Olena Bezhan

Fellows from Ukraine (11/2022-12/2022)

The Holocaust Phenomenon in Art and Literature

In 2002 Jonathan Safran Foer published his first novel Everything is Illuminated where he reinvents a trip to his family roots in nowadays Ukraine, the book became a bestseller and was turned into a movie – the scene was set for an encounter of American and Ukrainian Holocaust literature. This project is dedicated to study phenomenon of the Holocaust in literary texts of the late 20th to the first decades of the 21st century, focusing on American, late Soviet and contemporary works. These literary representations of the Holocaust open a space to research concepts of trauma and memory, the problem of anti-Semitism and question of self-identity in a comparative perspective.

Olena Bezhan is an associate professor, lecturer of the National Odessa Mechnikov University at the Department of Foreign Literature, Faculty of Romance and Germanic Philology. She is a literary critic who published on Holocaust literature, and comparative works on the study of this phenomenon in American and late Soviet literature. Her scientific interests include American literature, comparative studies, Holocaust literature, and Anglo-American drama.