Bit of a Jew: Holocaustic Images in poems by Sylvia Plath

“Bit of a Jew”: Holocaustic Images in the works of Sylvia Plath While reading Sylvia Plath’s poems “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” one cannot help but be struck down by the prominent visual images and deeply emotional reflections both poems force upon the reader. While stylistically different, connecting these two poems is the inclusion of references to the Holocaust. What is interesting is that Plath never lived through the horrors of the Holocaust and was …

…on the legitimacy of her employment of the Jewish persona: the holocaust serves her as a metaphor for the death-and-life battle between the self and a deadly enemy”(Rosenblatt, 154). The Holocaust is utilized in order to make a statement about life’s suffering, turmoil and depression in general, to express her inner feelings during her times of suicidal rage and to use Nazism to correlate her intimate feelings concerning her love-hate relationship with her father.