“Will this lead to a trivialization of Holocaust memory,” Christoph Ribbat asks, “Or will these popular genres open the discourse of memory by making it more democratic and more accessible?” (206). The work of Jewish-American fiction authors, such as Michael Chabon, who were not alive when Allied forces liberated the camps, has generated new and thoughtful avenues of criticism. Critical opinion about how the Holocaust should be portrayed and to what end, varies widely. While the Jews of Europe struggle to escape from the ghettos, boxcars, and death in the camps, the Americans of Kavalier & Clay take refuge in glamorous New York City with its big bands, surrealist art and the Golden Age of comic books. Americans, Jew and gentile, politically astute and clueless, laborer and capitalist, prefer to maintain a safe distance in mind and in fact. For most of the novel’s other characters, intent on plotting their own escapes, the events of the Holocaust remain 4,000 miles away. The horrors of the Holocaust, however, cast a shadow that hovers over nearly every chapter of Chabon’s 636-page novel. Only one, Josef Kavalier, is intimately tied to and escapes the Holocaust which destroys his entire family. Escape sounds like a ram’s horn throughout Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, looming large in the lives of his mostly Jewish characters.
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