Rescuing (My) Jews from Obscurity: The representation of Jewish people and history in Australian historical fiction

This creative writing thesis queries the representation of Jewish people and history in Australian fiction, asking if the current predominance of Holocaust novels effectively challenges anti-Semitism, or obscures understanding of it. The question is explored through a creative work demonstrating a praxis of representation that attempts to tell a broader, more diverse history of Jewish experience, and a related exegesis analysing anti-Semitic tropes and stereotypes identified in existing literary representations. In the creative work, three short fictional pieces depicting Jewish members of my family living in mid-twentieth-century Sydney are contextualised within the period of increasing anti-Semitism in Europe that resulted in the Holocaust. The exegesis consists of an autoethnographic reflection on the ethical choices I make in creative representation, in response to scholarly research into anti-Semitic representations (especially inadvertent ones) in Australian fiction. As Holocaust stories are popular, already attracting scholarly concern that readers receive their understanding of the Holocaust through novels, this thesis considers what more ethical approaches to representing Jews and Jewish history could look like, within Holocaust narratives and beyond them. While autoethnography and Holocaust studies are both conjectural spaces in which ambiguity often thwarts conclusiveness, the former has not explored the historical novelist’s specific ethical challenges, and the latter tends not to have engaged with the ethical implications of Jewish representation occurring predominantly only in Holocaust fiction. In combining these areas of inquiry, this thesis seeks to show the ethical possibilities of narratives that explore Jewish lives with more cultural breadth and diversity, and how these might challenge anti-Semitism.