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Other Voices
Editor-in-Chief: Vance Bell
Reviewed by Ingrid Woodrow

	Other Voices Editor-in-Chief: Vance Bell ov@dept.english.upenn.edu

Issue 2.1 of the University of Pennsylvania's literary journal Other Voices is a site of profound importance both for its subject matter and its intellectual vigor. This is academic thinking that is available not as a hard-to-get, cloistered print journal but as a Web site that anyone can access. Editor-in-Chief Vance Bell says the zine, founded in 1997, is "dedicated to expanding the dialogues that take place between disciplines, and which challenge received notions about reading and scholarship in the university and at large."

This issue of Other Voices contains essays, commentaries, memoirs, lectures, photos, reviews, links and multimedia articles dealing with genocide. From the confronting cover image of concentration camp prisoners dragging an emaciated body to an incinerator using ice tongs, to David Bowes' "Heirlooms: Dachau Photo Series," the work here, guest-edited by Shiela Kunkle, surely rates as one of the most important contemporary collections yet assembled on this topic.

I was affected most by Stephen C. Feinstein's discussion of the work of Zbigniew Libera's 1996 artwork entitled "LEGO," which is examined in the context of a contemporary strand of artistic interpretation of the Holocaust that invokes shock tactics to force the viewer into confronting this difficult subject matter. Libera worked with the LEGO corporation to create a seven-box limited edition of three LEGO sets of a concentration camp. (The company has subsequently distanced itself from the project.) The photographs of the artworks are chilling in their resemblance to store-bought toy sets with a horrifying twist. Libera's aim, according to Feinstein, is partly to show that "all the elements of a potential Holocaust or genocide surround us. All that is needed is someone to assemble them, and tell people how to use them."

Other Voices also features examinations of various critical works. Of particular interest were two reviews of Philip Gourevitch's book, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With All Our Families: Stories from Rwanda,' in which the author recalls picking up a newspaper while visiting the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1994 and seeing a front-page article on the genocide occurring at that time in Rwanda. The journal links to some important resources, notably the site for Hilton Als and James Allen's book Without Sanctuary: Photos and postcards of Lynching in America. The multimedia work in Other Voices is highly effective, too: I liked editor Aaron D. Levy's "small receptacles" in which he grapples with the idea of the caption as "the under-reported event in looking through the photograph." He writes his own captions for some wartime photographs, and the results are devastating: a mountain of Jewish belongings piled on the snow in a concentration camp, accompanied by the words, "scattered fields, sculpture — all that which men call beauty."

Rebecca Scherr, in "The Uses of Memory and the Abuses of Fiction: Sexuality in Holocaust Fiction and Memoir" cites survivor Sara Nomberg-Przytyk's experience:

"Spread your legs," yelled the blokowa. And the body hair was shorn too...We ceased to exist as thinking, feeling entities. We were not allowed any modesty in front of these strange men. We were nothing more than objects on which they performed their duties, nonsentient things that they could examine from all angles... it did not bother them that we were women and without our hair we felt totally humiliated...

Catherine A. Bernard takes up the theme of the feminine voice in Holocaust narratives, focusing on three memoirs by women: From Ashes to Life by Lucille Eichengreen, the Diary of Anne Frank and Life? or Theater? by Charlotte Salomon.

Other Voices is a high-quality intellectual forum, with user-friendly navigation and a striking red and white color scheme — the logo on the splash page is particularly effective. There are plans for an annual print anthology in late Spring and no plans to sell subscriptions — Other Voices wants to reach "as many individuals as possible." As a testament to the staff and students at the U of Pennsylvania and as proof of the existence of an innovative critical element at work on the Web, Other Voices is a zine that deserves to be heard. Bookmark it.

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Ingrid Woodrow is a writer based in Brisbane, Australia. Her first novel, Goddess and the Galaxy Boy, will be published in early 2001. She is completing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Queensland and working on a new novel.She is also the founding editor of the online writing journal Mangrove, which is listed as a "Site of National Significance" in the National Library of Australia's PANDORA archive.

Further information and samples of her work can be obtained by visiting www.uq.edu.au/~eniwoodr