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The Fantastic Novel: Joseph Skibell’s A Blessing on the Moon

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Holocaust Literature of the Second Generation
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Abstract

Joseph Skibell’s powerful novel A Blessing on the Moon forms a particularly original addition to the Holocaust “canon.” First published in the United States in 1991, the novel has been translated into several languages. The grandchild of a Jew who fled Poland, Skibell has spoken in interviews about the loss of many of his close family members, a topic that was not discussed, as he has described:

This silence, I think, haunted me as a child and formed my character in a number of ways…. So the book is an attempt on my part to recover from the silence a family history that, except for a clutch of photos and whatever is encoded genetically, had all but disappeared.1

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Chapter 4

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© 2007 Marita Grimwood

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Grimwood, M. (2007). The Fantastic Novel: Joseph Skibell’s A Blessing on the Moon. In: Holocaust Literature of the Second Generation. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230605633_5

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