earticle

영어

One of the characteristics of the literary works of the Holocaust is family disintegration. For instance, often we confront children who neglect their filial duty for their own survival. Also, we see mothers or fathers who abandon their parental roles facing the horrible threat of death in the Holocaust. Among these abnormality of family values, I explore the absence of fatherhood and the role reversal between a parent and a child in Dawid Sierakowiak’s The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak, Ida Fink’s short story, “The Key Game,” and Isaiah Spiegel’s “Bread.” By looking at the portrayal of the absence of fatherhood, I demonstrate how diaries and short stories from the ghettos differ in presenting the role reversal and the relationship between a parent and a child. In short, I illustrate that while Dawid’s Diary presents his personal reactions for his diminished father directly and authentically through the first-person perspective, it has limits in that it does not offer the whole picture of the situation which leads the father to abandon his assumed parental role. On the contrary, Fink and Spiegel’s autobiographical works show the complexity of the situations that make the fathers lose their parental responsibility and let their children be exposed to the danger of death through the third-person point of view.