World War II Literature Syllabus

A couple of years ago, I started doing something I never really thought I’d do: I began to read and research more about the Holocaust and World War II. I grew up with media depicting the Untied States’ perspective during World War II, specifically the heroic acts of United States service members in the fight against fascism. All of this, of course, positioned the United States as heroic and on the right side of history, and as I have said before, this is all true. We did help to defeat the Nazis during World War II; however, that narrative left out so much, including the fascists tendencies at home and the ways that the United States actually influenced the Nazi’s and the Holocaust. This exploration led to my “Jim Crow and the Holocaust” syllabus.

Following that course, and leading up to my “Black Expatriate Writers in France” study travel course, I started digging deeper into World War II in Europe. I did not necessarily plan this, but leading up to the study travel trip, I tried to find more texts and information about the South of France, specifically Marseille. This led me to watch the first episode of Transatlantic, a limited series on Netflix based on Julie Orringer’s The Flight Portfolio. I haven’t finished Transatlantic yet because I wanted to read Orringer’s novel first, and I did that before leaving for France. Orringer’s novel, coupled with things I learned from Nicholas…