marks, ellipses and blank pages in poet­ry, and the pres­ence of unre­li­able nar­ra­tors in fic­tion. While this lim­its the reader’s abil­i­ty to read in any con­ven­tion­al sense, these silences are not flaws. They are instead a crit­i­cal pres­ence that forces read­ers to acknowl­edge how words and mean­ing can diverge in the face of events as unimag­in­able as those of the Holocaust.