A thousand darknesses

What is the difference between writing a novel about the Holocaust and fabricating a memoir? Are Holocaust writings, by their very nature, exempt from criticism and interpretation? Do narratives about the Holocaust have a special obligation to be truthful--that is, faithful to the facts of history? Is a fictional account of the Holocaust, in the words of Elie Wiesel, "an insult to the dead"? In this provocative study, Ruth Franklin investigates these questions as they arise in the most significant works of Holocaust writing, from Tadeusz Borowski's Auschwitz stories to Jonathan Safran Foer's…