Archive Future: Trauma and the Child in Two Contemporary American Bestsellers

Abstract

Pozorski focuses in this chapter upon bestselling historical fiction that draws upon archival research. She develops a reading of the Holocaust archive in relation to two recent American bestsellers about World War II: Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See (2014) and Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale (2015), novels grounded in historical research. What does it mean for authors from the Midwest and the West Coast, respectively, to pursue the Holocaust as the topic of their fiction? Through close readings of the novels’ achronological representations of time and the figure of a vulnerable child, Pozorski argues that these bestsellers reflect a cultural trauma we have yet to confront – trauma that grows out of both willful ignorance during the early parts of the Nazi genocide and a failure adequately to help refugees upon the war’s end.