![]() ![]() In this remarkable book, Thomas lovingly probes problems of memory, imagination, the historically situated and socially constructed individual, and authenticity in the tender story of a woman who becomes a victim of the Holocaust at Babi Yar. Thomas’ breathtaking Holocaust novel, The White Hotel (1981), reveals what the historian-particularly the historian concerned with trauma and memory-can take from fiction. 1 When political satirist Stephen Colbert straps Elie Wiesel’s Night to his bookshelf between the fiction and non-fiction rows, or when acclaimed novelist Cynthia Ozick asserts that imagination has no place in historical writing, historians should pay attention and asks what these assumptions suggest about the evolving potentials of historical writing and historical inquiry. Any scholarly attempt to construct the boundaries between history and poetry should be of interest to historians, who generally demonstrate only a vague understanding of the theory behind their enterprise, often repeating unhelpfully that history is both art and science. If philosophers of history in the twentieth century focused on the distinction between historical knowledge and scientific knowledge, contemporary philosophers of history, after the linguistic turn and the literary turn, are confronted with the problem of history’s relation to art, specifically the art of telling stories. ![]()
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