In the last decade of the 20th century, we saw a virtual cottage industry of books and films on the Holocaust, everything from an unexpurgated Diary of Anne Frank to Roberto Benigni's Oscar-winning tragicomic film "Life Is Beautiful." In contrast, comparatively few Holocaust-related works were produced in the decade following World War II, when the horrific slaughter occurred. Dan Schwarz, professor of English and a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell University, maintains there's a reason for this.

In his new book, Imagining the Holocaust (St. Martin's Press, Dec. 1999), Schwarz traces the evolution of major works that are often used in teaching about the Holocaust and makes an argument that the kinds of Holocaust stories that are possible to tell not only change over time but build on what has come before. Schwarz discusses the book on "New York and Company," Jan. 6 from noon to 12:45 p.m., on National Public Radio's WNYC-AM station, 820 on the AM dial.

"We now have a reservoir of motifs and images provided by books and films" that have become part of the public consciousness, Schwarz argues. Each succeeding Holocaust narrative couldn't have happened without its antecedents. In other words, without a book like Night, Elie Wiesel's 1960 novel-memoir, there could be no Maus, Art Spiegelman's 1986 retelling in comic book format of his father's story of survival.

Schwarz cites the film "Schindler's List," made by Steven Spielberg from Thomas Keneally's novel of the same name, as a repository of such motifs and images. Spielberg's genius, Schwarz claims, was not necessarily to have created a great film but to have recognized "the full panoply of myths and images that were part of Holocaust literature." In one scene from the film, Polish peasants in fields draw their index fingers across their throats to signal to Jews in a passing boxcar that death awaits them at the camps. Recounted to Spielberg by survivors, that image is now part of our universal collective memory, thanks to the film's popularity.

Schwarz is quick to note that he is not a Holocaust scholar but a literary critic who seeks to describe how literature and film reveal "what happened, how we remember what happened and how we tell it."

His book divides the literary works into four categories: memoir, realism, myth and fantasy. Over time "people have recognized a need for imagination in understanding the Holocaust," notes Schwarz. "As we move further away from the original events, the narratives authors use to render the Holocaust horror evolved to include fantasy and parable."

In addition to exploring such well-known texts as Wiesel's Night, The Diary of Anne Frank, Primo Levi's Survival at Auschwitz and Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl, Schwarz resurrects important but often overlooked works such as John Hersey's The Wall, a retelling of the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, and Leslie Epstein's King of the Jews, a historical fantasy about the Lodz ghetto.

He also looks at a "conversation" between the Polish writer Bruno Schulz and Ozick. Two collections of Kafkaesque tales by Schulz, the 1934 Night in the Street of Crocodiles and 1937 Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, anticipate the Holocaust. Ozick saw Schulz as a kind of literary father figure and wrote The Messiah of Stockholm, published in 1987, as a response to his prescient stories. In her book she imagines the possibility that Schulz, who was murdered on the street during a 1942 Nazi aktion, had a son who survived the Holocaust and made his way to Sweden, where he severed himself from his past and invented a new life history.

The chapter links neatly with Schwarz's discussion on why the Holocaust was a repressed subject among American Jews and Americans in general when he was growing up and how it gradually opened up to become a meaningful source for artistic exploration.

Other books by Schwarz on modern literature include Reconfiguring Modernism: Explorations on the Relationship between Modern Art and Modern Literature and Reading Joyce's Ulysses. Imagining the Holocaust retails for $29.95 in the United States.

Schwarz is available to talk about Imagining the Holocaust. For review copies, contact Jenny Dworkin, St. Martin's Press (212) 982-3900, ext. 340. For more on the book, see the web site listed below.