Walter Abish’s Deconstruction of the Holocaust in <i>How German Is It</i>

Since his first startling novel, Alphabetical Africa ( 1974, hereafter, AA), Walter Abish has always been recognized as a provocative writer who challenges the limitations of language and literary expressions. His literary experiments can be easily observed in How German Is It (1980, hereafter, HG), too, though it adopts a far more realistic narrative than ЛЛ. Jerome Klinkowitz, who recognizes Abish's unique usage of realism, calls it "a superrealism" ("Walter Abish and the Surfaces of Life" 419) or "an experimental realism" ("Experimental Realism" 63). HG, for example, begins with an interrogative sentence answered by questioning: