Fatherland

Abstract

This dissertation is a novel about a family headed by a Holocaust survivor. The novel’s emotional core is the father’s four years of internment in Nazi slave labor camps. While that experience is minimally represented, it saturates nearly every other scene as a persistent shadow of the past. The novel encompasses the experiences of the Holocaust survivor’s wife and children. The arc of the story extends from the father’s birth to the end of his life, when a stroke paralyzes him and gives him aphasia. This novel’s form strings together scenes from post-war Poland, concentration camps, and all of the characters’ lives in a cyclical way so that narrative strands rise and sink in a woven pattern.