Benjamin Paloff’s new book is a sustained reflection on the ethics of representation and reception of works about “open confinement,” places where people are “neither confined to a cell, nor able to leave the tightly circumscribed antiworld” (114). These spaces—ghettos, concentration camps, and besieged cities—are the “worlds apart” of the title. They have their own subculture and produce a sense of life that is totally different from that of the normal world of personal freedom. The title alludes to the Gulag narrative of one of the book’s heroes, Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, whose Inny świat was first published in English, as A World Apart in 1951. “Open confinement” innovatively envelops camps and World War II ghettos with besieged cities—mainly the blockaded Leningrad but also, to some extent, Warsaw, partly destroyed after the ghetto uprising in the spring of 1943 and more massively during the general uprising in August-September of 1944.

The introductory chapter of Paloff’s book bears the provocative title “Have We Been Misreading the Camps?” The point is that, continuing Primo Levi’s statement that true witnesses are dead, the truth value of narratives of camp survivors is subverted by the very fact of survival. First-person narratives that give the readers the comfort of knowing that one has had to survive in order to be able to testify may fail to rise to the paradox of “the persistent sense of precarity and an equally persistent boredom with that same precarity” (4). Are we reading camp narratives in order to understand what it was like in the camps or are we enjoying them as stories of survival, a popular genre of twentieth and twenty-first century media?

Such doubts about the faithfulness of representations preface Paloff’s partial rehabilitation of fictional or fictionalized narratives, which sometimes stage the experience of inmates with greater enargeia (79–81), a more vivid evocation of its mental and bodily senses. This argument starts with the discussion of three examples of fraud in Ch. 1: Binjamin Wilkomirski’s (Bruno Dösseker’s) Bruchstücke (Fragments, 1995); Misha Defonseca’s (Monique de Wael’s) 1997 Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years; and Herman Rosenblat’s Angel at the Fence, a twenty-first century narrative whose publication was canceled when it was discovered that the author, a Holocaust survivor, had invented the central event. Paloff notes the reception paradox—“the actual camp survivor is dismissed for his mendacity, whereas the Swiss musician [Dösseker] is read more sympathetically as a victim of childhood trauma” (28)—but proposes that Fragments be “recovered for ethical use” upon being recontextualized by Stefan Maechler’s The Wilkomirski Affair that explains the biographical and psychological background of the fraud (28). The reception attitude that Paloff recommends is “parallactic,” which can be roughly explained as seeing the objects represented from different perspectives, from textual and contextual sources.

“Parallactic reading” is an alternative to a complete reliance on narrative accounts, particularly relevant when one reads what, following Artur Sandauer, Paloff calls “parabiography” (not to be confused with what, following Serge Doubrovsky, is called “autofiction”—the protagonist of “parabiography” is a fictional person, usually the author’s avatar). Chapter 2 is devoted to this genre and deals with Lydia Ginzburg’s Notes of a Blockade Person (a Leningrad/St. Petersburg text), Sandauer’s Zapiski z marwego miasta (Notes from the City of the Dead, 1963), and Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead.

This chapter’s observations on the theatricality of the narratives and of their representation of theatrical events lead up to the emphasis on energeia in the following chapter, on “real-life fiction,” which “blur[s] or almost completely obliterate[s] the separation between the actual author and his or her textual avatar” (79). These are mostly fictionalized narratives by authors who have really “been there.” One of the writers focused on here is Jorge Semprún, who wrote four novels based on his imprisonment in Buchenwald; in each, the first-person protagonist narrator is called “Gérard,” Semprún’s nom-de-guerre in the Resistance. One might note that some of Varlam Shalamov’s gulag stories can also be described as “real-life fiction.”Footnote ¹

This chapter contains a somewhat controversial section on Tadeusz Borowski and a misleading discussion of Ka-Tzetnik, a Polish Israeli Auschwitz survivor, one of the earliest Holocaust novelists. The author does not extend his own concept of “parallactic reading” far enough to balance the positions of theorists, philosophers, and historians, such as Gillian Rose’s inflationary concept of “the fascism of interpretation” (95), or Hannah Arendt’s unfairly dismissive view of Ka-Tzetnik, whose fainting at the witness stand of the Eichmann trial she mentions, scornfully, in Eichmann in Jerusalem.Footnote ²

It seems that Benjamin Paloff is too strongly under Arendt’s influence (incidentally, Arendt’s point about the “banality of evil” has, in Eichmann’s case, been disproved by research into that antisemite’s activities prior to Holocaust).Footnote ³ He relies too much on dated attitudes to Ka-Tzetnik and slips into imprecisions. In Israel Ka-Tzetnik was famous as an author not just of House of Dolls but also, and mainly, of his 1946 novel Salamandra (translated into English under the ill-chosen title Sunrise over Hell rather than with a reference to the mythical creature that survives in the fire).Footnote ⁴ That novel traces the near-paradigmatic stages in its “parabiographical” protagonist Harry Preleshnik’s Holocaust ordeal. House of Dolls is a sequel to Salamandra, featuring Harry but focused on his sister who, along with other Jewish girls, is forced into prostitution in a concentration-camp bordello for German soldiers. The novel contains just two scenes that may be described as pornographic; nor is it structured on the principle of pornographic escalation (which characterizes Kosiński’s The Painted Bird, a novel that plays on the reader’s tendency to become emotionally inured to accounts of atrocities; indeed, Paloff only mentions the first of the atrocities in it, which horrifies the reader not because it is the worst but, I believe, because it is the first). The trouble with House of Dolls is its fantasy of a bordello for Germans staffed with Jewish women: Jewish women, cruelly treated in other ways, were not generally used in such institutions in the Nazi camps. A parallactic reading of Ka-Tzetnik, resulting from the renewed interest in his works in recent years, would involve the informational input that made the novelist believe, in the 1950s, that they were.

Chapter 4 contains a critique of humorous representations of the camps by people who were not imprisoned, including Alberto Benigni’s film Life is Beautiful, and praise for the humor of the actual survivors highlighting the absurdity of the worlds apart. Particularly interesting is the discussion of the early post-Holocaust film comedy Undzere kinder (Our Children, 1948). The theme of the absurd seamlessly flows into Ch. 5, titled “Horror,” opening with an extract from the poet Miron Białoszewski’s memoir of the Warsaw uprising but eventually moving to works set in a ruined city, first the real Warsaw and then dystopian settings of the “zombie apocalypse” genre, which may have been influenced by the narratives of “worlds apart”: the protagonists have to survive among monsters who want to either kill or coopt them, in worlds that need no barbed wire to feel like camps.

On reading Worlds Apart one might want to ask the author critical questions: why he qualifies the Eichmann trial as “infamous” (102), or why he expands the concept of the “gray zone” beyond the meaning given it by Primo Levi. Yet such problems are compensated by the book’s excursions off the beaten track, to works that call for more attention, especially works coming from Czechia, Slovakia, and Poland, as well as to possible literary and cinematic contexts of these works. The impulse behind the “parallactic reading,” as made clear in the conclusion, is “to overcome the ethical trap that sequesters this material from us” (182) and to critique the tendency to disregard the persistence of open confinement (such as of Uighurs in China) in our own days.