SHORTLY AFTER THE PUBLICATION of his 2010 novel Die Leinwand (The Canvas, 2012), Benjamin Stein said in an interview with the German weekly Die Zeit:

In many ways this quote captures the essence of Stein's literary project, which seeks to broaden the range of Jewish identities, and especially religious identities, that can be expressed in German-language literature. Indeed, Die Leinwand, the protagonists of which are two observant Jews from different cultural backgrounds, reintroduces into German literature the possibility of representing and affirming Orthodox Judaism as a way of life. Within contemporary German-Jewish fiction, Stein's novel is unique in its emphasis on the ways that Jewish law structures the everyday life of observant Jews and sets them apart from non-Jews.

The opposition Stein establishes in the quote between an embrace of religion and a focus on the Holocaust is nevertheless puzzling, given the actual plot of his novel. For Die Leinwand can be read as a commentary on the Wilkomirski affair, that is, the scandal that erupted in 1998 after Binjamin Wilkomirski's widely acclaimed Holocaust memoir Bruchstücke: Aus einer Kindheit, 1939–1948 (1995; published in English as Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, 1997) was exposed as a fake. The formation, fabrication, and transmission of memories are the central theme of Die Leinwand, which exemplifies the nexus between Holocaust remembrance and contemporary German-Jewish writing discussed throughout this book. Indeed, it is interesting to note that the German-Jewish author who most emphatically seeks to stake out a new authorial position—that of the Orthodox Jewish writer whose Jewishness is not primarily defined by the Holocaust—does so by thinking through questions of Holocaust testimony. This connection indicates that Holocaust remembrance is still widely seen as the principle task of contemporary German-Jewish writers.