Jewish Ghosts: Haunting and Hospitality in Shalom Auslander's Hope

This article explores the Jewish ghost motif in Shalom Auslander's novel, Hope (2012). In particular, it focuses on the Holocaust and its ongoing reverberations within Jewish consciousness The ghost that incites the narrative is Anne Frank, reimagined by Auslander as an aged revenant who is discovered in the attic of an upstate New York home. Drawing from the work of Stephen Frosh, Susan Shapiro and Avery Gordon, my analysis looks at matters of refracted cultural memory, vicarious victimhood, intergenerational haunting, intertextuality and the uncanny Jewish body.