The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture [1st ed. 2020] 3030334279, 9783030334277

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Figures
Chapter 1 Introduction: Approaching the Holocaust in the Twenty-First Century
Part I Memoir
Chapter 2 Elie Wiesel’s Quarrel with God
Wiesel as Protest Theologian
A Suffering God
Silence
The Gates of the Forest, Twilight, the Forgotten
Twilight
The Forgotten
Conclusion—Significance of Wiesel’s Position
Bibliography
Chapter 3 Primo Levi’s Last Lesson: A Reading of The Drowned and the Saved
II
III
Bibliography
Chapter 4 What We Learn, at Last: Recounting Sexuality in Women’s Deferred Autobiographies and Testimonies
Bibliography
Part II Fiction
Chapter 5 Ghetto in Flames: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in Early Postwar Jewish Literature
Reporting the Revolt
“The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto”
The Miracle of the Warsaw Ghetto
“Yosl Rakover Talks to God”
Never to Forget: The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto
A Flag Is Born and A Survivor from Warsaw
The Wall
Bibliography
Chapter 6 The Nazi Beast at the Warsaw Zoo: Animal Studies, the Holocaust, The Zookeeper’s Wife, and See Under: Love
Animal Studies and the Holocaust
Diane Ackerman’s The Zookeeper’s Wife
The Zookeeper’s Wife at the Movies
See Under: Love
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 7 When Facts Become Figures: Figurative Dynamics in Youth Holocaust Literature
Introduction: The Dynamics of the Figurative
Anne Frank and Wartime Experimentation
The Definition of a Genre: Postwar Memoirs
Maus as a Fulcrum: The Literalization of Metaphor
Fairy Tales and Figurative Dynamics
The Holocaust as a Metaphor
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 8 Jewish Boys on the Run: The Revision of Boyhood in Holocaust Fiction and Film
The Perils of Jewish Boyhood Masculinity
“We Have to Find Somewhere. We Have to.”
Women to the Rescue
Bibliography
Chapter 9 “I Sometimes Thought I Was Listening to Myself”: Identity-Deliberation After the Holocaust in Chaim Grade’s “My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner”
“Societies of the Mind”: Self-Deliberation
Ethical Engagement Through Identity-Deliberation
Bibliography
Chapter 10 “The Relatedness of the Unrelatable”: The Holocaust as Trope in Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood
Works Cited
Chapter 11 The Holocaust in Works by Two Yiddish Writers in Argentina: Simja Sneh and Israel Aszendorf
Simja Sneh
Israel Aszendorf
Bibliography
Chapter 12 Edgar Hilsenrath’s Novels: Der Nazi & der Friseur and Berlin… Endstation
Der Nazi & der Friseur
Works Cited
Chapter 13 Transit and Transfer: Between Germany and Israel in the Granddaughters’ Generation
Bibliography
Chapter 14 Holocaust Memories and Polish Catholic Identity: Cultural Transmutations of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
Introduction
Miłosz and Andrzejewski’s Literary Testimonials of the Burning Ghetto
“Campo di Fiori” and “The Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto”: The Inadequacy of the Poetic Tradition in the Reality of the Apocalypse
Holy Week: The Failure to Save Christian Love
Wajda, Błoński, and Their Failed Politics of the Cultural Memory of the Holocaust
Błoński and Wajda: The Rhetoric of Moral Transformation
Błoński: The “Light of Truth” and the Promise of Polish Catholic Greatness
Wajda: Christian Love in Time of the Apocalypse
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 15 Post-Soviet Migrant Memory of the Holocaust
Bibliography
Chapter 16 Vasily Grossman and Anatoly Rybakov: Soviet Sources of Historical Memory of the Holocaust
Introduction: The Holocaust East and West
Life and Fate
War and Peace
Convergence: Stalin and Hitler
Heavy Sand: Squaring the Circle
Conclusions
Bibliography
Chapter 17 Refractions of Holocaust Memory in Stanisław Lem’s Science Fiction
Substitution in The Star Diaries
Ashes of Memory in Solaris
Hidden in Highcastle
Tapping Out Memories in Tales of Pirx the Pilot
Behind the Masking, First Consideration: Censorship, Lem’s Early Novels, and His Turn Toward SF
Behind the Masking, Second Consideration: Lem’s Relationship to His Past
The First Exception: His Master’s Voice
The Second Exception: “The World as Holocaust” and Faux Book Reviews
The Future…and the Terminus
Bibliography
Part III Poetry
Chapter 18 Poetry of Witness and Poetry of Commentary: Responses to the Holocaust in Russian Verse
Poetry of Witness and Commentary
Satunovsky (1913–1982)
Slutsky (1919–1986)
The Poets as Soviet Jewish Readers
Lipkin (1911–2003)
Galich (1918–1977)
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 19 “At Last to a Condition of Dignity”: Anthony Hecht’s Holocaust Poetry
Bibliography
Chapter 20 Wound Marks in the Air and the Shadows Within: A Poetic Examination of Dan Pagis, Paul Celan, and Nelly Sachs
Bibliography
Chapter 21 The Dark Side of Holocaust Era Poetry: Nazi Poetry Promoting Antisemitism and Genocide
Introduction: Innocence Preceding the Deluge
Antisemitic Poetry Saturates the German Public Sphere
A Bierhaus in Hell
Germany as an Occupying Power
The Binary Structure of Nazi Antisemitic Poetry
Conclusion
Bibliography
Part IV Film and Drama
Chapter 22 Holocaust Drama Imagined and Re-imagined: The Case of Charlotte Delbo’s Who Will Carry the Word?
Bibliography
Chapter 23 Wresting Memory as We Wrestle with Holocaust Representation: Reading László Nemes’s Son of Saul
Re-presenting the Holocaust
An Innovative Mode of Representing the Holocaust in Film
Standing Apart from Hollywood
Influences and Sources
The Limits of Representation
Representation and Healing—Psychic Integration
Bibliography
Chapter 24 Troubled Aesthetics: Jewish Bodies in Post-Holocaust Film
Invisible Aesthetics: “The Murderers Are Among Us”
Aesthetic Outlines: Witnessing in “Marianne and Juliane”
“Phoenix”: The Invisible Beauty of the Survivor
Bibliography
Chapter 25 Screen Memories: Trauma, Repetition, and Survival in Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker
Bibliography
Chapter 26 Haunted Dreams: The Legacy of the Holocaust in And Europe Will Be Stunned
Visual Allusion and Memory
Complicating Memory
The Multidirectionality of History
Art as Countermonument
Bibliography
Part V Graphic Culture
Chapter 27 “Master Race”: Graphic Storytelling in the Aftermath of the Holocaust
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 28 The Challenges of Translating Art Spiegelman’s Maus
Introduction
Translating Vladek: The Survivor in Spanish and Other Romance Languages
Untranslatable Vladek: Auschwitz and Beyond
Bibliography
Chapter 29 We Are a Long Ways Past Maus: Responsible and Irresponsible Holocaust Representations in Graphic Comics and Sitcom Cartoons
Introduction
Responsible Holocaust Comic and Cartoon Representations
Irresponsible Holocaust Comic and Cartoon Representations
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 30 Claustrophobic in the Gaps of Others: Affective Investments from the Queer Margins
Positioning Survivors’ Descendants
Feeling Strange
“Alan”
“Transparent”
“Part Hole”
“The Diary of Mini Horrorwitz”
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 31 Recrafting the Past: Graphic Novels, the Third Generation, and Twenty-First Century Representations of the Holocaust
Drawing the Past in Words and Images
Generational Transmission
Recrafting the Past
Family Stories
Mapping Memory
Memory Texts, Memory Objects
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 32 X-Men at Auschwitz? Superheroes, Nazis, and the Holocaust
World War II and the Emergence of the Superhero
X-Men and the Holocaust
Mutants, Trauma, and Genocide
History as Fiction or Fable as Fact?
Magneto at Auschwitz
Decoding “Aftermath, Part Two”
The Wolverine at Sobibor
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 33 An Iconic Image Through the Lens of Ka-tzetnik: The Murder of the Mother and the Essence of Auschwitz
Ka-tzetnik 135633: A Memory and a Name
The Key: The Murder of the Mother
A Photographic Icon of the Essence of Auschwitz
A Closing Reflection
Bibliography
Chapter 34 Photographing Survival: Survivor Photographs of, and at, Auschwitz
Karel Beran’s Documentary Photographs of Traces of His Forced Labor
Morris Pfeffer’s Portrait Photographs of Survivor Authority
Michael Zylberberg, Judith Perlaki, and Elizabeth Kent’s Portrait Photographs of Survivor Liberation
Conclusions: Survivor “Selfies” at Auschwitz?
Bibliography
Part VI Historical and Cultural Narratives
Chapter 35 A Reconsideration of Sexual Violence in German Colonial and Nazi Ideology and Its Representation in Holocaust Texts
Colonial Sexual Violence and Impunity in GSWA
Sexual Violence During the Third Reich
Nanda Herbermann
Liana Millu
Bibliography
Chapter 36 The Place of Holocaust Survivor Videotestimony: Navigating the Landmarks of First-Person Audio-Visual Representation
Bibliography
Chapter 37 Beckett’s Holocaust
i
ii
iii
iii
Bibliography
Chapter 38 The Auschwitz Women’s Camp: An Overview and Reconsideration
Bibliography
Chapter 39 Aryan Feminity: Identity in the Third Reich
Bibliography
Chapter 40 Reconsidering Jewish Rage After the Holocaust
Defining Revenge
Personal Narratives
Psychology of Revenge
Gendered Narrative Construction
Gender and Revenge Acts
The Evolution of Elie Wiesel’s Thought
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 41 Holocaust Shoes: Metonymy, Matter, Memory
The “Secret Life” of Holocaust Shoes
Shoes as Loot and Evidence: Holocaust Photography
Shoes as Memorial Objects: Metonymy and Synechdoche
The Pile Redeemed: Abraham Sutzkever’s “A Load of Shoes”
Shoes as Postmemorial Teleporters: Transparent
Bibliography
Chapter 42 From Holocast Studies to Trauma Studies and Back Again
The Holocaust and Trauma in Contemporary Literature
The Postmodern Condition
Bibliography
Contributors’ Notes
Index

Citation preview

The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture Edited by Victoria Aarons · Phyllis Lassner

The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture “This excellent collection of essays, edited by two internationally celebrated s­cholars, will be crucial reading for anyone interested in the twenty-first-century legacies of Holocaust representation, as they appear in genres ranging from testimony, videotestimony and poetry to graphic novels, comics and photography. It revisits classic works and debates as well as introducing important new perspectives such as those of trauma studies, gender and sexuality, animal studies and the third generation. This Handbook sets the conceptual scene for literary and cultural Holocaust studies in the current era.” —Sue Vice, Professor of English, The University of Sheffield, UK “Comprehensive, profound, intellectually daring, Aarons, Lassner and the scholars they have assembled in this remarkable collection have begun a conversation about the representation of the Holocaust in the twenty-first century that will define the terms of that conversation.” —Joseph Skibell, author of A Blessing on the Moon (1997) and A Curable Romantic (2010)

Victoria Aarons · Phyllis Lassner Editors

The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture

Editors Victoria Aarons Trinity University San Antonio, TX, USA

Phyllis Lassner Northwestern University Evanston, IL, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-33427-7 ISBN 978-3-030-33428-4  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Cover Art by Ava Kadishson Schieber This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank those who graciously granted permission to publish images to be used in the essays collected in this volume. For the image first published in “The Simpsons-NEVER AGAIN,” 2015 and “No Racism, No Antisemitism,” 2010, we thank Alexsandro Palombo, reprinted in this volume in Chapter 29, “We Are a Long Ways Past Maus: Responsible and Irresponsible Holocaust Representations in Graphic Comics and Sitcom Cartoons,” by Jeffrey Scott Demsky. We also thank graphic novelist Amy Kurzweil for permission to reprint the image from Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir (New York: Catapult/Black Balloon, 2016, p. 1) that appears in Chapter 31, “Recrafting the Past: Graphic Novels, the Third Generation and Twenty-First Century Representations of the Holocaust,” by Claire Gorrara. We are very grateful to Ava Kadishson Schieber for permission to use her artwork for the cover of the book. Ava was a hidden child during the Holocaust.

v

Contents

1

Introduction: Approaching the Holocaust in the Twenty-First Century 1 Victoria Aarons and Phyllis Lassner

Part I  Memoir 2

Elie Wiesel’s Quarrel with God 15 Alan L. Berger

3

Primo Levi’s Last Lesson: A Reading of The Drowned and the Saved 27 Anthony C. Wexler

4

What We Learn, at Last: Recounting Sexuality in Women’s Deferred Autobiographies and Testimonies 45 Sara R. Horowitz

Part II  Fiction 5

Ghetto in Flames: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in Early Postwar Jewish Literature 67 Avinoam J. Patt

6

The Nazi Beast at the Warsaw Zoo: Animal Studies, the Holocaust, The Zookeeper’s Wife, and See Under: Love Naomi Sokoloff

91

vii

viii  

CONTENTS

7

When Facts Become Figures: Figurative Dynamics in Youth Holocaust Literature 111 Joanna Krongold

8

Jewish Boys on the Run: The Revision of Boyhood in Holocaust Fiction and Film 129 Phyllis Lassner

9

“I Sometimes Thought I Was Listening to Myself”: Identity-Deliberation After the Holocaust in Chaim Grade’s “My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner” 147 Megan V. Reynolds

10 “The Relatedness of the Unrelatable”: The Holocaust as Trope in Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood 165 Paule Lévy 11 The Holocaust in Works by Two Yiddish Writers in Argentina: Simja Sneh and Israel Aszendorf 181 Alan Astro 12 Edgar Hilsenrath’s Novels: Der Nazi & der Friseur and Berlin… Endstation 199 Till Kinzel 13 Transit and Transfer: Between Germany and Israel in the Granddaughters’ Generation 217 Ashley A. Passmore 14 Holocaust Memories and Polish Catholic Identity: Cultural Transmutations of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Rachel F. Brenner

233

15 Post-Soviet Migrant Memory of the Holocaust 251 Karolina Krasuska 16 Vasily Grossman and Anatoly Rybakov: Soviet Sources of Historical Memory of the Holocaust 267 Alexis Pogorelskin 17 Refractions of Holocaust Memory in Stanisław Lem’s Science Fiction 287 Richard Middleton-Kaplan

CONTENTS  

ix

Part III  Poetry 18 Poetry of Witness and Poetry of Commentary: Responses to the Holocaust in Russian Verse 307 Marat Grinberg 19 “At Last to a Condition of Dignity”: Anthony Hecht’s Holocaust Poetry 327 David Caplan 20 Wound Marks in the Air and the Shadows Within: A Poetic Examination of Dan Pagis, Paul Celan, and Nelly Sachs Shellie McCullough

343

21 The Dark Side of Holocaust Era Poetry: Nazi Poetry Promoting Antisemitism and Genocide 357 Cary Nelson Part IV  Film and Drama 22 Holocaust Drama Imagined and Re-imagined: The Case of Charlotte Delbo’s Who Will Carry the Word? 401 Holli Levitsky 23 Wresting Memory as We Wrestle with Holocaust Representation: Reading László Nemes’s Son of Saul 417 Gila Safran Naveh 24 Troubled Aesthetics: Jewish Bodies in Post-Holocaust Film 439 Jessica Lang 25 Screen Memories: Trauma, Repetition, and Survival in Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker 459 Sandor Goodhart 26 Haunted Dreams: The Legacy of the Holocaust in And Europe Will Be Stunned 475 Melissa Weininger

x 

CONTENTS

Part V  Graphic Culture 27 “Master Race”: Graphic Storytelling in the Aftermath of the Holocaust 493 Victoria Aarons 28 The Challenges of Translating Art Spiegelman’s Maus Martín Urdiales-Shaw

511

29 We Are a Long Ways Past Maus: Responsible and Irresponsible Holocaust Representations in Graphic Comics and Sitcom Cartoons 529 Jeffrey Scott Demsky 30 Claustrophobic in the Gaps of Others: Affective Investments from the Queer Margins 553 Golan Moskowitz 31 Recrafting the Past: Graphic Novels, the Third Generation, and Twenty-First Century Representations of the Holocaust 575 Claire Gorrara 32 X-Men at Auschwitz? Superheroes, Nazis, and the Holocaust Edward B. Westermann

593

33 An Iconic Image Through the Lens of Ka-tzetnik: The Murder of the Mother and the Essence of Auschwitz 615 David Patterson 34 Photographing Survival: Survivor Photographs of, and at, Auschwitz 633 Tim Cole Part VI  Historical and Cultural Narratives 35 A Reconsideration of Sexual Violence in German Colonial and Nazi Ideology and Its Representation in Holocaust Texts 651 Elizabeth R. Baer

CONTENTS  

xi

36 The Place of Holocaust Survivor Videotestimony: Navigating the Landmarks of First-Person Audio-Visual Representation 669 Oren Baruch Stier 37 Beckett’s Holocaust 687 Ira Nadel 38 The Auschwitz Women’s Camp: An Overview and Reconsideration 707 Sarah Cushman 39 Aryan Feminity: Identity in the Third Reich 725 Wendy Adele-Marie 40 Reconsidering Jewish Rage After the Holocaust 743 Margarete Myers Feinstein 41 Holocaust Shoes: Metonymy, Matter, Memory 761 Sharon B. Oster 42 From Holocast Studies to Trauma Studies and Back Again 785 Hilene Flanzbaum Contributors’ Notes 805 Index 819

List of Figures

Fig. 21.1 Fig. 21.2 Fig. 21.3 Fig. 21.4 Fig. 21.5 Fig. 21.6 Fig. 21.7 Fig. 21.8 Fig. 21.9 Fig. 21.10 Fig. 21.11 Fig. 21.12 Fig. 21.13 Fig. 21.14 Fig. 21.15 Fig. 21.16 Fig. 21.17

If all people were Jews (postcard, Author’s collection) A mirror to the Jews (postcard, Author’s collection) Each mark you donate (flier, 4.25 × 5.5 inches, from an administrative unit of the Nazi Party, Author’s collection) We served under Colonel Beck (photo, 3.80 × 3.70 inches, Author’s collection) Jews, racketeers, nuns and priests (photo, 3.25 × 2.12 inches, Author’s collection) Whoever gives his hand to a Jew (postcard, Pub. Rudolf Fleisher, Braunschweig, Author’s collection) Bingen am Rhein hanged Jew (photo, 4.37 × 6 inches, Author’s collection) The Jewish chorus loudly cries (sticker, 2.25 × 1.5 inches, Author’s collection) The Führer casts them out (sticker, 3 × 1.75 inches, Author’s collection) Keep your child away from the Jew (sticker, 3 × 1.5 inches, Author’s collection) A sucking animal (sticker, 3 × 1.62 inches, Author’s collection) Tragedy (sticker, 2.25 × 1.5 inches, Author’s collection) Welcome to the Fatherland (sticker, 2 × 1.75 inches, Author’s collection) Group signatures to original poem (large postcard, 4.12 × 5.62 inches, Author’s collection) Group authored poem (reverse of no. 14, Author’s collection) From Carlsberg (large postcard, 4 × 5.75 inches, Author’s collection) Stalin as a Jew (flier, 4 × 8.5 inches, Author’s collection)

361 363 364 365 365 366 368 369 370 370 371 371 372 373 374 376 379

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xiv  

LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 21.18 Fig. 21.19 Fig. 21.20 Fig. 21.21 Fig. 21.22 Fig. 21.23 Fig. 21.24 Fig. 29.1 Fig. 29.2

Fig. 29.3 Fig. 29.4 Fig. 29.5 Fig. 31.1 Fig. 35.1 Fig. 41.1 Fig. 41.2

Fig. 41.3 Fig. 41.4 Fig. 41.5

The Whale and the Yid (flier, 5.75 × 8 inches, cf. image no. 12, Author’s collection) 381 The career of Aron Shmeerzon (flier, 6 × 8.25 inches, Author’s collection) 383 JUDE! (reverse of no. 19, Author’s collection) 384 A shout of Joy (postcard, Author’s collection) 388 Franz Odelga next to his carved Hitler portrait and his poem (postcard, Author’s collection) 389 Hail to our Führer (postcard, Author’s collection) 391 Envelope with sticker (6 × 5 inches, Author’s collection) 393 Maus as Holocaust postmemory (Note This frame reveals Vladek’s surprise at learning Artie’s authorial interventions) 530 The Simpsons-NEVER AGAIN (permission granted by artist, AleXsandro Palombo) (Note This depiction demonstrates how cartoon postmemory can modernize familiar Holocaust images) 535 Anne Frank, No Racism, No Antisemitism (permission granted by artist, AleXsandro Palombo) (Note Empowering Anne: Cartoon postmemory reconfiguring Holocaust icons) 536 Eric Cartman as Adolf Hitler (Note This character demonstrates how cartoon postmemory can complicate Holocaust remembrance) 538 Peter Griffin as Hassidic Jew (Note This character demonstrates how cartoon postmemory humor can spurn Holocaust remembrance) 541 Amy Kurzweil, Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir (New York: Catapult/Black Balloon, 2016), p. 1 (Reproduced with kind permission of the author) 586 “The Power of Habit” (Simplicissimus 1904; out of copyright) 659 USHMM #51175—Pile of shoes stored in a warehouse in Auschwitz, Photographer unknown, January 1945 767 USHMM #77394—Auschwitz women inmates sort through a huge pile of shoes from the transport of Hungarian Jews (From “The Auschwitz Album,” Lili Meier Photo taken by SS-Hauptscharführer Bernhardt Walter and his assistant, SS-Unterscharführer Ernst Hofmann, May 1944) 768 Edgar Snow, “Here the Nazi Butchers Wasted Nothing,” Saturday Evening Post, October 28, 1944, p. 20 769 Shoes from Majdanek (USHMM Permanent Exhibit) 771 Can Togay and Gyula Pauer’s “Shoes on the Danube Bank” memorial in Budapest (Gem Russan, 5 February 2019. Alamy stock photo) 774

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Approaching the Holocaust in the Twenty-First Century Victoria Aarons and Phyllis Lassner

How do we talk about the Holocaust now? What shape do critical discourses in Holocaust studies take at this point in time, a time that will see the end of direct survivor testimony? What aims, assumptions, interests, and commitments are involved in our contemporary engagement with Holocaust history, memory, and representation? What are the current preoccupations of scholars and critics in a reevaluation of the literatures, film, and other media of Holocaust representation? What kinds of questions are we asking of these narratives? As we move into the third decade of the twenty-first century, modes of Holocaust representation and its critical discourses reflect the shifting directional pull of time and its convergence with accumulating knowledge: well over half a century since the end of the war and the liberation of the concentration camps; long since the many voices of survivors have been recorded, cataloged, and written about; and following now the reimagining of events by a second and third generation of writers committed to the extension of Holocaust memory. How, “after such knowledge,” as Eva Hoffman once put it, is the Holocaust and its extended aftermath navigated, conveyed, and kept alive in the collective consciousness of new generations of scholars?1 What, after scores of attempts to accumulate, to understand, and to articulate the nature and magnitude of events, is there left to say? After years and volumes of histories, literary accounts, documents, reportage, media, and

V. Aarons (*)  Trinity University, San Antonio, TX, USA P. Lassner  Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_1

1

2  V. AARONS AND P. LASSNER

cinema—“yards of writing,” as Berel Lang has argued, “that attempt to overcome the inadequacy of language in representing moral enormity”2—what remains? What is left unsaid? What, in the extended legacy of the Holocaust, has been mislaid, overlooked, lost to time? As Edmund de Waal, inheritor of the treasured artifacts of his family’s past and author of The Hare with Amber Eyes, asks of the story behind such a legacy, “What is remembered and what is forgotten?”3 What is seen in the backward glance created by distance? How, then, might we hope to get it right? How might the past—this particular past—continue to be disarranged and unpacked so as to be reassembled? As child survivor Ruth Kluger puts it, “We all splash in dark waters when it comes to the past, to this past.”4 And, at this particular moment in post-Holocaust history, when the voices of the eyewitnesses increasingly exist solely in the archives of recorded memory, as Lothe, Suleiman, and Phelan ask, “[w]ill the disappearance of the last witness affect the way public discourse deals with the Holocaust? Will the Holocaust become, perhaps for the first time, truly ‘past history’? How will writers […] who may have no personal connection to the event engage with that history: what kinds of stories will they tell, and will they succeed in their effort to keep the public memory of the event from being lost?”5 What might be asked of the literature might well be asked of critical discourses as well: How will scholars of Holocaust literature, film, and the richly figured forms of memory talk about and navigate such texts? In what directions will the critical, filtered gaze turn? How might we cross the increasingly widening generational divide? In some decisive ways, the critical concerns, if continuing to negotiate some of the same demands, have shifted focus to the increasing effects of temporal, geopolitical, and experiential contingencies and constraints on Holocaust writing. To what extent do time, distance, culture, and geography alter and rearrange our perspective? Literary and scholarly accounts of the Holocaust constitute a diverse body of work in terms of genre and approach as well as the position from which one views the past. As Hilene Flanzbaum puts it, “the shape and language of memory is dictated by cultural contexts […] where you are standing and when you are standing […] makes all the difference in the world.”6 Thus, the body of literature and critical discourses that constitute the field of Holocaust literary and cultural studies draw upon and reflect the shape, changing paradigms, and central preoccupations of shifting generational contexts. As Ann Rigney poses, “if the (un) representability of the Holocaust was the central issue in cultural theory for decades, seventy years after the end of World War II, this has become compounded by the issue of accessibility: the moral and imaginative difficulties of later generations in overcoming the experiential gap between ‘then’ and ‘now.’”7 How, in other words, are scholars moving Holocaust narratives into the future, all the while remaining faithful to that which is substantial, foundational? As David Roskies and Naomi Diamant provocatively suggest, “to tell one story well requires that one not try to tell every story.”8 What stories will we tell as history and attention move forward in time and generation?

1  INTRODUCTION: APPROACHING THE HOLOCAUST … 

3

Inevitably, as we move farther and farther from the events of the Holocaust, memory becomes narrative and the corresponding scholarship responds not only to the corrosive effects of the acceleration of time but also to the new directions and developing shapes of testimony and the ways in which we talk about witnessing. These new directions will shape how critical discourses approach and adjudicate, not only newly fashioned modes of expression and the works of well-established, recognized writers, but also the work of recovery. As Roskies proposes, “Holocaust literature […] unfolds both backward and forward: backward, as previously unknown works are published, annotated, translated, catalogued […] and forward, as new works of ever greater subtlety or simplicity come into being” (3). Thus, even as time and distance intercede, introducing perhaps more proximate concerns and preoccupations in both writing and scholarship, a wide array of writers and scholars are increasingly engaging with the subject of the Holocaust, and they are so in newly framed, newly articulated genres, approaches, and perspectives. Such a looking forward is what we hope to have accomplished by way of the chapters in The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture. This collection of essays reflects current approaches to Holocaust literature that, we hope, open up future thinking on Holocaust representation. What kinds of questions are scholars asking of Holocaust literature? What narratives persist and in what form? As Roskies and Diamant ask, “Who speaks for the Holocaust? […] How shall they speak?” (1–2). These are stories that, as Kluger insists, “shouldn’t even exist to be told,” but they are, nonetheless, stories that “have no end” (40, 83). There is an intergenerational continuity not only in Holocaust writing, as the second and now third generations of Holocaust survivors have added their voices to Holocaust memory and the traumatic inscription of that history, but also a new generation of scholars who come to the Holocaust as a subject only now in the early decades of the twenty-first century. In Holocaust writing that has emerged since the turn of the millennium, we see a variety of different genres, different effects, and different forms of representation. The corresponding scholarship engages with and responds to the literature and other Holocaust cultural artifacts as it measures both their efficacy and uniqueness. Thus, the chapters in this volume reflect diverse generational perspectives—survivor writing, second and third generations—and genres—memoirs, poetry, novels, graphic narratives, films, video-testimonies, and other forms of literary and cultural expression. Viewed alongside one another, the chapters unfold in a kind of dialogue; through their arrangement, we have attempted to create interactions among generations, genres, temporalities, and cultural contexts. As Roskies and Diamant suggest, “[i]t did not take a generation for a literary response to the Holocaust to be born. But it took at least two generations for its history to acquire a shape. Literary history is the sum of many stories and it has taken this long for the stories within the story to be told” (8).

4  V. AARONS AND P. LASSNER

As we become ever more temporally distanced from the events of the Holocaust and as we build on past approaches, how do we navigate the complex narrative terrain of the stories of stories told? As the late Israeli psychologist Dan Bar-On suggested, modes of narrating the past matter; they redirect our attentions not only to what happened, “historical truths,” but how we talk about the events of the historical past, “narrative truths […] how someone tells what happened.” It is thus through such a fluid “intergenerational transmission” of narratives that “one generation’s story can influence and shape the stories of the next generations.”9 The direction from which we approach the narratives of the past shapes modes of representation and practices of remembering. As editors Claudio Fogu, Wulf Kansteiner, and Todd Presner suggest, in the introduction to Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture, “[t]he tour d’horizon of Holocaust studies raises intriguing questions… including how one chooses to narrate the history of Holocaust remembrance in what context, for whom, and to what ends.”10 There are, of course, many ways of telling, a wide range of modes of representation that respond to points of departure and different kinds of distance. That is, the direction from which a story is told depends, in large part, on the place from which one approaches the material: geographical, temporal, experiential, and narrative aims and strategies, in order, as Hayden White suggests “to generate ways of mediating between the corpus of facts known about the Holocaust and the various meanings that our ethical interests […] demand of us.”11 There are different kinds of telling, different kinds of testimony and commemoration. What matters is that the stories are told, stories, as David Grossman insists, “which have to be told again and again because that is the only way to assemble the traces of identity and fuse the fragments of a crumbled world.”12 Thus, the chapters that follow hope to add to the existing scholarship on Holocaust representation by uncovering new forms of expression, new directions, gestures, and transactions through which the stories of the past are renegotiated, reframed, and reexamined from new angles, new points of departure. The chapters in this volume present a variety of writing that, as S. Lillian Kremer has suggested, participates in the project of “understanding the twentieth century’s horrendous history, its psychological and theological aftermath, and the moral imperative to bear witness thereby fulfilling an obligation inherent in the Jewish tradition of remembering and reiterating the historic narrative.”13 In doing so, these chapters, in examining diverse genres and forms of expression from a range of critical points of departure, participate also in the ongoing project of responding to and talking through moments of rupture and incompletion. Holocaust representation is, after all, an opportunity to contribute to the making of meaning through the continuation of narratives of the past. As such, the chapters in this volume pose options for reading Holocaust texts, offering openings for further discussion and exploration. The inquiring body of interpretive scholarship responding to the Shoah becomes itself a story, a narrative that materially extends our inquiry into that history.

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As part of the process of ongoing inquiry, then, this collection of essays seeks to create a lively dialogue among an array of texts and voices. There is no guiding methodological or theoretical frame from which the individual scholars approach the subject of the Holocaust; there is no single, preferred way in, no single point of departure or point of origin for discovery. That is, the essays in this collection hope to raise more questions than answers, opening further possibilities for Holocaust representation. Thus, the chapters themselves represent a chorus of generational voices that are deeply engaged in making emphatic the complexities of witnessing, of testimony, and of transmission in their attempts to locate a fitting response to art made of atrocity. These chapters speak at once to the open and fruitful possibilities of new forms of representation all the while exposing the limits of such representation. As the proliferation of publications, films, media depictions, and annual scholarly conferences demonstrates, interest in historical and cultural representations of the Holocaust remains unabated. Although the field of Holocaust studies has always been multifaceted, its foundation rests upon historical excavation and archival research that exposes and corroborates Nazi Germany’s crimes against humanity. The “traumatic rupture” of the Holocaust, to borrow a term from Joshua Hirsch, in its various forms, continues to be interrogated, reopened.14 Our knowledge of the Holocaust’s vast reach has also necessitated attention to other primary sources, including oral and video testimony, memoirs, and diaries, and has extended to include autobiographical and imaginative fiction, drama, poetry, film, and the plastic arts, all of which has offered significant insights into the myriad forms of suffering, endurance, and resistance of victims and survivors. As contributors to this volume determine, from the first testimonies, memoirs, and poems to appear in the aftermath and onwards, Holocaust writers and artists have expressed the recognition that the narrative conventions that shape literary traditions such as replication, mimetic, or linear forms of storytelling, systematic or schematic plotting, and their open-ended or resolved conclusions respond to historical trajectories that have been ruptured by Holocaust experience. This is not to claim that Holocaust representation is positioned outside the literary figuration of the past. Rather as our essays make evident, Holocaust narrative innovation is motivated by commingling aesthetics with the priorities of history, testimony, and the ethics of representation. As a result of this amalgamation, the extremes of genocidal ideology, policies, and practices, and the traumatic experiences and painful memories of survivors and victims question and sometimes even defy the conventions of traditional realism as well as modernism’s impetus to reject the past and “make it new.” As though in critical response to this imperative, as Ira Nadel’s essay proffers, Samuel Beckett’s modernist forms are bound to history: “Most importantly, Beckett’s Holocaust was not abstract but real, his awareness of Jewish life and oppression finding early expression” in his

6  V. AARONS AND P. LASSNER

first novel. As so many artists and writers have anatomized, the traumatic Holocaust past will not let go of the present. The expressive result has been that first and succeeding generations of Holocaust writers and artists have represented their responses to suffering, survival, and memory through textual and visual narrative attempts that plot disjunctive temporalities where the present is destabilized, indeed haunted by the omnipresent past. As studied in this volume, Holocaust representation interweaves various, compatible, and cacophonous narrative modes in the attempt to express the unprecedented horrors of the Nazi roundups, deportation, incarceration, mass slaughter, and the vicissitudes of survival and the aftermath. Ongoing Holocaust scholarship remains deeply concerned about the viability of generalizations, universalizing platitudes, and totalizing approaches. Informed and shaped by the remaining slivers of experience and memory, Holocaust experience has been narrated in many genres and even within and derived from the shards of material evidence, as Sharon Oster explores through museum exhibitions of such objects as the shoes of victims. Holocaust inquiry often begins with survivor oral and video testimony, while as our essayists confirm, memoirs, fiction, poetry, drawing, painting, and collage have become sources of evidence and insight as well as poetry written as superimposed on drawing, medleys of different narrative voices and points of view or the mixture of fantasy and documentary realism in fiction and film, cartoons, photo and video installations. Our contributors examine how Holocaust literature has from the first and continues to embrace various genres of popular culture, including science fiction, satire, and parody. Yet despite this panoply of representational forms, many who “acknowledge that testimonial writing can have an aesthetic dimension” also argue “that the aesthetic dimension of fiction about the Holocaust renders it unreliable and open to suspicion” (Lothe et al., 4–5). All together, even as we editors plotted a logical categorical trajectory to present ongoing debates about the viability of new forms of Holocaust representation, we concluded that a cohesive Holocaust tradition or theory of representation contravenes the multifaceted approaches of its writers, artists, and scholars. In tandem, their methods subvert any holistic approach that would allow their envelopment by a global event to erase, elide, or ignore the individuality of their subjects’ experiences and responses. Instead, each of the contributors’ essays suggests that despite the efficacy of graphic or textual detail, characterizations, and contexts, Holocaust representation will continue to challenge traditional fictional and autobiographical imperatives to identify with, relate to, or even to understand the plight of the imperiled protagonists. In contrast, we are urged to consider that our study and acquisition of Holocaust knowledge leads us to recognize ourselves as radically distanced from the individual and collective traumas of the Holocaust but as engaged and committed participants in the ongoing project of Holocaust inquiry. Rethinking canonical writers is a hallmark of this volume, but our intention is also to offer new insights into Holocaust representation by considering

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how succeeding generations of Holocaust writing and artistry form a richly complex epistemological relationship that encourages new critical questions and inquiries. For example, contributors study how Holocaust narration has formed a reflexive relation between past and present as memories and traces of survivors’ Holocaust experience are recounted or even transmitted silently to their children and grandchildren. Demonstrating their experiential and historical distance as well as their psychological and cultural responses and bonds, second- and third-generation writers and artists have turned to narrative forms that respond to the fragmented stories, lapses, and ellipses that have been transmitted to them. Beyond first- and second-generation narratives, as Victoria Aarons and Alan Berger proffer, the third generation attempts to fill the ever-widening gap between those who directly suffered the events of the Holocaust and lived to recount their experiences and those for whom that particular history can only be imaginatively reconstructed from an approximation of that time and place, events excavated from the “shards” of memories, […] “refracting no more than their miserable incompleteness.”15

To be sure, post-Holocaust narratives are framed by an imaginative reinvestment in the past as they are mediated by time and experience. Our goal of offering new directions in Holocaust representation is the result of an expanding reach of Holocaust studies, both in generational terms and in international scope, including the work of creative writers, filmmakers, artists, and scholars around the globe. Together they create an archive of historical documentation and interpretive evaluation. Collectively, our contributors explore the myriad ways in which Holocaust experiences, memories, and representations continue to be deeply affected by specific cultural settings, histories, and cultural and political ideologies, from the Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic War that occluded the Jewish tragedy, to Israel where some 250,000 survivors found their only welcome, to Latin America where they contributed to a thriving Yiddish literary culture, and to the United States, where Americans’ responses to the Holocaust is now receiving wide attention, as the USHMM exhibit attests.16 Bringing together these multifaceted strands of Holocaust cultural production and scholarship addresses new directions in the field of Holocaust studies by demonstrating how earlier distinctions, such as historical and cultural studies, have merged to create an interdisciplinary field. For example, research by our contributors combines such subjects as memory, trauma, history, and cultural artifacts, producing intersecting and mutually informing insights within and among the volume’s essays. The ethics of Holocaust representation, a persistent concern among scholars, artists, and audiences, is interwoven with close textual readings, showing how such issues as historical accuracy and authenticity, the subjectivity and humanity of prisoners, competitive victimization, and the possibilities for and nature of resistance prevail to hover

8  V. AARONS AND P. LASSNER

over examinations of textual form and genre. Both writing and reading the Holocaust are ethical acts, gestures toward the perpetuation and transmission of memory and testimony and against genocide. As Susan Sontag once put it, after all, “[r]emembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself.”17 The ethical component of Holocaust representation is also evinced in essays that expose and delineate the perspectives of Nazi perpetrators. Although the origins and representation of antisemitic tropes have been studied widely, including Sander Gilman’s seminal work The Jew’s Body, Cary Nelson’s startling survey of Nazi-inspired poetry reveals the effort to aestheticize the demonization of the Jews and Jewish culture by deploying familiar poetic conventions that would seem to extend the supremacy of German culture.18 Wendy Adele-Marie’s chapter shows us how Nazi triumphalist ideology was integrated into the constructions of Nazi womanhood by German women who self-consciously activated its mythic incarnations of generating the Nazi future. Like Adele-Marie’s essay, Sarah Cushman’s topographical study of the women’s camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau attests to the necessity of including the ideological and structural constructions underpinning Nazi gender policies in order to understand the experiences and responses of their victims. As Gisela Bock theorizes, Nazi race hygiene “decreed that inferior breeds had to be eliminated while the superior German one had to be strengthened and improved.”19 The elimination of inferior women included separating them into a hell of their own where their encounters with men involved sexual and other forms of abuse and where brutality drove women prisoners from offering mutual support and comfort to self-enclosed indifference to the fate of others. By contrast, as Adele-Marie’s research evinces, German women who were designated as “superior” were motivated by the promises of social and economic rewards to join the Nazi war machine. Considered together, the topographical, ideological, and experiential research of our contributors reveals a complex relationship between the participation of German women in the Third Reich and the experiences of its women victims. That gender considerations complicate the chain of signification between historical and representational studies of the Holocaust is evidenced in Naomi Sokoloff’s comparative study of Diane Ackerman’s non-fiction account The Zookeeper’s Wife and its film adaptation. Framed by insights from Animal Studies, Sokoloff argues that Antonina Żabiński, the protagonist, “fosters an atmosphere in which humans and non-humans care for another, and these same qualities in her personality lead to her efforts on behalf of Jews.” While typically applied to victims and perpetrators, this definition of humanity allows us to reflect on the polysemous figure of the bystander who, faced with the certainty of draconian repercussions, makes the self-conscious choice to help strangers, who in Nazi ideology, constitute a verminous non-human species. In concert with historical approaches, this essay examines how the film and textual representations speak “to its particular time and milieu.”

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While historical accuracy, verification, and contingencies have always been a key concern in Holocaust studies, especially with the ongoing, various, and widely disseminated forms of Holocaust denial as well as instances of false memoirs, rarely have the two disciplines or forms of inquiry been considered in tandem with each other and with theoretical approaches as mutually informing. Holocaust representation reaches across a rich and diverse body of material: a multi-generational, multi-generic, trans-national, and trans-temporal hybridity. What we find in the over-arching genre of Holocaust representation is an intersection and crossing of genres, narratives, and meta-narratives, a hybrid “blurring of traditional genres,” as Berel Lang has suggested, one that is attentive to “the character of the Holocaust as a subject for literary representation and the role of historical and ethical causality in shaping the genres, and thus the forms, of literary discourse” (Lang, Holocaust Representation, 35). So, too, the critical discourses in response to the wide range of forms of representation are themselves modes of interpretive expansion and an uncovering of the past. The scholarship thus contributes to the ongoing construction of the larger historical narrative. The chapters that follow—meta-narratives that participate in the transmission of Holocaust history and story—draw upon a polyphonic literary representation of the Shoah, a crossing of literature and other media with its historical antecedents. That is, the chapters examine different genres, media, and perspectives through the lens of Holocaust studies. In doing so, they take on a variety of writers, cultural artifacts, methodological approaches, and modes of expression that hope to expand the reach of critical discourses on Holocaust representation. Some of the chapters offer newly framed analyses of iconic survivor writers, such as Primo Levi, Eli Wiesel, Dan Pagis, and Paul Celan. Others introduce relatively new writers, such as the third-generation graphic memoirist Amy Kurzweil. The chapters move around in time and location: North America, Argentina, Russia, Germany, Poland, and England. We have included a number of different genres and media in the hope of suggesting the range of representative forms of expression: memoirs, autobiographies, novels, comics and graphic narratives, science fiction, poetry, film, photography, and video testimony. We broach issues of gender and sexual identity in relation to Holocaust studies. We have divided the chapters into categories loosely defined by genre. However, as will be apparent, these categories overlap and intersect in interesting and provocative ways that demonstrate and perhaps even predict new expressive forms of Holocaust representation as writers and artists find the subject inescapable. All the chapters respond either explicitly or implicitly to the kinds of distance that results from experience that turns into memory. But if experience becomes memory, then memory turns back into “experience” through the lenses of narration. To be sure, this reflexively layered narrative mediation speaks to a drastically different kind of experience, not that of direct witnessing, but a second- and third-hand experience of reading about the events that happened.

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There are, of course, as many ways of telling as there are of reading. As Philip Roth once wrote, “[a]t their best writers change the way readers read.”20 Here, writer, reader, and scholar are engaged in a complex exchange of histories, perspectives, and negotiations in the process of making knowledge. These are active transactions that keep the dialogue open, an ethical exchange in which, as Lang puts it, “history has the last word—unspoken but insisted upon” (Holocaust Representation, 39). Together these interlocutors are engaged in a dialogue with history by which the voices of the past are reanimated. What is articulated is an invitation to engage, not only with what is articulated, but with what is not yet but might be said. The chapters that follow provide a range of perspectives from which the Holocaust has been and thus might yet be approached, new directions that draw upon the past as they move forward into the future.

Notes

1. Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust (New York: Public Affairs, 2011). 2. Berel Lang, Holocaust Representation: Art Within the Limits of History and Ethics (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 34. 3. Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 17. 4. Ruth Kluger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (New York: The Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 2001), 19. 5. Jakob Lothe, Susan Rubin Suleiman, and James Phelan, After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future (Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2012), 1. 6.  Hilene Flanzbaum, “Reading the Holocaust: Right Here, Right Now,” in Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 17, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 66. 7.  Ann Rigney, “Scales of Postmemory,” in Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture, eds. Claudio Fogu, Wulf Kansteiner, and Todd Presner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 114. 8. David G. Roskies and Naomi Diamant, Holocaust Literature: A History and Guide (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2012), 6. 9. Dan Bar-On, Fear and Hope: Three Generations of the Holocaust (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 335–336. 10. Claudio Fogu, Wulf Kansteiner, and Todd Presner, eds., “Introduction,” in Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 40. 11. Hayden White, “Historical Truth, Estrangement, and Disbelief,” in Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture, 54. 12. David Grossman, Writing in the Dark, trans. Jessica Cohen (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 13. 13.  S. Lillian Kremer, “The Holocaust in English-Language Literatures,” in Literature of the Holocaust, ed. Alan Rosen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 149.



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14. Josua Hirsch, Afterimage: Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 7. 15. Victoria Aarons and Alan L. Berger, Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, and Memory (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2017), 4. 16.  https://exhibitions.ushmm.org/americans-and-the-holocaust/main. 17. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 115. 18. Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991). 19. Gisela Bock, “Racism and Sexism in Nazi Germany: Motherhood, Compulsory Sterilization, and the State,” in Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust, eds. Carol Rittner and John K. Roth (New York: Paragon House, 1993), 161. 20. Philip Roth, “Interview with The Paris Review,” in Reading Myself and Others (New York: Penguin, 1985), 170.

PART I

Memoir

CHAPTER 2

Elie Wiesel’s Quarrel with God Alan L. Berger

Elie Wiesel’s literary, religious, and existential universe revolve around the deity. “As a Jew,” he writes, “sooner or later you will encounter the enigma of God’s action in history.”1 In other words, what is God’s role in the Jewish historical experience? Wiesel puts the matter directly: “Whoever praises God for Jerusalem and fails to interrogate Him about Treblinka is a hypocrite.”2 If God dwells in our midst, how is one to account for the Holocaust? From his canonical memoir Night (1958) to his last published volume Open Heart (2011), this question of questions lurks behind every word the Nobel Peace Laureate has written. The author’s interrogation of the deity (Din Torah) reveals his anguish; the Holocaust is explicable neither with nor without God. Night marks Wiesel’s transition from a deeply observant youth who by day studied Talmud and by night would run to the synagogue to weep over the destruction of the Temple. Night signals that traditional images of an all-powerful deity who enters into a covenantal relationship with the Jewish people and intervenes in history to protect His people now appear untenable. What choice does a believer have when Sinai is confronted by Auschwitz? How is one to choose life after experiencing the kingdom of death? Unlike the Talmudic heretic Elisha ben Abuyah who, after witnessing the death of innocents for following divine law, proclaimed there is neither judge nor judgment, Elie Wiesel is unwilling to embrace a death of God position. In a searing ritual poem, he writes: Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed. . . . Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and

A. L. Berger (*)  Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, USA © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_2

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16  A. L. BERGER Turned my soul to ashes. Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long As God Himself. Never.3

Embracing paradox, Wiesel writes of both a “murdered God” and a “God condemned to live.” Dare we add forever? This is why Wiesel contends that Night is both the end of everything and the beginning of everything. Unlike Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, whose Confessions reveal the journey of a tortured soul rejecting a carnal life and seeking redemption, Wiesel’s Night is, in Lawrence Cunningham’s perceptive phrase, “about someone’s death: the death of God, of history, of one’s father, and of meaning.” It is an anti-Exodus. In what follows, I discuss three interrelated themes. First I address the issue of the storyteller (maggid) as protest theologian. How does Wiesel’s theology function? What does he bring to his quarrel with God that distinguishes it from traditional Jewish theology? Silence is a central trope in Wiesel’s work as a theologian. How does silence speak and what does it communicate? Moving beyond Night, I discuss selected phases of Wiesel’s literary Din Torah, and changing images of the deity, focusing on a group of writings which best reveals this dynamic; among them are: The Gates of the Forest, Twilight, The Forgotten, A Prayer for the Days of Awe, and Open Heart. In what sense was God Himself a victim of Auschwitz? I conclude with a meditation on the significance of Wiesel’s position.

Wiesel as Protest Theologian Elie Wiesel was the Maggid (religious storyteller) of Sighet. He never claimed to be a theologian; quite to the contrary, he viewed himself as a storyteller. But the distinction between the two professions is in his case fluid. Wiesel himself noted that, “My preoccupations in literature are as much theological as they are literary, and maybe more of the former than of the latter.”4 Wiesel has in fact been termed one of the great theologians of our (the late twentieth) century. In making this claim, Jean-Marie Lustiger, born a Jew but converted to Christianity to save himself from the Nazis, writes of the special vocation of the authentic theologian: “a person whom God seeks and who himself searches for God and then communicates the experience.”5 But as a theologian, and true to his mystical and Hasidic background, Wiesel is fond of paradox, walking a theological tightrope, indicting—while refusing to abandon—God. Wiesel’s work is permeated by the tension between the preShoah religious youth he had been and the survivor he now was. This position is perhaps best summarized by Michael in The Town Beyond the Wall. He once overheard this prayer: “O God, be with me when I have need of you, but above all do not leave me, when I deny you” (Town Beyond the Wall, 44). Wiesel is left with questions. In Hebrew, the word for question is sh’elah

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which itself contains the word for God (El). Wiesel’s eternal questions are addressed to the deity. Moishe the Beadle, Wiesel’s Kabbalah teacher, told his pupil, “Man comes closer to God through the questions he asks him. Man asks and God replies. But we don’t understand his replies” (Night, 5). Michael de Saint Chéron helps readers understand Wiesel’s role as a theologian. He terms Wiesel “the theologian of the silence of God.” He is, continues Saint Chéron, “one of those children of Israel who has ‘taken upon (himself) the inconceivable guilt of God’s indifference, or absence, or impotence.’”6 Silence is of course a major trope in Wiesel’s work. He was silent for a decade following the Shoah. He took notes and continually reflected on his traumatic Holocaust experience, but wrote no memoir. Furthermore, Wiesel attests that he entered literature through silence.7 Moreover, he contends he does not understand the divine role in the Shoah. Why didn’t God intervene to stop the suffering, torture, and murder of innocents? Wiesel wonders why God was willing to change His mind about destroying Sodom and Gomorrah, in negotiating with Abraham, but refused to intervene to stop the Shoah. Complicating the issue, God did, according to midrashic sources, intervene to save a Jewish child from being bricked into a pyramid, but did nothing to prevent the murder of one and a half million Jewish children ­during the Holocaust. The depth of Wiesel’s theological and human despair is clearly evident in this excerpt from his 1955 autobiography, first published in Yiddish (Un di velt hut geshvign—And the World Remained Silent): In the beginning there was faith, a naïve faith; and there was trust, a foolish trust; and there was illusion, a frightful illusion. We had faith in God, trust in man, and we were Living an illusion. We pretended that a holy spark glowed in each of us; that the Divine Image dwells in our soul and shines in our eyes. Alas, this was the source, if not the cause, of the misfortune that befell us.

Professor Frederick Downing argues that Wiesel in the death camps saw “the Jewish people abandoned by the allies and by God. As an adult Wiesel continued to see the abandonment of the oppressed as a central problem, the answer to which is always solidarity with the victim.”8 Wiesel quarreled with, but never abandoned, God and the Jewish tradition. Rather, his experiences in the Shoah led him to attest: “I will never cease to rebel against those who committed or permitted Auschwitz, including God. The questions I once asked myself about God’s silence remain open.”9 To give validity to his belief, he had first to shout his disbelief in his disbelief. Rebellion is a form of faith for Elie Wiesel, but only from within Judaism. In one of Night’s starkest episodes, Wiesel witnesses the hanging of three Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz, two adults and a young boy. The other prisoners are forced to march in front of the condemned. The adults die quickly, the youth lingers. Wiesel heard a voice asking “For God’s sake, where is God?” He hears his own voice answer “Where He is? This is where-hanging here

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from this gallows” (Night, 65). This scene has been incorrectly identified as Wiesel’s endorsement of the death of God theology. In one sense, it would have been theologically and psychologically less painful to adopt this position. However, Wiesel refuses to abandon the preciousness of his pre-Shoah faith. In a classic 1970 exchange between the death of God theologian Richard Rubenstein and Elie Wiesel, the Noble Peace Laureate clarified his theological position. Rubenstein initially had written that the thread uniting God and man, connecting heaven and earth had been broken (by the Holocaust) we stand in a cold, silent, unfeeling cosmos, unaided by any purposeful power beyond our own resources. Wiesel exclaimed, “If you want difficulties, choose to live with God. Can you compare today the tragedy of the believer to that of the unbeliever? The real tragedy, the real drama, is the drama of the believer.”10 Wiesel sympathized with Job; I did not deny God’s existence, but “I doubted His absolute justice” (45). Wiesel attests “If I had not had faith, my life would have been much easier.”11 Wiesel’s memoir problematizes the fundamentals of Jewish existence while simultaneously embracing silence. The Akedah (binding of Isaac), which speaks of a father willing to sacrifice his son, is transmuted in Night to examples of sons abandoning fathers in order to stay alive. The Wiesel family was deported shortly after the holiday of Passover. But their exodus was not one from slavery to freedom; it was instead a journey from life to oblivion. It was, as noted above, an anti-Exodus. Wiesel writes of witnessing a group of Jewish prisoners saying Kaddish (the prayer for the dead) for themselves. He wonders whether in all of Jewish history this has ever occurred. Wiesel explicitly enquires, why thank God? Meditating on Rosh Hashanah, Wiesel knew that his sins grieved the Almighty. Consequently, the youth had pled for forgiveness believing that “the salvation of the world depended on every one of [my] deeds, on every one of my prayers.” In Auschwitz, however, he felt very strong: “I was the accuser, God the accused” (Night, 68). The God that “died” in Auschwitz was the deity whom the religious youth believed would intervene in history to protect His people and uphold the covenant. From this point on, Wiesel’s faith was no longer the simple, pure, naïve belief he had prior to the Shoah. He had to find a different image of God and a different way to believe. Wiesel’s quarrel with God differs from earlier forms of such quarreling in the Jewish tradition: biblical, rabbinic, and Hasidic. He re-views all of Jewish history in light of the Holocaust, asking if classical claims remain valid. Anson Laytner isolates several characteristics of post-Shoah theological protest.12 I focus here on the rejection of the biblical “for our sins we are punished” (mi-penei hata’einu) paradigm (were the million and a half children murdered by the Nazis being punished for their sins?) and the rabbinic “reproof of love” (yessurin shel ahava) assertion—was death by asphyxiation in gas chambers such a reproof? Wiesel’s 1978 play The Trial of God (As It Was Held on February 25, 1649, in Shamgorad)13 rejects these foundational assumptions of classical Jewish theology. The trial is a Purimshpiel indicting God for

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His silence during a pogrom. God’s defender, Sam, is in fact Satan. The play concludes with a crowd gathering for a new attack on the village’s remaining Jews. Throughout the play, Berish, an innkeeper whose daughter had been raped in the earlier attack and who consequently was rendered mute, calls God to account proclaiming that even if God has apparently abandoned the covenant, he—Berish—will not. Wiesel’s quarrel with God continues and intensifies when, given the option of justifying God or defending the Jewish people, he chooses the latter. Wiesel’s 1973 cantata, Ani Ma’amin: A Song Lost and Found Again, dedicated to his son Elisha, is a passionate defense of the Jewish people. The cantata portrays the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob ascending to heaven to petition God on behalf of their children who are being murdered in the Shoah. Their appeals evidently fall on deaf ears. God says nothing. The three patriarchs, unaware of the fact that God whispers to an angel, “Nitzhuni banai, my children have defeated me, they deserve my gratitude,” return to earth to be with the victims. Unbeknownst to them, God follows the patriarchs. Wiesel’s poetic retelling of a tale first presented in Midrash Rabbah Lamentations begs the question, of what use is a silent and powerless deity in the face of the extermination of the Jewish people? However, it also encourages the asking of theological questions which the storyteller can continually re-raise plunging deeper into this mystery. In Wiesel’s words, he opposes God but in defense of His creation.

A Suffering God Wiesel once told Harry James Cargas that ever since Auschwitz, he has been trying to find an occupation for God. When several years ago I asked Wiesel if he had found such an occupation, he responded, “Yes, but God does not listen.” Wiesel’s quarrel with God assumes an unexpected dimension when he speaks about the deity as a suffering God. Citing the Sefer Ha Zohar (Book of Splendor) a central text of Jewish mysticism, Wiesel writes “God is everywhere, even in suffering and in the very heart of punishment.” God is portrayed as accompanying the Jewish people into exile. Yet, God’s suffering implies a basic question: “Do we not have enough sorrow already?” The Jewish people conclude by asking, “Why must You add Yours to it?”14 Writing about the unprecedented suffering in the Shoah, Wiesel concludes that God “should have intervened or at least expressed Himself. Which side was He on?” If God was telling humanity something, we do not know what. “He,” continues Wiesel, “could have-should have-interrupted His own suffering by calling a halt to the martyrdom of innocents.” More questions: What kind of Deity is this? Was He indifferent? Or worse, powerless to stop the Shoah? We do not know, but it is imperative to keep asking questions as a way of keeping open the eternal dialogue between God and man. Moreover, the image of a silent God implies that the deity Himself was among the

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Holocaust’s victims. Many years ago, at a reception following his talk, I heard a conversation between Wiesel and an earnest young man. The youth asked Wiesel if it was still possible to believe in God. Wiesel responded vigorously, “Yes believe in Him. But you must always question Him.”

Silence Wiesel’s work is permeated by silence. “Silence,” he has attested, “like language […] demands to be recognized and transmitted.” Moreover, as Albert Friedlander notes, “The image of a silent God has endured in all [Wiesel’s]writings of evil, from […] Night, to his most recent statements.” Theological silence has a vital implication, having the effect “of reversing all religiously established values.”15 The Word of God is submitted to the truth. Reading the Bible in light of Auschwitz can yield silence. Steven Katz helpfully notes two types of silence; one is similar to an agnostic attitude—“I cannot know.” This avoids or evades the problems posed by Auschwitz. The second type is the “silence that comes after struggling with God, after reproaching God, after feeling His closeness or His painful absence.” Katz continues, correctly observing, “Having followed reason to its limits, it recognizes the limits of reason.”16 There is a scene in Night where the adolescent Wiesel watches a father beaten to death by his son over a crust of bread. The son, in turn, is fatally beaten by two other prisoners. Of all the things Wiesel might have said in response, he writes one brief sentence: “I was sixteen.” Years later, Wiesel met Samuel Beckett in a restaurant. Following a brief exchange, the two sat for an hour in silence “but not mute.” Wiesel’s well-known advice to writers: “condense, always condense.” In contrast to theological silence, Wiesel’s 1966 book The Jews of Silence references political silence as Wiesel the witness indicts American Judaism for their silence in the face of their oppressed Soviet brethren’s plight.

The Gates of the Forest, Twilight, the Forgotten These novels are significant in tracing the stages of Wiesel’s quarrel with God. Chapter 4 of The Gates of the Forest portrays a conversation between Wiesel’s idealized image of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, and Gregor (a spokesperson for Wiesel): “Rebbe, how can you believe in HaShem after the Khourban?” At this point, Wiesel’s quarrel with God still was fueled by his anger. The Rebbe pointed out that spiritual resistance including singing and dancing could be as efficacious as a man holding a dagger. He responded: “And how can you not believe after the Khourban?” Wiesel notes “Well, that was a turning point in my writing, that simple dialogue.” He also attested that he accepted the Rebbe’s response not as an answer but as a question, one more question.17 The Rebbe’s competing image of the deity gives Wiesel pause.

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Twilight Dr. Raphael Lipkin, a Holocaust survivor and professor of literature, is summoned to a mysterious psychiatric mountain clinic in upstate New York. The patients identify with various biblical characters. Lipkin hopes to re-establish contact with Pedro who rescued him from an orphanage after the war. Among the patients is one who identifies with God. In a dialogue with “God,” Lipkin is reproved. “God” defends himself: “All these creatures that breathe because of me, what do they want? That I keep quiet […] But when I remain silent, they reproach me. Do they think I like talking the blame for everything?” (207). The trial of God continues when Lipkin asserts that God could have prevented the Holocaust. “Yes, I could have,” his mysterious companion responds. “God” continues: “Can you tell me at what precise moment I should have intervened to keep the children from being thrown into the flames?” You are putting me on trial. “This demands facts and arguments, not clichés” (Twilight, 208). Echoing the position that God Himself suffers, the patient enquires: “Cry not only to God but for God” (Twilight, 213). Irving Abrahamson writes that the characters in Twilight transform into disappointed and desperate messengers to God whose task is to redeem the deity.18 Nevertheless, “What about God in all this?” is a constant refrain in the novel. The image of God is paradoxical, a creator of the universe who suffers along with the Jewish people.

The Forgotten Elhanan Rosenbaum is a psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor who suffers from the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. He needs to share his Shoah experiences with his son Malkiel before it is too late. The novel’s preface entitled Elhanan’s prayer is an evocative and moving portrayal of an enfeebled deity, one who needs to be reminded of the Shoah. Reversing the Shema Yisrael prayer, Elhanan gives God a command. Elhanan writes: “God of Auschwitz, know that I must remember Auschwitz. And that I must remind You of it [emphasis added]. God of Treblinka, let the sound of that name make me, and You, tremble now and always. God of Belzec, let me, and You, weep for the victims of Belzec” (Forgotten, 11). The prayer concludes: “Even if you forget me, O Lord, I refuse to forget You” (Forgotten, 12). Wiesel’s image of the deity is one of ambivalence; the creator of the world needs to be reminded of Auschwitz. On October 2, 1997, Elie Wiesel’s A Prayer for the Days of Awe was published in The New York Times. This remarkable piece appearing more than fifty years “since the nightmare was lifted” is best understood as Wiesel’s attempted rapprochement with God. From the prayer’s opening line—“Master of the Universe, let us make up. It is time. How long can we go on being angry?”—the overall tone is one of conciliation. However, Wiesel asks the central question: “What about my faith in you, Master of the Universe?”

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He confides that he never lost it; even in the camps, Wiesel continued to pray. The author then conjectures that “the prayers [were] a link into the vanished world of my childhood.” But Wiesel adds a central caveat, and his faith “was no longer pure. How could it be? It was filled with anguish rather than fervor, with perplexity more than piety.” The author notes that on the high holidays in the camps, his traditional prayers were “directed to you as well as against you.” Wiesel concedes that he would not repeat the “harsh words” he earlier used in his testimony. In his childhood, writes Wiesel, he “did not expect much from human beings. But I expected everything from you.” Wiesel’s ambivalent portrait of his relationship with God continues. On the one hand, he insists on asking the question plaguing him for over a half-century: “Where were you, God of kindness, in Auschwitz? What was going on in heaven, at the celestial tribunal, while your children were marked for humiliation, isolation and death only because they were Jewish?” On the other hand, Wiesel cannot forget the believing Jew he had been: “As we Jews now enter the High Holidays again […] let us make up, Master of the Universe. In spite of everything that happened? Yes, in spite. Let us make up; for the child in me, it is unbearable to be divorced from you so long.” Open Heart is Wiesel’s last published work. The 2012 book is a summing up of the author’s position on a variety of major themes, including whether the world has learned any lessons from the Holocaust (for the most part it has not); has he performed his duty as a witness (perhaps too well); the best way to protect his son in a threatening world (the best way would be to change the world in which he will grow up); and the predominant question—“And God in all that?” This question continually arises to the point of “obsession.” It haunts everything Wiesel has written. For Wiesel, Auschwitz is most of all a “theological scandal.” How is one to understand the silence of God? Yet everything remains a question. Yet the real questions, “Those that concern the Creator and His creation, have no answers.” Perhaps, wonders Wiesel, he should say to God “That I was also counting on His help.” The image of God in this instance remains one of an inscrutable and wounded deity.

Conclusion—Significance of Wiesel’s Position Wiesel’s more than half-century quarrel with God has yielded various images of the deity. These images range from a Master of the Universe hanging on the gallows in Night to a wounded post-Shoah God. The first image signifies the end of the author’s childhood belief in a traditional God, a Lord of History who intervenes on behalf of His chosen people. In the words of the liturgy, when the ark opens and the Torah scrolls are removed the congregation exclaims: Moses would say, “Arise, Oh Lord, and let thy enemies be scattered; let those who hate thee flee before thee.” This clearly did not happen in the Holocaust. The notion of a wounded deity is the one that Wiesel embraces following the theological rupture caused by the Shoah. Wiesel contends that only a wounded faith is worthy of a silent God. What links

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these images is the trope of God’s silence. In his 2005 novel The Time of the Uprooted, Wiesel introduces a character named Rebbe Zusya a mystical seer figure. Responding to a petitioner’s request about the nature of God, the Rebbe states, “God? A Jewish writer said that ‘the silence of God is God.’ I say that God is not silent, although He is the God of Silence. He does call out. It is by His silence that He calls to you. Are you answering Him?” (Time of the Uprooted, 152). Wiesel’s quarrel is with God’s silence. Wiesel’s quarrel with God is transmuted into his argument for the oppressed. In Souls on Fire, his initial volume dealing with Hasidism, Wiesel credits the movement with the insight that the road to God leads through man. The Nobel Laureate’s increasing role as a human rights activist originates partially from his acceptance of the fact that the mystery of God’s silence is intractable, but human solidarity is possible. Consequently, his quarrel with God becomes a mission to speak up for the downtrodden. Wiesel’s theological position is one that can be a source of comfort for post-Shoah Judaism in its attempts to deal with despair as well as with faith. Responding to a question about the possibility of building a religious life based on doubt, Wiesel attested that it is possible: “If, he said,” it is doubt together with faith [. …]. It can deepen faith and make it more real. Doubt is a kind of inoculation against this.19 Wiesel was a homo religiosus who could not continue to embrace his childhood faith nor could he renounce it. Ariel Burger contends that his faith became an “angry faith” or a “faith with teeth.”20 In the end, if one must choose between justifying God and helping the victims of injustice, choose to help the victims of injustice. God needs no help. Quarreling with the deity without abandoning him is what Laytner terms “faithful defiance”21 This is Elie Wiesel’s theological legacy.

Notes

1. One Generation After, trans. Lily Edelman and Elie Wiesel (New York: Schocken Books, 1982), 166. 2.  Alan L. Berger “Elie Wiesel,” in Interpreters of Judaism in the Late 20th Century, ed. Steven T. Katz (Washington, DC: B’nai Brith Books, 1993), 390. 3. Elie Wiesel, Night, trans. Marion Wiesel (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 34. 4. Irving Abrahamson, Against Silence: The Voice and Vision of Elie Wiesel, vol. 1 (New York: Holocaust Library, 1995), 39. 5. Jean Marie Lustiger, “Night: The Absence of God? The Presence of God? A Meditation in Three Parts,” in Elie Wiesel: Between Memory and Hope, ed. Carol Rittner, R.S.M. (New York: New York University Press, 1990), 188. 6.  Michael de Saint-Chéron, “Elie Wiesel as Theologian,” trans. Alan Astro, October 16, 2018. Unpublished Paper, 13. 7. Elie Wiesel, Why I Write Confronting the Holocaust: The Impact of Elie Wiesel, eds. Alan Rosenfeld and Irving Greenberg (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), 200. 8. Frederick L. Downing, Elie Wiesel: A Religious Biography (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2008), 240.

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9. Elie Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 85. 10. Elie Wiesel, “Talking and Writing and Keeping Silent,” in The German Church Struggle and the Holocaust, eds. Franklin H. Littell and Herbert Locke (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1974), 271–274. 11. Ariel Burger, Witness, 71. In the future this book will be cited as Witness. 12. Anson Laytner, Arguing with God: A Jewish Tradition (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aarson Inc., 1990), Chapter 8. 13. In Wiesel’s novel The Gates of the Forest, Gregor, the protagonist, relates the story of a din Torah which occurred during the Holocaust. In a concentration camp, one evening after work, a rabbi called together three of his colleagues and convoked a special court. He spoke (to his colleagues): “I intend to convict God of murder, for he is destroying his people and the law he gave them from Mount Sinai. I have irrefutable proof in my hands. Judge without fear or sorrow or prejudice whatever you have to lose has long since been taken away.” The trial proceeded in due legal form, with witnesses for both sides pleas and deliberations. The unanimous verdict: “Guilty.” Now, concludes the trial Judge, “let us pray.” 14. Elie Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1995), 104. 15.  Rabbi Albert Friedlander, “Wiesel and the Silence of God,” The Times, London, UK, December 13, 1986. Academic One File, http://linkgalegroup.com/apps/doc/A1117798523/Aone?u=gale15691@sid=Aone@ xid=ab338d.1, accessed 6 December 2018. 16. Steven T. Katz, et al., eds., Wrestling with God: Jewish Theological Responses During and After the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 366. 17. Irving Abrahamson, Against Silence: The Voice and Vision of Elie Wiesel, vol. III (New York: Holocaust Library, 1985), 63. 18. Irving Abrahamson, “And God Was Silent,” in Memory and Hope (New York: New York University Press, 1990), 165. 19. Ariel Burger, Witness, 77–78. 20. Ibid., 88. 21. Laytner, Op Cit., 222.

Bibliography Abrahamson, Irving, eds. Against Silence: The Voice and Vision of Elie Wiesel. New York: Holocaust Library, 1985. Abrahamson, Irving. “And God Was Silent.” In Elie Wiesel: Between Memory and Hope, edited by Carol Rittner, R.S.M. New York: New York University Press, 1990. Berger, Alan L. “Elie Wiesel.” In Interpreters of Judaism in the Late 20th Century, edited by Steven T. Katz. Washington: B’nai B’rith Books, 1993. Burger, Ariel. Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel’s Classsroom. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018. Cunningham, Lawrence S. “Elie Wiesel’s Anti-Exodus.” In Responses to Elie Wiesel, edited by Harry James Cargas. New York: Persea Books, 1978.

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De Saint Cheron, Philippe, “Elie Wiesel as Theologian.” Translated by Alan Astro. Unpublished Paper, October 16, 2018. De Saint Cheron, Philippe, and Elie Wiesel. Evil and Exile. Translated by Jon Rothschild. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990. Downing, Frederick L. Elie Wiesel: A Religious Biography. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2008. Friedlander, Albert. “Wiesel and the Silence of God.” The Times, London, UK, December 13, 1986. Academic One File. http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/ A117798523/AONE?u=gale15691&sid=AONE&xid=9b338da1. Accessed 6 December 2018. Katz, Steven T., et.al. eds. Wrestling with God: Jewish Theological Responses During and After the Holocaust. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Laytner, Anson. Arguing with God: A Jewish Tradition. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc., 1990. Lustiger, Jean-Marie. “The Absence of God? The Presence of God? A Meditation in Three Parts.” In Elie Wiesel: Between Memory and Hope, edited by Carol Rittner, R.S.M. New York: New York University Press, 1990. Wiesel, Elie. All Rivers Run to the Sea. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. ———. Ani Ma’amin: A Song Lost and Found Again. Translated by Marion Wiesel. New York: Random House, 1973. ———. “A Prayer for the Days of Awe.” The New York Times, October 2, 1997. ———. The Forgotten. Translated by Stephen Becker. New York: Summit Books, 1992. ———. The Gates of the Forest. Translated by Frances Frenaye. New York: Schocken Books, 1966. ———. Night. Translated by Marion Wiesel. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006. ———. One Generation After. Translated by Lily Edelman and Elie Wiesel. New York: Schocken Books, 1982. ———. Open Heart. Translated by Marion Wiesel. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012. ———. Souls on Fire: Portraits and legends of Hasidic Masters. Translated by Marion Wiesel. New York: Random House, 1972. ———. “Talking and Writing and Keeping Silent.” In The German Church Struggle and the Holocaust, edited by Franklin H. Littell and Hubert G. Locke. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1974. ———. The Town Beyond the Wall. Translated by Stephen Becker. New York: Schocken Books, 1982. ———. “Why I Write.” In Confronting the Holocaust: The Impact of Elie Wiesel, edited by Alvin Rosenfeld and Irving Greenberg. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978.

CHAPTER 3

Primo Levi’s Last Lesson: A Reading of The Drowned and the Saved Anthony C. Wexler

The Drowned and the Saved (1986), a work that focuses on the challenges facing an aging survivor, was published less than a year before Primo Levi’s presumed suicide in 1987. Levi left no note, and many observers perceived a sharp contrast between the image of Levi as a restrained and detached survivor and the desperation and violence associated with the manner of his death. Alfred Kazin, echoing a sentiment held by many, said that it’s “almost impossible to think of Levi as a pre-suicide, a not wanting-to-be, a flight from the world.”1 Suicide can cast a long shadow over an author’s last work and become the lens through which it is read; the work can be reduced to something like a crime scene and scoured for evidence that might shed light on the writer’s last act. Many critics turned to The Drowned and the Saved in search of clues or messages that could help solve the riddle of Levi’s death. The result was a series of influential readings that located in Levi’s last work the presence of emotions powerful enough to explain his last act. Prominent among them are readings proposed by Cynthia Ozick, Alvin Rosenfeld, and others. Of course, not all critics focus on the emotions that traverse Levi’s last work, just as there is no consensus about whether or why to make a strong distinction between early and late Levi—an approach, as we will see, that was also championed by Ozick and Rosenfeld. Critics like Jonathan Druker, Alexander Stille, and Lawrence Langer, to name only a few, have all challenged efforts to read Levi’s suicide backward into his work.

A. C. Wexler (*)  Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_3

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In this essay, I’m less interested in taking up a position within that debate than in considering how these prominent readings of Levi’s last work, especially those that focus on what Levi’s last work says about his final years, tend to obscure what the last work actually does—how the work reveals and responds to challenges of age and the transformation of Holocaust memory, and the role that the gray zone plays in that response. Cynthia Ozick’s article, “The Suicide Note,” is perhaps the most thorough example of the tendency to read Levi’s last work in terms of the suicide. Published in The New Republic in 1988, the article identifies the emergence of Levi’s long-repressed anger as the central feature of his final work. Ever the iconoclast, Ozick’s article sets out to shatter Levi’s image as a survivor “consummately free of rage, resentment, violent feeling, or any overt drive to ‘trade punches,’” a survivor whose work, she says, has incorrectly been associated with feelings of “peacefulness” and “uplift.”2 For Ozick, the last work can be read as a suicide note avant la lettre—a work that prefigures the transformation of Levi’s rage into ultimate self-destruction. Viewed from the perspective of his last work, she attributes his earlier works to a form of self-deception. Levi, she claims, spent his career acting the way he believed a “civilized man ought to conduct himself when he is documenting savagery” (Ozick, “Suicide Note,” 36). The result, she goes on to say, “was the world’s consensus: a man somehow set apart from retaliatory passion. A man who would not trade punches. A transparency; a pure spirit. A vessel of clear water” (Ozick, “Suicide Note,” 36). The Drowned and the Saved, says Ozick, “is the record of man returning blows with all the might of human fury, in full knowledge that the pen is mightier than the fist” (Ozick, “Suicide Note,” 34). Ozick imagines Levi as a man in the midst of the most violent transformation of his life, one that finally allowed him to remove his earlier “civilized” mask—a move that ultimately resulted in an act of self-destruction. Ozick, then, reads Levi’s last work as a kind of Biblical ululation or lamentation—a crucible in which Levi finally vents his long-repressed rage against the Germans and their genocidal project. Not all critics, however, identify rage as an organizing affect in Levi’s last work. Other readings focus on themes of self-revision and remorse. Alvin Rosenfeld, for example, identifies a contrite, self-critical Levi—a survivor, says Rosenfeld, who “is hard on himself in this book, indeed, much too hard.”3 In The End of the Holocaust, a work that reflects on the changing character of Holocaust awareness and its attenuation, Rosenfeld considers the shift from early to late Levi—a shift championed by Ozick and others—in terms of Levi’s changing relationship to his work as a writer and witness. From the vantage point of late life, Levi comes to see that his own work contributed to the “drift and distortion of memory and consequently…the obfuscation and falsification of the past” (Rosenfeld, “The End,” 205). This painful realization, says Rosenfeld, led Levi to call “into serious question the value of the testimony offered in his earlier books” (Rosenfeld, “The End,” 207).

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And in fact, Levi does reflect on his earlier works in The Drowned and the Saved. In an often-quoted passage, Levi sees himself as a compromised witness. After declaring that “the worst survived” and that “the best all died,” Levi goes on to make the following confession4: “I must repeat,” says Levi, that we, the survivors, are not the true witnesses. This is an uncomfortable notion of which I have become conscious little by little, reading the memoirs of others and reading mine at a distance of years…we are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom. Those that did so, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute, but they are the “Muslims,” the submerged, the complete witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have had a general significance. (Levi, “Drowned,” 83–84)

By reading his memoirs at a distance of years, Levi, the survivor, came to ­recognize the stark contrast between his status as a privileged prisoner and the victims who touched bottom. Only with time did he recognize that he would not be able to assimilate the inassimilable experiences of the “complete witnesses.” Levi’s reflections on the tight compact between survival and privilege would help him to explain the shame that seems to intensify with age. Rosenfeld reads Levi’s last work as the “the author’s farewell to writing”— an account similar to the one provided by Renzo, Levi’s son, who offered the following explanation for his father’s death: “Now everyone wants to understand, to grasp, to probe,” says Renzo with regard to his father’s sudden death: “I think my father had already written the last act of his existence.”5 For Renzo, Levi, after writing his last work, had no reason to remain alive. For Rosenfeld, by contrast, Levi “introduces into his last writings a note of self-indictment and, with it, a burden of shame that must have been excruciating for him to bear” (Rosenfeld, “The End,” 205). Other critics focus on Levi’s sadness, grief, or pain in order to explain the manner of his death. Irving Howe titled his 1988 review of The Drowned and the Saved “The Utter Sadness of the Survivor”; Philip Roth, who taught Levi’s last work in classes on Holocaust literature, described it as “a masterpiece of grief, and of thinking about grief”6; and Eric Sundquist, who discussed Levi’s role in Roth’s 2017 novel Exit Ghost, described Levi’s last work as “essentially a study of the lasting pain of the Holocaust.”7 All these readings largely set aside how the work, in surprising ways, attempts to help readers, especially a younger generation of readers, cultivate an active and moral relationship to the meaning of the Holocaust, even as the generation who survived them age and die, taking their testimony with them. To do so, Levi challenges his readers’ understanding of atrocity—notions, as we’ll see, informed largely by literary and cinematic sources and rhetoric. Responding to these misunderstandings forms the core of the last book’s mission. This is a last work not only because of what it can—or can’t—reveal about Levi’s last act; it’s also a last work insofar as it responds to the ways

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that the meaning of Holocaust memory was transforming with the passage of time, a transformative process shaped by his own anxieties regarding the aging process. Levi, I argue, writes his last book from the vantage point of a coming world without witnesses. And he produces a work that aims to cast the moral meaning of the Holocaust forward, to help younger readers consumed with a host of new problems—nuclear threats, unemployment, depletion of resources, and the impact of innovative technologies—to remember, as Levi says in the conclusion, that “it happened” and that “therefore it can happen again” (Levi, “The Drowned,” 198–199). In a 1986 interview, Levi himself described his reason for writing The Drowned and the Saved in terms of his growing recognition of time’s interminable threat to the survival of Holocaust memory: “I feel the passage of the years, of my years too. And as they pass, I can feel a slippage in the way these memories are understood in the world.”8 For Levi, the bodily and cognitive challenges associated with aging were not experienced as an exclusively personal problem—it was a process with collective implication for the future of Holocaust memory. And bearing witness to this dual burden is part of what growing old entailed for Levi. In fact, Levi continuously reckons with the passage of time and the “slippage” of memory over the course of The Drowned and the Saved. In his effort to reach readers, especially those in Europe with no filial or religious ties to the victims, Levi employs an unconventional form of Holocaust education, one that deviates sharply from the strategies promoted in the United States, which tend to promote an identification with the victims and largely ignore the psychology of the persecutors. In a sharp essay, “Against Generational Thinking in Holocaust Studies,” Gary Weissman discusses how Holocaust studies scholarship produced primarily by American literary scholars has sought to preserve a “living connection” that might “transcend time.”9 These Holocaust scholars working in the United States employ a generational rhetoric that focuses principally on the family ties between survivors and their children (“the second generation”) and survivors and their grandchildren (“the third generation”), as sites whereby non-witnesses can be transformed into caretakers of the Holocaust. This idiom of family has been expanded to include an ever-growing Holocaust survivor family (“the post-generation”), one that extends to people with no direct filial connections to the actual events of the Holocaust. Weissman explores how these filial connections, real or imagined, have helped to foster a space cut off from the public sphere where a living connection to the Holocaust can be preserved. This sphere, in turn, provides an important counter to the ways that Holocaust memory has been simplified and distorted in the public sphere—a process that is one of Levi’s central concerns in The Drowned and the Saved. While this generational rhetoric provides one method for preserving a living connection to the Holocaust, one that has appealed to American scholars and readers, Weissman advocates for a “counterdiscourse that would encourage scholars to

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critically reevaluate” these established generational terms, which have exerted so much influence over the last three decades” (Weissman, “Against,” 163). Writing for a different readership than these American scholars, however, Levi responds to the passage of time and to the distortions of Holocaust memory in the public sphere in a very different manner, one that does not traffic in filial connections or intimate bonds. Instead of asking his readers to identify with the victims and to see themselves as a part of an ever-growing Holocaust family, Levi’s last work makes a much more difficult demand on his readers. In it, Levi asks readers not to identify with the victims, but rather, to identify with the forms of complicity and collaboration that helped grease the wheels of the Nazi machine. Echoing Adorno’s pedagogical vision in “Education After Auschwitz,” Levi aims to help his reader cultivate a form of critical self-reflection. Consider Adorno’s description of pedagogy after Auschwitz: One must come to know the mechanisms that render people capable of such deeds, must reveal these mechanisms to them, and strive, by awakening a general awareness of those mechanisms, to prevent people from becoming so again. It is not the victims who are guilty, not even in the sophistic and caricatured sense in which still today many like to construe it. Only those who unreflectingly vented their hate and aggression upon them are guilty. One must labor against this lack of reflection, must dissuade people from striking outward without reflecting upon themselves. The only education that has any sense at all is an education towards critical self-reflection.10

Levi, as we will see, cultivates a similar brand of critical self-reflection in his chapter on the gray zone, which focuses on the role of complicity. Over the course of “The Gray Zone” chapter, Levi considers a series of events and people who occupy positions along the “gray band,” understood as “a zone of ambiguity” that blurs the boundaries between victims and perpetrators (Levi, “Drowned,” 58). Levi encourages his readers to undertake an ongoing, reflective, analytical understanding of their own potential for evil. In this way, Levi promotes a form of critical self-reflection that, though a troubling mode of self-reflection, might help his readers to better understand the psychology of people that allow atrocities to be carried out in their midst. And, in a coming world without witnesses, this brand of critical self-reflection, a mode rarely championed by Holocaust scholars working in America, might just be a better defense against future genocides. With this in mind, I want to turn to Levi’s last work.

II The Drowned and the Saved dwells almost obsessively on the passage of time. Indeed, the preface and the first chapter can be read as an extended meditation on the historically negative work of time’s passing. And if time can,

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in this sense, be read as the protagonist of the last work, then its impact on memory (and, by extension, on the way that the Holocaust is understood) is the central theme. The preface opens with the prophecy, ascribed to the Nazis, that the events of the Holocaust will be too enormous to be believed and that, in a world without witnesses, the perpetrators will dictate the history of the Lagers. And this prospect connects to Levi’s uncertainty regarding his own testimonial project. Levi entwines his fears about being rendered unrecognizable and of betraying his life long commitments—fears associated with the aging process—with the ways that Holocaust memory was changing over time. ­ Consider the opening lines of the first chapter: “Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument…The memories that lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even grow, by incorporating extraneous features” (Levi, “Drowned,” 23). Levi doesn’t begin the chapter with a sustained reflection on the “memory of the offense,” which happens to be the chapter’s title, but rather, with the fundamentally unstable nature of memory itself. Yet Levi is not principally concerned with time’s threat to perception or with his own fading memories—although he discusses both issues over the course of the last work. Instead, Levi initially worries about the expansion of memory over time. This expansion or drift of memory, he claims, “is accentuated with the passing of years and the piling up of experiences of others, true or presumed, on one’s own” (Levi, “Drowned,” 72). In the last work, Levi zeroes in on the ways that the narrative impulse, something he felt with special intensity, only contributes to this expansion. While Levi praises the effort to “keeps memories fresh and alive,” he also worries that “memory evoked too often, and expressed in the form of a story, tends to become fixed in a stereotype, in a form tested by experience, crystallized, perfected, adorned, installing itself in the place of raw memory and growing at its expense” (Levi, “Drowned,” 24). One can either accept the “slow degradation” that “few memories resist,” or one can actively struggle to preserve memory against decay (Levi, “Drowned,” 24). The very effort to preserve memory in the form of a story leads to the transformation of “raw memory” into a stereotypical narrative that presents a false version of the original events. Like an artist who loses control of the creative process, Levi, the aging survivor, watches as the events that defined his life were being transformed; how they acquired what Lawrence Langer refers to as a “mist of misconceptions.”11 Over the course of the book, while Levi routinely invokes Biblical episodes and verses to shed light on certain experiences, he spends far more time citing an impressive (and largely under-theorized) array of literary and cinematic sources, many of which, Levi says, have contributed to this mist—a mist that was now shaping his readers’ ideas and impressions of the atrocities that shaped his life and that so powerfully affected his understanding of the world.

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While Levi is quick to point out that the oppressors and the victims are by no means “interchangeable,” he is powerfully attuned to the fact that their memories are all affected by the passage of time. Both, Levi says, “are in the same trap” (Levi, “Drowned,” 24). And they both seek to replace their “genuine memories,” which are painful for different reasons, with a more “convenient reality,” one that allows them to achieve a measure of detachment and distance from the past (Levi, “Drowned,” 27). “The further events fade into the past,” says Levi, “the more the construction of convenient truth grows and is perfected” (Levi, “Drowned,” 27). Unable to arrest this process, Levi ends the chapter with an apology. “An apology is in order,” Levi announces: “This very book is drenched in memory; what’s more a distant memory. Thus it draws from a suspect source and must be protected against itself” (Levi, “Drowned,” 34). Levi reckoned with these “memory problems” with special intensity when he confronted members of the young generation who came of age in the 1980s, a generation, he says, for whom the events of the Holocaust were becoming increasingly “distant, blurred, ‘historical’” (Levi, “Drowned,” 198). These young people, Levi says in the book’s conclusion, differed from the “young people of the 1950s and 1960s” who spoke about these events “in the family,” and for whom such memories “still preserved the freshness of things seen” (Levi, “Drowned,” 198). To dramatize the problem, Levi describes a scene of failed pedagogy—a scene that is as devastating as it is sweet. The following scene, which I quote in its entirety, took place during one of Levi’s many classroom visits across Italy: I remember with a smile the adventure I had several years ago in a fifth-grade classroom, where I had been invited to comment on my book and to answer the pupils’ questions. An alert-looking little boy, apparently at the head of the class, asked me the obligatory question: “But how come you didn’t escape?” I briefly explained to him what I have written here. Not quite convinced, he asked me to draw a sketch of the camp on the blackboard indicating the location of the watch towers, the gates, the barbed wire, and the power station. I did my best, watched by thirty pairs of intent eyes. My interlocutor studied the drawing for a few instants, asked me for a few further clarifications, then he presented to me the plan that he had worked out: here, at night, cut the throat of the sentinel; then, put on his clothes; immediately after this, run over there to the power station and cut off the electricity, so the search lights would go out and the high tension fence would be deactivated; after that I could leave without any trouble. He added seriously: “If it should happen to you again, do as I told you. You’ll see that you’ll be able to do it. (Levi, “Drowned,” 157)

The scene illuminates the student’s inability to understand the significance of Levi’s testimony. Where Levi describes a world in which imprisonment does not lead to escape, the student imagines a world in which a Hollywood escape is always a possibility. Instead of asking about the killers, the young boy focuses on the conduct of the victims, and he reads their situation

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through the prism of stereotyped notions—notions, of course, that have no relation to the events as they were experienced. The imagination of atrocity, and Levi certainly saw this, had been influenced by Hollywood escape narratives specifically about World War II, and by a torrent of “literary and cinematic rhetoric” (Levi, “Drowned,” 160). The student assimilates the past such that an “escape from Treblinka” is indistinguishable from an escape “from an ordinary jail,” and hunger in Auschwitz can be compared to the experience of “someone who has skipped a meal” (Levi, “Drowned,” 158). Levi’s purpose is not to fault the student, however. Instead, he uses the episode to shed light on the gap that “exists and grows wider every year between things as they were ‘down there’ and things as they are represented by the current imagination fed by approximative books, films and myths” (Levi, “Drowned,” 157). In other words, the scene illustrates the fatal slide of Holocaust memory “towards simplification and stereotype,” a slide that threatens to render the events of the Holocaust unrecognizable (Levi, “Drowned,” 157). What makes Levi’s last work interesting, however, is that it doesn’t aim to only describe this slide or to shed light on all the ways that current understandings of the Holocaust deviate from the historical reality. It also aims to “erect a dike” against this slide of Holocaust memory (Levi, “Drowned,” 157). In other words, Levi does not only want to describe and lament this growing chasm between generations and to expose the consequences that such flights of rhetoric have—and will continue to have—on the future shape of Holocaust memory. Levi’s last work also has a pedagogical implication, one that connects to Levi’s longstanding interest in teaching. With that in mind, I want to briefly consider some of Levi’s comments on teaching—comments, as we’ll see, that link his first and last work. It is important to note that Levi places the scene with the young boy under the sign of teaching, a move that connects it to another scene of teaching from Levi’s first work, Survival in Auschwitz. In “The Canto of Ulysses” chapter from the first work, Levi refers to the twenty-sixth canto of Dante’s poem, and his efforts to recall and transmit a specific passage on the uniquely human quest for knowledge and excellence. This scene took place while Levi was trying to teach Italian to Pikkolo, a young Alsatian inmate.12 The young Levi begins his lesson by attempting to recall lines from Dante’s poem that he once knew by heart. The struggle to remember the lines, and to create a point of contact between Dante’s world and the world of Lagers, speaks to a larger effort to impose a measure of control and order on the chaotic universe of the Lager. Teaching Pikkolo was not merely a matter of transferring information, but an effort to transmit a universal message. Victor Brombert, in a reading of this scene, reminds us that Levi, through his deployment of Dante, establishes a link between two scenes of teaching: one taking place between Levi and Pikkolo and the other involving the effort of Dante’s Ulysses to teach his men, a link, Brombert goes on to say, that is “not merely thematic, but historic and transcultural: from Homer to Virgil,

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to Dante, to Primo Levi, to the future reader. The spanning of the Greek and Roman antiquity, the Middle Ages, the modern period, suggests a reassuring permanence and continuity.”13 The scene of teaching from Levi’s first work establishes a form of trans-historical continuity that allows Levi to “reestablish a link with the past,” and to save “it from oblivion,” a process, Levi says in his last work, that helped to reinforce his identity (Levi, “Drowned,” 139). Teaching allows one to take up a place within the chain of tradition. And, by extending a lesson across time, time’s power is defeated. The scene of failed pedagogy from his last work, by contrast, presents an inter-generational chasm that Levi’s ability to quote Dante cannot close. The scene with the young boy in The Drowned and the Saved reveals time’s power to dampen and transform our understanding of even the most atrocious acts. Where teaching is connected with the survival of civilization in the first work, to the longing to transmit meaningful messages across time, in the last work, it is connected to the failure of the aging survivor to communicate his experiences to members of the next generation. And the fear of not being understood by members of this generation is perhaps Levi’s greatest concern. Indeed, Levi last work reflects repeatedly—almost obsessively—on the risks and rewards of inter-generational communication. He describes his primary desire to communicate with “young people of the 1980s,” a generation for whom the events of the Holocaust were becoming increasingly “blurred, [and] ‘historical’” (Levi, “Drowned,” 198). And he was highly attuned to the specific differences between himself, and the codes that had shaped his life, and those relied on by members of the young generation. In his mind, they were “bereft not of ideals but of certainties, indeed distrustful of the grand revealed truth: disposed to accept the small truths, changeable from month to month on the convulsed wave of cultural fashions, whether guided or wild” (Levi, “Drowned,” 199). Levi, long regarded as an anachronistic figure, a nineteenth-century humanist likened to “some heroically oblivious silent-film actor who maintains his calm amid the whirlings of nature,” was now facing a generation who relegated such figures, and the events that defined their lives, to the mythical past.14 Regardless, Levi remained committed to the effort to communicate with the young: “For us to speak with the young becomes ever more difficult,” he says in his last work. “We see it as a duty and, at the same time, as a risk: the risk of appearing anachronistic, of not being listened to” (Levi, “Drowned,” 199). While he was certainly aware that the desire to communicate and the ability to communicate were two separate things, Levi realized that he could no longer rely on the basic narrative urge that drove his first book, Survival in Auschwitz. In the preface of that work, Levi claims that he did not intend to “formulate new accusations,” but, instead, “to furnish documentation for a quiet study of certain aspects of the human mind” (Levi, “Survival,” 9). Fueled by what he describes as a twenty-six-year-old writer as a feverish compulsion to tell his story to the “rest” of the world, and to make the “rest participate in it,” Levi employed a set of literary tactics to

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encourage an immersive experience for the reader (Levi, “Survival,” 9). Now, forty years later, and powerfully attuned to the impact of time on the memory of trauma, he would have to rely on a riskier approach. For if his deposition is to have a general significance, something other than conventional pedagogy must be employed. Levi does not appeal to eternal values, nor does he expound on the qualities of the victims; instead, he turns to the gray zone and to the forms of complicity that link the world of the Lagers to the lives of his readers.

III In an interview with Milvia Spadi from 1986, Levi called the chapter on the gray zone the “most important” in the book. The reason, he said, is that the chapter counters the “extreme simplification” performed on his famous and widely read earlier works: “On the one side, there are supposed to be the butchers, who are monsters. And we are the innocents.”15 By contrast, what Levi wants to claim is that “even the oppressors of those times were creatures like us” (Anissimov, “Tragedy,” 387). Levi describes his last work as an active response to the ways that his earlier works were being interpreted and simplified by young readers. It should be said, however, that Levi’s young readers are not entirely to blame for misreading and simplifying Levi’s earlier work. Survival in Auschwitz leaves readers with the searing image of the absolute victim, those non-men and women who inhabit a realm between life and death. In that work, the image of these Musselmänner encloses, for Levi, “all the evil of our time” (Levi, “Survival,” 90). Additionally, the first work’s narrative arc from incarceration to freedom invites the same kind of romantic stereotypes expressed by Levi’s young student and explored in a chapter called “Stereotypes.” His last work, by contrast, creates an impossible chasm between the drowned, the true witnesses whose depositions would have general significance, and the saved, those inmates who “by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom” (Levi, “Drowned,” 83). While his last work certainly pays tribute to the image of the absolute victim, in “The Gray Zone” chapter he chooses instead to focus on the costs of survival within the camps. The chapter on the gray zone, which he describes as the most important chapter of his last work, serves to derail the kind of simplistic and mythic account of the Holocaust currently in circulation among his young readers. In an interview from 1979, Levi first addressed the question of why, after such a long absence, he chose to return to the world of the Lagers in what would become his last work. Levi’s answer focused on the book’s narrative strategy, and he said that he wanted to judge the experience of the camps “with the eyes of the indifferent, the eyes of the young man who knows nothing about these things…” (Anissimov, “Tragedy,” 383). The choice, and the writerly challenge, to orient himself toward the past from such a vantage

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point seems like a remarkable task for an aging survivor. Indeed, where Ozick suggests that Levi stops “acting” the part of the civilized survivor in his last work and that his anger authentically undermines his civilized image, Levi, in this interview, seems to describe his last work as a civilized and humanizing effort, a work in which he took on a perspective most foreign to his own, willing to explore “the very edge of ambiguity” (Anissimov, “Tragedy,” 383). It is through this focus on ambiguity, the gray zone, that Levi aims to correct a way of thinking about the past that he associates with his young readers and which was powerfully dramatized through the anecdote about the young student who tells him how to act if he should find himself in a similar situation. “The Gray Zone” chapter begins not with a description of the zone itself—that comes slowly and in pieces—but with an admission of failure. “Have we,” asks Levi, “we who have returned – been able to understand and make others understand our experience?” (Levi, “Drowned,” 36). The question cuts to the heart of the last work. But instead of directing blame toward any particular party, Levi goes on to equate the act of “understanding” with a “profound simplification” (Levi, “Drowned,” 35). Without such simplifications, Levi says, we would experience the world as an “infinite, undefined tangle that would defy our ability to orient ourselves and decide upon our actions” (Levi, “Drowned,” 36). If simplification is required for understanding, however, it is also a problem, especially when it comes to teaching about the events. Levi associates this simplification with the way that history is taught in schools. In the classroom, in Levi’s understanding, complex phenomena are reduced to simplistic accounts and easy lessons that avoid “half-tints and complexities…” (Levi, “Drowned,” 37). Levi goes on to associate this propensity for what he calls “Manichaean” thought among youth: “The young above all demand clarity, a sharp cut; their experience of the world being meager, they do not like ambiguity” (Levi, “Drowned,” 37). The young, says Levi, feel “the need, to separate evil from good, to be able to take sides, to emulate Christ’s gesture on Judgment day: here the righteous, over there the reprobates” (Levi, “Drowned,” 37). Indeed, the cover of the first edition of The Drowned and the Saved featured the imploring faces of Hans Memling’s Last Judgment. For Levi, however, this demand for moral clarity, powerfully dramatized in Memling’s masterpiece, shapes one’s understanding of the past, and while the desire for simplification is justified, says Levi, it “does not always apply to the simplification itself, which is a working hypothesis, useful as long as it is recognized as such and not mistaken for reality” (Levi, “Drowned,” 37). Interestingly, Levi describes youth as the period in the life cycle when one is most prone to making such mistakes. Where aging threatens the continuity of the body and the mind, youth is a period aligned with reductive and simplistic readings of the past. Levi sets out to implode these tendencies toward simplification and distortion through his strategic orientation toward the gray zone—a zone

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that temporarily removes our ability to judge. Yet before describing the figures who occupy the zone, Levi starts by making an important comparison between the young and the “newcomers to the Lagers, whether young or not” (Levi, “Drowned,” 37). These newcomers, Levi tells us, arrived in the camps armed with conceptual models that left them ill-equipped to deal with the fiercely individualistic realities of camp life. They entered the camps, says Levi, hoping “to find a terrible but decipherable world, in conformity with that simple model which we atavistically carry within us—‘we’ inside and the enemy outside, separated by a sharply defined geographic frontier” (Levi, “Drowned,” 38). Instead of a world organized around an easily recognizable set of oppositions, the new arrival discovered a world that did not conform to any models. Through a series of associations that link the young to the newcomers to the Lager, Levi focuses on an experience defined by the shattering of one’s conceptual models, firmly held assumptions, and the demand for moral clarity. This is not to say that he aims to turn those who were not there into secondary witnesses—far from it. Instead, he wants to find a way to challenge the interpretive strategies of his young readers, and he does so, as we will see, by arranging various figures and scenes along a gray spectrum that connects—without conflating—the terrifying reality within the camps to the small complicities that unfold within everyday life. From the terrifying initiation process, Levi focuses on those inmates who managed to adapt to the univers concentrationnaire, and, for the rest of the chapter, he shines his analytic light on a collection of “obscene or pathetic figures (sometimes they possess both qualities simultaneously)” who occupy the space “which separates (and not only in the Nazi Lagers) the victims from the persecutors” (Levi, “Drowned,” 40). Having passed through the gates into this foreign world, Levi exposes his young readers, those people with simplistic and increasingly historical accounts of the camps, to the gray specimens that, he says, are “indispensable to know if we want to know the human species, if we want to know how to do defend our souls when a similar test should once more loom before us, or even if we only want to understand what takes place in a big industrial factory” (Levi, “Drowned,” 40). Once inside, Levi draws our attention to what he calls the most degraded aspect of National Socialism: the creation of the group of Sonderkommandos (or SK), the Jews who were in charge of running the crematoria. At a distance of almost forty years, and with a wealth of accumulated knowledge about the layout and operation of the camp system, Levi could have written about any number of figures and features of the camps, yet, in his final work, he focuses on these prisoners, who, for the sake of their own survival, contributed to the running of the crematoria. This group of prisoners, like the gray zone itself, “contains an incredibly complicated internal structure,” and he reminds us that these figures confuse “our need to judge” (Levi, “Drowned,” 42). Levi is here drawing an important parallel between the newcomers’ initial inability to understand the camp’s internal structure and the readers’ inability to judge these figures that populate the gray zone.

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The radical ambiguity and moral disorientation associated with the gray zone challenges facile judgments and the simplistic narratives that accompany them. Levi anticipates and responds to the fact that readers will want to turn away from the terrifying reality of these special squads. And it is precisely this desire that Levi seeks to offset. Levi dredges up what he calls this “abyss of viciousness” in order to get his young readers to become conscious of the motives and actions that enabled this infernal system to flourish and “because what could be perpetrated yesterday could be attempted again tomorrow” (Levi, “Drowned,” 53). Recognizing the remarkable ease with which souls can be destroyed confuses us in our need to judge to the same extent that the SK confuses the easy categories of victim and victimizer. Levi reminds his readers that “the existence of the squads had a meaning, a message: ‘We, the master race, are your destroyers, but you are no better than we are; if we so wish, and we do so wish, we can destroy not only your bodies but also your souls, just as we have destroyed ours’” (Levi, “Drowned,” 53–54). Nevertheless, Levi is clear that the need for a confusion of judgment is not an argument for the eradication of judgment. Ultimately, it is essential that we not confuse the murderers with their victims, for to do so is, he says, “a moral disease or an aesthetic affectation or a sinister sign of complicity, above all, it is a precious service rendered (intentionally or not) to the negators of truth” (Levi, “Drowned,” 48–49). And yet, despite the warnings, the development and style of the chapter are both eccentric and disorienting. Levi appears to describe a place where survival and complicity go hand in hand, and perhaps not surprisingly, this has led to criticism. How can he, a Holocaust survivor, temporarily blur the lines? How can he, an innocent victim, focus so much attention on these gray specimens? Apparently, as an aging witness painfully attuned to the transformation of Holocaust memory, these were risks he was willing to take. Over the course of the chapter, Levi passes from the extreme example of the SK through a series of events and people who occupy positions along the “gray band, that zone of ambiguity which radiates outwards from regimes based on terror and obsequiousness” (Levi, “Drowned,” 58). From the members of the SK, Levi then turns his attention to the duplicitous figure of Chaim Rumkowski, the man who occupies a central role within the chapter. After having attained a small degree of power within the Lodz ghetto, and fueled by a pathetic sense of pride, Rumkowski seized the opportunity to assume control of the ghetto. As an “energetic, uncultivated, and authoritarian man” who “passionately loved authority,” Rumkowski, a Jew, clung to his position as president of the ghetto despite the fact that his administrative efforts had disastrous consequences for his fellow Jews (Levi, “Drowned,” 62). After helping the Nazis liquidate the ghetto, he was sent off to the camps himself. “Drenched in duplicity,” he was a degraded figure who clung to any sign of privilege, hoping that it might ensure his own survival and the survival of others (Levi, “Drowned,” 65).

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For Levi, the story of Chaim Rumkowski “sums up in itself the entire theme of grey zone” (Levi, “Drowned,” 66). Rumkowski was not a monster, and he should not be judged as one, nor does Levi, as John Leonard says, “relish the sleazy story” of this man.16 He was a simply a man who sought to save himself through collaboration. However, the everydayness of his collaboration differed from the terrifying image of the SK, and, as such, he occupies a very different place along this gray band. Levi identifies in Rumkowski’s story a “sense urgency and threat” that speaks to the tight compact between small complicities and the larger engine of genocide: “We are all mirrored in Rumkowski,” says Levi, “his ambiguity is ours, it is our second nature, we hybrids molded from clay and spirit” (Levi, “Drowned,” 69). It is in the person of Rumkowski that Levi asks his readers to find their reflections. A figure who, like the Kapos and Lager functionaries, and like all those who “shake their heads but acquiesce,” displayed a willingness to serve a regime to whose misdeeds he remained “willingly blind” (Levi, “Drowned,” 68). “Like Rumkowski,” Levi reminds us, “we too are so dazzled by power and prestige as to forget our essential fragility” (Levi, “Drowned,” 69). Levi does not suggest that his readers are interchangeable with Rumkowski, that they are guilty of his crimes, but rather, that they should see in Rumkowski a shared potential to let things slide, to look away, and to become small accomplices of a larger regime. For Levi, Rumkowski— and this is not the first time Levi turns his analytic eye on this man—functions as a unique hinge figure, a man whose willingness to collaborate looks backward to the infernal world of the Lagers, and to the forced complicity in the camps, and forward, to the everyday lives of his young readers, and to their ever willingness to be dazzled by power and to forget their essential fragility. Levi, then, encourages a new mode of seeing that isn’t dazzled by power, knowing that we all tend to prefer to be dazzled than bear the discomfort and anxiety of our own fragility. Levi turns to the concept of the gray zone because he believed that a willingness to acknowledge one’s own fragility— physical, mental, moral—is what can sustain his readers’ active moral relationship to the events of the Holocaust. Describing this gray band over the course of the chapter, Levi presents a new kind of lineage, one that replaces the chain of tradition connecting Homer, Virgil, Dante, Levi, and the reader, with a new chain that links big and small complicities during the Holocaust to the potential complicities of us all. Through this chain, Levi encourages his readers to reflect on the strength of their own “moral armature,” and to recognize their own capacity to forget their “essential fragility,” that all are too easily “dazzled by power and prestige” (Levi, “Drowned,” 68–69). Through his emphasis on the infinite gradations of responsibility, human weakness, and moral ambivalence that extend from life within the Lager to the present, Levi reconciled the historical passing of generations to the enduring moral crisis that the Holocaust presents to us all.

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Leon Wieseltier once described Levi as the greatest of the modern rationalists, a man with “night vision,” who “demanded of reason what Milton demanded of virtue, that it not be a youngling in the contemplation of evil.”17 Through his last work, and in particular in the chapter on the gray zone, Levi suggests to his readers—especially those young ones with whom he most desperately wanted to communicate—how not to be younglings in the contemplation of evil and how to resist that interminable desire to reduce the world to tidy poles and simple narratives that allow one to temporarily forget or to comfortably locate events in the cold storage of history. To see in this way, however, Levi asks readers not to identify with the figure of the victim, but rather, with the figure of the collaborator; to undertake an ongoing, reflective, analytical understanding of their own potential for evil. This is what an education in critical self-reflection entails, and this is what Levi’s last book aims to remind readers. And this is one, powerful way, of responding to time’s inevitable impact on bodies and minds and our understandings of historical events. The Drowned and the Saved is one of the best books we have for describing and responding to these challenges in a coming world without witnesses.

Notes

1.  Alfred Kazin, “My Debt to Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi,” in Testimony: Contemporary Writers Make the Holocaust Personal, ed. David Rosenberg (New York: Random House, 1989), 125. 2. Cynthia Ozick, “The Suicide Note,” The New Republic, March 21, 1998, 33. 3. Alvin H. Rosenfeld, The End of the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 192. 4. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 82. 5.  Diego Gambetta, “Primo Levi’s Last Moments,” Boston Review 24, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 26. 6. Claudia Roth Pierpont, Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 165. 7.  Eric Sundquist, “Philip Roth’s Holocaust,” The Hopkins Review 5, no. 2 (2012): 254. 8.  Primo Levi, “The Drowned and the Saved (1986),” interview by Giorgio Calcagno in The Voice of Memory: Interviews 1961–1987, Primo Levi, eds. Marco Belpoliti and Robert Gordon (New York: The New Press, 2001), 110. 9.  Gary Weissman, “Against Generational Thinking in Holocaust Studies,” in Third Generation Holocaust Narratives: Memory in Memoir and Fiction, ed. Victoria Aarons (New York: Lexington Books, 2016), 162. 10.  Theodor W. Adorno, “Education After Auschwitz,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 193. 11. Lawrence L. Langer, Preempting the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 34.



42  A. C. WEXLER 12. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 109–115. 13. Victor Brombert, In Praise of Antiheroes: Figures and Themes in Modern European Literature 1830–1980 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999), 117. 14.  David Denby, “The Poised Art of Primo Levi: The Humanist and the Holocaust,” The New Republic, July 28, 1996, 28. 15. Myriam Anissimov, Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist (London: Aurum Press, 1998), 386–387. 16.  John Leonard, “The Drowned and the Unsaved,” review of The Voice of Memory: Primo Levi Interviews, 1961–87, eds. Marco Belpoliti and Robert Gordon, The Nation no. 9, April 2001, 70. 17. Leon Wieseltier, introduction to The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent: Selected Essays by Lionel Trilling, ed. Leon Wieseltier (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2000), xv.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. “Education After Auschwitz.” In Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, translated by Henry W. Pickford, 191–204. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Anissimov, Myriam. Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist. London: Aurum Press, 1998. Brombert, Victor. In Praise of Antiheroes: Figures and Themes in Modern European Literature 1830–1980. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999. Denby, David. “The Poised Art of Primo Levi: The Humanist and the Holocaust.” The New Republic, July 28, 1996. Gambetta, Diego. “Primo Levi’s Last Moments.” Boston Review 24, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 25–29. Judt, Tony. Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century. New York: The Penguin Press, 2008. Kazin, Alfred. “My Debt to Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi.” In Testimony: Contemporary Writers Make the Holocaust Personal, edited by David Rosenberg, 115–128. New York: Random House, 1989. Langer, Lawrence L. Preempting the Holocaust. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Leonard, John. “The Drowned and the Unsaved.” Review of The Voice of Memory: Primo Levi Interviews, 1961–87, edited by Marco Belpoliti and Robert Gordon. The Nation no. 9, April 2001. Levi, Primo. Collected Poems. Translated by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann. London: Faber and Faber, 1992. ———. The Drowned and the Saved. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. ———. “The Drowned and the Saved (1986).” Interview by Giorgio Calcagno in The Voice of Memory: Interviews 1961–1987, Primo Levi, edited by Marco Belpoliti and Robert Gordon, 109–113. New York: The New Press, 2001. ———. Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity. Translated by Stuart Woolf. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Ozick, Cynthia. “The Suicide Note.” The New Republic, March 21, 1998.

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Pierpont, Claudia Roth. Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013. Rosenfeld, Alvin H. The End of the Holocaust. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. Sundquist, Eric. “Philip Roth’s Holocaust.” The Hopkins Review 5, no. 2 (2012): 226–256. Weissman, Gary. “Against Generational Thinking in Holocaust Studies.” In Third Generation Holocaust Narratives: Memory in Memoir and Fiction, edited by Victoria Aarons, 159–184. New York: Lexington Books, 2016. Wieseltier, Leon. Introduction to The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent: Selected Essays by Lionel Trilling, edited by Leon Wieseltier, ix–xvii. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2000.

CHAPTER 4

What We Learn, at Last: Recounting Sexuality in Women’s Deferred Autobiographies and Testimonies Sara R. Horowitz

In Ida Fink’s short story “Aryan Papers,”1 a sixteen-year-old Jewish girl obtains the false identity papers necessary for her and her mother’s attempt to pass as non-Jewish Poles and elude the tightening net of the Nazi genocide. Desperate to purchase these crucial papers at any cost, the girl shows up at a bar for a rendezvous with a man in his forties whom she knows from work. She brings whatever cash she and her mother have scraped together. But the women have already lost most of their assets to blackmailers. The reader soon understands that money comprises only payment in part; an additional cost has already been stipulated and agreed upon. The man has demanded that the girl top up the sum by having sex with him. While the story is narrated in the third person, Fink clearly signals the girl’s emotional state, both through indirect interior narration, and from the man’s remarks to her and to a friend who arrives immediately after the sexual act has been completed. The narrative takes pains to emphasize the girl’s youth—she “looked like a child” (64) and the man calls her “little one” (67). Her sexual inexperience is signaled through her nervousness, her self-soothing with the thought that intercourse “probably doesn’t take long,” her turning away as he undresses, and the man’s later comment to his friend that she was a virgin (66). Into what rubric do we fit the exchange between the unnamed Jewish girl and her unnamed coworker? In my brief synopsis of Fink’s story, I have deliberately avoided terms associated with such transactions, terms such as

S. R. Horowitz (*)  York University, Toronto, ON, Canada © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_4

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transactional sex, sexual barter, forced prostitution, non-consensual sex, instrumental sex, rational sex, rape, and violation. While scholars of sexuality during Holocaust and other contexts have carved out useful distinctions and definitions for each of these terms, in the broad scope there remains considerable overlap among the terms, which are sometimes grouped under different overarching categories and sometimes put into opposition with one another. The working out of these definitions is important to the study of the Holocaust, and of sexuality more broadly, not as a mere catalog exercise but as a means to better understand these experiences and their psychological, social, and political aftereffects. These terms often come under contention; attached to each are implications about degradation, coercion, consent, and agency that are still under debate.2 Which of those terms applies to Fink’s “Aryan Papers”? The man who provides her with these important documents has no trouble defining the encounter. In response to the query of his friend, who arrives just as the girl leaves, the man terms her “just a whore” (67). The term both degrades her and accords her agency, implying consent. On the other hand, his friend perceives her as a victimized virgin, “pale, teary-eyed, shaky” after a coerced encounter. A close reading of the story makes the case for seeing the teenaged girl as engaging in non-consensual sex, or forced prostitution; we might make a case for calling it rape. At the same time, the story recognizes an element of choice, an act of resistance to the death machinery. The girl regrets not agreeing earlier to a pragmatic if distasteful bargain; she “wanted to get everything over with as quickly as possible” (64, emphasis mine). In the context of genocide, however, how meaningful is the concept of choice? The girl agrees to a sexual act under threat of death—from blackmailers, and from the man himself, who, she reflects, “could have informed” (66). The man’s final pronouncement—“Since when can’t virgins be whores?” (68)—leaves intact the ambivalences of the exchange: virgin and whore, victim and agent, acted upon and acting. In insisting on the fluidity of terms and their implications, Fink’s story asks that we allow the ambiguities of sexual encounters during the Holocaust to remain unsettled, that we open space for the devastating inner contradictions their narratives convey. For this reason, rather than map the categories of sexual behaviors and sexual violence in memoirs and testimonies by women who had been children or young adults during the Shoah, I will focus on a small number of deferred narratives in order to raise a set of difficult and delicate issues about the crafting and publishing of memory narratives that contain sensitive sexual revelations. By deferred narratives, I mean stories survivors tell about their experiences that were produced or released half a century or more after the war—encompassing both accounts written or spoken decades after they occurred, and accounts written years earlier but withheld until much later. The deferred sets of memories may have been postponed because of an inability to give them voice or because of a deliberate decision

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to suppress them. In their later years, women come to reflect upon the impact of their wartime experiences and ordeals. These reflections are complicated and deeply nuanced. They stand in sharp contrast with the heroic, celebratory, and sometimes sentimental rhetoric of public commemorations—in particular, staged or organized events that celebrate women, such as the beauty pageant for survivors held annually in Haifa since 2012. Examining deferred accounts, and the relationship between such early and later testimonies, helps us to understand not only past experiences, but also how the extended postwar life refracts wartime remembrances. Beginning with the late 1980s, the publication of memoirs by women intensified. By then, most women survivors were in their late sixties or older. Those who raised children are largely empty-nested, and many are widows; often those who worked outside the home have retired. In their later years, women often felt free to make public episodes that were earlier viewed as too dangerous, painful or shameful to reveal, memories that implicate others, or that were seen as an affront to the dignity of their late husbands. Topics such as sexual barter, sexual experimentation, and infanticide come into relief. Tendered a half a century or more after the German defeat that ended both World War II and the war against the Jews, the stories women tell—publicly, privately, cryptically, or directly—open up space for reflection, for reconstruction, and for re-evaluation of the past and its effects over time. These accounts, composed or released decades after the events occurred, rarely diverge from the record set by earlier accounts. But they add detail and gendered nuance and delve into topics that were, for a long time, kept out of the master narrative of the Shoah. Rather than look to the body of theoretic writing on sexual economies during the war and more generally, I want to explore how women survivors themselves give shape to narratives of sexual encounters, how they interpret their own stories. Drawing largely on memoirs and testimonies by girls and young women—specifically those by Fania Heller, Bronia Jablon, Molly Applebaum, and Rachel Shtibel—I understand these narratives as enacting difficult negotiations between past and present, between private memory and later audiences. I employ the term “encounters”—deliberately vague and deliberately inadequate—because I intend to show how these narratives trouble such categories as abuse, agency, coercion, and consent, and to examine first-hand accounts about sexuality as attempts to engage, deflect, shape, and resist interpretation and judgment. I want to tease out three related elements in these accounts. First, the radical aloneness of the survivor, along with a desire for integration into family and community: The feeling of aloneness emerges not only from sexual encounters under atrocity, but from a feeling of profound disappointment in those who were counted upon for protection, and who were perceived as somehow derelict or remiss (even when there is nothing they could have done). There is a breach, then, in the intimate bonds of family, the ties of

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community—a sense that one’s place in these webs of human connectedness has become denaturalized. Second, the element of rage: Susan Derwin, Naomi Seidman, Jeffrey Prager, and others have written in different ways about the problematic disappearance of rage in many survivor narratives— ways in which the vulnerability of the victim but not the victim’s anger against the perpetrators becomes part of the acceptable conversation of Holocaust survivors. Third, the ways in which the present social environment shapes testimony: Dori Laub, Lawrence Langer, Geoffrey Hartman, Henry Greenspan, and others have explored the ways in which a rememberer needs a listener or audience to produce a memory narrative, and sometimes shapes narrative to fit the perceived desires of the listener. I would add that in narrating the past, the survivor tries to recapture or refurbish these punctured webs of human connection. But narratives about women’s sexual encounters often push against familial and community norms. Let me begin with Fanya Gottesfeld Heller’s 1993 memoir, Strange and Unexpected Love.3 In it, Heller describes the growing genocidal threat to her family, their desperate attempts to hide from roundups, and the life-saving hiding place provided by a Ukrainian militiaman named Jan. Heller portrays her sexual liaison with Jan as consensual, reciprocal, and loving, rather than coerced or bartered. She recounts a tender courtship, a feeling of jouissance and exhilaration. “There was something between Jan and me that transcended the physical: we had been allied, entwined, intimately involved with each other for over a year before we made love” (160). She revels in sensual pleasure. It grounds her. “Love-making surprised me: it felt so right, the only right thing in a time of madness” (139). In her preface to a later edition of the memoir, Heller places her relationship with Jan in the context of an increased sexual license afforded women during the war—a loosening of the controls of family and community sanctions along with an intensified need for physical and psychological relief. Some women, she notes, “took comfort in intimate relationships that might be considered illicit or misguided in ordinary times.”4 But as for herself, even decades later, she insists that “no one will ever love me as much as he did.” While Fanya never retracts her memory of romance and courtship, her narrative also makes clear that her family’s survival depended on the affair. When Jan begins courting Fanya in her parents’ home, her parents already perceive his attentions as offering them a lifeline amid the threat of genocide. They urge her to be “nice” to him. When the two begin their affair, her parents do not voice opposition. It is clear, however, that they perceive it as shameful. Her father reassures her that whatever she does during the war on behalf of her own and her family’s survival will be kept secret after the war: “In Paris no one will know. You’ll be clean, I promise you” (160). It is impossible to read Heller’s account without factoring in the political context—she, a Jewish adolescent without the right to live, he, a Ukrainian militiaman with the right to grant or to take her life. The disparity colors our perception of the

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mutuality Heller’s account insists upon. Moreover, without the upheaval of the war, and the Nazi assault on Jewish lives, the couple would never have united. In addition to being separated by religion and nationality, Fanya and Jan were from different social and educational strata. She was a Jewish, bourgeois, intellectual, and cultured teenager—and a virgin—whose love interests had been university bound or educated; he was Christian, older, uneducated, and in uniform. Indeed, those differences—and the pressures of their respective communities—reassert themselves once the war ends and the danger has passed—and Jan no longer holds the power of life and death in his hands. Although in the immediate postwar period, they harbor intense feelings toward one another; Fanya realizes she cannot “untangle [love] from my deep feelings of gratitude” (274). When I first met Heller, soon after the publication of her memoir, Heller made clear the social price of going public. In conversation, and in a preface to a later edition, Heller recounts being broadly criticized for publishing her account, including being snubbed by members of the New York synagogue she and her family had attended for decades. Although she does not say so in the book, her children, too, expressed discomfort with her plans to publish her memoirs, feeling that it might cause the family embarrassment.5 Indeed, the pressure to keep secret the elements of her survival—and the sense of shame attached to her behavior—intensifies immediately after the war. Her mother insists that Fanya bury the past. Still, rumors circulate and diminish her reputation. One man, insistent on a relationship with, her asserts that she has no basis to refuse him: “You had a goy. Why not me?” (245). In the postwar atmosphere, Fanya understands that a past “sullied” by suggestions of sexual impropriety is opprobrious and diminishes a woman’s worth as a marriage partner. In fact, her future husband’s dignified acknowledgment, during their courtship, of her experience and his agreement to put it in the past deeply endear him to her. “‘You know,’ he said to me, ‘if you tell me that you’re a virgin, I’ll buy you the nicest Persian lamb coat.’ I told him, ‘You can save yourself the coat.’ He said nothing more … not then and not ever, and I respected him for this” (278). Only after her husband’s death in 1986 does she begin her memoirs project.6 By then, Heller has raised a family and is a grandmother. Her narrative locates the wartime sexual relations somewhere on a continuum between chosen and coerced. A desperation similar to Heller’s drives Bronia Jablon into sexual relations with the man who hides her and her little daughter during the war years. In her memoir A Part of Me,7 Jablon recounts her struggle as a young mother to evade the murderous net that was tightening around the Jews of Poland. In 1938, at the age of twenty, Bronia married. A year later, she gave birth to Lucy. Her town was then controlled by the Soviets, and life was difficult but bearable. But in June 1941, Germany reneged on its alliance with the Soviet Union, and the German army moved eastward, encompassing the region where Bronia and her family lived. The Germans began an aggressive killing

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program targeting Jews. One strategy for remaining alive during the series of roundups and massacres was to go into hiding. Jablon describes how Jews desperately sought places of shelter where they might remain for months, even years, on end. People hid in secret rooms, behind false walls or underneath houses or barns or factories; others hid in makeshift bunkers in the forests. However, families with babies and young children experienced particular difficulty finding places to hide. People were often reluctant to offer shelter or to share their space with small children. Babies and children could not be counted upon to remain absolutely silent under duress and for long stretches of time. Rescuers and fellow-fugitives feared that a child’s presence would give away their location, and everyone would be killed. The additional hardships imposed by the presence of a small child impelled Bronia’s husband to abandon his family and flee to the forest. Jablon recalls, “One day, my husband made a sudden decision to leave us – me and our child. He decided to go into hiding in the nearby forest. It was difficult for me to understand this selfish move; perhaps his fear of death was the dominant impulse.” A week later, he returned for Bronia, trying to convince her to leave Lucy behind in the care of the child’s grandmother. But Bronia refused to abandon her child. “When I looked at the now haggard face of my child, I told my husband that I couldn’t leave her. He kissed me and my daughter and left. That was the last time we saw him.” By then, Jablon’s own parents and many others in her family had already been killed. She understood that remaining in the ghetto was, in essence, a death sentence. Against all odds, she made the difficult decision to flee with her child. Utterly dependent on the kindness of strangers for basic things such as shelter and food, and fearful of betrayal by acquaintances and strangers alike, Bronia made her way with three-year-old Lucy. After a series of precarious situations—carrying Lucy for kilometers on end, sneaking into open barns and haylofts, leaving the child hidden in fields while she foraged for food—Bronia is at the edge of her strength. But a man spots the pair in a field, observes them over the course of several days, and eventually offers to take them in. The man, a blacksmith named Vena, took Bronia and Lucy home and concealed them in a root cellar. The space was not deep enough for Bronia to stand in and was plagued by vermin. Before telling his wife about the Jewish mother and child on their property, Vena gave Bronia some money. He instructed her to hand the funds to his wife so that she would believe that they were being compensated for the risk they were taking. Eventually, with a German defeat in sight, Vena confesses to Bronia that he has loved her from the moment he first saw her in the hayfields. Telling her that he plans to leave his wife and marry her after the war, he demands that they begin having sexual relations immediately. Bronia refuses. Attempting to reason with him, she explains that while she has immense gratitude toward him, she also appreciates the kindness of his wife and daughters, and does not want to betray them. Angrily, Vena takes Bronia and Lucy out to the fields

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and tells them they can no longer stay with him. Turning his back on them, he begins walking home. Bronia assesses her predicament: She and Lucy are not prepared for the cold weather, have no food, no prospects for surviving the rest of the war. “I realized that I had made a wrong decision.” Running after him, she agrees to whatever he wishes. Vena embraces her and tells her he was “only joking.” But she understands that her survival and Lucy’s now hinge on a quid pro quo: shelter in return for sex. Although she feels guilty about betraying Vena’s family, she does not feel guilty about trading the only currency she has—her body. Unlike Heller, who presents her relationship with Jan as a romance, even with its implied transactionality, Jablon makes a deliberate calculation that, at least on her part, has nothing to do with romance. It is, plain and simple, a business transaction, a bargain that she would have accepted right from the beginning, when he first approached her in the field. “After all, when I was in such desperate need and danger when I first met Vena, I would have agreed to anything in order to save my life and that of my child.” Much like Heller’s Jan, Jablon’s Vena remains steadfast in his love after the war. And like Fania, Bronia disengages from her former lover. In the decades following the war, she distances herself repeatedly from men who approach her with kindness and offers of help and then declare their love for her. She turns down intimacies and even marriage proposals. She puts it baldly: “I wasn’t ready to sell myself for a slice of bread.” In a sense, asserting the right to make choices over her body is a way of reclaiming sovereignty, of rebuilding herself and her life after catastrophe. By the time that Heller and Jablon compose their memoirs, they have raised families and are grandmothers. They have left hometowns in Eastern Europe permanently, sojourning in several countries before arriving in North America. They are part of a cohort of women survivors who, late in their lives, look back with the perspective of life experience, and a desire to leave a record of events often omitted in accounts of the Holocaust. Both Heller and Jablon locate their wartime sexual relations somewhere on a continuum between chosen and coerced. Their memoirs mention instances of rape that they were aware of, which they distinguish from what they themselves experienced, but see as bearing some relationship to it. Most pointedly, both memoirs describe situations with varying elements of love, power, and choice. They complicate our understanding of women’s experiences during the Nazi genocide. One important subset of deferred memoirs by women survivors is those composed by women who had been children during the war. They comprise the youngest cohort group with personal memories of the Shoah. Many of the same factors that account for the spate of late in life memoirs and testimonies by women generally often pertinent to the emerge of memoirs by this group as well—empty-nesting, mature-learner classes, the wide reach of testimony projects, widowhood, a desire to leave a legacy for grandchildren.

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Other issues come into play as well. For many years, the recollections of those who had been children during the Shoah were seen as less valuable. They were thought to have been too young to have understood, to have known much, to have remembered extensively. But as old age and mortality strike older survivors, it falls increasingly to younger ones to speak in commemorative and educational contexts. As Dori Laub and others have noted, the sense that one has a listener encourages—indeed, creates—testimony,8 and the growing attention to the recollections of the remaining survivors has encouraged the flow of oral and written memory narratives. Here, too, women survivors make public memories long considered too shameful to share. Two examples of very different kinds of deferred accounts by child survivors give a sense of the fraught events brought to light many decades after the war: Rachel Shtibel’s The Violin9 and Molly Applebaum’s Buried Words.10 Rachel Shtibel was only five years old when the Nazis invaded her town in southern Poland in 1941. As an adult, she shared stories with her husband, a war orphan from Lublin. But the couple agreed that nothing was served by dwelling on memories of trauma and suffering. Rachel rarely spoke of what she endured. When they were approached in 1996 by the Shoah Foundation, Rachel found that she very much wanted to give videotaped testimony. Two years later, she began writing her memoirs. The process plunged her deeply into the fabric of memory, reliving events that brought waves of difficult emotions. But it also brought to the forefront a disturbing episode that Rachel had never revealed to anyone. When Rachel was 7 years old, a Polish farmer agreed to harbor four members of her family in his barn. After a series of deportations, and with the destruction of the ghetto immanent, other family members secretly joined them, including a cousin Rachel’s age. In addition to extended family, the group also included a doctor who was a family friend, for a total of ten fugitives. To keep the farmer from knowing how many Jews were hiding in his barn, and for everyone’s safety, the men dug a bunker measuring 3 meters by 3 meters under the barn. The people could lie in it in two rows, “foot to foot, toes touching” (47). Rachel lay between her parents. The family hid there for a year and a half, in silence and barely moving. “In these positions we remained. There was no room for standing or moving. When one person had to turn, all of us would have to turn. The deeper we were inside the bunker, the less air we had” (47–48). Rachel and her cousin were ordered to remain absolutely silent. We “were not allowed to use our voices to speak. We could only communicate by moving our lips. Turn. Whisper. Turn” (48). If the girls made a sound, “one of the adults would lie on us. Choke us. So we could not breathe” (48). Like most children in duress, Rachel felt comfort in the presence of her family. Yet Rachel was subject to sexual abuse in the bunker. “I felt it penetrate me. Unfamiliar and painful. Something larger than me, forcing its way through me. Someone’s toe in my vagina” (50). It was the family friend,

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the doctor. The child squirmed and tried to move away, waking her mother. Her mother scolded her and told her to lie still. Helpless to prevent these assaults, which became a nightly routine, Rachel attempted to dissociate. But the assaults escalated and continued for the duration of the group’s time in the bunker. The man would “abuse me every night after that, often forcing my toes to play with his genitals as well” (50). He was, Shtibel reflects in the memoir, “training me.” Eventually, she recollects, she began to feel “a perverse pleasure from his toes” and from the awareness that she was pleasuring him in return. For Shtibel, writing out that deferred memory was deeply significant. She had not included it in her Shoah Foundation testimony; she had never spoken of it to anyone at all. She observes, “All my life I have kept this secret” (50). In retrospect, she comes to understand the toll that this abuse has taken on her—something beyond the trauma and the “rage inside of me” (144) caused by wartime terror and duress. “It has affected my entire adult life. Sometimes, even today, I cry and mourn the defenseless child that he killed” (50). By the time she writes this, Shtibel has been married for over fifty years, with children and grandchildren of her own. The sexual abuse inflicted on her, and her own forced complicity, still causes her emotional pain. Another sexual secret runs through Shtibel’s memoir, intertwined with her contending with wartime trauma and coming to terms with its effect on her. At several points in the memoir, Shtibel remarks on instances where her mother, Sara, was not sufficiently protective or loving. Once, when running barefoot through fields to escape capture by Germans, Shtibel recollects that while her aunt carried her cousin, Sara dragged Rachel by the hand. Another time, she remembers her mother leaping out of the window of a room where they were hiding when Germans approached, leaving her daughter behind. After the war, when Sara gives birth to another daughter, Rachel remembers feeling neglected. These feelings about her mother grow and gain power over time, rather than fading as Rachel moves into adulthood and motherhood. Years later a chance conversation with her granddaughter in 1993 begins to unlock a family secret. Her granddaughter observes that while Rachel’s parents both have blue eyes, Rachel’s eyes are brown, a genetic impossibility, given that blue eyes are linked to a recessive gene. Shtibel suddenly realizes that her blood type is incompatible with her parents’. By then, Shtibel’s parents are no longer alive. She begins asking surviving relatives of her parents’ generation about her parentage. They refuse to countenance her questions, castigating her for raising the issue. Eventually, from the artifacts from the past that remain in her hands, she begins to piece together her personal history. She was the love child of a man she knew as her uncle, who gave her, as an infant, to his childless brother and sister-in-law to raise as their own. Even long after all four parents had died, revealing the truth was seen as exposing an unseemly sexual shame, and a slight to the parents who raised her. Layered onto one another, the story of Rachel’s parentage and the story of

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her wartime survival constitute a story of origins for Rachel. The stories that define her hint at unspeakable and illicit desire—her birth father’s, her birth mother’s, the man in the bunker, Rachel herself. Although different, one set of paired desires dissolves into the other, both impeding Rachel from owning her own story, both linked by anger at and distance from Sara, her adopted mother. Molly Applebaum’s account of sexual activity as a hidden child is deferred in a different way. Applebaum wrote entries in a diary for about two years during the Holocaust. After the war, the diary left her possession. It was returned to her almost seventy years later—one of the very few such diaries by children that are still in existence. Eventually, it was translated from Polish to English. In the interim, in 1998, Applebaum also wrote her memoirs. In 2017, the diary and the memoir were published together in a volume. The account in the diary was rendered contemporaneously to the events they describe. The release of that account, however, was deferred by many decades. The existence of both the diary and the later memoir permits us to compare the accounts given in each. Applebaum—then Melania Weissenberg—was born in Krakow in 1930. When she was eight years old, her father passed away and her mother remarried. In the fall of 1940, the family was taken to a ghetto. As rumors circulated about the death camp Belzec, Molly’s mother attempted to arrange safe haven for her family outside the ghetto. She approached a Polish farmer named Victor whom she knew from the marketplace. He agreed to hide the family in his barn, along with Molly’s older cousin Helen. But Molly’s stepfather could not endure the abysmal conditions and returned to the ghetto. And Molly’s little brother kept running outside to play with the farm children, endangering their hiding place. To protect Molly, their mother returned with him to the ghetto. Molly’s family did not survive the Shoah. But Molly and Helena remained with Victor for the duration of the war. There Molly composed most of her diary entries. The 1998 memoir is a detailed account of Molly’s life before, during, and after the war, with a brief epilogue added in 2001. The narrative flows smoothly, giving a detailed and coherent account of the girl’s experiences in the Holocaust, and her life afterward. She describes childhood friendships, family relations, dating, married life, and starting a family. In it, Applebaum outlines in great detail the day-to-day challenges she faced hiding in the barn: the scarcity of food, the need to relieve oneself, extremes of weather, dampness, boredom, fear, and silence. The diary, by contrast, is spare—at points, cryptic. Possibly to safeguard her intimate confidences, possibly to guard against repercussions should the diary fall into the wrong hands, the girl invents nicknames for the people she writes about. The events described are bounded by time—1942–1945—and even within that time frame, entries become sporadic. The facts recounted in the diary and the memoir accord with one another. Both describe the difficult conditions that Molly and Helen endured.

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Fearful that someone might learn that he was harboring two Jewish girls, Victor built an underground hideout for them. He buried a box in the ground inside the barn, and the girls stayed inside it. About the size of a wardrobe lain on its side, the box had sufficient room for Molly and Helen to lie side by side, but not to sit. It served as their living quarters for two years. Generally, they were allowed to crawl out of the box once or twice a day—usually at night—to stretch, relieve themselves, and clean up. Victor or his sister would bring the two girls water and food “sporadically,” Applebaum recalls in the memoir (71). “Lying idly the whole day is horrible,” she observes in one diary entry. “for it is only at night when we can go out, stretch out in the stinking cold, dark stable and shudder whenever we hear a dog bark” (17). The memoir offers a more fulsome narrative—understandably so, as the conditions of Molly’s concealment made writing difficult, and entries became shorter and less frequent. But the diary contains some details omitted from the memoir. Applebaum’s memoir closes with an expression of gratitude toward her “saviours” (116); throughout its description of the war years, Victor’s resourcefulness and the great risk he took on her behalf are noted. The diary echoes that vast gratitude, observing that due to “his willingness to save the poor human souls, this noble human soul has overcome countless obstacles at every step and is trying to prolong our miserable life in all possible and impossible ways. Ciuruniu [one of her nicknames for Victor], our life!” (21). At the same time, the diary also reflects Molly’s deep fears that Victor will grow weary of looking after their needs, will decide that the risks are too great to bear, and will turn them out to fend for themselves. It captures the abysmal quality of Molly’s day-to-day life: “I spend entire days so unpleasant and filled with torment” (22). Sometimes the cousins go for days without food, growing weak from hunger. The diary records a letter that Helen writes to Victor and his sister: “Have scruples, have mercy! Do not let us die of ­hunger […] Do not change your attitude toward us. Death by starvation is horrible […] Jesus will reward you for this mercy” (29). Significantly, one aspect of the period spent beneath the barn is entirely missing from the 1998 memoir, although it has an important place in the diary: sex. Several entries have only a single word or phrase: “Sex” (21); “Sex again” (22). Her older cousin Helen has begun having sexual relations with Victor. While it is not clear from the diary whether Victor or Helen first initiated these encounters, it is clear that the girls see Victor’s sexual involvement as a way to keep him interested in their predicament and allow them to remain in his barn. The diary documents a series of overtures that Helen makes to Victor, with Molly’s encouragement. “She approached him, and it happened” (22). Helen’s notes to Victor, copied in Applebaum’s diary, are seductive speech acts, expressing her own sexual longing: “Honey, my dearest, your every touch feels like an electric current, everything vibrates in me and begs for more” (23). She asks to feel him “pressing down against

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me […] on the tip and with your finger” (23). Other notes to Victor are more explicit. In time, Victor begins to have sexual relations with Molly, as well; she was then 13, and he, 40. The two cousins seem to compete for time with him. The diary entries reflect these relations: “Sex […] but out of resignation” (25); “July 21, sex with me, and on the 23rd with kitten [her nickname for Helen]”; “July 30, sex with Kitten from behind” (30), and so on. The diary’s translator, noted Polish historian Jan Grabowski, notes that Applebaum “invented a new word in her Polish vocabulary (lutanie)” to connote sexual intercourse.11 Applebaum’s diary entries make clear that the two cousins understood that having sex with Victor was a way to keep him engaged with their predicament. In that sense, it falls under the rubric of bartered or even coerced sex. But the diary does not express reluctance or distaste for these intimacies. On the contrary, the encounters themselves, and the cousins’ talking about the encounters, relieves the long hours of boredom in their dark hiding place. On May 20, Molly complains, “I am terrible bored. [We] no longer have anything to talk about because we ran out of topics along time ago” (20). After Helen’s first recorded overture to Victor, in December, Molly observes, “[W]e have such a pleasant topic for another couple of days” (22). Molly notes believes that Helen seeks erotic pleasure in her relations with Victor— that “she needed it as medicine” (25). Her letters to him, as the diary records them, shows Helen desperate for some sensual pleasure amid the horrors of war and the omnipresent threat of death. The initiation of sexual relations for Molly comes in the context of the polysemous eroticism of adolescence, heightened by conditions of war and genocide. Well before the onset of intimacies with Victor, Molly notes that she and Helen “talk a lot about having sex, and Kitten shows me exactly how it is done” (22). Already in the ghetto, before her confinement beneath Victor’s barn, Molly develops an intense crush on a young woman in her early twenties. She confides in her diary, “If you only knew how much I love you… If only you knew. But you do not and you shall never know. Because you will not believe that such a love can exist. It is called lesbian love; that is, of a woman for another woman” (4). The diary entries before Molly begins to have sex with Victor suggest that she feels desire for Helen, as well, and the cousins’ conversations about Helen’s sex with Victor seem connected with that. The diary narrates these ongoing relations from the perspective of a young teenager. The context of these sexual encounters—Victor holding the power of life and death over the two Jewish girls, their utter isolation—always hovers in the background. At the same time, the diary records the girls’ erotic pleasure. In The Violin, Shtibel, too, notes the mixture of a sexual encounter born of diminished choices, and the acknowledgment of the victim’s pleasure. The man who assaulted her in the bunker, she asserts, took her “innocence.” Shtibel writes, of course, from the perspective of an adult, many years

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later. With an adult’s comprehension, she articulates the components we now understand to be entailed in the sexual abuse of children: an unwanted incursion, a feeling of complicity in pleasure, the ignorance (real or simulated) of other adults. Applebaum’s diary, by contrast, reflects the experience of sexual abuse from the child’s experience, without the interpretation imposed by the adult rememberer. The same factors prevail: constricted choices, pleasure, and complicity. In an intact world where Jewish children had the right to live, social structures and parental protection might have prevailed. Children may have been allowed to feel curiosity, eros, and desire without it leading to sexual relations with a much older adult. At the time that Applebaum was composing her diary entries, she did not have the distance and wisdom of adulthood to evaluate her situation and behavior. Even more to the point, she could not afford to do so. She understood that she had to please. Applebaum’s 1998 memoir does not record the sexual aspects of her childhood and survival. But elements of that early experience of abuse and its aftereffects may be discerned in its pages. The memoir continues from the war years to the memoir’s present, when Applebaum is already a widow and a grandmother. It narrates a postwar marriage that Molly enters into reluctantly, a life-long financial struggle, an unhappy family life. In the period immediately following the war, Applebaum remembers a series of disturbing encounters with men. At 14, for example, a man she describes as “much older” courted her. He was on the “verge of proposing” when she revealed that he been married with two children before the war, and that he believed his wife had survived. “I wondered why Helen had never warned me about anything to do with men [….] she knew all there was to know…” (84). Applebaum met her husband, Rubin, another war orphan, in Toronto. He proposed to her in 1950. Although she told him repeatedly that she didn’t love him, he convinced her to marry him, anyway. She looked forward to plunging into the role of housewife, but Rubin insisted that she work. In retrospect, the marriage was ill-considered from the start. “I was being brainwashed from the start without realizing it” (104). She describes her husband as a “stingy” man who fell into “rages.” But although she remembers it as a difficult marriage, it does not occur to her to divorce. She remains married until Rubin’s death in 1983, noting, “I had so much anger stored up” (112). Years later, she begins to read psychology books about abusive relationships. The symptoms fit. “The books made me realize there is a name for what I endured” (113). In the context of the memoir, this statement is a commentary on her marriage. But she does not specify, and it could equally well pertain to her childhood. At the very least, she seems to understand belatedly that the wartime abuse she experienced made her vulnerable to later abusive relationships. She reflects, “As a victim, you’re already damaged – you don’t have the skills to love yourself, to care for yourself, to feel sexy, to make choices or to make decisions, and every incident of abuse further damages you. As a victim, you just survive; you don’t feel any joy or love, you just

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feel pain […] There had to have been tremendous damage done before that allowed us, when we are like this, to stay in these relationships” (113). While Applebaum does not articulate, as Shtibel does, the sense that her early abuse had robbed her of something essential about her childhood, she acts out an attempt to reconstitute that loss. Late in her life, she develops a hobby, sewing elaborate clothes for Barbie dolls. By then, even her grandchildren are too old to be interested. For Applebaum, the aftereffects of wartime trauma extend beyond her relationship with her husband. She expresses regret for not having adequately mothered her children. While she tended to their daily needs, she acknowledges that an emotional component was missing. “I did not make enough time for my own children. […] I feel that their emotional needs were not met. We did not tell them that we loved them or that we were proud of them and they were treasured. Because we never got this kind of affection in our own lives growing up. I had no example to follow and did not see the need” (44). In retrospect, she feels that she did help her children gain a sense of worth and self-esteem. “Neither Rubin nor I hugged or kissed the kids when they were not babies anymore. We didn’t tell them that we loved them, and we didn’t tell them they were cute or good-looking […] We had no models from our own childhood” (112–113). This emotional gap between survivor parents and children surfaces in many accounts by both generations. It is especially pronounced in the testimonies and life writing of child and adolescent survivors whose mothers did not live through the war.12 Applebaum’s wartime diary, published under the title Buried Words, was buried in several senses. Most of it was composed when its author was literally buried beneath a barn in Poland. After the war, the diary was buried figuratively. Unknown to Applebaum, it remained in her cousin Helen’s possession. Helen eventually married and moved to North America, taking Molly’s diary with her. Only after Helen died did Helen’s husband return it to Applebaum. The diary’s contents became a kind of deferred account by deliberate choice, although not Applebaum’s. Unwilling to destroy the diary, Helen nevertheless wished to suppress its revelations, presumably because of how her actions might be perceived by later readers. The diary’s translator, who developed a friendship with Applebaum while working on the translation, asked her whether she, too, might wish to keep its contents private. Applebaum insisted on publication.13 The deferred accounts discussed here in detail depict women in four stages of life: Jablon, a young mother making calculated decisions; Heller, a teenager blending romance with a transaction that her parents countenance; Applebaum, a young teenager with her older cousin keeping their rescuer motivated; and Shtibel, a child abused by a fellow-fugitive. All hid in confined spaces with few viable options. Jablon was the most matter-of-fact about the transaction she was conducting at the time. Knowingly choosing to engage in sexual relations with an adulterer, she wanted to safeguard her child’s life.

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In retrospect, she remembers herself consciously, if reluctantly, choosing her action. She thus claims an element of agency over her survival and, more importantly, asserts a continued ability to be her child’s mother. This emphasis on agency and mothering stands as a necessary balance to her account of the child she could not save. While under the protection of Vena’s family, she discovers that she was pregnant with her husband’s child. Vena’s wife midwifes the birth, telling Bronia, “If I hear a single sound from you, I will kill you with this ax.” Afterward, Vena’s wife takes the “beautiful child, with pink cheeks and handsome features” and buries him. Bronia was too weak to resist. Indeed, being Lucy’s mother continues to be the strongest element in her sense of identity throughout Jablon’s memoir, lasting well into her second marriage, Lucy’s marriage, and Lucy’s own motherhood. For Heller and Applebaum, two teenagers during the war, erotic discovery and pleasure are woven into their respective narratives of the sexual encounters that saved their lives. During the war, Heller remained connected to her family, and her account of her relationship with Jan has the trappings of romantic courtship. Jan nurses her when she falls ill, proclaims his love for her, converses with her. Decades later, from the perspective of mature adulthood, she acknowledges the genuineness of Jan’s love as well as the ambiguities inherent in their relationship. She owns her own acquiescence in the relationship and the comfort derived from it, even while contextualizing it in the constricted options available to her and her family. Like Jablon, she understands her actions as vital to the survival of loved ones. Although in the immediate postwar period, she struggles with how to resolve her relationship with Jan, and later suffers from community approbation (and the suggestion that Jan may have been implicated in her father’s death), the memoir does not imply that her relationship with Jan cost her lasting psychological damage. By contrast, Applebaum’s diary, especially in combination with her later memoir, suggests lasting scars. Although Applebaum, too, describes her sexual encounters as providing psychological relief from unbearable circumstances, her conditions radically differed from Heller’s. Although both were still in their teens and virgins before commencing sexual relations with their rescuers, Applebaum was significantly younger. Jan’s relationship with Fanya begins as a courtship under the watchful eyes of her parents. Their acquiescence gives it a semblance of normalcy to the relationship. By the time Molly begins to have sex with Victor, she is already orphaned. The sexual encounters take place outside the circle of parental protection, with Victor accountable to no one. Utterly dependent on Victor, Molly’s sense of agency in the relationship shifts blame and anger inward. Her life afterward entails a series of unsatisfying connections. She acts out the repercussions without fully putting the pieces together. In the case of Shtibel, the transactional element is absent entirely. Victimized by a fellow refugee and family friend no doubt seeking

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psychological relief from his own anxiety and boredom, Shtibel acknowledges the toll of childhood abuse. Although, unlike Applebaum, she enjoys a loving marriage, she and her husband early on agree to a code of silence about the past. She struggles with anxiety and depression. A long-term feeling that some essential part of her has been snuffed out of existence surfaces in her compulsion to look at herself in mirrors. “I needed mirrors everywhere. […] When I looked at myself in the mirror, I felt alive. It confirmed that I existed” (131). While Rachel Shtibel rages against the man who abused her, her rage extends to her mother, who did not recognize the abuse as it occurred. Looking back at their experiences together during the war, Rachel recounts episodes prior to the bunker, where her mother acted “unmotherly.” In her memoir, Shtibel breaks two long-lasting silences—one self-imposed, the other imposed by others. The process of plunging into memory was harrowing—so much so that her husband sought to dissuade her. But she describes it as also therapeutic, leaving her feeling at “peace” (144) with her past. Molly Applebaum, too, rages against her mother. In a videotaped interview, she remembers that when her father died, her mother told her euphemistically that he “just went away for a while.” Only the gossip of other children told her baldly that he was dead. Although Molly acknowledges that this is “how death was explained to children at that time,” Molly cannot forgive her mother’s “lie.” Afterward, Molly insists, their relationship grew attenuated—so much so, that when her mother takes Molly’s younger brother back to the ghetto and leaves her with Victor, Molly does not care. Yet one can see in Molly’s anger at her mother a rage at being “abandoned”—even though this abandonment saved her life. By contrast, neither in the diary nor in the memoir does Molly express anger at Victor. To the contrary—she sings his praises. In the interview, she characterizes their sexual relationship as “entertainment.” Her interviewer is clearly uncomfortable with her response. He stammers for an extended moment, trying to collect himself and proceed with the interview. Most viewers are similarly discomfited. We cannot help but see the transactionality in Molly’s sexual relations with Victor, the element of coercion, of power imbalance. We are inclined to see it the way Rachel Shtibel comes to understand her experience in the bunker—as abuse, as exploitation, as robbing a child of innocence, of childhood. But Molly pushes back against this reading of her life. She refutes the idea that Victor abused or victimized her, pointing out that she insisted that Victor and his sister be recognized by Yad Vashem as “righteous among the nations,” and pointing to a feeling of life-long connection with the family. She wants to own the experience—to own the desire, the agency, the pleasure, and the choice. She resists the perspective that would define this as abuse, define her as victim. In the interview, Applebaum acknowledges that at an earlier time, she would not have allowed the diary to go public. Now, however, “My brain grew up and I have my own ideas.”

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In Rage is the Subtext, Susan Derwin discusses the “transformation of rage through narrative-making”—that is, the ways in which crafting a narrative about traumatic rage transforms rage into something we might call art. More than other modes of representation, art allows for levels of complexity and inner contradictions of inner life that can stand in tension without being resolved. In the narratives discussed here, a subtext of rage (to borrow Derwin’s term) emerges from the past, from trauma, from anguish. But the rage is also against later social conditions that insist that the women’s narratives conform to and affirm communal norms if they are to enter into the public discourse. Was it love or transaction? Coercion or pleasure? Abuse or entertainment? I’m not suggesting here that we call coercion and abuse by any other name, or that perpetrators should not be held to account. But I am suggesting that to a certain extent, and horrifyingly so, the women experienced the events they recollect and narrate as abuse and something else, as well. In retrospect, that “something else” might be seen as part of the abuse. But it is more than that. The narratives insist on the rememberers’ right to narrate that “something else,” to interpret it, to integrate it into the story of a life, before categorizing or judging or shaming. And they insist, as well, on the damage exacted not only by the events they recollect, but also by the need to self-censor, restrict, or recast their memories in ways that minimize the disturbance to their audience. The women discussed here—and others—bring an element of defiance to their deferred account. They choose to make public aspects of their lives that run counter to familial and community norms. In so doing, they map the tensions inherent in bridging their radical aloneness by narrating their breach with family and community. If survivors of such experiences tell their stories to complete the historical record, you might say that they also do so, in some measure, to complete themselves.

Notes

1. Ida Fink, “Aryan Papers,” in A Scrap of Time and Other Stories, trans. Madeline Levine and Francine Prose (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), 63–68. 2. See, for example, Doris Bergen, “Sexual Violence in the Holocaust: Unique and Typical?” in Lessons and Legacies VII: The Holocaust in International Perspective, ed. Dagmar Herzog (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006), 179–201; Anna Hájková, “Sexual Barter in Times of Genocide: Negotiating the Sexual Economy of the Theresienstadt Ghetto,” Signs 38, no. 3 (2013), 503–533. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/668607; Dagmar Herzog, ed., Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Rachel Saidel and Batya Brutin, eds., Violated: Women in Holocaust and Genocide (New York: Remember the Women Institute, 2018); and Zoe Waxman, Women in the Holocaust: A Feminist History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

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3.  Fanya Gottesfeld Heller, Strange and Unexpected Love: A Teenage Girl’s Holocaust Memoirs (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav Publishing House, 1993); reissued as Love in a World of Sorrow: A Teenage Girl’s Holocaust Memoirs (New York: Devora Publishing, 2005). 4. “Author’s Preface to the Second Edition,” in Love in a World of Sorrow, 10. 5. Fanya Heller, Ben Gurion University, 1996. 6.  “Author’s Preface to the Third Edition,” in Love in a World of Sorrow: A Teenage Girl’s Holocaust Memoirs (Jerusalem: Geffen, 2015). 7. Bronia Jablon, A Part of Me (Toronto: Azrieli Foundation, 2018). 8.  See, for example, Dori Laub, “Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening,” in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, eds. Dori Laub and S. Felman (New York: Routledge, 1991). 9. Rachel Shtibel, The Violin, in The Violin and a Child’s Testimony by Rachel Shtibel and Adam Shtibel (Toronto: Azrieli Foundation, 2007). 10. Molly Applebaum, Buried Words: The Diary of Molly Applebaum (Toronto: Azrieli Foundation, 2017). 11. Jan Grabowski, “Introduction,” in Buried Words by Molly Applebaum, xxvi. 12.  See, for example, Sara R. Horowitz, “Memory and Testimony in Women Survivors of Nazi Genocide,” in Women of the Word: Jewish Women and Jewish Writing, ed. Judith Baskin (Detroit: Wayne State, 1994), 258–282. 13. Conversation with Jan Grabowski, October 17, 2017.

Bibliography Applebaum, Molly. Buried Words: The Diary of Molly Applebaum. Toronto: Azrieli Foundation, 2017. Bergen, Doris. “Sexual Violence in the Holocaust: Unique and Typical?” In Lessons and Legacies VII: The Holocaust in International Perspective, edited by Dagmar Herzog, 179–201. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006. Fink, Ida. “Aryan Papers.” In A Scrap of Time and Other Stories, translated by Madeline Levine and Francine Prose, 63–68. New York: Pantheon Books, 1987. Hájková, Anna. “Sexual Barter in Times of Genocide: Negotiating the Sexual Economy of the Theresienstadt Ghetto.” Signs 38, no. 3 (2013): 503–533. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/668607. Heller, Fanya Gottesfeld. “Author’s Preface to the Third Edition.” In Love in a World of Sorrow: A Teenage Girl’s Holocaust Memoirs. Jerusalem: Geffen, 2015. ———. Strange and Unexpected Love: A Teenage Girl’s Holocaust Memoirs. Hoboken, NJ: Ktav Publishing House, 1993; reissued as Love in a World of Sorrow: A Teenage Girl’s Holocaust Memoirs. New York: Devora Publishing, 2005. Herzog, Dagmar, ed. Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Horowitz, Sara R. Interview with Fanya Heller, Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva, Israel, Summer 1996. ———. “Memory and Testimony in Women Survivors of Nazi Genocide.” In Women of the Word: Jewish Women and Jewish Writing, edited by Judith Baskin, 258–282. Detroit: Wayne State, 1994. Jablon, Bronia. A Part of Me. Toronto: Azrieli Foundation, 2018.

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Laub, Dori. “Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening.” In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, edited by Dori Laub and S. Felman. New York: Routledge, 1991. Saidel, Rachel, and Batya Brutin, eds. Violated: Women in Holocaust and Genocide. New York: Remember the Women Institute, 2018. Shtibel, Rachel. The Violin, in The Violin and a Child’s Testimony by Rachel Shtibel and Adam Shtibel. Toronto: Azrieli Foundation, 2007. Waxman, Zoe. Women in the Holocaust: A Feminist History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

PART II

Fiction

CHAPTER 5

Ghetto in Flames: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in Early Postwar Jewish Literature Avinoam J. Patt

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (April 19, 1943–May 16, 1943), the largest mass revolt in a major city in Nazi-occupied Europe, is the defining symbol of Jewish resistance to Nazi oppression during World War II. In the days and weeks after the uprising broke out, the news of the revolt captivated Jews from diverse ideological backgrounds around the world. Even before the details of the revolt became known—such as the identities of the heroes, the circumstances of the resistance or how it was organized—news of the uprising was being interpreted in public settings over the course of 1943–1944. At the same time, a process of mythologizing and fictionalizing the heroism of the uprising began to enable diverse audiences to imagine themselves in the same situation. This chapter will examine early representations of the uprising in wartime and early postwar literature, including the radio play “The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto” (October 1943), H. Leivick’s theatrical production, Der Nes in Geto (1944), the short story Yosl Rakover Talks to God (1946), and John Hersey’s novel The Wall, among others. Jews around the world projected diverse religious, political, and historical interpretations onto the last battle of Warsaw’s Jews, revealing that the dramatic framework of the event was sufficiently flexible as to absorb a broad range of Jewish responses to the Holocaust.

A. J. Patt (*)  University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_5

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Reporting the Revolt On April 23, 1943, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency delivered news of the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt, relaying a report received in Stockholm the day before with the headline “Nazis Start Mass-Execution of Warsaw Jews on Passover; Victims Broadcast S.O.S.” In the weeks that followed, the Jewish press continued to report on events in the Warsaw Ghetto, quickly beginning a search for the identities of the “Jewish heroes of Warsaw.”1 Over the next several weeks, memorials and days of protest were organized by Jewish communities in the Yishuv in Palestine and around the world. On June 3, 1943, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) reported that London’s Evening Standard proposed making April 19 of every year a so-called Jewish Day: April 19, the day when human valor converted the Warsaw ghetto into a fortress of freedom should be an honored day among men cherishing mercy and tolerance…Jews are fighting today on all fronts for the cause of humanity, and the Jew will be among the proud participants of common victory.2

Two weeks later, on June 16, 1943, the JTA reported on a planned mass meeting in New York to commemorate the Jewish heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto. The Jewish Labor Committee organized the Saturday evening, June 19, event at Carnegie Hall, to celebrate the heroes and honor Szmul Zygielbojm, who had taken his own life in London after hearing news of the revolt.3 Lucy Schildkret (later Lucy Dawidowicz) recalled the June 19, 1943, service in her memoirs: We went and we wept, yet there was pride in what the Polish Jews had done. For the first time anywhere during the German occupation of Europe, a civilian population had taken up arms against their German oppressors. Not just any civilian population, but the most oppressed, the most helpless, the most desperate. In the next weeks, Bundist and Zionist underground reports from Warsaw reaching the West gave details of the fighting and listed the names of the dead and the few survivors…The events of the Warsaw ghetto burned into my consciousness…The Warsaw ghetto became a constant part of my internal life. I used to imagine myself there, test myself as to how I would have behaved. Would I have had the courage to fight? Would I have had the stamina against despair?4

The forty or so surviving ghetto fighters who had managed to sneak out of the sewers on May 10, 1943, with Simcha Rotem (Kazik) and escaped from the Mila 18 command bunker in a group led by Zivia Lubetkin struggled to remain alive on the Aryan side of Warsaw. Lubetkin, Tosia Altman, Marek Edelman, Hirsch Berlinski, Israel Kanal, and Tuvia Borzykowski were among the initial leaders of this group; Yitzhak Zuckerman (deputy ZOB— Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa/Jewish Fighting Organization—commander) would join them in the forest after a few days.5 At the same time, news of

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deaths and names of heroes began to emerge (the Bundist engineer, Michael Klepfish, was first identified as one of the leaders of the revolt).6 As Jews in the Free World began to take stock of the meaning of the “heroic, last stand” of the Warsaw Jews who “would not be led like sheep to the slaughter,” memorial services were organized; in the Yishuv, Zivia Lubetkin and Tosia Altman were eulogized in June 1943 after it was believed they had both died in the uprising. (Zivia, it was later discovered, had survived, while Tosia died two weeks after the end of the uprising.)7 As Melech Noy (Neustadt), a Labor Zionist leader in the Yishuv involved in rescue efforts during the war, would note one year after the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto Rising, most initial accounts of the uprising outside occupied Europe “were based on smuggled letters and reports which could only hint at what occurred. Naturally many of those accounts were filled out by conjecture and imagination.”8 Over the course of 1943, therefore, once the uprising had been suppressed and once the surviving ghetto fighters had managed to find shelter on the Aryan side of Warsaw, Yitzhak Zuckerman, Adolf Berman (of the Jewish National Committee or JNC), Marek Edelman and Leon Feiner (of the Bund), and others worked to establish connections with the outside world, secure funding needed to continue their relief and rescue work, and, at the same time, write the first draft of the history of the revolt to convey to the outside world what had transpired. The first report from the Bund, dated June 22, 1943, describes “the historic events that occurred in the Warsaw Ghetto,” noting that lack of space prevents them from offering precision and esteem that “even the smallest detail deserves.” Even so, it would be impossible for someone who was not there to appreciate the magnitude of what had just transpired in Warsaw: What was going on in April and May in Warsaw that Jewish - German war, that as it has been named the Battle of Ghettograd - this really does surpass any analogy from the history, either of our own or of any other nation… the unforgettable, deeply moving images of the ghetto, enwrapped in the clouds of smoke, lit by the enormous glow of blazing fires, this staccato clatter of machine guns, the roar of howitzers, the pandemonium of the heavy artillery - exploding mines, crashing buildings - and these people of ours living amidst the inferno… It seems that there is no master of pen, brush or sound, who could represent in full the Great Event which was happening before our eyes, neither could he express what we all experienced in those terrible, tragic and yet great days.9

This first report from the Bund, along with subsequent reports from the Jewish National Committee that highlighted the contributions of Zionist groups in the ghetto, would not be read in London, New York, and Tel Aviv until nearly a year after the revolt, meaning Jews around the world knew something remarkable had taken place, but could only imagine what it must have been like to be among the fighting Jews in the ghetto.

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In the summer of 1943, most Jews in the free world understood that an unexpected outbreak of Jewish resistance had taken place, and that the lives and deaths of the Jewish heroes and martyrs needed to be celebrated. Even as news continued to trickle out of occupied Poland, and as coverage continued to focus for the most part on the conquest of Poland and new bombing campaigns over Germany, a process of mythologizing—and indeed fictionalizing—the heroism of the uprising to enable diverse audiences to imagine themselves in the same situation began.

“The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto” In October 1943, a few days before Yom Kippur, “The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto” was first broadcast on NBC radio, and would be subsequently broadcast on an annual basis as part of the Eternal Light Series.10 Written by Morton Wishengrad, the play, which was the capstone of an American Jewish Committee series to confront antisemitism, started with a cantor chanting el malei rachamim, the traditional Ashkenazi prayer for the dead. “Hear him with reverence,” the announcer instructed. “In the Ghetto, thirty-five thousand stood their ground against an army of the Third Reich—and twenty-five thousand fell. They sleep in their common graves but they have vindicated their birthright [….] for they have made an offering by fire and atonement unto the Lord and they have earned their sleep.”11 As Jeffrey Shandler notes, this broadcast was the first mainstream dramatic representation of the uprising, six months after the battle and just days before the High Holidays. The response was so overwhelming that the program was aired again for Hanukkah in December 1943. The play situated the heroic struggle within a religious framework, making use of ritual music, biblical language, and imagery. An unnamed voice likened the victims of the Warsaw Ghetto to the “scapegoats of the centuries” and recalled Leviticus descriptions of release of goats into the wilderness: “but for them in the Warsaw Ghetto there was no wilderness…only the abyss.” In advance of Yom Kippur, the play made it clear who the new scapegoat offering this year would be. And again, when the radio play was rebroadcast on December 12, 1943, on NBC the opening announcement linked the broadcast with the upcoming Jewish holiday of Hanukkah as “the triumph of light over darkness. Today you will hear a modern parallel of the Maccabean revolt….”12 The play followed the wartime experiences of the fictional Isaac Davidson, from Lublin, and his wife, Dvora, and son, Samuel. After the fall of Poland, Isaac Davidson narrates, “they herded us into a cattle car and transported us to the Ghetto of Warsaw [sic]. It was a place in Purgatory and around that Purgatory they had built a brick wall and another wall of barbed wire and beyond the wire stood a third wall of soldiers armed with bayonets” (“The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto,” 1). Davidson recounts attempts by Jews in the

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ghetto to make the best of the situation, finding opportunities for education, culture, religion, the arts, health care, and social welfare despite the Nazis’ efforts to inflict misery. Isaac depicts the degradation of the 500,000 in the Warsaw Ghetto until June 22, 1942 (sic),13 when “armored cars escorted a convoy of black trucks into the Ghetto. They seized men and women and children and packed them into trucks and these were the uncoffined dead who never returned. And each day thereafter the black trucks came…” (8). Isaac relates how dynamite, rifles, and grenades were smuggled through the sewers by the Polish Underground to the Jews in the ghetto until April 19, 1943, when 35,000 Jewish men, women, and children stood ready to greet a detachment of storm troopers in light tanks. After wiping out the entire detachment, the Jewish fighters battled SS troops, as “flags of the United Nations…floated over the roofs of the Ghetto” and Jewish engineers exploded 8000 factories producing material for Germany. Like a modern-day Hanukkah, Isaac recounts the battle of the few against the many: They brought up the regular army. The Ghetto had defeated the Storm Troopers and now it was the Ghetto against the German Army. The Third Front. We retreated slowly from our positions as they sent flame throwers, mortar, cannon, tanks and planes against us. (BUILD UP VOLUME OF SOUND, SHELLS, MACHINE GUNS, BOMBS, ETC.) (“The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto,” 12)

“The entire ghetto was in flames” but the Jews continued to fight, “after thirty-seven days. A few Jews with guns fighting a Nazi army for thirty-seven days” (13). Isaac speaks to a dying ghetto fighter whose arm has been blown off and is slowly bleeding to death, but he smiles [at Isaac], estimating 1200 Nazi casualties: “they should have known the ghetto would explode.” As the cantor chants one final el malei rachamim prayer, the voice of the narrator provides a final instruction to the listener: Hear him with reverence. For he sings a prayer for the dead — twenty-five thousand dead. It is no ordinary prayer and they are not ordinary dead. For they are the dead of the Warsaw Ghetto — in the year nineteen hundred and forty-three. Tonight they sleep in their last trench, their choirs dispersed in ashes, their holy books sodden in the seventh-month rain, the rubble deep on the thresholds of their houses. They were Jews with guns! Understand that — and hear him with reverence as he chants the prayer. (“The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto,” 14)

“The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto” would be rebroadcast annually as part of the Eternal Light Series on NBC radio, usually on the anniversary of the [Warsaw Ghetto] uprising, April 19, with the script unchanged. Three performances in 1943 provoked 12,000 letters. The War Department sent transcripts of the show to be played on Armed Forces Radio around the world.14

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The radio drama highlighted the heroism of the ghetto fighters who did not despair in the aftermath of the great deportation but resolved to fight back, despite their perceived abandonment by the nations of the world. Their appeals were greeted with silence: You did not answer, the radio listener is rebuked. Nonetheless, Wishengrad concluded that the band of fighters armed by the Polish Underground15 managed to hold off the entire German Army for 37 days, even flying the flags of the United Nations above the ghetto walls.16 Without access to information regarding the origins of the Jewish underground or the names of the fighters, Wishengrad provided listeners with the imagery to imagine themselves as if they too “had been to Egypt and am not departed” (14). The themes combine religious tropes of sacrifice (azazel), resistance (the few against the many), remembrance (Egypt), persistence (Rabbi Tarfon), and resilience, but they did not just pray: “They were Jews with guns!” For Wishengrad, the process of mythologizing the uprising, casting it in distinctly religious terms, also conveyed a message to all who witnessed. “For on the page of their agony they wrote a sentence that shall be an atonement, and it is this: Give me grace and give me dignity and teach me to die,” Wishengrad writes (14). The fighting Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto had transformed their death sentence; not merely content to die a passive death, they had chosen the means of their death, and done so with “dignity.” By the first anniversary of the revolt, the JTA reported that Jews in the United States “commemorated … with memorial meetings, a fifteen-minute work stoppage, and the issuance of a proclamation by the American Jewish Conference to the democratic world pleading for the rescue of those Jews who can still be saved.”17 Likewise, the Synagogue Council of America proclaimed April 19, 1944, to be a day of prayer and sorrow, calling all rabbis to “convoke special services on April 19 to honor and mourn the heroes and martyrs of the ghettoes who sacrificed their lives in the cause of the United Nations and for the glory of Israel, and to dedicate themselves to the effort of rescuing the survivors.”18 Special prayers were to be recited in advance of a two-minute moment of silence at 11:00 a.m., while another prayer for private gatherings would be recited during a 15-minute work stoppage at work, home, or in the factory. The Jewish Daily Forward on April 19, 1944, called on Jews in New York to mark the day of memory for the heroes and martyrs of the Warsaw Ghetto, who had written a “chapter of light in the human struggle for freedom.” The Forward called upon readers to participate in the 11:30 a.m. march to City Hall and the evening program at Carnegie Hall featuring a speech by Jacob Pat of the Jewish Labor Committee, as well as remarks by other notables, including the Yiddish writer, H. Leivick. In his remarks at Carnegie Hall, Leivick reflected on the meaning of the revolt in Warsaw, for Jews in America, and indeed for the entire world. The revolt, he argued, had surely transformed those who lived at the time, filling them with wonder, with fear, and with guilt and shame. The heroism of the

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fighters, he noted, also filled him with guilt and anger—for it symbolized the inability of Jews around the world to respond to calls of their brothers for aid, and the indifference of the world to that same cry for help. Likewise, it filled him with guilt before the millions of “silent, submissive, and lost” Jews, “slaughtered like sheep.” We do not know what to call the Jewish uprising against the Germans in the ghetto: resistance, a revolt, or some loftier name. Whatever name we give it, the simple fact itself will transcend our words and fill us with wonder and fear, with prayer, with an upsurge of rebellion-and with the consciousness of guilt. Our own lives have been transfigured, and must be understood anew and justified in a new way….19

For Leivick, the revolt not only signified guilt, and shame, and anger— for American Jews, he argued, it “consecrated our names, too” exulting them and uniting them again for the Jewish bond of freedom, justice, and proud national culture. For American Jews who had been separated from the wellspring of Jewish national culture and peoplehood in Europe, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was a reminder of the strength and power the Jewish people might still possess; the heroism of the Warsaw Ghetto Fighters was the story of American Jews, too.

The Miracle of the Warsaw Ghetto Over one year after the revolt was over, before all of its details were known, the process of immortalizing the heroism of the Warsaw Ghetto continued to develop in another dramatic sense, as H. Leivick would write the new theatrical production Miracle of the Warsaw Ghetto under the direction of Jacob Ben-Ami of the New Jewish Theater in New York.20 Like the radio play of Wishengrad, the Leivick play recounted the bravery of one family and its neighbors, featuring as its central character a student who at first argues against armed violence, but is finally convinced that it is necessary to fight when his sweetheart is killed on an underground mission. The souvenir program for the play, which featured an illustrated cover by Arthur Szyk, included a few words from Leivick highlighting the importance for him of staging a drama on the uprising as soon as possible, even as the war continued. While the events are so extraordinary we all stand before a question: should we try now, at this time, to produce on the stage the drama of Jewish heroism, or should we wait until a later time, when the events will be removed from us by an appropriate distance? Our answer must be: we must not wait… We [Jews in America] must however achieve a part of the holiness and bravery which our brothers demonstrated in the hour of their wondrous uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto.

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Leivick seemed to believe that the dramatic performance of the revolt onstage would enable actors and audience members alike partake in a spiritual, religious, and holy experience that could in some way newest play sought to channel the guilt, shame, and anger of American Jews into a united feeling of pride in Jewish national culture and peoplehood, and a renewed dedication to celebrate the heroism of the Jewish people. The heroic image of Jewish men and children engaged in battle against an unseen enemy captured the themes of the play and Leivick’s call for Jews in America to “show the experiences of our folk-heroism, of our people’s tragic glory.”21 Leivick’s Der Nes in Geto (The Miracle of the Ghetto) opened in October 1944 and played for 20 weeks in NYC before going on tour in early 1945. In the play, a diverse group of Jewish characters represent a cross-section of Jewish society—a Zionist, a Bundist, a Hassidic Rabbi (Reb Itzik), a fighter from the Land of Israel named Joseph, the daughter of a convert, and others—unite to become the backbone of the struggle against the Nazis.22 The first act opens on Passover eve, as the remaining Jews, trapped in the ghetto, prepare for the holiday while waiting for the arrival of weapons. The first scene is set in a basement synagogue, where two young Jews, Yudel and Leibush, stand, immersed in prayer, as if in a dream. The stage directions indicate that above the Holy Ark a large banner proclaims: “Gevald Yidn, Zayt Zikh Nisht Meya’esh!” [Woe Jews, Do Not Despair!]23 One character named Isaac compares their imprisonment to slavery in Egypt: “Why is this night different from all other nights? On all other nights we let ourselves be led like calves into the gas chambers. But on this Passover night we will not let that happen. We will shoot. With what will we shoot, ha? With what? Now this is a kashya [a question].”24 The play charts the transformation of Jews traditionally unprepared for combat, into a realization that the only path is armed struggle. Israel, initially passive, eventually embraces armed resistance after his girlfriend Rachel dies on an underground mission to obtain arms, after the Polish Underground fails to deliver them. In the third act, Israel returns to the ghetto with dynamite, which he uses to blow up a German tank, declaring to the other Jewish fighters, “I know that even in your fear you are wonder Jews […] And I know now, that with one grenade it is possible to destroy a whole tank…” (Leivick, 318). Before exploding himself along with the tank, Israel proclaims to those assembled around him, “The wicked one may be stronger than us, but not his wickedness. Tanks will continue to come – let them come. We will confront them. For what do we need dynamite? With our hearts will we destroy the tanks. A Jew is stronger than tanks.”25 After the death of Israel, the remaining characters, led by Reb Itzik holding a Torah scroll, swear an oath to never surrender: “By the living Torah we take an oath to further sanctify God’s name; to continue our war with the Nazi, may his name be blotted out, may his memory, like the memory of

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Amalek, be erased from the face of the earth.”26 The play concludes with this final prayer, signifying the Jewish transformation to a resolute militancy, with all characters holding their guns aloft in the air. Leivick’s play resonated with a broad Jewish audience, as it would play for 20 weeks in New York before traveling to Milwaukee, Chicago, and Montreal over the next year. For Leivick, the idea that Jews could discover the inner strength to transform a history of Jewish passivity into a struggle against oppression was “the miracle in the ghetto.” The cross-section of Jewish society, from the most traditional to the most secular, from Zionist to Bundist, was secondary. What mattered for Leivick was that the Jewish people as a whole had discovered the inner strength to rise up against the forces of darkness. For readers of postwar descriptions of the destroyed Jewish quarter of Warsaw, the ruins of the ghetto symbolized the destruction of European Jewry as a whole. Journalistic accounts of travels to the ruins of Jewish life in Europe were accompanied by imagined narratives of suffering and heroism in the war. In his travelogue Ash and Fire, Jacob Pat, a political leader of the Jewish Labor Committee, journalist, and writer, expressed trepidation about telling the story of the revolt, feeling unworthy of recounting the deeds of the Jewish heroes of Warsaw. Pat’s postwar travelogue utilized a journalistic method, describing his encounters with surviving Jews amidst the ruins of a destroyed Poland in a matter-of-fact account (including his guide through ruined Warsaw, the Bundist ghetto fighter, Marek Edelman). Other writers, however, did not hesitate to situate their accounts of Jewish heroism in the ruins of the ghetto, interpreting the meaning of the revolt in historical, political, and even theological terms. Writers like Zvi Kolitz wanted to imagine what it must have been like to be inside that ghetto and how the experience of fighting back against the Nazis changed the nature of the Jewish relationship with God. What could be learned from the example of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising about Jewish behavior during the war? What did it mean to die al Kiddush Hashem (to sanctify God’s name) in the Warsaw Ghetto? Could the Jewish religion remain unchanged? Could Jews still believe in a God who would preside over such a calamity?

“Yosl Rakover Talks to God” The short story, “Yosl Rakover Talks to God,” written by Zvi Kolitz for Di Yiddishe Tsaytung in Buenos Aires and published on September 25, 1946 for a special issue in conjunction with Yom Kippur, imagined the last confessions of a fictional Hasidic ghetto fighter in the Warsaw Ghetto. The story, which would come to be separated from Kolitz’s byline, was subsequently published erroneously in the 1950s as an authentic document recovered from the ruins of the ghetto.27 For Jewish readers already conditioned to read imagined accounts of the last battle of Warsaw’s Jews, it is unsurprising that the line between fact and fiction could become so easily blurred.

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For Kolitz, the fictionalized setting of the Warsaw Ghetto was the ideal place to situate such a dramatic encounter, as the ruins of the ghetto became the stand-in for both commemorations and reflections on the meaning of the destruction of European Jewry. Not long before the story was published, the first part of the Ringelblum Oneg Shabbes archive was unearthed in Warsaw in September 1946. For Jewish readers who wanted to believe in the authenticity of the text, the angry encounter between a Jew who remained proud to be a Jew but whose relationship with God had been transformed had tremendous resonance after the war. Kolitz was born in 1919 in Alytus, a small town in Lithuania (located between Grodno and Kovno); he left Lithuania with his mother and siblings in 1936 (studying in Florence for several years), before eventually reaching Jerusalem in 1940 where he joined the Revisionist movement and became involved in organizing the Irgun.28 After a brief imprisonment by the British in Palestine, Kolitz attended the World Zionist Congress in Basel in 1946 before traveling to Buenos Aires where he was invited to write the story by Di Yiddishe Tsaytung. In an interview with Paul Baade years later, Kolitz explained that in his mind the struggle of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto recalled Jacob’s wrestling with the angel on the banks of the Jabbok, which “reached a new climax in the Warsaw Ghetto….”29 For Kolitz, the struggle of the Jewish people in the Warsaw Ghetto symbolized the dramatic transformation of the people who had wrestled with God and emerged forever changed. In the aftermath of the war, the creation of the state of Israel would reflect this permanent change. Yosl Rakover rejects the notion that he must wait for a miracle, for God’s intervention in history. On the contrary, for Kolitz, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising represents the turning point in Jewish history when the Jewish relationship with God is transformed; no longer satisfied with waiting for a God who has “veiled his face in indifference,” Yosl resolves to take action on his own by killing the Nazi aggressors, an action driven by the need for vengeance: Vengeance is holy, for it is mentioned between two names of God, as it is written: “A God of vengeance is the Lord!” Now I understand it. Now I feel it, and now I know why my heart rejoices when I remember how for thousands of years we have called upon our God: “God of Vengeance!” El Nekamot Adonoi. (10–11)

By imagining his ghetto fighter as a pious Hasidic man who has lost all of his family, Kolitz transcends political differences between members of the fighting underground seizing instead upon the motivation of vengeance, which did in fact unite a broad range of fighters. Unlike the fighters in the Jewish Fighting Organization who joined together, however, Yosl Rakover stands alone before his God and his enemies. He has chosen to continue to believe in God, despite God’s best efforts to make him stop believing. At the same time, he

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has learned from the example of a God of vengeance to relish the opportunity to die taking revenge on Nazi soldiers for the death of his family and people. In this, Kolitz captured a major theme common to the testimonies of the ghetto fighters from all movements: the satisfaction of taking revenge, of seeing Nazi blood flowing in the streets. “Yes, I speak of vengeance. Only rarely have we seen true vengeance, but when we have experienced it, it was so comforting, and so sweet, such deep solace and intense happiness, that to me it was as if a new life had opened up” (“Yosl Rakover,” 12–13). Kolitz also articulates a proud defense of Jewish distinctiveness in general, and a specifically Zionist conclusion to the experience of such oppression in the war. For Kolitz, the only possible conclusion to the destruction of the ghetto as it symbolizes the extermination of European Jewry is continued pride in being a member of the Jewish people. Being Jewish, he explains, “is an art”: I believe that to be a Jew is to be a fighter, an eternal swimmer against the roiling, evil current of humanity. The Jew is a hero, a martyr, a saint. You, our enemies, say that we are bad? I believe we are better than you, finer. But even if we were worse — I’d like to have seen how you would have looked in our place.

For Kolitz and for Rakover, the relationship has changed…Jews as actors in history must no longer be the blind supplicants of God. The Jewish God is a God of vengeance and the fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto are the agents of his vengeance. By making his ghetto fighter a Hasidic man taking vengeance on the enemy, Kolitz argues that dying to sanctify God’s name (al Kiddush hashem) means taking vengeance in the name of God. Perhaps readers who wanted to believe this story was true also preferred to imagine a new type of glorious and heroic Jewish death.

Never to Forget: The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto The American Jewish community—Bundists, Communists, Zionists, mainstream American Jewish organizations, and others—had been divided by political ideologies that prevented an effective and organized communal response during the war.30 After the war, all tried to incorporate the memory of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising into their worldview. One of the first literary treatments of the uprising in English, the poem/artbook Never to Forget: The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto by Howard Fast and William Gropper, represented the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as part of man’s universal struggle for freedom, devoid of any specific Zionist references. The book was published in 1946 by the Book League of the Jewish People’s Fraternal Order in New York, a section of the International Workers Order, a fraternal order and mutual benefit organization that grew out of a split between the Arbeter Ring and the Workmen’s Circle. The Jewish People’s Fraternal Order was the largest section of the IWO, and a large proportion of its leadership were

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members of the Community Party. (The IWO was also responsible for Camp Kinderland and cemeteries, etc.)31 The author of Never to Forget, Howard Fast, was a novelist and later television writer who was the son of Jewish immigrants from Britain and the Ukraine. Fast, who spent World War II working with the United States Office of War Information, writing for Voice of America, joined the Communist Party USA in 1943.32 The artwork in Never to Forget: The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto was the work of William Gropper, a satirist and illustrator, who had already published a series of lithographs in 1943 soon after the revolt, titled Your Brother’s Blood Cries Out (the title based on God’s words to Cain in Genesis 4:10).33 Most of Gropper’s original lithographs reproduced in the 1946 publication depicted the subjugation of the Jews of Warsaw, the combatants fighting with meager weapons, overpowered by the SS troops looming over them, perhaps creating an image which would resonate with a universal call to aid the oppressed and powerless masses the world over. In Never to Forget: The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto, through poetry and art, Fast and Gropper turned the saga of the Warsaw Ghetto into a universal struggle for freedom: HEAR YE, For this is a twice told tale, A song of my people that becomes a song of all people; Will there come a time when the word, freedom, is less potent? For everlasting glory and not for forgetting– Then let it be asked, who has a better right to use the word and use it proudly? It was on our lips that the words formed, let my people go! And where was freedom’s cause that we were not found?

Never to Forget presented the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as part of the universal struggle of man against fascism; the blue Jewish flag would flutter alongside the red flag. Although Jews had perished in the Warsaw Ghetto struggle, their weapons would be used in the struggle for universal freedom until all men could live together in peace. The struggle of the Jewish people “becomes the song of all people.” In the same way, Jewish suffering and the specifically Jewish mark of shame is understood to be borne in the “common name of humanity.” More than anything else, the Jewish people died “for the cause of liberty” (Fast, Never to Forget, 2). While Yosl Rakover’s intonation of the Shema prayer was presented by Kolitz as a proud declaration of Jewish national identity, Fast reinterpreted the prayer: To the time we faced the Nazi in the streets of Warsaw, Hear, oh Mankind, Men are brothers, Humanity is One.

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A Flag Is Born and A Survivor from Warsaw As American Jews grappled with the questions of Patriotism, Communism, and Zionism after the war, the blue Jewish flag would also be translated into dramatic representations of the Jewish struggle against oppression. Following the success of Leivick’s Der Nes in Geto in 1944–1945, the Broadway play, A Flag Is Born, opened on Broadway on September 4, 1946, starring well-known actors Paul Muni and Celia Adler, alongside a young Marlon Brando.34 The play was produced by the American League for a Free Palestine, the brainchild of Peter Bergson (aka Hillel Kook).35 The play, written by Ben Hecht, directed by Luther Adler and with music by Kurt Weill, was intended as propaganda to help mobilize American opinion for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. In 1943, Hecht and Weill had partnered to create the We Will Never Die pageant. A Flag Is Born linked the wartime suffering of the Jewish people with the need for a postwar solution to Jewish statelessness. The narrator emphasizes Jewish suffering during the war instead of Jewish heroism: Of all the things that happened in that time – our time – the slaughter of the Jews of Europe was the only thing that counted forever in the annals of man. The proud oration of heroes and conquerors will be a footnote in history beside the great silence that watched the slaughter. (A Flag Is Born)

The play, set in a graveyard, features three characters—elderly Treblinka survivors, Tevye, and Zelda—who drag their tired and broken bodies searching for a path to Palestine and Brando’s David, an angry young concentration camp survivor. As David leaves the graveyard of Europe for his new homeland, he offers a harsh indictment of Anglo-American Jewish silence, addressing his audience directly: Where were you—Jews? Where were you when the killing was going on? When the six million were burned and buried alive in the lime pits, where were you? Where was your voice crying out against the slaughter? We didn’t hear any voice. There was no voice. You, Jews of America! You Jews of England! Strong Jews, rich Jews, high-up Jews; Jews of power and genius! Where was your cry of rage that could have filled the world and stopped the fires? Nowhere! Because you were ashamed to cry as Jews! A curse on your silence! That frightened silence of Jews that made the Germans laugh as they slaughtered.

In the play’s finale, David delivers a fiery pro-Zionist speech, moves across a bridge into Palestine, and, as Edna Nahshon notes, “with the mixed sounds of ‘Hatikvah’ and gunfire in the background, raises Tevya’s prayer shawl as a makeshift flag and marches off to war.” According to Nahshon,

80  A. J. PATT A Flag Is Born was an unabashed propaganda piece. It focused on what one might call the “geopathological” state of the DPs (displaced persons) and emphasized the Zionist territorial solution, namely unrestricted immigration to Palestine and the Jews’ right to restore and be restored in their land. The play’s message went out loud and clear: Europe could not be home to the survivors of the Holocaust; the British announcement that survivors should go back to their places of origin was unacceptable; Palestine was the only option for Jewish resettlement; and the establishment of an independent “Hebrew” state there was imperative and non-negotiable.36

For American Jews, the play seemed to suggest, only support for Zionism could atone for the sin of silence during the war. Only through the symbolic transformation of Tevya’s tallit into the Zionist banner could the deaths of millions of Jews find meaning after the war. “A Flag Is Born,” which ran in New York for 120 performances (three times as long as originally planned) and then played in six North American cities, raised more than $400,000 for the American League for a Free Palestine, the largest block of funds the League ever attained.37 Such symbolic transformations did not only take place in theatrical productions after the war. Music also symbolically transformed the meaning of traditional Jewish formulations in the postwar context. In 1947, Arnold Schoenberg composed A Survivor from Warsaw, a cantata, which according to music scholar and historian Jeremy Eichler, “became the first major musical memorial to the Holocaust.”38 The text depicts an inmate from the Warsaw Ghetto who managed to hide in the sewers of Warsaw but is now imprisoned in a concentration camp, subjected to horrible beatings by SS guards. As the mostly unconscious prisoners suffer through additional beatings and selections for the gas chambers, the group suddenly begins to sing the Shema in Hebrew. The Shema prayer is then used again by the composer to reflect the tension between a particular Jewish identity (Hear O Israel) and themes of universal and common suffering. Furthermore, the work’s atonality also suggested an interpretation of the survivor’s suffering. The Albuquerque Civic Symphony Orchestra premiered the atonal musical memorial under the direction of Kurt Frederick on November 4, 1948. Eichler argues that as a musical memorial A Survivor from Warsaw predated almost all of its sibling memorials, crystallizing and anticipating the range of aesthetic and ethical concerns that would define the study of postwar memory and representation for decades to come. It also constituted a uniquely personal memorial that may be read not only as a work of Holocaust art but also as a profoundly autobiographical document, one that sheds light on constellations of particularist identities often hidden beneath the “universalist” veil of one of the twentieth-century’s most iconic musical figures.39

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By 1948, that is within five years of the revolt, writers had interpreted the event in multiple ways: a site for a final reckoning between a Jew and his God (Kolitz), as a universal call for freedom (Fast and Gropper), a propagandistic appeal to support the Irgun’s struggle against the British (Hecht), a musical memorial to the suffering of Europe’s Jews (Schoenberg), and more. Marie Syrkin, who had been so active writing about resistance during the war in her role as one of the editors of the Labor Zionist Jewish Frontier, wrote one of the first and arguably most influential early treatments of Jewish resistance in English, Blessed Is the Match, which was published on August 21, 1947, by the Jewish Publication Society of America. The book underwent three additional printings in six months. Syrkin’s book situated the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising within the context of a Zionist struggle for the creation of the state, especially important in 1947.40 In 1949, the Bund also published the volume In Heldiszn Gerangl [In Heroic Struggle], dedicated on the 6th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, documenting the Bund’s role in the Ghetto battles. The volume included Marek Edelman’s The Ghetto Fights, Vladka’s On Both Sides of the Ghetto Wall, and Bernard Goldstein’s Five Years in the Warsaw Ghetto, as well as chapters from J.S. Hertz, Fighters, Heroes, and Martyrs, which featured profiles of fallen Bundist ghetto fighters.

The Wall While archivists and historians were working to document Jewish history under Nazism, popular fiction would reach a much broader audience in America. In 1950, John Hersey, recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for his novel A Bell for Adano and acclaimed for his reporting for The New Yorker on “Hiroshima” made the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising the subject of his next novel, The Wall. Hersey’s novel quickly became a Book of the Month Club Selection and a New York Times Bestseller.41 The book was reprinted three times by Knopf in 1950 and became the fourth best-selling book of 1950. Hersey received the second annual Jewish Book Award for 1950. Hersey asked that the cash award be donated to the Joint Distribution Committee.42 Hersey’s novel employs the voice of Noach Levinson, archivist for the Warsaw Ghetto Judenrat, modeled after Emanuel Ringelblum. In addition, the characters of Dolek Berson and Rachel Apt become leaders of the resistance in the ghetto.43 Although Hersey included a disclaimer in the front matter, many readers believed the novel to be true, and indeed, his meticulous research and writing style made it seem based in actual events: This is a work of fiction. Broadly it deals with history, but in detail it is invented. Its ‘archive’ is a hoax. Its characters, even those who use functions with actual precedent—such as the chairmanship of the Judenrat, for example—possess names, faces, traits, and lives altogether imaginary. (Hersey, The Wall, front matter)

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Hersey’s attention to historical detail resulted from three years of research conducted by Mark Nowogrodzki and Lucy S. Dawidowicz, who helped uncover and translate the Yiddish and Polish documents Hersey used to suggest historical authenticity. Hersey’s novel did not only dramatize the revolt; it also focused on the ghetto’s cultural life created before its destruction, which offered a sense of optimism in the face of catastrophe. As Deborah Lipstadt notes, “Hersey injected a universalistic tone into the story of a failed uprising and the tragedies of ghetto life. That may explain why American audiences read it with such enthusiasm. Hersey’s Jewish heroes became ideal men and women.”44 The Wall focuses on the archivist (Levinson’s) diary, excerpts from the underground archive, as well as interviews with surviving members of the uprising. An unnamed “editor” combines all of these materials as its structure, which follows the experiences of the Berson, Apt, and Mazur families, who are forced to live together in one ghetto apartment. The novel chronicles the life and death of the ghetto, culminating in the revolt. In one excerpt from November 1942, Levinson details his transformation from an intellectual into a “soldier of Israel,” recalling Leivick’s protagonist, Israel, in Der Nes in Geto who also comes to the realization that Jews possess the inner strength to battle the forces arrayed against them.45 Likewise, Levinson realizes, perhaps too late, what it means to live a life of consequence and action. EVENTS NOVEMBER 4, 1942. ENTRY DITTO. N.L. The most unexpected eventuality in the history of our ghettodom has come about. I, Noach Levinson, have become a soldier of Israel. I, who without my glasses cannot see a four-storey house unless it touches the end of my nose, have joined the Z.O.B. This means, I discover, that I have just begun to live….

Levinson explains that just as he arrived late to the Z.O.B., so too did the Zionists of Hechalutz, Communists, and others put aside their differences to destroy anti-humanity: We have had to bury some differences to arrive at this unanimity, but we have now done so…For we have reduced all our various politics to a single maxim: The fact that a man is a man is more important than the fact that he believes what he believes. …And so, after all, we tell ourselves, man’s real quiddity is that he is a human being, not that he is a Zionist, a Communist, a Socialist, a Jew, a Pole, or for that matter, a Nazi. But (and here is why we prepare to kill) any man who cannot recognize this basic maxim is an agent of Anti-Humanity, and his purpose, whether conscious or not, is the wiping out of mankind. We must kill him first, for the sake of all the others. (476–477)

As the novel moves toward its conclusion and the remaining fighters huddle in a bunker under the ghetto, Hersey depicts the fighters observing the

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anniversary of the death of I.L. Peretz in a bunker on the fifth day of the revolt, the 5th day of Passover. As Levinson pays tribute to the great Yiddish writer, he evokes a universal sense of Jewishness, which adapts to the times and eras in which Jews live, and which, in troubled times, is “a call to battle and a challenge to heroism” (612). Above all, however, through Levinson, Hersey argued for a definition of Jewishness in which Jews would not forever be locked in a physical and spiritual ghetto. Instead, he envisioned a future that affirmed the potential for a free and open democratic society that valued the unique contributions of all distinct national and ethnic groups, making humanity “the synthesis, the sum, the quintessence of all national cultural forms and philosophies” (615). This conclusion would be echoed by Rachel Apt, who, after the failed uprising, declares as far as “our religion is concerned, I think there is only one thing: not to hurt anybody. For me the whole of the Torah is in one ­sentence in Leviticus: ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’”46 As Lipstadt notes, this worldview led Rachel to the conclusion that love of her neighbor would be an even more effective force with which to confront the Nazi than violence which had led Rachel to end up in the sewer after all. This conclusion bothered some Jewish readers. As Nancy Sinkoff’s research has uncovered, Nathan Ausubel wrote an eight-page letter to Hersey reproaching him for “obscuring the specific antisemitic thrust of Nazism by structuring the book’s plot as a struggle between the forces of Humanity and AntiHumanity.”47 Ausubel particularly took issue with the conclusion’s message to “turn the other cheek,” asking Hersey: “Suppose Rachel had not fought at all, at the very outset but loved the Nazis? What would have happened? She would have gone to the umschlagsplatz like the other sheep, only beatified like a saint with a gold nimbus floating over her head!”48 Ausubel reminded Hersey angrily that what united the fighters was not love, but hate: “Hatred of their murderers and tormenters” had motivated the ghetto fighters, despite the differences among the Zionists, Bundists, religious Jews, socialists, and Communists. For Hersey, however, the struggle against the Nazis was not just a struggle against antisemitism, it was a struggle against the enemies of all humanity. In making the novel more appealing to a broader audience, Hersey also downplayed any references to socialist or communist Jewish groups who may have played a role in the revolt. Sinkoff argues that Hersey was concerned with Cold War American liberal anti-communism, and thus very carefully made sure his ghetto fighters were members of Hashomer Hatzair and not the Bund: as he explained to Nowogrodzki: “I settled on Hashomer for the central characters partly because Hashomer would be unfamiliar to most Americans readers and so would not summon an immediate hostile response, as the mere words Socialist and Communist are apt to do.”49 Those familiar with the history of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising were also concerned by the fact that Hersey obscured the actual identities of

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Ringelblum, Anielewicz, Edelman, and others. Still, as Moses Leavitt of the JDC noted, the fact that a non-Jewish writer had written such a popular book on an important Jewish topic seemed to alleviate these concerns. Reviews in the major Yiddish newspapers in New York generally expressed an appreciation that a non-Jewish writer had tackled the difficult subject and paid such careful attention to historical details.50 Yet many of these reviewers noted that as a Gentile writer (and son of a priest no less), Hersey had overlooked essential aspects of the Jewish experience during the war, obscuring the sense of terror in the ghetto, the feelings of abandonment by their former neighbors in Poland, and an overwhelming resentment at the seeming indifference of the world to their plight. Of all the reviewers who critiqued Hersey, perhaps none was better situated to evaluate the effectiveness and authenticity of his depiction of the underground archive and the revolt in the Warsaw Ghetto than Rachel Auerbach, who reviewed the novel for Di Goldene Keyt in 1951.51 Like other critics, she felt Hersey had minimized the daily terror experienced by Jews and the depth of German crimes, while also demonstrating a lack of understanding for Jewish culture and traditions. But what seemed especially to perturb Auerbach was the fact “that Hersey’s novel suited its American audience’s view of the war,” which underscored the triumph of universal good over universal evil and minimized specific Jewish suffering. By 1950, Germany had been readmitted into the sphere of the Western nations (with the Federal Republic of Germany established in May 1949), and Auerbach understood this would limit Hersey’s ability to represent the full extent of Nazi evil for an American audience. For a popular audience, this meant downplaying Jewish rage and the desire for revenge, to turn the tragedy of the Warsaw Ghetto into a triumphant reading of the forces of humanity, democracy, and goodness, against anti-humanity, fascism, and evil.52 This tendency to fictionalize history in the American context would continue, prefiguring the popularity of Leon Uris’ Mila 18 in 1961, and even later the 1978 mini-series Holocaust, and a TV adaptation of The Wall based on the Broadway play of the same name, broadcast on CBS in 1982. Despite the concerns of Rachel Auerbach about the obscuring of the historical record, the popularity of Hersey’s novel indicated that what mattered more to American audiences, both Jewish and non-Jewish, were the universalizing moral lessons that could be drawn from the example of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and more broadly from the Holocaust itself. In such a case, the specific identities of the ghetto fighters were less important. As a rich historical and fictional literature on the revolt developed in the first decade after 1943 (in Yiddish, Polish, English, and Hebrew), several key patterns in the literature began to emerge. All reinforced the centrality of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as the focal point of Jewish collective memory of the war—but also as an event sufficiently flexible as to be incorporated into multiple postwar Jewish political and historical frameworks. As a response to Nazi

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persecution, the revolt symbolized the determination of the Jewish people to endure, persevere, and preserve their faith and traditions, whether in Israel or in America. The revolt symbolized the defense of freedom and democracy and the collective ethos of the Jewish people. Depending on political orientation, the uprising in Warsaw reflected the Jewish ability to fight back, or was seen as a revolution in Jewish history highlighting the determination of the Jewish people to reject the passivity of the diaspora and embrace the need for the creation of the Jewish state, or reinforced the universal brotherhood of humanity in defense of freedom and democracy. All the same, one common theme became clear, the specific identities of those who resisted in the ghetto became less significant than the idea that resistance had occurred. Even after the surviving ghetto fighters doubted whether a “master of pen, brush or sound…could represent in full the Great Event,” Jewish and non-Jewish audiences around the world continued to imagine themselves in the battle of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Notes



1. “Di Yiddishe Heldn fun Varshe (The Jewish Heroes of Warsaw),” Forverts, May 10, 1943. 2. http://www.jta.org/1943/06/03/archive/london-paper-urges-observanceof-jewish-day-to-mark-resistance-in-warsaw-ghetto. 3. http://www.jta.org/1943/06/16/archive/mass-meeting-in-new-york-willcommemorate-jewish-heroes-of-warsaw-ghetto. 4. Lucy S. Dawidowicz, From That Place and Time: A Memoir, 1938–1947 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989). 5. See in Bella Gutterman, Fighting for Her People: Zivia Lubetkin, 1914–1978 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2014), 260. 6. See, for example, Davar, May 28, 1943. 7. June 7, 1943, Reuters reports on the “heroines” of the ghetto, “Two Joans of Arc,” London, June 6. Natan Alterman wrote a poem in Tzivia’s honor, published in Davar, called: “A Hebrew Maiden” (Davar, June 6, 1943). 8. See in Melech Neustadt, The Warsaw Ghetto Rising (Tel Aviv, 1944). 9.  From WRB Files, FDR Library, Marist University, Folder “Council of the Rescue of the Jews in Poland,” p. #508; see http://www.fdrlibrary.marist. edu/_resources/images/wrb/wrb1436.pdf, accessed 3 February 2017. 10. Jeffrey Schandler, Jews, God, and Videotape: Religion and Media in America (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 76. 11.  “The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto,” American Jewish Committee Archives, http://www.ajcarchives.org/AJC_DATA/Files/RD2.PDF, accessed 11 January 2017. 12. Ibid. 13.  Wishengrad identifies the start date of the deportation as June 22, 1942, although July 22, 1942, was already identified as the starting date of deportations in reports published by the World Jewish Congress in August 1943. 14. Shandler cites a press release marking the 25th anniversary of the series which claimed that listeners sent 10,000 letters in response to the drama. “The

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Eternal Light” (press release), September 26, 1969, RG 11C, box 30, folder 42, JTS Archives, p. 2, in Shandler, Jews, God, and Videotape, p. 294, fn. 64. 15.  Gutman details the role of the Polish Underground in arming the Jewish underground, including the first shipment, a small cartload of ten pistols. See Israel Gutman, Revolt of the Besieged: Mordechai Anielewicz and the Uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto (Tel Aviv: Moreshet, 1963), 279. 16. Marie Syrkin detailed in the Jewish Frontier in July 1943 that the flag of Zion had flown over the ghetto walls (the ZZW did indeed manage to raise the flag over Muranowska 7). Perhaps Wishengrad has inserted a universalistic response to this Zionist declaration here. 17. “Battle of Warsaw Ghetto Commemorated Today by Jews Throughout the United States,” April 19, 1944, Jewish Telegraphic Agency. 18. American Jewish Historical Society Archives (AJHS), Synagogue Council of America papers, SCA I-68. 19. Speech of H. Leivick at Carnegie Hall, April 19, 1944, quoted in “The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto, April 19–June 1, 1943” (New York: Farband Labor Zionist Order), USHMM Library. 20. Hasia Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence After the Holocaust, 1945–62 (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 74. In October 1944, the New Jewish Folk Theater staged Miracle of the Warsaw Ghetto with music composed by Shalom Secunda and actor Sam Jaffe offering English commentary to the play. Menachem Rubin, Isador Casher, Berta Gersten, and Muriel Gruber appeared with Jacob Ben-Ami. 21. The historical specificity of the Szyk image was secondary, as in this case the scene chosen for the cover had in fact been created by Szyk almost ten years earlier to dramatize another episode of Jewish heroism. The one-armed hero in the center of the cover was none other than Josef Trumpeldor, who had died defending Tel Hai in 1920 subsequently becoming a Zionist hero. 22. See discussion in Samantha Baskind, The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018), 28–32. 23. Leivick, “Der Nes in Geto,” Unpublished Works, 217. 24. Leivick, “Der Nes in Geto,” Unpublished Works, 224. See also in Baskind, 29. 25. Leivick, 318. 26. Leivick, 320. See also excerpts from play in see in Shmuel Niger, Kiddush Hashem, 1948, 447–452. 27. Zvi Kolitz, Yosl Rakover Talks to God (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), see intro by Paul Baade, 50–53. In 1954, Di Goldene Keyt, a Yiddish quarterly in Tel Aviv, ran Yosl Rakover as an authentic document. The next year, it was broadcast on a Berlin radio station and was run in the Parisian Zionist journal La Terre Retrouve. 28. Yosl Rakover Talks to God, see Paul Baade introduction, 39–41. 29.  Yosl Rakover Talks to God, 53. 30.  See Henry Feingold, “Who Shall Bear Guilt for the Holocaust,” in The American Jewish Experience, ed. Jonathan Sarna (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1997).

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31. As early as 1944, the Special Committee on Un-American Activities of the US House of Representatives attacked the IWO as a “host of Communist functionaries.” 32.  In 1950, Fast was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. 33. Baskind, The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture, 24. 34. Paul Muni also performed a reading of the ZOB manifesto at the April 19, 1945, opening of the Jewish Labor Committee exhibition on the Warsaw Ghetto. See NYU Library, Tamiment Archive, JLC Reel 32, Folder 13, “Heroes and Martyrs” #338–39. See also in Baskind, 56. 35. See http://www.ajhs.org/publications/chapters/chapter.cfm?documentID=268#. See also Judith Tydor Baumel, The “Bergson Boys” and the Origins of Contemporary Zionist Militancy (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005), 219. 36. Edna Nahshon, “From Geopathology to Redemption: A Flag Is Born on the Broadway Stage,” Kurt Weill Newsletter 20 (Spring 2002): 5–8, https://www. kwf.org/images/newsletter/kwn201p1-24.pdf#page=5. 37. See Stuart Schiffman, “A Stone for His Slingshot,” in http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/735/a-stone-for-his-slingshot/#comments. 38.  Jeremy Adam Eichler, 2015, “The Emancipation of Memory: Arnold Schoenberg and the Creation of ‘A Survivor from Warsaw’,” Columbia University Academic Commons, https://doi.org/10.7916/D8SB44TJ, abstract. 39. Eichler, The Emancipation of Memory: Arnold Schoenberg and the Creation of ‘A Survivor from Warsaw’, 2015. 40.  Marie Syrkin Papers at AJA http://collections.americanjewisharchives.org/ ms/ms0615/ms0615.html#series7. 41. See From Deborah Lipstadt, Holocaust: An American Understanding (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016), Chapter One, “Holocaust in American Popular Culture.” 42.  See letter from John Hersey to Philip Goodman, May 9, 1950, NY_ AR_45-54/NY_AR45-54_Admin/NY_AR45-54_00201/NY_AR4554_00201_0405.pdf. Moses Leavitt (executive vice chairman of JDC) noted the popular novel was “of immeasurable help to our efforts to inform the public of the problem overseas and in raising funds to meet this problem.” See Letter from Moses A. Leavitt to Mr. John Hersey, May 29, 1950, NY_AR4554_00201_0409.pdf. 43. For a detailed analysis of the historical background of the novel, see Nancy Sinkoff, “Fiction’s Archive: Authenticity, Ethnography, and Philosemitism in John Hersey’s The Wall,” Jewish Social Studies 17, no. 2 (Winter 2011): 48–79. 44. Lipstadt, Holocaust: An American Understanding, 33. 45. Hersey, The Wall, Knopf, 1950, 475. 46. Hersey, The Wall, 632. 47. Nathan Ausubel to John Hersey, November 19, 1949, Hersey Papers, Uncat ZA MS 235, Box 20. 48. See Sinkoff, “Fiction’s Archive”—Nathan Ausubel to John Hersey, November 19, 1949, Hersey Papers, Uncat ZA MS 235, Box 20.

88  A. J. PATT 49. John Hersey to Mark Nowogrodzki, October 13, 1949, letter in the personal collection of Mark Nowogrodzki, 3. See in Sinkoff, Fiction’s Archive, 52–53. 50. Sinkoff, 67. 51. In Sinkoff, 72; Rokhl Oyerbakh, “Vegn bukh, ‘Di vant’ fun John Hersey,” Di goldene keyt: Fertl-yorshrift far literatur un gezelshaftlekhe problemen 8 (1951): 162–180. 52. Sinkoff, “Fiction’s Archive,” 70. See also Naomi Seidman, “Elise Wiesel and the Scandal of Jewish Rage,” Jewish Social Studies 3, no. 1 (Autumn 1996): 1–19.

Bibliography Primary Sources Fast, Howard. Never to Forget: The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto. Hecht, Ben. A Flag Is Born. Hersey, John. The Wall. Leivick, H. Der Nes in Geto. Kolitz, Zvi. Yosl Rakover Talks to God. Schoenberg, Arnold. A Survivor from Warsaw. Wishengrad, Morton. “The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto.”

Secondary Sources Baskind, Samantha. The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018. Baumel, Judith Tydor. The “Bergson Boys” and the Origins of Contemporary Zionist Militancy. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005. Dawidowicz, Lucy S. From That Place and Time: A Memoir, 1938–1947. New York: W. W. Norton, 1989. Diner, Hasia. We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence After the Holocaust, 1945–62. New York: New York University Press, 2010. Eichler, Jeremy Adam. 2015. “The Emancipation of Memory: Arnold Schoenberg and the Creation of ‘A Survivor from Warsaw’.” Columbia University Academic Commons. Feingold, Henry. “Who Shall Bear Guilt for the Holocaust.” In The American Jewish Experience, ed. Jonathan Sarna. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1997. Gutman, Israel. Revolt of the Besieged: Mordechai Anielewicz and the Uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto. Tel Aviv: Moreshet, 1963. Gutterman, Bella. Fighting for Her People: Zivia Lubetkin, 1914–1978. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2014. Lipstadt, Deborah. Holocaust: An American Understanding. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016. Nahshon, Edna. “From Geopathology to Redemption: A Flag Is Born on the Broadway Stage.” Kurt Weill Newsletter 20 (Spring 2002): 5–8. Neustadt, Melech. The Warsaw Ghetto Rising. Tel Aviv, 1944.

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Schandler, Jeffrey. Jews, God, and Videotape: Religion and Media in America. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Sinkoff, Nancy. “Fiction’s Archive: Authenticity, Ethnography, and Philosemitism in John Hersey’s The Wall.” Jewish Social Studies 17, no. 2 (Winter 2011): 48–79.

CHAPTER 6

The Nazi Beast at the Warsaw Zoo: Animal Studies, the Holocaust, The Zookeeper’s Wife, and See Under: Love Naomi Sokoloff

“It’s a great – and as yet untold – story.”1 So starts a review of The Zookeeper’s Wife, the 2017 docudrama/feature film that recounts how the director of the Warsaw Zoo, Jan Żabiński and his wife, Antonina, aided Jews during the Holocaust.2 What the couple did was, in fact, extraordinary. Rescuing people from the Ghetto and hiding them at the zoo, at times in animal cages and tunnels, Jan and Antonina succeeded in saving some 300 lives. In 2017, though, the story was not exactly new—at least not for everyone. Long before the film, and before the book on which it was based (Diane Ackerman’s best-selling non-fiction account, The Zookeeper’s Wife, 2007),3 Antonina’s memoirs were published in Polish (1968). She and her husband received recognition from Yad Vashem in 1965 as Righteous Among the Nations, and interviews with them appeared in Polish, Hebrew, and Yiddish newspapers. What’s more: in his novel See Under: Love (1986), Israeli author David Grossman featured the Warsaw Zoo as a site of refuge for persecuted Jews.4 The emergence of the Żabiński story in these various venues illustrates David Roskies’ argument that it is difficult to delineate clear chronological stages of literary response to the Holocaust.5 Different communities have responded to the Holocaust at different times and each in its own way. In comparison with the Polish public and the Israeli public, most Americans came belatedly to the story of the Warsaw Zoo. Not surprisingly,

N. Sokoloff (*)  University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_6

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the discovery and rediscovery of Jan and Antonina’s heroism have yielded differing reactions and kinds of expression in these different cultural contexts. In this essay, I compare Grossman’s fiction, Ackerman’s creative non-fiction, and the recent cinematic version of The Zookeeper’s Wife to ­ demonstrate how each interprets the Warsaw Zoo and how each spoke to its particular time and milieu. The overarching quality all three share is that they invite consideration through the lens of critical animal studies—not only because of their focus on zoo life, but because of the remarkable role the zoo played in saving people the Nazis referred to as dogs, apes, beasts, and vermin. An animal studies approach can call attention to ways that representations of nonhuman creatures have helped humans imagine themselves and their own values in relation to the Holocaust.

Animal Studies and the Holocaust Animal studies is a field that has been gaining momentum since the year 2000 and that has begun to find application in connection with Holocaust studies.6 For instance, scholars have focused on Hitler’s views of Jews as subhuman, and they have looked at long-standing antisemitic rhetoric that used animal tropes to vilify Jews.7 Documenting how Nazi methods of extermination actualized those metaphors in brutally literal ways, researchers have shown that Himmler and others worked in mechanized farming or in slaughterhouses and then adapted what they learned to the running of death camps.8 Recent scholarship has also examined how scientific research from the time of the Third Reich (famously, the work of Konrad Lorenz) focused on eugenics and how experiments, begun in the realm of animal behavior, were later extended to human beings.9 Some historical studies have called attention specifically to cruel treatment of animals during World War II—noting, for instance, that Germany bombed zoos and that the Axis powers slaughtered horses in battle to prevent them from falling into enemy hands.10 Further investigation shows that Nazi attitudes toward animals did not lack for complexity or inconsistency; even as all the horrors took place, Germany enacted extensive animal protection laws. Some were sentimental or well-meaning; others were simply oppressive, such as those forbidding Jews to have pets.11 Considerable scholarly work has examined the symbolic use of animal characters in literature, including fable and allegorical texts.12 Much attention has gone, in particular, to Art Spiegelman’s Maus.13 Analyses have discussed whether Spiegelman’s depiction of Jews as mice, Germans as cats, the French as frogs, and so on reinforces or subverts ethnic stereotypes, and whether defamiliarization of the Holocaust through animal imagery makes truths about the Hitler era more accessible or more remote. In related areas, literary scholarship and cultural studies have traced the vexed history of the phrase “like lambs to the slaughter,” which implies that Jews went passively to their deaths,14 and the controversial trope of the “Nazi Beast,” which had a long

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life in journalism, educational texts, and other public discourse after the war and which implies that the perpetrators were inhuman monsters, not ordinary or even banal evildoers.15 It is in connection with metaphor and other figurative language that animal studies’ perspectives on the Holocaust have garnered greatest visibility and generated the most heated disputes. Impassioned activists have raised awareness, and ire, by comparing the meat industry to Nazi genocide, while scholars have debated the ethics of making such analogies.16 A number of studies have considered the representation of these issues in literature—for example, in fiction by I. B. Singer and J. M. Coetzee.17 How does knowledge emerging from this field apply to varied artistic accounts of the Warsaw Zoo? For starters, of direct relevance for Ackerman’s book is some of the historical information. Her writing is based on fact and offers closely documented reportage. The zoo she describes in The Zookeeper’s Wife is not Aesopian: That is to say, it is not primarily a metaphor for human suffering, constraint, or dreary and degraded lives. It’s really a zoo, and the story of the rescue, astonishing as it is, actually took place in wartime Warsaw. At the same time, along with commitment to historical accuracy, Ackerman’s text offers a thematic spotlight on artists who frequented the Żabiński zoo. In what follows, I will argue that this theme, together with Ackerman’s own expressive prose, emphasizes the positive role art can play in struggles against dehumanizing ideologies. In contrast, consider David Grossman: While he took historical events as a point of departure for his novel, he developed wildly whimsical and inventive plots and characters. His unrestrained use of the fantastic, along with his extravagantly farfetched animal imagery, pointedly poses the question: How can art respond to an unbelievable yet true story? The conclusion the novel arrives at is one of despair: Imagination can never adequately process the horrors of the Shoah. For its part, the film adaptation of The Zookeeper’s Wife diverges from both these texts in the way it mixes verifiable information with artistic license. In a bid to be entertaining, the movie straddles the line between biography and fiction, playing up elements likely to pay off at the box office. In all three works, combining imagination and fact draws attention to the achievements and limits of creative writing. This kind of concern has been a persistent matter of contention in the field of Holocaust studies.18 Does creative writing disrespect or illuminate catastrophe? It is significant that the books and film I discuss rethink boundaries between human and other animals. They thereby reassess the scope of the concept “person.” Concern with that topic has been fundamental for critical animal studies, a field which often champions animal rights and questions the privileging of people over other living beings.19 The retellings of the Warsaw Zoo story all touch on the issue of animal welfare, but they put a distinct spin on reassessments of personhood. In connection with the Holocaust, these works wrestle with the conundrum of what defines humanity and humaneness in a setting of inhuman brutality, where Jews are designated as vermin

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to be exterminated. That question then takes on a notably gendered aspect, since The Zookeeper’s Wife—in the prose version and in the cinematic version—focuses on Antonina (rather than Jan) and on women’s experiences in the Shoah. See Under: Love, too, combines thematic focus on women with representation of animals. It does not foreground female perspectives, but animal studies nevertheless offers entrée to analysis of gender here, because it is a field that has often perceived equivalences between women and animals, pointing out how both have been disparaged and oppressed by men.20 A look at gender in the different iterations of the Żabiński story, along with a look at animal themes and at tensions between art and historical fidelity, can help indicate how each of these works grapples with a tale of unlikely rescue and with efforts to honor the dignity of individuals in times of mass destruction.

Diane Ackerman’s The Zookeeper’s Wife The field of animal studies has delved deeply into the history of zoos, their cultural significance, and their representations in literary texts. For example, scholars have pointed out extensive connections between zoos and empire building. The claim is that political domination and control—along with the manipulation of animals for purposes of scientific knowledge—have been central to the development of zoology. Zoos long served as sites of memory to the colonial past, proving who conquered which territory and popularizing “exploration and conquest”21; the live spectacle of animals on exhibit provided evidence of “hegemony over distant lands.”22 In that regard, capture, displacement, and display of animals have had much in common with the plight of human “immigrants, refugees and slaves.”23 This negative assessment of zoos is further bolstered by work from the field of literature. Ample evidence indicates that, in creative writing, zoos frequently symbolize abuse of power.24 Multiple literary texts protest, resist, or subversively portray the practices that have caused pain to animals in captivity. This background helps contextualize and underscore the significance of Nazi behavior reported by Ackerman in her book. Describing the military takeover of Warsaw in 1939, The Zookeeper’s Wife notes that German leaders deported prized zoo animals to enhance their own collections. Those animals served as symbols of conquest, while the conquerors had little regard for less valuable species. Soldiers took cruelty to extremes, hunting game within the park just for sport (TZW, 95). Ackerman documents that German scientific interests, too, went to extremes, in accordance with Hitler’s ideology. Prominent German zoologist Lutz Heck, who visited the Warsaw Zoo, was involved in attempts to breed new versions of “certain extinct, presumably noble species, such as tarpans (ancient horses) and aurochsen (ancient cattle), while eliminating other species” deemed racially undesirable.25 Still, although Ackerman acknowledges this troubling treatment of animals, she does not condemn all zoos. On the contrary, her book portrays the Polish zookeepers in positive terms. Antonina uses her zoo as a pulpit

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to preach conservation and as a refuge, a “lifeboat” (TZW, 27) for young animals orphaned by hunters. In her own household, Antonina took in a baby badger, lynx kittens, a bottle-fed deer fawn, and wild boar piglets that ate table scraps. The text remarks, “Finding all young mammals adorable, from rhino to possum, she reigned as a mammal mother herself and protectress of many others” (TZW, 27–28). As this quote suggests, the loving relation between humans and animals here is due, above all, to Antonina’s exceptional empathy and ability to identify with animals. Jan describes his wife as “porous,” almost able to read the minds of animals (TZW, 235). She manages to traverse the borders of no-man’s land between tame and wild.26 These points call to mind efforts within the field of animal studies to eschew speciesism—that is, to question the binary opposition human/animal—so as to increase respect for the natural world and to diminish human mistreatment of nonhuman creatures. Antonina embodies such an ideal. She becomes most humane, most compassionate, when she undoes the boundaries between species. She fosters an atmosphere in which humans and nonhumans care for another, and these same qualities in her personality lead to her efforts on behalf of Jews. As one reviewer noted, “[I]t was Antonina’s connection to the animal world – her belief that every living thing is entitled to life, respect and nurture – that made her incapable, despite her own terrors, of turning away from suffering.”27 Indeed, she offers her home as a Noah’s ark for hunted Jews, despite the danger this action poses to her family. On that ark, moreover, the company of animals brings comfort to the humans and helps them transcend suffering (TZW, 166–167). In hindsight, it is clear that this comfort in itself constituted an act of resistance to Nazi ideology, which claimed Jews were inherently cruel to animals and which forbade them to have pets.28 Note, too, that the scenes of comfort have a distinctly gendered aspect, encapsulated in the descriptions of Antonina’s maternal, protective role. Historically, women have been closely associated with animal welfare initiatives, and concern for animals gets coded feminine in many historical contexts.29 Animal studies scholars have argued that women are natural allies of animals. In The Zookeeper’s Wife, although Jan is an environmentalist and a caring naturalist, the story focuses more on Antonina and her roles as homemaker and caretaker. We mustn’t forget, of course, that while the zoo becomes a positive place because of Antonina’s tenderness and the companionship of animals, it is a good place primarily because anything is better than the ghetto. For the Jewish guests, even living in cages presents a step up from hellish alternatives. Humanities scholars have condemned zoos as oppressive confinements, but in this text the meaning of zoos changes. Certainly, there is confinement here, but the value attached to it shifts. Rather than capture, displacement, and display, the Warsaw Zoo in this case signifies rescue, refuge, and invisibility. The powerful imagery of The Zookeeper’s Wife comes from the central irony of the Żabiński family’s efforts: As the Nazis dehumanized Jews, the zookeepers saved them by hiding them among their animals.30

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Another aspect of the Warsaw Zoo that is presented very positively is its connection with art. Melding nature with culture, the park in prewar days served as a venue for concerts and public lectures. Jan felt such events could serve as an uplifting element of city life. Furthermore, he and Antonina invited painters, sculptors, and other artists to come, visit, and “uncage their imaginations” (TZW, 35). One artist in particular, Jewish sculptor Magdalena Gross, found the zoo highly stimulating and became Antonina’s close friend. Reflecting on this kind of relationship, Ackerman makes the case that art can honor animals by seeing them intently and acknowledging them in respectful ways. Her stance contrasts with the position prevalent in critical animal studies, which holds that zoo animals undergo a double captivity: first at the hands of their captors and then “through the eyes of spectators who exercise scopic power” over them.31 Advocates of this belief maintain that zoos are never for the benefit of animals, and that what people see in zoos is not nature so much as their own perceptions and unnatural constructs of animal life. Ackerman, more approvingly, emphasizes that the human sculptor at Antonina’s zoo comes to view animals as inspiration, in a way that entails spectacle but explicitly moves beyond it. Consider the following statement about Magda: […] she happened by the zoo one day and saw a shocking flock of flamingos strutting by. Beyond them roams a dream-panoply of even stranger animals – fabulous shapes, and hues more subtle than any painter could mix. The spectacle hit her with all the power of revelation. (TZW, 37) [emphasis added]

What Magda experiences is a rapturous, awe-filled appreciation of each individual creature’s distinctive peculiarities. Antonina wrote in her diary that the animals absorbed Magda “until she lost herself in their quiddities for hours” (TZW, 170). Ackerman’s own prose acknowledges quiddity through its descriptive specificity32—a style of writing that draws extensively on information from Antonina’s diaries. Like Antonina, Ackerman is a naturalist of keen observational powers, and she lovingly devotes long passages to portraying particular animals treasured by Antonina. Consider this excerpt describing a rabbit in the Żabiński household: Naturally gifted with amber eyes outlined in black like Egyptian hieroglyphs, three layers of fur, large snowshoe feet, and extra-long incisors for gnawing moss and lichen, he quickly developed habits and tastes unknown to rabbit culture and a bizarre griffin-like personality. (TZW, 163)

Precisely because Antonina herself so appreciated the singularity of each of her animals, she felt devastated when faced with closure of the zoo during German occupation. The text reports: “[a]ll she could do was await the liquidation, a loathsome word suggesting a meltdown of creatures her family

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knew as individuals, not as a collective mass of fur, wings, and hooves” (TZW, 74). While many literary narratives that deal with the Holocaust rely deliberately on collective nouns and on metonymy in order to refer to mass destruction and express the impacts of dehumanization,33 Ackerman’s book does just the opposite: It provides an abundance of specificity in protest against anonymity and annihilation, and it engages metaphor and simile to highlight uniqueness. The passage above, for instance, compares the rabbit’s feet to snowshoes and its eyes to hieroglyphs. Admittedly, the prose presents the nonhuman animal through a human lens, but the aim is not to anthropomorphize; rather, the goal is to convey high regard for the rabbit’s selfhood and singular temperament. Attention to detail, in the author’s exquisitely illustrative narrative style, speaks directly to the book’s emphasis on the worth of the individual, whether human or animal. Altogether, while presenting a historically reliable account of the wartime events, Ackerman touts the ability of the imagination to transform experience. She suggests that art can accord dignity and respect, even as she herself enacts a similar move through her own artistic reflections on the Warsaw Zoo. Instilling humane values into the reported events, she affirms the worth of individual lives.

The Zookeeper’s Wife at the Movies Neither descriptive precision nor essayistic reflection translates exactly into cinema. Unsurprisingly, then, when the film adaptation of The Zookeeper’s Wife was released, it elicited both praise and criticism from reviewers. Some found the visuals of animals affecting and eye-catching.34 Others felt that the film failed precisely because it loses the attention to dense detail that the book offers. One review lamented, “a brilliantly specific story has been reduced to conventional drama and synthetic heroics.”35 As is often the case in feature film and TV productions, animals here serve mainly to enhance human drama and to heighten excitement. Animals on screen tend to appear in distorted or artificial ways. By speeding up events, fast-forwarding, or zooming in on moments of conflict, video often presents natural life in ways more action-packed than what people see when watching animals in a zoo, or in wild habitats, for that matter, where animals do things at their own pace.36 Even nature films tend to be geared toward tempos that will appeal to human audiences; this tendency is all the more evident in Hollywood productions that press animal characters into the service of stories about people. In the film The Zookeeper’s Wife, animals are very much part of dramatic plot turns, giving birth (and so, showcasing how bravely and selflessly Antonina serves as midwife), behaving like members of the family (and therefore making evident how accepting and loving the Żabiński’s are), breaking loose from their cages during bombings (putting into relief Nazi viciousness), and so on. These actions—often suspenseful,

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sometimes amusing, at times grotesque—decrease the kind of emphasis on delicate reflection that is such a fundamental quality of Ackerman’s prose. What results is spectacle, scenes that augment tales of human suffering under military occupation. What gets lost is the keen observation of the world that Ackerman ascribed to naturalists and artists. Just as the book’s emphasis on detailed, painterly description concedes its place to drama, so too the focus on artists diminishes in the film. In Ackerman’s text, art is crucial for building bridges between human and nonhuman animals. Magda, for instance, admires animals while learning from them about hue, gracefulness, and quirky detail. In the film, those elements of the story are largely absent. Artists make only cameo appearances. True, the guests paint on the walls in their secrets lairs at the zoo, but their efforts hardly amount to aesthetically compelling work or to art that links people and wild creatures in a meaningful fashion. Instead, their paintings serve primarily to evoke pathos, and they are presented in a heavy-handed, calculating way. For instance, the camera lingers on Stars of David decorating the hiding places. This cinematic choice is both sentimental and hardly persuasive. Real Jews in these circumstances would have been very aware of the need to cover their identity and leave no sign of their presence.37 In short, the attention to painting in the film is a poor substitute for Ackerman’s rich descriptions of Magda’s sculptures and the Żabiński’s commitment to art. Beyond the treatment of art and artists, the film differs from Ackerman’s book in its emphasis on female vulnerability. For example, Lutz Heck, the German zoologist, gets little mention from Ackerman, but on screen he becomes a central, menacing character who persistently threatens Antonina. In a plotline that deviates from the historical record, he pursues her amorously, forcing himself on her nearly to the point of rape. Another storyline presents the brutal rape of a little girl in the ghetto. Traumatized and mute following her attack, she is nursed back to health by Antonina and thereby learns to trust once again. That character does not appear in the book and is most likely a fabrication. However, this sequence of events in the film provides opportunity for Antonina to talk about her own traumatic past, about how she lost her parents when she was a child, and about how she regained trust by befriending animals. The scenes with the little girl become further occasions to demonstrate that the zookeeper’s wife identifies with defenseless or wounded souls. Insistently, the movie portrays females as prey to victimization. The woman protagonist appears, repeatedly, in eroticized and vulnerable circumstances. The violent sexualization of Antonina, together with the girl’s graphic, bloody rape, presents female suffering for the entertainment of the audience, magnifying the spectators’ voyeuristic, scopic power over the characters. These scenes also compare mute people, left speechless by trauma, and nonhuman creatures, traditionally perceived as “dumb” animals. Both women and animals, like Jews, are oppressed by the Nazis.38 Zoo creatures here are

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subject to horrendous assault. They are hunted in the Żabiński’s park much as Antonina is stalked by Heck and as Jews are rounded up by the Gestapo. In addition, the film presents animals in exploitative ways, putting their bleeding and mangled carcasses on display and inviting audiences to gawk, much as it allows the audience to gawk at female humans who are threatened or brutalized. No wonder critics were divided about the efficacy of this film’s portrayal of Antonina. Some heralded The Zookeeper’s Wife as a path-breaking portrayal of a brave woman, while others remarked that it is the men here who always hold the reins of power.39 Antonina may be a strong, independent, courageous woman, but those qualities do not always shine through. For the most part, she is simply caught between her would-be lover and a jealous husband. The ambivalent responses that the film evoked point to equivocal implications of the title The Zookeeper’s Wife. Although Antonina is so central to this story, the title presents her not in her own right, but as someone’s spouse. Furthermore, although she takes on multiple responsibilities for the animals, she herself is not designated as a zookeeper. Instead, the title casts her as an afterthought. The implied contradictions are striking, yet the subordination of Antonina to her husband is consistent with the way the Żabiński story has been constructed in other contexts. For instance, on the Yad Vashem Web site concerning the Warsaw Zoo and the Holocaust, Jan’s name appears first and the post focuses mostly on him.40 Moreover, Ackerman’s book recounts that Antonina did not receive as much credit in her own day as she deserved; Jan praised Antonina only sparingly (TZW, 231–232). In short, Ackerman chose a title that downplays Antonina’s individuality, but her narrative then emphasizes that Antonina deserves the spotlight; in this text a hitherto untold story is finally getting told. The movie, in contrast, uses the same title, but that title acquires a different valence. By placing the woman, like the animals in captivity, at the mercy of male characters, the film underscores female susceptibility to maltreatment. In that context, the title comes across as dismissive of female agency and it invokes the name of a well-known poem by Sylvia Plath, “The Zoo Keeper’s Wife.”41 There, Plath presents a woman whose husband abuses both her and the animals in his care. Jan, certainly, was not that kind of villainous zookeeper; still, like the animals in an ill-managed menagerie, Antonina in the movie is turned into spectacle, an object of violence and disdain. Taking all this into account, viewers are left with inconclusive evidence: Is the Antonina on the screen strong and heroic or does the exploitation of her detract irrevocably from the portrait of a capable woman?

See Under: Love Both versions of The Zookeeper’s Wife, with distinctive degrees of fidelity to the historical record, tell an unlikely story of altruistic rescue. See Under: Love, in contrast, creates a fantastical zoo, testing feats of imagination and tall tales

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of passion and art, to see if they help ease the painful emotions of the second generation or in any way diminish the horror of the Shoah. Eventually, the novel arrives at the conclusion that they don’t. The characters find that the Holocaust defies both rational understanding and artistic response. Grossman introduces the Warsaw Zoo into the novel through the figure of Anshel Wasserman, a prisoner in a death camp who spins a fantastic yarn. The commandant of the camp has demanded entertainment, and so Wasserman creates new adventures for “The Children of the Heart,” characters he invented long before the war for a series of children’s stories. In the new tale crafted for the Nazi officer, those once young characters are now an elderly crew, banding together to save Jews from the ghetto and hide them in the zoo. They also care for an infant whose life is accelerated to undergo growth, maturity, and old-age in the space of 24 hours. The fourth and final chapter of See Under: Love, which recounts their exploits, is called “The Complete Encyclopedia of Kazik’s Life,” and it aspires to create a unique reference source documenting and honoring the full events of a single, abbreviated life.42 The encyclopedia provides information about actual events from the Nazi era, yet it constantly undermines or overrides fact with fiction. For instance, while the zoo rescue follows the outline of the Żabiński story, Jan and Antonina play no part. In addition, the format of the narrative displays some of the standard features of encyclopedias, such as alphabetical entries, cross-references, and mention of historical figures and incidents, but Grossman simultaneously challenges the conventions of the genre through use of idiosyncratic entries, including “love,” “suffering,” and “life, the joy of,” along with a heterogeneous collection of names, occurrences, and places. All sorts of digressions highlight the zany actions of a bunch of eccentric Jews in hiding, mixing together beasts and human antics and snippets of horrifying history from the Third Reich. In short, it’s a “real zoo,” not in the sense the reader encounters in Ackerman’s book (i.e., a verifiable historical phenomenon), but in the sense of the slang expression, which connotes a place of confusion and disorder. In an interview, Grossman remarked on the tensions within his narrative design; he noted that under the rigid structure and hard definitions of the encyclopedia, “many stories pulse, and they are full of life and desire and color and imagination […]”.43 The forces of life, creativity, and love overcome the constraints of a standard encyclopedia, with its rational categories and dry exposition. A number of passages exceed the constraints of an encyclopedia not just structurally, but in a turn to madcap whimsy featuring animals. One such passage, in which the imagination is uncaged and in which animals break free of their cages, appears in an entry called “Loneliness.” The context is as follows: Two lovers at the zoo have been separated during the German invasion of Warsaw in 1939. The man is Jewish, the woman not, and it has become too dangerous for a Jew and a non-Jew to cohabit. He, however, can’t bear to be

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away from her, calls her name, and runs to her, screaming, because “this mad war was keeping them apart like a steel cage” (SUL, 310). Otto, the zookeeper, remarks, all the peacocks started screeching and the newly widowed tiger lamented with him, and the owls and foxes join in too, and all that noise woke me up, and for a minute I could have sworn the animals were rioting against us, against the war, against everything that was going on at the zoo [..] the steel cage bars had begun to shake and bend. […] tiny parrots swelled up as if with some exotic disease, till they resembled brightly colored turkeys, or ostriches with their little cages dangling from their necks like charms. (SUL, 310)

Bursting past any kind of verisimilitude, the passage suggests that both humans and nonhuman animals experience the same vitality and passions. Together with the lovers, the wild zoo animals protest war and imprisonment. Wondrously, just as the zoo is about to “pull itself out by the roots and fly up to the sky” (SUL, 310), the lovers reunite, and all calms down. Love, at least, for the moment, saves the day. In other words, the paragraph insists on the primacy of personal feelings and the emotional worlds of individuals as it decries an era of mass murder and oppression. Despite the humane message that this text shares with The Zookeeper’s Wife, stylistic differences jump off the page. Where Ackerman’s prose is lyrical, precise, and measured, Grossman engages in wild abandon. His writing exoticizes and fantasizes animals, manipulating them in order to register extreme human emotional responses. Figurative language, deploying animals as absurd emblems of feelings shared with humans, is as close as he comes to a blurring of species boundaries. Unlike Antonina, who, according to Ackerman, “loved to slip out of her human skin for a while and spy on the world through each animal’s eyes” and intuited their “concerns and knowhow” (TZW, 25), Grossman does not radically de-center human life and culture nor enter the perspectives of nonhumans. Note though, that the imagery in the fourth chapter of See Under: Love does grow out of concern for animal welfare. To understand this representation, it is helpful to be aware of the first chapter of the novel, “Momik,” which focuses on the early experiences of the very boy who grows up to be a writer and composes the encyclopedia. At age nine, Momik first hears of the “Nazi Beast,” a ubiquitous phrase in 1950s Israel where the story takes place. Ignorant of history, the boy is not sure what the words mean. Nonetheless, wishing to emulate the heroic characters in his grand uncle’s tales about the Children of the Heart, he captures a variety of creatures, keeps them in cages in his cellar, and tries to figure out which is the Nazi Beast. By identifying the culprit, he believes he can lure it into the open, fight it, defeat it, and so save his parents, survivors of the Holocaust, from their nightmares and fears. The game turns cruel. The animals are trapped in the dark, Momik fails to feed them adequately, and they grow angrier and angrier. Implied is a critique of

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zoos in general. The boy plays the role of zoologist, labeling cages, classifying everything, making a show of his own authority (SUL, 8). The upshot is that taxonomy, analysis, domination, and abuse—all in the name of science— appear here in miniature. Despite the poignancy of the child’s youth and innocence, Momik’s actions are clearly condemned as inhumane. Crisis becomes inevitable, and when it erupts, it undermines the boy’s assumption that rational thought and knowledge are strength. This happens as the animals grow increasingly irate and as Momik, afraid of them, prolongs their captivity. Tormenting the hapless birds, the cat, the hedgehog, and the other captives in his cellar, the little boy discovers his own capacity for cruelty. His encounter with the “Nazi Beast” reveals to Momik that beastliness can reside in anyone, even himself. As a result, he comes to reject the ­control and domination that zoos entail, and he learns to see the animals as sentient beings. There is no comforting resolution, though, to his conflicts. He is overcome with fear and, ultimately, can contain neither the animals nor the emotions that are part of his second-generation heritage. He learns more and more about the Holocaust and becomes overwhelmed and desperate, unable to assimilate the facts into his understanding or feelings. Realizing he cannot manage the Beast—whether that means the creatures he has imprisoned, the Nazi past, or even the brute within himself—he opens all the cages, lets the animals go, and suffers emotional collapse.44 This crisis eventually leads to the encyclopedia. The last chapter of See Under: Love presents Momik’s ongoing, adult efforts as a writer to grapple with the same issues that permeated his childhood. The struggle manifests itself now as a preoccupation with the role of the writer. On the one hand, as he confronts the Beast anew, he strives to impose order by compiling a reference source, all the while knowing that rational approaches have failed him before. On the other hand, he experiments with fantasy, an option that allows him to deal indirectly with issues too painful to handle directly.45 He tries to reconnect with Holocaust survivors he knew in his childhood and to re-conceive their lives in fabulous ways, as if to give them a second chance to make things turn out better. When he conjures up figures he knew long ago—deeply damaged, severely incapacitated individuals, whose trauma made them appear beastly and monstrous46—he imagines them as Jews at the zoo, rescued from the ghetto. Momik’s encyclopedia presents these characters as eccentrics who arouse compassion, not just revulsion. Significantly, given his own preoccupation with the capabilities and limitations of art, he casts them as artists. Each of them creates something distinctive and peculiar, thereby constructing his or her own life. The entry titled “Artists” includes, among others, the figure “AARON MARCUS [see under: FEELINGS], a man dedicated to enlarging the scope of human feeling” who experiments with inventing never-before felt emotions and ever subtler nuances of sentiment, as well as “MALKIEL SEIDMAN [q.v.], artist of the frontiers of personality,” a

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man who composes a dictionary of a single life. Attention to detail, to fine shades of affect, to the myriad dimensions and complexities of each individual: These are art in the context of Momik’s imaginary zoo. Art is defined as something that “augments human aspirations and intensifies longing” (SUL, 307). Grossman’s insistence on this point, along with the exuberant profusion of detail in his prose, recalls the quiddity and specificity in Ackerman, but on a different scale: even, run amok. The characters become grotesquely exaggerated, absurd fabrications. Grossman’s emphasis on each individual’s uniqueness constitutes a protest against dehumanizing ideology. As Malkiel Zeidman puts it, it is crucial to recognize “we are each endemic, as if in each of us existed a single animal” (SUL, 339). At the same time, though, the very preposterousness of the artists implies that the novel is trafficking in impossibilities, and the artists’ accomplishments all verge on monstrosity. Take Hannah Zeitrin, a decrepit, old woman and the “artist of love” (SUL, 307). Prodigiously promiscuous, she possesses irresistible sexual allure described in terms of raw instinct and violence. She and one of her partners make love “like hungry animals” who bite and scratch; when she slinks around the zoo, the animals in their cages become aroused and “mate in a frenzy.” She even brings out the animal in God, who fights the evil inclination and does not succumb to her seductive ways, but who, in heaven, “bellows like a bull” and arches “like a mighty tomcat” (SUL, 412). Finally, bizarre scenes of fornication throw Hannah together with Kazik, now a virile young man but also still an infant swathed in diapers. She sniffs him “like an animal,” embraces him passionately, and then proceeds to stab him repeatedly with a knife (SUL, 415). See Under: Love here invokes age-old tropes that associate female sexuality with animality and violence.47 The descriptions of Hannah’s deeds and misdeeds, which range from astonishing to atrocious, hardly offer unequivocal evidence that her so-called art affirms the dignity of the individual. Yet the portrait of Hannah is not simply outlandish, because Momik tries to see her in an accepting and tolerant way. He vividly remembers his childhood neighbor, Hannah, a survivor widely reviled and condemned as a slut. His creative writing envisions her as a victim of multiple rapes, someone to be pitied, whose wild behavior was induced by the abuse she suffered in the ghetto. The encyclopedia, consequently, creates contradictory impressions, arousing empathy but caricaturing Hannah as much as it honors her. When all is said and done, art does not secure the vision of respect for the individual that Momik strives so strenuously to endorse. The character Kazik expresses this point most succinctly: “art cannot promise salvation; […], in fact, it is his very freedom that deprives an artist of comforting illusions and brings him closer to acknowledging the limitation of hope” (SUL, 307). What remains incontrovertible is the horror of the Holocaust that defies both understanding and re-imagining.

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The denouement of the plot reinforces that conclusion. Kazik, not yet one day old but already aging and wizened, discovers the reasons he and his ­companions reside in the zoo. He has visions of a death camp, seeing what the Nazis have in mind for him. Like Momik when he was a child, Kazik feels overwhelmed by the knowledge he gains. Even given a stupendously short life, he cannot bear to live any longer, and the tale of the zoo ends with Kazik’s suicide. Grossman’s novel thus proves much more pessimistic than Ackerman’s tale of the Warsaw Zoo. His characters imagine a Noah’s Ark where “the animals will save the humans” (SUL, 367), but pleasant fables are not to be. In the final chapter of See Under: Love, trust and innocence are a thing of the past, not viable in a world where the child must age in appallingly accelerated fashion and learn all too quickly about genocide.

Conclusion See Under: Love, The Zookeeper’s Wife, and the film version of The Zookeeper’s Wife endow the Warsaw Zoo with shifting qualities, each ascribing new implications to the Żabiński story. All three consider how the extreme conditions of the Holocaust foster thinking about humane treatment of animals, about dehumanization, and about ways that gender figures into the dignity accorded to individuals. All three works place human characters within the cages of a zoo to explore the potential roles of art in an inhumane world. Yet each narrative emerges out of its own cultural milieu and reflects and addresses distinctive circumstances and values. Both Ackerman’s book and the cinematic version of The Zookeeper’s Wife present first-generation testimony anew, through the prism of a later generation’s perspectives. They tell the kind of story, of exceptional rescue, that has gained disproportional prominence in American popular culture. Featuring Righteous Gentiles, they resemble The Diary of Anne Frank and Schindler’s List and call to mind the warm American reception accorded those narratives. See Under: Love, in contrast, tells a second-generation story that draws inspiration from historical records, but embraces fantasy. Like any number of Israeli authors born after the war, Momik ventures into the realm of make-believe to highlight how difficult it is to speak on behalf of victims and survivors. Shedding light on these texts, knowledge and models of interpretation from the field of animal studies suggest ways that generations of readers may discover and rediscover the Warsaw Zoo and gain insights into the extraordinary rescue that took place there.

Notes

1.  Sheila O’Malley, “The Zookeeper’s Wife” [film review], March 29, 2017, http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-zookeepers-wife-2017. 2. The Zookeeper’s Wife, directed by Niki Caro, 2017, Focus Features, Film.

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3. Diane Ackerman, The Zoo Keeper’s Wife: A War Story (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007). 4. David Grossman, ‘Ayen ‘erekh: ahavah (Jerusalem: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1986). The English translation by Betsy Rosenberg appeared in 1989 as See Under: Love (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux). One reviewer of Ackerman did briefly acknowledge the Grossman precedent: Eva Hoffman, “Ark Angels: The Unusual Tale of the Jews Who Were Sheltered in a Zoo During the Holocaust,” Financial Times, 15 (London), May 24, 2008. 5. David G. Roskies, “What Is Holocaust Literature?” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 21 (2005): 157–212. 6. For a concise overview of scholarship on animal studies and the Holocaust, see Laura Petersen, “‘We Are Story Animals’: Aesopics in Holocaust Literature by Art Spiegelman and Yann Martel,” in Aesopic Voices: Re-framing Truth Through Concealed Ways of Presentation in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, eds. Gert Reifarth and Philip Morrissey (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), 175–207. Also of relevance, Anat Pick’s Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 24. 7. Jay Geller, Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018). 8. Charles Patterson, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust (New York: Lantern Books, 2002), 106–113; “The Great Divide: Animals and the Holocaust,” Tikkun 18, no. 2 (2002): 77–79. 9. Boria Sax, Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats, and the Holocaust (New York: Continuum, 2000), 126–131. 10. Sax, Animals in the Third Reich, 95. For a documentary film on the Warsaw Zoo during the war, see Safe Haven: The Warsaw Zoo (Blue Heron International Pictures, 2009). 11. Sax, Animals in the Third Reich, 111–121. 12.  Petersen, “Story Animals,” 2011; Randy Malamud, Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 31. 13. See, for instance, Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory After the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 139–179; Marianne Hirsch, “Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-memory,” Discourse 15, no. 2 (Winter 1992–1993): 3–29; and Petersen, “Story Animals,” 2011. 14. Yael S. Feldman provides an overview of the debates in “‘Not as Sheep Led to Slaughter’?: On Trauma, Selective Memory, and the Making of Historical Consciousness,” Jewish Social Studies 19, no. 3 (2013): 139–169. 15. Tom Segev documents Israeli references to Nazis as beasts or demons: The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993); see especially p. 332. See also Or Rogovin, “Count Him a Human Being: David Grossman’s See Under: Love and Holocaust Perpetrators in Israeli Fiction,” Prooftexts 35, no. 1 (2015): 13–24. One of the outstanding discussions of how ordinary people became perpetrators can be found in Christopher Browning’s, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).

106  N. SOKOLOFF 16.  The most intense of the public controversies concerned PETA’s campaign against factory farms, launched in 2004 and called “Holocaust on Your Plate,” https://www.peta.org/blog/peta-germanys-holocaust-display-banned/. David Sztybel assesses the debates in his scholarly article, “Can the Treatment of Animals Be Compared to the Holocaust?” Ethics and the Environment 11, no. 1 (2006): 97–132. 17.  See Emily Miller Budick’s, The Subject of Holocaust Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 229–237. 18. In Using and Abusing the Holocaust (Indiana University Press, 2006), 123–141, Lawrence Langer discusses transactions between fact and imagination as the “quintessential task for Holocaust art,” 124. 19. David Herman, “Animal Worlds in Modern Fiction: An Introduction,” Modern Fiction Studies 60, no. 3 (2014): 421–443. 20. Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations, eds. Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); Aaron Gross, “Introduction and Overview: Animal Others and Animal Studies,” in Animals and the Human Imagination: A Companion to Animal Studies, eds. Aaron Gross and Anne Vallely (Columbia University Press, 2012), 1–30. 21. Malamud, Reading Zoos, 73. 22. See Walter Putnam, “The Colonial Zoo,” in French Thinking About Animals, eds. Louise Mackenzie and Stephanie Posthumus (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2015), 31–45; here 31. 23. Putnam, “The Colonial Zoo,” 32–33. 24. Marian Scholtmeijer claims that literature was ahead of the curve, anticipating issues that other fields such as philosophy pursued only later. “The Power of Otherness: Animals in Women’s Fiction,” in Animals and Women, eds. Adams and Donovan, 231–262. For analysis of many English-language literary texts, see Malamud, Reading Zoos. 25. Susie Linfield, “A Natural History of Terrible Things,” The Washington Post, September 16, 2007, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/ article/2007/09/13/AR2007091301895.html?noredirect=on. 26. For helpful discussion of texts by other naturalists who similarly strive to read the minds of animals, see David Herman, Narratology Beyond the Human: Storytelling and Animal Life (Oxford University Press, 2018), 55–57. 27. Linfield, “A Natural History,” 2007. 28. Sax, Animals in the Third Reich, 111–121 discusses German policy regarding animal protection. 29. Frederick L. Brown, The City Is More Than Human (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016). 30. D. T. Max’s review of Ackerman’s book emphasizes this irony as a feature of the Warsaw Zoo rescue: “Antonina’s List,” NY Times, September 9, 2007. 31. Putnam, “The Colonial Zoo,” 31. 32. The text is loosely structured and frequently veers into descriptive digression. That could be seen as a fault by some readers, or as a chance to luxuriate in detail. 33. Rogovin, “Count Him a Human Being.” 34. Jacob Soll finds that the violence against animals provides the film an original take on the Holocaust: “The Revelatory Horror of The Zookeeper’s Wife,” April 3, 2017, https://newrepublic.com/article/141806/revelatory-horror-zookeepers-wife. Stephen Holden found the animals entertaining, but the rest of

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the film insipid and sentimental, unwilling to engage with Nazi barbarity on a big scale: “In ‘The Zookeeper’s Wife,’ the Holocaust Seems Tame,” New York Times, March 29, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/movies/ the-zookeepers-wife-review-jessica-chastain.html. 35. Joe Morgenstern, “Maladaptation of the Species,” Wall Street Journal, April 3, 2017: A11. 36. Malamud, Reading Zoos. 37. This point, that Jews would not have advertised their Jewishness, is raised by Wojciech Oleksiak, “The Zookeeper’s Wife: Fact vs. Fiction,” https://culture. pl/en/article/the-zookeepers-wife-fact-vs-fiction, March 30, 2017. 38. Some viewers, such as Holden (“The Holocaust Seems Tame”), have sensed that Jewish suffering is of secondary salience in this film, and that the animals elicit more attention and sympathy. My thanks to Lawrence Baron for raising this point with me. 39. Soll, “Revelatory Horror,” called it “the first feminist Holocaust film.” Michael Coppola opines that all the power rests in the hands of the male figures. “‘Zookeeper’s Wife:’ Sloppy Characterization Hurts Film,” The Ionian, April 12, 2017, http://www.ioniannews.com/arts_and_entertainment/article_ a4ae876c-1fce-11e7-9b54-9fa62241ea4e.html. 40. http://www.yadvashem.org/righteous/stories/zabinski.html. 41. Plath’s poem, from 1961, appears in her Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), 155. 42.  For extended discussion, see Naomi Sokoloff, “The Holocaust and the Encyclopedic Imagination,” in The Representation of the Holocaust in Literature and Film, ed. Marc Lee Rafael (Williamsburg, VA: The College of William and Mary, 2003), 139–157. 43. David Grossman, “Holocaust, Storytelling, Memory, Identity: David Grossman in California; See Under: Love: A Personal View,” Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought 51, no. 1 (2002): 42–51. 44. For overviews of critical approaches to Grossman’s novel, two useful sources are Naomi Sokoloff, “Rereading David Grossman’s See Under: Love,” Prooftexts 35, no. 1 (2015): 1–12, and See Under: Shoah: Imagining the Holocaust with David Grossman, eds. Marc De Kesel, Bettine Siertsema, and Katrzyna Szurmiak (Leiden: Brill, 2014). 45. Gilead Morahg argues that post-modern narrative experiment in this novel, as in other second generation Israeli novels, helps perform the work of mourning; “Breaking Silence: Israel’s Fantastic Fiction of the Holocaust,” in The Boom in Contemporary Israeli Fiction, ed. Alan Mintz (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997), 143–183. 46. Mia Spiro interprets the Beast directly in reference to the survivors themselves: “Uncanny Survivors and the Nazi Beast: Monstrous Imagination in See Under: Love,” Prooftexts 35, no. 1 (2015): 25–36. 47. The treatment of female sexuality and animality calls to mind, for example, fiction by D. H. Lawrence, as discussed by Carrie Rohman in Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 106–132; David Herman, Narratology Beyond the Human, 61–63.

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Bibliography Ackerman, Diane. The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007. Adams, Carol J., and Josephine Donovan, eds. Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Browning, Christopher. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. Budick, Emily Miller. The Subject of Holocaust Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. De Kesel, Marc, Bettine Siertsema, and Katrzyna Szurmiak, eds. See Under: Shoah: Imagining the Holocaust with David Grossman. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Feldman, Yael S. “‘Not as Sheep Led to Slaughter’?: On Trauma, Selective Memory, and the Making of Historical Consciousness.” Jewish Social Studies 19, no. 3 (2013): 139–169. Geller, Jay. Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017. Gross, Aaron. “Introduction and Overview: Animal Others and Animal Studies.” In Animals and the Human Imagination: A Companion to Animal Studies, edited by Aaron Gross and Anne Vallely, 1–30. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Grossman, David. Ayen ‘erekh: ahavah. Jerusalem: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1986. ———. “Holocaust, Storytelling, Memory, Identity: David Grossman in California; See Under: Love: A Personal View.” Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought 51, no. 1 (2002): 42–51. ———. See Under: Love. Translated by Betsy Rosenberg. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1989. Herman, David. “Animal Worlds in Modern Fiction: An Introduction.” Modern Fiction Studies 60, no. 3 (2014): 421–443. ———. Narratology Beyond the Human: Storytelling and Animal Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Hirsch, Marianne. “Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-memory. Discourse 15, no. 2 (1992–1993): 3–29. Hoffman, Eva. “Ark Angels: The Unusual Tale of the Jews Who Were Sheltered in a Zoo During the Holocaust.” Financial Times, 15 (London), May 24, 2008. Holden, Stephen. “In ‘The Zookeeper’s Wife,’ the Holocaust Seems Tame,” New York Times, March 29, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/movies/ the-zookeepers-wife-review-jessica-chastain.html. “Holocaust on Your Plate.” https://www.peta.org/blog/peta-germanys-holocaustdisplay-banned/. LaCapra, Dominick. History and Memory After the Holocaust. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. Langer, Lawrence. Using and Abusing the Holocaust. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Linfield, Susie. “A Natural History of Terrible Things.” The Washington Post, September 16, 2007. Malamud, Randy. Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Max, D. T. “Antonina’s List.” NY Times, September 9, 2007.

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Morahg, Gilead. “Breaking Silence: Israel’s Fantastic Fiction of the Holocaust.” In The Boom in Contemporary Israeli Fiction, edited by Alan Mintz, 143–183. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997. Morgenstern, Joe. “Maladaptation of the Species.” Wall Street Journal, April 3, 2017: A11. O’Malley, Sheila. “The Zookeeper’s Wife” [film review], March 29, 2017. http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-zookeepers-wife-2017. Oleksiak, Wojciech. “The Zookeeper’s Wife: Fact vs. Fiction.” https://culture.pl/en/ article/the-zookeepers-wife-fact-vs-fiction. March 30, 2017. Patterson, Charles. Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust. New York: Lantern Books, 2003. ———. “The Great Divide: Animals and the Holocaust.” Tikkun 18, no. 2 (2002): 77–79. Petersen, Laura. “‘We Are Story Animals’: Aesopics in Holocaust Literature by Art Spiegelman and Yann Martel.” In Aesopic Voices: Re-framing Truth Through Concealed Ways of Presentation in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, edited by Gert Reifarth and Philip Morrissey, 175–207. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011. Pick, Anat. Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Plath, Sylvia. “The Zoo Keeper’s Wife.” Collected Poems, 155. London: Faber and Faber, 1981. Putnam, Walter. “The Colonial Zoo.” In French Thinking About Animals, edited by Louise Mackenzie and Stephanie Posthumus, 31–45. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2015. Rogovin, Or. “Count Him a Human Being: David Grossman’s See Under: Love and Holocaust Perpetrators in Israeli Fiction.” Prooftexts 35, no. 1 (2015): 13–24. Rohman, Carrie. Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Roskies, David G. “What Is Holocaust Literature?” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 21 (2005): 157–212. Safe Haven: The Warsaw Zoo. Blue Heron International Pictures, 2009. Sax, Boria. Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats, and the Holocaust. New York: Continuum, 2000. Scholtmeijer, Marian. “The Power of Otherness: Animals in Women’s Fiction.” In Animals and Women, edited by Adams and Donovan, 231–262, 1995. Sokoloff, Naomi. “The Holocaust and the Encyclopedic Imagination.” In The Representation of the Holocaust in Literature and Film, edited by Marc Lee Rafael, 139–157. The College of William and Mary, 2003. ———. “Rereading David Grossman’s See Under: Love.” Prooftexts 1, no. 35 (2015): 1–12. Soll, Jacob. “The Revelatory Horror of The Zookeeper’s Wife.” https://newrepublic. com/article/141806/revelatory-horror-zookeepers-wife. Spiro, Mia. “Uncanny Survivors and the Nazi Beast: Monstrous Imagination in See Under: Love.” Prooftexts 35, no. 1 (2015): 25–36. Sztybel, David. “Can the Treatment of Animals Be Compared to the Holocaust?” Ethics and the Environment 11, no. 1 (2006): 97–132. The Zookeeper’s Wife. Directed by Niki Caro. Focus Features, Film, 2017.

CHAPTER 7

When Facts Become Figures: Figurative Dynamics in Youth Holocaust Literature Joanna Krongold

Introduction: The Dynamics of the Figurative How is the Holocaust narrated in youth literature? What literary strategies and stylistic tools are employed by authors when dealing with the limits of representation that both the Holocaust and children’s/young adult literature impose? In the face of these limits and the increasing temporal distance from the events of World War II, youth literature about the Holocaust continues to thrive in the fiction, nonfiction, fantasy, memoir, graphic narrative, and picture book genres. This diverse literature often provides fertile ground for experimentation in both form and content, exemplifying and in some cases catalyzing broader trends in Holocaust literature. It is therefore important to examine the evolution of Holocaust representation and, in particular, the dynamics of the figurative in literature for young people. Positioning themselves in contrast to strictly literal tellings and retellings of the Holocaust, these figurative dynamics operate through specific literary devices such as personification, metaphor, metonymy, allegory, time travel, fairy tales, and magic. If, as theorists such as Elie Wiesel, George Steiner, and Alvin H. Rosenfeld posit, figurative language and metaphor are unable to adequately convey the atrocity of the Nazi genocide, then critics must equally acknowledge that youth literature about the Holocaust relies on such dynamics. The many contradictions raised by youth Holocaust literature are in part owing to its encounter with at least two figurative muzzles: one in the form

J. Krongold (*)  University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_7

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of the representational difficulties (or impossibilities) facing all Holocaust literature and the other in the form of perceived appropriateness and assumed age-based maturity levels. Addressing the former, Adrienne Kertzer, one of the foremost scholars of children’s Holocaust literature, argues that “if all language is inadequate, as many Holocaust writers say, then ultimately all literature about the Holocaust may be a form of children’s literature, trying to describe events with a very limited vocabulary.”1 Kertzer highlights the ongoing relevance of a flourishing field that has been dramatically understudied in academia. The latter representational muzzle of appropriateness often leads to fears that children will absorb vicarious trauma from the Holocaust literature they read or, contrarily, become inured to it. To borrow a phrase from Betty Bacon’s 1988 Marxist collection on socioeconomic politics in youth literature, “how much truth do we tell the children?”2 There is certainly no consensus on the answer to that question, and youth literature spanning the last eighty years can be seen grappling with its difficulty. Authors of youth Holocaust literature struggle with oversimplifying the events of World War II to the point of distortion or risk terrorizing children with the brutal truths of historical fact. Similarly, such authors must navigate the uncertain terrain between artistic freedom and historical accuracy. As Lydia Kokkola argues, “Holocaust literature for children can be conceived as having a greater moral obligation to be historically accurate than historical fiction dealing with less catastrophic events.”3 The issue of historical accuracy and authenticity in youth literature becomes highly contentious when the subject is the Holocaust, an event that is viewed by many as the epitome of inexpressible horror and that has been politicized, elevated, and denied in the decades following World War II. Redemptive and generalized narratives clash with those that attempt to represent or gesture at the gruesome, near-fantastic reality of the Holocaust, leading to a wide array of texts both inventive and informative. As understandings of writing, time, memory, and experience from before World War II are displaced by the seemingly incomprehensible enormity of the Holocaust, authors trying to represent it often take an imaginative leap in narrative. This leap can be seen as a linguistic, epistemological, and ontological shift that relies on figurative dynamics to convey meaning. When facts are too enormous to comprehend, youth literature uses the strategies of figurative language to narrate the story of a single child, adult, cat, or mouse. This chapter traces the trajectory of figurative dynamics on a continuum in order to understand the specific problematics and possibilities of narrating the Holocaust for young people. The continuum of figurative dynamics in youth Holocaust literature proceeds along a roughly chronological path, developing in ways that raise and complicate ever-present questions of representation in Holocaust studies.4 Beginning with authors writing during the Holocaust,

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the first phase of the continuum is characterized by experimentation with figurative devices like personification. Such experimentation, seen in Anne Frank’s diary and other literature written for and by children during the Holocaust (like Yankev Glatshteyn’s Emil and Karl and the poetry of children incarcerated in Theresienstadt), highlights the unfixed and uncanonized nature of Holocaust writing during the war. In the postwar period, as survivors and scholars began to theorize about the possibilities and limitations of Holocaust literature, the memoir became the primary mode of narrating the Holocaust for young people. This second phase of the continuum established staunch literary conventions and demarcated authors’ use of figurative dynamics to serve a more strictly documentary or memorial purpose. Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir, Maus, acts as the fulcrum of the continuum of figurative dynamics because it transforms metaphor from an intellectual reference to an immersive reality. Within this context, the Jews under Nazi occupation are not said merely to be like mice, they actually exist as mice, alongside German cats, Polish pigs, and American dogs. This metaphorical realization leads to the third phase of the continuum in which time travel, fairy tales, and magic are employed by authors such as Jane Yolen to actualize abstract concepts and make the Holocaust accessible to a late twentieth-century youth audience. Characters are no longer tasked with merely remembering the Holocaust; they are transported to a time and place in which they experience it. The fourth phase of the continuum of figurative dynamics is built upon this actualization of metaphor but takes it to another extreme in works of early twenty-first-century fantasy. In these texts, the Holocaust becomes a metaphor, a metonymized event that represents absolute evil and depravity, and which can be employed at will to elucidate authors’ tales of fantastical genocide, racial discrimination, or war. Given this use of the Holocaust as a tool to be manipulated and instrumentalized, the future of youth Holocaust literature and the next phase of the figurative continuum are uncertain. The works considered in this chapter span generic categories and demonstrate a chronological breadth indicative of many of the changes that youth Holocaust literature underwent in the years following World War II. From life writing and memoir to fairy tales and fantasy, authors as diverse as Anne Frank, Elie Wiesel, Art Spiegelman, Jane Yolen, and Suzanne Collins illustrate the wide range of figurative dynamics at the heart of Holocaust representation in literature for young people. Although Frank, Wiesel, and Spiegelman did not compose their Holocaust texts expressly for a child readership, they have been adopted by young adults and are frequently included in middle or high school curricula. These texts are often a child’s or young adult’s first introduction to the events of the Holocaust, and an examination of such Holocaust literature reveals much about the ways in which we narrate and communicate trauma, war, death, and atrocity to young people.

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Anne Frank and Wartime Experimentation Lacking any foreknowledge of the outcome of the war or their own precarious futures, authors writing during the Holocaust responded to their and other people’s circumstances with a sense of immediacy and immersion. In this first phase of the continuum of figurative dynamics, methods of understanding and communicating the events of the Holocaust through literature were not yet defined, fortified, or scrutinized. While wartime writing was abundant, from poetry and songs to diaries and novels, Holocaust literature for and by children composed during World War II was significantly less common and was by no means a fixed category. The most famous and arguably most influential youth Holocaust text, Anne Frank’s diary, is one example of such writing. Figurative dynamics proved to be pliable tools that allowed Frank to write the events she was witnessing and experiencing even while the conventions of how to do so were not yet established. Frank’s diary begins with the thirteen-year-old’s birthday wish: “I hope I shall be able to confide in you completely, as I have never been able to do in anyone before, and I hope that you will be a great support and comfort to me.”5 Although Frank could not have anticipated it in June 1942, these words prove true as she continues to rely on the characteristic figurative device of her diary: personification. She addresses the diary in the second person, demonstrating both her desire for a confidante and her willingness to transform the object from an inanimate “it” to an animate “you.” The complex relationship between Frank and the personified diary develops as the young writer comes to look upon her diary as both living and life giving. Over the course of roughly three months in early 1944, Frank’s connection with her diary undergoes a crucial change; her diary and self blend together as she steadily augments and alters personification to become a kind of auto-prosopopoeia. Frank observes on February 3, 1944, that her life and the life of the diary are becoming intertwined: “should I be saved, and spared from destruction, then it would be terrible if my diaries and my tales were lost” (Diary, 501). Although the opposite occurred, her existence was and is bound up with that of the diary and comes to embody Amy Hungerford’s conception of personification in Holocaust texts: “The text is not only like a life…but it can become the actual experience of another life, an experience that then becomes ours.”6 In prevalent postwar understandings of the Holocaust text, Anne Frank and her diary are one. Another transformation occurs in March 1944 when the diary, previously figured as dependent on and infused with Frank’s identity and writing, is presented as a reciprocal or symbiotic partner in her life and work: “I want to go on living even after my death! And therefore I am grateful to God for giving me this gift, this possibility of developing myself and of writing, of expressing all that is in me!” (Diary, 591). Frank could not possibly have known that she was anticipating both her own and her

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diary’s fate, but she clearly realizes the potential of her written words to house and preserve something of herself. Building upon this construction of the self-infused text, Frank comes to rely on her diary so much that she becomes a text-infused self. After an attempted burglary of the Secret Annex in which Frank is hiding, the other inhabitants suggest that she burn her diary if they are apprehended by the police. This threat of destruction prompts Frank to respond to her diary/self, “not my diary, if my diary goes I go with it!” (Diary, 617). There are at least two interpretations of Frank’s statement, both of which are eerily predictive of her death less than a year later and her diary’s life during the subsequent seventy-five years. The first hinges on Frank’s feeling that she cannot live without her diary, even when faced with the very real possibility of personal harm, deportation, or murder. Her life is tied up with that of the diary to such an extent that carrying on without it seems impossible. Ultimately, however, the diary does not “go” and Frank does not “go with it”; rather, she is the one who is deported and her diaries and notebooks remain in the Secret Annex. When Frank was arrested, an Austrian SS officer, Karl Silberbauer, emptied the briefcase holding her diaries, notebooks, and papers in order to collect any money and jewelry that the residents of the Secret Annex still possessed. Frank’s writings, including the diary, were obviously not considered to be valuables and were scattered on the floor where Miep Gies later discovered them. The assumption of worthlessness in fact allowed Frank’s diary, now viewed as one of the most valuable Holocaust documents in existence, to survive. Tied to the vicissitude of value and the endurance of the diary is the second interpretation of Frank’s statement after the incident of trespassing. Given her intense awareness of the diary as an expression, embodiment, or constituent part of herself, Frank suggests that the very reality of her existence would cease to be if the diary were destroyed. The personification on which Frank has relied for nearly two years, and which has brought her diary to life, is for the first time truly jeopardized; losing this figurative device and the diary which exemplifies and contains it is perceived by Frank to be synonymous with her own demise. For Frank, the death of the metaphor is the death of the author.7 After the break-in, Frank demonstrates an awareness that her diary is a preserver of life, paradoxically uniting her claim that she cannot or will not live without it and her earlier expressed desire to live through it after her death. Frank’s entry after the burglary and the ultimate fate of the diary powerfully confirm Hungerford’s thesis, for the only known Anne Frank is embodied in the diary; to readers, the diary is Anne Frank. However, the Anne Frank that it becomes, the literary persona of the diary, is a constructed and assumed one.8 Readers have the power to shape and define Anne Frank, for her diary is, to use Roland Barthes’ phrase, “eternally written here and now”9; this omnipresence leads to numerous interpretations with varying degrees of accuracy, awe, and agenda. Significantly, the

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very possibility of readers’ agency in shaping and interpreting the character and story is embedded, through Frank’s use of personification, in the diary itself. When Kitty is addressed as “you,” the reader is implicated in the second person, drawn into Frank’s narrative as a character within it. The diary is therefore utterly invested in second person personification; it begins with the “you” that will become Kitty, a friend, confidante, and creator, and ends, albeit in an incomplete manner, in the hands of the “you” that is the reader, left to complete a story and life abruptly truncated by the Nazi genocide.

The Definition of a Genre: Postwar Memoirs Following the experimentation and flexibility of both form and content in wartime Holocaust writing as demonstrated by Frank’s diary, the postwar period ushered in a significant change in the way figurative dynamics operated in Holocaust literature for young people. As scholars and survivors alike began to reflect on and theorize about the experience of the Holocaust, conventions of how to represent that experience in words began to coalesce and solidify. Early critical and theoretical studies by Irving Halperin, George Steiner, Lawrence Langer, and David Roskies contributed to this canonization of Holocaust literature. The overwhelming trauma of the Holocaust caused many to question the validity, ethical acceptability, and epistemological possibility of representing it through writing. Silence, some of these critics argued, was the better option when faced with the seemingly impossible task of using language to represent the unrepresentable corruption of humanity, place, theology, and art that was perceived to have occurred during World War II. Others such as Elie Wiesel called for a strict emphasis on documentary literature and testimony, decrying other forms of art as unacceptable, impossible, and indeed, as in Theodor Adorno’s oft-quoted dictum, “barbaric.”10 Several children’s and young adult texts published in this postwar period both conformed to and challenged these incipient conventions, contributing to worldwide understandings of the Holocaust and its representation. The most well-known of these texts is Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night. First published in French in 1958 following Wiesel’s revisions to his scathing Yiddish version that censured the non-Jewish world for its inaction during the Holocaust, Night achieved a level of popularity after its 1960 English publication that had not been seen since Anne Frank’s diary. It describes the experience of fifteen-year-old Eliezer during World War II, from his childhood in Transylvania through the German occupation of Hungary in 1944 to his eventual deportation to Auschwitz and later Buchenwald. Hailed as a work of depth and darkness by critics and lay readers alike, Night maintains its place as a landmark in the evolution of Holocaust narration. It is also the first in a long line of memoirs for young readers that employs metaphor in particular ways, relying on figurative language as a literary tool rather than a lived reality.

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Wiesel departs from the narrative mutability demonstrated by wartime writers like Anne Frank to establish a distinct genre with identifiable patterns and structures: the young adult Holocaust memoir. Responding to critics of imaginative fiction as well as developing trends in Holocaust representation, this literature fixed the memoir as the primary and most appropriate means of communicating the events and experiences of the Holocaust to young people. A generally more rigid set of parameters governed the writing of those who lived through the Holocaust and chose to write about their harrowing experiences after the war; artistic embellishment in their work was largely considered unnecessary or distracting by milder critics, and offensive, sacrilegious, or even dangerous by harsher ones such as Wiesel.11 He thus uses metaphor in ways that necessarily adhere and contribute to the literary rigidity of his time, while simultaneously challenging and questioning the boundaries of the memoir genre. Given Night’s status as a popular and critical success, as well as its reliance on figurative devices (even as its author decries their use in other works), it is important to examine how Wiesel narrates his own life to such effect that the text has been labeled “beyond criticism.”12 Wiesel erects certain pillars of artistry in Night to enhance his story and communicate his experiences; they also establish a form of imaginative writing within an avowedly testimonial piece of literature that becomes a kind of template for authors writing children’s Holocaust memoirs in the years to follow such as Aranka Siegal, Johanna Reiss, Ruth Minsky Sender, and Livia Bitton-Jackson. The second phase of the figurative continuum is thus characterized by representational devices used with cautious deliberation: images to augment memory and metaphors to augment facts. One of the central figurative pillars in Night is the final image in the text: that of the corpse in the mirror. Visibility and invisibility are prominent themes for Wiesel throughout Night as he details his traumatic encounter with the violence and despair of “never-ending” night.13 After miraculously surviving life in Auschwitz, the horrific death march to Buchenwald, the disease, violence, and malnutrition of the camps, and his father’s death months before liberation, Eliezer finds himself in front of a hospital mirror: “From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me” (Night, 115). Eliezer is completely dissociated from the self he sees; his identity as a teenage boy and scholar has been effaced, replaced by a dead body that is paradoxically living, breathing, and looking. The reflection before Eliezer bears no resemblance to the self that he inhabits, and from whose perspective he has written the memoir. This fragmentation of identity not only links Wiesel to Frank, but also precipitates and necessitates one of the most well-known and effective metaphors of the text. For Wiesel, the rupture between himself and the corpse in the mirror, seen finally as two separate beings, is a violent and torturous one. He has been involuntarily rent from himself, and the conclusion of the text suggests that

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unity of his two selves is possible neither in the present of the hospital nor in the future of the survivor-as-author.14 Both Eliezer and Wiesel become in this final scene fractured and fragmented third-person observers, one reflecting on the horrors of his teenage years, the other gazing at that reflection and finding it irreconcilable to the world of the living. The unrelenting, haunting memory of the trauma never leaves Wiesel, nor does the “look” of the corpse that is and always will be himself. Eliezer has been rendered invisible not by choice, but by the circumstances of his life during the Holocaust. However, there is a paradox at play in this final image. By writing about his own invisibility and that of his family, friends, and acquaintances, Wiesel is in fact fashioning the people in his life as visible, again and forever. They become characters, granted (or limited to) life within the pages of his memoir. Faced with the narrative impediment of Auschwitz and the silence that many feel it demands, Wiesel is forced into a decision either to testify, and therefore create representations, or to remain silent and risk losing the agonizing memories of his family and others who perished in the Holocaust. Wiesel’s ultimate choice, perhaps the survivor-as-author’s version of Lawrence Langer’s “choiceless choice,” is one that simultaneously obliterates and preserves the identity of those he is trying to represent.15 “The event robbed man of all masks,” said Wiesel in a 1977 lecture at Northwestern University, and yet Night’s conclusion argues for the necessity of masks in the representation of the Holocaust.16 His father and the other characters depicted in the memoir wear the masks that Wiesel has devised in order to portray them through language. They will never be the actual people that Wiesel remembers, resisting a kind of ontological reality; they are metaphors, existing only behind the mask of representation itself. This is the case with all documentary and life writing, but the issue of authenticity and its relation to representation acquires a particularly urgent and conflicted quality in the field of Holocaust literature following the publication of Night. Wiesel himself argues for the importance of authenticity even while engaging in the necessary work of the imagination to recreate and render his past experiences present. Despite Wiesel’s urging against the fictionalization of the Holocaust, his work (which includes reconstructed dialogue, merging of characters and scenarios, and awareness of narrative theme and climax) illustrates that authenticity and imagination are not antithetical.

Maus as a Fulcrum: The Literalization of Metaphor The 1980s and early 1990s saw a monumental shift in the representation of the Holocaust in literature for children and young adults. While the rigidity of the memoir genre, in part instigated and curated by Elie Wiesel in the two decades following the publication of Night, continued to flourish, children’s authors also began experimenting widely with figurative dynamics and imaginative representations of the Holocaust. A number of factors contributed to this change, including chronological displacement from the Holocaust as an

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event, the incorporation of a kind of postmodern self-consciousness through metanarrative, and, notably, the introduction of “second generation” writers of the Holocaust. For many of these writers, figurative devices no longer merely served an epistemological purpose within Holocaust texts for children; they became ontological realities. Metaphors were substantiated, abstract concepts actualized, and fantasies interwoven with facts in order to represent the experience of the Holocaust for a new generation of readers. Art Spiegelman’s Maus, as the fulcrum of the figurative continuum of youth Holocaust literature, maintains a connection to the work that preceded it while illuminating and broadening possibilities of future Holocaust representation. Spiegelman incorporates aspects of Frank’s experimentation with personification and Wiesel’s use of memoir and masks into Maus, placing it in an already established tradition of Holocaust literature. However, through the realization of his central metaphor, in which Jews are represented as mice, Germans as cats, and all other people as various animal species, he vaulted Holocaust literature into a realm that was largely unexplored. In Maus, Jews are no longer said to be like mice, they actually are mice, a crucial distinction that transforms a simile into a reality.17 The spatial and temporal remove from the Holocaust may have contributed to Spiegelman’s willingness to depart from traditional modes of storytelling in the 1980s. A certain freedom pervades his work that would have been out of place in the canon of memoirs solidified by Wiesel. As the Holocaust became an increasingly distant memory during the 1980s and 1990s, new narrative strategies were required to make the imaginative leap back to the horrors of World War II. Metaphor thus became a kind of referential bridge for those who, like Spiegelman, united their imagination with the stories of others to represent the Holocaust. The unimaginable, in this case, was imagined in order for Holocaust literature to continue. One of the ways this imagination is enacted in children’s Holocaust literature is the self-conscious disintegration of seemingly monolithic narrative structures. Spiegelman employs certain techniques of postmodernism that highlight an awareness of the constructedness of his work. In Maus, this is conveyed not only through the text’s central animal conceit, but also through Spiegelman’s progressive deconstruction and questioning of that conceit. Spiegelman experiments with form and content in his graphic literary work, pushing the boundaries of taste and interest to explore the contours of the comic book form. In doing so, he narrates both his father’s story before, during, and after the war and his own reception, understanding, and experience of that story as a child of Holocaust survivors. Spiegelman’s use of metaphor lays the groundwork for the transmission of an account that apparently could not be (and certainly was not) narrated any other way. Metaphors that had previously been strictly used and prescribed in Holocaust literature now took on new life. In contrast to Wiesel’s use of metaphor as a comparative tool to render authentic the facts of his experience and enhance the verisimilitude of his narrative, Spiegelman accepts the artifice

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of his premise; he does not merely compare but makes literal the metaphor that Jews were mice, Germans cats, and Poles pigs during the Holocaust. He reaches into the realm of the fantastic to clarify and draw attention to the composition of his ostensibly true story, and in doing so, facilitates previously unexplored representational possibilities. In this way, Spiegelman aligns himself more with Frank than Wiesel, expanding on her personification of the diary with the reification of metaphor in Maus. Wartime Holocaust writing such as Frank’s diary was a space of literary experimentation while Wiesel’s work and other postwar memoirs helped to circumscribe the ways that figurative devices could be used in youth Holocaust literature. Following these phases, Maus drastically altered, revised, and challenged Holocaust literature for a new generation of readers. The text convincingly demonstrates the value of including and acknowledging the figurative dynamics at play in literary Holocaust representation, and in doing so gains access to storytelling devices that had seldom been considered before. Both the literalization of metaphor and the distinctive comic form contribute to this access, as Michael P. Rothberg argues: “By situating a nonfictional story in a highly mediated, unreal, ‘comic’ space, Spiegelman captures the hypersensitivity of Auschwitz – at once more real than real and more impossible than impossible.”18 Spiegelman’s answer to the impossibility of Holocaust writing, put forth by Wiesel and many other critics, is to highlight and heighten the figurative dynamics that are already operating in any kind of literature, especially that which addresses trauma, violence, war, and genocide.

Fairy Tales and Figurative Dynamics Roughly contemporaneous with Spiegelman is Jane Yolen, a pivotal author of youth Holocaust literature who transformed the genre through her use of fairy tales, time travel, and other figurative dynamics. Her early texts are occupied with many of the same issues as Spiegelman’s Maus: She depicts presence and absence through the connective tissues of narrative and metaphor that grant passage from the present to the past and back again. Yolen’s two young adult Holocaust novels, The Devil’s Arithmetic (1988) and Briar Rose (1992), were published at almost exactly the same time as Spiegelman’s two volumes of Maus and exemplify the trend of postmodern, postmemorial works that use figurative devices to experiment with genre and communicate some aspect of the Holocaust to young people.19 Although Yolen was not a child of Holocaust survivors, much of her complex work aligns her with Spiegelman and other writers of the “second generation” seeking a way to connect with events that they themselves did not experience but feel compelled to remember. Yolen finds fruitful ground for the exploration of controversial themes in both texts through her actualization of metaphor, trauma, and fairy tales. Despite being rooted in historical fact, Yolen’s texts are self-consciously fictional, and she experiments with the ways that fact and fiction can intertwine to reveal certain aspects of the Holocaust that might otherwise be difficult

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or even impossible to represent. This embrace of fictionality has resulted in debate over how much embellishment and artistic license is permissible in children’s Holocaust literature and whether the ultimate result of such fiction could be Holocaust denial. Phyllis Lassner and Danny M. Cohen argue that “while fantasy and fairy tale elements offer accessibility for young audiences to learn about the brutal and incomprehensible extremes of the Holocaust, they may also undermine its grim historicity.”20 This debate is especially fraught in the realm of children’s and young adult literature, where concerns about traumatizing children with the horrors of the Holocaust often play a central role. A response to these difficult issues can be found in one of the other ways Yolen’s texts differ from Spiegelman’s: the generational divide. While Spiegelman’s text focuses on Art as a child of Holocaust survivors, both of Yolen’s works position members of the so-called third generation as protagonists. As Victoria Aarons argues, third-generation Holocaust narratives often involve “return journeys – both physical and imagined – to the sites of traumatic origin […and] reveal attempts to comprehend, give voice to, and demystify the ‘unimaginable,’ unrepresentable fracture of the Holocaust.”21 Yolen’s texts, especially Briar Rose, adhere to this definition as the protagonist Becca travels to Poland to unravel the mystery of her grandmother’s survival during World War II. For Yolen, fiction facilitates connection to a memorial truth; in her own words, “subversive recountings of the Holocaust can make even more real what – at the remove of fifty years – seems not real. Magic is like that.”22 In connecting with a generation to whom the Holocaust is almost unbelievable in scope and experience, Briar Rose uses magic, fantasy, and fairy tales to emphasize the value of remembering and storytelling. In Briar Rose, Becca is a young Jewish journalist determined to discover the truth of her recently deceased grandmother’s Holocaust experiences at Chelmno and as a partisan. One of the ways in which Briar Rose differs from other third-generation texts is that Becca’s grandmother Gemma can only communicate her personal history through retellings of the fairy tale, “Briar Rose.” This frame is both a strategy of traumatic deferral and a metaphor for Gemma’s Holocaust experience, but as Becca slowly discovers, also translates into the literal. From the code names (the Polish Kziȩźnicka or Princess for Gemma) to the thorns (barbed wire), from the mist (poison gas) to the kiss (mouth-to-mouth resuscitation), the actualization of metaphor in Briar Rose makes the fairy tale concretely real. Just as Yolen asks readers to question their assumptions about the familiar story, “Briar Rose,” she also upends their expectations, based on that story, of a neat conclusion and the reinforcement of hopeful Holocaust narratives. For example, Yolen belatedly reveals that the heroic Prince of the story responsible for kissing the Princess awake is not sexually or romantically attracted to the Princess at all; he is Josef Potocki, a persecuted homosexual aristocrat who eventually joins a partisan band in the forests of Poland. The object of Josef’s desire is in fact a male partisan who is revealed to have been Becca’s grandfather. Josef’s interest in the Princess,

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Gemma, is therefore as a friend, a fellow partisan, and a gassed and ­near-dead Jew whom he desperately wants to save. The fabled kiss that concludes the grand romance of the fairy tale is Josef’s mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, reviving Gemma from the otherwise deadly effects of carbon monoxide gas. Yolen thus problematizes elements of the “Briar Rose” narrative that rely on the original conclusion of the narrative. Yolen’s greatest use and manipulation of the fairy tale, however, arrives after the conclusion of the text itself. In an Author’s Note, Yolen’s paratext communicates important details that contest the fairy-tale notions that Briar Rose ostensibly supports: The town of Chelmno exists. There may be a priest there, but I have not met him. There may be good people there. I have never heard them interviewed. This is a book of fiction. All the characters are made up. Happy-ever-after is a fairy-tale notion, not history. I know of no woman who escaped from Chelmno alive.23

By including this unsettling coda, Yolen highlights the artifice of her narrative by both upholding and undermining the story that the reader has just concluded. This is achieved initially by her signaling to the reader that the characters, significantly the helpful or atoning people in Chelmno, are pure invention.24 Possibly more important than this notification of fictionality is the question of Gemma’s survival. Within the context of the Briar Rose narrative, Gemma unquestionably survived Chelmno, for she lived to have children and grandchildren (including Becca) years later. However, the paratext also suggests that the story of this one sleeping Princess is not, was not, and could not be true. The Author’s Note is a chilling pronouncement that the story of Briar Rose is patently false; as many characters repeat (and as the historical record proves), no women survived Chelmno. Adrienne Kertzer convincingly argues that Yolen’s paratextual strategy “give[s] child readers a double narrative, one that simultaneously respects our need for hope and happy endings even as it teaches us a different lesson about history” (Mother’s Voice, 75). Yolen’s version of the moral at the end of a fairy tale is thus a dark reminder of historical truths that cannot be ignored. As with the incomplete resolution to Frank’s diary and Wiesel’s haunting conclusion to Night, the end of Briar Rose engages with the uncertain terrain of Holocaust representation for young people, questioning the possibility of happy endings.

The Holocaust as a Metaphor In the wake of Yolen’s work, authors of early twenty-first-century fantasy series altered the landscape of children’s Holocaust literature by exploring (and in some cases exploiting) new intersections between the figurative and the literal. The Holocaust was transformed from what was thought of as an

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unspeakable and unknowable event that required allegory or metaphor to aid in its transmission (as seen in the works of Wiesel, Spiegelman, and Yolen) to an allegory or metaphor for other, often fantastical stories that were apparently unrelated to World War II. In assuming that the Holocaust is a known quantity, fashioning it as such in their texts, or relying on parents, teachers, or older readers to explain historical connections to young audiences, authors like J. K. Rowling and Suzanne Collins use the Holocaust as a literary tool. This transition from the Holocaust as subject to the Holocaust as object represents a radical change in the ways that figurative dynamics influence the narration of the Holocaust in texts for young people. In series such as Harry Potter and The Underland Chronicles, the Holocaust itself becomes the literary technique rather than the communicative goal, the means rather than the end. Such fashioning of the Holocaust as a formal device deflects attention away from it, for Rowling and Collins do not explicitly address the events of World War II. To proponents of strictly factual or testimonial Holocaust literature such as Elie Wiesel, the manipulation of the details and experiences of the Nazi genocide would likely be viewed as disrespectful, unethical, or blasphemous. Nonetheless, many authors freely use the Holocaust as a referential figurative tool in their exploration of race, war, and discrimination; this can be seen throughout the Harry Potter series in the form of Muggle persecution, treatment of non-human magical creatures, and the Nazi-like policies of Grindelwald, Voldemort, and the Death Eaters. If allegorical references to the Holocaust are recognized, such texts provide potentially useful historical lessons; if not, they lose contextual significance and as a result decentralize the Holocaust. Authors like Rowling and Collins do not attempt to narrate the story of the Holocaust and, in treating it as a trope or device to be used at will, risk erasing the specificity of the event itself. A new form of children’s Holocaust literature has therefore developed in the last twenty years that departs not only from the documentary memoirs of the postwar period but also from the metaphorical representations of the Holocaust found in Spiegelman’s and Yolen’s work. This is not to say that documentary memoirs and metaphorical representations did not also continue, nor that there were no other ways to narrate the Holocaust for young people.25 However, in terms of the evolution of figurative dynamics and imaginative innovation in children’s Holocaust literature, fantasy series represent a foray into hitherto unexplored methods of representing the Holocaust. Beginning with Collins’s Gregor the Overlander in 2003, The Underland Chronicles’ use of themes, ideas, and facts drawn from World War II make it an excellent example of Holocaust familiarity in contemporary culture: The Holocaust assumes a place alongside other historical events and metaphors as a tool that can be referenced without being explained. Racial purity, discrimination, persecution, and genocide are explored in The Underland Chronicles, and fantastical elements of the plot are placed in a real-world context with real-world consequences. As Collins describes on her Web site, “no magic, no

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space or time travel, there’s just a ticket to another world behind your clothes dryer.”26 Gregor, following his toddling younger sister Boots, falls through a laundry grate to discover a vast domain beneath New York City populated by pale humans, rats, bats, cockroaches, and other anthropomorphized creatures. In this foreign and immense Underland, Gregor is faced with battles, bloodshed, and complicated intra- and inter-species allegiances.27 Collins’s series acknowledges the political, cultural, and racial machinations and ramifications of war, and the ability (or inability) of children to cope with such trauma. Collins’s allegorical use of the Holocaust in the series is obvious to any reader who has even a basic knowledge of World War II. To those who do not, Collins positions the ambiguously allied rat, Ripred, as the sole possessor and purveyor of historical knowledge. When Gregor and his companions discover that a group of mice have been herded by rats off the edge of a tunnel cliff to their deaths, allusions to Nazi methods of mass killing become pronounced. Imagery borrowed from the ravine shootings by the Einsatzgruppen, the rock quarry murders at Mauthausen, and the lethal gas vans at Chelmno positions the mouse slaughter as the Underland parallel of the Holocaust. Collins’s choice of mouse victims places her text in conversation with Art Spiegelman’s Maus. However, while Spiegelman makes explicit metaphorical use of mice to represent Jews, Collins makes implicit metaphorical use of Jews to represent mice; she evokes the Holocaust to add weight and depth to her tale of inter-species genocide. Eventually, Gregor is forced to confront the very real enactment of this genocide as he and his questing companions approach a volcano and, unable to intervene, witness the gruesome murder of dozens if not hundreds of mice in an enclosed pit: “Every last mouse left in the pit had collapsed in a heap…The mice were rolling on the ground, pawing at the air, at their necks, their bodies wracked with terrible spasms…They went into convulsions, teeth snapping on empty air, claws lashing out to battle an enemy they couldn’t see.”28 Gregor and his friends realize too late that poisonous, colorless, and odorless gas from the volcano is being pumped into the pit and suffocating the mice. Reflecting on this gruesome extermination, most of the companions are disbelieving; despite having seen the genocide enacted firsthand, they cannot reconcile it with their knowledge of the Underland. When one of them comments that the scene they have witnessed has no precedent, Ripred grimly replies, “This has too much precedent” (Marks, 295). He is clearly aware of the historical facts of the Holocaust but does not elaborate on them for the benefit of his companions. Readers likewise are left without obvious connections between the Nazi genocide of Jews and the rat genocide of mice; those who have already learned about the Holocaust will likely understand Ripred’s comment while those who have not can continue reading in ignorance of it. Ripred’s grasp of Overland history is relevant only as it relates to the present circumstances of the Underland. Gregor and his companions therefore view the mouse extermination as the fulfillment of a fabled prophecy and a further

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cause for nationalism and war, but do not knowingly correlate the Underland genocide with the Holocaust. According to Collins’s series, then, genocide is not at a remove from the historical, emotional, or racial knowledge of children. However, nowhere does Collins signal that the Holocaust is her subject; an Author’s Note in the style of Yolen and many other writers of children’s literature who draw on the events of World War II is conspicuous in its absence. Perhaps problematically then, Collins uses the Holocaust to demonstrate the presence of violence, death, trauma, and persecution in the world, a presence that must be incorporated, using diverse narrative strategies, into children’s understandings of that world. She eschews the context and specificity of the Holocaust in favor of its distortion to make a broader point about war and, in doing so, narrates a gripping fantasy story about political, geographical, and emotional exploration that only implicitly relates to the Holocaust.

Conclusion Given this potential for Holocaust distortion or absence in contemporary children’s fantasy series, what are the imaginative possibilities for the next phase of the figurative continuum? Will the Holocaust lose all specificity in children’s literature, eschewing particularized knowledge of the Nazi genocide? Although there is no definitive answer to these contentious questions, the continuum of figurative dynamics provides a useful framework for analyzing the trajectory of youth Holocaust literature thus far. Holocaust literature for young people has progressed from wide experimentation with figurative devices during the war years through narrowly defined rules of representation in postwar memoirs to renewed interest in the realization of metaphor. It is clear that, during the fourth phase of the continuum in which the Holocaust has been fashioned into a literary tool, imaginative and artistic motivations trump pedagogical or historical goals. While children’s and young adult literature has and continues to explore and innovate Holocaust representation, it also demonstrates the evolving narration of distressing events and experiences such as genocide, war, and loss to young people. As has been demonstrated in this chapter, such a pressing concern comes to fruition in the pages of children’s books, some of which have been well-studied and others of which have been relatively neglected in the wider scholarship of Holocaust literature. Poised on the cusp of a new phase in the continuum of figurative dynamics, the Holocaust is at risk of becoming part of a mythologized past, standing alongside other genocides and catastrophes as a pliable and narratable historical event. The Holocaust has the potential to become something generally remembered and particularly forgotten. It is therefore of crucial importance to examine the figurative dynamics that inform the contested but polysemous and ever-changing genre that is youth Holocaust literature. In narrating stories of death and destruction, figurative dynamics are the means by which a diary, corpse, princess, or mouse can come to life.

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Notes







1. Adrienne Kertzer, My Mother’s Voice: Children, Literature, and the Holocaust (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2002), 39. 2. Betty Bacon, How Much Truth Do We Tell the Children? The Politics of Children’s Literature (Minneapolis: MEP Publishing, 1988), i. 3. Lydia Kokkola, Representing the Holocaust in Children’s Literature (New York: Routledge, 2003), 3. 4. See Hamida Bosmajian, Sparing the Child: Grief and the Unspeakable in Youth Literature About Nazism and the Holocaust (New York: Routledge, 2002). 5. Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank: The Revised Critical Edition (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 197. 6. Amy Hungerford, The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 104. 7. Although Frank links her literal death with the cessation of the metaphor, Roland Barthes’s formal conception of the death of the author is also at work in her diary. See Rachel Feldhay Brenner, “Writing Herself Against History: Anne Frank’s Self-Portrait as a Young Artist,” Modern Judaism 16, no. 2 (May 1996): 105–130. 8. See Sara R. Horowitz, “Literary Afterlives of Anne Frank,” in Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory, eds. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jeffrey Shandler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012). 9. Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), 145. 10. Theodor Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (London: Neville Spearman, 1967), 34. 11.  Wiesel repeatedly stated that there is no such thing as literature of the Holocaust, much less fiction of the Holocaust. See Alvin H. Rosenfeld’s engagement with this idea in A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980). 12.  A. Alvarez, “The Literature of the Holocaust,” Commentary 35, no. 5 (November 1964): 65. 13. Elie Wiesel, Night, trans. Marion Wiesel (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 98. 14. See Ellen S. Fine, Legacy of Night: The Literary Universe of Elie Wiesel (Albany: SUNY Press, 1982); Zoe Waxman, Writing the Holocaust: Memory, Testimony, Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 15. Lawrence Langer, Versions of Survival: The Holocaust and the Human Spirit (Albany: SUNY Press, 1982), 72. 16.  Elie Wiesel, “The Holocaust as Literary Inspiration,” in Dimensions of the Holocaust: Lectures at Northwestern University (Evanston: Northwestern University, 1977), 6. 17. Spiegelman also self-consciously complicates his representation of Jews: they possess mouse heads and tails, but have hands and feet, walk upright, communicate with human language, and wear clothes. 18.  Michael Rothberg, “‘We Were Talking Jewish’: Art Spiegelman’s Maus as ‘Holocaust’ Production,” in Considering Maus: Approaches to Art Spiegelman’s “Survivor’s Tale” of the Holocaust, ed. Deborah R. Geis (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003), 143.

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19. Though Yolen’s most recent young adult text, Mapping the Bones (2018), is her first Holocaust novel in over twenty-five years, it does not engage in the kind of formal, generic, or figurative experimentation that characterizes her early works. 20.  Phyllis Lassner and Danny M. Cohen, “Magical Transports and Transformations,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 33, no. 2 (Fall 2014): 167–168. 21.  Victoria Aarons, ed., Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives: Memory in Memoir and Fiction (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016), xiii. 22.  The remove is now closer to eighty years. Jane Yolen, “Foreword: The Rumpelstiltskin Factor,” in The Fantastic in Holocaust Literature and Film: Critical Perspectives, eds. Judith B. Kerman and John Edgar Browning (Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 2015), 2. 23. Yolen, Briar Rose (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1992), 264. 24. See Adrienne Kertzer’s productive comparisons between Briar Rose and Claude Lanzmann’s documentary film, Shoah. 25. A popular subgenre that could be categorized as historical fiction combines the perceived authenticity of fact with invented characters or scenarios. See Kathy Kacer, Clara’s War (Toronto: Second Story Press, 2001); Carol Matas, Daniel’s Story (New York: Scholastic, 1993); and Lois Lowry, Number the Stars (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989). 26. Suzanne Collins, “Q&A with Suzanne Collins,” Scholastic, http://www.scholastic.com/underlandchronicles/popups/suzannecollins_qanda.htm, accessed 14 January 2019. 27. Suzanne Collins, Gregor the Overlander (New York: Scholastic, 2003), 109. 28. Collins, Gregor and the Marks of Secret (New York: Scholastic, 2006), 289–292.

Bibliography Aarons, Victoria, ed. Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives: Memory in Memoir and Fiction. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016. Adorno, Theodor. Prisms. Translated by Samuel and Shierry Weber. London: Neville Spearman, 1967. Alvarez, A. “The Literature of the Holocaust.” Commentary 38, no. 5 (November 1964): 65. Bacon, Betty, ed. How Much Truth Do We Tell the Children? The Politics of Children’s Literature. Minneapolis: MEP Publishing, 1988. Barthes, Roland. Image Music Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press, 1977. Bitton-Jackson, Livia. I Have Lived a Thousand Years: Growing Up in the Holocaust. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. Bosmajian, Hamida. Sparing the Child: Grief and the Unspeakable in Youth Literature About Nazism and the Holocaust. New York: Routledge, 2002. Brenner, Rachel Feldhay. “Writing Herself Against History: Anne Frank’s Self-Portrait as a Young Artist.” Modern Judaism 16, no. 2 (May 1996): 105–130. Collins, Suzanne. Gregor and the Marks of Secret. New York: Scholastic, 2006. ———. Gregor the Overlander. New York: Scholastic, 2003.

128  J. KRONGOLD ———. “Q&A with Suzanne Collins.” Scholastic. http://www.scholastic.com/ underlandchronicles/popups/suzannecollins_qanda.htm. Accessed 14 January 2019. Fine, Ellen S. Legacy of Night: The Literary Universe of Elie Wiesel. Albany: SUNY Press, 1982. Frank, Anne. The Diary of Anne Frank: The Revised Critical Edition. New York: Doubleday, 2003. Glatshteyn, Yankev. Emil and Karl. 1940. Translated by Jeffrey Shandler. London: Scholastic, 2007. Horowitz, Sara R. “Literary Afterlives of Anne Frank.” In Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory, edited by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jeffrey Shandler. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. Hungerford, Amy. The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Kertzer, Adrienne. My Mother’s Voice: Children, Literature, and the Holocaust. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2002. Kokkola, Lydia. Representing the Holocaust in Children’s Literature. New York: Routledge, 2003. Langer, Lawrence. Versions of Survival: The Holocaust and the Human Spirit. Albany: SUNY Press, 1982. Lassner, Phyllis, and Danny M. Cohen. “Magical Transports and Transformations.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 33, no. 2 (Fall 2014): 167–185. Minsky Sender, Ruth. The Cage. New York: Bantam Books, 1986. Reiss, Johanna. The Upstairs Room. New York: HarperCollins, 1972. Rothberg, Michael. “‘We Were Talking Jewish’: Art Spiegelman’s Maus as ‘Holocaust’ Production.” In Considering Maus: Approaches to Art Spiegelman’s “Survivor’s Tale” of the Holocaust, edited by Deborah R. Geis, 137–158. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003. Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. London: Bloomsbury, 2007. Siegal, Aranka. Upon the Head of a Goat: A Childhood in Hungary 1939–1944. 1968. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1981. Spiegelman, Art. The Complete Maus. New York: Pantheon Books, 2011. Volavková, Hana, ed. I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children’s Drawings and Poems from Terezín Concentration Camp 1942–1944. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962. Waxman, Zoë. Writing the Holocaust: Identity, Testimony, Representation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Wiesel, Elie. “The Holocaust as Literary Inspiration.” In Dimensions of the Holocaust: Lectures at Northwestern University. Evanston: Northwestern University, 1977. ———. Night. 1960. Translated by Marion Wiesel. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006. Yolen, Jane. Briar Rose. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1992. ———. “Foreword: The Rumpelstiltskin Factor.” In The Fantastic in Holocaust Literature and Film: Critical Perspectives, edited by Judith B. Kerman and John Edgar Browning, 1–2. Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 2015.

CHAPTER 8

Jewish Boys on the Run: The Revision of Boyhood in Holocaust Fiction and Film Phyllis Lassner

In her discussion of boyhood on the Hollywood screen, Susan Jeffords ­proposes the following: This linking of a collective, communal renewal with an individual boy’s entry into adulthood expresses a fundamental desire for rebirth, a wish that the arrival of the new man can also be the occasion for the generation of a properly organized society, a return to the kind of golden age that nostalgia can allow us to believe in.1

I begin with this acknowledgment of wishful thinking to argue that the representation of Jewish boyhood in Holocaust fiction and film posits a critical, historical challenge to the nostalgic, timeless coming-of-age boy’s story, and the restoration of a mythical “golden age.” The human, cultural, and ethical void left by Nazi Germany’s totalizing efforts to destroy European Jewish communities and their cultures points the way toward reconsidering the narrative and interpretive meanings of boyhood. I begin by asking, what happens to extant definitions, representations, and meanings of boyhood masculinity, how might they be affected by the history of European Jewish boys whose identities and development into adulthood are besieged by genocide?2 In particular, I consider terrorizing policies and events that shape accounts of Jewish boys’ experiences during the Nazi era, including antisemitic constructions of Jewish masculinity and the attempts of Jewish boy protagonists to survive in hiding their identities, on the run, and in response to survival. As Steven Haynes proffers, “masculinity is socially P. Lassner (*)  Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_8

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constructed (‘shaped by historical circumstances and social discourses […]’), on multiple ‘masculinities’ (‘hegemonic’ and ‘nonhegemonic’) and […] on the relationship between maleness, masculinity, and the exercise of social power” (144). Despite the radical intervention of Holocaust history, to some extent the stories of Jewish boys’ Holocaust experiences follow narrative conventions of boys’ adventure stories in the wild. Young male protagonists in traditional adventure stories endure life and near death ordeals in a variety of treacherous settings, from the isolated and icy Canadian Rockies in Jack London’s 1903 novel Call of the Wild or a desolate island, as in William Golding’s 1954 Lord of the Flies. Despite the threatening unknown and lack of adult support, the inherent intelligence of the boys is typically called into action, producing survival skills that save their lives and inspire either the development of their moral consciousness or its obliteration. Given the popularity of their tales, boy adventurers may forever be imprinted on readers’ imaginations as residing in Neverland, never to be tainted by the temptations of adult sexuality or to deviate from a redemptive social vision. Essentially and irrepressibly imperfect, adventure boy heroes have become beloved canonical figures, such as Kipling’s Kim, Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, Tolkien’s Bilbo Baggins, and George Lucas’s Luke Skywalker.3 The Second World War intervened in this template by constructing a more critical construction of the boy adventurer’s character. For example, in a fiction that was “provoked by the horrors of the Second World War,” Lord of the Flies depicts a group of English schoolboys who become stranded on a deserted island with no adults and no social limits.4 Beginning with good intentions to cooperate, the boys soon devolve into viciousness, scapegoating a fat boy and then vying violently among each other for power. According to Jerry Mosher, “Golding’s novel suggested that evil was not limited to the adult world, for original sin lurked within even the most civilized young men, but in the hardships they endure, it’s difficult to decide which is crueler— nature or mankind” (69). Most recently, fictional representations of boys have complicated their characters and fates by depicting them through “The intersections of boys and class, boys and race, boys and gender identity, boys and social power” (Pomerance and Gateward, Introduction, 9). Jewish boys’ Holocaust escape sagas also share narrative terrain with the tradition of the bildungsroman, as Tarshia L. Stanley’s definition implies: “It has been the literary definition of the bildungsroman to articulate the coming of age of the male child, a process necessarily fraught with exodus and death as the child is divested of the things and people that connected him to his youth.”5 In Jewish boys’ Holocaust narratives, the meanings of divestment, “exodus and death” no longer constitute a universal odyssey toward the assumption of adult responsibility. The vicissitudes of escape from Nazism’s murderous threats mean that opportunities for restoration, evolution, or transformation are shattered. Unlike Dickens’ Pip or George Lucas’s

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Luke Skywalker, who acquire knowledge of good and evil by confronting and overcoming their fathers’ weaknesses or dark transgressions, Jewish boys in such Holocaust novels as Imre Kertész’s Fatelessness or films such as Jan Nĕmec’s Diamond of the Night are forced to confront incontestable evil when they confront all-encompassing Nazi power.6 For Jewish Holocaust boys, there are no social spheres or other worlds in which they can pursue noble goals.7 They are trapped in circumstances that rob them of the time and space in which it might be possible to recall the ethical traditions that inspire conscious moral choices. Most often, hunted or under direct Nazi attack, instead of moral choices, Jewish boys in these accounts are reduced to instinctive searches for the necessities of bare survival—food, shelter, and escape. Psychological complexity or a mythical ordeal that leads to disillusionment and enlightenment is portrayed as the struggle to retain the boys’ besieged Jewish identity. By November 1938 or Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), a European Jewish boy’s entry into adulthood was shattered as Nazi storm troopers set about destroying Jewish communities and their social order throughout Central Europe, and in the invasions of Eastern and Western Europe. While many adults clung to “the desire for rebirth,” for the few boys who escaped or survived the camps, this desire remained embedded in memories of childhood tales that receded and lost their efficacy with each crisis they faced. As Jewish families were torn apart, sons who attempted to escape faced emotional and material loss of the parents who had provided the love, protection, and sense of belonging that would have guided them into communally responsible adulthood. While such losses would have been true for Jewish girls as well, their ability to escape was determined by traditional Jewish constraints, but paramount were Nazi gendered policies regarding German women’s value to the state and symbolized by their Aryan appearance. Based on this model, blond, pretty Jewish girls and women could attempt to hide in plain sight.8 However, they would also have needed external support and documents such as false or forged baptismal certificates, ration cards, and other identity papers.9 In differently gendered terms, the fate of escaping Jewish boys was fraught with their Jewish mark of degeneracy—a boy’s circumcised penis was all too easy to detect and exposure would lead promptly to murder. The imprisoning settings in which Jewish boys struggled to survive encompassed all of Europe, including slave labor and concentration camps, in hiding, passing as nonJews or Aryans, or finding refuge in the Soviet Union, as did Solomon Perel. Perel’s memoir Europa, Europa charts his rescue into a Soviet orphanage as short lived, however, ending with the German invasion.10 Not only was safety never guaranteed, but the loss of family and community and the personal identity they had endowed left a psychological and cultural void that signaled an irreplaceable part of themselves. As Margarete Feinstein reports,

132  P. LASSNER Virtually all the survivors faced the world without grandparents, parents or older siblings. For the majority, their adolescence had been interrupted, depriving them of the opportunity to experiment with gender roles and courtship within the safety of their communities and families.11

Although many films depict the fates of Jewish boys in the Holocaust, I focus on Rachel Seiffert’s 2017 novel A Boy in Winter and Pepe Danquart’s 2013 film Run Boy Run, adapted from the 2000 novel of the same title by Uri Orlev which narrates the Holocaust escape experiences of Yoram Fridman.12 Among several similar features that invite comparative study, the protagonists in both Seiffert’s novel and Danquart’s film struggle to survive on the run, having left their parents who have been rounded up by the Nazi invaders of their villages. In Danquart’s film, eight-year-old Srulik runs from the Nazis only because his father commands him to. In Seiffert’s novel, thirteen-year-old Yankel escapes with his younger brother on his own initiative, without informing their parents. With historical certainty, both narratives show that to remain with their families would have ensured death for all. While all three boys survive, their escapades stonewall the normative developmental stages posited by pediatrician M. Michael Thaler when he spoke to a conference of Holocaust survivors and scholars: “Children exist in a psychological space of reflected meaning and worth” in which they learn “to take responsibility for the acts of others” and begin “to formulate a relationship with the world.”13 The world confronted by the Jewish boy escapees has foreclosed their social development by rejecting them along with their cultural traditions which have been erased. In turn, the historical catastrophe that destroyed the European Jewish world also questioned “the meaning and worth” of those qualities with which boys have been endowed in literature and film, from Huck Finn and Oliver Twist through Francois Truffaut’s film character Antoine Doinel and Chris MacKay’s 2017 Lego Batman Movie. Murray Pomerance and Frances Gateward outline these boyhood characterizations as they appear on screen: unruly tikes, agents of aggression, symbols of the collapse of the civilized forces of nature as contradistinguished from refined products of socialization and control. Inherent in screen boyishness has been a disregard for limitation, a spontaneous expression of freedom, a mocking wit, in general a stylishly choreographed antisocial impulse. (“Introduction,” 5)

Underlining the unruliness of these fictional boys is an innocence that regardless of their transgressions is designed to appeal to audience sympathy and hope for their redemption. Nazi ideology, as embedded in Seiffert’s and Danquart’s narratives, found Jewish boys guilty from the moment of conception. Rather than representing a core or essential element that characterizes a generic or universal mythic boyhood, the qualities listed in the above quote emerge as the Jewish boys’

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calculated responses to their mortal danger. If the boys in Seiffert’s and Danquart’s texts exhibit “antisocial” impulses and “a mocking wit,” these are shown to be survival strategies in the face of limitations imposed by Nazi tyranny, not by the social and political structures of their communities. Their mockery targets their oppressors while enacting the psychic preservation of the boys’ sense of self. These responses do symbolize “the collapse of the civilized forces of nature,” but in historical and political terms, not as mythic or ecological signs that indicate inherent moral flaws leading to the dissolution of a golden age. Instead, the characters and fates of Jewish boys in Holocaust representations reflect the draconian practices of the Nazi state for which the destruction of the Jews and their culture is a political necessity. Alon Confino proffers that as the Nazis set out to build an empire based on the systematic persecution and extermination of groups of people – the greater the need for a new national story to make sense of what was happening. According to this story the Jews reflected a historical past – historical origins, to be exact – that needed to be extirpated in order for a new Germany to arise. To create a Nazi civilization, a new European order and form of Christianity, Jewish civilization had to be removed. Germany’s historical origins needed to be purified down to the Jews’ shared past with Christianity via the canonical text.14

The dangers Nazism found in the origins of Jewish civilization are inscribed in The Hebrew Bible, the canonical text to which Confino refers. In Genesis 14.24, “the LORD” responds to Abraham’s despair at being childless: “‘Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them’. And He added, ‘So shall your offspring be’.”15 If the new Germany were to supersede all other civilizations, the sacred Jewish text, with its promise of boundless Jewish regeneration, had to be expunged along with the Jewish people. In both A Boy in Winter and Run Boy Run, the moment of the boys’ escape from Nazi occupiers establishes their characters as a question about the relationship between basic survival and the survival of Jewish identity, culture, and continuity. A Boy in Winter features two brothers identified as Yankel and his younger brother Momik. Momik’s age is unspecified but their father indicates that Yankel is thirteen, significant as the age of Bar Mitzvah, when Jewish boys celebrate their entry into adulthood as fully responsible members of their Jewish communities, upholding their ethical values and religious practices. Seiffert sets her novel in Ukraine which before the Second World War was the third largest Jewish community in Europe, ranking fifth in the world.16 In the half year that frames the novel, from November 1941 through early 1942, the Germans are engaged in building roads to expedite Operation Barbarossa, which, in its push into Soviet Russia, would fire the opening shots of the Jewish genocide. Like almost all others across Europe, this fictional Ukrainian Jewish community is on the brink of destruction and

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like Srulik in Run Boy Run, the escape of Yankel and Momik evokes an apocalyptic finality—a last chance for Jewish survival and regeneration. The ability of Yankel and Srulik to fulfill their responsibilities as Jewish adults remains challenged, however, throughout Seiffert’s novel and Danquart’s film. In their respective narratives, the two boys learn that survival is an ongoing but destabilizing process that tests their commitment to Jewish identity and historical consciousness. The escape of Srulik, the protagonist of Run Boy Run, is set into motion when his father gently pushes him away and uses himself as a decoy, sacrificing his life to help the boy survive. Their parting embrace signals imminent loss, which as it echoes in each crisis marking the trajectory of Srulik’s escape, creates a faltering sense of time that keeps replicating loss. Pressing ahead but with the relentless threat of losing ground conveys the near impossibility of rescue, the development of the boy’s self-determination, and the reclamation of Jewish continuity. Although Srulik has absorbed his father’s directives as the only stable guide, they are contested with each terror and even each support the boy encounters over the three years of his ordeal: “Forget your name and mother and father, but never forget that you’re a Jew, even though you must hide it.” Reverberating with the phrasing of biblical injunction, the meanings of Srulik’s saga are tethered to the interlacing of the ancient Jewish past and the genocidal present. Although his life is threatened with every mile he endures, hiding his Jewish identity and then reclaiming it represent Srulik’s greatest challenges as well as that of his narrative.

The Perils of Jewish Boyhood Masculinity For Srulik, Yankel, and Momik, as for all Jewish boys and men caught in the Nazi vise, the sole feature of their Jewish identity that cannot be disguised is their circumcised penis. Because circumcision marks a covenant between Jews and God, a foundational tradition uniting Jewish generations, in Nazi ideology and practice, the murder of Jewish men signified the desired end of Jewish regeneration and culture. In the film Europa, Europa, based on Solomon Perel’s Holocaust escape memoir, the boy’s “Baltic” Aryan good looks, German language fluency, and bravery in battle have ensured his acceptance at a Nazi military school and recognition as a Nazi boy hero.17 Nonetheless, Perel’s Jewish identity is depicted as ineffaceable when he is driven to excruciating measures to disguise it. His attempt to create a foreskin must, of course, fail. He does, however, largely through luck, remain undiscovered. Danquart emphasizes the danger of exposing Srulik’s circumcised penis throughout Run Boy Run. The boy is warned never to lower his pants, but in a “spontaneous expression of freedom,” nourished by the Polish family which has sheltered him, he joins a boys’ peeing contest with irrepressible glee. His “disregard for limitations” only exposes the limits imposed on his Jewish identity, and he is expelled from the farm where protection is no

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longer possible. In another scene, when a Nazi officer orders him to drop his pants, Srulik retorts that his circumcision resulted from surgery to cure an infection. On this occasion and when he repeats it later, he has no chance of being believed. In contrast to films that have been interpreted as either “deny[ing] the Jewish boy as a sexual being” or depicting their “inscrutable” sexuality, Holocaust texts represent the circumcised Jewish penis as a blatant sign of the Nazi obsession with Jewish male sexuality.18 For the Nazis, the circumcised penis represented the depravity of Jewish men. Sander Gilman traces this obsession to late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century antisemitic ideology: “The Jew remains the representation of the male as outsider, the act of circumcision marking the Jewish male as sexually apart, as anatomically different.”19 With “deviant genitalia, the genitalia not under the control of the moral, rational conscience,” the sexuality of the Jewish male is “diseased” and “polluting” (Gilman, 124). In Holocaust narratives, the Nazi demonization of Jewish male sexuality frequently explodes into a spectacle of antisemitic fervor. Complete with overwhelming bystander approval, including derisive laughter and jeers, scenes portraying public humiliation of the Jewish male and his circumcised penis suggest that in Nazi racial ideology, Jewish tradition is “the source of corruption,” motivating the Nazi destruction of Jewish culture (Gilman, 123).

“We Have to Find Somewhere. We Have to.”20 Isolated from their communities and adult expectations, preternaturally innocent, but congenitally depraved in the eyes of the Nazis, in order to survive, Seiffert’s and Danquart’s Jewish boys must make their way through the treacherous forests and marshlands of Ukraine and Poland, respectively. Nearly vanquished many times by snowstorms, icy rain, and the vicissitudes of unknown terrain and hostile bystanders, the boys are always on the verge of succumbing to starvation and illness, all the while being hounded by Nazi trackers and their dogs. In both the novel and film, the landscape is depicted as so hostile as to metonymically become another instrument of Nazi torture. Seasonal changes, from one extreme to another, suggest that the Nazi invasion has denatured the landscape and churned the climate. From the alternating perspectives of Seiffert’s Yasia, a young Ukrainian peasant, and Yankel, and Momik, their trek across the Ukrainian marshland animates the open but claustrophobic landscape as an enemy: Yankel comes to a stand-still on the mud, and he finds the land before him is sodden and empty. He can see no track, no path that he should follow. Just the lifting darkness, all the distance still to be covered. Dawn is a cold line at the horizon, and the wind cuts into his face and fingers. Momik cries against his shoulders, crying at the cold: he can’t help himself. (198)

136  P. LASSNER Drips fall from above, from the mossy curls dangling from the branches, as she waits for the rain to pass over. Yasia has no dry wood for a fire, even if she dared light one; no dry ground to lie on. The smaller one dozes, held in his brother’s arms, soft mouth open. Not the older one, though: he is wakeful […] Legs drawn up, he shields his young brother from the worst of the wet – and all the time he is watching, searching the chill and dripping scrub around them. He is listening out, Yasia thinks. (199)

The emptiness of the land, like that in Run Boy Run, is an illusion. It is actually filled with promises of entrapment, arrest, and of being a pathway to safety. Paths in fact disappear; sinking into mud or snow and ice, they assume an uncanny sense of agency, challenging the very idea of the boys’ survival. The land which the Jews have inhabited for centuries now registers their traumatic response to the probability of their extinction. The chill empties Yankel’s mind of everything except the anxious watchfulness and “same twist of fear and rage” that began with his parents being “hauled” away (Winter, 197). Aside from Momik’s crying and the sound of rain dripping off the tree moss, silence permeates, but not as a metonym of Holocaust unrepresentability. Instead, silence is the language of escape, as it is in Jan Nĕmec’s 1964 Czech film Diamonds of the Night, which also features two brothers running from Nazi capture through perilous woodlands, swamps, and rocky terrain. Like Seiffert’s novel, Nĕmec’s film substitutes foreboding silence and visual images of an ominous, denaturalized landscape to represent the boys’ fearful expectations and responses to the relentless danger of attack or arrest. Whereas Seiffert’s terse narrative in the present tense suggests a continuum of relentless terror, Nĕmec punctuates the boys’ perilous escape with interposed flashes of a boy’s dreams, memories, and fantasies of the scantily remembered past and foreshadowing of a perilous future. The silent image with which Run Boy Run begins, of the boy Srulik, as yet unidentified, lying in a snowbank and then trudging through the resistant snow, suggests that the invasion has transmogrified nature to mirror Nazi brutality. Beaten for trying to steal a man’s jacket, covering his feet with rags, he wanders in the snow while the camera withholds any sign of his whereabouts or of a destination. With no voice or revelation of his thoughts or feelings, Srulik’s character is focalized through his desperate attempts to find food and shelter. Like Yankel, Momik, and Yasia, he finds illusory refuge under trees that offer no protection. Alone on the run in the Polish wilderness, he rarely encounters anyone, and in tracking his movements, the camera characterizes him as isolated from his origins, family, and community, implying that the Jewish continuity on which his development had relied has been replaced with one menacing landscape and season after another. The myth of boys’ journeys to adult responsibility has been superseded by a genre of ­discontinuity—a dystopia. Unlike the character of Srulik, which takes shape through his odyssey, Seiffert prepares us for Yankel’s escape by establishing his character from the

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start. The thirteen-year old is portrayed as unsettled, as chafing against family and community expectations for Jewish boys in small-town Ukraine. Viewed by his father as “the most puzzling of his children. A worry, always,” Yankel “is incapable of following orders” and “can never stand and listen for any length of time without shifting” (A Boy, 62, 67). In contrast to the legendary bookish Jewish boy, the yeshiva bocher, whose days are spent pouring over ancient Jewish texts, from the perspective of his teacher, Yankel “displayed the same restless wish to be elsewhere, outside, anywhere but the classroom” (A Boy, 64). A truant and a risk-taker, with “the will Yankel was born with” (A Boy, 66) and “no sense of his own fragility” (70), he spends his time sleeping outdoors and “returning home unwashed and coughing, with barked shins and bruises” or with the town’s non-Jewish “working boys,” jumping “from the town bridge into the waters,” and in winter, “on a working boy’s wager, arms out for balance,” sliding on the ice “with a trail of the younger children following behind […] once he’d tested it for them” (65). To compensate for neglecting his homework, he copies the answers of other boys or even his sister’s (65). Like so many boy adventurers and for Yankel, school and books are the institutional means by which their societies attempt to rein in boys’ obstreperous desires for self-expression and discovery. In this sense, Yankel resembles Huck Finn, “the central figure in the almost invariably nostalgic mode of the coming-of-age story.”21 Another perspective, however, demonstrates the difference Holocaust ­history makes between Twain’s fable of a boys’ self-sufficient, independent ­odyssey into manhood and Seiffert’s characterization of Yankel’s journey. For Yankel, as for Srulik, the possibility that there is an unconstrained frontier to which they can flee and then return, to serve as critical agents for ­“societal revision,” can be neither supported nor sustained if documented history intervenes (O’Shea, 85). This supposition, however, begs the question of whether any imaginative fiction owes any debt to historical accuracy. Because Seiffert’s novel is a boy’s adventure story but one that owes its plot, characters, and even its metaphors to Holocaust history, it calls attention to a significant and ongoing debate about the ethics of Holocaust representation: Whether Holocaust art is limited by “the intrinsic priority of historical representation” and “the ethical consequences of the perspectivism of art.”22 That like Danquart, Seiffert chose to adhere to documented history is embedded in the following acknowledged constraints: Even if Yankel and Srulik are not captured by the Nazis, these Jewish boys are likely to be spurned or denounced by Ukrainians or Poles or to succumb to the harsh topography depicted in both narratives as representing rejection of the Jewish boy escapees. By contrast, Huck’s open ended, uncontested adventure owes more to myth than mimesis. Seiffert’s boys’ adventure is also a work of imagination, but each of its precarious episodes questions whether Holocaust history and its ethical concerns can accommodate a Jewish boy’s fictional journey to self-discovery and adult disenchantment when the frontier promises only incarceration, murder, and

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destruction. As Yoram Fridman, Solomon Perel, and Aharon Appelfeld attest, like Yankel, rather than succumb to the Nazi will to destroy, they embraced risk as self-determination.23 Yankel, in A Boy in Winter, is one of the novel’s three protagonists, all of whose narratives alternate and become interwoven in response to the brutal invasion of Ukraine by the Wehrmacht and SS. The novel charts the survival of Yankel and Momik as dependent primarily on the relationship they form with Yasia, a farmer’s daughter, but their escape also turns on a coincidental encounter with the third protagonist, Otto Pohl, a German engineer supervising the road construction. Isolated from the others’ interactions, Pohl’s narrative highlights the emergence of his moral consciousness as the sole German agent of resistance to the edicts of his SS overlords. In concert with Yasia and Magda in Run Boy Run, Pohl’s character demonstrates Omer Bartov’s point that at any given point during the Holocaust, bystanders and perpetrators were always faced with the choice to collaborate in, passively observe, or actively resist mass murder, and that resistance could come in a variety of ways and could be meaningful, even if it meant saving only a handful of victims.24

Pohl’s character develops from pragmatic professionalism into emotional and then active “insubordination” as he recoils from the merciless decisions of the military, including the command to use Jewish women prisoners as slave labor, “breaking stones and hauling” (Boy, 127, 125). “First came the shock, and then the slow and dread realization […]” (182). Having distinguished himself from the prescribed masculinist militarism of the Reich, he is transformed into the prototypical good German, activating his moral epiphany with a spontaneous decision that saves the lives of Yasia and the brothers but risks his own.25 In contrast, Run Boy Run features no good Germans: “Danquart explained that he didn’t want to diffuse the film’s central theme by including an Oskar Schindler or a music-loving Nazi officer, as in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist.”26

Women to the Rescue Before she encounters Yankel and Momik, Yasia travels to the market town to sell apples from her family’s orchard. Like everyone in her community, her life has been shaped by foreign occupation—first by Soviet collectivization and then by Germans “tak[ing] whatever they want, whoever they have use of” (Winter, 40). While in town, she catches sight of Yankel and Momik furtively making their way through the “shadowed edges” of the town’s winding deserted lanes, but with a finely honed sense of danger, she recognizes their vulnerability, and with more impulse than conscious thought, shares her own survival instincts by warning them about the surrounding German militias (107). After declaring that she “can’t help” them, she hides them in rafters

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above the workshop of her father’s cousin Osip, bringing them food, sharing snippets of information, and despite threats to her own safety and her ambivalence toward the boys’ strangeness, discovers that “They will be company. Even if they will be a worry for her” (110, 138). Yasia and the two Jewish boys build an uncertain relationship based solely on their individual and combined vulnerability, a collaboration expressed primarily in silence. To be sure, Yankel and Momik probably speak Yiddish which Yasia would not understand—“it is a strange tongue they speak with one another: murmured and furtive, like a secret they keep between them” (143–144). Moreover, all Yasia knows of Jews has been learned “from folk tales” that would depict them as mysterious and threatening (53). The boys’ alignment with folk tales accords with their enigmatic silent strangeness. While in one sense, this configuration would affirm antisemitic suspicion, Seiffert emphasizes Yasia’s acceptance of the boys, which is supported later by her family, as a moral corrective. In another secret and strange language, Momik’s only recourse to play, to act like a typical young boy, [is] are the figurines Yankel carves for him out of wood fragments: “There are shapes that look like people, almost; ones that look like goats too or maybe farm dogs; and some others that [Yasia] can’t make out” (139). Throughout the extreme hardships of their journey, Yankel never stops carving figurines for Momik or attempting to save them from destruction, as though they are relics of the boys’ lost familial and cultural home. In their multiple meanings, the figurines signal an open ended form of representation that presages the possibility of a future for the boys. Part of this openness are the multiple forms of ­communication expressed among the three that defy conventional language, including that which is constrained by reliance on prejudicial tales and rhetoric. Instead, the novel conveys a language that Yankel and Yasia learn to read in each other’s eyes and facial expressions: “perhaps he saw what she was thinking” as they share the experiences of trekking from the town through the marshlands, first in a horse-drawn cart and then on foot, sinking into icy water, losing their way as the track disappears in mist, and using up their meager supply of food (144). Yasia’s rescue of the Jewish boys structures her journey to self-discovery while it also expands her cultural and ethical consciousness. Magda, the Polish woman who shelters Srulik in Run Boy Run, acts upon the humanitarian instincts that have already been honed in her work with Polish partisans. The film emphasizes her commitment to saving Srulik by highlighting the two occasions in which she takes him in, the second time even more dangerous than the first. In the first instance, with detailed attention to his safety, Magda replaces his Jewish name with a Polish one, Jurek Staniak, teaches him Catholic prayers, and invents a cover story for him to memorize. Savvy about the Nazis’ draconian practices, she also tells Srulik that he can stay with her for only a short while. That peril stalks Srulik’s brief but idyllic stays with Magda is forecast in his nightmare recalling the ghetto in which he and his

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family had been herded. It is therefore no surprise when during his second stay with Magda, the sound of jackboots invades her farm and as the episode ends, the Nazi troops burn all the houses in the hamlet. Only after the camera pans the burnt-out houses do we see Magda rush into hers and strip the floor to discover Srulik cowering in a tiny space but alive. Although their acts of rescue heighten the risk of Nazi discovery and reprisals, both Magda and Yasia imperil their own lives and that of their communities to shelter the Jewish boys. Isolated with these women, with no “empowering” male presence, another danger lurks in the margins of both A Boy in Winter and Run Boy Run, one that theorizes women’s roles in the development of masculinity in boys’ coming-of-age stories—that without the presence of a father figure, “female influence (associated with weakness) is […] disempowering.”27 In the Holocaust settings of both Seiffert’s and Danquart’s narratives, the influence of women characters counters stereotypes of mothers or maternal figures as passive aggressively stifling boys’ self-discovery. A Boy in Winter introduces this counter-narrative with its construction of the character of Yankel’s mother Miryam. Unlike the Jewish mother of stand-up comedy, mocked for her anxious and suffocating pleas, Miryam “takes quiet delight in [Yankel’s] adventures” (66). Forced by Nazi guards to remain silent and still, Miryam resists by remaining inspired by another young man’s precarious adventure, that of her brother Jaakov, who crossed the continent to Palestine, to “the newand-old land” to work with others “for the common good” (66, 88). Where Yankel’s father Ephraim sees only “the risk of failure,” Miryam “favoured the hopeful parts” (89). Miryam and her prescience recall the biblical Miriam, referred to as “Miriam the Prophetess” who joined her brothers Moses and Aaron in the Jews’ escape from slavery in Egypt and journey to “the newand-old land” of their dreams.28 That Ephraim is an optician by profession, correcting the sight of others but clinging to his own fatalistic vision, can only lead him to question Miryam’s optimism. While she secretly supports her boys’ escape, he yearns myopically for their return, even though their reunion would ensure the murderous end of them all. The representation of Yankel’s intrepid escape effort and Ephraim’s passivity resonates with two stereotypes of Jewish men as described by David Desser—“laboring within the paradigm of muscular masculinity […] an image in which the Jewish man quite literally came up short,” and “the traditional portrayal of the Jew as urban, weak, frail and intellectual.”29 In connecting the alternating narratives of Yankel, Momik, and Yasia, the novel suggests that the intervention of women resolves the dilemma of representing Jewish masculinity in a time of catastrophe. With each crisis, Yankel recalls his mother’s words as motivation to go on: “Yankel thinks now: if they can just keep going long enough, then they will be safe again. Because there has to be a time after this: his mother told him so” (198). Miryam’s trust in the open-ended fate of the boys’ journey can thus be viewed as the narrative force supporting Yasia’s efforts to save them.

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Although Srulik, Yankel, and Momik all survive, their experiences with others during their ordeals and after liberation raise questions about their character formation and development as Jewish subjects. In the spring of 1945, as Russian tanks and trucks enter the region where Srulik has been living with a farming family, masquerading as the Polish Jurek, a playful swimming scene suggests that the possibility for childhood development can be restored. Liberation and Jurek’s integration into the local Polish community are interlaced when he rides the church bell ropes, his gleeful smile in concert with the ringing sounds of celebration, and the directive of the local priest that Jurek should take first communion. Despite his dual identity and his father’s plea to never forget his Jewish identity, the boy expresses no disorientation or ambivalence. Instead, the narrative has followed a progression that resembles the boy’s classic journey of development from the traumatic moment of catapulting him into exile through his struggles to survive and a restoration of family life and social stability. Another form of integration, that is, of the film’s narrative with history and biography, culminates in the final scenes, which raise challenging questions about the relationship between documented Holocaust experience and the myth of restoration and reconciliation. In the midst of the liberation festivity, a car appears in the Polish farm’s courtyard and the driver identifies himself as Moshe Frankiel, a representative of the Jewish Agency; he has tracked Srulik in order to restore him to the surviving Jewish community. When Srulik protests that he’s not a Jew, the film responds by repeating its refrain of Jewish masculine identity: Frankiel orders Srulik to pull down his pants. In a self-determining gesture, the boy then defies both the persecution he faced as a Jew and his father’s exhortation never to abandon his Jewish identity by protesting, “I don’t want to be a Jew.” Suggesting a struggle between the priest and Srulik’s father for the boy’s identity, the Jewish agent grabs Srulik, takes his rosary, and throws it away, aggressively enforcing the claims of Jewish continuity. The struggle between the agents of Christian hegemony and Jewish continuity becomes a challenge to “the traditional portrayal of the Jew as urban, weak, frail and intellectual,” and hovers over the film’s resolution. To reintroduce Srulik to his past, Frankiel takes the boy to Bloni, his home town, where he looks into the window of his abandoned home and recalls his father’s pleas. Having revived his Jewish memory, he now recognizes the tragic fate which he was spared. The epiphany leads into a definitive scene, where Srulik and Frankiel arrive at a crossroad and the boy chooses the road to the Łodz Jewish orphanage, a microcosmic rescue of Jewish endurance. In the film’s epilogue, the now elderly Srulik recounts that in 1962 he moved to Israel, where he reunited with his sister Faija whom he hadn’t seen in thirty years, married, had two children and six grandchildren. With the camera focused on Srulik’s broad smile, the film unequivocally proclaims the fulfillment of his father’s plea as a victory.30 Like the biblical patriarch Israel, for which the name Srulik is a Yiddish translation, the boy will also fulfill his role as Jewish progenitor. The epilogue establishes a promise of Jewish

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continuity by “reaffirming the role of generational identity in the symbolic memory culture of the Holocaust.”31 However, even as the epilogue features Fridman’s testimony, as a form of representation, it also raises questions about upbeat, forward-looking messages that elide the history and memory of the horrific end of six million murdered Jews. Omer Bartov condemns such “emotional catharsis” as “positively repulsive kitsch” that “raises doubts about the compatibility […] between the conventions and constraints” of feature filmmaking “and the profound rupture of Western civilization which was at the core of the Holocaust” (44, 45). With a neutral narrative voice, sustaining the novel’s continuous present, the resolution of A Boy in Winter is unsettled and unsettling about the restoration of Jewish identity and a Jewish homeland. After finding their way to the farm of Yasia’s uncle and recovering from their perilous journey, at the moment the season of resurrection is dawning, Yankel and Momik are consecrated with blessings and baptism by the village priest and accepted into the marshland community. The boys’ legitimacy as Christians is documented with their birth dates and names “scratched into the priest’s ledger, and onto the sheaves of village papers” (237). Their conversion appears to be finalized; Yasia renames Yankel Yevhen and Momik becomes Mirek, so “if anyone should come asking, the two of them are marsh boys” (238). The reference to the marshland questions the nature of the boys’ rescue: It suggests the land’s absorption or supersession of Jewish history and culture. Whereas Momik will never celebrate his bar mitzvah, Yankel’s coming-of-age story will now fulfill a Christian morality tale. In Seiffert’s exodus story, its marshlands are also resonant with the marshes through which Moses led the Israelites, and like the biblical figure, Yankel is rescued by a woman of a different, often hostile culture. In a critical ontological move, Seiffert’s naming of Yankel denotes the Yiddish translation of Jacob, also known as Israel, who in his prophetic biblical role is credited as the progenitor of the Jewish people. Instead of fulfilling such a linear progression, A Boy in Winter concludes with the narrative’s recollection of its beginning: a documentation of the Nazis’ final destruction of Jewish life and culture. At the end, however, silence and narrative circularity reflect a more open ending: There is “no need for talking. Of all that is no longer. Or can’t be made right again. Of times to come, that can’t be guessed at yet” (238). Whether the brothers’ Jewish identity and Jewish continuity can be restored is left open. Studied together, A Boy in Winter and Run Boy Run challenge each other’s resolutions. Although some, like Srulik (Yoram Fridman), survived to reclaim their Jewish selves and most created new lives and families and integrated into Jewish communities wherever they were allowed to immigrate, all were left with endless grief for their lost families and communities. Seiffert’s novel by contrast ends the story of Jewish survival with those whose Jewish selves were left as lost or unresolved as the price of rescue. In both novels, the Jewish boys’ adventure story revises the idea of “communal renewal” by

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questioning whether and how the “desire for rebirth” can be an imaginative possibility after genocide has destroyed the myth of “return to the kind of golden age that nostalgia can allow us to believe in.”

Notes











1. Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 96. 2. Steven Haynes argues persuasively that the “gender scholarship” informing Men’s Studies has also “made such a signal contribution to our understanding of women’s experience in the Holocaust,” “Ordinary Masculinity: Gender Analysis and Holocaust Scholarship,” The Journal of Men’s Studies 10, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 143–163, 143. 3. Writing about the development of children’s literature, Humphrey Carpenter notes that classical children’s stories before the First World War embraced “Arcadian” settings that tended “towards idyllic, ruralist fantasy,” but that “after the experience of the Somme,” it became harder to create “Never Never Lands,” 210. 4.  Jerry Mosher, “Survival of the Fattest: Contending with the Fat Boy in Children’s Ensemble Films,” in Where the Boys Are: Cinemas of Masculinity and Youth, eds. Murray Pomerance and Frances Gateward (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 61–82, 69. 5. Tarshia L. Stanley, “The Boys’ Price in Martinique,” in Where the Boys Are: Cinemas of Masculinity and Youth, eds. Murray Pomerance and Frances Gateward (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 206. 6. Imre Kertész, Fatelessness (New York: Vintage, 2004); Diamonds of the Night, Jan Nĕmec, director, Czechoslovakia, 1964. 7. See Murray Pomerance and Frances Gateward, “Introduction,” for a comprehensive survey of boy characters and related themes in Hollywood and independent films, 1–20. 8. Livia Bitton-Jackson recounts how the beauty attributed to her blond hair saved her from being sent to the gas chamber at Auschwitz when an SS officer admired her “goldene Harr,” I Have Lived a Thousand Years: Growing Up in the Holocaust (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), 78. 9. This is not to say that girls were passive victims. In the ghettoes, they smuggled food, traded on the black market, and joined networks of boy smugglers. See Nicholas Stargardt, Witness of War: Children’s Lives Under the Nazis (New York: Vintage, 2007), 14. A girl’s escape resembling that of Solomon Perel is that of sixteen-year-old Basia Kohn who made her way from occupied Poland to Soviet Russia where she survived a slave labor camp. Betty Rich, Little Girl Lost (Toronto: The Azrieli Foundation, 2011). As distinct from individual escapes, the Kindertransport was an organized rescue effort, saving nearly 10,000 Jewish children. 10. Solomon Perel, Europa, Europa (New York: Wiley, 1997). Perel’s story became widely known from Agnieszka Holland’s film adaptation, produced by CCC— Filmkunst GmbH, Berlin, 1990. Survival in the Soviet Union was no panacea, however, since most refugees from Nazi occupation were sent to Siberian slave labor camps or once the Germans invaded, were subject once again to roundups and slaughter.

144  P. LASSNER 11.  “Absent Fathers, Present Mothers: Images of Parenthood in Holocaust Survivor Narratives,” Nashim (2007): 155–182, 155. 12. Uri Orlev, Run Boy Run, trans. Hillel Halkin (Houghton, Lorraine Books), 2001. Other films include The Search (Fred Zinnemann, 1948), Au Revoir Les Enfants (Louis Malle, 1987), Europa, Europa (Anjiewska Holland, 1991), Fateless (2005), and The Children of Chance (2016). I am grateful to Lawrence Baron for sharing a much longer, more comprehensive list of such films. 13. M. Michael Thaler, “Unlikely Witnesses: Children’s Voices and What They Tell Us About the Holocaust Experience,” in The Legacy of the Holocaust: Children of the Holocaust, eds. Zygmunt Mazur, Fritz H. König, Arnold Krammer, Harry Brod, and Władysław Witalisz (Cracow, Poland: Jagiellonian University, 2002), 27–58, 41. 14. Alon Confino, A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 5. 15.  The Torah: The Five Books of Moses. A New Translation according to the Masoretic Text (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1962), 24. 16. Karel C. Berkoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine Under Nazi Rule (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008). 17. Europa, Europa, Agnieszka Holland, Director, Germany, France: Les Films du Losange/CCC Filmkunst, 1990, US 1991. The film mocks Aryan identity as a spurious invention when “Baltic” is invented to rationalize Solek’s black hair. For extended discussion of this film, see Lawrence Baron, Projecting the Holocaust into the Present (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 84–88. 18. Steven A. Carr, “L.I.E., The Believer, and the Sexuality of the Jewish Boy,” in Where the Boys Are: Cinemas of Masculinity and Youth, eds. Murray Pomerance and Frances Gateward (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 316–332, 318. 19. Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991), 119. 20. Rachel Seiffert, A Boy in Winter (New York: Pantheon, 2017), 207. 21.  Mary B. O’Shea, “Crazy from the Heat: Southern Boys and Coming of Age,” in Where the Boys Are: Cinemas of Masculinity and Youth, eds. Murray Pomerance and Frances Gateward (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 83–97, 85. 22. For discussions of the ethics of Holocaust representation, see Simone Gigliotti, Jacob Golomb, and Caroline S. Gould, Ethics, Art, and Representations of the Holocaust (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), xvii, xviii. A prime example of a problematic young readers’ Holocaust fiction is the novel The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and its film adaptation, which imagine a friendship that develops when a Jewish and a German boy meet on opposite sides of the fence surrounding Auschwitz, culminating in their eternal bond when they walk hand in hand to the gas chamber. 23. At the age of nine, Aharon Appelfeld escaped from a Nazi slave labor camp and hid for three years. He emigrated to Palestine in 1946 where he began to write autobiographical and speculative fiction of the Holocaust. See his memoir, A Story of a Life (New York: Schocken Books, 2004). 24.  Omer Bartov, “Spielberg’s Oskar: Hollywood Tries Evil,” in Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List, ed. Yosefa Loshitzky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 41–60, 42.

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25. The designation good German has been used ironically to condemn Germans who insisted they did not support the Nazi regime or were unaware of its genocidal crimes. It also refers to fictional characterizations of the exceptional German, usually male, who sacrifices himself to save Jews. See such films as The Black Book, Paul Verhoeven, Dir. Netherlands, 2006 and Suite Française, based on the novel by Irene Nemirovsky, Saul Nibs, Dir., UK, France, Belgium, 2015. Liliane Weissberg discusses Steven Spielberg’s construction of Oskar Schindler as the good German rescuer and its American and German reception, “The Tale of a Good German,” in ed. Loshitzky, 171–192. 26. Tom Tugend, “The Boy Who Ran for Three Years to Escape the Holocaust,” Jerusalem Post, April 27, 2014, https://www.jpost.com/Arts-and-Culture/ Entertainment/The-boy-who-ran-for-three-years-to-escape-the-Holocaust350518, accessed 11 November 2018. 27.  Nicole Marie Keating, “Mamma’s Boy,” in Where the Boys Are: Cinemas of Masculinity and Youth, eds. Murray Pomerance and Frances Gateward (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 246–263, 248. 28. Ginzberg, Louis, The Legends of the Jews, vol. III (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society). 29. David Desser, “Jews in Space: The ‘Ordeal of Masculinity’ in Contemporary American Film and Television,” in Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls: Gender in Film at the End of the Twentieth Century, ed. Murray Pomerance (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 267–281, 269–270, 271. 30. “Fridman said the movie is more than 90 percent accurate depicting his story […] He said: ‘Some of the names were added as I didn’t remember all the names of the people I met along the way. But the movie itself is as real as possible’.” Randall P. Lieberman, “Film Depicts Real World War II Experience,” Florida Jewish Journal, October 6, 2015, https://www.sun-sentinel.com/floridajewish-journal/news/palm/fl-jjps-runboyrun-1007-20151006-story.html. 31. Yosefa Loshitzky, “Introduction,” Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List, 1–17, 4.

Bibliography Appelfeld, Aharon. A Story of a Life. New York: Schoken Books, 2004. Baron, Lawrence. Projecting the Holocaust into the Present. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. Berkoff, Karel C. Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine Under Nazi Rule. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. Bitton-Jackson, Livia. I Have Lived a Thousand Years: Growing Up in the Holocaust. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999. Carpenter, Humphrey. Secret Gardens: A Study of the Golden Age of Children’s Literature. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985. Carr, Steven A. “L.I.E., The Believer, and the Sexuality of the Jewish Boy.” In Where the Boys Are: Cinemas of Masculinity and Youth, edited by Murray Pomerance and Frances Gateward, 316–332. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005. Confino, Alon. A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. Desser, David. “Jews in Space: The ‘Ordeal of Masculinity’ in Contemporary American Film and Television.” In Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, edited by Murray Pomerance, 267–281. Albany: State University of New York Press.

146  P. LASSNER Diamonds of the Night. Jan Nĕmec, director, Czechoslovakia, 1964. Europa, Europa. Agnieszka Holland, director. Filmkunst GmbH. Germany, France: Les Films du Lasange/CCC Filmkunst, 1990, US 1991. Gigliotti, Simone, Jacob Golomb, and Caroline S. Gould, eds. Ethics, Art, and Representations of the Holocaust. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014. Gilman, Sander. The Jew’s Body. New York: Routledge, 1991. Ginzberg, Louis. The Legends of the Jews, vol. III. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1978. Haynes, Stephen. “Ordinary Masculinity: Gender Analysis and Holocaust Scholarship.” The Journal of Men’s Studies 10, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 143–163. Jeffords, Susan. Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994. Keating, Nicole Marie. “Mamma’s Boy.” In Where the Boys Are: Cinemas of Masculinity and Youth, edited by Murray Pomerance and Frances Gateward, 246– 263. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005. Kertész, Imre. Fatelessness. New York: Vintage, 2004. Lieberman, Randall P. “Film Depicts Real World War II Experience.” Florida Jewish Journal. October 6, 2015. https://www.sun-sentinel.com/florida-jewish-journal/ news/palm/fl-jjps-runboyrun-1007-20151006-story.html. Loshitzky, Yosefa. Ed. Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List, 1–17. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Mosher, Jerry. “Survival of the Fattest: Contending with the Fat Boy in Children’s Ensemble Films.” In Where the Boys Are: Cinemas of Masculinity and Youth, edited by Murray Pomerance and Frances Gateward, 61–82. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005. O’Shea, Mary B. “Crazy from the Heat: Southern Boys and Coming of Age.” In Where the Boys Are: Cinemas of Masculinity and Youth, edited by Murray Pomerance and Frances Gateward, 83–97. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005. Perel, Solomon. Europa, Europa. New York: Wiley, 1997. Rich, Betty. Little Girl Lost. Toronto: The Azrieli Foundation, 2011. Seiffert, Rachel. A Boy in Winter. New York: Pantheon, 2017. Stanley, Tarshia L. “The Boys’ Price in Martinique.” In Where the Boys Are: Cinemas of Masculinity and Youth, edited by Murray Pomerance and Frances Gateward, 203– 216. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005. Stargardt, Nicholas. Witnesses of War: Children’s Lives Under the Nazis. New York: Vintage, 2007. Suite Française. Saul Nibs, Dir., UK, France, Belgium, 2015. Thaler, M. Michael. “Unlikely Witnesses: Children’s Voices and What They Tell Us About the Holocaust Experience.” In The Legacy of the Holocaust: Children of the Holocaust, edited by Zygmunt Mazur, Fritz H. König, Arnold Krammer, Harry Brod, and Władysław Witalisz, 27–58. Cracow, Poland: Jagiellonian University, 2002. The Black Book, Paul Verhoeven, Dir., Netherlands, 2006. The Torah: The Five Books of Moses. A New Translation According to the Masoretic Text. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1962. Tugend, Tom. “The Boy Who Ran for Three Years to Escape the Holocaust.” Jerusalem Post, April 27, 2014. https://www.jpost.com/Arts-and-Culture/ Entertainment/The-boy-who-ran-for-three-years-to-escape-the-Holocaust-350518. Accessed 11 November 2018.

CHAPTER 9

“I Sometimes Thought I Was Listening to Myself”: Identity-Deliberation After the Holocaust in Chaim Grade’s “My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner” Megan V. Reynolds

Considering the ample critical attention paid to Chaim Grade’s famous short story “My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner,” there exists a surprising gap in the scholarly analysis about its rhetorical features and its resonance for an English audience. This gap is all the more surprising given the radical differences between the original Yiddish publication and English translations, and the fact that the story is the rhetorical quarrel between the two characters.1 While an initial reading of this short story appears as a dialogue between two diametrically opposed Eastern European Jews who argue about the nature of Jewish belief, Grade’s characterization and rhetorical positioning of central characters Hersh and Chaim complicate this reading. Though they have different names and beliefs regarding the existence of God, I argue that Chaim materializes Hersh as an imagined interlocutor with whom he can confront and deliberate his own Jewish identity. Hersh and Chaim are undeniably tied—two sides of the same coin. Chaim evokes Hersh as a voice to deliberate with at critical moments of identity questioning. I propose a reading of “My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner” in which Chaim engages in a form of identity-deliberation with Hersh as an oppositional voice because these quarrels allow Chaim to both reimagine and reinforce a sense of identity after the Holocaust.2

M. V. Reynolds (*)  University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_9

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The story begins with Chaim Vilner’s return to Bialystok in 1937, a significant return for Chaim as it represents both his homecoming and his reencounter with the Yeshiva he left a few years earlier. While there, he encounters his former classmate, Hersh Rasseyner. Because Hersh is still a devote member of the Yeshiva, the two quarrel with each other. Two years later, Chaim and Hersh meet, and quarrel, again in Vilna. By this time, World War II has broken out and the Russians occupy the city. Chaim encounters Hersh yet again in Paris nine years after their Vilna quarrel. Chaim discovers that Hersh “had been in a camp in Latvia. Now he was in Germany, at the head of a Yeshiva” (Grade, 385). The two quarrel again about their opposing views on Jewish faith and what form faith takes after the Holocaust. The story concludes with little resolution between the characters; Hersh remains devout and Chaim maintains his disbelief. While their arguments begin in Bialystok before the Holocaust, their rapport after the Holocaust functions as the crux of the story. Grade dedicates much of the rhetorical space in the story to their final encounter after the Holocaust. Though Chaim and Hersh’s quarrels before the Holocaust certainly carry moral and religious weight, their conversation after the Holocaust becomes much more loaded as the stakes of their argument tackles questions of Jewish identity concerning how to live in a post-Holocaust world. When discussing Grade’s short story, Irving Howe notes how in “another setting, all this might seem an intellectual exercise, but here, as these two men confront one another, their dispute signifies nothing less than the terms upon which they might justify their lives.”3 Although self-deliberation tackles practical problems with concrete solutions, identity-deliberation concerns itself with larger questions that determine an individual’s conception of self. Identity-deliberation, similarly to self-deliberation, examines an individual’s conversation with him or herself. However, identity-deliberation differs in that it expands on what deliberating with the self can do and what kinds of questions these conversations can tackle. While self-deliberation primarily focuses on crafting concrete solutions to practical problems, identity-deliberation confronts questions of identity. Additionally, though self-deliberation finishes once the participants decide on a concrete solution, identity-deliberation can recur indefinitely. Moments of identity-deliberation arise when an individual faces a crossroads in their conception of self. In other words, when Chaim experiences a moment of identity questioning, Hersh appears, ready to deliberate. I propose that we read “My Quarrel” as a form of identity-deliberation in which Hersh serves as an alter ego. Such a reading argues for a reconnection with a sense of self and Jewish identity before a reestablishment of a sense of community at large can occur. Identity-deliberation also carries an important ethical component. Indeed, Grade’s rhetorical positioning of “My Quarrel” as an example of identity-deliberation speaks to the “significant relation between the moral implications of the Holocaust and the means of its literary expression.”4

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Grade, who fled Vilna before the Nazi occupation, speaks to the concentration camp experience without claiming it as his own. While we perhaps ­cannot claim that Chaim, the character, and Chaim, the author, are the same individual, their shared name and profession as writers is telling. In sharing a name and using the first-person perspective, Grade suggests a conflation of author and character. This conflation, one that Edward Alexander describes as “thinly disguised for fictional purposes,” reinforces “My Quarrel” as a moment of identity-deliberation and demonstrates ethical engagement with a Holocaust experience that is not his own.5 By crafting a narrative in which “the voices we hear in this dialogue are the accusing and self-accusing voices of the author himself,” Grade both speaks to himself in this identity-deliberation and to a larger Jewish community (Alexander, 233). This identity-deliberation allows Grade (and by extension Chaim) to attempt to understand other Holocaust trauma without placing himself in the same position as concentration camp survivors. Examining Grade’s story, then, provides an example of not only a specific rhetorical activity that helps determine a sense of self after the horrors of the Holocaust, but it also offers an ethical response to writing about the Holocaust in general. Identity-deliberation, quarreling about unanswerable questions with an imagined version of oneself, helps Chaim determine his own identity, both as an individual and as a member of a wider community. While it could certainly and convincingly be argued that the Holocaust fractured a sense of Jewish community or even a sense of human community, Grade’s short story denies such a reading. Instead, by engaging in identity-deliberation, Chaim can reassert a sense of community while also maintaining separation between different lived experiences during the Holocaust. Additionally, Grade himself uses “My Quarrel” as an argument for what Jewish identity after the Holocaust can be and what form an ethical response can take.

“Societies of the Mind”: Self-Deliberation Multiple disciplines, including rhetoric, philosophy, psychology, and literary studies, offer theories for understanding self-deliberation, but this internal dialogue remains notoriously difficult to define. Indeed, arguing that Chaim evokes Hersh as an other in “My Quarrel” raises the question of why we can consider Hersh an alter ego in the first place. A useful starting place for understanding self-deliberation is to begin by examining rhetorical deliberation in general. Accordingly, Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s The New Rhetoric remarks that “it is by analyzing argumentation addressed to others that we can best understand self-deliberation, and not vice versa.”6 They also consider an audience fundamental to any kind of rhetorical activity. “[E]mphasizing the fact that it is in terms of an audience that an argument develops,” Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca assert that without an audience an argument

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cannot occur (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, 14, original emphasis). In other words, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca indicate that any argument necessitates a kind of community. They do not specify, however, what form this audience can take. Deliberation marks a specific type of rhetorical argumentation because it complicates the very dictum concerning audiences upon which Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca found The New Rhetoric. Grade’s dialogue in “My Quarrel” positions neither Chaim nor Hersh as a typical audience. Instead of an audience that he performs for or speaks to, Chaim speaks only to Hersh and they both listen and react to the others’ statements. Their interactions demonstrate a rhetorical situation in which an interlocutor takes the place of a traditional audience. Hersh, therefore, represents both Chaim’s audience but also his direct interlocutor. Just as argumentation cannot occur without an audience, deliberation cannot occur without interlocutors. Because deliberation relies on the interactions between interlocutors, deliberation posits a cooperative rhetorical model. Each interlocutor must listen and respond directly to his companion. For the namesake quarrel to occur at all “an effective community of minds must be realized as a given moment” (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, 14). By arguing with Hersh, Chaim creates a community of minds, a situation in which multiple minds come together in deliberation. This community of minds thereby indicates that the very form deliberation takes assumes a communal, shared nature. Encompassing those involved in the deliberation, a community of minds encourages cooperation instead of argumentative out-maneuvering. A deliberation seeks consensus among, not victory over, its interlocutors. In fact, deliberation as a form of rhetorical activity would not be possible without this community of minds. In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that deliberation requires a dialogical approach because “[w]hen great issues are at stake, we distrust our own abilities as insufficient to decide the matter and call on others to join us.”7 By including others in the deliberative process, Aristotle indicates that we rely on more than our own opinions; Aristotle’s definition posits a necessarily cooperative model. Similarly to Aristotle, Douglas Walton maintains that deliberation is collaborative. Both Aristotle and Walton claim that cooperation allows a deliberator to consider other possible viewpoints, which actually strengthens the group’s eventual decision. Walton expands on Aristotle’s concept of the deliberative argument as dialogical by claiming that “[d]eliberation is a symmetrical type of dialogue: the two parties perform the same roles in putting forward suggestions and making recommendations.”8 Walton gives both sides of the dialogue equal share in the rhetorical responsibilities. In this sense, deliberation seeks to engage with a community of minds to create a concrete solution to a practical problem. Without both participants, the deliberation cannot proceed. Grade’s structure in “My Quarrel,” which gives each character equal rhetorical responsibility in the conversation, mirrors Walton’s symmetrical

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dialogue that typifies deliberation. One interlocutor does not dominate the conversation and examining the space dedicated to each character reveals a fairly symmetrical distribution. For the final monologues of the short story, Hersh’s monologue, six pages long, encompasses just over a fifth of the twenty-five-page story. Chaim’s monologue consists of just over six pages and equates to one-third of the story. Combined their monologues constitute thirteen pages, half of the total story. And this just accounts for the final monologues of the narrative. Beyond their final deliberation, the entire story revolves around Chaim and Hersh’s interactions. As Howe points out, “[o]n the face of it, ‘My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner,’ […] is an ideological dialogue between a badly shaken skeptic, evidently the writer himself, and a zealous believer” (Howe, 197). At face value, then, Chaim and Hersh do appear as entirely individual interlocutors engaging in external deliberation. These recurrent monologues concern Chaim and Hersh’s opposite beliefs about God’s existence, beliefs that dictate how they live their lives. However, Grade’s description of their interactions as a singular quarrel proves significant. Firstly, a quarrel implies a different rhetorical situation than an argument. There is a certain familiarity that accompanies a quarrel; it erupts spontaneously between people who already know each other. Additionally, the quarrel does not presume to cut these ties of familiarity. Despite the disagreement, Chaim and Hersh’s friendship persists. Crucially, a quarrel presents a different temporality. Whereas an argument is time-bound in that a winner emerges at the end of it, Grade’s depiction of Chaim and Hersh’s quarrel depicts an entirely different rhetorical situation. Over the course of their many sustained monologues, Grade never establishes a clear “winner.” Though Chaim gets the final say in the story, it is clear that this ending is temporary. Grade implies that Chaim and Hersh will meet again, and that, following the pattern established in this story, their quarrel will erupt once more. Indeed, Grade reflects the way this quarrel never seems to end in the title itself. Instead of titling the story “My Quarrels,” Grade chooses to describe their interactions in the singular “My Quarrel.” The quarrel proves forever ongoing, an attribute that reflects the troubling nature of the subject of discussion. In such a faith-based quarrel, neither Chaim nor Hersh can be crowned a winner. Instead, they can merely defend and advance their own divergent conceptions of Jewish faith to a member of their Jewish community. Lonnie Athens explains how this external quarrel can turn inwards. According to Athens, the type of conversation Chaim and Hersh participate in can easily represent a form of self-deliberation because “[w]hen soliloquizing we always converse with an interlocutor, even though it may deceivingly appear as if we are only speaking to ourselves.”9 What presumably represented an external deliberation between two individuals now reflects how a conversation with the self also includes other interlocutors. Athens conceives of these interlocutors as “phantom others,” figures “who are not present, but whose impact upon us is no less than the people who are present

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during our social experience” (Athens, 525, original emphasis). His idea of the “phantom other” recalls Mary M. Watkins’s description of “imaginal others.” According to Watkins, imaginal others represent “others not physically present but actually experienced nonetheless.”10 Watkins’s definition clarifies that the imaginal other may not physically exist, but that does not diminish his or her presence and potential insights. Additionally, recent research in neuroscience indicates that a community of minds can exist in an individual. Bessel van der Kolk explains how “[m]odern neuroscience has confirmed this notion of the mind as a kind of society.”11 That is, Chaim’s quarrel with Hersh reflects the way their interactions exist within a community—even an internal one. This quarrel, one as serious and ongoing as the existence of God and his role in the world, cannot be answered alone. Indeed, the narrative itself begins with a return to community. Chaim, despite leaving the Yeshiva, returns home to a Jewish community that still accepts him (even though some must “keep the head of the Yeshiva from finding out”) (Grade, 382). This sense of ongoing Jewish community carries important implications; it reflects a Jewish community that, though it quarrels within itself, still accepts each other. The quarrel itself, then, represents an engagement with community, instead of a rejection of it. In other words, the mind as a kind of society reflects the community of minds required for engaging in deliberation in the first place. A community of minds therefore recalls both Athens’s and Watkins’s concepts for the other interlocutor during self-deliberation; both define that other as something somehow distinct from ourselves. Chaim need only imagine an interlocutor to engage in self-deliberation. He does just this when he interacts with Hersh. Throughout “My Quarrel,” Hersh apparently only exists for Chaim just as a “phantom other” or “imaginal other” would only exist for the person evoking them. When Chaim returns to Bialystok, he hears that Hersh, a staunch Mussarist, “kept to his garret in solitude and did not even come to the Yeshiva” (Grade, 382).12 Despite Hersh’s self-sequestration, he and Chaim do run into each other alone on the road. Even as Hersh approaches and then stares intensely at Chaim he keeps silent. Chaim initiates the interaction. After their conversation, Hersh does not walk away but “gave a start and disappeared” (Grade, 384). This pattern of Chaim’s initiation of conversation and Hersh’s disappearance at the end continues. When Chaim unexpectedly finds Hersh in Vilna in 1939, he feels “so glad to see him that [he leaves his] place in the line, push[es] through the crowd, and [comes] up to him” (Grade, 384). Abandoning his place in the ration line and approaching Hersh, Chaim initiates this second meeting. Additionally, though Hersh does not disappear in the same way he does after their first meeting, Hersh does still seem to fade away into the background. After talking briefly with Chaim, Hersh “retreat[s] a few steps and motion[s] with his eyes to the Red Army soldiers, as though to say: And you bear responsibility for them” (Grade, 384). Hersh’s haunting and unspoken admonishment concludes the briefest

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section of the story while also implying that Hersh fades away; his appearance in Vilna feels like an apparition. In this sense, Hersh functions like an alter ego for Chaim, the “other” part of himself. Grade’s positioning of this story as a quarrel, then, makes an argument for the way a sense of Jewish community can be internalized. Even during a time of mass antisemitism, Chaim can still turn inward and engage in a quarrel with his alter ego. Ultimately, this ability to internalize the quarrel represents a continued interaction with Chaim’s Jewish community. Their final and most thoroughly developed quarrel occurs in Paris in 1948. While riding the metro, Chaim sees a familiar face. Excited to see his former schoolmate whose fate he had been uncertain of, Chaim “push[es] [his] way to him through the passengers and blurt[s] out, ‘Excuse me, aren’t you Reb Hersh Rasseyner?’” (Grade, 385). Once again, Chaim finds Hersh and initiates their interaction. Chaim’s repeated initiations indicate Hersh’s status as an alter ego because for the deliberation to begin, it must be Chaim, the individual who conjures Hersh as a conversational partner, to start the interaction. Though Chaim wonders if they will meet again at the end of the story, Grade’s narrative predicates itself on their continual and unexpected meetings. These two characters always find a way back to each other. In fact, it is these unexpected meetings that clearly indicate how Hersh functions as an alter ego for Chaim. While meeting Hersh in Bialystok in 1937 makes sense because they both grew up there, stumbling upon Hersh again in Vilna two years later after World War II has broken out seems less plausible. For Chaim to find Hersh in Paris nine years after the war feels miraculous if we perceive these characters as two separate individuals. However, when we consider Hersh as Chaim’s alter ego their encounter seems fitting.13 It makes sense that Chaim’s alter ego would accompany him. Additionally, the overwhelming majority of the story consists of Chaim and Hersh conversing with (and, in the English translation, exclusively with) each other. While Hersh serves as Chaim’s alter ego, their conversation moves beyond the scope of self-deliberation as a form of practical problem solving with a concrete solution. According to Walton, deliberation resembles a “town hall meeting, where a group of concerned citizens get together to discuss and attempt to solve a practical problem” (Walton, 151). The purpose of engaging in external deliberation in the first place is to determine a specific solution to a practical problem. Self-deliberation therefore functions as an internal deliberation about a concrete solution for a practical personal issue. For Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, interlocutors search for a solution to a controversial problem by establishing a community of minds to discuss the issue, a claim that supposes a solution can be found at all. Indeed, the goal of both external and internal deliberation is to engage with a community of minds to solve a problem. But Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca leave what counts as a “controversial issue” ambiguous. Doing so runs the risk of blurring boundaries between

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controversies. A self-deliberation about whether to return to Bialystok for a lecture is radically different than navigating identity and faith after the Holocaust. Determining how to live and what to make of faith after the Holocaust represents a much more sustained line of questioning and one that cannot be so easily answered. Chaim and Hersh, instead of searching for concrete solutions to everyday problems, tackle the moral quandaries of God and his responsibility to man. Grade maintains a strict tension between Chaim, a secular man who left the Novaredok Yeshiva, and Hersh, a devout Mussarist. When Chaim asks Hersh how he is at the beginning of the story, forgetting the baggage that “[a]mong the Mussarists when you ask, How are you? the question means What is the state of your religious life?,” their conversation immediately turns to moral and ethical dilemmas and devolves into a irresolvable disagreement (Grade, 382). Clearly, their deliberations confront much more complicated issues that arguably have no concrete solutions than simply attempting to solve a practical problem. Their conversations become especially fraught after the Holocaust. Jean Nienkamp’s theory of “internal rhetoric” helps clarify why Hersh appears as a consistent adversary for Chaim during his identity-deliberations, explaining how “internal rhetoric” “occurs between one aspect of the self and another.”14 Watkins clarifies that the interlocutor can represent a specific articulation of an other. The presence of a highly specific other “is viewed not as a fragmentation or splitting of a unity – as in psychoanalysis – but as a process of differentiation. Each imaginal figure represents a different perspective through which events and the self can be viewed” (Watkins, 106). Hersh and Chaim as diametrically opposed figures make sense in light of a moment of identity-deliberation in which Chaim weighs two different responses to a problem. Because he represents such a different perspective from Chaim’s, Hersh acts as a radical other against whom Chaim can determine a sense of self. Grade’s positioning of Hersh as Chaim’s argumentative adversary is hardly surprising to anyone well versed in the history and generic conventions of Yiddish literature. Originally written in Yiddish, “My Quarrel” holds true to Yiddish traditions of confrontation. According to Ruth R. Wisse, “[o]ne mode of confrontation, or encounter, recurs so often in Yiddish poetry and prose, and with such obvious success, that we might consider it the natural form of the literature.”15 Considered in its original language “My Quarrel” does indeed include the emblematic confrontation that Wisse describes. Over the course of the narrative, Hersh and Chaim continually reencounter each other and resume their quarrel. In fact, all of their encounters in Grade’s short story take the form of a confrontation. From the very moment Chaim addresses Hersh in Bialystok, a quarrel follows. When Chaim asks how he is, Hersh jumps at the opportunity to answer the question with his own stinging question: “And how are you, Chaim Vilner? My question, you see, is much more important?” (Grade, 382). Grade makes clear from their first

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interaction that Chaim and Hersh communicate through these bouts of confrontation. These confrontations primarily concern questions of religious and moral virtue, as well as identity. Chaim and Hersh remain locked in quarrels about the very moral questions that determine a sense of self. From the onset of the narrative, then, Grade positions himself within a Yiddish tradition of moral confrontation between two characters. The confrontations between Chaim and Hersh also exclusively occur orally, serving as a useful example of what David Roskies calls “Jewspeak.” Roskies outlines the various phases of “the vocal strain of Yiddish” in which the fourth and final phase occurs after the Holocaust’s widespread destruction of many Yiddish cultural capitals.16 Wisse claims that Jewish writers from Yiddish-speaking communities “were affected by the War far more critically than their colleagues in other languages, since it was their particular language base that had been obliterated” (Wisse, 43). For Roskies and Wisse alike, the story’s original Yiddish represents an important connection with the Jewish community and Jewish heritage, especially for Jewish writers living in a post-Holocaust world. Roskies writes that Jewspeak is “an essential expression of the once-living folk” (Roskies, 294). Heidrun Friese makes a similar claim. She remarks that the “the loss of a common language which is not that of violence, also generates proximity, a special closeness to one’s own language shared with one’s fellow countrymen.”17 Wisse too comments that Yiddish serves as “the basis of a common culture” (Wisse, 35). While Friese posits the loss of a shared language as that which marks one as a member of the community, Roskies and Wisse argue for Yiddish’s continued use as a reminder of the community before that loss. For all three, however, language offers the key to community belonging. Grade, writing in Yiddish, seems to be making an argument for a reconnection with a lost sense of Jewish community. However, Milton Himmelfarb’s English translation of Grade’s short story makes a different argument. Although the English translation still retains the Yiddish tradition of sustained moral and ethical argumentation, this version does cut much of the original Yiddish version, with the consequence that readers lose much of the story’s original engagement with Yiddish rhetorical traditions. In the original narrative another character, one of Hersh’s students, enters the dialogue and therefore alters the rhetorical confrontation. While some scholars, like Wisse or Roskies, lament the disappearance of this third character and the loss of an essential Yiddishness, the English translation presents a new dynamic that focuses entirely on the conflict between Chaim and Hersh. Because we only see the interactions between these two characters and because they do represent two radically different responses to the same question, the English translation demonstrates how identity-deliberation helps determine a sense of self after an extreme trauma. In this sense, reading the English translation of “My Quarrel” both holds true to the traditional Yiddish literature of philosophical debate and challenges the outcome of such a deliberation. As Wisse explains, these traditionally

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Yiddish debates carry an immense weight; they lock the speakers in a “moral context in which everything else must be weighed and understood” (Wisse, 35). The conversation between Chaim and Hersh certainly carries this moral baggage. Indeed, Chaim’s deliberations with his alter ego revolve around the very existence of God and what it means to be Jewish. Holocaust trauma and the Nazi dehumanization of Jewish people make this process of determining a sense of Jewish identity all the more difficult. J. M. Bernstein claims that “the formation of the subject crucially involves the experience of loss and separation, and that this experience must be broadly understood as one of the intrusion into the subject-to-be of a radical exteriority.”18 Nazi aggression and antisemitism represent an intrusion that, as Bernstein notes, “must be negotiated and without the negotiation of which there is no possibility of subjects” (Bernstein, 121). For Chaim, Hersh serves as an other with whom he can negotiate. Indeed, Chaim must negotiate with Hersh to reassert a sense of identity. To determine his sense of identity, Chaim needs a philosophical other with whom he can test and defend his own ethical and religious positions. For this reason, I would suggest, Hersh exclusively appears during moments when Chaim faces uncertainty about his identity. When Chaim left the Yeshiva to pursue his literary career, he also left his life in Bialystok. Chaim’s career as a writer separates him from his old schoolmates still living there, meaning that Chaim returns home to a place he feels both strongly connected to and disconnected from. Although a few of his old classmates “came to [his] lecture one evening,” others seek Chaim out secretly because the head of the Yeshiva disapproves. Seeing former classmates who must sneak around to attend his lecture, Chaim contends with his decision to leave the Yeshiva in the first place. Faced with both the strict religious training of his youth and his current disbelief, Chaim materializes Hersh in a moment of identity uncertainty. Chaim’s conversation with Hersh helps him understand his own identity position. After his argument with Hersh, he feels more secure in his sense of self: “I returned to Vilna with a burden removed from my conscience. In the disputation with the Mussarist [Hersh] I myself began to understand why I had left them” (Grade, 384). It is his confrontation with Hersh that allows Chaim to both understand his own past as a member of the Mussarist Novaredok Yeshiva, and to also solidify his decision to leave. Their second meeting in the narrative follows a similar pattern. Confronted with the occupation of the Soviet Army in Vilna, Hersh voices the potential guilt Chaim may feel. Almost immediately once Chaim admits that his “heart [is] heavy,” Hersh appears (Grade, 384). The moment when Chaim begins to feel a sense of anguish about the war, his alter ego arises for a brief identity-deliberation. Their conversation during their final meeting proves the most morally challenging for Chaim and therefore demands a more sustained i­dentity-deliberation. The length of this last meeting reflects the complexity of Chaim’s questions

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about his identity. Faced with the knowledge of the Holocaust and its aftermath, Chaim must confront a shifting sense of self. In fact, Hersh’s appearance in response to trauma seems hardly surprising. Van der Kolk argues that “the self can be detached from the body and live a phantom existence on its own” (van der Kolk, 102). In other words, Chaim evoking Hersh speaks to the way a body, and specifically a body that has experienced trauma, can create its own phantoms. This phantom existence is especially telling when we recall Athens’s terminology of the “phantom other” that appears in self-deliberative moments. According to Athens, “[t]he only time during which a glimpse can be caught of our phantom community is when we are caught up in the throes of dramatic personal change” (Athens, 526). Hersh’s previous appearances coincide with moments when Chaim confronts his own sense of self, and their sustained deliberation after the horrors of the Holocaust attest to Athens’s claim. The widespread destruction of European Jewry would cause any Jew, even a secular man like Chaim, to reexamine his own Jewishness. Chaim’s quarrel with Hersh emphasizes two potential responses to the Holocaust—responses that Chaim must contend with. On the one hand, Chaim, contemplating the horrors of the Holocaust, remains secular. Shocked at Hersh’s steadfast faith, Chaim questions how he could believe in God after surviving a concentration camp. Angrily, he remarks that a “miracle happened to you, Reb Hersh, and you were saved. But how about the rest? Can you still believe?” (Grade, 386). Chaim’s response represents one that is widespread after the Holocaust: What God could allow such an atrocity to happen? And yet, Chaim cannot disavow his Jewishness so easily. This conflict, between his lack of faith and his Jewish identity, erupts in his identity-deliberation with Hersh because the question of his own identity in relation to Jewishness is one he cannot disregard without serious contemplation. On the other hand, Hersh, despite witnessing the Nazi atrocities firsthand in a concentration camp, paradoxically maintains his steadfast faith. Hersh responds to Chaim: “Without any doubt,” Hersh Rasseyner answered calmly, “I see everywhere, in everything, at every moment, particular providence. I couldn’t remain on earth for one minute without the thought of God. How could I stand it without Him in this murderous world?” (Grade, 386)

Whereas the Holocaust appears to have confirmed Chaim’s disbelief, it has only strengthened Hersh’s faith. The confrontation between these two about the ethical implications of life after the Holocaust animates these two divergent responses. Chaim, grappling with Jewish identity after the Holocaust, conjures Hersh to deliberate with in what Alexander refers to as a “dialogue of the mind with itself” (Alexander, 236). By confronting these two potential responses to living in a post-Holocaust world, Chaim can begin to sort through where his own Jewish identity lies.

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Chaim’s identity-deliberation with Hersh, perhaps more importantly than simply confronting an opposite response to his own, forces him to defend his position and thereby strengthen his own identity claims. These identity-deliberations allow Chaim to construct Gordon Wells’s concept of a “meaning potential,” which “makes possible the development of a personal sense of self.”19 In fact, these meaning potentials depend entirely upon Chaim confronting an identity other than his own. Chaim and Hersh’s quarrel, therefore, can be seen as a moment of identity development. Although Chaim and Hersh disagree, the self and the other do not have to agree and, in fact, rarely should if identity-deliberation is to be productive. Deliberative interactions arise when a community of minds faces conflict meaning that if Chaim and his alter ego, Hersh, already agreed no deliberation would be necessary. Chaim needs an other to challenge his ideas and values. In other words, Chaim and his alter ego may not be in close harmony at all, but instead in sharp conflict with one another. In this case, where it is Chaim against Hersh, “their two voices will be clearly distinguishable from each other” (Athens, 529). Because Chaim and Hersh represent radically differing views, their two voices easily separate into two distinct voices during identity-deliberation and allow Chaim to see “one’s present self, not from within, but from without.”20 In other words, the two different voices make “possible self portraitures” (Athens, 527). Without two clearly distinct voices, Chaim would not be able to see himself from “without,” as Norbert Wiley puts it, thereby limiting his self-definitive abilities. Hersh therefore challenges Chaim’s beliefs and identity claims in order to assure either their resiliency in the face of competing views or their need for adaptation. Quite simply, Hersh appears in moments of self-doubt for Chaim when these convictions need strengthening or restructuring. At one point, Hersh blatantly makes apparent Chaim’s identity conflict in the aftermath of the Holocaust: now we’re both face to face with the destruction of the Community of Israel. But you are faced with another destruction as well — the destruction of your faith in the world. That’s what hurts and torments you […] And you find contradictions in what I said. But the real contradiction you find is not in what I said but in yourself. (Grade, 393)

While Hersh’s speech recalls Wisse and Roskies claim that Yiddish can serve as an important point of connection for Jewish communities, it also clearly speaks to Chaim’s very need for identity-deliberation. As Hersh points out, Chaim suffers from contradictory thoughts. Without Hersh, without a voice from without, to force Chaim to confront his own conflict, Chaim would not be able to feel secure in any identity position. Through a prolonged identity-deliberation, Chaim arrives at a secure identity position (at least temporarily). After Hersh’s last monologue, Chaim

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launches into his own response. Though Hersh reprimands Chaim for his contradictions, Chaim too makes Hersh’s contradictions apparent. He says, How estranged you feel from all secular Jews can be seen in your constant repetition of ‘we’ and ‘you.’ You laugh at us poor secularists. You say that our suffering is pointless; we don’t want to be Jews, but we can’t help it. It would follow that the Germans made a mistake in taking us for Jews. But it’s you who makes the mistake. The enemies of Israel know very well that we’re the same; they say it openly. And we’re the same not only for the enemies of Israel, but for the Master of the World as well! (Grade, 403)

Not only does Chaim acknowledge and then rebut Hersh’s strict moralizing about who belongs to the Jewish community, he also stakes his claim as a part of that community. In other words, in rebuking Hersh, Chaim claims an identity position. According to Neinkamp, the presence of an alter ego “enables self-knowledge and self-definition” (Neinkamp, 56). Hersh’s appearance makes possible a self-knowledge and self-definition from without precisely because Hersh’s presence allows Chaim to hold two contradictory identity positions simultaneously without threatening a collapse of identity. From these two positions, Chaim can determine his own sense of self. Through his identity-deliberation with Hersh, he can assert a sense of self after the Holocaust’s radical disruption of Jewish life. In fact, this way of deliberating a sense of self proves particularly important to those suffering from Holocaust trauma. The very turn toward an inner deliberation creates a reassertion of self in the face of Nazi attempts at Jewish annihilation. As Jeremy Adler writes, “[i]f the victims are to be understood as people, this can only be achieved by imagining their inner selves: the gesture may retrospectively reinstate their humanity and remove them, at least in memory, from the clutches of their murderers.”21 Chaim’s quarrel with Hersh marks a turn inward followed by a turn toward the larger Jewish community in that it embodies divergent responses to the Holocaust. This type of turn confronts the types of identity challenges that arise after an extreme trauma. In the closing lines of the narrative, Chaim takes leave of his alter ego. Hoping to see Hersh again in the future, Chaim remarks, “may I then be as Jewish as I am now. Reb Hersh, let us embrace each other….” (Grade, 407). The ellipsis at the end leaves the conversation open. It also represents both a sign that Hersh and Chaim will meet again as Chaim confronts another question of identity, and an end to Chaim’s current identity questioning. Similarly to Hersh’s sporadic appearances, the ellipsis signifies that the identity-­ deliberation never comes to a permanent end, but arrives at subsequent conclusions that can and, in most cases must, be reopened in order to continue to develop a sense of self in response to his changing experiences. Based on the recursive structure of Grade’s story, the conversation never actually stops, but resurfaces indefinitely, waiting for Chaim to conjure up Hersh once again

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in a moment of need. Chaim’s clear claim of Jewish belonging signals that he no longer needs Hersh to help him develop a self-portrait from without. Additionally, this statement clearly depicts Chaim’s identity claim while also calling for an inclusive and accepting Jewish community. After all, Chaim concludes the conversation, and the story itself, with a call for friendship: “Reb Hersh, let us now embrace each other….” (Grade, 407). By offering to embrace his alter ego at the end of their heated deliberation, Chaim reincorporates Hersh. This call to friendship, or at least acceptance, depicts how speaking with an alter ego helps Chaim reclaim a sense of identity after the Holocaust because he no longer needs Hersh to challenge his claims. But this call for an inclusive Jewish community can only occur after Chaim wrestles with Hersh in a moment of identity-deliberation. Van der Kolk notes how “[n]euroscience research shows that the only way we can change the way we feel is by becoming aware of our inner experience and learning to befriend what is going on inside ourselves” (van der Kolk, 208, original emphasis). Chaim and Hersh’s embrace at the end, then, represents Chaim’s befriending of himself, even the most disparate aspects of that self.

Ethical Engagement Through Identity-Deliberation Chaim’s call for an embrace, while serving as an assertion of identity, also carries with it an ethical component of identity-deliberation. The embrace as a sign of friendship reflects a wider argument for Jewish identity after the Holocaust. Andrew Benjamin writes how “[a]fter the Shoah politics and political solidarity take on a different quality. The attribution of an identity and the affirmation of that identity have to be viewed as importantly different.”22 As Benjamin acknowledges, the Holocaust denied Jews the ability to define their own sense of identity. External characterizations overpowered internal definitions. Hersh, as Chaim’s alter ego, allows Chaim to reclaim “the possibility of that conception of identity that Jews would attribute to themselves” (Benjamin, 179). Crucially, this reclamation builds upon relationships with other Jewish conceptions of self. The embrace at the end of “My Quarrel” indicates an individual moment of identity-deliberation but also an ethical imagining of other Jewish identities as well. In their final deliberation of the story, Chaim chastises Hersh for an exclusionary model of Jewish identity. He reminds Hersh that the “same misfortune befell us all” and challenges Hersh’s faith in the face of atrocity (Grade, 406). Chaim continues, accusing Hersh of accepting the outcome of the Holocaust too easily: “but you have a ready answer, while we have not silenced our doubts, and perhaps we will never be able to silence them” (Grade, 406). Hersh’s solution ignores the widespread suffering of a larger Jewish community. Conversely, Chaim’s response allows space for doubt. It forces us to confront the trauma of the Holocaust without an escapist answer. In other words, Chaim’s doubts prove an ethical response to Holocaust

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trauma because they both acknowledge the realities of the Holocaust while also opening up the Jewish community as inclusive to the secular. It creates a Jewish inclusivity that denies Nazi’s the ultimate victory of the destruction of Jewish communities. While Chaim pushes against Hersh’s answer to the Holocaust, he also evokes Hersh as an alter ego who helps him understand his ethical responsibility to other survivors. Using a concentration camp survivor as his partner in identity-deliberation, Chaim can imagine that specific Holocaust trauma without appropriating it. As Bernstein writes, “traumatic moments are the ones that ‘found’ the self to an ethical experience” (Bernstein, 105). Hersh not only helps Chaim reorient and claim a sense of self, he also allows Chaim to confront the experiences of others without silencing them. Bernstein continues by stating that the “insistence of traumatic experience, its unavoidability and its laceration of subjectivity, and the way that non-representable experience creates an ethical bond to the other, offers a model or paradigm of ethical experience” (Bernstein, 101). The trauma that provokes such disparate responses from Chaim and his alter ego proves the glue that creates an ethical responsibility to others. Additionally, because the story is told from Chaim’s point of view, Grade does not attempt to step into the camps directly. Instead, he allows Hersh to speak of this experience in a certain elliptical manner; Chaim can imagine his experience without claiming it as his own. Thomas Trezise argues that this “discursive indirection can be employed not only to counter our horror but also to counter the illusion that the survivor’s horror is our own.”23 While Grade’s story does not offer its reader an easy escape from confronting Holocaust trauma (Hersh’s “ready answer”), it does deny us the possibility of putting ourselves in the camps. As a narrative framed by identity-deliberation, Grade’s famous short story allows Chaim to reorient and claim his Jewish identity after the Holocaust and makes an argument for ethical engagement with Holocaust trauma itself. The English translation of “My Quarrel” therefore represents an important development in how to imagine Jewish identity in a post-Holocaust world and how to ethically write about others’ Holocaust trauma without appropriation.

Notes

1. Chaim Grade, “My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner,” trans. Milton Himmelfarb, in Truth and Lamentation: Stories and Poems on the Holocaust, eds. Milton Teichman and Sharon Leder (Urbana: University Illinois Press, 1994), 401. 2.  Hereafter, “My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner” will be denoted as “My Quarrel.” 3. Irving Howe, “Writing and the Holocaust,” in Writing and the Holocaust, ed. Berel Lang (New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1988), 197. 4.  Berel Lang, “Introduction,” in Writing and the Holocaust, ed. Berel Lang (New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1988), 1–2.

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5. Edward Alexander, The Resonance of Dust: Essays on Holocaust Literature and Jewish Fate (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979), 233. 6. Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Teatsie on Argumentation (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), 41. 7. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 1999), 1112b9–12. 8. Douglas N. Walton, The New Dialectic: Conversational Contexts of Argument (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 152. 9. Lonnie Athens, “The Self as a Soliloquy,” The Sociological Quarterly 35, no. 3 (1994): 525. 10.  Mary M. Watkins, Invisible Guests: The Development of Imaginal Dialogues (Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 1986), 2. 11.  Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (New York: Penguin Books, 2014), 282. 12. Mussarists’ practice emphasizes cultivation of individual inner virtues in addition to learning the rules of the Torah because a knowledge of the rules does not determine “good” behavior. According to Edward Alexander, “Mussarists are an ascetic Jewish sect, to which Grade himself belonged in his youth. In biblical Hebrew musar means ‘chastisement’ and hence ‘instruction’ as to right conduct; by extension it may be said to comprise the ascetic and devotional element of religious ethics” (Alexander, 247). 13. Gry Faurholt’s article “Self as Other: The Doppelgänger” offers a useful examination of the self as an alter ego. Crucially, Faurholt argues that doppelgäger represents an uncanny alter ego, a kind of monstrous double, that serves as a Freudian manifestation of a part of the self that has been dissociated. While my argument draws on arguments about the self confronting an “other self,” Faurholt’s argument moves in a different direction. His work, however, is worth mentioning. 14. Jean Nienkamp, Internal Rhetorics: Toward a History and Theory of SelfPersuasion (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001), x. 15. Ruth R. Wisse, “Two Jews Talking: A View on Modern Yiddish Literature,” Prooftexts 4, no. 1 (1984): 35. 16. David G. Roskies, “Call It Jewspeak: On the Evolution of Speech in Modern Yiddish Writing,” Poetics Today 35, no. 3 (2014): 294. 17.  Heidrun Friese, “Silence—Voice—Representation,” in Social Theory After the Holocaust, eds. Robert Fine and Charles Turner (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 167. 18. J. M. Bernstein, “‘After Auschwitz’: Trauma and the Grammar of Ethics,” in Social Theory After the Holocaust, eds. Robert Fine and Charles Turner (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 121. 19.  Gordon Wells, “Semiotic Mediation, Dialogue, and the Construction of Knowledge,” Human Development 50, no. 5 (2007): 255. 20. Norbert Wiley, The Semiotic Self (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 46. 21.  Jeremy Adler, “Good Against Evil? H.G. Adler, T.W. Adorno and the Representation of the Holocaust,” in Social Theory After the Holocaust, eds. Robert Fine and Charles Turner (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 77.

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22. Andrew Benjamin, “Friends and Others: Lessing’s Die Juden and Nathan der Weise,” in Social Theory After the Holocaust, eds. Robert Fine and Charles Turner (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 179. 23. Thomas Trezise, Witnessing Witnessing: On the Reception of Holocaust Survivor Testimony (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 205.

Bibliography Adler, Jeremy. “Good Against Evil? H.G. Adler, T.W. Adorno and the Representation of the Holocaust.” In Social Theory After the Holocaust, edited by Robert Fine and Charles Turner, 71–100. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000. Alexander, Edward. The Resonance of Dust: Essays on Holocaust Literature and Jewish Fate. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Martin Ostwald. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 1999. Athens, Lonnie. “The Self as a Soliloquy.” The Sociological Quarterly 35, no. 3 (1994): 521–532. Benjamin, Andrew. “Friends and Others: Lessing’s Die Juden and Nathan der Weise.” In Social Theory After the Holocaust, edited by Robert Fine and Charles Turner, 179–195. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000. Bernstein, J. M. “‘After Auschwitz’: Trauma and the Grammar of Ethics.” In Social Theory After the Holocaust, edited by Robert Fine and Charles Turner, 101–124. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000. Friese, Heidrun. “Silence—Voice—Representation.” In Social Theory After the Holocaust, edited by Robert Fine and Charles Turner, 159–178. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000. Grade, Chaim. “My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner,” trans. Milton Himmelfarb. In Truth and Lamentation: Stories and Poems on the Holocaust, edited by Milton Teichman and Sharon Leder, 382–407. Urbana: University Illinois Press, 1994. Howe, Irving. “Writing and the Holocaust.” In Writing and the Holocaust, edited by Berel Lang, 175–199. New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1988. Lang, Berel. “Introduction.” In Writing and the Holocaust, edited by Berel Lang, 1–15. New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1988. Nienkamp, Jean. Internal Rhetorics: Toward a History and Theory of Self-Persuasion. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001. Perelman, Chaim, and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. The New Rhetoric: A Teatsie on Argumentation. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969. Roskies, David G. “Call It Jewspeak: On the Evolution of Speech in Modern Yiddish Writing.” Poetics Today 35, no. 3 (2014): 225–301. Trezise, Thomas. Witnessing Witnessing: On the Reception of Holocaust Survivor Testimony. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Penguin Books, 2014. Walton, Douglas N. The New Dialectic: Conversational Contexts of Argument. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. Watkins, Mary M. Invisible Guests: The Development of Imaginal Dialogues. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 1986.

164  M. V. REYNOLDS Wells, Gordon. “Semiotic Mediation, Dialogue, and the Construction of Knowledge.” Human Development 50, no. 5 (2007): 244–274. Wiley, Norbert. The Semiotic Self. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Wisse, Ruth R. “Two Jews Talking: A View on Modern Yiddish Literature.” Prooftexts 4, no. 1 (1984): 35–48.

CHAPTER 10

“The Relatedness of the Unrelatable”: The Holocaust as Trope in Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood Paule Lévy

In this groundbreaking study Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in an Age of Decolonization, published in 2009, Michael Rothberg advances a new perception of remembrance that calls into question the postulates of current thinking on cultural memory and group identity.1 To him memory ought to be seen as multidirectional, that is to say as effecting dynamic transfers between diverse places and time, and as “subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing and borrowing” (Rothberg, 3). Rothberg views the public sphere as a “malleable discursive space in which groups […] actually come into being through their dialogic interaction with others” (5), while memories, instead of competing with each other, interact productively and in unexpected ways. Taking the Holocaust as his “paradigmatic object of concern” (6), Rothberg boldly links memories of genocides and colonialism as he reflects on the ways in which the public articulation of collective memory by marginalized social groups may provide resources for other groups to express and assert themselves. Thus, he juxtaposes the ­histories of Blacks and Jews to highlight “both structural problems in those histories and missed encounters between them” (Rothberg, 137). It is in this light, as well as in the light of Cathy Caruth’s assertion that “in a catastrophic age, trauma itself may provide the very link between ­cultures” that I intend to study Caryl Phillips’s novel The Nature of Blood, published in 1997.2 A prominent and prolific British writer of Caribbean

P. Lévy (*)  University of Versailles, Saint-Quentin en Yvelines, France © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_10

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origin, Caryl Phillips is the author of seven novels and several books of non-fiction; he has also written extensively for film, theater, radio and ­television. In most of his essays and interviews, he establishes an explicit connection between his literary production and the main elements of his personal history (“the conundrum of my own existence,” as he puts it in his collection of essays, The European Tribe, 8).3 Caryl Phillips was born in Saint Kitts, a small island in the West Indies, and he was brought to England when he was only three months old. He grew up in Leeds, an industrial city in the north of the country, where he was daily confronted with rampant racism. Despite what he refers to as a “massively dysfunctional and traumatic childhood”4 he managed to graduate from Oxford. An extensive traveler, admitting to a life “of compulsive itinerancy,”5 Phillips is presently living and teaching in the USA (at Yale University), while maintaining his links with both Britain and the West Indies. He perceives his own impossibility of ever going back to “some authentic point or origin” as characteristic of our globalized contemporary world: “These days we are all unmoored. Our identities are fluid. Belonging is a contested state. Home is a place riddled with vexing questions.”6 Concerned with issues of displacement, precarious belonging, fragmentation and exile, his novels—to which he sometimes ironically refers to as “a form of autobiography”7—criss-cross time and place, between Europe, Africa and the Americas, thus charting what Paul Gilroy has called “The Black Atlantic.”8 For Phillips’s generation of Caribbean intellectuals who had come of age in the early postwar years, the Holocaust had quite “a formative impact,” exerting a strong hold on [their] imagination.9 Phillips relates this interest in Jewish history to growing up as a black child “in what seemed to [him] a hostile country” (The European Tribe, 54) at a time when public discourse showed little interest in the predicament of immigrants from the former ­colonies: “[It was] not on the curriculum and certainly not on the television screen” (The European Tribe, 54).10 Meanwhile, the persecution of Jews and the Holocaust had been the object of much public concern, and Philips recalls how, in the personal and cultural confusion he experienced as an adolescent, he had naively come to see Jewish history as a mirror for his own sense of exclusion: “As a result I vicariously channeled a part of my hurt and frustration through the Jewish experience” (The European Tribe, 54). From then on he read with passion the diary of Anne Franck and even posted a picture of her above his writing desk: “In some strange way she was partly responsible for my beginning to write.”11 Phillips also recalls that it was in fact a television series, “The World at War,” dealing with the Nazi occupation of Poland, that prompted him to write his first short story, one about a Jewish boy who refused to wear the yellow star: “The Dutch boy was, of course, me” (“On ‘The Nature of Blood’,” 6). In fact, Jewish motifs are not uncommon in postwar Caribbean ­literature.12 According to Sarah Casteel this is to be related to “a Caribbean ­sensibility that privileges multiple and complex forms of identification over

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the dyads of black/white and victim/perpetrator” (“Writing Under the Sign of Anne Frank,” 797). Jewish motifs may also be ascribed to the longstanding Jewish presence in the region, which originated in the 1492 expulsion from Spain. Phillips himself had a Jewish grandfather, a Portuguese trader, who had come to St Kitts by way of Madeira.13 The Nature of Blood (1997) is the author’s sixth novel. It is the third time Phillips deals with the Holocaust; the first was a collection of essays “The European Tribe” published in 1987,14 the second was a novel, Higher Ground, published in 1989.15 The Nature of Blood is a highly self-conscious, fascinating yet perplexing textual experiment, which boldly cuts across genres, periods, and cultural contexts as it juxtaposes black and Jewish histories in a transnational and deliberately anachronistic narrative frame. Mixing historical, literary and invented figures, this puzzling kaleidoscopic novel consists of four main narrative blocks. The first features Eva Stern, a young survivor of Bergen-Belsen who, mostly in the first person singular, evokes or at times hallucinates her past, present and future. As if Phillips were in search of the historical roots of intolerance, the second narrative goes back to the Renaissance; set in the small Italian town of Portobuffole, near Venice in the 1480s, it chronicles a case of blood libel that led to the public execution of three members of the Jewish community. The third narrative, which takes place in s­ixteenth-century Venice, retells, mostly in the first person, the story of Othello, the Moorish general brought to the city to wage war against the Turks. Framing these accounts and providing therefore both the beginning and the ending of the novel, one finds the story of Stephan who, as we later realize, is in fact Eva’s uncle, an idealistic Jewish doctor who had left pre-war Europe to participate in the construction of the new Jewish state in Palestine; decades later he encounters in modern day Tel Aviv a young Jewish woman from the immigrant Ethiopian community who feels ostracized in Israeli society. Far from appearing in sequential order, these stories are tightly interwoven in a series of untitled and abruptly disjointed chapters or paragraphs shifting into one another at increasing speed as the novel develops. Added to this are a series of fictional documents written in a variety of voices and genres: for example, medical reports, mock encyclopedia entries on various topics, an inner monologue of Malka, the Ethiopian Jew, a mysterious voice derisively addressing Othello. The novel’s universalizing title (“The Nature of Blood”), as well as its intricate structure and generic hybridity, hint at a commonality among the stories. The reader is invited to become an active agent in the elaboration of meaning as, probing his way into the novel’s labyrinthine structure,16 he attempts to follow the ramifications of or convergences between these distinct narratives of marginalization, exclusion and displacement that prompt him to re-examine any exclusive claim to human suffering. The novel was a success, even though it gave rise to rather contrasted reviews. Thus, British writer Hilary Mantel strongly objected to what she

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viewed as an intolerable “cosmopolitanization” of the Shoah: “It is indecent to lay claim to other people’s suffering: it is a colonial impulse, dressed up as altruism. The heart may be pure, but more than heart is needed: good motives sometimes paralyze thought. We are not all Jews. That is a simple fact. It is why the Holocaust happened.”17 Other critics, on the contrary, were enthusiastic. James Shapiro, for example, wrote in The New York Times: “[…] in taking the Holocaust as his subject, and in writing much of the novel in the voice of a white Jewish woman, Mr. Phillips […] challenges the current literary tribalism, pervasive in this age of identity politics, that would mark off black experience as the domain of blacks, restrict the telling of women’s lives to other women, and leave the Holocaust to the Jews.”18 When it comes to the Holocaust, however, is it ethically acceptable “to trope away from specificity” and to inscribe it in a continuum of historical catastrophes, thereby reducing it to a convenient archetype?19 One recalls Cynthia Ozick’s sense of outrage in her provocative essay, “A Liberal’s Auschwitz”: “Jews are not metaphors, not for poets, not for novelists, not for theologians, not for murderers and never for anti-Semites.”20 Though in a different manner, Brian Cheyette makes a similar point: “There is always a risk in engaging in metaphorical thinking, which I have called the anxiety of appropriation, especially in relation to histories of racial victimization.”21 As James E. Young observes, however, metaphors and analogies might as well be viewed as inherent in Holocaust representation22: [E]ven if the realities of the camps and ghettos were unprecedented, the available language and figures to describe them were not. […] even with the dangers of archetypal thinking so apparent, there may be no alternative: to think about, to remember, and to express events is either to do so archetypally and figuratively—or not at all. (89, 93)

In his illuminating chapter entitled “Names of the Holocaust: Meaning and Consequences” (83–98) James Young further argues that the Holocaust even tended to become “its own trope” (84) and that eventually “it came to figure other, unrelated events for both victims and non-victims, Jews and non-Jews” (84). Rather than discard particular Holocaust metaphors, one should therefore reflect on their ethical and political implications, a particularly sensitive issue when it comes to a pairing of Black and Jewish history— especially in the African American context.23 In a later essay, “Metaphor and Memory,” Cynthia Ozick herself acknowledges the potential for empathy inherent in metaphorical thinking: did not the Jews turn their memory of bondage in Egypt into “a metaphor of pity for the outsider […] the great metaphor of reciprocity?”24 Hence, metaphor, Ozick contends, is “the reciprocal agent, the universalizing force: it makes possible the power to envision the stranger’s heart” (279). One is also reminded of Bernard Malamud’s oft-quoted, yet somewhat ironic assertion: “‘All men are Jews except they

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don’t know it.’ I doubt I expected anyone to take the statement literally. But I think it’s […] a metaphoric way of indicating how history sooner or later treats all men” (in Leslie A. Field and Joyce W. Field, 11). In The Nature of Blood does Phillips’s comparative approach dilute and relativize the Shoah? Or, does it promote a productive dynamic displaying respectful hospitality to the story of others? This is the question that will be addressed through a close textual study of the novel and an assessment of Phillips’s aesthetics and ethics. In this novel whose first word, as noted by Michael Rothberg (164), is “between,” the characters’ voices all emerge from the depths of exile, alienation and loss. Transcending discontinuities of time and place, these voices seem to enter in strange resonance with one another. As their respective stories open, all the protagonists seem suspended, so to speak, between a cruel past and a most uncertain future, between up-rootedness and a problematic vision of home: “The old word is dead […] The new world is just beginning” (9). In this respect the choice of settings, which underscores the thematic parallels between the various narrative strands, is quite telling. Phillips chooses to begin the stories of Stephan and Othello in Cyprus, a liminal zone between the West and the East, and the site of conflicted national belonging between Greece and Turkey, which here clearly functions as a place of transit. Stephan is in one of the displaced persons’ camps established by the British for the refugees who were refused entry into Palestine. An active member of the Haganah, he tries to recruit volunteers for the Israeli Promised Land, which he pictures as a haven for “the displaced and the dispossessed (5). Othello has sailed to the island to counter the Turkish threat. He hopes that Cyprus will serve him “as the school in which [he] might further study the manners of Venice” (166) before he returns to this city, which he persists in viewing as “home” (182) despite the insidious racism he is daily confronted with. Bergen-Belsen, where Eva’s story opens, right after it has been liberated by the British, appears as a sort of no man’s land peopled with skeleton-like shadows, helplessly wondering what will become of them. Though broken by grief, Eva dreams of going to England (“This was to be a new land,” 198) to seek the protection of Gerry, a British soldier who befriended her. Yet, all the characters’ hopes or ideals are shattered. Stephan ends up a solitary old man in Israel, haunted by his past (“I still carry within me the old world that I once cast aside,” 11) and bitterly disillusioned as his encounter with Malka has made him aware that the country he has helped to build is far from perfect. Othello’s assimilationist ideal is defeated. Eva, who cannot survive her psychic scars, eventually commits suicide in a London hospital. The choice of Venice, (“the New York of the Renaissance,” as Phillips sees it in The European Tribe, 45), where the story of Othello and that of the Portobuffole Jews intersect, is also highly symbolic to the author: “Sixteenth century Venetian society both enslaved the black and ridiculed the Jew,” he recalls in The European Tribe (45). As Bryan Cheyette observes, Venice has

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often been represented in literature both as the decaying heart of European civilization and as a meeting point between Europe and Africa.25 Owing to its prosperity it attracted an influx of marginal peoples who were barred from official citizenship. Among them were the Jews, tolerated as usurers yet looked down upon and confined to the ghetto.26 In The European Tribe, Phillips expands on the Venetian ghetto as the “model for all others in the world” (52); he implicitly relates it not only to the Jewish ghettoes of World War II but also, which is much more debatable (were it explicit the comparison would be indecent) in connection with modern ghettoes inhabited by the socially and culturally marginalized. In The Nature of Blood, Othello visits the Venetian ghetto on two occasions, each time with a sharp sense of anguish, while each time remaining blind to the resemblance between the Jews’ precarious status in Venice and his own. Though for instance, he feels sympathetic to the “weather-beaten, warp-faced Jew toiling over a book in semi-darkness” (141) who, in a powerful scene of “cultural triangulation” (Clingman, 156), translates Desdemona’s Italian script on a letter she sent to him, he fails to recognize in the man a mirror image of himself.27 It is as if each story revolves around something that can be neither confronted nor passed beyond, as if, oddly enough, time worked in two directions, the present anticipating the future and the future strangely reverberating upon the past. Each story seems to stage a thwarted attempt at fully articulating what had remained submerged, latent, dormant, not fully assimilated in the preceding ones, while at the same time prefiguring what is to follow. Just as the Venetian ghetto implicitly mirrors Othello’s alienation and prefigures the ghettoes of World War II, the sufferings of the small Jewish community of the Portobuffole Jews in the German city of Cologne before they migrated to Italy seem another anticipation of their grim future to come: “Such is the way of the Germans with their Jews” (49), ironically concludes the chronicler as he evokes the persecutions suffered by these Jews and their eventual expulsion from Germany in 1424.28 In the troubling impression of menace and déjà-vu which is e­ stablished as the narrative unfolds, in the skillful alternation of repetition and change, recognition and denial, immediacy and belatedness, effacement and ­re-inscription, as well in the strange sense of haunting enacted in the novel, one recognizes the very pattern of trauma as Cathy Caruth, for example, defines it: “a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available. This truth in its delayed appearance […] cannot be linked only to what is known but also to what remains unknown in our very actions and language” (Unclaimed Experience, 4). Cathy Caruth also insists that the main characteristics of trauma are its indirect relation to reference, its belated impact and the repetition compulsion it induces on the subject. Both in its macro-structure and in its micro-structure, both in terms of the individuals and in terms of the communities represented in the novel, The Nature of Blood mimetically espouses the unpredictable eruptions

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and the indirection of traumatic memory. It is precisely this strategy of ­indirection (as regards the nature of the links between the various narratives) as well as the novel’s deliberate absence of closure,29 that saves it from outrageous oversimplification, saves it from collapsing the differences between the various episodes and characters into a flattened sense of similarity. Rather than of direct correspondences, one ought to speak of uncanny echoes, parallels or reverberations between the stories. These “ripples of association” as Stephen Clingman, for example, calls them are notably effected by the tight network of metaphorical links between the stories (158). One is struck for example by the omnipresence of ashes and smoke.30 The narrative opens with the image of the small campfires around which potential immigrants to Palestine gather at night in Cyprus: “Between us a small fire sputtered. When the wind rose, the flames occasionally danced” (3). This, however, is followed by flames of less benevolent nature: the burning at the stake of the Portobuffole Jews (“a fire will be set under them, reducing their bodies to ashes,” 152), which itself prefigures the furnaces of the concentration camps, whose smell assails the deportees as soon as they get off the train: “The chimneys bellow smoke. A sweet aroma […] Plumes of smoke spin into the night air. The smoke whispers the truth, but at this moment none wish to listen” (164–165). In the sections devoted to Othello it is as if the omnipresent smoke were replaced by the fog enveloping the city, an apt metaphor for the Moor’s troubled perception of his own place in “The Most Serene Republic.” Blood also saturates the novel. It is of course at the very heart of the accusations leveled against the Portobuffole Jews, perceived as “merchants of tears and drinkers of human blood” (56). In Bergen-Belsen, there is “a river of blood” flowing on the train platform (162), and “blood everywhere” when sanitary napkins are taken away from the women (164). Eva herself eventually commits suicide by severing her arteries. Throughout the novel it is as if, in an ironic inversion of the stereotyped image of Jews as blood thirsty cannibals, Europe itself devoured their flesh and spit “their chewed bones” onto the island of Cyprus (12). As Bénédicte Ledent observes (Caryl Phillips, 139), blood, an ambivalent symbol, is on the one hand the substance of life linking all human beings together (one is reminded of Shylock’s rhetorical question: “if you prick us do we not bleed?”) while on the other hand it symbolizes the barriers between the various human groups and the violence these barriers generate. The Nazis, this is recalled in the Holocaust sections of the novel, were obsessed by racial purity. Othello, who is so proud of his noble lineage (“I […] was born of royal blood,” 159) is slow to understand that the Venetians, hostile to his marriage to fair Desdemona, are intent on “keeping the bloodlines pure” (112). So are the Jews to a certain extent with their cultural withdrawal and reluctance toward exogamy though this might have less to do with “bloodlines” than with the Jewish emphasis on tradition and peoplehood: does not Eva’s mother assert that marrying outside one’s own people is “the greatest crime a person could commit” (70)? On another level the blood motif also played a role in the very

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composition of the novel: Phillips claims that the final spur to his writing was his sense of outrage when reading about the scandal that arose in 1996 when it was revealed that the Israeli authorities had dumped the blood donated by Ethiopian Jews so as not to contaminate the national blood supply (“On ‘The Nature of Blood’,” 4).31 However daring, far-fetched, incongruous or at times unsavory some of these parallels may seem, they are largely redeemed by the author’s remarkable sense of empathy toward his characters. This is most striking in the sections devoted to Eva Stern, which, though increasingly fragmented, constitute the bulk of the novel. As J. M. Coetzee remarks, “pages of Eva’s story seem to come straight from hell, striking one with appalling power,” 39.32 Trauma and dissociation are vividly rendered by her broken narrative which keeps moving back and forth between various layers of time (her life in the camps, the events prior to her deportation and those following her liberation), between interior monologue and dream sequences, between first person and third, between parenthetical and italicized sections. In a series of poignant vignettes, the author captures with extreme delicacy and economy of means the family’s bewilderment, their mounting anguish and humiliation when the first edicts against the Jews were promulgated; then the terror, boredom and claustrophobia of the two years they spend in hiding until the dreadful moment of their arrest, when life stops and meaning collapses: “In the sky there shone a solitary star. The three of us joined the flood of people pouring down the street toward the train station. A human river of shattered lives and at eighteen I now understood how cruel life could be” (70–71). While the author evokes in sharp details and short disjunctive sentences the stench and squalor of the cattle wagons (156–157), he chooses to remain at a distance at crucial moments: when the train reaches the camp platform, for instance, the narrative, reduced to a series of almost hallucinatory snapshots, fragments into a series of dispersed voices: They address nobody in particular. You are eighteen and you have a trade. Give the child to his grandmother. Give away the baby. And now at the end of the long platform, a uniformed man who possesses the gift of supreme confidence […] Destiny is a movement of his hand. Perhaps a quick question to make sure. Looks can deceive. How old? Healthy or ill? […] Already a loudspeaker is blasting instructions […]. (163)

Phillips displays the same reserve as he evokes the gas chambers in a deliberately neutral tone: “The process of gassing takes place in the following manner” (177). Throughout the Holocaust sections of the novel, the stress is as much on the concrete conditions of the prisoners’ life (“Lick your spoon. Lick your spoon. No time. No clock. Now only work. March to work,” 170) as on their psychic deterioration, on the erosion of their sense of dignity and identity (“We all look the same. Grotesque figures, naked and without hair,” 162) and on their growing mental confusion. In Eva’s case, this confusion

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culminates in deliberate psychic dissociation: “I decide to put Eva away in some place for safe-keeping until all is over. But already Eva refuses to be hidden. There is no new name in my throat. Eva refuses to disappear” (162). The young girl’s sense of dehumanization and estrangement persists after her liberation as she feels she has become a puzzling object of study for psychiatrists and journalists. Gerry’s awkward questions or remarks (“Are you all right? You look like you’ve had a shock of some kind,” 28), as well as the dry language of the medical reports inserted in the text, highlight the gap that now separates her from others: “But he can never understand somebody like me. None of them can” (43). The hut in which Eva for a while chooses to lock herself up in the liberated camp (“among the ghosts of strangers,” 33) is emblematic of her inner prison and of the survivor’s guilt which paralyzes her: “to move on is to forget. To forget is a crime. How can they both remember and move on?” (157). Wherever she goes Eva feels she is being followed by some hideous double or dybbuk she cannot leave behind: “Stay away from me! I scream. But nobody sees her” (198). Phillips draws just as sensitive a portrait of Othello, whose story he situates within a larger discourse of immigration and diaspora. Transplanting the idea of wandering and uprooting to a non-Jewish context, the sections devoted to Othello in The Nature of Blood suggest an expansion of an essay ironically entitled “A Black European Success” in The European Tribe, in which Phillips purported to throw light upon “the true nature of [the hero’s] psychological anguish […] often missed in productions of the play” (45). To Phillips, Othello is the epitome of the contradictions and vulnerabilities of the minority subject who fought his way into the spheres of power: I had moved from the edge of the world to the center […] I, a man born of royal blood, a mighty warrior, yet a man who, at one time, could view himself only as a poor slave, had been summoned, to serve this state; to lead the Venetian army; to stand at the very center of the empire. (The Nature of Blood 107–108)

Though fascinated by the might and splendor of the city and despite the honors heaped upon him owing to his military victories, the Moorish general experiences solitude and alienation among the proud Venetians “sternly unconcerned with anything beyond the narrow orbit of their own lives” (122) and covertly hostile to strangers. “Life for him is a game in which he does not know the rules” (The European Tribe, 47). The Venetians’ language, of which he possesses only a rudimentary grasp, is as opaque to him as their customs or the labyrinthine topography of the city (109) in which he takes long solitary strolls. The damp, shabby back alleys and the stagnant, putrid canals (146) he soon discovers beside the gracefully ornamented façades are emblematic of the least palatable aspects of Venetian life: “this great city appeared sluttish beneath her regal garb” (146).

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Yet Othello believes that his eager mimicry of his hosts’ manners as well as his marriage to Desdemona (“a fair prize”) will grant him full acceptance among them while operating a harmonious fusion between European and African cultures: “[S]uch a conjunction of traditions might at least subdue a portion of the ill-feeling to which my natural state seemed to give rise” (120). It merely cuts him adrift from his past (“There is no turning back,” 160) and generates a sense of guilt and betrayal all the more painful since he has left behind a wife and child in Africa. Worse, it gives him a misleading impression of security: after his marriage, he lowers his guard and, oblivious of the dangers surrounding him, he prefers to confine himself indoors with his wife (“There is time for love […], then more love,” 174). At this point, the chronology is brutally disrupted by a mocking voice, which, addressing Othello in the manner of a modern day black radical, calls him an Uncle Tom and gives him a warning: [T]he river that does not know its own source will dry up. (182) My friend, an African river bears no resemblance to a Venetian canal […] Only the most powerful heart can endure the pulse of two such disparate life-forces […]. But you run like Jim Crow and leap into her creamy arms […]. No good can come from your foreign adventure. A wooden ladle lightly dipped will soon scoop you up and dump you down and into the gutter. Brother, jump from her bed and fly home. (183)

Phillips’s ironic revision of Shakespeare’s tragedy illustrates the rich intertextuality of the novel, which contributes to the dialectics of recognition/ alteration so characteristic of trauma33 while it opens a metatextual dimension and establishes a deliberate distance from the characters despite the sense of immediacy conveyed by the way in which they are portrayed. Everything in The Nature of Blood is mediated through literary references. The novel appears in fact as a palimpsest of allusions. For example, is not Venice (“this fabled city,” 107) “as much a literary space […] as it is a geographical place” (Rothberg, 3)? The city also summons up reminiscences of Shakespeare’s Shylock, another source of fascination for Phillips (“Shylock has always been my hero,” he declares in The European Tribe, 55).34 The dense intertextual network introduces a radically new perspective in canonical texts while relating each of his characters to other figures of dislocation, other victims of racism. In Phillips’s treatment of Othello’s story this is made all the easier since the hero is never called by his name, even though he is so clearly recognizable. As he retells the story from the Moor’s point of view and makes him the eager observer of his hosts’ customs, Phillips reverses the conventional anthropological perspective, just as displaces the causes of the hero’s predicament. The narrative stops after the General’s arrival in Cyprus; no Iago is needed; the burden of the Moor’s unresolved past is underlined by the allusions to his African family, of which there is no mention in Shakespeare’s play. Rather than by jealousy, Phillips’s Othello is defeated by his self-denial and his inability to take full measure of the prejudices against

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him. His story provides a powerful counterpoint to that of the Portobuffole Jews: “[They] arrived as foreigners, and foreigners they remained” (52). Moreover, the insertion of dry dictionary entries on Venice and on the ghetto highlights what is missing in official historiography: the emotional dimension, the presence of racial others and the hypocrisy hidden behind the city’s self-complacent official discourse.35 For ethical reasons having to do with the difficulties inherent in Holocaust representation the Holocaust sections are just as fraught with intertextual allusions, a means at this point for Phillips to remain at a remove from what he depicts. Critics have identified echoes of such authors as André SchwartzBart, Elie Wiesel, Cynthia Ozick, Primo Levi and above all of Anne Frank’s diary, of which Eva’s story proposes both a revision and a sequel to since it continues after the family’s arrest.36 Phillips is faithful to the source text as he depicts the claustrophobia and terrors of life in hiding, the young girl’s proximity to her sister Margot, the palpable tension between her parents, the mother’s remoteness from her daughter as well as Eva’s naïve dreams of a better future. Yet the perspective is radically shifted and unsettling details are introduced. Thus, some of Anne’s characteristics, such as her attachment to her boyfriend, Peter, and her passion for Hollywood, are displaced onto Margot; Anne’s much-celebrated optimism (“I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart,”37 The Diary, 327) is now undermined by the bitter statement of Eva’s mother: “You see, Eva, in spite of everything that we have lost, they still hate us and they will always hate us” (87). The reader’s involvement with the young girl is further complicated as Phillips desecrates the iconic portrait of Anne and challenges all “sanitized interpretations” of the diary (Ledent, “Fictional and Cultural Labyrinth,” 157) by refusing to depict her as pure and innocent. In his revised version, Anne/Eva is prejudiced toward some of her fellow deportees (“the dirty uncultivated people from the East,” 170); she forges a letter of proposal from Gerry to obtain permission to go to England after the war; last but not least, she admits to having worked in a Sonderkommando in Bergen-Belsen. Even more unsettling—to say the least—are the oblique connections established at the end of the novel between Eva and Malka, the Ethiopian Jewish woman whose life in Israel has turned into just another version of exile. Malka’s nightmarish journey from her native land is evoked in terms eerily reminiscent of Eva’s in the cattle wagons: “And then you herded us on to buses. We had never been on such a thing as a bus. And yes, it was frightening. At dawn we discovered that we were travelling through a desert that was littered with the skeletons of camels and goats. People looked around. Not everybody was there. It was impossible to take everybody. Relatives were being abandoned. And then on the embassy compound where we were stored like thinning cattle. Grazing on concrete” (200). Like Eva in England, Malka later finds liberation an ambiguous concept: “This holy land did not deceive us. The people did” (209). In Phillips’ s opinion at least, Ethiopian Jews, despite their muchcelebrated rescue, did not receive an untainted welcome in Israel. Malka often

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feels objectified as some kind of exotic other. She recalls for example how “t]he mayor of the town in which [we] were first placed complained. He had requested that he be sent only those who could sing and dance so that we might form a folklore group for tourists” (208). Though trained as a nurse, she cannot find a job and lives with her family, like most new immigrants, in an “ugly housing at the edges of the city” (209). In The Nature of Blood, The Jewish Promised Land has not made itself free from exclusionary practices.38 These unsettling examples point to Phillips’s daring challenge of all binary conceptions of victims and perpetrators of racism. As he explores ambivalent versions of belonging and exclusion, he rejects all rigid conception of identity as well as all essentialist notions of home—as if, to him, the end of exile inevitably implied the marginalization of others. Yet differences, of course, must be made, should be made. Of Malka, Phillips writes: “She had lived. She was living” (212). Malka clearly is not Eva. Direct analogies are carefully avoided. Thus, The Nature of Blood, a bold attempt to write “Literature on the Ashes of History” (Caruth), uses the Holocaust as a metaphor liable to highlight the resonances between Blacks’ and Jews’ shared histories of racism, exclusion and cultural destruction. Phillips promotes cross-cultural understanding as he steps in the oft-troubled debate between Blacks and Jews and documents with uncanny vividness, yet respectful distance, the horrors meted out to Europe’s strangers: “[this] novel is about Europe’s obsession with homogeneity and her inability to deal with the heterogeneity that is — in fact — her natural condition” (“On ‘The Nature of Blood’,” 6). While allowing different instances of suffering to address each other, Phillips and probes into the enigma of trauma as “both destruction and ­survival” (Caruth 1995, 72). The lacks and erasures of official historiography are supplemented through the power of fiction; fragile, yet indispensable bridges of mutual understanding are established as the novel resurrects the dead, renders voice, visibility and justice to the silenced, the marginalized and the oppressed, and engages them in fruitful dialogue. “Everybody is a part of somebody else’s game,” declares Eva, acknowledging the vital necessity of solidarity in tragic circumstances, in a statement that might as well be viewed as an apt comment on the whole book (170). As he telescopes self and other, affect and control, the particular and the universal, as he explores the fractures, twists and turns of diasporic lives, Caryl Phillips proposes a thought provoking, albeit unsettling, ethical vision based on commitment to uncovering historical relatedness while keeping at a salutary remove from unrelatable horror.

Notes



1. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). 2. Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 11. For this parallel with Cathy

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Caruth I am indebted to Bénédicte Ledent (2001), Stef Craps and Anne Whitehead in particular. 3. Caryl Phillips, The European Tribe (Boston: Faber, 1987). See also Phillips’s interview with Erika J. Waters, “‘I Am What I Am Because I Was Born There’,” The Caribbean Writer 9 (1995): 102–114. 4.  Owing not only to the pressures of immigration but also to his parents’ incompatibility of characters and subsequent divorce. “Rites of Passage,” The Guardian, November 2, 2001, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/ nov/03/fiction.artsandhumanities, retrieved January 15, 2019. 5. Quoted in Stephen Clingman, “Forms of History and Identity in The Nature of Blood,” Salmagundi, no. 143 (Summer 2004): 144. 6. Caryl Phillips, A New World Order (New York: Vintage, 2001), 6. 7. In Stephen Clingman, 145. 8. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993). 9. Sarah Casteel, “Writing Under the Sign of Anne Frank: Creolized Holocaust Memory in Michelle Cliff and Caryl Phillips,” Modern Fiction Studies 60, no. 4 (2014): 800. 10. A sinister example of this hostile climate is for example the “Rivers of Blood” speech, pronounced in 1968 by conservative Member of Parliament Enoch Powell against massive migration from the ex-colonies. 11. Caryl Phillips, “On ‘The Nature of Blood’ and the Ghost of Anne Frank,” CommonQuest 3, no. 2 (1998): 7. 12. Other examples of cross-cultural Caribbean engagement with the Holocaust can be found in Michelle Cliff’s Abeng, whose young protagonist displays a similar fascination for Anne Frank, or Anita Desai’s Bamgartner’s Bombay where the hero, a German Jew who thought he could find refuge in Bombay, becomes an emblematic figure of Diaspora and exile. 13. Phillips became aware of this grandfather’s existence only after he left the university. The man never knew or acknowledged his grandson and the author denies that this may have been a source of inspiration for The Nature of Blood. 14. The European Tribe is an account of the author’s travels through Europe, which he describes from the point of view of an outsider, casting upon the old continent an anthropological gaze and blaming it for its intolerance and racism. 15. The novel anticipates The Nature of Blood as it boldly juxtaposes the disparate stories of a Holocaust survivor from Poland living in England, an African go-between for British slave traders in the 1800s and a young black radical imprisoned in the United States in the late sixties. 16. On the maze-like aspects of the novel, see in particular, Ledent, 2001. 17. Hilary Mantel, “Black Is Not Jewish.” Review of The Nature of Blood, by Caryl Phillips, Literary Review (1 Feb. 1997): 39. 18. James Shapiro, “Diasporas and Desperations,” The New York Times, May 25, 1997, http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/97/05/25/reviews/970525.25shapirt. html, retrieved January 15, 2019. 19. Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 210. 20. Cynthia Ozick, “A Liberal’s Auschwitz,” in The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, ed. Bill Henderson (Yonkers: Pushcart Book Press, 1976), 153.

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21. Brian Cheyette, Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), XIV. 22.  James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). 23. On this topic see for instance Eric Sundquist and Emily Budick (as regards the literary aspects of the issue). In her illuminating article “My Holocaust is not your Holocaust,” Wendy Zierler also recalls the hateful results of Holocaust comparisons in the African-American context (49). She remarks that Phillips’s origins in the West Indies and Britain rather than in the US allowed him a distance from such antagonistic interaction and exposed him to a reality of antisemitism rarely acknowledged by African-American writers (Zierler 57). “One of the aspects of black America that I have never been able to comprehend fully is the virulent anti-Semitism that seems to permeate much black thoughts,” writes Phillips in The European Tribe (53). Benedicte Ledent suggests that the book’s success in the United States may be due to Phillips’s choice of a European setting, enabling “American people to view their identity dilemma from a critical distance” (Ledent 2002, 155). 24. Cynthia Ozick, Metaphor and Memory (New York: Vintage: 1991), 279. 25. Brian Cheyette, “Venetian Spaces: Old-New Literatures and the Ambivalent Uses of Jewish History,” in Reading the ‘New’ Literatures in a Postcolonial Era, ed. Susheila Nasta (Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2000), 53–72. 26.  For a detailed study of Jewish life in Venice, see for example Cecil Roth, History of the Jews in Venice (New York: Schocken Books, 1975). 27. Here Phillips seems to suggest that, were he acknowledged as such, the Jew could act as an apt mediator between Europe and Africa. 28. In his acknowledgments of his historical sources (VII), Phillips mentions the book Portobuffole by Salomone G. Radzik (Editrice La Giuntina) as main source of inspiration. 29. While Eva’s story and that of the Portobuffole Jews end in tragedy, Othello’s, Stephan’s and Malka’s remain deliberately open-ended. 30. For a thorough study of these twin motifs, see in particular Véronique Pauly’s article. 31. The reason invoked was fear of AIDS. See for example Serge Schmemann’s article in The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/29/ world/ethiopian-in-israeli-riot-over-dumping-of-donated-blood.html. The ban on Ethiopian blood was removed in 2016. 32. J. M. Coetzee, “What We Like to Forget.” Review of The Nature of Blood, by Caryl Phillips, New York Review of Books (6 Nov. 1997): 39. 33. On the resonances between intertextuality and the symptomatology of trauma, see Whitehead 89–93 in particular. To her, intertextuality is a key stylistic device of trauma fiction. 34.  Phillips accounts for his strong interest in Shylock in the following terms: “He makes it uncompromisingly clear that he wants nothing to do with Christians beyond his business […] He is advocating separatism and, as many black Americans will testify, there is a time when such a debate is necessary” (The European Tribe 55). 35. See for example the following edict of the Grand Council: “We intend to tolerate some bullying and maltreatment toward the Jews who reside among us,

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but we want them to be able to stay and live in our domain without being submitted to excessive damage and insults” (99). 36.  On the references to Schwarz-Bart and Wiesel, see for example Rothberg (169; 170). On the echoes from Anne Frank’s diary see for example Ledent, Whitehead and Casteel. Reminiscences of Cynthia Ozick are suggested by the character of Rosa, a pregnant woman who shares the Sterns’ hiding place and is often depicted as wrapped in a shawl. 37. Many scholars have pointed out that this statement is preceded and followed by a more realistic assessment. 38. As Michael Rothberg observes, “the novel makes no direct reference to the plight of Palestinians, but their presence shadows the text from the opening page and Phillips has raised the issue in other places” (168).

Works Cited Budick, Emily. Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversations. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Caruth, Cathy. Literature in the Ashes of History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. ———. Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. ———. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Casteel, Sarah. Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. ———. “Writing Under the Sign of Anne Frank: Creolized Holocaust Memory in Michelle Cliff and Caryl Phillips.” Modern Fiction Studies 60, no. 4 (2014): 796–820. Cheyette, Brian. Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. ———. “Venetian Spaces: Old-New Literatures and the Ambivalent Uses of Jewish History.” In Reading the ‘New’ Literatures in a Postcolonial Era, edited by Susheila Nasta, 53–72. Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2000. Cliff, Michelle. Abeng. New York: Plume, 1984. Coetzee, J. M. “What We Like to Forget.” Review of The Nature of Blood, by Caryl Phillips. New York Review of Books (6 Nov. 1997): 38–41. Clingman, Stephen. “Forms of History and Identity in The Nature of Blood.” Salmagundi, no. 143 (Summer 2004): 141–166. Craps, Stef. “Linking Legacies of Loss: Traumatic Histories and Cross-Cultural Empathy in Caryl Phillips’ Higher Ground and The Nature of Blood.” Studies in the Novel 40, nos. 1–2 (2008): 191–202. Derrida, Jacques. Spectres de Marx. Paris: Galilée, 1993. Desai, Anita. Baumgartner’s Bombay. New York: Penguin, 1989. Eckstein Lars. “The Insistence of Voices: An Interview with Caryl Phillips.” Ariel 32, no. 2 (2001): 33–43. Field, Leslie A., and Joyce W. Field, eds. “An Interview with Bernard Malamud.” In Bernard Malamud: A Collection of Critical Essays. London: Prentice-Hall, 1975. Frank, Anne. The Diary of A Young Girl. 1953. The Definitive Edition. New York: Bantam Books, 1997.

180  P. LÉVY Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993. Jaggi, Maya. “Crossing the River: Caryl Phillips Talks to Maya Jaggi.” Wasafiri 20 (1994): 25–30. LaCapra, Dominick. Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Ledent, Bénédicte. Caryl Phillips. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. ———. “Fictional and Cultural Labyrinth: Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 32, no. 1 (January 2001): 185–195. Mantel, Hilary. “Black Is Not Jewish.” Review of The Nature of Blood, by Caryl Phillips. Literary Review (1 Feb. 1997): 39. Ozick, Cynthia. “A Liberal’s Auschwitz.” In The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, edited by Bill Henderson. Yonkers: Pushcart Book Press, 1976. ———. Metaphor and Memory. New York, Vintage: 1991. Pauly, Véronique. “Le motif de la fumée dans le roman de Caryl Phillips, The Nature of Blood, 1997.” In Le Détail à l’oeuvre: Individu et histoire dans la littérature, les arts et les discours, edited by Daniel Argelès, Anne-Marie Jolivet, Heidi Knörzer, Cristina Marinas, and Véronique Pauly, 131–144. Palaiseau: Presses de l’Ecole Polytechnique, 2012. Phillips, Caryl. A New World Order. New York: Vintage, 2001. ———. Higher Ground: A Novel in Three Parts. New York: Penguin, 1989. ———. “On ‘The Nature of Blood’ and the Ghost of Anne Frank.” CommonQuest 3, no. 2 (1998): 4–7. ———. The European Tribe. Boston: Faber, 1987. ———. The Nature of Blood. London: Faber and Faber, 1997. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Standford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Shapiro, James. “Diasporas and Desperations.” The New York Times, May 25, 1997. http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/97/05/25/reviews/970525.25shapirt. html. Retrieved January 15, 2019. Sundquist, Eric. Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. Young, James E. Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Waters, Erika J. Waters. “An Interview with Caryl Phillips: ‘I Am What I Am Because I Was Born There’.” The Caribbean Writer 9 (1995): 102–114. Whitehead, Anne. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Zierler, Wendy. “‘My Holocaust Is Not Your Holocaust’: ‘Facing’ Black and Jewish Experience in The Pawnbroker, Higher Ground, and The Nature of Blood.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 18, no. 1 (2004): 46–67.

CHAPTER 11

The Holocaust in Works by Two Yiddish Writers in Argentina: Simja Sneh and Israel Aszendorf Alan Astro

This chapter studies two Yiddish writers active in Argentina after World War II: Simja Sneh and Israel Aszendorf. Born in Poland one year apart (1908 and 1909, respectively), they were involved in literary circles before the war. With the Nazi invasion, both fled eastward toward the Soviet-occupied part of Poland and then into the Soviet Union, ending up in far reaches of the empire, such as Tashkent. After the war, each spent some time in Europe before immigrating to Argentina, where they were significant figures on the Yiddish cultural scene. And a daughter of one, the son of the other—Perla Sneh and Alexander Ashendorf—have done much to preserve the paternal legacy. It is a sign of the waning of Yiddish that its literary treasures may depend on something so fragile as descendants’ appreciation of forbears’ work. I hope to show that in this case, the dedication is not simply the result of filial piety and that Sneh’s and Aszendorf’s writings are of true quality. Given the current non-existence of translations into English, I beg the reader’s forbearance as I summarize stories by them.

A. Astro (*)  Trinity University, San Antonio, TX, USA © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_11

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Simja Sneh As pseudonyms and even heteronyms (as used by the Portuguese master Fernando Pessoa) make clear, a writer’s name is not simply a designation. For this reason, I note a particularity of Simja Sneh’s name: The J in “Simja” represents a Hispanic rendering of the Hebrew guttural ch in Simcha, meaning “joy” in Hebrew and Yiddish. Born in Puławy as Simja Rozenblat, the future Sneh had a traditional Jewish education, studied at a Polish high school and university, and served in the Polish Army. In addition to working as bookkeeper, or as commercial agent for a paper factory, Sneh published in Yiddish- and Polish-language periodicals.1 In 1939, rapidly foreboding how dire Jewish fate would be under the Nazis, he fled eastward. The trajectories of wartime Jewish refugees to the communist homeland were varied. Some ran afoul of Soviet officialdom and suffered in prison camps; this is what Yiddish writer Avrom Zak lived through and recounts in several volumes.2 Others had less terrible confrontations with authorities and managed to squeak by, via sometimes rocambolesque adventures. Such is what we read about in an MLA-prize-winning Yiddish memoir by Yitzhak Ehrlichson.3 After initially being brutalized by Soviet police, Ehrlichson ended up transporting two train wagonloads of whiskey—government property, of course—through the far reaches of the communist empire. In terms of that time and place, Sneh’s refuge in the Soviet Union was a generally positive experience. Being there afforded not only survival but also an ardently desired chance to fight the Germans. He did so first in the Red Army (until 1941, when Stalin ordered the discharge of foreigners and recent Soviet citizens from its ranks) and then in Anders’ Polish Army in exile (despite the obstacles placed on the path of Jews wishing to join). Sneh marched with Polish troops through Iran to British Mandatory Palestine— just as Menachem Begin did. It was in Tel Aviv that Sneh adopted his alias and made himself younger in order to enlist in the British Army’s Jewish Brigade. (The Lexicon of Modern Yiddish Literature still notes his false year of birth: 1914.) Sneh saw combat in Italy and accompanied allied soldiers occupying Germany. Falling ill, he was evacuated to London, where he published his first book: a Yiddish novella titled Oyf fremde vegn [On Foreign Ways], on a predictably tragic romance in Uzbekistan, between a Polish Jewish refugee and a young Muslim woman on a kolkhoz.4 Released from the hospital in London, our writer drifted to Amsterdam and elsewhere. In 1947, he went, somewhat illegally, to Argentina, to visit a friend who had emigrated before the war. There he stayed, except for residing in Israel from 1973 to 1975. Simja Sneh died in Buenos Aires in 1999. Sneh’s most important works are El pan y la sangre [Bread and Blood], a 1977 collection of stories he translated from Yiddish into Spanish,5 and one of the most original and extensive literary retellings of Holocaust-era Jewish survival: a six-volume memoir, titled in Yiddish Na ve’nad, “a restless

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wanderer,” according to the Hebrew phase in Genesis (4: 12) denoting the punishment meted out to Cain. Only the first two volumes appeared in Yiddish, in 1952; all six were published in Sneh’s own Spanish version under the title Sin rumbo [Aimless] in 1993 to 1997.6 Na ve’nad largely recounts the author’s own wartime trajectory from Poland to London via Russia, Iran, Palestine, and Western Europe. However, the narration remains anonymous and hardly any characters are named. To quote Perla Sneh, “The distinctly collective narrator of Sin rumbo (Na ve’nad) is neither martyr nor hero. The voice is that of ‘one,’ as in the sentence: ‘In the interior of the country, one could manage more easily.’”7 Other designations for the narrative voice, which often turns into that of a single protagonist, include “someone,” “the Jewish soldier,” or even simply “the soldier.” One of myriad instances of this narrative strategy occurs when Sneh recounts a surprising but historically accurate occurrence. In liberated Rome, the Pope receives Allied troops, including—unbeknownst to the Holy Father—members of the Jewish Brigade. Pius XII extends his ring for those attending to kiss. In one case, “someone” extends his own hand, and the Pope “stops, a bit troubled.” Thereupon, the soldier smiled. He pointed to the Star of David, attached to his shoulder and declared, in English, that he was a Jew. The Pope appeared even more troubled, but kept his good-natured smile… He then asked what was his country of origin. (Sin rumbo, 4: 205)

The soldier is about to say “Poland,” but realizes that it is more important, hic et nunc, to indicate whence he had more recently come: “the Jewish country, Eretz-Israel.” He then added he was part of a “Jewish army.” The Pope’s eyes expressed even more astonishment, but the kindly smile stayed on his lips. In a somewhat strange Hebrew, pronounced differently from what the soldier was accustomed to hearing, he blessed the Jew, wishing him a safe return home. (Sin rumbo, 4: 205)

Note how in this last sentence Sneh goes within a few words from referring to the protagonist as “the soldier” to calling him plainly “the Jew”—an important fact concerning the object of a papal benediction in an epoch far less ecumenical than ours. As we shall see, the specificity of Jewish fate is a major theme in Sneh’s work. Perla Sneh underscores another particularity of her father’s imposing memoir: its unabashed portrayal of a Jewish desire for revenge against the Nazis, from the beginning through the end of the war and beyond. When first enrolled in the Red Army, the narrator imagines himself saying to his mother left behind in Poland:

184  A. ASTRO Who has said that blood stinks? It’s not true. Blood smells good. The odor of blood is delightful and brings satisfaction. It is a pleasure for the nostrils, the height of wellbeing. That blood. The impure blood of the green-bluish uniform. The blood of the enemy. “Is it not so, Mama?” “Yes, my son, most certainly.” (Na ve’nad, 248; cf. Sin rumbo, 1: 317)

Likewise, at war’s end, Sneh does not flinch from describing how Jewish soldiers marching through German lands occasionally extract wanton revenge, to which allied comrades-in-arms would turn a blind eye. In one case, Jewish Brigade members shoot up a saloon, where Germans “are already dancing. So soon” after war’s end (Sin rumbo, 5: 19). A mirror shatters, bulbs are ­broken and then: Nothing could be seen: just hands and fists; Jewish soldierly hands and fists striking German heads… Hands that ripped, destroyed, annihilated… Is this how humans look when unexpectedly attacked?… when ruthlessly beaten, without even having the chance to resist? Was this how our fathers, our brothers and sisters, our mothers looked? O hand of mine, strike harder, with greater fury, until blood flows, until thou murderest… (Sin rumbo, 5: 20; ellipses in the original)

Such violence by Jewish Brigade troops is limited to the first days on the vanquished enemy’s soil. Obviously, the Allies could not long tolerate such indiscipline, behavior so dishonorable. But also the realization dawns upon the brigadniks that “it’s just a drop in the sea.” “Once again they arrive at the same conclusion: no revenge exists that could placate their souls,” given the magnitude of the crimes committed against their people (Sin rumbo, 5: 24, 29, 20). As the narrator asks in italics, “Wherethrough passes the road for whoever must continue walking, and who neither can nor wants to forget and yet, at the same time, wishes to preserve his humanity?” (Sin rumbo, 5: 28). As Perla Sneh (172) asserts, “Paradoxically, revenge becomes just as impossible as forgiveness, which French philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch has said ‘died in the extermination camps.’” Even the incommensurability of Jewish suffering in the war, the solitude of the Jews, cannot keep the “lonely Jewish soldier” from feeling some compassion at the massive destruction of Germany. He feels the wind “arguing” with him: “Now you are convinced that not only Jews have suffered because of this storm that has destroyed half the world. Regarding the fact that the Jews have suffered more than others, what can be done? This has always been Jewish fate, since the beginning of eternity. No way of changing that.” Of course, if one wanted to, one could find some way to answer, but one lacked the will to argue with anyone. Even with the wind. Even with one’s own thoughts and objections. (Sin rumbo, 6: 61)

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In his stories, Sneh often returns to what he says here: “the fact that the Jews have suffered more than others” during World War II. A particularly poignant tale in this regard is “La sexta punta” [The Sixth Point] (El pan, 135–158). Its narrator is unusual for Yiddish fiction: a Gentile. He is a Red Army soldier, named Zakharov. Soviet troops are going through a Ukrainian village where nationalists, sensing the Germans’ imminent arrival, have shot the communist head of the town council and several Jews who had taken refuge there. One old Jew, miraculously surviving, is evacuated with the marching army. But he soon dies from his wounds, as does a Soviet soldier. Two roadside graves are quickly dug. The soldier is laid to rest under a fivepointed Soviet star, but Lipkin, a Polish Jew in the ranks, insists that the old man’s resting place be marked by a Star of David. The sergeant complains about the Jews: “You’ve got to have things different. The five points of our star aren’t enough for you. You need a sixth one. The devil take you” (El pan, 155). Lipkin tries to explain to his comrade Zakharov, in Polish-inflected Russian: “Of all the villagers they killed just one. The village was there afterwards, and then dinners were cooked. But they killed all the Jews. All, without exception” (El pan, 157). Lipkin says on the same page, “They want to annihilate us, all of us Jews. Precisely the Jews. No one wants to understand this.” The tale ends as Zakharov tells the reader a dream he had that night: “I was swimming in a sky full of pointy stars. Lipkin was strangling me. I couldn’t scream” (El pan, 158). Troublingly, Sneh seems to suggest that even a well-disposed Gentile, confronted with a statement of the Jews’ singular fate during the war, feels the assertion as a kind of aggression. The sheer incomprehension of the extent of the Jewish catastrophe—and the strange situation in which it places Jews—is brought home by another troubling tale by Sneh, “Chocolate” (El pan, 119–134; cf. Sin rumbo, 5: 25–28). Reuben, a soldier in the Jewish Brigade, hitchhiking in occupied Germany, is offered a lift by Patty, an Irishman in the British Army. Patty speaks of his wife’s awaiting him with their newborn son at home, whereas Reuben recalls his niece left in Poland: “Patty’s little boy is alive and smiling. Rokhmele has been turned into a cloud” (El pan, 129). These thoughts reappear verbatim when Patty asks where Reuben will go when this “damn military service” is over (El pan, 129). Reuben responds, with an English pejorative term for Germans in the text: “I’m from Poland, but the Jerrys killed my entire family.” Patty replies in turn, in a phrase again in English in the text, “Oh, I am sorry.” He falls silent, and Reuben reflects: Patty is a good fellow, a man with a heart. Here he is, reproaching himself for asking so inopportune a question. He regrets having hurt someone by grazing an open wound. But, with all that, Patty’s little boy is alive and smiling, and Rokhmele has been turned into a cloud… (El pan, 130)

Their jeep stalls and the two dismount to inspect the motor. A small boy comes over, tugs at Reuben’s sleeve, and calls him by the generic name for

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a British soldier: “Do you have chocolate, Tommy? Give me a little piece” (El pan, 130). Reuben is used to distributing candy to children while thinking of Rokhmele, but Patty and he have just driven by a Nazi-era sign reading that the town had been declared judenrein. “Go away,” he tells the boy and explains to Patty: “This is a child of Germans. All of them, all the Jerrys are goddam killers of children.” Not ­surprisingly, Patty responds that the child is guilty of nothing and that while Reuben may well choose not to give him any chocolate, he will do so. Patty murmurs something to himself beginning with a J—and Reuben wonders if he is imprecating Jerrys or Jews (El pan, 131–132). As Patty is about to offer the boy candy, Reuben snatches it. The chocolate falls into the mud. Patty, reeling at the offense, challenges Reuben. He again mutters a J-word; this time, Reuben is sure he means Jew and not Jerry. Patty throws down the gauntlet: “We’ll fight it out” (El pan, 132). This phrase in English in the original suggests that we are about to witness a gentlemanly joust according to the strict code of boxing, despite the real tensions involved. Reuben muses: Rokhmele was killed according to all the rules of judenrein… British soldiers are used to giving out chocolate to German children, since the war is over and children are hungry. If Rokhmele were alive, she’d get chocolate too. But she doesn’t get any, because according to all the rules of the game she’s dead. (El pan, 134)

In this impromptu pugilistic encounter, Reuben defeats Patty, but by choking him, against boxing norms. Disgusted, Patty leaves Reuben on the side of the road. Alas for Reuben, “a sudden longing took hold of him. He wished to continue hearing Patty’s gab. But the truck went quickly off and disappeared. Reuben felt himself under the weight of an immense, intolerable solitude” (El pan, 134). A Jew’s isolation during the war can stir up, even afterward, emotions that still place him outside the bounds—or the bonds— of humanity. In 1957, Sneh elaborated one of his Soviet war stories, “El pan” [Bread] (El pan, 73–118), into a play, Dos geshrey in der nakht [The Cry in the Night].8 That piece portrayed both the war and a decade later, showing how tragedy continued via communist refusal to acknowledge specific Jewish fate. We see how much Sneh’s perspective had evolved by then. His memoirs, especially the first two volumes that had appeared in Yiddish in 1952, largely celebrate Soviet combat against the Nazis, the prohibition of explicit antisemitism, the wartime flowering of official Yiddish culture. However, Na ve’nad already portrays dystopic aspects of the system such as persistent economic inequalities; rampant speculation and corruption; implicit distrust of Jews as potential anti-Soviet elements; arbitrary expulsions to far-off regions of the Soviet Union; and, as mentioned, the forced discharge of foreigners, including many Jews, from the Red Army in 1941.

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True, in 1948 Sneh published a volume of poetry—Bleter oyfn vint [Leaves in the Wind]—under the imprint of the ICUF, a Yiddish communist organization.9 However, that was before the Soviet Union had turned virulently anti-Israel. Many of pieces in that book proceed from Sneh’s Zionism and warmly evoke scenes from his time in the Land of Israel. Not long afterward, Sneh broke with the ICUF and castigated ideological blindness. In the preface to the 1957 play just mentioned, A Cry in the Night, he refers sarcastically to Stalin in a kind of religious blasphemy: Once again, years had to pass by. There came the shameful doctors’ trial, the annihilation of Jewish cultural life in the Soviet Union, the murder of the Yiddish writers. Finally, after the fall of the “slaughterer, who had disguised himself as the High Priest at the altar,” people recalled that “refugees had said something about that, and we should have listened more to them…” (Dos geshrey, 3)

Here is an exchange from the play, between a Russian official and a refugee from Poland, whose Jewish background [yidishn opshtam, i.e., “stemming from Jews”] has just been recalled: Refugee: What do you mean, stemming? I am a Jew. I don’t stem from Jews; I continue to be one. Tsherdakov: Who’s preventing you? Who’s bothering you because of that? Refugee: No one… no one. But the old hatred hasn’t gotten out of your blood, your bones. Tsherdakov (enraged): Stop the insults! Refugee: If the truth is an insult, that’s not my fault. Tsherdakov: We’re shedding blood for you… Refugee: Not for us! For your country, for your own home. Tsherdakov: True, for our home, but not just for our home; for the whole world, for all peoples. Refugee: Other peoples shed blood in the fight; the Jewish people is being exterminated. What are you doing against that? Tsherdakov: We are fighting against the greatest enemy of the Jewish people. Refugee: And in 1939 [date of the Germano-Soviet Nonaggression Pact], you delivered us into his hands. Tsherdakov: Among us, you are all free. Refugee: Free to deny ourselves. (Dos geshrey, 62–63)

The drama, never performed (perhaps because it went so against ideological fashion), is to my mind on a par with Wiesel’s play on Soviet Jewry, Zalmen or the Madness of God, which came over a decade after.10 Sneh, too, was active in that later struggle, publishing his translation, from Russian into Spanish, of writings by Jewish dissidents.11 Darrell Lockhart, a major American scholar of Latin American Jewish literature, emphasizes Sneh’s self-translation by hailing him as “a seminal figure in

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Holocaust literature written in Spanish.”12 I would add that even within the vast corpus of writing in Yiddish on the Shoah, the original version of Sneh’s Na ve’nad is of significant quality and breadth. Also, his play on Soviet Jewry masterfully broaches a topic somewhat less present in Yiddish literature. One can only hope that someday Sneh’s work will be made available to a wide audience via translation into English.

Israel Aszendorf In a September 1953 issue of the Parisian Yiddish daily Undzer Vort, there appeared an article titled “A Conversation with Israel Aszendorf.”13 Its author was Simja Sneh, writing as Buenos Aires correspondent for the paper. Aszendorf had recently left the French capital, where he had resided since 1948, and had just arrived in Argentina, where he would settle permanently. Sneh noted the similarities between himself and the subject of his article. Both were born in Poland. More precisely, Aszendorf’s birthplace was Melnitse, a village-like shtetl, and he grew up in Lemberg (then Lvov, USSR; now Lviv, Ukraine). As I mentioned before, each had escaped to the Soviet Union during the war and had ended up in places as far away as Tashkent. Sneh noted his commonalities with Aszendorf, but there were differences. In addition to his career in Yiddish, Sneh had published in Polish before the war and would come to be a journalist and translator in Spanish; Aszendorf wrote only for a Jewish audience, and all his works were in Yiddish, except for a small number in Hebrew.14 Sneh’s first book and measure of celebrity came after World War II; Aszendorf published his first volume in 1932 and soon achieved renown as a poet.15 The following fact may serve as an indication of his prewar importance: The Montreal Yiddish poet and critic Melech Ravitch composed in 1939 the entry on Aszendorf for his oft-cited multivolume series of intimate portraits of significant Polish Yiddish writers. Though just a decade-and-a-half his senior, Ravitch refers to Aszendorf as his rebellious son “born out of wedlock.”16 Here are some more differences between Sneh and Aszendorf: While the former was a mineworker and soldier in the Soviet Union, the latter took part in state-sanctioned Yiddish cultural undertakings there. After the war, Sneh had gone back to the country of his birth in an unfruitful search for surviving relatives and soon departed. Contrarily, Aszendorf resided in Poland for a few years after the war, joining other writers in an attempt to replant Yiddish culture among the decimated Jewish population. Aszendorf’s activities in postwar Poland were manifold. He collaborated on two collections of Yiddish writing that came out in Lodz in 1946 and 1948.17 In that same city, he published a play on the biblical King Saul, a paean to Jewish combativeness for which he would ultimately share an American Yiddish literary prize with the great Yiddish poet H. Leivick.18 Most surprisingly, Aszendorf wrote the narrative for a Yiddish-language propaganda film on the post-World War II settlement of Jews in Lower Silesia, a

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formerly German region annexed by Poland.19 The film, sponsored by the Polish government, celebrates postwar Jewish colonists’ skill in agriculture and industry, the revival of Jewish religion and culture, as well as the free expression of all shades of Jewish political opinion. True, the régime had not yet been entirely taken over by communists. By 1948, Aszendorf left Poland for good; he had to avail himself of the pretext of departing, just temporarily, to attend a Yiddish cultural event in Paris. Far more typical than Sneh’s haphazard travels that ended in Argentina, Aszendorf’s movement first to Paris and then to Buenos Aires was a trajectory followed by a number of Yiddish refugee writers. Lodging and creative employment were scarce in the French capital, whereas some Argentine Jewish organizations “imported” from France displaced artists and activists who could shore up local Yiddish culture.20 At the ceremony honoring Aszendorf’s arrival in Buenos Aires in 1953, one speaker explained this strategy: “Yes, our community is a hearty one, but it is no secret that we are still raw and provincial. We lack leaders with a clear direction. Therefore, we welcome intellectuals to help plow the soil.”21 Alas, Aszendorf’s cultural labor in Argentina was not long lived. As an inspector of Jewish schools in the provinces, he died in 1956, at age 47, from a sudden heart attack on the train to a remote Jewish community. Still, his eight years after leaving postwar Poland were quite productive. In Paris, he published a book of poetry and another of short fiction.22 In Buenos Aires, a committee of friends put out a volume of his Letste shriftn [Last Writings] two years after his death. One of Aszendorf’s poems in Paris drew the attention of US Yiddish poet and critic Jacob Glatstein and appears as well in a significant anthology of Yiddish poems about the Yiddish language itself that was published in Buenos Aires. The eight-verse piece is simply titled Oysyes [Letters]: Gothic letters are pointy: Bayonets, rods for torture, knives. Latin letters are round: Barrels filled with red wine. Hebrew letters aren’t Drunk on wine or others’ blood. They are angular, speckled, stooped, Just like my people’s destiny.23

“Letters” is a denunciation of German (“Gothic”) and Christian (“Latin”) cruelty, which leads Glatstein to see it as one of the “better national poems of our tragic epoch,” an expression of a poet’s “longing… to approach the border of silence.”24 What Glatstein considers a movement toward silence might well be the fact that Hebrew letters—or more precisely, Jewish letters as they are called in Yiddish—are not exactly celebrated: “They are angular, speckled, stooped.”

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Yiddish has been forced to stoop, but still lives, as we see in another poem by Aszendorf, “Elegy to Yiddish”: Fathers and mothers Murdered in ovens by German hands Still live with us And will die only when their language dies. (Vey un vunder, 123)

The murdered family did not survive but somehow lives; this is the message of a story, with a surprising comic touch, that Aszendorf published in Paris and titled “A Relative” (Shutfim, 183–197). The narrative begins as David Farber—the name of the protagonist in many of Aszendorf’s tales—travels from Poland to the French capital, where his brother had lived before the war and whence he had been deported to an extermination camp. David places an announcement in a Parisian Yiddish newspaper, seeking someone who knew his brother before his murder by the Nazis. He receives a letter from a man also named Farber. David goes to see him. It turns out that the other Farber had not the slightest acquaintance with his brother, but is certain, on the flimsiest of evidence, that they are related: “Where do you come from?,” asked the man. “Lublin.” The man said triumphantly: “I come from a shtetl near Lublin. You are surely a relative.” David explained to him: “In the last years before the war, I lived in Lublin. I am originally from Podolia, from a shtetl near the Russian border.” The man, disappointed, said: “So you aren’t from Lublin. But that doesn’t change anything.” He was not about to give up. “You may still be family.” (Shutfim, 185)

The other Farber holds dearly onto this family romance for two reasons. First, he has lost all his relatives, while his wife’s family survived and their daughter, hidden by Christians, has become not only estranged from Judaism but hostile to it. Secondly, even among the community of survivors in Paris, few are willing to recall life in the old country, and David is a fresh arrival not averse to reminiscence. However, when the newly encountered Farber, a garment manufacturer, offers to sell him clothing at cost—“I don’t want to make a profit from ­relatives”—David fears lest he seem to be exploiting the other’s mistake. He decides not to visit his “relative” again. Ironically, when a man from Rouen named Finkel, who did know his brother in Paris, shows up, David learns how estranged his true relative had become. His brother Meir—like himself, a dedicated student of modern Hebrew, from a religiously observant home— had lived with a non-Jewish Frenchwoman, who is now embarrassed of

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having had a Jewish lover. David thinks: “My brother’s tragedy has become ash, along with him” (Shutfim, 189, 193). Finkel then invites David to come back with him to Rouen, to teach Hebrew to his daughter and other Jewish children. His argument goes as follows: You want to be among Jews? You’ll find some in Rouen. Back in the old days, in Poland, when some thousand Jews lived in a remote shtetl, it felt like too few. We all wanted to live in Warsaw, Lodz, Lemberg, or Vilna. We wanted to be among tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. Now we have to make do with few. Each Jewish family is a people, a people of Israel. (Shutfim, 194)

The Jewish people has been reconfigured by the Holocaust. Blood family members—David’s brother, Meir; the other Farber’s daughter—are gone or become alien. Now, one may choose one’s family. Lest this be seen as a ­relatively (as it were) happy ending, Aszendorf provides a final ironic twist. It is summer. The Rouen Jewish families have all gone on vacation. David decides this is the chance to visit Paris properly. Once there, however, he feels lonely—and goes to visit the other Farber, who turns out to have died. His wife explains he had a heart condition, made worse by his daughter’s rejection of her Jewish family and their immigrant ways. The widow then tells David: “Just because he’s died, don’t think you’re off the hook. You are now the sole member of my husband’s family” (Shutfim, 196). The story ends as David reflects: “Perhaps, after all, the other Farber doubted I was a relative, but his wife is certain of it. She has inherited me from her husband, along with all the other things he has left her.” They are now truly family, “related via misfortune” (Shutfim, 197). The murder of David’s brother in Auschwitz is made present via the death of the man with the same last name. Though somewhat ironic in tone, this tale reinforces the notion that death itself is no longer the same after Auschwitz. Another Parisian story by Aszendorf portrays postwar survival in even bleaker terms. Titled “Nisht oysgemitn dem goyrl” [The Fate Not Averted] (Letste shriftn, 87–116), it is presented as fragments of a diary left behind by someone who has just committed suicide in a dingy Parisian hotel. The author of this embedded text is a young Jewish woman, who had been in a ghetto and a Nazi labor camp. This literary strategy is a bit surprising: A female narrator is rare in survivors’ accounts and fiction of the time. We learn the diarist arrives first in Sweden, a common point of transit for Holocaust survivors, and then in Paris, where a far-off relative has offered to sponsor her. She hesitates. In an echo of Aszendorf’s earlier story, fellow former inmates tell her that things have changed: One’s family used to mean a brother, a sister, or, obviously, parents. Now, after the great slaughter, only fragments remain. Even a remote cousin matters. The main thing is, he wants to see you. Maybe a match will come of this. (Letste shriftn, 90)

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Her encounter with the cousin in Paris is one of several wherein she is disappointed or even abused by men, whether truly interested in marriage or simply wishing to bed her down. When she refuses such advances, the relative withdraws his help, and lecherous bosses fire her. Despite misgivings, she embarks on an apparently mutual relationship with a Jewish black marketeer who had been both a prisoner of a Russian labor camp and a DP in Germany. The idyll ends suddenly when he runs off to America. More interesting than these sad scenarios are some other situations depicted. An American journalist wishes to buy her story, adapt it, and sell it to a newspaper. Her response: “I took fright at such ‘adaptation.’ I knew that his inventions would have a stronger effect on the readers than any true experience of mine, terrible though it has been” (Letste shriftn, 89). Even more upsetting is what happens at an association of survivors she frequents. She is asked to take a place on the dais at a commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. To her surprise, she is presented as a partisan fighter in the forests. “Remember those who took up arms and defended our honor,” exclaims the organizer of the event. She wonders: “Was it not enough for him that I was in a ghetto and a camp? Do I need to have been a partisan, for his happiness to be complete?” When she confronts the speaker with his untruth, he asks: “Is being a partisan a cause for shame?” She answers: “Not only isn’t it shameful, but it’s highly honorable. However, I wasn’t a partisan and don’t deserve the honor.” The organizer’s retort: “Isn’t it sufficient that I have awarded you an honor and invited you onto the dais—more than you deserve? Now you come to complain” (Letste shriftn, 95, 96). Our diarist is understandably nonplussed. Another awful meeting occurs with a vacationing American Jewish couple who asks her for directions. Discovering their common origin, they invite her to a café, tell her about themselves, and show her a photo of their sumptuous wedding reception, with a date inscribed on it: January 1, 1943. She is taken aback, despite what she knows to be unreasonable about her attitude: “Young people in love shouldn’t have married because overseas their brethren were being killed?” Still, she cannot keep from blurting out: “I was in the ghetto then… and also in a camp.” The wife reacts with dread, “And you’re alive?!” “I don’t know if I am,” she answers (Letste shriftn 110, 111). This is something we hear in Aaron Zeitlin’s “Monologue in Plain Yiddish,” when the poet’s interlocutor says, “You say you’ve died/But you pretend to live.”25 Incomprehension grows between the young woman and the couple. The husband asserts, “Among us that’s not the way it would have been. We Americans wouldn’t have let it happen. If someone calls me a Jew, he gets it right in the kisser.” Whereupon he “balls up his fists as though getting ready to fight” (Letste shriftn, 111). “Jew” and “fight” are in English in the original—as the same words are in Simja Sneh’s tale “Chocolate.” Comparing this scene with the one in the survivors’ association, our diarist ponders:

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Some want to view those murdered as cowards. Others would have them be saints. Nobody wants to see them as they really were, in suffering and in death. All wish them to be something that would justify their own lives, their identities, their politics. (Letste shriftn, 112)

Our diarist has been critical of many survivors’ will to forget, marry, re-found families immediately, and jockey for wealth and position. Yet she comes to wonder about her assumptions: It seemed to me necessary to pause. A pause to consider what had happened, to take a good look around. Now I think they were right, not I. There were things one could do immediately after returning to life and regaining freedom, things one would not dare do later. (Letste shriftn, 103)

These lines perhaps suggest Aszendorf is questioning the very effort by a writer-survivor to contemplate what has happened, to turn it into text; such endeavors require a certain solitude and distance from the world. Holocaust writing can be interpreted as renewal of life. The opposite may also be true, as we see from Literature or Life, the reticently titled memoir of Buchenwald by Jorge Semprún.26 Explaining why he waited until 1994 to publish about his experience in the concentration camp, Semprún stated: “To remain in that memory would surely have made it impossible to write any book, and perhaps would have led to suicide.”27 Indeed, our diarist’s misadventures, and her exacerbated introspection, end in death by her own hand. She reminds herself that in the ghetto and camp, she “fought for life out of fear of death. Now for fear of life, I shall voluntarily give myself over to death” (Letste shriftn, 116). Hers will not be a suicide by just any means: “I can choose one of many. Throwing myself in front of a car. Jumping out the window onto the street. Hanging myself.” But she uses gas—not because a jet is conveniently located in her room, but because it is the death “fated” [bashert] for her, as it was for her parents, brother, and sister. How realistic is this dénouement? In Un prénom républicain [An Administrative Name], the memoir of a Yiddish-speaking childhood in Paris, 1.5-generation28 French writer Berthe Burko-Falcman tells of young Jewish women who committed suicide after the war: “Nina, who had made some life-affirming resolutions, married very early. By 18, she had a child. Her little girl had just turned 20 months old when Nina jumped out the window into the courtyard of the apartment building.”29 Even more similarly: “At age 16, Danielle waited for her grandmother to leave, and then turned on the gas” (Un prénom, 118). The death sentence on Jewry seems not to have been commuted: “Whoever experienced the terrors of the last war is afraid to remain in Europe,” writes the diarist in “The Fate Not Averted” (Letste shriftn, 101). Despite Aszendorf’s asserting he wished to portray Jewish “revival” as well as “extermination”—oyfkum as well as umkum (quoted in “Oyfgenumen”)—his

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postwar tales are often bleak. However, I would like to end on one clear exception, where the ill fate hanging over the Jewish people is abrogated and rebirth affirmed. The story is titled “Di bagegenish” [The Encounter] (Letste shriftn, 206–213), and its protagonist is named Farber, as in “A Relative.” Emigrating on a ship during the boreal summer, he finds himself in his new home, Buenos Aires, during the humid austral one. He takes refuge from the sweltering city in a cooler rural location—something between a small town and a village: “halb shtetl un halb dorf,” as he had known at home (Letste shriftn, 206). In cattle-rich Argentina, the hotel serves meat for lunch and dinner, which lie heavily on Farber’s stomach. Going to buy dairy products, he is greeted by a farmer with one sharp word: “¿Judío?”—Jew in Spanish. Farber, taken aback, avers he is. The farmer roars: “They’re everywhere here” (Letste shriftn, 207). A few days later, he espies Farber from afar and moves closer to stare him down. Farber wonders if he is looking for a fight, but is unwilling, as a foreigner and a stranger in town, to engage a local. Yet he feels he could meet the challenge: a surprising bit of diaspora combative spirit, which will have the chance to prove itself later. But the farmer is no local at all. Imagine Farber’s surprise when on their next chance encounter, the man calls out to him in Ukrainian. It turns out they are from the same village: Milnitse (Aszendorf’s own birthplace). The farmer left before the war; Farber during it, in 1941, before the massacre. The Ukrainian regales his Jewish interlocutor with antisemitic stereotypes. He reminisces about “Yankl who falsely weighed the peasants’ grain,” Shloymke who took advantage by “selling liquor and never drinking,” and Jews who exploited his sister as a housemaid yet caused her to look down on her peasant origins: “When she came home on Sunday or a holiday, she acted like a noblewoman. She wanted us to serve her!” (Letste shriftn, 208, 212). He too would have wanted to work for Jews, bringing them firewood—just to get a piece of hallah. (Gentile appetite for the Sabbath loaf is a topos in Yiddish literature.) The farmer’s attitude toward the Jews: “I’ve always hated you and always needed you, and sought you out. A dog’s life!” He “reassures” Farber. “I hate you, but I also hate others.” The dark-haired Italians and Spaniards of Argentina do not escape his ire. “They all descend from Jews… There’s just one real Christian here, and that’s me—Eastern Orthodox.” Still, he calls Farber a “zemlyak,” a Slavic term meaning the same as landsman [compatriot] in Yiddish (Letste shriftn, 212, 210, 212, 208). He mentions going to a Jewish restaurant in Buenos Aires, just to eat varenikes. Disappointed by the fare, he has taught his wife to make such specialties and invites his Jewish townsman to taste them. At the table, Farber (who, remember, had originally come to the farm to buy milkhiks) is not enticed. He has dined “on meat cooked by the French, the English, the Uzbeks. But this meat tasted treyf. It was not just because it was pork. It was as though a piece of a living pig had just been cut off and served to him.” Yet Farber feels “drawn” back to this man. “Perhaps it’s

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because of the young, pretty wife? No, he wants to see the farmer. He senses that something between them has taken place but not been completed” (Letste shriftn 210, 213, 211). Their next chance encounter is at a restaurant. Farber grabs a table-leg, “as a woman in labor holds, clings, onto something to make the pain easier to bear.” The simile is striking. Yet it is not a baby but a long-gestating torrent of words that will be delivered. Farber blurts out what he had heard from a survivor: How the Ukrainian villagers helped the Germans murder the Jews, splitting their heads with iron rods, raping women, pillaging Jewish taverns and celebrating it all in drunken abandon. The farmer responds heatedly: “Yes! That’s it! They were waiting for such a day. How I envy them.” To which Farber replies: As soon as I had seen you, I felt that you were supposed to be the one to bash my brains out with an iron rod. But I was gone before the slaughter. You had left a few years earlier… Now I have a wife and child, who bears my father’s name. The same is true of others, my friends, who escaped. And you—just look at you. You don’t seem human. You’ve been ruined by liquor. You’re falling to pieces. You’re through. (Letste shriftn, 213–214)

The farmer gets ready to deal a blow to Farber’s head, but Farber jabs one into his ribs. The restaurateur runs up and ends the fight. At the end of “The Encounter,” Farber’s wife and child have joined him. As they walk back to the train station, the Ukrainian approaches. At first, “Farber shudders, as though he had seen a ghost. But then he took his son into his arms, raised him high, passed the farmer by as though he were waving a flag, victorious over the enemy” (Letste shriftn, 214). Though Aszendorf did not live long after publishing this tale, his faith in the future and family was not misplaced. His widow and three-year-old son (note the similar configuration to the family in the story) went to live in Israel, where her Mizrahi family—Jews from Aden—had settled. Thus, Alexander Ashendorf grew up in a world far from Yiddish. However, in recent years he has learned the language thoroughly and is translating his father’s works.30 Their publication in English will be “victorious over the enemy,” as his father wrote. Finally, I would like to suggest a surprising parallel between this story and tales by Jorge Luis Borges. I doubt Aszendorf had enough time before dying in his new homeland to become proficient in Spanish and read the Argentine master. Nonetheless, the fateful Jewish-Ukrainian meeting on the pampa in Aszendorf’s “The Encounter” resembles predicaments in stories by Borges: “The South,” “The Gospel According to Mark,” and most uncannily one also titled “The Encounter” (“El encuentro” in the original).31 In each case, visitors from the city to a remote rural location become involved in conflicts that are of that time and place—and simultaneously not of that time and place.

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Can this apparent coincidence be another encounter not quite of this world: between Aszendorf and Borges in the Argentine countryside? At a 1967 commemoration of murdered Soviet Yiddish writers, Sneh was on a panel with Borges at the Buenos Aires branch of the YIVO. Aszendorf might have been there too, had he lived long enough.

Notes











1. Leyb Vaserman, “Sneh, Simkhe-Yitskhok,” in Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, eds. Shmuel Niger and Yankev Shatski, vol. 6 (New York: Alveltlekher Yidisher Kultur-Kongres, 1965), col. 473. This entry has been translated by Joshua Fogel, “Simkhe-Yitskhok (Simja) Sneh,” https://yleksikon.blogspot. com/2018/05/simkhe-yitskhok-simja-sneh.html, accessed 4 December 2018. 2. See Arnaud Bikard, “L’écrivain yiddish Avrom Zak, un témoin mineur? Le récit exemplaire d’un réfugié juif en Union Soviétique lors de la Seconde Guerre mondiale,” in Premiers savoirs de la Shoah, ed. Judith Lindenberg (Paris: CNRS, 2017), 91–112. 3. Yitzhak Erlichson, My Four Years in Soviet Russia, trans. Maurice Wolfthal (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2013). The Modern Language Association awarded this book the Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies, for the years 2010–2013. 4. Simja Sneh, Oyf fremde vegn (London: Fraye Yidishe Tribune, 1947). 5. S. Sneh, El pan y la sangre, trans. S. Sneh (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1977). Translations from French, Spanish and Yiddish are mine, unless otherwise noted. 6. S. Sneh, Na ve’nad (Buenos Aires: Undzer Vort, 1952). The title page notes this as volume 1; however, its translation by Sneh himself appears as the first two volumes of the Spanish version: Sin rumbo, 6 vols. (Buenos Aires: Milá, 1993–1997). 7. Perla Sneh, “Simja Sneh: A Language in Solitude,” in Splendor, Decline, and Rediscovery of Yiddish in Latin America, eds. Malena Chinski and Alan Astro (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 169. 8. S. Sneh, Dos geshrey in der nakht (Buenos Aires: Undzer Vort, 1957). 9. S. Sneh, Bleter oyfn vint (Buenos Aires: ICUF, 1947). 10. Élie Wiesel, Zalmen or the Madness of God, trans. Nathan Edelman, adapt. Marion Wiesel (New York: Random House, 1974). The original French ­edition appeared in 1968. 11.  Alexander Voronel and Victor Iajot, eds., Samizdat judío, trans. S. Sneh (Buenos Aires: Comité Argentino de Estudio de la Situación de la Minoría Judía en la U.R.S.S., 1977). 12. Darrell Lockhart, “Simja Sneh,” in Holocaust Literature: An Encyclopedia of Writers and Their Work, ed. S. Lillian Kremer, vol. 2 (New York: Routledge, 2003), 1179 (emphasis added). 13. S. Sneh, “A shmues mit Yisroel Ashndorf,” Undzer vort (Sept. 1953), 12, 14. Further information on Israel Aszendorf is found in “Ashendorf, Yisroel,” Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literature, vol. 1 (New York: Alveltlekher Yidisher Kultur-Kongres, 1956), cols. 193–194. This entry has been translated by Fogel: “Yisroel Ashendorf (Israel Aszendorf),” https://yleksikon.blogspot. com/search?q=ashendorf, accessed 4 January 2019.

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14. A collection of miniatures in Hebrew is mentioned in the preface to his posthumous writings: Aszendorf, Letste shriftn (Buenos Aires: Argentiner Opteyl fun Alveltlekhn Yidishn Kultur-Kongres, 1958), 7. 15. Aszendorf, In a groyser, fremder shtot (Lemberg: Y. Fridman, 1932). 16. Melech Ravitch, Mayn leksikon (Montreal: A Komitet in Montreal, 1945), 1: 36. 17.  Yidishe Shriftn: Literarish Zamlbukh (Lodz: Fareyn fun yidishe literatn un zhurnalistn in Poyln, 1946 and 1948). 18. Aszendorf, Der meylekh Shoel (Lodz: Yidish Bukh, 1948). 19.  Shaul Goskin and Y. Goldberg, dirs., Der yidisher yishev in Nider-Shlezye (1947). 20. See Chinski, “Yiddish Culture After the Shoah: Refugee Writers and Artists as ‘Fresh Creative Energies’ for Buenos Aires,” in Splendor, Decline, and Rediscovery of Yiddish in Latin America, eds. Chinski and Astro, 42–68. 21.  “Oyfgenumen Yisroel Ashendorfn in literatn-fareyn,” Di Prese, October 2, 1953. 22. Aszendorf, Vey un vunder (Paris: Yidisher Pen-Klub, 1950); Shutfim fun goyrl (Paris: Yidisher Pen-Klub, 1953). 23. Aszendorf, Vey un vunder, 7; Samuel Rollansky, ed., Musterverk fun der yidisher literatur, vol. 33: Antologye: Yidish in lid (Buenos Aires: Ateneo Literario en el IWO, 1967), 24. 24. Jacob Glatstein, “In tokh genumen,” Yidisher Kemfer, November 23, 1956: 14, and October 13, 1950: 14. 25. “Monolog in pleynem yidish,” Aaron Zeitlin, Ale lider un poemes, vol. 1: Lider fun khurbn un lider fun gloybn (New York: Bergen-Belsen Memorial Press, 1967), 101. 26. Jorge Semprún, Literature or Life, trans. Linda Coverdale (New York: Penguin, 1998). The original French edition came out in 1994. 27. “Rencontre avec Jorge Semprún, à l’occasion de la parution de L’écriture ou la vie (1994),” interview with Semprún by his publishing house, http://www. gallimard.fr/catalog/entretiens/01029405.htm, accessed 4 January 2019. 28. See Susan R. Suleiman, “The 1.5 Generation: Thinking About Child Survivors and the Holocaust,” American Imago 59, no. 3 (2002): 277–296. 29. Berthe Burko-Falcman, Un prénom républicain (Paris: Seuil, 2007), 118. 30. As I write this, Alexander Ashendorf is putting the final touches on three volumes of collected plays, poems, and stories by his father. 31. Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Viking 1998), 174–179, 364–369, and 397–401.

Bibliography Astro, Alan, ed. Yiddish South of the Border: An Anthology of Latin American Writing. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003. Aszendorf, Israel. Der meylekh Shoel. Lodz: Yidish Bukh, 1948. ———. In a groyser, fremder shtot. Lemberg: Y. Fridman, 1932. ———. Letste shriftn. Buenos Aires: Argentiner Opteyl fun Alveltlekhn Yidishn Kultur-Kongres, 1958. ———. Shutfim fun goyrl. Paris: Yidisher Pen-Klub, 1953.

198  A. ASTRO ———. Vey un vunder. Paris: Yidisher Pen-Klub, 1950. Bikard, Arnaud. “L’écrivain yiddish Avrom Zak, un témoin mineur? Le récit exemplaire d’un réfugié juif en Union Soviétique lors de la Seconde Guerre mondiale.” In Premiers savoirs de la Shoah, edited by Judith Lindenberg, 91–112. Paris: CNRS, 2017. Borges, Jorge Luis. Collected Fictions. Translated by Andrew Hurley. New York: Viking 1998. Burko-Falcman, Berthe. Un prénom républicain. Paris: Seuil, 2007. Chinski, Malena, and Alan Astro, eds. Splendor, Decline, and Rediscovery of Yiddish in Latin America. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Erlichson, Yitzhak. My Four Years in Soviet Russia. Translated by Maurice Wolfthal. Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2013. Glatstein, Jacob. “In tokh genumen.” Yidisher Kemfer, November 23, 1956: 14; October 13, 1950: 14. Goskin, Shaul, and Y. Goldberg, dirs. Der yidisher yishev in Nider-Shlezye, 1947. Lockhart, Darrell. “Simja Sneh.” In Holocaust Literature: An Encyclopedia of Writers and Their Work, edited by S. Lillian Kremer, vol. 2, 1179–1181. New York: Rouledge, 2003. Niger, Shmuel, and Yankev Shatski, eds. Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, vols. 1 and 6. New York: Alveltlekher Yidisher Kultur-Kongres, 1956 and 1965. Ravitch, Melech. Mayn leksikon, vol. 1. Montreal: A Komitet in Montreal, 1945. Rollansky, Samuel, ed. Musterverk fun der yidisher literatur, vol. 33: Antologye: Yidish in lid. Buenos Aires: Ateneo Literario en el IWO, 1967. Semprún, Jorge. Literature or Life. Translated by Linda Coverdale. New York: Penguin, 1998. Sneh, Simja. Bleter oyfn vint. Buenos Aires: ICUF, 1947. ———. Dos geshrey in der nakht. Buenos Aires: Undzer Vort, 1957. ———. El pan y la sangre. Translated by S. Sneh. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1977. ———. Na ve’nad. Buenos Aires: Undzer Vort, 1952. ———. Oyf fremde vegn. London: Fraye Yidishe Tribune, 1947. ———. Sin rumbo, 6 vols. Translated by S. Sneh. Buenos Aires: Milá, 1993–1997. Suleiman, Susan R. “The 1.5 Generation: Thinking About Child Survivors and the Holocaust.” American Imago 59, no. 3 (2002): 277–296. Voronel, Alexander, and Victor Iajot, eds. Samizdat judío. Translated by S. Sneh. Buenos Aires: Comité Argentino de Estudio de la Situacion de la Minoría Judía en la U.R.S.S., 1977. Wiesel, Élie. Zalmen or the Madness of God. Translated by Nathan Edelman. Adapt. Marion Wiesel. New York: Random House, 1974. Zeitlin, Aaron. Ale lider un poemes, vol. 1: Lider fun khurbn un lider fun gloybn. New York: Bergen-Belsen Memorial Press, 1967.

CHAPTER 12

Edgar Hilsenrath’s Novels: Der Nazi & der Friseur and Berlin… Endstation Till Kinzel

When the topic of the annihilation of the Jews during the National Socialist regime is turned into fiction, a certain uneasiness about this always creeps in. For one may well wonder whether the horrors of persecution as well as of both concentration and extermination camps can or ought to be turned into fictional as opposed to factual or documentary literature. Does this fictionalization not necessarily lead to a problematic fusion of fact and fiction which in turn may lead to doubt about actual occurrences once the imaginary character of some parts of these works is demonstrated? Does it not mean to willfully play with authentic memories of horrible events if one uses them to create works that possess aesthetic appeal? Are certain styles of fictional discourse to be regarded as morally improper for the depiction or presentation of the destruction of the Jews and other minorities, especially if they employ humor and satire?1 Without forgetting about these and other questions to which there are no easy answers,2 one should perhaps approach the issue with an open mind about the various options for attempting to confront by literary means one of the major catastrophes in twentieth-century history. That this problem is not one limited to the persecution and destruction of the Jews is evident from similar attempts, to write about the Armenian genocide or the Soviet Gulag about which Solzhenitsyn’s major book The Gulag Archipelago is the prime exhibit. In addition, the particular features of memorial culture

T. Kinzel (*)  Technical University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_12

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and cultural memory at various times and in different places may contribute to specific forms of conformism, sentimentalism, and the commercialization of genocides and especially the Holocaust.3 The writer Edgar Hilsenrath (1926–2018) is a particularly interesting object of any discussion in this regard, as he has written about the general topic of persecution and annihilation of the Jews under National Socialism in various fictional books. In addition, he has also contributed to the literature about the Armenian genocide with his long novel Das Märchen vom letzten Gedanken [The Story of the Last Thought] (1989), offering food for thought about the presentation of genocide in literature already by introducing the narrative concept of “fairy tale” into the discussion, a form of narration that would seem ill-adapted to describing the real-life events of a major historical catastrophe.4 In this 500-page novel, Hilsenrath offers a non-realist presentation of the Armenian genocide in the mirror of fabulous stories that nevertheless manage to incorporate a lot of ethnographic knowledge that he partly acquired through an extended period of studying books about Armenian history in the United States as well as through traveling to Turkey.5 It has been pointed out by Hans Vilmar Geppert that the fairy tale elements of the novel are anti-histories written in a folksy way, that is to say, myths, legends, anecdotes, fables, etc.6 These may, however, serve in a special way to carry “a truth about the crime of genocide that may be different from the actual reality,”7 an insight that can also be applied to the actual Holocaust novels written by Hilsenrath. Thus, his novel Jossel Wassermanns Heimkehr also employs various kinds of tall tales to present the way of life of Jews in Galicia, told from the perspective of a dying man who has escaped to Switzerland and now, in September 1939, wants to record the story not only of his life but also of his home shtetl Pohodna. But even though the memories of Jossel Wassermann are full of funny stories, the historical point in time, virtually on the eve of the annihilation of Eastern European Jewish life and culture, makes it impossible for the reader to ignore the brutal fact that this very world would have been totally destroyed a few years later.8 Over the years, Hilsenrath has written a total of six novels as well as short stories and satirical texts, many of which also concern themes explored at length in his novels. These themes include not only the period of World War II and the post-war era in Europe and the United States, but also meta-fictional storytelling in more contemporary settings. The satires also ­ take up issues such as neo-Nazis in Western Germany. But even this kind of storytelling is linked to the overall concern with persecution and genocide, as the novel Berlin… Endstation (2006), to take the most obvious example, makes clear. In this somewhat loosely constructed, episodic novel, Hilsenrath has invented a protagonist and strangely homodiegetic narrator, that is, a narrator inside the storyworld,9 who is in fact trying to write nothing less than a holocaust novel.10 The (initial?) narrator, Joseph Leschinksy aka Lesche, first lives in New York, working in all kinds of places for only very short periods of time in order to survive, trying to acquire the resources that will enable him

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to write his book. This fictional book is called Der Jude und der SS-Mann, a novel that shares a certain feature with Hilsenrath’s own novel Der Nazi & der Friseur, namely its satirical character: It is described by Lesche as “A satire on the Nazi period” [“Eine Satire auf die Nazizeit”] and in a nod toward the difficulties Hilsenrath had with the introduction of his own books into the German book market, Lesche adds: “This is something the Germans can’t stomach. The topic is too sensitive. They believe the topic should be treated either with deadly seriousness or not at all” (Hilsenrath: Berlin… Endstation, 14) [“So was vertragen die Deutschen nicht. Das Thema ist zu heikel. Sie glauben, das Thema müsse entweder mit tödlichem Ernst behandelt werden oder gar nicht”].11 He finally moves back to Germany, first to Munich, but then on to Berlin, the focal point of German history, but also the place where a holocaust memorial was then in the planning state. Lesche tells this to his interlocutor Singer in the New York emigrants’ cafeteria where he usually goes and asks him what he thinks about this. Singer’s response is laconic: “This is a bad joke. Why do the Germans need a memorial? Germany as a whole is a holocaust memorial” (Hilsenrath, Berlin… Endstation, 9) [“Das ist ein schlechter Witz. Wozu brauchen die Deutschen ein Mahnmal? Ganz Deutschland ist ein Holocaust-Mahnmal”].12 In one vivid scene, Lesche is invited to a reading in a small German town where the local members of a fictional right-wing party DNP (modeled on the right-wing party actually called NPD) crowd the lecture room in an intimidating way, while the “director,” presumably the head librarian who had invited the writer, tries to calm him down by saying that they will not beat him during the reading, but perhaps only later. And even though the director ensures Lesche that he had already called the police, he suggests that they cannot guarantee they will arrive on time, implying that the police do not act as eagerly against rightwing radicals as against left-wing radicals. Laconically, the narrator notes that the press coverage of the event was helpful in terms of advertising: “The publisher sold a further 10,000 books because of that” (Hilsenrath, Berlin… Endstation, 81) [“Der Verleger verkaufte dadurch weitere 10 000 Bücher”]. The largely autobiographical character of this particular scene is underscored by its earlier publication in the weekly paper Die Zeit under the heading “Poet’s Reading” [“Dichterlesung”]: In this version, Hilsenrath speaks in his own name. His book is in fact called Der Nazi & der Friseur and the right-wing party is called by its correct name NPD.13 A common feature of a number of Hilsenrath’s novels is the fact that they often contain autobiographical material or allusions without, however, being straightforward autobiography. The stages of Hilsenrath’s life are often somehow mirrored in his fictions, even though he was always very much averse to these fictions being read as autobiographical in any direct way. Thus, he later claimed that he was forced by some of his German publishers to insert prefaces maintaining that his fictions were autobiographical. Had he not agreed to this, he later said, the publishers would not have printed his books (Braun, Ranek, 259). In addition, the cover blurbs

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also often suggested that Hilsenrath’s fictions were actually based on parts of his life experiences. It seems that Hilsenrath did not object to the publishers’ blurb texts that directly contradicted his own artistic intentions: “I thought, let them just write what they want,” he is reported to have said later (Braun, Ranek, 218). The publisher’s attempts to highlight allegedly autobiographical connections of his fictions indicate a certain wariness at the time of publishing literary material on the persecution and destruction of the Jews that was not simply “authentic” documentation. Thus, autobiographical “authentication” could also function as a protection for the writer’s more outrageous fictional devices. Although for artistic reasons, Hilsenrath negated the autobiographical nature of most of his writings, he did not in fact refrain from all storytelling about his life. Autobiographical storytelling by Hilsenrath that was obviously edited and then documented on a CD recording14—there does not seem to be a printed version of these narrations—strongly indicates that Hilsenrath transformed many of his actual memories into some sort of fiction by integrating them in his novels, even using more or less the same stories or words in both cases. Thus, listening to the CD after having read the novels leads to the recognition of an inextricable intertwining of fictional and factual storytelling or, if one prefers this structuralist terminology, of the contamination of the fictional text with spoils from real-life experiences remembered (cf. Braun, Ranek, 125).15 The autobiographical “contamination” of fictional texts is an important element of how these texts work on its readers, for these readers are thereby constantly tempted to read texts of this kind “referentially.” This autobiographical background is therefore a key element of Hilsenrath’s writings, and the fact that he was himself persecuted for being a Jew gives all his texts an urgency which clearly distinguishes them, e.g., from autobiographical texts of non-Jewish Germans who also deal with the persecution of the Jews under National Socialism, but sometimes without giving this extended consideration.16 However, autobiographical reference usually turns out to be more complicated once the author’s memories are compared to others, as in the case of Hilsenrath’s brother.17 Hilsenrath made fictional use of this topic already in the 1960s, when his rather long novel Nacht (1964) [Night; 1966] was published. In this book, his first novel, Hilsenrath depicted the struggle for life of two Jews in a Romanian ghetto. But the fact that he had spent some time in a Romanian ghetto at Moghilev-Podolsk himself does not mean that the novel presents his own experiences. In fact, as Helmut Braun hat pointed out, the twelveyear process of trying to write Nacht was also the attempt to find the necessary methods to write about the topic in a literary way and so as to work himself through his grief for the Jewish people as such (Braun, Ranek, 133). Unfortunately, this first novel did not receive a wide circulation in Germany at the time, as there was strong opposition to the book even within the publishing house of Kindler, including by the advertising director who [himself] was a Jewish survivor of concentration camps and felt that Hilsenrath’s

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novel presented a libel of Shoah victims (Braun, Ranek, 139–140). Naturally, Hilsenrath did not agree and rejected the idea that depicting the dishonorable treatment of the victims by the perpetrators was identical to dishonoring the victims, even though he did in fact seek to destroy the popular image of Jews as noble victims (Braun, Ranek, 150). The fact that the publisher virtually excluded the novel from circulation did not help Hilsenrath’s career. The first print-run was quickly sold-out, and instead of reprinting, the publisher notified booksellers that there would be no second edition (Braun, Ranek, 155–156). And even when the novel was finally bought out again in 1978, after the success of Der Nazi & der Friseur, one of the most influential German literary critics at the time, Fritz J. Raddatz, published a damning review detailing Hilsenrath’s stylistic failures and concluding harshly that one simply could not write a book about this topic in that manner.18 Raddatz’s critical judgments explicitly distinguished between the author Hilsenrath’s “pitiless” [“erbarmungslos”] fate, which he exempted from criticism, and his “pitiful” [“erbärmlich”] book. Raddatz employed a fixed set of aesthetic principles, which, he seemed to believe, could tell you once and for all how one can or should write about topics like life in the ghetto.19 Thus, he bemoaned the repetitiveness of Hilsenrath’s style, his allegedly purple prose, his literary dilettantism in describing dialogue as well as clichés on almost every page (Raddatz, “Breitwandbuch”). This influential critic’s judgment may here stand as exemplary, as it surely helps to understand why Hilsenrath, in spite of the recognition he achieved later, did not at the time become a favorite author in German literary criticism and still maintains a somewhat precarious “canonical” status (cf. Vahsen, Lesarten, 58–59).20

Der Nazi & der Friseur One of Hilsenrath’s most important novels is without question Der Nazi & der Friseur [1977], originally written in German but first published in an English translation in a slightly different version. The German version was published without the subtitle of the American edition that explicitly referred to A Tale of Vengeance (Horch: “Grauen,” 25). It was not easy for Hilsenrath to get the novel published, for reasons which will become apparent in the following discussion of the text. According to the Austrian writer Friedrich Torberg, himself the author of works confronting the fate of the Jews under National Socialism, one of the factors contributing to the dislike of many publishers in Germany for Der Nazi & der Friseur was a so-called grotesque Talmi-philosemitism that was prevalent in post-war Germany. This was a kind of philosemitism that was not the result of genuine affection and ­understanding and could therefore not be relied on.21 A brief selective summary of the plot and the construction of the novel is in order to highlight the outrageousness of Hilsenrath’s conceit. For the homodiegetic narrator of the story is Max Schulz, a German who looks like the stereotypical Jew, and especially so in comparison with his friend

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Itzig Finkelstein who looks like the stereotypical “Aryan.” Max Schulz offers the following descriptions: “My friend Itzig was blonde and blue-eyed, he had a straight nose, finely curved lips and good teeth. I, however, Max Schulz, illegitimate though purely Aryan son of Minna Schulz, had black hair, frog’s eyes, a hooked nose, thick lips and bad teeth” [“Mein Freund Itzig war blond und blauäugig, hatte eine gerade Nase, feingeschwungene Lippen und gute Zähne. Ich dagegen, Max Schulz, unehelicher, wenn auch rein arischer Sohn der Minna Schulz, hatte schwarze Haare, Froschaugen, eine Hakennase, wulstige Lippen und schlechte Zähne”].22 He then goes on to make a career in the SS and actually becomes a mass murderer in Eastern Europe during World War II. He not only unapologetically speaks of himself as a mass murderer—“the mass murderer Max Schulz”—but after the war takes over the identity of Itzig Finkelstein, the Jewish boy with whom he grew up as a neighbor and schoolfellow. Itzig, the son of a barber, in a reversal of stereotypes, looks like the model “Aryan” of which the National Socialists dreamed. Max presents his story in different layers, going back and forth, constantly reminding the listeners/readers of the fact of his double identity as Max Schulz and Itzig Finkelstein: He repeatedly uses phrases like “I, Itzig Finkelstein, formerly Max Schulz.” This implies that, even as he claims to be a successful impersonator of one of the Jews he killed, he stages this in such a way that the novel’s readers can never forget this crucial fact. This is important for it means that even though Max Schulz may fool all kinds of people in the course of his narrative, the readers of the novel cannot be fooled. He begins his story with the story of his birth and, a bit later, of his conception which he owes to his “five fathers,” as his mother regularly had sex with five different men. This makes his paternity uncertain, regardless of which he tries to follow his ancestry back to the time of Frederick the Great, if not to the battle in the Teutoburg forest (Nazi & Friseur, 7). This statement can serve as a parodic reference to genealogical claims in order to make fun of the National Socialist obsession with genealogy, especially in light of the fact that Max in the very first sentence of his narrative as well as in the next sentences repeatedly stresses his allegedly “purely Aryan” character and goes so far as to say that he checked the family trees of all his five potential fathers. At the same time, however, a close link to Jews and Jewishness in connection with his upbringing is established: Minna Schulz, his mother, was working as a housemaid in the household of the Jewish fur trader Abramowitz. This initial proximity to Jewish life is the starting point of Max Schulz’s lifelong engagement with Jews and Judaism, as will be explained in more detail below. For it is obvious from the very beginning that the narrator has acquired a thorough knowledge of Judaism over the years, going into considerable detail explaining aspects of Jewish life to his readers/listeners whom he seems to imagine as mostly non-Jewish themselves. This indicates that Hilsenrath’s intended audience would be primarily non-Jews whose possibly anti-Jewish prejudices were in need of a thorough-going revision.

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The parts of his biography explaining how he came to be a member of the NSDAP are narrated in such a grotesque way that Hilsenrath abandons all kinds of “realism” for hyperbolical parody that serves to highlight the actually grotesque nature of National Socialist ideology. Thus, Schulz mentions his membership in a local association for the protection of animals. This serves as a seemingly neat transition into becoming a member of the NSDAP, because Adolf Hitler himself has the reputation of being an animal lover! Slogans such as “Adolf Hitler liebt die Tiere, und die Tiere lieben ihn!” [“Adolf Hitler loves the animals and the animals love him, too”] prepare the ground for the actual coming of the Führer to the fictional Silesian town of Wieshalle, an event that serves as a characterization of National Socialism in general, e.g., by presenting a speech by Hitler that mirrors actual public speeches in its hyperbolical rhetoric. The use of names is an important satirical method which Hilsenrath employs again and again. One National Socialist, a former teacher of the narrator Max whom he also meets at the Hitler rally in Wieshalle, is called Siegfried von Salzstange, juxtaposing the mythologically laden German name Siegfried connected to the story of both the Nibelungs and Wagner’s myth-regenerating opera with the mundane Salzstange, salt stick, a mere snack that sounds oddly out of place linked to the name of a prototypical hero often visually represented at the time. It is Siegfried von Salzstange who explains to Max the sociology of Hitler’s followers: They are, he claims, the “complete failures” [“verkrachten Existenzen”] as well as those who are short of breath and professional asskissers [“Arschlecker von Beruf”] and all those who had at one time or another been beaten over the head (Nazi & Friseur, 50). Herr von Salzstange, strangely also characterized as a nobleman through the “von” in his name, letting the character appear particularly ridiculous, then explains why he is now a follower of Hitler: Because his wife always puts pepper in his morning coffee, for which he revenges himself on her by snoring all night, which, of course, only leads to further doses of pepper instead of a wife subdued by punishment (Nazi & Friseur, 51). In this hilarious way, Hilsenrath points to personal resentment as a key element of recruiting fellow travelers for National Socialism, combined with the pseudo-religious quality of Hitler’s performance as a rally speaker. The text again and again draws on religious and particularly Biblical terminology to frame the Führer’s speech during which he actually quotes from a Bible he holds in his hands. Hitler ironically draws on Biblical language in order to introduce his complete reversal of Biblical morality, a reversal which first and foremost cancels the prohibition on murder: Whereas in ancient times it was said that one should not kill, his own commandment reads: “Whoever kills the enemy of the people, sanctifies my name. And who sanctifies me, participates in my holiness” [“Wer den Volksfeind tötet, der heiligt meinen Namen. Und wer mich heiligt, der hat Anteil an meiner Heiligkeit”] (Nazi & Friseur, 56).

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Hilsenrath presents Hitler as someone who openly calls for a religiously sanctified killing of alleged enemies of the people. This open declaration does not, however, lead to recognizable resistance among the town’s citizens. Hilsenrath offers a sarcastic and hilarious distortion of much of the history connected to Germany under National Socialism. Thus, the speech by Adolf Hitler is integrated into the novel, but it is not any actual speech given by Hitler. Instead, it is a parody that employs the stylistic means not only of Biblical language but particularly of Also sprach Zarathustra [Thus Spoke Zarathustra] by Friedrich Nietzsche. Hilsenrath, who generally speaking does not pepper his books with intellectually sophisticated intertextual material, thereby implicitly suggests the quasi-Nietzschean character of Hitler’s politics, parodically playing on the rather simplistic notion of Nietzsche as a precursor of “fascism,” as in Georg Lukács’s The Destruction of Reason.23 The Führer speaks as if he were a prophet, and he holds his rally on top of a mountain locally known as the “Ölberg” (“Mount of Olives”) because it is the place where the town’s cooking oil firm is holding its annual Schützenfest [“riflemen’s meeting”] (Nazi & Friseur, 47). For this reason, Hitler’s fictional speech is called “Bergpredigt” (sermon on the mount) which reflects the speech’s parody of religious preaching. Hitler, who did in fact like to call on providence, is here repeatedly referred to as the “son of providence” [“Sohn der Vorsehung”], so that the Nazi party is also called “the party of the son of providence,” of which the narrator becomes a member on the day following the historical speech (Nazi & Friseur, 62). In this very same chapter, Max Schulz also begins to develop antisemitic notions, and it is very significant for Hilsenrath’s fictional presentation of this development that initially Max was not an antisemite at all. His ideological turn thus comes about almost accidentally, even though Hilsenrath connects Max’s sliding into antisemitism with the notion of the rats in their basement flat, thus implicitly drawing on a staple of antisemitic imagery. In what follows, Max adopts the National Socialist ideology wholesale. This becomes clear through the shifting of the narrative voice in Chapter 10 from “I” to “we,” assuming collective responsibility but at the same time downplaying his individual contribution to persecution: “The Jews! They didn’t fare well with us. We, the New Germany, showed the Jews what it means not to have thick blood in their veins but merely water. […] We, the New Germany, eliminated the Jews from key positions and state offices, intimidated them severely, blackmailed them, expropriated them step by step and drove them out of their professions” [“Die Juden! Die hatten es schlecht bei uns. Wir, das Neue Deutschland, zeigten den Juden, was es heißt, wenn einer kein dickes Blut in den Adern hat, sondern bloß Wasser. […] Wir, das Neue Deutschland, entfernten sie aus Schlüsselpositionen und staatlichen Ämtern, schüchterten sie tüchtig ein, erpressten sie, enteigneten nach und nach ihren Besitz und verdrängten sie aus den meisten Berufen”] (Nazi & Friseur, 69). Max Schulz claims only minor responsibility for all these actions at first, for he was only “small fry” [“ein kleiner Fisch”] at the time (Nazi & Friseur, 69).

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His actions consisted mainly, he claimed, in attaching himself to the “wheel of history” [“Rad der Geschichte”] (Nazi & Friseur, 69), and immediately afterward Hilsenrath lets him speak very laconically about his later actions as a mass murderer. This laconic statement is further underscored by the device of directly addressing the reader whom he purports to draw into his confidence, making what follows even more outrageous: “Whether I then already killed Jews? Do you want to know this? No, not yet then. Only later. Then I was just a member.” [“Ob ich damals schon Juden umbrachte? Wollen Sie das wissen? Nein, damals noch nicht. Erst später. Ich war damals bloß Mitglied”] (Nazi & Friseur, 70). It is in this context as well that Max Schulz tries to lead his readers into agreeing with his judgment that there are clever Jews and stupid Jews—and all those Jews staying on in Wieshalle, among them his former friend Itzig Finkelstein and his family, were stupid Jews, according to the narrator. He even imagines taking over the barbershop of Finkelstein, but for the time being can only cultivate his resentment. His fantasies are printed in capital letters imitating newspaper headlines (Nazi & Friseur, 74). In this way, Max Schulz is presented as someone who gradually slips into becoming a mass murderer, someone who did not originally plan to kill any Jews but regardless ended up ruthlessly putting thousands to death by shooting them, including, perhaps, his former neighbor Itzig Finkelstein. After the war, Max Schulz uses his Nazi connections to search out former SS men and doctors who can help him assume a fake Jewish identity: His penis is circumcised by a former Nazi medical doctor while another fellow SS man tattoos his arm with the number of an Auschwitz inmate. Schulz only killed Jews in a smaller concentration camp called Laubwalde, but he immediately decides to capitalize on the much more monstrous reputation of Auschwitz to turn himself into no less than an Auschwitz survivor. He also not only turns the many thousands of Jews he killed into mere numbers (Nazi & Friseur, 79), perversely claiming that his service in Laubwalde was a “peaceful time” [“friedliche Zeit”], while at the same time nonchalantly saying that he now cannot remember exactly how many Jews he actually shot. (He repeatedly comes back to this point in the course of the narration.) Within the logic of the novel’s narrative construction, it also makes a lot of sense that Hilsenrath has Max Schulz tell about this crucial period in a rather hasty and blurry manner: Despite generally and repeatedly acknowledging the fact of being a mass murderer, Max Schulz does not present himself in any way troubled by his conscience or any inconvenient emotions of a moral nature. If we can believe his story, he simply does not care at all about what happens to the Jews he is ordered to kill. It is important to emphasize this point, for it is exactly this lack of interest in individual persons, his complete disregard for any humane reaction toward the extermination of the Jews that makes his later choice to pass not only as a Jew but as a Jewish Auschwitz survivor so outrageous. He not only impersonates Itzig Finkelstein so successfully that the non-Jewish committee members accept him unhesitatingly

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as the Jew who fits their anti- or philosemitic prejudices to a T. While living as a fake Jew in post-war Germany, he even has a sexual affair with a German countess—her name again hearkens back to the Nibelungs, for it is Kriemhild—who is an antisemite and constantly confronts him with her prejudices, thereby helping him to develop a strong “Jewish” identity (Nazi & Friseur, 203, 213). This is part of the theme of the changing positions of “victims as perpetrators as victims,” as Agnieszka von Zanthier has pointed out, a theme that Hilsenrath has taken over from his first novel Night into Der Nazi & der Friseur.24 For the antisemitic remarks of the duchess provoke him into a thorough study of Jewish books: He not only reads a book on Jewish history, but writings by Theodor Herzl, Moses Hess, Max Nordau, speeches by Jabotinsky, and even right-wing Zionist literature (Nazi & Friseur, 216). Max Schulz as Itzig Finkelstein talks himself into a rage, quoting Martin Luther by emphatically—and, of course, ironically—claiming “Here I stand and cannot do otherwise! I am a Jew. And I am proud of it. And if you don’t like it, you can lick my arse!” [“Hier stehe ich und kann nicht anders! Ich bin Jude. Und ich bin stolz darauf. Und wenn’s Ihnen nicht paßt, dann können Sie mich am Arsch lecken”] (Nazi & Friseur, 217). He later also manages to emigrate to Israel and to establish himself there as a barber. Due to his wartime experience as a German soldier in Eastern Europe, he can also make the Jews in Israel believe that he knows how to fight, convincing them that he was actually fighting as a partisan. In another Hilsenrathian irony, the former mass murderer of Jews in Eastern Europe becomes a fighter who defends the state of Israel against its enemies. Grotesquely, as he does not want anyone examining his life record too closely, he rejects the suggestion that he apply for Wiedergutmachung (reparation) money in Germany. He purports to be morally opposed to receiving any money from the Germans, and in order to give force to this rejection, he actually founds an anti-reparation league of which he becomes the leader. Inadvertently, Itzig Finkelstein, as Max Schulz now calls himself, takes over a position that is directed against the very attempt of the Federal German government to officially acknowledge the state’s responsibility for what was done to the Jews under National Socialism. Even though the Max Schulz transformed into Itzig Finkelstein does not present himself in any way troubled by his conscience, this could be said to be a mere dissimulation on the surface of his discourse, but even this cannot be affirmed with any degree of certainty. For as he constantly has to affirm his new identity as Itzig, he continually has to maintain the presence of the absent murdered Jew and his family. This even goes so far as Max Schulz in the persona of Itzig Finkelstein addressing this very Itzig Finkelstein in an imaginary dialogue. In this dialogue, however, the latter remains silent. “Can you hear me, Itzig?” [“Kannst du mich hören, Itzig?”] Schulz calls out to him (Nazi & Friseur, 245), conjuring up memories of childhood games together, such as Blinde Kuh (hide and seek). He draws on these common

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memories in order to have an occasion for going on with his autobiographical storytelling. Schulz does not want to tell his story simply but he obsessively needs to tell it to the murdered Itzig: “Listen, Itzig. Listen carefully with your dead ears” [“Hör zu, Itzig. Spitze deine toten Ohren”] (Nazi & Friseur, 251). Bernhard Malkmus has pointed out that the narrator in the guise of Itzig “represents the Janus face of simulation and dissimulation in the picaresque tradition,” explicitly including in the text references to a kind of fairy tale magic that enables one to change one’s identity as if by magic (see Nazi & Friseur, 120).25 The novel has correctly been characterized as “one of the most eccentric modern reworkings” of the picaresque tradition, both in the narrative structure and in the outsider role of Max Schulz that is already a clearly marked feature of this character from the very first sentence of the narrative, including being raped as a baby by his stepfather (Nazi & Friseur, 22–24).26 This initial act of violence thus prefigures the terrors to follow later and even offers a suggestion as to why Schulz’s mind became as warped and alienated from ordinary human suffering as to willingly take part in genocidal actions. The changing identity of Max Schulz is used by Hilsenrath to accomplish various functions of his narrative at the same time. First, he employs the stereotypical descriptions of the allegedly purely “Aryan” Max, who looks like antisemites’ stereotypes of a Jew, and of the Jew Itzig, who looks like the ideal German Hitlerjunge, as Nike Thurn notes.27 This foregrounded use of stereotypes forces readers to engage in a reconsideration of their own possibly stereotypical expectations when reading about Jews and non-Jews. Second, he also includes elements of the story that facilitate the fictional plausibility of Max moving from being a perpetrator to becoming a “fake Jew” who claims to have been a victim of National Socialist persecution. When Max has to go into hiding after the retreat of the German troops from Eastern Europe, he is treated as a kind of slave, including as a sex slave, by an old Polish woman living in the forest. This woman saves him from freezing to death and comments that he looks rather starved and whether guys like him cannot stand more than “sub-humans” [“die Untermenschen”] (Nazi & Friseur, 149). When Max responds that he does not know, as he had not yet been a subhuman, the old woman drily retorts: “But yes. Now you are” [“Doch. […] Jetzt sind Sie einer”] (Nazi & Friseur, 149). In this way, Max Schulz’s transition from perpetrator to victim becomes part of the deconstruction of typical constructions of perpetrators and victims in the German post-war era, as Thurn demonstrates at length (Thurn: “Falsche Juden,” 386–395). The reversal of identity is preceded by the application of Nazi terminology to a Nazi criminal. Hilsenrath offers a deconstruction of the stereotypical images of perpetrators and victims that had been established in the post-war era and which accommodated the fact that speaking about Jews in post-war Germany was heavily guarded by taboos (Bomsdorff: “Späte Anerkennung für Edgar

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Hilsenrath,” 273). On the other hand, he consistently downplays his own importance in the Nazi scheme of exterminating the Jews: He repeatedly claims to have been only “small fry” [“ein kleiner Fisch”], someone who acted only on orders, because otherwise he would have been much too afraid to kill (Nazi & Friseur, 245). This is clearly a parodic reductio ad absurdum of the grotesque self-exculpation in which Max Schulz engages when he maintains: “I never was an antisemite. I have never been one. I have only co-operated.” [“Ich war kein Antisemit. Ich bin nie einer gewesen. Ich habe bloß mitgemacht”] (Nazi & Friseur, 245). If he never was an antisemite, however, his willingness to kill Jews becomes even more ominous and monstrous than it would be otherwise. For admitting to hatred of Jews would at least open up the possibility of “understanding” his actions, of making sense of them: Hatred could function as an explanation for his horrible crimes. The fact (if it is a fact) that he did not hate the Jews but simply did what he was told to do is a narrative device that presents the readers of the novel with the refusal to make the story cohere with popular notions, such as that hatred of Jews can function as a sufficient explanation of National Socialist mass murders. Hilsenrath opts for a non-psychological interpretation or rather ­ self-interpretation of the perpetrator that increases the reader’s alienation and thus may well work both ways: Either one finds the perpetrator Max Schulz’s non-hatred of Jews even more terrifying, or, assuming the reader considers him- or herself as a non-antisemite, the fact that even an alleged non-antisemite could engage in wholesale slaughter might have a particularly unsettling effect on such a reader. All these narrative devices serve as integral parts of Hilsenrath’s attempt to keep the memory of the Nazi genocide alive. But Hilsenrath includes this in a much broader view of memorializing genocides. Hilsenrath’s poetics of genocide is encapsulated in the remarks coming at the end of his “Armenian” novel Das Märchen vom letzten Gedanken. The “whispering voices of the victims” [“Flüsterstimmen der Opfer”], the text reads, “upset the bowels” [“stören die Verdauung”] (Hilsenrath, Märchen, 624). The dead Armenians whose whispering can be heard in Hilsenrath’s novel may be able to affect us almost physically. The protagonist of the novel, the dying Khatisian, expresses the hope that his “last thought will fly back into the gaps of the Turkish history books” [“letzter Gedanke zurückfliegen wird in die Lücken der türkischen Geschichtsbücher”] (Hilsenrath, Märchen, 623). The distribution of the whispering throughout the world would create discomfort, and many people would get headaches from thinking a lot about the stories presented in the book. These last remarks, in fact, are part of a dialogical sequence on the very last page of the novel and are uttered by an imaginary Turkish minister whose last question to Khatisian suggests that the whispering would create unpleasant feelings: “Who would want this? And what kind of sense would that make?” [“Wer will das schon? Und was für einen Sinn hätte das?”]. Khatisian laconically answers, “Not everything needs to make sense, Mr Minister” [“Es muß ja nicht alles einen Sinn haben, Herr Minister”] (Hilsenrath, Märchen, 624).

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Hilsenrath’s fairy tale stays discomforting right to the very end—there is no “and they lived happily ever after” according to the fairy tale’s convention. The sad truth of Hilsenrath’ narration consists in highlighting both how things might have happened and how they should not ever repeat themselves. The refusal of Hilsenrath’s narration to make some sense of, or attribute meaning to, the Armenian genocide applies equally to the annihilation of the Jews in Der Nazi & der Friseur. Hilsenrath’s strongly dialogical imagination—the last pages of this novel also contain a lot of dialogue between Max Schulz as Itzig Finkelstein and a former judge whom he met in Israel and now tells his life story. In this dialogue, Schulz claims to strive for a punishment that will satisfy his victims, but he knows that there is no punishment for him that will be a reconciliation for his victims (Hilsenrath, Nazi & Friseur, 453, 456). The plain fact that Max Schulz may very well have killed 10,000 Jews prima facie rules out the possibility of a just punishment for him, thus indicating again that it is impossible to “make sense” of his actions, to attach a comforting and edifying meaning to it all. The last scene of the novel assumes a kind of supernatural symbolism when Max Schulz perceives the wind coming through his open window, a wind that he imagines as a wind blowing from the symbolical forest of the six million, as the narrator calls the forest in which he shot his victims. And while the wind is blowing, the white curtains turn black and become transformed into wings that actually catch Schulz at his arms and carry him away to this very forest (Hilsenrath, Nazi & Friseur, 465). The recourse to such an ending, which could be taken to be a mere fantasy of the dying Schulz, underscores the inadequacy of concluding such a story with straightforward realism: There is no “solution” [“Lösung”] (Hilsenrath, Nazi & Friseur, 457). But it also suggests that in spite of all his protestations to the contrary, Max Schulz is not only a criminal but a human being who is constantly troubled by his conscience and who, in spite of his successful change of identity from Nazi criminal to fake Jew, always knows that he is a perpetrator and that his victims were his victims.

Notes



1. See, e.g., Rüdiger Steinlein, “Das Furchtbarste lächerlich?: Komik und Lachen in Texten der deutschen Holocaust-Literatur,” in Kunst und Literatur nach Auschwitz, ed. Manuel Köppen (Berlin: Schmidt, 1993), 97–106. See also the following discussion chaired by Steinlein in which Hilsenrath defended his use of black humor and satire (108). 2. See the useful discussion of some relevant issues in Susanne Rohr, “‘Genocide Pop’: The Holocaust as Media Event,” in The Holocaust, Art, and Taboo: Transatlantic Exchanges on the Ethics and Aesthetics of Representation, eds. Sophia Komor and Susanne Rohr (Heidelberg: Winter, 2010), 155–178; for further discussion, see also the contributions in Simone Gigliotti, Jacob Golomb, and Caroline Steinberg Gould, eds., Ethics, Art, and Representation of the Holocaust: Essays in Honor of Berel Lang (Lanham: Lexington, 2014).

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3. Cf. Lászlo Földényi, Schicksallosigkeit: Ein Imre-Kertész-Wörterbuch. Tr. Akos Doma (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2009), 150–151. 4. Edgar Hilsenrath, Das Märchen vom letzten Gedanken. ([Köln]: Dittrich, 2005). 5. Helmut Braun, Ich bin nicht Ranek: Annäherung an Edgar Hilsenrath (Berlin: Dittrich, 2006), 230–234. 6.  Hans Vilmar Geppert, Der Historische Roman: Geschichte umerzählt – von Walter Scott bis zur Gegenwart (Tübingen: Francke, 2009), 320. 7. Rubina Peroomian, “The Truth of the Armenian Genocide in Edgar Hilsenrath’s Fiction,” Journal of Genocide Research 5, no. 2 (June 2003): 281–292. Here 281. Cf. also Kirsten Prinz, Brüchiges Gedächtnis: Der Genozid an den Armeniern in Texten von Edgar Hilsenrath, Zafer Şenocak und Esmahan Aykol (Berlin: Bachmann, 2015). 8. See Lothar Baier, “Legende von der sinnlosen Tat,” in Edgar Hilsenrath: Das Unerzählbare erzählen, ed. Thomas Kraft (Munich: Piper, 1996), 94–97. 9. Strangely, because the novel begins with the statement “Eigentlich heiße ich Joseph Leschinsky, aber da manche Leute Leschinsky zu lang fanden, nannte man mich Lesche.” [“My real name is Joseph Leschinsky, but as some people found Leschinsky too long, I was called Lesche.”], but then after one more paragraph which reports some thoughts of Lesche presented with the inquit-formula “sagte ich zu mir,” the narration unaccountably shifts to a heterodiegetic narrator. 10. The protagonist of the novel explicitly describes himself as a German writer who needs the German language and who needs to listen to it all the time. See Edgar Hilsenrath, Berlin… Endstation (München: dtv, 2009), 9. 11. See in more detail Patricia Vahsen, Lesarten: Die Rezeption des Werks von Edgar Hilsenrath (Conditio Judaica 71) (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2008); Stephan Braese, “‘… wir nannten sowas Zersetzung’ – Edgar Hilsenraths Der Nazi & der Friseur: Unmittelbar zur Erfahrung der antifaschistischen Satire,” in Das teure Experiment: Satire und NS-Faschismus, ed. Stephan Braese (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1996), 241–278; Stephan Braese, Die andere Erinnerung. Jüdische Autoren in der deutschen Nachkriegsliteratur (Berlin: Philo, 2001), 429–484; as well as Julia von Bomsdorff, “Späte Anerkennung für Edgar Hilsenrath,” in Lexikon der “Vergangenheitsbewältigung”: Debatten und Diskursgeschichte des Nationalsozialismus nach 1945, eds. Torben Fischer and Matthias N. Lorenz (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015), 272–274. 12. Cf. on the controversial debates connected to the holocaust memorial, Claus Leggewie and Erik Meyer, “Ein Ort an den man gerne geht”: Das HolocaustMahnmal und die deutsche Geschichtspolitik nach 1989 (Munich: Hanser, 2005). 13.  This text is reprinted as Edgar Hilsenrath, “Dichterlesung,” in Edgar Hilsenrath: Das Unerzählbare erzählen, ed. Thomas Kraft (Munich: Piper, 1996), 101–102. 14. Gabriele Diedrich, ed., Edgar Hilsenrath erzählt aus seinem Leben: “Deutsch war nicht die Sprache der Nazis. Es war meine Sprache” (Wiesbaden: Aktives Museum Spiegelgasse für Deutsch-Jüdische Geschichte in Wiesbaden e.V., 2009).

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15. Consider also the discussion of Uwe Durst, Theorie der phantastischen Literatur (Berlin: Lit, 2010) on the relation between fictional world and non-literary reality (92–103). 16. See Ingo Piel, Die Judenverfolgung in autobiographischer Literatur: Erinnerungstexte nichtjüdischer Deutscher nach 1945 (Frankfurt/M.: Lang, 2001); Joana van de Löcht, Aufzeichnungen aus dem Malstrom: Die Genese der “Strahlungen” aus Ernst Jüngers privaten Tagebüchern (1939–1958) (Frankfurt/M: Klostermann 2018), 232–240. 17. Consider also Volker Dittrich, Zwei Seiten der Erinnerung: Die Brüder Edgar und Manfred Hilsenrath (Berlin: Dittrich, 2012). Edgar Hilsenrath succeeded in having the book withdrawn from the market, but it is still available for consultation in various libraries. Dittrich’s book is problematic precisely because it juxtaposed recorded memories of Manfred with autobiographically read passages from various novels by Edgar Hilsenrath which are thereby denied their literary and fictional character. 18. Fritz J. Raddatz, “Breitwandbuch: Edgar Hilsenrath’s Buch ‘Night’,” Die Zeit, September 29, 1978. 19.  See also Hans Otto Horch, “Grauen und Groteske: Zu Edgar Hilsenraths Romanen,” in Verliebt in die deutsche Sprache: Die Odyssee des Edgar Hilsenrath, ed. Helmut Braun (Berlin: Dittrich/Akademie der Künste, 2005), 19. 20. Bernd Wagner, “Angst vor der Wirklichkeit. Warum die deutsche Kritik Kafka, Broch und Musil liebt – Fallada, Remarque und Hilsenrath hingegen nicht. Was am Ende zeigt, wie zufällig Kanonbildungen sind,” Die Zeit Nr. 33, August 11, 2005. 21. Friedrich Torberg, “Ein Freispruch, der keiner ist,” in Edgar Hilsenrath: Das Unerzählbare erzählen, ed. Thomas Kraft (München/Zürich: Piper, 1996), 74. On Hilsenrath’s “writing against philosemitism” see also Elisabeth H. Debazi, Zeugnis – Erinnerung – Verfremdung: Literarische Darstellung und Reflexion von Holocausterfahrung (Marburg: Tectum, 2008), 195–200. 22. Edgar Hilsenrath, Der Nazi & der Friseur (Gesammelte Werke 2) ([Köln]: Dittrich, 2004), 31–32. 23. Georg Lukács, Die Zerstörung der Vernunft (Berlin: Aufbau, 1953), 244–317. 24.  Agnieszka von Zanthier, Julian Stryjkowski und Edgar Hilsenrath: Zur Identität jüdischer Schriftsteller nach 1945 (Essen: Die Blaue Eule, 2000), 118–123. 25. Bernhard F. Malkmus, The German Pícaro and Modernity: Between Underdog and Shape-Shifter (New York: Continuum, 2011), 132. 26. See Dietrich Dopheide, Das Groteske und der Schwarze Humor in den Romanen Edgar Hilsenraths (Berlin: Weissensee Verlag, 2000), 236, 240. 27. Nike Thurn, “Falsche Juden”. Performative Identitäten der deutschsprachigen Literatur von Lessing bis Walser (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015), 366.

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Works Cited Braese, Stephan. Die andere Erinnerung. Jüdische Autoren in der deutschen Nachkriegsliteratur [The Other Memory: Jewish Authors in German Post-War Literature]. Berlin: Philo, 2001. ———. “‘… wir nannten sowas Zersetzung’ – Edgar Hilsenraths Der Nazi & der Friseur: Unmittelbar zur Erfahrung der antifaschistischen Satire” [“…we called something like this dissolution – Edgar Hilsenrath’s “Der Nazi & der Friseur”: Directly Related to the Experience of Antifascist Satire”]. In Das teure Experiment: Satire und NS-Faschismus [The Expensive Experiment: Satire and NS-fascism], edited by Stephan Braese, 241–278. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1996. Braun, Helmut. Ich bin nicht Ranek: Annäherung an Edgar Hilsenrath [I Am Not Ranek: Approaches to Edgar Hilsenrath]. Berlin: Dittrich, 2006. ———, ed. Verliebt in die deutsche Sprache: Die Odyssee des Edgar Hilsenrath [In Love with the German Language: The Odyssey of Edgar Hilsenrath]. Berlin: Dittrich/ Akademie der Künste, 2005. Debazi, Elisabeth H. Zeugnis – Erinnerung – Verfremdung: Literarische Darstellung und Reflexion von Holocausterfahrung [Testimony—Memory—Alienation: Literary Presentation and Reflection of the Holocaust Experience]. Marburg: Tectum, 2008. Diedrich, Gabriele (Hg.). Edgar Hilsenrath erzählt aus seinem Leben: “Deutsch war nicht die Sprache der Nazis. Es war meine Sprache.” [Edgar Hilsenrath Tells Stories from His Life: “German Was Not the Language of the Nazis. It Was My Language”]. Wiesbaden: Aktives Museum Spiegelgasse für Deutsch-Jüdische Geschichte in Wiesbaden e.V., 2009. Dittrich, Volker. Zwei Seiten der Erinnerung: Die Brüder Edgar und Manfred Hilsenrath [Two Versions of Memory: The Brothers Edgar and Manfred Hilsenrath]. Berlin: Dittrich, 2012. Dopheide, Dietrich. Das Groteske und der Schwarze Humor in den Romanen Edgar Hilsenraths [The Grotesque and Black Humor in Edgar Hilsenrath’s Novels]. Berlin: Weissensee Verlag, 2000. Durst, Uwe. Theorie der phantastischen Literatur [Theory of Phantastic Literature]. Berlin: Lit, 2010. Földényi, Lászlo. Schicksallosigkeit: Ein Imre-Kertész-Wörterbuch [Fatelessness: An Imre-Kertész-Dictionary]. Translated by Akos Doma. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2009. Geppert, Hans Vilmar. Der Historische Roman: Geschichte umerzählt – von Walter Scott bis zur Gegenwart [The Historical Novel: History Re-told—From Walter Scott to the Present]. Tübingen: Francke, 2009. Gigliotti, Simone, Jacob Golomb, and Caroline Steinberg Gould, eds. Ethics, Art, and Representation of the Holocaust: Essays in Honor of Berel Lang. Lanham: Lexington, 2014. Hilsenrath, Edgar. Berlin… Endstation. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2009. ———. Das Märchen vom letzten Gedanken (Gesammelte Werke). [Köln]: Dittrich, 2005. ———. Der Nazi & der Friseur (Gesammelte Werke 2). [Köln]: Dittrich, 2004. ———. Jossel Wassermanns Heimkehr. Munich: Piper, 1993. ———. Nacht (Gesammelte Werke 1). [Köln]: Dittrich, 2005.

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Horch, Hans Otto. “Grauen und Groteske: Zu Edgar Hilsenraths Romanen” [Horror and the Grotesque: On Edgar Hilsenrath’s Novels]. In Verliebt in die deutsche Sprache: Die Odyssee des Edgar Hilsenrath [In Love with the German Language: The Odyssee of Edgar Hilsenrath], edited by Helmut Braun, 19–32. Berlin: Dittrich/ Akademie der Künste, 2005. Kraft, Thomas, ed. Edgar Hilsenrath: Das Unerzählbare erzählen [Edgar Hilsenrath: Narrating the Non-narratable]. München/Zürich: Piper, 1996. Leggewie, Claus, and Erik Meyer.“Ein Ort an den man gerne geht”: Das HolocaustMahnmal und die deutsche Geschichtspolitik nach 1989 [“A Place to which One Likes to Go”: The Holocaust Memorial and German Politics of History After 1989]. Munich: Hanser, 2005. Lukács, Georg. Die Zerstörung der Vernunft: Der Weg des Irrationalismus von Schelling zu Hitler [The Destruction of Reason: The Road of Irrationalism from Schelling to Hitler], 244–317. Berlin: Aufbau, 1953. Malkmus, Bernhard F. The German Pícaro and Modernity: Between Underdog and Shape-Shifter. New York: Continuum, 2011. Peroomian, Rubina. “The Truth of the Armenian Genocide in Edgar Hilsenrath’s Fiction.” Journal of Genocide Research 5, no. 2 (June 2003): 281–292. Piel, Ingo. Die Judenverfolgung in autobiographischer Literatur: Erinnerungstexte nichtjüdischer Deutscher nach 1945. Frankfurt/M.: Lang, 2001. Prinz, Kirsten. Brüchiges Gedächtnis: Der Genozid an den Armeniern in Texten von Edgar Hilsenrath, Zafer Şenocak und Esmahan Aykol [Fragile Memory: The Armenian Genocide in Texts by Edgar Hilsenrath, Zafer Şenocak and Esmahan Aykol]. Berlin: Bachmann, 2015. Raddatz, Fritz J. “Breitwandbuch: Edgar Hilsenraths Buch ‘Nacht’” [‘A Book That Paints Everything Very Broadly’]. Die Zeit, September 29, 1978. https://www. zeit.de/1978/40/breitwandbuch, February 10, 2019. Rohr, Susanne. “‘Genocide Pop’: The Holocaust as Media Event.” In The Holocaust, Art, and Taboo: Transatlantic Exchanges on the Ethics and Aesthetics of Representation, edited by Sophia Komor and Susanne Rohr, 155–178. Heidelberg: Winter, 2010. Steinlein, Rüdiger. “Das Furchtbarste lächerlich? Komik und Lachen in Texten der deutschen Holocaust-Literatur” [The Most Horrible Ridiculous? Comedy and Laughter in Texts of German Holocaust Literature]. In Kunst und Literatur nach Auschwitz, edited by Manuel Köppen, 97–112. Berlin: Schmidt, 1993. Thurn, Nike. “Falsche Juden”. Performative Identitäten der deutschsprachigen Literatur von Lessing bis Walser [“Fake Jews”: Performative Identities in German-Language Literature from Lessing to Walser]. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015. Torberg, Friedrich. “Ein Freispruch, der keiner ist” [An Acquittal That Isn’t One]. In Edgar Hilsenrath: Das Unerzählbare erzählen, edited by Thomas Kraft, 72–76. München/Zürich: Piper, 1996. Vahsen, Patricia. Lesarten: Die Rezeption des Werks von Edgar Hilsenrath [Readings: The Reception of the Work of Edgar Hilsenrath] (Conditio Judaica 71). Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2008. van de Löcht, Joana. Aufzeichnungen aus dem Malstrom: Die Genese der “Strahlungen” aus Ernst Jüngers privaten Tagebüchern (1939–1958) [Notes from the Maelstrom: The Genesis of “Strahlungen” out of Jünger’s Private Diaries]. Frankfurt/M: Klostermann, 2018.

216  T. KINZEL von Bomsdorff, Julia. “Späte Anerkennung für Edgar Hilsenrath” [Late Recognition for Edgar Hilsenrath]. In Lexikon der “Vergangenheitsbewältigung”: Debatten und Diskursgeschichte des Nationalsozialismus nach 1945 [Lexicon of “Coping with the Past”: Debates and History of Discourses Concerning National Socialism After 1945], edited by Torben Fischer and Matthias N. Lorenz, 272–274. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015. von Zanthier, Agnieszka. Julian Stryjkowski und Edgar Hilsenrath: Zur Identität jüdischer Schriftsteller nach 1945. Essen: Die Blaue Eule, 2000. Wagner, Bernd. “Angst vor der Wirklichkeit. Warum die deutsche Kritik Kafka, Broch und Musil liebt – Fallada, Remarque und Hilsenrath hingegen nicht. Was am Ende zeigt, wie zufällig Kanonbildungen sind” [Fear of Reality: Why German Criticism Loves Kafka, Broch and Musil—But Not Fallada, Remarque and Hilsenrath. Which Ultimately Show How Accidental Canon Formations Are]. Die Zeit Nr. 33, August 11, 2005. Young, James E. Beschreibung des Holocaust: Darstellung und Folgen der Interpretation. Translated by Christa Schuenke [Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation]. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1997.

CHAPTER 13

Transit and Transfer: Between Germany and Israel in the Granddaughters’ Generation Ashley A. Passmore

This chapter discusses how Mirna Funk’s novel, Winternähe [Proximity to Winter] (2015) provides a complex transnational lens through which to challenge dominant discourse about the position of Jews in contemporary Germany by incorporating depictions of intergenerational traumas and flight. It also considers Funk’s discursive intervention in the third generation’s disenchantment with collective identity construction of the German Jew. Funk, a German Jewish journalist and author whose 2014 article, “Ohne mich” [Without Me] in ZEIT Magazin, gained attention when she declared her decision to emigrate to Israel because of ongoing antisemitism she experienced in her native Germany.1 Funk’s claim in the article, that contemporary Germany’s polished face of post-Holocaust inclusion works to deny the presence of contemporary antisemitism by relegating it to the past, is expanded in the novel to reflect on how the past lives on in the present through the personal and historical memory of individual Jews. Through the representation of transnational memories and alternative mapping of the cityscape of Berlin, Winternähe foregrounds the Jewish experience in contemporary Germany as a community in close proximity to migratory experience and impacted by its precarity. Personal and cultural identity, formed by traumas carried across borders, is expressed through a family narrative that is rearticulated in three generations, with the Holocaust as an implicit thematic informing the youngest generation’s encounter with anti-Semitism in contemporary Germany.

A. A. Passmore (*)  Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_13

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In Winternähe, Funk tells the story of Lola, the 34-year-old, German granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, whose positionality in contemporary, multicultural Berlin is marked by a family history of multiple border crossings, family estrangement, and intergenerational continuities. While bearing a strong resemblance to Funk’s own biography as the child of a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother, the figure of Lola also personifies the abstract division between German and Jew, a feeling she calls “being a mixture of a concentration camp inmate and a concentration camp guard.”2 Even as all the members of Lola’s family have left Berlin (“It was as if Berlin had been swept clean,”) and she is the only family member remaining, the novel demonstrates how her Jewish family is anchored to Berlin’s history and marked by its internal borders (Funk, 153). Not only is Lola the divided inheritor of Jewish Holocaust survivors and perpetrators, she is also the child of East Germans whose family is separated by the wall. Lola’s grandparents, Hannah and Gershom, survived the Holocaust and returned to East Germany because of her grandfather’s convictions as a Communist. When Lola is seven years old, her father, Simon, who was already divorced from her non-Jewish mother, Petra, flees to West Berlin and Lola stays to be raised by her Jewish grandparents as her mother pursues her career goals. Lola’s grandmother, Hannah, a survivor of Dachau concentration camp, dies in 2001, and her grandfather, Gershom, who survived the war by fleeing to Palestine in the late 1930s, returns to Israel to live out the rest of his days. Simon, after fleeing to the West, goes first to Israel, and then to a jungle in Australia. After her grandfather, Gershom, dies in Israel, she discovers a letter written by her grandmother, Hannah, who confesses that Simon was fathered by an American soldier who saved her from death at the end of the war and that she has never told anyone else in the family about this secret but Lola. In an effort to see her father, Lola then makes her way to Bangkok with the intention to continue to Australia to find him. But Lola takes her own desire to flee to the extreme and chooses instead to go where “there were no Jews” on a remote Thai island where she reflects on her family story (Funk, 261). Despite her intentions, she meets Israelis (and a Palestinian) there escaping the tumultuous war between Israel and Gaza. Throughout the novel, the recurrent theme of border crossings and escape cross-references the history of Jewish emancipation in Germany and the situation for Jews in contemporary Israel, but also the wider Jewish history of forced expulsion, migration, estrangement, and inner exile. Echoes of her ancestors’ lived experiences reverberate in Lola’s life, from border crossing and flight to the complicated hopes of Zionism in a Jewish state. Like her father and grandfather before her, she flees to Israel to escape a situation in Germany. But her family, like many families who experienced the disjunctions of the trauma of the Holocaust, is not a faithful transmitter of these traumas. In their comprehensive survey of third-generation Holocaust literature, Victoria Aarons and Alan L. Berger note that the stories received

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by third-generation inheritors are “fractured by distance and inaccessibility, hampered by a tentative grip on ‘knowing’.”3 The incoherencies and continuities fall along gender lines as Lola’s father and grandfather remain silent about their years in flight (her father from East Germany; her grandfather from the Holocaust). In contrast, Lola’s grandmother, Hannah, spoke continuously of the Holocaust and her experiences. When Hannah dies, Lola appears to be on a quest of discovery to learn even more than Hannah’s narrative. Lola’s journey takes her on paths that parallel the experiences of her family members, often without a Lola having a conscious connection to the historical referents to her inner conflicts. Instead, as a child of a German and a Jew, she embodies the impulses of her forefathers and foremothers, since “in her dwelled forgetting and remembering in equal measure” (Funk, 313). Yet, in moments of apparent emancipation and escape, however, Lola is brought back to some of the foundational stories of her family’s own struggles. Told alongside Lola’s experiences, these familial stories take the shape of intergenerational memories and contain several layers of historical events and political systems that reorganized the landscape of Germany, where the family’s Holocaust experiences took place. Israel, in turn, is cast as a second homeland or place of refuge, but it is complicated by the conflict and by terrorism. The disjunctions in Lola’s family history do not offer her a stable foundation for an organic belonging into a group identity under the heading of the German Jewish experience. This complication is due not only to the heterogeneity and hybridity of the contemporary Jewish population in Germany, rather, it is also due to the tension between the national memory of Germany with respect to the Holocaust and the transnational memories of her family members who symbolize the trauma and the extent of the German crime. As Aleida Assman has observed, after the war, “the memory of the Holocaust was fragmented and dispersed. The embodied memory was confined to various groups of survivors and privatized within the families of the victims. It took two decades before the event was identified by name and a discourse evolved on the unprecedented magnitude of the trauma and crime.”4 In Assmann’s assessment of the mnemohistory of the Holocaust crime, it has become globalized, with local variations on commemoration and collective memory formation. In this context, it becomes the specific task of the generation of the granddaughters who must, like Lola, negotiate their own, often complex, family memories in the context of this contemporary trend of Holocaust memory in both globalized and localized forms. In the process, third-generation survivors find their personal narratives in conflict with a newly realigned ethnopolitical order that prioritizes national and collective narratives over the lived Jewish experience of flight and transition. In Winternähe, Lola embodies the particularized perspective of a third-generation inheritor who comes into conflict with the official memory culture of Germany, which has covered over the possibility of contemporary

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trauma or reactionary rage through a solemnification and recontextualization process of Holocaust memorialization or even of Jewish communal regeneration. Scholars of Jewish revitalization projects in contemporary Berlin have noted that, after 2001, Jewish architectural projects that have explicitly Jewish themes “became a unique selling point” of Berlin, even if the usable pasts of Jewish Berlin are not the ones that reflect that location’s history.5 Lola encounters this directly at one of the centers of this newly reinfused Jewish community, the Rykestraße synagogue in Prenzlauer Berg, which was rededicated in 2005. There, she encounters a contemporary German Jewry that has been reinvented into a far more orthodox community than the history of predominantly Liberal Judaism of pre-war Germany and the East German Jewish presence after the war that her own family history represents. Because Lola is Jewish through her father only, her Judaism is in question, and she is asked to go through a formal (orthodox) conversion process at the synagogue in order to be officially recognized as a Jew in the German Jewish community, a demand that ultimately leads her to leave Germany for Israel. The rebirth of the Jewish community in Germany around the year 2000, after decades of debate about the status of that Jewish presence in the land of the perpetrators of the Holocaust, raised the possibility of the reconstitution of a specifically German Jewish culture in the cities where Jews concentrated, primarily in Berlin. But ambiguities inherent in the new Jewish population in Germany caused by the familial and historical trajectories of individual Jewish families living there have made this growing population of Jews in Germany somewhat resistant to any easy process of collectivization or normalization as a “new German Jewry.” Despite being collectively represented by institutions such as the Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland [Central Council of Jews in Germany], the religious, national, and cultural diversity of the Jewish Germans makes it impossible, for example, to even know the true number of those who identify as Jewish and live there.6 It is understandable, therefore, that Winternähe shows Jews of the third generation as a deeply heterogeneous community primarily composed of recent migrants, dual citizens and expats. This is the same Jewish environment of Berlin that Max Czollek, the German Jewish poet and playwright, has noted. For Czollek, a member of the third generation like Funk, the second generation operated in a great cultural vacuum where Jews were simply missing and Jewish culture had disappeared through genocide and emigration. But the third generation experienced a new Jewish multiplicity and a rebirth of Jewish cultural institutions such as schools, synagogues, and Jewish newspapers. In his manifesto of the third generation, Desintegriert Euch! [Disintegrate Yourselves!], Czollek reminds readers that “this development was made possible because numerous Jews migrated to Germany at the beginning of the 1990s. The overwhelming majority of Jews today are part of the population of Germany with migration backgrounds.”7 Jews were sought-after migrants during the breakup of the Soviet Union and roughly 200,000 post-Soviet Jews entered Germany

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under HumHAG, a German temporary law created to assist immigration for individuals who were recognized as refugees by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), usually as victims of humanitarian crises, and selected for resettlement. Under HumHAG, Jews were brought to Germany as so-called Kontingentflüchtlinge or quota refugees. Today, nearly 90 percent of all Jews in Germany are descendants of these post-Soviet Jewish immigrant population.8 At the same time, among Jews in Berlin who grew up with German parents, many are descendants of East German citizens, like Mirna Funk (and her character, Lola), and they experienced their own, intra-national migration after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Other young Jews are Israelis living in Berlin, who chose to use European Union passports they inherited from their own grandparents and move to Berlin, whether because of experiences in the army, or the trauma of growing up during the Second Intifada, or because of the rising cost of housing in Israel.9 In Winternähe, Lola’s Israeli love interest, Shlomo Levy, is representative of this Israeli expat community: His traumatic experiences in the army serving in the West Bank, where he accidentally shot and killed a boy, motivate him to leave the army and go to Germany to escape the life in Israel. Shlomo’s quest to redress his guilt in the land of the perpetrators is a mirror image of Lola’s travel to Israel to flee from experiences of antisemitism in Germany. She is seeking a safe haven, even if she arrives at the beginning of the 2014 war between Israel and Gaza, she paradoxically finds some refuge amidst the booms of the qassam rockets she hears intercepted by Iron Dome while she hides in a shelter. Unlike previous generations of German Jews after the Holocaust who attempted to resettle and reestablish a place amidst the rubble, the third generation, “die Dritte Generation,” according to an article of the same title Funk wrote for ZEIT Online, is much more openly Jewish, internationally oriented, and more likely to reassert its victory over the fascists. In her article, Funk quotes Czollek’s characterization of how the third generation distinguishes itself against the first and second generations: “Weniger Schlösser an der Tür, dafür mehr Baseballschläger daneben.” [“Fewer locks on the door but more baseball bats nearby.”]10 Czollek’s mention of baseball bats recalls the bat-wielding “Bear Jew” character (Sgt. Donny Donowitz) of Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 revenge fantasy World War II film, Inglorious Basterds. At the same time, it refers to Woody Allen’s 1979 movie, Manhattan, in which Allen’s stand-in character, Isaac Davis, tries to convince his New York intellectual friends to bring baseball bats to beat a group of Nazis marching in New Jersey. While his interlocutors praise a “devastating satirical piece in the New York Times” that they believe is enough to deal with the problem, Davis insists that such passive responses are doomed to fail. Czollek’s rhetorical call to arms mirrors the spirit of the recent Disintegration Congress held at the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin in May, 2016, as part of the annual “Radikal jüdische Kulturtage” [“Radical Jewish Culture Days”] festival there.

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The congress, which Max Czollek co-initiated, recalls the breakaway impulse of the Zionist Congress in Basel a century before, but instead of collectively preparing to emigrate to Palestine, the organizers wanted to provoke, “through the motto of disintegration, to deliberately free themselves from social attributions and distance themselves from the construction of the ‘foreign’ in Germany after 1945.”11 Jews of the third generation, like Lola, want to remain Berlin, but also to assert a self-determination inside the German landscape that was lost to previous generations because of nationalism and the Holocaust. Even today, as long as Jews remain in Germany, there will be an irreducible dissent that cannot be bridged, even as the landscape of the country and its capital are changing. In Winternähe, the transformations of contemporary Berlin and the erasures of the recent past in the rebuilding of the unified Berlin serve as literal representations of the forgetting of Lola’s family, in conscious memory, of their history. For example, street names in Lola’s lived present are mentioned with barely any historical annotation of their symbolic meanings in prior eras, such as the period of the GDR, which is most closely represented by Lola’s absent father, who fled to the West and later, to another country. Through Lola’s retelling of her father’s growing unease with the East German system, her relationship to present-day Berlin reconstitutes itself through the lens of her own traumatic familial history. This profound recasting of locations in the city through the perspective of Lola’s inherited memory highlights the “necessarily palimpsestic nature of urban space,” as Andreas Huyssen coined the layers of urban historical memory.12 In Winternähe, certain urban spaces, although they are now rebuilt and unrecognizable, are nevertheless symbolic for Lola insofar as they fit into the continuity of Lola’s own personal, familial narrative, which draws from both her lived experience of feeling provisional but also hold elements of a transpersonal memory that reach back to her father’s and her grandparents’ traumatic experiences in the city. One example of this is when Lola describes the area of Mainzer Straße, now a youth mecca where her friends live in trendy Friedrichshain. Yet she also recalls that her father, after divorcing Lola’s mother, was unable to get an apartment for himself in the German Democratic Republic system of allotment in Berlin, a relatively common issue in Berlin starting in the 1970s.13 She remembers that he lived with a friend there, and later occupied an apartment in Friedrichshain, in another such semi-official housing project during the GDR. Making a claim to one’s right to live in a place by virtue of being the one who lives there was a common practice in the GDR, as Iko-Sascha Kowalczuk has recounted, in particular for those who could not succeed in securing housing through the official channels, and Mainzer Straße was one of the central locations of this alternative practice of living.14 After the fall of the wall in 1989, Mainzer Straße became the location of a prominent standing squatters’ rights movement, when Autonome (the autonomous ones) from both former East and West Berlin settled in these apartments that were in a legal limbo once

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the GDR was no longer in power. During the “summer of anarchy” in 1990, the group articulated a message that a space belonged to those who occupy it, and fought attempts to bring the area into the spatial topography of the new political and economic order shaping up in the vacuum opened up by German reunification.15 The squatters’ movement, insistent as it was on continuing to stay in a space that was opened up by a shift of national boundaries, articulated the right of provisional belonging in contemporary Berlin that today echoes the Jewish community’s own articulated conditional status in the city as a result of their history of exclusion and dispossession there. Yet the influence of the Holocaust on the perceived conditional status of Jews in Berlin is obscured in the landscape of a city that casts itself as an unencumbered place of refuge for a globalized, creative class. Although this image of Berlin is generally understood to be a feature of the post-Cold War Berlin, it has a much longer history. Berlin as a repository of educated individuals who are not beholden to place is part of what Heinrich Heine observed in 1826 when he quipped his essay collection, “Reisebilder” [Travel Pictures], that, “Berlin is not a city at all, rather, it provides a space where a lot of people, including many intellectuals, gather, for whom the location is quite unimportant. That’s who makes up intellectual Berlin.”16 Yet, on the other hand, the Jewish connection to Berlin is not merely a side effect of globalization, and Lola’s conscious decision to live, and, by the end of the novel, to return, to Berlin is about a historical connection that continues to hold meaning, even alongside of trauma and exclusion. Like Eastern Germans in Mainzer Straße and Friedrichshain who occupied spaces that were not originally intended for them but who insisted on recognition of their belonging there because of the fact that they occupy those spaces, Funk’s novel asserts that third-generation Jews demand the same recognition of their presence and connection in contemporary Germany. At the same time, contemporary Berlin is a city that is intent to conjure many of the ghosts that continue to haunt the memories of third-generation Jews. By overriding the internalized barriers of recent history that act as impediments to the foundation of its new, mobile, and multinational citizenry, Berlin is also a site of an erasure of certain aspects of third-generation Jewish memory, and thus Lola makes the decision to leave for Israel. Because Berlin had itself been the victim of a border condition, and because it “straddled the division of Germany” it “thus was the best place to heal the wounds of division,” and was therefore chosen as the post-reunification capital on June 20, 1991.17 In the euphoric, post-wall years, Berlin “downplayed the significance of social, geographic, and economic boundaries as barriers,” and focused attention instead on the self-styled, post-national citizens and cross-border flow of capital and people.18 At the same time, Berlin became the center of a reconstituted German nation with new boundaries that marginalize the differences that remain even though their spatial dimensions

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have disappeared, for example, the differences between East and West, or migratory, cross-border experiences. The continuous division and reunification that is at the heart of the urban imaginary and the creativity of postwall Berlin have left their marks on third-generation Jews in Berlin, but they have not succeeded in completely subsuming the decentralized Jewish experience within that city or the Jewish life that extends from Berlin to beyond its borders. Lola’s border crossing from Germany to Israel in Winternähe is one born out of an admixture of family loyalty, a sense of isolation as a Jew in Berlin, and flight as a political statement, and it mirrors Funk’s own public announcement about why she chose to leave for Israel in 2014. In a recent interview with German Jewish studies scholars Katja Garloff and Agnes Mueller, Funk described her novel as a way of “showing that the story isn’t over” by “showing how it feels like being in the third generation.”19 The mix of motivations in Lola’s decision to leave could be read as the contemporary nonchalance of a globalized Jewish community in Germany. But like Lola’s choice to leave, the Jewish decision to leave (or to return) because conditions require it was rarely a clear-cut choice historically, in particular for women. The work of Barbara Einhorn on German Jewish women returnees to East Germany after World War II has shown how, for Jewish women, it was an “intimate interrelationship between the personal and the political” which determined their motivation to leave Germany and ultimately brought them back.20 In the novel, despite the story taking place seventy years later in 2014, one also finds elements that are both political and personal in Lola’s decision to leave. On the one hand, her grandfather, Gershom, lives in Israel, on the other, Lola has quit her job at a marketing firm because her colleagues begin to speak negatively about Jews during a meeting, not knowing that Lola is Jewish. In the midst of her career turmoil, another personal matter emerges: Lola meets Shlomo Levy, an Austrian-Israeli journalist for Ha’aretz who is staying in Berlin. Her spontaneous decision to follow him back to Israel seems impulsive except for the fact that she has just had a difficult date with Toni, a self-declared leftist, and “politically educated” photographer in Berlin, who goes on a drunken tirade about Israel is an “apartheid state.” After learning about the Jews in Lola’s family, Toni follows up with a declaration that indicates that he wishes Jews would stop living in the past: All of this took place an eternity ago, for fuck’s sake! At some point, things have to go back to normal. Again and again this same old story. The poor Jews and the bad Germans. Don’t you all feel a bit stupid yourself, always taking this victim role? It would make me uncomfortable. I would be embarrassed to make such a big deal in front a whole people for seventy years. I felt guilty during my entire youth. For what? For something I never had anything to do with. I think it would really be cool if the Israelis and the Jews would finally forgive us. I think it would be cool if they said that, seventy years is a long time, and now it’s enough for us too. Forgive and forget.21

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That Jews in Germany continue to live in a past that is still present while non-Jewish Germans are increasingly eager to live in a present that contains this history to the past is something the novel demarcates as a difference for third-generation German Jewish inheritors of Holocaust trauma and Germans who are not. One possible interpretation of the title “Winternähe” or “proximity to winter” is that it is a word that evokes the hybrid experience of time that comprises the space in which Jews remain close to the Holocaust, death, or “winter” even as they are also moving in the direction of renewal, or “spring” and “summer.” One finds this sense of hybrid time in a recent collection of contemporary young Jewish writing on the future of Jewish life in Germany and Europe, in which a couple, Cecilia and Yair Haendler, an Israeli-Italian academic couple who teach Torah for a Hillel International Germany project, Torah on Tour, remark on the dual experience of time for young German Jews. They liken it to Walter Benjamin’s famed elucidation of the 1920 painting of Paul Klee, the Angelus Novus, who is, according to Benjamin’s 1940 “On the Concept of History,” is driven forward by the winds of time but is always glancing backwards.22 According to them, the “new Judaism” is always looking back at “that which we have left. This is why we, like many others, moved to Berlin, a place where we had always been; a place where, even though we were seeing it for the first time, seemed like something that we were remembering, because our grandparents had told us about this place. Or they did not.” For the Haendlers, being in Germany is not just for the sake of Germany itself, but also for the piece of Jewish life that was “stranded” there and continued to circulate.23 Likewise, Lola’s boyfriend, Shlomo remarks on the darker aspects of being conscious about the remainder of Jewish life in Germany and how the Germans incorporated the Jews, “not just historically, but also biologically” (Funk, 312). Describing to Lola how difficult it was for him to go to Germany from Israel, even if it represented an escape from the army, he tells her that “[e]very time, when I breathe in the air of Berlin or of Hamburg, I know that I am breathing in the ashes of dead Jews. The only thing I don’t understand is how the Germans haven’t already been suffocated by this ash.” With the metaphor of ash, Winternähe demonstrates how, in the context of the Jewish consciousness of reconnecting with the specifically Jewish remainder of Germany, there is no progression of time, only a recirculation across borders and within them. The political nature of Lola’s departure from Germany to Israel is not far underneath the surface when the novel begins with a description of casual micro-aggressions against Lola as a Jew in Berlin, some of which rise to the level of illegality. In the opening scene of the novel, for example, Lola is in a civil hearing against two non-Jewish Berliners who work in the fashion and media industry like Lola. Lola’s complaint against them comes after she gets tagged and notified on Facebook and Instagram because an image of herself (a selfie taken against her permission from the social media platform) that has been blown up into a poster-sized image and hung on a wall at a

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digital media conference called “What’s next?”. One of the two hipsters is photographed during the “What’s next?” conference drawing a Hitler mustache on the large image of Lola’s selfie with a marker with a “thumbs up” hand signal reminiscent of the controversial fashion photographer, Terry Richardson. While her social media circle argues whether the scene is ironically hip or offensive, Lola tries to repair the damage by yelling at the PR manager of “What’s next?” and finally goes to the police to file a claim. There, she encounters a clueless police officer who knows nothing about social media and tries to convince Lola through questions that this wasn’t an act of antisemitism but perhaps a personal vendetta or the actions of a spurned lover. It is here where Winternähe is most explicit about the difficulty of pinpointing how antisemitism continues in contemporary Germany. When the German state demotes an action with antisemitic overtones into a personal, romantic squabble, it is itself a political action insofar as it denies that antisemitism exists in contemporary Germany. “Her whole life, everyone who met her decided about her identity,” the novel’s narrator remarks, as Lola’s experiences are defined by the outside, whether by the state and its laws or by the attitudes of non-Germans. “Among philosemites, she was a Jew, as it was among Reform Jews, among German Jews too, because they were astounded that others besides themselves had survived. At the same time, they were delighted they were not alone with their traumatic familial constellation, which is something that absolutely every European Jew is born into.”24 When the lawyer for the defendants in Lola’s civil case successfully argues to the judge that the Hitler mustache drawers’ actions could not have been antisemitic since, from the standpoint of halakha, Lola is not Jewish (her father is Jewish, but not her mother), it announces yet another external judgment of Lola’s Jewish identity, one from the German legal system. Part of the drama of the novel is the question of whether Lola’s decision to leave Germany is a choice or the result of an unlivable situation for her as a Jewish woman in Berlin. In this sense, Lola enacts a dilemma facing many German Jews in the third generation: to determine if their current existence in Europe is too fragmented and precarious to forge a life there, or whether their sense of susceptibility is part of the inevitable, inherited remainder of the lived experiences of the first generation of their grandparents. Members of the third generation are often on a quest to seek both a connection to the generation who lived the Holocaust and to rectify the injustices suffered by their grandparents. The literature of the third generation often thematizes this desire through what Aarons and Berger call “quest narratives” in which “plots to seek out and wrest hold of the unfolding of events with the hope of some disclosure and arbitration” (Aarons and Berger, 12). After the situation with the Hitler mustache, Lola notes that “the incident had thoroughly and silently transformed her” (Funk, 22). Yet Lola’s decision to leave Germany

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and later, Israel, also recalls her father’s decision to leave East Germany for the West, Germany for Israel, and Israel for Australia. This second-generation response both to the Holocaust but also to the political order of post-war Europe drives Lola’s own transit over national borders. But her father’s rejection of Germany and of her family, typical of the second generation’s protest against the past, goes too far for Lola to bridge in her own identity. The continual inaccessibility of her father, whom Lola never does ultimately see again, becomes the limit of her interest in the quest for the elusive knowledge about the traumas that she hopes will solve her own identity crisis of the present. With that open-ended resolution to her travels, Lola returns to Berlin and to her circle of friends there who are likewise seeking orientation in the syncretic, globalized city. The year that Winternähe appeared, 2015, Germany witnessed an unprecedented number of migrants and refugees entering the country, over a million people, who were fleeing from conflicts in their origin countries, such as those escaping the civil war in Syria that began in 2011 after the global upheavals caused by the Arab Spring. Funk’s novel, about the intergenerational continuity of experience of those who were also caught between flight and conflict, and about the lives of the Jewish inheritors of onetime refugee seekers that are still being lived, struck a chord with the ethos of the time it was published. By providing a literary space for a reexamination of the experience of Jewish migration and trauma in the subsequent generations after the Holocaust, Funk complicated the simplistic discussions that emerged in that year of the “refugee crisis” regarding motivations for flight, or about who belongs to a place, and the expectations for integration in Germany and in the European Union. By presenting Jewish migrant memories, internal and family divisions, and the historical trajectories that inform the present for Jewish citizens of Germany, Winternähe highlights the transnational nature of the traumas of the Holocaust that are still relevant to Germany’s present. With Winternähe, Funk presents the transnational, globalized nature of Holocaust trauma and memory: from the GDR and the Soviet Union to a reunified Germany; from Germany to Israel; from Israel to Palestine; and from the Middle East to Thailand and back. In this way, the novel intersects with Michael Rothberg’s concept of a “multidirectional memory” where, in contrast to processes of collection (national) remembrance, “memory is not the exclusive property of particular groups but rather emerges in a dynamic process of dialogue, contestation, and exchange that renders both memories and groups hybrid, open-ended, and subject to renegotiation.”25 In showing the multidirectional associations that Lola finds on her quest to uncover her own family’s experience, Funk highlights both the dynamic transfer of memory making that takes place across borders in the search for refuge and the constitutive Jewish connection to the current demographic changes in contemporary Germany.

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Notes

1. Mirna Funk, “Ohne mich,” ZEIT Magazin, no. 50, December 4, 2014, https:// www.zeit.de/zeit-magazin/2014/50/antisemitismus-deutschland-mirna-funk. 2. Mirna Funk, Winternähe (Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer Verlag, 2015), 313. “…sie [sah] sich als eine Mischung aus KZ-Häftling und KZ-Aufseher…” Translation mine. 3.  Victoria Aarons and Alan L. Berger, Third Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, Memory (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017), 9. 4. Aleida Assmann, “The Holocaust—A Global Memory? Extensions and Limits of a New Memory Community,” in Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices, and Trajectories, eds. Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 556. 5.  Ayse N. Erek and Eszter Gantner, “Disappearing History: Challenges of Reimagining Berlin After 1989,” in Cultural Topographies of the New Berlin, eds. Karin Bauer and Jennifer Ruth Hosek (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018), 183. 6.  Dani Kranz, “Forget Israel—The Future Is in Berlin! Local Jews, Russian Immigrants, and Israeli Jews in Berlin and Across Germany,” Shofar 34, no. 4 (2016): 9. 7. Max Czollek, Desintegriert Euch! (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2018), 32. 8.  HumHAG is short for “Gesetz über Maßnahmen für im Rahmen humanitärer Hilfsaktionen.” The law was replaced at the end of 2004 by the comprehensive Zuwanderungsgesetz (immigration law) which codified immigration laws to Germany and began Germany’s new status as an immigrant country. In the year preceding the change of the law, more post-Soviet Jews emigrated to Germany (19,000) than to Israel (11,000). Dmitri Belkin, “Jüdische Kontingentflüchtlinge und Russlanddeutsche,” http://www.bpb. de/gesellschaft/migration/kurzdossiers/252561/juedische-kontingentfluechtlinge-und-russlanddeutsche, accessed 27 December 2018. 9. From late 2000 after the Middle East Peace Summit that took place between President Bill Clinton, Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Chairman of the Palestinian Authority, Yassir Arafat, at Camp David in July, 2000, lasting until mid-2005. 10.  Mirna Funk, “Wir lebenden Juden,” ZEIT Online, July 31, 2016, https:// www.zeit.de/kultur/2016-07/juden-dritte-generation-kultur-intellektuelledeutschland. 11.  “Desintegration,” Max Gorki Theater, http://www.gorki.de/de/themenseite-festival-desintegration, accessed 27 December 2018. 12. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 81. 13.  Regarding this phenomenon, see Udo Grashoff, Schwarzwohnen: die Unterwanderung der staatlichen Wohnraumlenkung in der DDR (Göttingen: V&R Verlag, 2011). 14.  Susan Arndt, Stephan Bialas, and Grit Friedrich, Berlin, Mainzer Strasse: ‘Wohnen ist wichtiger als das Gesetz’ (Berlin: Basisdruck, 1992), 253.

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15. On the description of this movement by those who led it, see A. G. Grauwacke, Autonome in Bewegung. Aus den ersten 23 Jahren (Berlin, Hamburg: Assozation A, 2019). 16. Cited in “Projekt Gutenberg-DE,” Gutenberg, SPIEGEL ONLINE, last modified, April 26, 2006, http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/reisebilder-393/39. Also published in Heinrich Heine, Sämtliche Werke II (München: Artemis & Winkler Verlag, 1969). Translation mine. 17. Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 225. 18. Janet Ward, Post-Wall Berlin: Borders, Space and Identity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 11. 19. Katja Garloff and Agnes Mueller, “Interview with Mirna Funk,” in German Jewish Literature After 1990, eds. Katja Garloff and Agnes Mueller (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2018), 230. 20. Barbara Einhorn, “Gender, Nations, Landscape and Identity in Narratives of Exile and Return,” Women’s Studies International Forum 23, no. 6 (2000): 702. 21. Funk, 35–36. “Das alles ist doch ewig her. Verdammt nochmal. Irgendwann muss doch auch mal gut sein. Immer wieder diese Leier. Die armen Juden und die bösen Deutschen. Kommt ihr euch nicht selbst ein bisschen bescheuert dabei vor, immer diese Opferrolle einzunehmen? Mir wäre das unangenehm. Mir wäre das peinlich, einem ganzen Volk siebzig Jahre lang Theater zu machen. Meine ganze Jugend habe ich mich schuldig gefühlt. Für was? Für eine Sache, mit der ich nie etwas zu tun gehabt habe. Ich fände es cool, wenn die Israelis und auch die Juden endlich verzeihen würden. Ich fände es cool, wenn sie sagen würden, so, siebzig Jahre sind eine lange Zeit, uns reicht es jetzt auch langsam. Vergeben und vergessen.” Translation mine. 22. Walter Benjamin, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” in Gesammelte Schriften, eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Volume I: 2 (Frankfurt a.M.: edition suhrkamp, 1980), 697f. 23. Cecilia and Yair Haendler, “‘Berliner Juden’ – Ein Zwiegespräch,” in “Weil ich hier leben will…”: Jüdische Stimmen zur Zukunft Deutschlands und Europas, eds. Walter Homolka, Jonas Fegert, and Jo Frank (Freiburg i. B.: Verlag Herder, 2018), 68. 24.  Funk, 35. “Ihr Leben lang schon hatte jeder Mensch, dem Lola begegnet war, über ihre Identität entschieden. Bei Philosemiten war sie Jüdin, bei Anghängern des REformjudentums auch, bei deutschen Juden sowieso, weil diese erstaunt waren, dass außer ihnen noch mehr überlebt hatten, und gleichermaßrn erfreut darüber, mit ihrer traumatischen familienkonstellation, in die absolut jeder europäische Jude hineingeboren ist, nicht allein sein zu müssen.” Translation mine. 25.  Michael Rothberg, “Multidirectional Memory in Migratory Settings: The Case of Post-Holocaust Germany,” in Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales, eds. Chiara de Cesari and Ann Rigney (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2014), 126. See also: Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).

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Bibliography Aarons, Victoria, and Alan L. Berger. Third Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, Memory. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017. Arndt, Susan, Stephan Bialas, and Grit Friedrich. Berlin, Mainzer Strasse: ‘Wohnen ist wichtiger als das Gesetz’. Berlin: Basisdruck, 1992. Assmann, Aleida. “The Holocaust—A Global Memory? Extensions and Limits of a New Memory Community.” In Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices, and Trajectories, edited by Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad, 97–117. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Belkin, Dmitri. “Jüdische Kontingentflüchtlinge und Russlanddeutsche.” http:// www.bpb.de/gesellschaft/migration/kurzdossiers/252561/juedische-kontingentfluechtlinge-und-russlanddeutsche. Accessed 27 December 2018. Benjamin, Walter. “Über den Begriff der Geschichte.” In Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Volume I: 2. Frankfurt a.M.: edition suhrkamp, 1980. Czollek, Max. Desintegriert Euch! Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2018. Einhorn, Barbara. “Gender, Nations, Landscape and Identity in Narratives of Exile and Return.” Women’s Studies International Forum 23, no. 6 (2000): 701–713. Erek, Ayse N., and Eszter Gantner. “Disappearing History: Challenges of Reimagining Berlin After 1989.” In Cultural Topographies of the New Berlin, edited by Karin Bauer and Jennifer Ruth Hosek, 181–200. New York: Berghahn Books, 2018. Funk, Mirna. “Ohne mich.” ZEIT Magazin, no. 50, December 4, 2014. https:// www.zeit.de/zeit-magazin/2014/50/antisemitismus-deutschland-mirna-funk. ———. Winternähe. Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer Verlag, 2015. ———. “Wir lebenden Juden.” ZEIT Online, July, 31, 2016. https://www.zeit.de/ kultur/2016-07/juden-dritte-generation-kultur-intellektuelle-deutschland. Garloff, Katja, and Agnes Mueller. “Interview with Mirna Funk.” In German Jewish Literature After 1990, edited by Katja Garloff and Agnes Mueller, 229–234. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2018. Grashoff, Udo. Schwarzwohnen: die Unterwanderung der staatlichen Wohnraumlenkung in der DDR. Göttingen: V&R Verlag, 2011. Grauwacke, A. G. Autonome in Bewegung. Aus den ersten 23 Jahren. Berlin, Hamburg: Assozation A, 2019. Haendler, Cecilia, and Yair Haendler. “‘Berliner Juden’ – Ein Zwiegespräch.” In “Weil ich hier leben will…”: Jüdische Stimmen zur Zukunft Deutschlands und Europas, edited by Walter Homolka, Jonas Fegert, and Jo Frank, 64–74. Freiburg i. B.: Verlag Herder, 2018. Heine, Heinrich. Sämtliche Werke II. München: Artemis & Winkler Verlag, 1969. Cited in “Projekt Gutenberg-DE.” Gutenberg, SPIEGEL ONLINE. Last modified, April 26, 2006. http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/reisebilder-393/39. Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Kranz, Dani. “Forget Israel—The Future Is in Berlin! Local Jews, Russian Immigrants, and Israeli Jews in Berlin and Across Germany.” Shofar 34, no. 4 (2016): 5–28. Ladd, Brian. The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

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Max Gorki Theater. “Desintegration.” http://www.gorki.de/de/themenseite-festivaldesintegration. Accessed 27 December 2018. Rothberg, Michael. “Multidirectional Memory in Migratory Settings: The Case of Post-Holocaust Germany.” In Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales, edited by Chiara de Cesari and Ann Rigney, 123–145. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2014. ———. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. Ward, Janet. Post-Wall Berlin: Borders, Space and Identity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Ward, Simon. Urban Memory and Visual Culture in Berlin: Framing the Asynchronous City, 1957–2012. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016.

CHAPTER 14

Holocaust Memories and Polish Catholic Identity: Cultural Transmutations of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Rachel F. Brenner

Introduction In the spring of 1943, two deeply believing Polish Catholics who witnessed the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which coincided with the Holy Week of Easter, produced literary testimonials of the Jewish tragedy. Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) wrote two poems, “Campo di Fiori” and “Biedny Chrześcijanin patrzy na getto” [“A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto”]; Jerzy Andrzejewski (1909–1983) wrote a novella, Wielki Tydzień [Holy Week]. Thematically, these contemporaneous literary representations of the Ghetto destruction by young but already prominent writers focused on the unchristian responses of mainstream Polish Catholics to the mass murder of the Jews. In 1987, on the cusp of the postcommunist era, Jan Błoński, a prominent Polish literary critic, published an essay in the progressive Roman Catholic magazine Tygodnik Powszechny under the title, “Biedni Polacy patrzą na getto” [“The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto”]; in 1995, a few years into the postcommunist era, Andrzej Wajda, the celebrated Polish film director, produced an eponymous cinematic adaptation of Andrzejewski’s novella.

Polak-Katolik [Pole = Catholic], a catch-phrase that indicates the inseparability of ethnic Poles from the Catholic Church. R. F. Brenner (*)  University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_14

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Błoński’s and Wajda’s reproductions of Miłosz’s and Andrzejewski’s responses to the Polish attitude toward the burning Ghetto were overwhelmingly rejected by the Polish public. Wajda’s film was completely ignored: it received no public attention and promptly disappeared from movie theaters. In contrast, the vociferous repudiation of Błoński’s essay set off decades-long tenacious, vehement denial of Polish antisemitism during the Holocaust, which, I note parenthetically, intensified especially with Jan Gross’s publication of Neighbors in 2001. The present right-wing government passed (and then somewhat amended) a bill criminalizing negative appraisals of PolishJewish relationships during the Holocaust. Błoński and Wajda must have been aware of the antagonism that their essayistic and cinematic treatments of the Polish response to the Holocaust were likely to evoke. In fact, the rejection of their works had been foreshadowed by the repudiation of Claude Lanzmann’s documentation of Polish antisemitic sentiments and actions during the Holocaust in his 1985 monumental Shoah.1 Lanzmann’s exposure of the Polish general agreement and proclivity to cooperate with the extermination of the Jews—an attitude presaged by interwar Polish rabid antisemitism that did not diminish in the wake of the war—was vehemently rebuffed by the Polish public and government.2 The unwavering rejection of Lanzmann’s, Błoński’s, and Wajda’s “renewal[s] of the memory of the Holocaust,” demonstrated the extent to which the communist ideological, universalizing dictum—all war casualties were victims of the fascist aggression—effectively helped repress the story of the Jewish genocide in Polish war narrative.3 Following Halbwachs’ concept of collective memory, the communist regime-sanctioned “collective frameworks” of essentialist characterizations of the World War II victims and perpetrators were “in accord with the predominant thoughts of the [Polish] society.”4 Ironically, the refusal of the Poles—Catholics par excellence—to account for their lapse of Christian love for the mass murdered Jews concurred with the propaganda of the “godless” communists which underplayed the particularity of the Jewish fate under the German occupation. Błoński and Wajda, however, deemed it necessary for the sake of the hallowed Polish Catholic identity to acknowledge and atone for the unchristian behavior toward the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Jan and Aleida Assmanns’ conceptualizations of social memory help elucidate Błoński’s and Wajda’s eventually failed efforts to restore the memories of Polish witnessing of the Holocaust to the public sphere. “Communicative memory comprises memories related to the recent past. These are what the individual shares with his contemporaries,”5 whereas “The archive is the basis of what can be said in the future about the present when it will become the past.”6 Once processed, archival memory transforms into “cultural memory,” which is “a kind of institution. It is exteriorized, objectified, and stored away in symbolic forms […] such as monuments, museums, libraries, archives, and other mnemonic institutions.”7 With the passage of time, the communicative memory of recent events, which speaks directly to the community, becomes

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an archival memory to serve as a historical resource for the subsequent, present-day communicative memory. Once the archival memory has been ­recognized and assimilated in the communicative memory, it enters the collective cultural memory as a tradition to be remembered and learned from. The waning of the communicative memory indoctrination in the communist era enabled access to the archived memories of the precommunist era. Significantly, the memories with regard to Jews that the Polish people chose to recover did not relate to the unchristian response of the Polish witnesses to the Jewish fate in the Holocaust. Rather, with governmental official support, the Poles invoked the archival memory of the antisemitic bias,8 namely the interwar and wartime propagandist denunciations of Jews as the fifth ­column—Żydokomuna (Judeo-Communism)—and therefore the enemies of the Polish people (Himka and Michlic, 7). The recall of the image of the Jew as a hostile Other reaffirmed the ethnically exclusionary Polish national identity. As the grip of the communist regime and its ideology weakened and eventually disappeared, it was possible to validate the singularity of Polish patriotic opposition to the German occupation, and especially the heroic story of the Polish underground. At long last, the peerless Polish heroism of the failed 1939 defense of Warsaw and the defeated 1944 Warsaw Uprising could be commemorated in conjunction with the glorified 1831 and 1863 brutally suppressed insurrections against the tsarist rule. The revival of the exclusionary national narrative, however, would not be complete unless the Catholic component of Polish identity had been effectively reclaimed. The postwar decades of complex, often unsettling and for the most part hostile relations of the Church with the anti-religious communist regime were punctuated by the extraordinary events of the election of Cardinal Karol Wojtyła to the papacy and Pope Paul John’s triumphant 1979 visit to Poland. The crucial role that the Catholic Church played in the Solidarność [Solidarity] movement, which hastened the demise of the Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe and the following disintegration of the Soviet Union, reinforced even further the inherently Catholic Polish national identity. The role that the Polish Church played in the collapse of communism reaffirmed the national claim to Poland’s special place in the Roman Catholic Church (Alvis, 218–250).9 The religious factor in the fall of the communist regime reinvigorated the Partitions era myth of the messianic destiny of Poland as the “Christ of Europe.” In retrospect, it may seem obvious why neither the Polish citizens nor the institution of the Church would be willing to acknowledge their unchristian response to the Holocaust. The admission of this dishonorable behavior of Polish Catholics as well as the Polish Catholic Church, which, as well known, did not issue any official condemnation of the mass murder of the Jews, would have marred this moment of political triumph. However, Błoński’s and Wajda’s essayistic and cinematic intentions to reach a wide public attest to their conviction that the glorious resurrection of Poland’s political

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independence provided an auspicious moment to confront the inglorious memory of Polish behavior in the Holocaust. It does not mean, however, that they sought to achieve their goal by simple duplication of the archival memories of Miłosz and Andrzejewski who watched the animosity of the Poles toward the burning Jews and identified it as the withdrawal of the Divine Grace. Błoński and Wajda, who recalled the moral failure from the vantage point of the second “miracle”10 of Poland’s restoration, believed that the presence of Grace evinced by the regained political freedom, impelled the Polish Catholics to acknowledge their shameful collective memory of the Holocaust and thus confirm their special standing among the Christian nations. Błoński and Wajda therefore approached the archival memories of the Ghetto in Miłosz’s poems and Andrzejewski’s story in a strategic manner. To appraise the ethical and ideological rationale for those strategies, I first examine Miłosz and Andrzejewski’s real-time communicative memories, which correlated the Holy Week’s commemoration of Christ’s passion with the unfolding Jewish passion in the Ghetto.

Miłosz and Andrzejewski’s Literary Testimonials of the Burning Ghetto During the summer and fall of 1942, Miłosz and Andrzejewski engaged in an epistolary exchange in which they recognized that the premeditated destruction of the Jews disempowered the norms of Christian humanistic ethics and devalued its moral teachings. Miłosz published the correspondence only in 1990, admitting that he had been persuaded “by those who argued for their [the letters’] archival value, since there are few testimonies about people’s state of mind during the time of the German occupation.”11 In the spring of 1943, however, while watching the fires of the Ghetto Uprising, both writers felt obligated to confront their fellow Polish Catholics then and there with the moral and religious meaning of the act of witnessing the Jewish genocide. “Campo di Fiori” was published in 1944 and “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto” in 1945. Andrzejewski read the first version of Holy Week to his fellow-writers in 1943.12 The texts represent the writers’ moral and theological struggle with the annihilation of the Jews. Since it was blocked by the Ghetto wall, the invisible destruction infiltrated, or rather, assaulted the writers’ imagination. The search for redemption in the Romantic tradition of the prophetic stature of the poet in “Campo di Fiori” was not corroborated in “The Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto.” There the speaker is confronted with the apocalyptic vision of the murder of the Jews as the collapse of the salvation-driven Christian telos. In Holy Week, the horror of the burning Ghetto transforms the witnessing Christian world into a battlefield between the forces of hate and love. The witnesses’ complicity in the Jewish genocide determines the victory of evil, which collapses the Christian foundational commandment of caritas.

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“Campo di Fiori” and “The Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto”: The Inadequacy of the Poetic Tradition in the Reality of the Apocalypse Contrived symmetry governs both form and content of “Campo di Fiori.” The sixteenth-century event on Campo di Fiori, where the crowds remain indifferent to Giordano Bruno’s burning on the stake is juxtaposed with the scene on Krasińskich Square, where the crowds take no notice of the burning Jews in the Ghetto. While the Romans resume their mundane activities even before the flames of the stake have died out, the Varsovians are having fun on the carousel in the Easter entertainment park in front of the Ghetto, despite the shower of ashes that reaches them from behind the wall. The final stanzas tie the disparate narratives, the differing historical times, and the distant geographic locations with the poet-speaker’s prophetic proclamation of redemption. The poet redeems the universal disregard for the suffering Other when he admits, “But I that day reflected/on the loneliness of the dying men.” His poetry will engender a “legend” when his “word shall stir revolt/ on the new Campo di Fiori.”13 The revolutionary aspect of poetry which dissents from the world’s insensitivity will redeem the forgotten story of human suffering. Miłosz’s much later dissatisfaction with “Campo di Fiori” which he called “a very immoral poem… written from the point of view of an observer of people who were dying”14 had already been implied in “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto,” where the disintegration of the poetic forms marked the collapse of the prophetic stature of the poet. Even though the speaker’s Christian identity keeps him physically safe on the “Aryan side” of the city, his imagination exposes him to the apocalyptic reality behind the wall. There, he confronts the ultimate destruction of the Ghetto, already populated by bees and ants, which prosper on the remains of human bodies, namely “red liver,” “the honeycomb of lungs,” and “white bone.” While the world of the burned Jews is being taken over by insects, the underworld fills up with their ashes. Hostage of his imagination, the Christian speaker descends to a hellish mock-funeral of the burned Jews performed by a “guardian mole” with “a small lamp fastened to his forehead,” who looks like “a Patriarch.” Having lost his people, the Patriarch15 has transformed into an underground mole sorting the piles of Jewish ashes. Thus concludes the history of the Jewish nation that began in “the great book of the species.”16 The fires of the Final Solution which turned the Jews into ashes left no evidence of their existence. But the Final Solution also affected the poor Christian, who, in contrast with the Jews, is destined live. It made him realize that being alive identified him as an accomplice of the Christian murderers of the Jews. Indeed, the poor Christian admits, “I am afraid, so afraid” of the guardian mole, who “will count me among the helpers of death: / The uncircumcised.” However, as horrifying as it is, the implication of the “uncircumcised” Christian in the murder of the Jews has even more drastic repercussions: It signals the withdrawal

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of Grace. Identifying himself as, “the Jew of the New Testament, / Waiting two thousand years for the second coming of Jesus,” the speaker understands that Jesus, a circumcised Jew, has been burned with the Jewish people (Polonsky, 51). Thus, the termination of Jewish history effectively ends the Christian “waiting” for the Messiah. The poet’s redemptive prophetic prowess in “Campo di Fiori” could not withstand the apocalyptic vision of “The Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto.” The “poor Christian” realizes that his position as a passive witness has tarnished his Christian self. The annihilation of the Jews by Christians made the Christian spectator spiritually poor as it deprived him of the messianic salvation of the Second Coming.

Holy Week: The Failure to Save Christian Love Jerzy Andrzejewski’s Holy Week takes place on the “Aryan side” of Warsaw. Even though it is Easter time, the sounds and the smoke of the fighting and burning Ghetto dominate the life of the Polish protagonists. They are put to a moral test with the arrival of Irena, a young Jewish woman who is seeking shelter in the apartment of Jan Malecki, her former suitor, now married to Anna. Anna is a deeply believing Catholic in advanced stages of pregnancy. The individuals in Malecki’s apartment represent a range of responses to the Jewish plight. Though Jan is hesitant to take the risk to shelter Irena, his rebellious brother Julek departs with his young friend, Włodek, to help the fighting Ghetto, while Anna perceives Irena’s arrival as a sign of moral redemption for the Catholic Church. The world outside the apartment predominantly approves of the destruction of the Jews. Mrs. Piotrowski, a neighbor who is a rabid antisemite, is determined to get rid of Irena. In Malecki’s office everybody with the exception of one person believes that the Germans are solving Poland’s “Jewish problem” (Andrzejewski, 79–80). In a horrific scene, Polish children denounce a little Jewish boy to a German policeman who executes him on the spot. All along, as part of Easter celebrations, the infamous carousel is being constructed at the Ghetto wall, while passersby for the most part remain indifferent to the Ghetto events. In addition, the demoralization of the Polish society spreads beyond the Jewish sphere. Thus, while seeking shelter for Irena, Malecki is shot dead by a Polish gang. The main plotline follows Anna’s lost battle for the soul of Christianity. Anna’s pregnancy and the timing of the Holy Week of Easter allude to the Virgin Mary: metaphorically, she represents both the Christian ethos of redemption in the miraculous birth of Jesus and the divinity of his self-sacrificial atonement for the world. Anna believes that the tragedy of the Jews undermines the Christian “eternal sense and order in the world.” Thus, the suffering of the Jews has become “the most painful test for a Christian conscience.” She admits that the Jews have already suffered “for many centuries”

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for having refused to accept Jesus as the Messiah. Now, it is the moral obligation of the Christians to abandon the mindset of hate and embark on Jesus’ gospel of love by extending help to the suffering Jews. “Who, if not a Christian,” Anna asks, “ought to do everything in his power to lighten the misfortune of these downtrodden people and be with them, as they died alone and without hope?” (Holy Week, 53). Hence, she approves of Jan’s offering Irena hospitality and supports Julek’s departure for the Ghetto. Furthermore, Anna is ready to act on her vision of a true Christian. She realizes that Irena’s arrival signals the providential design to fulfill the commandment of caritas. Consequently, she engages in making plans to find a secure haven for Irena. Symbolically, this act of Christian love will atone for the centuries of Jewish suffering inflicted by the Church, as it will thwart the German plan of the total extermination of the Jewish people. Ironically, Anna’s plans to save Irena (and the Church) sustain a terrible defeat when she is in church observing Good Friday and praying “for a merciful fate” (Holy Week, 115). Those devotional acts signal Anna’s continuing confidence in providential Grace. At that very moment, however, the antagonistic powers of Christian hatred of Jews take over, dispelling the redeeming presence of Providence that she saw in Irena’s arrival. Mrs. Piotrowski’s young husband a “typical Warsaw rake” (Holy Week, 113) attempts to take advantage of Irena’s situation and rape her. But jealousy is not the only reason for Mrs. Piotrowski’s hatred for Irena. Her attitude draws upon the Church’s theology of hateful contempt for Jews that Anna wished to replace with the gospel of Christian love. In a conversation with Anna, Mrs. Piotrowski makes her uncompromising position about helping Jewish fugitives clear, “In my opinion… any Pole who hides a Jew in his house is… nothing but a swine! I’m a Pole and that’s what I say!… It’s unchristian for good Catholics to have to die for a single solitary Jew. That simply cannot stand” (Holy Week, 62). Mrs. Piotrowski who sees herself as a “Pole” and a “good Catholic” sets on a mission to protect Polish society not only from fugitive Jews, but also from the Poles who shelter them, and who therefore are neither true Poles, nor good Catholics, but “swine.” This “good” Polish Catholic approves not only of Jewish extermination; she also supports the death sentence decreed by the German occupier for the “unchristian” Polish Catholics who help Jews. Mrs. Piotrowski’s subsequent public and vociferous exposure of Irena’s Jewish origins and her banishment in full daylight to a crowd of spectators amounts to a death sentence to the fugitive; it also brought to light Polish general consensus with the murder of the Jews. Eliciting no opposition, she calls Irena “a filthy Jew,” ordering her, “Get out of here! Back to the ghetto with you. That’s where kikes like you belong.” Before she leaves, Irena curses Mrs. Piotrowski and the crowd, “And may the rest of you all die like dogs! May you all burn just like us. May they shoot each and every one of you! I hope they murder you all!” Then “[s]he quickly turned around, and in

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the deathly silence that ensued, she started walking slowly toward the gate” (Holy Week, 124). As she jumps into the streetcar, “in the distance a powerful explosion rocked the air, and from the midst of the dark cloud of smoke there arose over the ghetto a blood-red glow” (Holy Week, 125). Holy Week concludes with the victory of hatred over love. Whereas Anna’s failure to save Irena attests to the absence of providential Grace, the banishment of Irena from the relative safety of the “Aryan side” to the burning Ghetto affirms the providential nature of the Final Solution. The Polish Catholics’ willing compliance with the German prohibition to shelter Jewish fugitives foreboded a successful completion of the Final Solution; it ensured that there would be no Jewish survivors. Andrzejewski’s novella reechoes Miłosz’s poetic preoccupation with the apocalyptic impact of the Jewish Holocaust. Both writers viewed the Polish Catholic attitude toward the Holocaust as a catastrophic breach of Christian love which collapsed the theological foundation of the Christian faith. Decades later, Wajda and Błoński acknowledged the gravity of the crisis, but, unlike the eye-witnesses of the Holocaust, they believed that it could be mended and eventually deposited in the cultural memory of the nation.

Wajda, Błoński, and Their Failed Politics of the Cultural Memory of the Holocaust In their reproductions of Miłosz and Andrzejewski, both Wajda and Błoński aimed at the transformation of the haunting archival memory into “cultural memory.” As they saw it, once confronted, admitted, and atoned for, the shameful past would be deposited in national mnemonic institutions; there it would function as a cautionary tale, forewarning of the dangers of antisemitism and other forms of bigotry. Nonetheless, Wajda and Błoński were aware of the resistance that their intertextual “transmissions of knowledge”17 from Miłosz and Andrzejewski’s literary testimonies were bound to encounter. Indeed, by the time their subversive works reached the public, the mainstream not only had definitively denied the archival memory they were invoking; it had also engendered alternative cultural memories which countervailed the academia and its bona fide, historical research of the Holocaust in Poland. Suffice it to mention the restrictions imposed on the Jewish Historical Institute and the proliferation of publications that neutralized, marginalized, or denied the Holocaust at the time of the communist era and even in its aftermath.18 In the twenty-first century, this ideological orientation has been producing mnemonic institutions, such as museums, monuments, and chapels devoted to commemoration of innumerable Polish rescuers of Jews.19 While aware of the obstacles they faced, Błoński and Wajda also understood that the extent and intensity of the officially sanctioned historical revisionism of Polish-Jewish relations represented a symptom of an unresolved

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problem of the Polish collective memory, which arose from Poland’s tragic history. As the deliberate constructions of their works demonstrate, Błoński and Wajda realized that the compulsive rejection of the Jewish history of suffering on the Polish soil signaled the overpowering need to compensate for the terror of the German occupation, the betrayal of the Allies who handed Poland over to the Soviet Block, and the former history of the political disempowerment of the Partitions. They also knew that the remedy for these blows to the national pride consisted in the revival and the cultivation of the interrelated myths of the unparalleled heroic character of the Polish people and the messianic destiny of the Polish Catholic nation. Thus, they were aware that the recognition that the Jewish genocidal plight not only surpassed Polish suffering but also discredited the Poles as morally flawed Catholics was unacceptable to the present-day Polish mindset. Such recognition would have contradicted the idealized image of the long suffering, yet courageous, and supremely Catholic Polish nation that the reborn Polish state was intent on maintaining internally and presenting to the world. Błoński’s and Wajda’s works therefore reflect authorial consciousness of the incompatibility between the shameful archival memory of the Holocaust and the communicative memory of the political-ideological triumph over the communist regime. To reconcile those two contradictory components of Polish national memory, they approached the problem by means of complex rhetorical constructions: On the one hand, they insisted that the authenticity of Polish exceptionalism was predicated upon confronting and admitting the unchristian response to the Holocaust. On the other hand, to preempt resistance, they sought to ease the confrontation with the shameful past by attenuating the gravity of the transgression and by ascertaining redemption.

Błoński and Wajda: The Rhetoric of Moral Transformation At first sight, the titles of Wajda and Błoński’s works foreshadow close relations with the precursor texts. While Wajda’s eponymous title Holy Week elicits the anticipation of “a relation of similarity” to Andrzejewski’s novella, Błoński’s title, “The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto,” promises “a relation of contiguity” with Miłosz’s poem (Lachman, 305). The subsequent encounters with the works, however, instantly complicate the anticipation of affinity, as neither replicates the literary, be it poetic or fictional, genre of the referent text. Wajda’s and Błoński’s generic reproductions of Miłosz’s and Andrzejewski’s texts imply extensive liberties that they were taking with the archival texts aiming at eventually consigning the history of Polish witnessing of the Holocaust to the nation’s cultural memory: Both the essay and the film sought to manage their audiences’ reception of admission and atonement for that dishonorable history. By associating with well-known texts by highly esteemed writers, they meant to confer validity on their works and secure the audiences’

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confidence in their message. At the same time, by claiming the freedom to interpret literary texts, they meant to appropriate them in ways they deemed effective to elicit the desired reception.

Błoński: The “Light of Truth” and the Promise of Polish Catholic Greatness The distinction between the genre of the “given text and the ‘other’ text (the referent text)” (Lachman, 304) prompts a closer look at the “relation of contiguity” of Miłosz’s “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto” and Błoński’s “The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto.” While the plural form of “the poor Poles” refers to the collective of Polish witnesses, the substitution of “Christian” with “Poles” invokes the national, rather than Catholic identity of the observers of the burning Ghetto. The national identity of the witness is reinforced in the opening of the essay, which does not refer to Miłosz’s poem, but rather to the poet’s much later general pronouncements about the “burden of guilt” of the “native soil” which was “sullied, blood-stained, desecrated” by the murder of the Jews.20 Elaborating upon Miłosz’s metaphor, Błoński claims that the Jewish blood, which has seeped into the Polish motherland, has infiltrated and sullied the memory of the Polish nation, because the murder of the victims who “shared our home” (35) was not opposed by their Polish neighbors. Therefore, the tarnished memory of the Holocaust needs to be expiated. Spiritual cleansing, however, can be effective only “if we see ourselves in the light of truth” (35) and assume responsibility for the moral misconduct. It is important to note Błoński’s rhetorical shift to first person plural, a rhetorical device which communicates that, as a Pole, the author’s shares the responsibility with his readers. In the following segment of the essay, Błoński presents a complex twofold argument about the futility of evasion or denial of the moral transgression toward the Jewish victims. He begins by referring to Miłosz’s “Campo di Fiori” and affirming that the moral failure of the Poles who ride the carousel in front of the burning Ghetto cannot be redeemed through the art of poetry. Aligning with Miłosz’s assessment of the immorality of the poem, Błoński agrees that it is immoral to “soothe the conscience” (36) through an emotionally detached poetic observation of the tragic death of the Ghetto Jews. In the reality of the genocide, the aesthetic of the poet’s word cannot compensate for the moral failure of the witness to identify with the suffering of the Jewish neighbor. Then, to drive home the impossibility of evading moral responsibility by manipulations of words, Błoński assumes the mantle of a fictional writer. He switches to the genre of drama and invents a dialogue, whereby a “fictitious Pole” struggles to find words which would refute the perennially asked question, “Why are Poles anti-semites?” (42). The strategy of the narrative

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shift, which gives readers an illusion of being in the role of objective listeners, intends to elicit a realization of the futility of the Polish interlocutor’s line of defense. At the same time, the questions posited by the inquirer survey the history of Polish antisemitism, reminding the reader-now-listener of ­anti-Jewish activities, such as the centuries-long intolerance of and contempt for the Jewish minority, legislated discrimination against Jews, the postwar pogroms in Kraków and Kielce, the accusations of the Jews for being communist sympathizers, or conspirators, and the list goes on (37–39). The debate does not end on a note of clarity and resolution. On the contrary, in the aftermath of the debate Błoński ascribes to his fictitious Pole “a sense […] of contamination” and “a feeling of being somewhat soiled and defiled.” Then, quite unexpectedly, he returns to the intertext of the title and associates the interlocutor’s sense of moral unease with the sense of guilt of the “Poor Christian” in Miłosz’s poem. Asserting his interpretive freedom as a literature reader, Błoński defends this inference, “I have – as probably every reader does – filled in the gaps in my own reading of ‘A Poor Christian.’” Yet, he tries to preempt a criticism of his interpretation with a comment, “I hope, however, that I have not strayed too far from the intentions of the poet” (42). At first sight, the refutatio seems somewhat unconvincing, perhaps even disingenuous. A prominent literary critic, Błoński must have been aware that his reductive interpretation of Miłosz’s notion of the destruction of the Jews as an apocalyptic ending of his poor Christian’s “waiting two thousand years for the second coming of Jesus” (41) might encounter criticism. But Błoński’s preemption of criticism is intentional, as is his deliberate misinterpretation of Miłosz’s theological argument of the end of Grace. To evade the hopelessness of Miłosz’s view of the irredeemable consequences of the Holocaust for the Christian world, Błoński advances an analytical interpretation: “the mole” is not a Patriarch, who witnesses the definitive destruction of his Jewish people, but rather the poor Christian’s “own moral conscience which condemns (or may condemn) [him]” of being “a helper of death” (41). A proper response to this condemnation may resolve the trauma of being implicated in the murder of the Jews. In order to get rid of the “mole who burrows in our subconscious” (43), it is necessary to abandon “the defensive attitude” that was demonstrated in the dialogue and “face the question of responsibility in a totally sincere and honest way” (43). Recognizing the transformative and therefore daunting nature of his demand, Błoński hastens to reassure his reader that the admission of responsibility might not be difficult. The “new Church documents” of Vatican II show “loud and clear: the Christians of the past and the Church itself were wrong… to consider Jews a ‘damned’ nation.” For centuries, the theology of contempt for the Jews demonstrated that “Christians were not Christian enough” (43–44). And so, as Catholics, the Poles must comply with the Church’s new doctrine which “speak[s] clearly about the failure to fulfill the duties of brotherhood and compassion” toward the Jewish people (44).

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But Błoński’s rationale for the necessary moral transformation does not stop at the invocation of the post-Holocaust theological reform of the Catholic Church at large. The essay ends on a rhetorically powerful accord which pulls together the mythical national and religious aspects of Polish identity. It concludes with an intertextual reminder of the great Polish poets, and especially Mickiewicz, who already in the time of the Partitions predicated the “messianic” destiny of the Polish people on the acceptance of “Israel, ‘the older brother,’” who should be treated with respect and love. Błoński’s final message implies that thanks to “our literary greats,” who believed in extending Christian caritas to the Jews, wrote about it and lived by it, “we were still Christians” at the time of the Holocaust. As a result, “God held our hand” and so we, Polish Catholics, were saved from “ ­ taking part in the crime” of the Jewish murder. Today, the consciousness of the great poetic tradition of tolerance and enlightenment which envisioned the unique destiny of the Polish Catholic nation impels “our duty” to seek expiation by a truthful “viewing of the past” so that Polish soil desecrated with Jewish blood, can be cleansed and the messianic potential of the Polish nation can be realized (47).

Wajda: Christian Love in Time of the Apocalypse Whereas Błoński’s essay aspires to restore the national and religious linkage of Polish identity, Wajda21 focuses his rhetorical strategies on the restoration of the Catholic component of the equation. In this respect, the filmic adaptation remains faithful to the dominant religious theme in Andrzejewski’s novella, which, as mentioned before, the film director emphasizes by the adoption of the novella’s title, Holy Week. Wajda enhances the centrality of the Christian theme in the film by constant invocations of Easter: Each segment of the film is headed by the calendric day of the Holy Week. This construction, which establishes correspondence between Christ’s passion and the passion of the Jews burning behind the Ghetto walls, reechoes Andrzejewski’s deliberate situating of the tragedy of the Jewish destruction in the context of the Christian foundational story. At the same time, as Paul Coates observes, in view of Wajda’s intention of “simply reproducing Andrzejewski’s novella, all omissions and emendations gain in significance.”22 This discussion of Wajda’s Holy Week confirms Coates’s observation: Despite the film’s similarities with the novella, the “omissions and emendations” reveal that the rhetoric of the rearrangement of the episodes, the characterizations of the protagonists, and the composition of the film at large produces a message which intentionally transgresses Andrzejewski’s apocalyptic vision in the story. The fact that the novella, as its title Holy Week indicates,23 ends on Good Friday, rather than Easter Sunday, implies that the murder of the Jews has eliminated the salvific denouement of the resurrection of Jesus in the New Testament story. Anna’s attempt to validate Christian caritas by sheltering a Jewish fugitive is defeated by an act of betrayal of the Polish Catholic

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witnesses of the Jewish agony, which echoes the betrayal of Jesus. The Via Dolorosa of Irena, the Jewish woman, who is hunted down, blackmailed, mocked, violated, and finally handed over to the German executioners by the Polish crowd, does not end in God’s intervention, which in the Christian biblical story created the hitherto unbroken faith in the providential care of Divine Grace. But while Andrzejewski’s novella ends, as already mentioned, with the apocalyptic victory of Christian hatred over Christian love, in the film adaptation, the apocalyptic significance of the Polish population’s choice of hate over love for the burning Jews undergoes significant transmutations. Unlike Błoński, who demanded that [the] Polish society atone for its prewar and wartime antisemitic sentiments, behavior, and activities retroactively, that is, through a “sincere” and “honest” retrospective of the archived memory, Wajda wishes his audience to recognize the redeeming aspects of Polish behavior in his cinematic recapture of the real time of the novella. The rhetorical strategy which downplays the Poles’ unchristian attitude toward Jews emerges first and foremost in the relentless atmosphere of terror created by the constant presence of the German perpetrators. The frequent reappearance of four ominous German motorcycle riders, who invoke the four riders of the apocalypse, the night and day roundups of hiding Jews, the constantly replayed sights of the burning Ghetto punctuated by the sounds of fighting and the anguished screams of the burning people—these episodes construct a visual narrative which tells the story of life under constant terror. Whereas some Poles are shown praising the Germans for solving the “Jewish problem” for Poland, the film tends to attenuate the Polish negative responses to the Jewish situation. Thus, the horrific scene of malicious Polish children who gleefully invite the execution of a Jewish fugitive boy is altogether excised from the film; the Polish onlookers who mock the burning Jews are practically absent, but a Polish tram passenger is killed by a stray bullet from the Ghetto; the blackmailers of Irena are Gestapo officials: Malecki is killed by the Gestapo, rather than by Polish gangsters. Mrs. Piotrowska, who eventually banishes Irena, is mainly motivated by her husband’s attraction to the Jewish woman. In the reenactment of the scene in Malecki’s office, whereby two individuals express their satisfaction with the destruction, their comments are offset by a courageous and strong rejection by another office employee. At the same time, the expansion of the plotline which tells of Polish solidarity with the Ghetto fighters provides Polish viewers historically inaccurate yet reassuring information of Polish support of the Ghetto Uprising. Thus the novella’s subplot, which tells of Malecki’s brother, Julek, and his young friend, Włodek, both underground fighters, who depart for the Ghetto, transforms into a prominent plot, which, I would argue, plays an important part in the film’s final message. Julek, who volunteers to assist the Ghetto fighters, is joined not only by his young acolyte, but also by a whole group of young fighters who force their way into the Ghetto and whose heroic exploits are represented in a number of central episodes placed against the background

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of the helplessly burning Ghetto. In a conspicuous departure from the novella and, indeed, another blatant disregard for historical accuracy, Wajda transforms the infamous carousel at the Ghetto walls which, we recall, was depicted in “Campo di Fiori” and which was negatively referred to in the novella, into an ingenious device which Julek and Włodek use to approach the Ghetto walls in order to detect an opening which would lead the young fighters into the Ghetto. Wajda makes sure that the episodes of Julek and his fighting cohort in the Ghetto not only represent the Poles’ solidarity with the Jewish comrades-in-arms, which transcends the tradition of Polish exclusionary ­ nationalism. Julek’s emotional affinity with Anna and his understanding of her grief over the tragedy of the Jews behind the wall denotes the religious-Catholic component of the Polish military operation in the Ghetto. Indeed in his final conversation with Anna, Julek explains his sense of obligation to fight with the Jews, repeating verbatim Anna’s previously uttered description of her feelings about the horrific situation in the Ghetto, “who if not we [Christians] need to be with them [the Jews].” In this sense, Julek’s recognition of his obligation to be with the Ghetto fighters reflects not only the humanistic ideal of brotherhood of men, the values of which obligate him to be with the Jewish victims of the terrible injustice of racism; he is also and perhaps foremost motivated by his sense of obligation as a Christian to practice the commandment to love one’s neighbor. The reaffirmation of love dominates the concluding episodes of the film, which mark a momentous departure from the conclusion of the novella. Thus, the film does not end with Irena’s banishment by Mrs. Piotrowski and the open ending of her foreboding departure into the city, where she is bound to be denounced and murdered. Rather, the film ends with an unrealistic, but, in terms of the final message, effectively staged final scene of Irena actually walking into the burning Ghetto. The final scene is preceded by two juxtaposed episodes of Anna in the Church at the Easter service, kissing the wounds of crucified Jesus, and of Malecki being killed by the Gestapo while seeking assistance for Irena. In these scenes, Anna’s worship reaffirms her unbroken faith in the love that Jesus’ suffering bestowed upon the world, whereby the ethics of the responsibility for the suffering other is tragically confirmed by Malecki’s death. In the meantime, Irena, who enters the burning Ghetto, passes by German soldiers who return from their murderous act of burning the Ghetto. These Germans, unmoved by the horror of their deeds, however, remind the viewer of those who are still there, namely Julek and his cohort, who continue to abide by their duties of solidarity and Christian love for the Jews in the Ghetto. Wajda’s film ends with a message to his viewers that the Jews, even though betrayed and sent to death by some Poles, would not die alone, thanks to some true Polish Catholics who saw their Christian obligation in extending love to their Jewish neighbors.

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Conclusion Błoński’s and Wajda’s efforts to save the Polish Catholic conscience by invoking the shameful historical record of Polish attitudes toward Jews during the Holocaust have definitively failed. And the recent political and ideological developments in Poland tell us that the denial of this record has become increasingly aggressive. However, Błoński’s and Wajda’s failures to mobilize the real-time legacy of Miłosz and Andrzejewski on their mission to make the Poles face their discreditable past are instructive. Even though the sobering lessons they deliver do not by any means elicit an optimistic perspective of the world steeped in genocidal atrocities, they must be heeded. Invoking archival memories of Miłosz and Andrzejewski, Błoński and Wajda reaffirm the existence of rebellious voices then and now, which, while aware of the futility of their efforts, were impelled to speak the truth. The remarkable rhetorical flexibility of the essay and the film attests to Błoński’s and Wajda’s staunch belief in the importance of a truthful admission of the past to save moral core of the Polish Catholic identity. At the same time, their failures provide indubitable evidence of the overwhelming political and ideological agency to create an alternative archival memory, which would reaffirm the Polish Catholic identity in compliance with the ideologically constructed communicative memory of the present. Thus, the failure of Błoński’s and Wajda’s works to elicit a transformation of the collective memory of the Holocaust signals an unequivocal crisis of the humanistic ethics. It perhaps behooves us, the scholars who reassess the permutations of World War II, not only to disavow the winning history of evasion and denial, as represented here, but also admit the unresolved moral crisis of the world imbued with the ineradicable imprints of the Holocaust evil and declare the need for new solutions.

Notes



1.  Robert E. Alvis, White Eagle: One Thousand Years of the Polish Catholic Tradition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 244–245. 2. Claude Lanzmann, The Pentagon Hare: A Memoir, trans. Frank Wynne (London: Atlantic Books, 2009), 494. See also, Antony Polonsky, ed., “Introduction,” in “My Brother’s Keeper?” Recent Polish Debates on the Holocaust (London: Routledge, 1990), 1–34. 3. John-Paul Himka and Joanna Beata Michlic, eds. “Introduction,” in Bringing the Dark Past to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 1–24. 4. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992 [1941]), 40. 5. Jan Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 36. 6. Aleida Assmann, “Canon and Archive,” in A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, eds. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: de Gruyer, 2010), 102.

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7. Jan Assmann, “Communicative and Cultural Memory,” in A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, eds. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: de Gruyer, 2010), 110–111. 8.  There were government orchestrated anti-Jewish campaigns, whereby Jews were accused of being Zionists and therefore enemies of the communist regime. These events were triggered by the growing rift between Israel and the Soviet Union following, respectively, the 1956 Sinai Campaign and the 1968 Six-Day War. 9. Se also, Neal Pease, Rome’s Most Faithful Daughter: The Catholic Church and Independent Poland 1914–1939 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009). 10. The first “miracle” was the reestablishment of the Second Republic after World War I. 11. Czesław Miłosz, Legends of Modernity: Essays and Letters from Occupied Poland, 1942–1943, trans. Madeline G. Levine (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 2005), 262. 12.  Miłosz’s poems were published in his 1945 volume of poetry, Ocalenie [Rescue] (Warsaw: Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza “Czytelnik”); “Campo di Fiori” was published in 1944 in the volume Z otchłani: poezje [From the Abyss: Poetry], ed. L. Wajdelota [T. Sarnecki] (Warszawa: Wydaw). Ż.K.N. [Żydowskiego Komitetu Narodowego]; Andrzejewski read the first version of Holy Week to fellow-writers in 1943, as related by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Notatki 1939–1945, ed. Andrzej Zawada (Wydawnictwo Dolnośląskie, 1991), 89–90. The rewritten and only extant version of Holy Week was published in the 1945 collection of stories Noc (Warszawa: Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza “Czytelnik”). The quotations are taken from the translation by Oscar E. Swan and his students, Holy Week: A Novel of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007). Page numbers from the translation will appear in the text. 13.  “Campo Di Fiori” and “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto,” trans. A. Gillon, in Jan Błoński, “The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto,” in “My Brother’s Keeper?” Recent Polish Debates on the Holocaust, ed. Antony Polonsky (London: Routledge, 1990), 49–51. 14. Ewa Czarnecka and Alexander Fiut, interviewers, Conversations with Czesław Miłosz, trans. Richard Lourie (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), 13, 131. 15. Even though there were three Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, I assume the reference here is to Abraham, the first Patriarch and the first to receive the promise of becoming the father of the Jewish people. 16. The name of the Book of Genesis in Polish is Księga Rodzaju, that is, the book of species. Since the poem tells us that the Patriarch studied “wielką książkę gatunków,” the great book of the species, and since “rodzaj” (species) is the synonym of “gatunek,” I believe it is safe to conjecture that the Patriarch studied the Book of Genesis and especially the story of Creation. 17. Renate Lachman, “Mnemonic and Intertextual Aspects of Literature,” in A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, eds. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: de Gruyer, 2010), 306.

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18.  Joanna Beata Michlic and Małgorzata Melchior, “The Memory of the Holocaust in Post-1989 Poland,” in Bringing the Dark Past to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe, eds. John-Paul Himka and Joanna Beata Michlic (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 415–417. 19.  Alina Molisak, “Righteous in the Chapel” [„Sprawiedliwi w Kaplicy”], in Pomniki pamięci: Miejsca niepamięci [Monuments of Memory: Places of Oblivion], eds. Katarzyna Chmielewska and Alina Molisak (Warszawa: Instytut Badań Literackich PAN, 2017), 35–53. 20. Jan Błoński, “The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto,” in “My Brother’s Keeper?” Recent Polish Debates on the Holocaust, ed. Antony Polonsky (London: Routledge, 1990), 34. 21. I would like to express my gratitude to the Unit of Supporting Teaching, Learning and Technology at the College of Letters and Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and especially to Ms. Mary Pruchniak, Special Senior Librarian, and David Himelick, Techzone Assistant Manager, for making Wajda’s film Holy Week available to me. 22. Paul Coates, “Observing the Observer: Andrzej Wajda’s ‘Holy Week’” (1995), Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue Canadianne des Slavistes 42, nos. 1/2 (March–June 2000), 29. 23. Holy Week does not include Easter Sunday.

Bibliography Alvis, Robert E. White Eagle: One Thousand Years of the Polish Catholic Tradition. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Andrzejewski, Jerzy. Holy Week: A Novel of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Translated by Oscar E. Swan and his students. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007. Assmann, Aleida. “Canon and Archive.” In A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, edited by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, 91–109. Berlin: de Gruyer, 2010. Assmann, Jan. “Communicative and Cultural Memory.” In A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, edited by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, 109–119. Berlin: de Gruyer, 2010. ———. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Błoński, Jan. “The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto.” In “My Brother’s Keeper?” Recent Polish Debates on the Holocaust, edited by Antony Polonsky, 34–48. London: Routledge, 1990. Czarnecka, Ewa, and Alexander Fiut, Interviewers. Conversations with Czesław Miłosz. Translated by Richard Lourie. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987. Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Translated by Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992 [1941]. Himka, John-Paul, and Joanna Beata Michlic, eds. Bringing the Dark Past to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013. Lachman, Renate. “Mnemonic and Intertextual Aspects of Literature.” In A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, edited by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, 301–311. Berlin: de Gruyer, 2010.

250  R. F. BRENNER Lanzmann, Claude. The Pentagon Hare: A Memoir. Translated by Frank Wynne. London: Atlantic Books, 2009. Michlic, Joanna Beata, and Małgorzata Melchior. “The Memory of the Holocaust in Post-1989 Poland.” In Bringing the Dark Past to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe, edited by John-Paul Himka and Joanna Beata Michlic, 403–450. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013. Miłosz, Czesław. Legends of Modernity: Essays and Letters from Occupied Poland, 1942– 1943. Translated by Madeline G. Levine. New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 2005. Pease, Neal. Rome’s Most Faithful Daughter: The Catholic Church and Independent Poland 1914–1939. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009. Polonsky, Antony, ed. “Introduction.” In “My Brother’s Keeper?” Recent Polish Debates on the Holocaust, 1–34. London: Routledge, 1990.

CHAPTER 15

Post-Soviet Migrant Memory of the Holocaust Karolina Krasuska

“I never heard dirty Jew, dirty Russian tended to come up. Particularly in Hebrew school. Not very often, but often enough that I felt justified in using it as an excuse when I tried to convince my parents to let me transfer to a normal public school,” reminisces the narrator in the opening of David Bezmozgis’s short story “An Animal to the Memory” (2004).1 Looking back at his former teenage self in the seventh grade, Mark Berman, who as a child immigrated from the Soviet Union, points to a set of categories within his school experience, within which precisely “Russian” is the marker of difference. As we learn, his “campaign” (Bezmozgis, 68) to leave Hebrew day school fails because his parents insist that he stays to learn “what it was to be a Jew” (Bezmozgis, 69). The short story renders his Jewish education as an education in Holocaust remembrance, and at the same time suggests that his Russian difference translates into his failure to properly celebrate Holocaust Remembrance Day at school. Indeed, what is the difference that “Russian” makes when we approach Holocaust remembrance and memorialization within Jewish American writing? Bezmozgis’s work belongs to contemporary Anglophone, largely autobiographical, fiction written by authors who as children immigrated to the United States and Canada in the 1980s and early 1990s from the Soviet Union, or the former Soviet Union, and belong to Russian-speaking Jewish communities constituting an estimated 10–15 percent of America’s Jews today.2 The beginning of this literary wave is marked by the publication of Gary Shteyngart’s The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (2002) and short stories by David Bezmozgis and Lara Vapnyar. Others, such as Keith Gessen, Michael Idov, Sana Krasikov, Ellen Litman, Nadia Kalman, Irina Reyn, K. Krasuska (*)  University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_15

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Maxim Shrayer, Anya Ulinich, followed in their steps a few years later or published their first works only in 2014 (Yelena Akhtiorskaya, Boris Fishman) or 2017 (Julia Alekseyeva).3 These writers have been producing fiction that centers on immigration and Jewishness in North America, with the Soviet Union as a place of origin. Slavic studies scholars stress their Russianness and speak about “Russian hybrid writers”4 and “Russian-American” writing in the context of a Russian diaspora.5 Jewish Studies research has concentrated on “multiply hyphenated identities nesting like matroyshka dolls” of “American Jewish Russian,”6 “Soviet-born émigré Jewish writers,”7 where “émigré” seems to connect the current group of writers to earlier waves of Russian immigrants. Their work has been discussed under the rubric of migration literature, including comparisons with other contemporary migrant literatures.8 Yet what happens when immigrant literature encounters, to a large extent, well established collective memory, here specifically American memory of the Holocaust? How is the representation of Holocaust memory reconfigured within the post-Soviet migration background that this writing narrates? Among over thirty novels, short story volumes, memoirs, and graphic novels published within this wave, four texts focus on the theme of the Holocaust and Holocaust memory. While two short stories: David Bezmozgis’s “An Animal to the Memory” (2004) and Lara Vapnyar’s “There Are Jews in My House” (2003) are the works from the early phrase of the wave, two larger works: Boris Fishman’s novel A Replacement Life (2015) and Julia Alekseyeva’s graphic novel Soviet Daughter (2017) are much more recent.9 Parallel to the case of Bezmozgis’s character in the opening of this chapter, addressing Holocaust memory could be read as an attempt at belonging to the Jewish American tradition and entering into a dialogue within this field: While Bezmozgis’s narrator focuses on the American Jewish memory of the Holocaust as something not his own and only to be learned, and Vapnyar addresses Russian antisemitism during World War II, Fishman and Alekseyeva create texts where they ask what Holocaust memory means today and blend it with the dominant theme of immigration. I include all four texts in the discussion below to point to representative characteristics that appear throughout the literary genres that these texts represent, even though their genre characteristics weigh heavily on the possibilities of representation. It is especially the case with the graphic novel, Alekseyeva’s Soviet Daughter. Moreover, Soviet Daughter complicates the discussion on one more level: While we can attempt to read Bezmozgis, Vapnyar, and Fishman within now well-researched coordinates of third-generation Holocaust literature, Alekseyeva may be seen as a fourth-generation text, a new phenomenon that only awaits scholarly study.10 Bezmozgis’s, Vapnyar’s, Alekseyeva’s, and Fishman’s writing contributes to what I would like to call post-Soviet migrant memory of the Holocaust. Each literary text reconfigures a set of Soviet and post-Soviet related factors that together make up the cultural complexity of Holocaust writing within this wave of Russian Jewish American writing. Bezmozgis’s “The Animal to the

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Memory” addresses mostly the issue of migrant memory of the Holocaust, with the indirect residue of Soviet memory. Vapnyar’s “There Are Jews in My House,” set in a wartime Soviet town occupied by the Nazis, is interested in how the success of the rescue of Jews is conditioned by state socialist ideology as it intersects with latent antisemitism. Alekseyeva’s Soviet Daughter combines the focus on the transmission of Holocaust memory in the context of migration with the interest in Soviet history and adds the theme of Jewish evacuation and survival in the Soviet hinterland. Finally, Fishman’s A Replacement Life most broadly interweaves the themes related to Soviet history, evacuation to the East, Russian immigrants in the United States and politics of memory. Different aspects of Sovietness—Sovietness of the Holocaust, Sovietness of memory—are responsible for a set of conceptual displacements that constitutes the framework for thinking about these literary texts. Similarly to Bezmozgis’s protagonist from “An Animal to the Memory,” this fiction, in its migrant condition, stands at the crossroads of American and Soviet genealogies of memory. The inheritance of Soviet cultural memory of the “catastrophe,” as the Jewish genocide during World War II has been spoken about in Russian, or the “imperfect silence” about it in the Soviet Union shapes how Holocaust memory informs this fiction.11 The silencing Jewish genocide occurred on Soviet territory on political grounds. Namely, it was often subsumed under the murder of universalized Soviet citizens, which foregrounded the sheer immensity of Soviet civilian losses generally, estimated around eighteen million.12 Zvi Gitelman explains political reasons why the Jewishness of the victims was muted in the Eastern bloc generally: it served the “friendship of the peoples […] and proletarian internationalism” or in other words, worker’s solidarity that was to transcend any ethnic or religious designations (Gitelman, 190). As Tarik Amar, among others, has demonstrated, this silencing was, however, not a result of a coherent Soviet policy, but existed as a tendency and especially because of that remained “imperfect” (Amar, 166). Accordingly, the Soviet memory of the Holocaust was not just absent, but rather existed under a different guise and with a different emphasis. Recent scholarly works on film, photography, literature and monuments in the USSR and post-Soviet Russia show various manifestations of the memory of the Jewish genocide.13 In addition, Soviet literary and film representations of the Holocaust obeyed different aesthetic principles and generated different meanings (Murav, 194; Gershenson, 223–228). The memory of the Holocaust has become a “unifying force” among Soviet Jewry just after World War II14; local, grassroots commemorative activities were a sign of what Arkadi Zeltser calls “their own public time” or a rare fleeting opportunity to function in a Soviet public space as a community.15 While these grassroots activities may to some extent find their parallels in the postwar United States within Jewish communities, as shown for instance by Hasia Diner, the mainstreaming of Holocaust memory that has taken place in the United States since the 1970s, and peaked in the early 1990s, is without a counterpart in the Soviet Union, and then the former Soviet Union.16

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Anglophone fiction by immigrants from the former Soviet Union not only locates its characters within the reach of Soviet and post-Soviet memory of the Holocaust, but also, with the Soviet setting in some of these ­narratives, expands geographically and conceptually the dominant American narrative of the Holocaust as largely determined by death camps, located mostly in Nazi-occupied Poland, but also, among others, narratives about escape, hiding, shooting sites, and the ghettos in various locations in Europe. To put it briefly, the Holocaust is remembered differently and it is a different Holocaust that is remembered. Parallel to Soviet Jewish writing on the Holocaust, these works show what Harriet Murav calls a “different trajectory” of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union (Murav, 151). She calls for “a broadened definition of what constitutes a Jewish response to the Holocaust” and the tacit cultural assumptions as to what the “Holocaust” signifies in American and Israeli culture (Murav, 152). With narratives about the Soviet Union, including evacuation into the Soviet hinterland as in Soviet Daughter and A Replacement Life, Jewish experiences in the Red Army and the entanglements with Soviet state socialism, especially in “There are Jews in my House” and Soviet Daughter, this fiction is able to explore different meanings of Jewish survival and broaden literary meanings of the Holocaust.17 The Anglophone writing by immigrants from the Soviet Union or the former Soviet Union can be read as a part of American or North American third-generation Holocaust literature, but at the same time, with its partial genealogy in Soviet Holocaust memory, forms a distinct subset and reveals constitutive assumptions about how we understand “third generation.” No matter whether third-generation literature is defined as created by thirdgeneration authors and/or creating third-generation protagonists itself,18 its American iteration it points to a very specific localized genealogy of memory, with English as “the authorized language of Holocaust memory.”19 In other words, “third-generation literature” does not only imply a formal or structural affinity among the works or a specific biography of the writers themselves, but also a certain, variously defined, difference from firstand second-generation literature in the United States (Aarons and Berger), which clearly was a part of the mainstreaming of Holocaust memory. Russian Anglophone immigrant third-generation writing only partly fits this complexity, because of Soviet and post-Soviet collective memory that it also transmits. If we perceive “generation,” not only as a genealogical calculation, a broadly shared birth date, but rather as a shared lived experience, as Astrid Erll suggests, post-Sovietness of this wave of third-generation Jewish American writers and their “third-generation” protagonists occupy a distinct place, with the migrant memory of the Holocaust as one of their characteristics.20 One of the earliest texts within the contemporary wave of Russian Jewish American writing, Lara Vapnyar’s short story “There Are Jews in My House” offers a narrative from the point of view of a helper, yet illustrates a failed attempt at a rescue with a keen interest in local Soviet conditioning. The premise of the short story is enthralling: on an evening walk, with the

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Nazis already in her mid-sized Russian town, Galina remembers the preceding six hard weeks when she has been sheltering her Jewish friend, Raya and her young daughter Leeza and considers giving them away to the Nazis. By being fully enveloped in her point of view, we witness Galina trying to rationalize why the relations in her household between her and her own daughter, Tanya, and Raya and Leeza have been gradually becoming more tense. On finally returning home, Galina sees only her own daughter in the apartment, holding Leeza’s beloved doll—Raya and Leeza have left. Readers are left wondering what happened to Raya and Leeza, but the ending hints at it when Tanya reports: “Leeza said she would not need the doll anymore,” strongly suggesting that ­leaving the shelter means certain death at the hands of the Nazis (Vapnyar, 49). The plot may not be specific to the Soviet setting, but its specifically Soviet details play a vital part in constructing the story. In constructing her protagonists, Vapnyar follows the common historical thread, as identified by Gunnar Paulsson, that the offer of help was based on an earlier personal relationship and friendship.21 Galina and Raya knew each other well from work at the town’s library and had been friends sharing so many characteristics. With a long list of correspondences, Vapnyar makes sure we notice both these similarities as well as trivia: They lived on the same street in two identical two-room apartments. They had daughters of almost the same age. Their husbands worked as engineers in the town’s big textile factory. They were both outsiders in this town, having moved here because of their husbands’ jobs. Neither had relatives or friends here […]. They both were born in the beginning of March. (Vapnyar, 14)

On paper and from Galina’s perspective, their social standing under state socialism is identical. They even joked that they looked so similar that they could be taken for sisters, with Raya exclaiming when they bought identical dresses that they were twins. Then, during the war both their husbands were drafted and neither woman could be evacuated into the Soviet hinterland because their husbands were not party members. This socialist effort to universalize Soviet citizens, visible in their token affinities listed above is, however, largely obscured by seemingly insurmountable differences between them. These differences are the basis for Galina’s reasoning why she should stop helping Raya. Her internal monologue is predicated explicitly on deeply ingrained antisemitism and on perceived differences in sexuality that also point to a traditional reservoir of antisemitic stereotypes. On her walk, Galina recollects how one night when her mother had more to drink she made her compare Christian and Jewish graves and then, based on this fleeting evidence taught her that “Jews get everything” (Vapnyar, 26). In her peregrinations, Galina also makes sure to emphasize financial differences between her and Raya’s family, in what they ate and wore, with the emerald earrings and Leeza’s expensive doll being the ultimate symbols for these “two princesses” (Vapnyar, 4).

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Galina’s mother also figures as the source of her attitude toward sexuality that is markedly different than Raya’s. Galina remembers how her mother pressed her palm to the oven when she caught her masturbating. As a result, in Galina’s self-narrative, “[t]he high point of Galina’s sex life came in the gynecologist’s office, where she went for her annual checkups” (Vapnyar, 22). In contrast, Raya knows things about beauty, “feminine hygiene,” and— during her love affair with a traveling engineer—provides some advanced sex education for Galina (Vapnyar, 17). These fragments mirror the stereotype of Jewish hypersexuality and specifically about the enticing belle juive or a beautiful Jewess that on paper may be comparable to Galina’s “Slavic beauty,” but Raya has this something that makes her be noticed first (Vapnyar, 24).22 Vapnyar constructs a Holocaust story that juxtaposes Soviet state socialist conditioning to create solidarity and the persistent residue of pre-revolutionary antisemitism. As such, the story represents a conflict that concerns more than an individual, here Galina, but that speaks to how Jews could and could not survive in the Soviet East. It offers a literary investigation into damning statistics of comparatively little non-Jewish help offered to Jews in the Soviet Union.23 Julia Alekseyeva’s graphic novel Soviet Daughter, while also interested in the specific Soviet historical context of World War II, including Jewish evacuation and survival in the Soviet hinterland, centrally addresses the intergenerational dynamic of memory in the context of migration. “It is a story of our two generations separated by 80 years – but somehow united in spite of everything,” we hear from a narrator in the opening of the novel (Alekseyeva, 6). This union and closeness between a great-granddaughter and a great-grandmother come to the fore through the formal structure of the graphic novel. Formally, Soviet Daughter consists of two entangled story lines drawn in the same dynamic style, with soft black lines with gray watercolor shading. The shorter “interludes” are devoted to Julia and span the time from her immigration to the United States from Russia in 1992 till the present when she is a graduate student at Columbia. The main chapters narrate Julia’s great-grandmother’s, Lola’s, life from when she was growing up in Tsarist Russia, through the Russian Revolution, World War II, including the evacuation to Central Asia, her immigration to the United States till her death in 2010. As another sign of their closeness, Lola and Julia are portrayed together multiple times throughout the novel, especially in the form of tableaus on title pages of “interludes.” Similarly to Bezmozgis’s “An Animal to the Memory,” where the protagonists’ immigrant background is key, here the immigration history binds Julia and Lola. They are first and fourth generation Holocaust survivors, but first and 1.5 generation immigrants. Both of them immigrated to the United States in 1992, with the difference that Julia was a four-year-old girl at the time. Accordingly, early in the novel, in a family picture panel we see five family members, including Lola and Julia, at the time of their immigration to the United States, stressing this shared experience (Alekseyeva, 20). Also, then,

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with Julia’s mother and her grandparents working, Lola was taking care of the little Julia daily: “Thankfully there was Lola, the only refuge in the land of monsters,” we read in a panel that is the first of the series of Julia and Lola’s common portraits (Alekseyeva, 24). Lola’s story spans a hundred years, but especially concentrates on the times from the pre-revolutionary Russia, the Russian revolution, though the Stalinist purges and the Holocaust in the USSR, till the Soviet victory in World War II. This great genealogical distance of four generations between Julia and Lola allows for adopted witnessing of early, pre-war Soviet Russia.24 And precisely these early, here clearly idealized, activities in Lola’s life, such as her membership in the Worker’s Union and the Komsomol, pose as lines of transgenerational identification for Julia and are paired with Julia’s progressive political activities in the 2000s, such as her attempt at unionizing and participation in the Occupy movement. For example, the last panel in the graphic novel, shortly after Lola’s death, shows Julia going to a union organizing meeting. This may be interpreted as done under Lola’s influence. As we read: “After all – governments may change, the historical period may shift, generations may differ. But nothing, not all the guns and pepper spray and police batons in the world, not even time can kill a true idea” (Alekseyeva, 191). These affinities, based in shared migration experiences and political proclivities, but at the same time differences of lived historical circumstance, come to the fore on the cover of Soviet Daughter: its center shows a staged framed oval color image of young Lola in a military uniform with Julia, approximately the same age. In the drawing, Julia gazes at readers directly, from behind Lola who looks up at something unspecified. While, next to the title, the hammer and sickle gesture toward the Soviet setting, the rusty reddish background images comes from the staple repertoire of Holocaust representation in the West. Namely, the train, going over a bridge resonates strongly with deportations and camp imagery.25 Yet just like Alekseyeva’s rewrites the connotations of early Soviet state socialism, so does she redefine these images beyond their usual straightforward connotations. When juxtaposed with the panels in the novel, these images capture the various—hopeful and tragic—trajectories of Lola’s Kiev family. Namely, the train on the cover appears as a part of the panel showing Lola’s, a secret police official’s and her two young children’s evacuation to Aktyubinsk in Kazakhstan in 1941 (Alekseyeva, 143). In contrast, when the burning barn from the cover reappears as a part of a panel, it illustrates that not all evacuation scenarios were successful: this image reappears in the novel as a part narration of Lola’s parents’ murder in Vladikavkaz by Chechens (Alekseyeva, 156). At the risk of a lack of narrative continuity, these generally lesser known stories of survival and death in the Soviet hinterland are complemented by the Babi Yar massacre by Nazi shooting squads or Einsatzgruppen: it is a full double page panel (Alekseyeva, 146–147), a format unique in this graphic novel that speaks to the event emblematic for the Holocaust in the East and implicitly may be read as alluding to the earliest Soviet Jewish texts on the catastrophe.

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Alekseyeva also represents what Olga Gershenson termed an “alternative track” in Soviet Holocaust memory.26 Namely, with the focus on Lola’s three brothers, who were drafted into the Red Army the graphic novel represents the experience of Soviet Jewish soldiers. The panel devoted to the brothers-soldiers shows their oval framed photographs lying on what appears to be a checked tablecloth. This illustrated intimate setting brings the official history back home, makes it usual, especially that the text talks only about their service, not foreshadowing their fate: “I would think about them often […]. I had no idea where anyone was, whether they were safe, whether they were even alive” (Alekseyeva, 144). In Soviet Daughter, Julia is able to see herself in her great-grandmother through the state socialist memory that does not compete, but complements, modulates, and extends beyond the memory of the Holocaust. Alekseyeva provides a record of Sovietness of the Holocaust and, at the same time, Soviet memory around World War II. The themes present in the above-mentioned works—intergenerational memory, the American mode of memorialization, the Holocaust in the former Soviet Union, and the migration background also shape Boris Fishman’s A Replacement Life.27 Yet, because it is a full-fledged novel, they are significantly developed and configured anew while immersed in questions of the ethics of remembering and the instrumentalization of memory. A Replacement Life focuses on 25-year-old aspiring writer Slava Gelman, a 1.5 generation immigrant from Minsk and grandson of Holocaust survivors, set in 2006 New York City. After his grandmother’s death, Slava, asked by his resourceful grandfather, starts inventing stories and writing testimonies for the aging Soviet community members in South Brooklyn so that they appear eligible for reparations from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. In this way, the novel demonstrates the limits of who can be named a survivor and, consequently, who obtains compensation. It provides a commentary, then, on the marginalization of flight survivors, Jews who evacuated into Soviet Central Asia, who became eligible for any compensation only after 2006 when the novel is set.28 At the same time, Slava’s fake narratives about World War II reveals silences within Soviet memory. Slava’s language and writerly abilities allow him to enter into the position of a secondary witness, as Aleida Assman calls the position of the person listening, collecting testimonies.29 Ultimately, he may be creatively rewriting them to fit the requirements of the application, but in the meantime, he collects Jewish wartime stories from the former Soviet Union. He is the local archivist writing the “tales of woe and deceit” (Fishman, 203). Slava listens to untold stories of evacuation to the Soviet hinterland or of the Great Patriotic War. These may be stories that have remained untold by these persons individually or at least, in case of the veterans, long unrehearsed. Moreover, they have stayed untold or not heard as a part of the cultural memory because in the Soviet Union the stories of evacuation were not heroic enough and too ethnically specific to be justly

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remembered and in the West have not belonged to the canon of Holocaust memory.30 In this vein, Slava wonders if his grandfather who fled the draft to Uzbekistan is “a hero or a coward?” (Fishman, 125). These stories are not told to measure their heroism. They rather fulfill an important social function within the community of Soviet immigrants, recreating a bond—even if it is for a fee that the applicants pay to Slava’s grandfather; even if one of them denounces Slava to the Claims Conference. By showing the process of Slava’s forging—both understood as producing and lying—the testimonies, the text reflects not only on how to write an effective testimony for a restitution application, “a little boring story” (Fishman, 130), but, more generally, how to write about the Holocaust. It readdresses the question of how the descendants—both in familial terms and as inheritors of cultural memory—are able represent the atrocity and to what ends. The Soviet and American post-Soviet settings entail a different emplotment of Holocaust narratives and its memory.31 Different historical material forces writing to stray from the known mold, to exceed narrative patterns and explanation grids that readers in English have become used to. The presence of World War II Jewish Soviet veterans in this fiction, striding the streets of South Brooklyn in full military uniform gear, as in A Replacement Life, or veterans comparing their medals, most revered items on the long journey out of the Soviet territory, as in Bezmozgis’s novel The Free World, modifies how we see Jews in World War II.32 These scenes, centered around Jewish Soviet veterans, may serve as background to Mark Berman’s reaction to the Holocaust Remembrance Day in Bezmozgis’s “An Animal to the Memory,” which opened this chapter. When Mark comes down to the school basement hall to see the Remembrance Day exhibit, he is mostly interested in the Jewish active resistance to Nazi persecution. Himself a raucous teenager, he gets shoved and immediately retaliates with double force. As a result, during the solemn ceremony, led by the school principal, a rabbi, a Holocaust survivor, and an author of a published Holocaust memoir himself, the exhibition objects are broken and the ritual of the ceremony interrupted. In a physically and emotionally intense interaction, Mark is reprimanded by the school principal at the candlelit basement exhibit and thus initiated and assimilated into a collective memory of the Holocaust. Other texts discussed here by Vapnyar, Alekseyeva, and Fishman focus not on assimilation, but its opposite: They illustrate how memory patterns may diverge and make us see that what we have become used to, does not need to be the norm. The writing by post-Soviet immigrants to North America is influenced by the memory of migration and migrant Soviet collective memory of World War II—the Great Patriotic War and the Holocaust in the East. While American third-generation authors make their “reverse journeys” (Roskies and Diamant, 163), metaphorically or not, to collect memories, this metaphor is hard to apply to the third or fourth-generation writers with

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a migration background or characters who themselves completed a journey from the Soviet Union or the former Soviet Union. If they return, it is not to trace the world of their grandmothers and grandfathers, but their own, as for instance in other works from this wave of Russian Jewish American writing, Anya Ulinich’s Petropolis or Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan.33 Another approach is to question the prevalent idea of who the immigrant is and create what might be called a reverse migration narrative, as in Sana Krasikov in The Patriots, where an American, Florence, in her revolutionary fervor, migrates to the Soviet Union in the 1930s.34 The novel spans the time of World War II, too; yet in its plot barely includes anything that has been known as the center of Jewish lives during the War. It centers on the evacuation to Central Asia and directly addresses the experience of the Gulag. To be sure, the criticism of the “formulaic memorialization” of the Holocaust is not exclusive to post-Soviet Jewish writing in North America (Aarons and Berger, 9). Yet the constitutive tissue of this literature—entanglements of different totalitarianisms and migration—has the potential to effectively broaden and nuance our understanding of the dynamics of Holocaust memory.

Notes







1. The research for this chapter has been carried out as part of the NCN grant no. 2018/31/D/HS2/02124. David Bezmozgis, “An Animal to the Memory,” in Natasha and Other Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 65–78. 2. Jonathan D. Sarna, Dov Maimon, and Shmuel Rosner, Toward a Comprehensive Policy Planning for Russian-Speaking Jews in North America (Jerusalem: Barbara and Jack Kay Center for Communal Life at the JPPI, 2013), http:// ejewishphilanthropy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/ Toward_a_Comprehensive_Policy_Planning_for_Russian-Speaking_Jews_in_ North_America.pdf. 3. Gary Shteyngart, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (New York: Riverhead Books, 2002). For the designation of this literary phenomenon as a “wave,” see: Anna Katsnelson, ed., “The New Wave of Russian Jewish American Culture,” special issue, East European Jewish Affairs 46, no. 3 (2016). 4.  Karen Ryan, “Failures of Domesticity in Contemporary Russian-American Literature: Vapnyar, Krasikov, Ulinich, and Reyn,” Transcultural 1, no. 4 (2011): 63–75. 5. Adrian Wanner, “Moving Beyond the Russian-American Ghetto: The Fiction of Keith Gessen and Michael Idov,” The Russian Review 73, no. 2 (April 2014): 281–296. 6. Adam Rovner, “So Easily Assimilated: The New Immigrant Chic,” AJS Review 30, no. 2 (November 2006): 313–324. 7.  Sasha Senderovich, “Russian Jewish American Lit Goes Boom!” Tablet, last modified June 17, 2014, https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/ books/175906/russian-jewish-am-lit. 8.  Sasha Senderovich, “Scenes of Encounter: The ‘Soviet Jew’ in Fiction by Russian Jewish Writers in America,” Prooftexts 35, no. 1 (2016): 98–132;

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Karolina Krasuska, “Narratives of Generationality in 21st-Century North American Jewish Literature: Krauss, Bezmozgis, Kalman,” East European Jewish Affairs 46, no. 3 (2016): 285–310. 9. Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life: A Novel (New York: Harper, 2014); Julia Alekseyeva, Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution (Portland: Microcosm Publishing, 2017); and Lara Vapnyar, “There Are Jews in My House,” in There Are Jews in My House (New York: Pantheon, 2003), 3–50. 10.  For different conceptualizations of generational differences in American Holocaust literature and characteristics of third-generation Holocaust writing, see, Victoria Aarons, ed. Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives: Memory in Memoir and Fiction (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016); Victoria Aarons and Alan L. Berger, Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, and Memory (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2017); Monica Osborne, “Representing the Holocaust in Third-Generation American Jewish Writers,” in The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction, eds. David Brauner and Axel Stähler (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 149–160; For a comparative reading of third-generation and post-Soviet fiction along the cultural implications of “generation” and generationality, see in Krasuska. 11.  Tarik Amar, “A Disturbed Silence: Discourse on the Holocaust in the Soviet West as an Anti-Site of Memory,” in The Holocaust in the East: Local Perpetrators and Soviet Responses, eds. Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, and Alexander M. Martin (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), 166. 12. Zvi Gitelman, “The Holocaust in the East: Participation and Presentation,” in The Holocaust in the East: Local Perpetrators and Soviet Responses, eds. Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, and Alexander M. Martin (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), 190. 13. Harriet Murav, Music from a Speeding Train: Jewish Literature in Postrevolution Russia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011); Olga Gershenson, The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 2013); Arkadi Zeltser, Unwelcome Memory: Holocaust Monuments in the Soviet Union, trans. A. S. Brown (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2018); and David Shneer, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011). 14.  Mordechai Altshuler, “Jewish Holocaust Commemoration Activity in the USSR under Stalin,” Yad Vashem Studies 30 (2002): 271. 15.  Alan Rosenbaum, “The Holocaust in the USSR and the Memorial Calendar,” The Jerusalem Post online, last modified December 13, 2018, https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/The-Holocaust-in-the-USSR-andthe-memorial-calendar-574304. 16. Hasia R. Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence After the Holocaust, 1945–1962 (New York: New York University Press, 2010). For a perceptive comparison about generational differences in Holocaust memorialization in Australia and then in the US, specifically, Charleston, see David Slucki, “The Third Generation and the Responsibility to Remember,” in In the Shadows of Memory: The Holocaust and the Third Generation, eds. Esther Jilovsky, Jordana Silverstein, and David Slucki (Portland: Vallentine Mitchell, 2015), 295–308.

262  K. KRASUSKA 17.  John Goldlust, “A Different Silence: The Survival of More Than 200,000 Polish Jews in the Soviet Union During World War II as a Case Study in Cultural Amnesia,” in Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union, eds. Mark Edele, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Atina Grossmann (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017), 31. 18. Cf. Victoria Aarons and Alan L. Berger, Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, and Memory (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2017), 14. 19. David G. Roskies and Naomi Diamant, Holocaust Literature: A History and Guide (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2012), 157. 20. For a differentiation in the concept of generation, see: Astrid Erll, “Generation in Literary History: Three Constellations of Generationality, Genealogy, and Memory,” New Literary History 45, no. 3 (2014): 388. 21. Cf. Gunnar S. Paulsson, Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw, 1940–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). 22. The incorporation of sexuality into Holocaust literature broadly has a long tradition and to a large extent can be read as a marker—even if not exclusively—of texts written by women. It is also a marker of passing time in women’s testimonies, with more openness about sexuality after several decades after the war: Edit Jeges, “Gendering the Cultural Memory of the Holocaust: A Comparative Analysis of a Memoir and a Video Testimony by Olga Lengyel,” in Women and the Holocaust: New Perspectives and Challenges, eds. Andrea Pető, Louise Hecht, and Karolina Krasuska (Warsaw: Instytut Badań Literackich PAN, 2015), 233–253. On the other hand, sexuality and sexual education are a theme in Vapnyar, appearing also in another short story from the volume; Lara Vapnyar, “Love Lessons-Mondays, 9 A.M.,” in There Are Jews in My House (New York: Pantheon, 2003), 120–149—and in her 2014 novel The Scent of Pine—Lara Vapnyar, The Scent of Pine: A Novel (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014). 23. Cf. Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, trans. Ora Cummings (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 430. 24.  “Adopted witness” is Geoffrey Hartman’s term, cf. Hartman, The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996). 25.  Cf. Oren Baruch Stier, “Different Trains: Holocaust Artifacts and the Ideologies of Remembrance,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 19, no. 1 (2005): 81–106. 26. “An Alternative Track” is a chapter in Gershenson’s study. On Soviet Jewish soldiers as agents of creating Holocaust memory, see Murav; Shneer. 27. Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life: A Novel (New York: Harper, 2014). 28. Soviet wartime evacuees to the East, known as flight or indirect survivors, became eligible for the Claims Conference Hardship Program only in 2012, cf. “Certain Jews Who Fled Nazi Advance from Areas Never Occupied Will Receive One-Time Compensation; Certain Orphans, Western Persecutees Also to Be Paid,” claimscon.org, last modified December 15, 2011, http://www. claimscon.org/2011/12/hardship-fund/. 29.  Aleida Assmann, “History, Memory, and the Genre of Testimony,” Poetics Today 27, no. 2 (2006): 267.

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30. Cf. Gershenson, 225. 31. Emplotment is a term used in Hayden Write that Murav uses to talk about Soviet writing on the Holocaust, cf. Murav, 194. 32. David Bezmozgis, The Free World: A Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). 33. Anya Ulinich, Petropolis (New York: Viking, 2007); Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan (London: Granta Books, 2010). 34. Sana Krasikov, The Patriots: A Novel (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2017).

Bibliography Aarons, Victoria, ed. Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives: Memory in Memoir and Fiction. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016. Aarons, Victoria, and Alan L. Berger. Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, and Memory. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2017. Alekseyeva, Julia. Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution. Portland: Microcosm Publishing, 2017. Altshuler, Mordechai. “Jewish Holocaust Commemoration Activity in the USSR Under Stalin.” Yad Vashem Studies 30 (2002): 271–296. Amar, Tarik. “A Disturbed Silence: Discourse on the Holocaust in the Soviet West as an Anti-Site of Memory.” In The Holocaust in the East: Local Perpetrators and Soviet Responses, edited by Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, and Alexander M. Martin, 158–183. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014. Arad, Yitzhak. The Holocaust in the Soviet Union. Translated by Ora Cummings. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. Assmann, Aleida. “History, Memory, and the Genre of Testimony.” Poetics Today 27, no. 2 (2006): 261–273. Bezmozgis, David. “An Animal to the Memory.” In Natasha and Other Stories, 65–78. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004. ———. The Free World: A Novel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. “Certain Jews Who Fled Nazi Advance from Areas Never Occupied Will Receive One-Time Compensation; Certain Orphans, Western Persecutees Also to Be Paid.” claimscon.org. Last modified December 15, 2011. http://www.claimscon. org/2011/12/hardship-fund/. Diner, Hasia R. We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence After the Holocaust, 1945–1962. New York: New York University Press, 2010. Edele, Mark, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Atina Grossmann, eds. Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017. Erll, Astrid. “Generation in Literary History: Three Constellations of Generationality, Genealogy, and Memory.” New Literary History 45, no. 3 (Summer 2014): 385–409. Fishman, Boris. A Replacement Life: A Novel. New York: Harper, 2014. Gershenson, Olga. The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 2013. Gitelman, Zvi. “The Holocaust in the East: Participation and Presentation.” In The Holocaust in the East: Local Perpetrators and Soviet Responses, edited by Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, and Alexander M. Martin, 185–192. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014.

264  K. KRASUSKA Goldlust, John. “A Different Silence: The Survival of More Than 200,000 Polish Jews in the Soviet Union During World War II as a Case Study in Cultural Amnesia.” In Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union, edited by Mark Edele, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Atina Grossmann, 29–94. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017. Hartman, Geoffrey. The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996. Jeges, Edit. “Gendering the Cultural Memory of the Holocaust: A Comparative Analysis of a Memoir and a Video Testimony by Olga Lengyel.” In Women and the Holocaust: New Perspectives and Challenges, edited by Andrea Pető, Louise Hecht, and Karolina Krasuska, 233–253. Warsaw: Instytut Badań Literackich PAN, 2015. Jilovsky, Esther, Jordana Silverstein, and David Slucki. “The Third Generation.” In In the Shadows of Memory: The Holocaust and the Third Generation, edited by Esther Jilovsky, Jordana Silverstein, and David Slucki, 1–14. Portland: Vallentine Mitchell, 2015. Katsnelson, Anna, ed. “The New Wave of Russian Jewish American Culture.” Special issue, East European Jewish Affairs 46, no. 3 (2016). Krasikov, Sana. The Patriots: A Novel. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2017. Krasuska, Karolina. “Narratives of Generationality in 21st-Century North American Jewish Literature: Krauss, Bezmozgis, Kalman.” East European Jewish Affairs 46, no. 3 (2016): 285–310. Murav, Harriet. Music from a Speeding Train: Jewish Literature in Post-Revolution Russia. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. Osborne, Monica. “Representing the Holocaust in Third-Generation American Jewish Writers.” In The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction, edited by David Brauner and Axel Stähler, 149–160. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015. Paulsson, Gunnar S. Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw, 1940–1945. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Rosenbaum, Alan. “The Holocaust in the USSR and the Memorial Calendar.” The Jerusalem Post online. Last modified December 13, 2018. https://www.jpost.com/ Israel-News/The-Holocaust-in-the-USSR-and-the-memorial-calendar-574304. Roskies, David G., and Naomi Diamant. Holocaust Literature: A History and Guide. Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2012. Rovner, Adam. “So Easily Assimilated: The New Immigrant Chic.” AJS Review 30, no. 2 (November 2006): 313–324. Ryan, Karen. “Failures of Domesticity in Contemporary Russian-American Literature: Vapnyar, Krasikov, Ulinich, and Reyn.” Transcultural 1, no. 4 (2011): 63–75. Sarna, Jonathan D., Dov Maimon, and Shmuel Rosner. Toward a Comprehensive Policy Planning for Russian-Speaking Jews in North America. Jerusalem: Barbara and Jack Kay Center for Communal Life at the JPPI, 2013. http://ejewishphilanthropy. com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Toward_a_Comprehensive_ Policy_Planning_for_Russian-Speaking_Jews_in_North_America.pdf. Senderovich, Sasha. “Russian Jewish American Lit Goes Boom!” Tablet. Last modified June 17, 2014. https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/ 175906/russian-jewish-am-lit. ———. “Scenes of Encounter: The ‘Soviet Jew’ in Fiction by Russian Jewish Writers in America.” Prooftexts 35, no. 1 (2016): 98–132.

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Shneer, David. Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011. Shteyngart, Gary. Absurdistan. London: Granta Books, 2010. ———. The Russian Debutante’s Handbook. New York: Riverhead Books, 2002. Slucki, David. “The Third Generation and the Responsibility to Remember.” In In the Shadows of Memory: The Holocaust and the Third Generation, edited by Esther Jilovsky, Jordana Silverstein, and David Slucki, 295–308. Portland: Vallentine Mitchell, 2015. Stier, Oren Baruch. “Different Trains: Holocaust Artifacts and the Ideologies of Remembrance.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 19, no. 1 (March 2005): 81–106. Ulinich, Anya. Petropolis. New York: Viking, 2007. Vapnyar, Lara. “Love Lessons-Mondays, 9 A.M.” In There Are Jews in My House, 120–149. New York: Pantheon, 2003. ———. “There Are Jews in My House.” In There Are Jews in My House, 3–50. New York: Pantheon, 2003. ———. The Scent of Pine: A Novel. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014. Wanner, Adrian. “Moving Beyond the Russian-American Ghetto: The Fiction of Keith Gessen and Michael Idov.” The Russian Review 73, no. 2 (April 2014): 281–296. Zeltser, Arkadi. “The Subject of ‘Jews in Babi Yar’ in the Soviet Union in the Years 1941–1945.” Translated by Michael Sigal. yadvashem.org. www.yadvashem.org/ research/about/mirilashvili-center/articles/babi-yar.html. Accessed 14 December 2018. ———. Unwelcome Memory: Holocaust Monuments in the Soviet Union. Translated by A. S. Brown. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2018.

CHAPTER 16

Vasily Grossman and Anatoly Rybakov: Soviet Sources of Historical Memory of the Holocaust Alexis Pogorelskin

Introduction: The Holocaust East and West The purpose of this essay is to introduce the reader to two works of ­twentieth-century Soviet fiction: Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate and Anatoly Rybakov’s Heavy Sand.1 While each is different from the other in purpose and intent, both provide graphic accounts of the mass slaughter of Soviet Jews that began with the Nazi invasion in the summer of 1941. Grossman also provides a vivid picture of a Nazi death camp in Poland. The Holocaust East and West is a looming presence in his work. He himself was among the first, certainly the first journalist, to encounter direct evidence of it. As a correspondent with the Red Army newspaper Krasnaia zvezda, Grossman traveled with Soviet troops and was present in August 1944 when they discovered the death camp at Treblinka. His description of what they uncovered, “The Hell of Treblinka” “was the first full account based on the eyewitness reports of survivors of a Nazi [death] camp to appear in any language.”2 Grossman also included a theme, certainly unique, even daring for the time. The author compared the Stalinist regime to the Third Reich, suggesting that little difference existed between the two. Soviet censorship meted out harsh treatment for such a heretical notion. The novel was confiscated, and the party’s overseer of orthodoxy and ideology, Mikhail Suslov, informed Grossman that the novel would not see the light of day for another 300 years.3 A. Pogorelskin (*)  University of Minnesota-Duluth, Duluth, MN, USA © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_16

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268  A. POGORELSKIN

Anatoly Rybakov, author of Heavy Sand, possessed a background similar to Grossman’s. Like Grossman, he too was born in Western Ukraine, and like him, Rybakov studied engineering before becoming a writer. But unlike his compatriot, Rybakov grew up in Moscow, specifically on the street that gave its name to his most famous work, the Arbat trilogy.4 The first volumes capture the mood and spirit of Moscow in the 1930s. The third depicts World War II from the perspective of a tank commander who had spent three years in Siberian exile, experiences that mirrored Rybakov’s own. Heavy Sand, Rybakov’s novel of Jewish life in Russia after the revolution, devotes the last third to an account of the slaughter of the Jews in a small town near Chernigov in Western Ukraine, where the novel is set. It was published within three years of completion.5 Though written nearly twenty years apart, neither Grossman’s novel nor Rybakov’s belongs to a larger body of Russian Holocaust representation.6 Grossman’s novel, completed in 1960, did not appear until 1988, itself a harbinger of the glasnost’ era. Rybakov’s had already been in print in the Soviet Union for a decade. Both novels attracted attention for their treatment of the Holocaust in a culture that largely ignored it. Their uniqueness in their own literary tradition as well as the disparate motives that produced them make each crucial for understanding Holocaust awareness in Russia and for Holocaust studies generally. Impediments to the emergence of Holocaust awareness in the Soviet Union were certainly numerous, at times seemingly insurmountable.7 Until Stalin died, the war constituted an integral part of his cult. After 1945, World War II, the Great Patriotic War in the Soviet Union, was neither studied nor analyzed. Victory lay with Stalin’s wise leadership. No more questions need be raised. Certainly, no memoir literature from the war appeared before 1953.8 Lest the truth of the country’s devastation be revealed and hence the extent of its vulnerability before the West, the war dead was put at nine million and no more. That number was of course indivisible by nationality. All who perished were Soviet citizens. Under Khrushchev, with the Stalin cult dethroned, World War II itself acquired cult status and the talismanic figure of twenty million dead in the war confirmed the uniqueness of Soviet suffering. That number too was indivisible by nationality. Official Soviet policy remained: “No distinct Jewish suffering.”9 At least under Khrushchev, some war memoirs were published. Others became the first examples of samizdat, that is, typescripts that circulated illegally in Soviet society. Although many memoirs were still unpublishable from the regime’s perspective, the lid had come off the previously forbidden topic of the war. At this time, the mid-1950s, Grossman began to write Life and Fate.10 The work constituted his own contribution to de-Stalinization. He also initiated conceptualizing in fiction that the Jewish population of the Soviet Union had been the Nazis’ primary target, not the Slavic peoples as a whole, as Soviet Orthodoxy held. Writing in the 1950s, Grossman was certainly a pioneer in the Soviet context in defining the launching of a war intended

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specifically against the Jews. But then his work, had it appeared abroad at that time, would have been equally pioneering. Holocaust consciousness, it could be said, only emerged in the West, starting in 1961. That year saw both the beginning of the Eichmann trial in April and the release of Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg four days after Eichmann was sentenced to death on December 15. Nearly two decades were required to complete the narrative. Christopher Browning writes, “It was not until the late 1970s that the Holocaust began to obtain the position it currently holds in American consciousness.”11 Rybakov addressed the question of a distinctive campaign against the Jews twenty years after Grossman, but by then the whole concept of the Holocaust had crystallized in the West. Rybakov on the other hand, though writing about the Holocaust, paradoxically fought the emergence of its distinctive conceptualization in the Soviet context, a point to be examined below. Published a decade after Heavy Sand, Grossman’s novel was nonetheless written first and, as noted, was ahead of its time, East and West. I will therefore examine Life and Fate first. It pioneered Holocaust awareness in the Soviet Union. Echoes of it, moreover, can be found in Heavy Sand.

Life and Fate War and Peace It is a truism of the critical literature on Grossman’s novel, with more in the offing, that the author took War and Peace as a model in composing his novel of World War II.12 Katarina Clark writes that Grossman “used the compositional strategy of War and Peace for representing war by hanging a huge slice of history on a single family [the Shaposhnikovs] and its filiations.”13 Robert Chandler, the English translator of the novel, observes, Grossman’s “choice of a similar-sounding title almost challenges the reader to compare” his novel to War and Peace.14 Caryl Emerson hedges somewhat on the comparison between the two novels. “Life and Fate,” she writes, “aims to do for World War II what War and Peace did for Napoleon’s invasion of 1812.”15 At the same time, she insists, “the differences between the two national epics are more profound than the similarity” (Emerson, 349). Grossman, she maintains, has produced “the gentler, more trusting text […] apology and forgiveness” characterize his work (351). Tolstoy on the other hand is “far crueler and unforgiving” (350). Grossman is “more intimate […] and without answers […] in the spirit of Chekhov” (353). In one sense, the differences that she ascribes to each work are not surprising. Grossman’s argument in Life and Fate about the similarities between the Soviet Union and the Third Reich, he believed, would be accepted by the Soviet regime in 1961, already waging a campaign of de-Stalinization. If his text was “more trusting,” as Caryl Emerson writes, Grossman at the time trusted that the regime would publish his work.

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Tolstoy in contrast conducted a bitter polemic with his contemporaries regarding the future of Russia in 1860. Few of his Western-minded compatriots shared his nationalistic views.16 His animus in the matter carried over to his novel. Grossman himself maintained that there was a great deal of Tolstoy’s work in his. “During the whole war the only book that I read was War and Peace which I read twice.”17 But the novel was more than a literary text for Grossman. He went to Tolstoy’s estate Iasnaia Poliana twice, once before the Battle of Stalingrad. He returned again after von Paulus’s defeat, both times as though on pilgrimage (Garrard and Garrard, 213). In other words, whatever the actual similarities and differences between Grossman’s novel and War and Peace, for Grossman himself, something in Tolstoy’s work resonated profoundly with him. Katarina Clark suggests that Grossman began to take inspiration from Tolstoy’s novel even before the war. She observes that “since 1938 […] ­creative people had been enjoined to draw in their work on War and Peace, a favorite text of Lenin […]” (Clark, 619). But three years later, with the actual invasion of the Soviet Union, the ideological acceptability of the novel might well seem irrelevant. What then did Grossman see in it and how did he use Tolstoy’s epic work? Put another way, which War and Peace did he invoke to give Life and Fate coherence and a connection to the larger realm of Russian culture? In her analysis of Life and Fate, Clark links Grossman to his compatriot and fellow writer Ilya Ehrenburg. She emphasizes their shared “cosmopolitan perspective” (Clark, 607). In fact, one could argue, they differed from each other more than they were alike. This is true, for example, precisely with regard to their shared cosmopolitanism. Grossman lived briefly with his mother in Switzerland between ages five and seven before returning with her to Berdichev in Western Ukraine where he grew up. Ehrenburg was sooner the true European. He lived over twenty years in Paris as an adult. He traveled in Spain during the civil war and led the European anti-fascist cultural front in the 1930s.18 Grossman, while speaking French like his mother who taught the language, was far more rooted in Russia and its Jewish culture than Ehrenburg. He began his career as a writer of fiction in 1934 with the highly praised short story “In the Town of Berdichev,” set in a shtetl during the civil war.19 While secular and assimilated as a Jew, he still retained the perspective and a sense of the Russian-Jewish life which he had observed as a child. In fact, his biographers maintain that “Grossman struggled with the mysteries of […] Jewish identity” all his life, that is, he retained a sense of Jewish identity along with its nuances and vulnerabilities. Ehrenburg on the other hand had a less intimate relationship with his heritage (Garrard and Garrard, 53). With regard to their Jewish identity, Grossman and Ehrenburg differed over their relationship to The Black Book of Russian Jewry, begun in 1943 to document Nazi crimes against the Jews, primarily in the East. Ehrenburg

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withdrew from the project the following year, “sensing that the Stalinist authorities would suppress their work” (cited in Grossman, A Writer at War, 244). Grossman would not be deterred and stepped in to finish it. Unlike Ehrenburg, he had seen the results of the Holocaust at first hand. While Ehrenburg did much of the editing of the accounts of others, Grossman contributed two pieces that described what he saw at Treblinka and in his hometown of Berdichev.20 Grossman’s Jewish identity, already evident with his first published story, was “to gradually awaken even more as evident in his wartime diary.”21 Direct exposure to the Holocaust would only intensify that identity. Grossman’s relationship to the regime also differed from Ehrenburg’s. It was said of Ehrenburg that during the war, Stalin gave him leave “to write anything,”22 whereas Grossman was continually reined in. At the end of the Battle of Stalingrad, which he had covered so brilliantly, his editor at Krasnaia zvezda gave poet and novelist Konstantin Simonov, “the fair-haired boy of the party,” the honor of being present at the battle’s close and ordered Grossman to leave the shattered city (Garrard and Garrard, 165). Grossman then did not have so much in common with Ehrenburg as Katarina Clark has suggested. Their shared “cosmopolitan perspective” was more tenuous than she allowed. War and Peace in fact served Grossman’s purposes well. It provided a guide for telling the story of the war with Germany, starting in 1941, from the Russian perspective. Tolstoy, for example, showed that in 1812, accommodation or collaboration with the invader proved impossible. Stalin, like Alexander I in disdaining all peace offers from Napoleon, refused to negotiate with the enemy once the Russian border had been breached. Tolstoy’s passion to denounce the West as a destructive influence on traditional Russian cultural values also inspired Grossman. Unlike Tolstoy, however, Grossman was no xenophobe. In Life and Fate, he describes an uprising of Russian prisoners in German captivity who as former Bundists and Mensheviks represent the many European strands of Russian socialism. They work in concert to defeat an enemy opposed to pluralism of any kind (Life and Fate, 298–312). But Grossman could still take inspiration from a work that Tolstoy had intended as a brief against the destructive forces that threatened to distort and destroy what was uniquely Russian and organic to its culture. Tolstoy believed, unlike Grossman, that almost any foreign influence posed a threat to Russia. His image of what Napoleon’s invasion of 1812 portended, that is, the imposition of the ideas of the French revolution and the Napoleonic order, nonetheless proved compelling for Grossman more than a century later. Here is why. American Slavicist Kathryn Feuer has described how Tolstoy, writing in the early 1860s, used his epic novel to argue that the reform movement of the time, impelled by Russia’s recent defeat in the Crimean War, went counter to Russian tradition and threatened the country’s organic development.23 Tolstoy, she explains, uses “the Napoleonic invasion” as a symbol

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“for the introduction of an alien order” in Russia (Feuer, 143). The Germans had similarly tried to impose “an alien social order” on Russia, Grossman ­suggested ten years after the war ended. The invaders of 1941 constituted the worst of what the West had to offer. The rich Jewish culture and humane European socialist tradition had confronted an alien force that like the French in 1812 had threatened to destroy or at least erode Russian civilization. More deeply Russian than Ehrenburg, Grossman proved sensitive to inspiration from Tolstoy’s xenophobic masterpiece. Tolstoy is indiscriminate in his xenophobia. He “ridicules not only Napoleon and the French, but also all other alien nationalities as well (Germans, Poles, Italians, English, Austrians). Foreigners are fools, only Russians are taken seriously” (Emerson, 352). Grossman on the other hand had two alien invaders in mind in writing Life and Fate. More obviously, the invader of 1941 who sought to enslave the Slavic people and included the annihilation of Grossman’s own on its agenda. But Grossman added another enemy of the Russian people that Tolstoy could not have anticipated, namely the Stalinist regime itself, an alien import nearly identical to what the Nazis brought. The government of Lenin had been overthrown in 1929 when Stalin defeated his rivals and henceforth ruled alone. Both one-man rule and Stalin’s doctrine of “Socialism in One Country” were antithetical, Grossman believed, to the European socialist tradition that underlay Russian Marxism. The enemy this time had conquered. With collectivization of the peasantry in the early 1930s, Stalin had imposed a “second enserfment” in the countryside. As in 1812, a Russian serf army once again repelled an invader determined to impose an alien order on Russia. Harder to confront was the alien order of another enemy of the Russian people, this time originating from within. Grossman therefore added a second theme to the novel that reinforced the analogy with War and Peace. He equated the Third Reich with the Bolshevik regime. Both were alien imports, nearly identical to each other and imposed on the Russian people by coercion. The Nazis, like Stalin’s regime, were equally ready to sacrifice the Slavic people for their own ends. As Grossman’s biographers observed, he was “the first Soviet writer […] to perceive […] that the two great totalitarian regimes, Nazi and Soviet, were not opposites but mirror images of each other” (Garrard and Garrard, 236). Both were practitioners of genocide. Major Yershov, imprisoned in a German camp, reflects on the two enemies he confronts. He was certain that he was not only fighting the Germans but fighting for a free Russia: certain that a victory over Hitler would be a victory over [Stalin’s] death camps where his father, mother and his sisters had perished. (Life and Fate, 316)

Both Hitler’s and Stalin’s regimes had constructed death camps. Grossman determined to call each of them to account in Life and Fate.

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Here is why Grossman believed in 1961 that the novel could be published. Khrushchev, with the Secret Speech denouncing Stalin in February 1956, had embarked on what turned out to be an erratic program of de-Stalinization, but de-Stalinization nonetheless. Unfortunately, Grossman fell victim to the trepidatious inconsistencies of the policy. And worse for him, Khrushchev and Suslov could perceive that while their target was their predecessor, Grossman’s was the whole system that Stalin had erected. The leadership was determined to keep the system, at least, intact. Convergence: Stalin and Hitler Grossman chronicled the way that each regime, Soviet and Nazi, debased its own national culture. Mass murder, whether originating in the Soviet Union or the Third Reich, occurred within a context in which cultural values themselves had already succumbed to destruction. Life and Fate’s two protagonists, both married to sisters in the Shaposhnikov family, observe the destruction and debasement of culture all around them. At the same time, they witness the erosion of morality within themselves. The brilliant physicist Viktor Shtrum, married to Liudmila Shaposhnikova, prepares to behave with the same independence of spirit in politics that he shows in his scientific research. He has crafted “a new vision of the nature of the forces within the atom” (Life and Fate, 350). That success encourages him to contemplate defiance of the regime and reach out to those in disfavor. A perfectly timed call from Stalin, however, supporting his research, “… do you have all the necessary laboratory equipment?” asks the Generalissimo, reminds Shtrum of the rewards of compromise, and he slips back into bondage, i.e., conformity, betraying the possibility of independence to mirror his intellectual emancipation (Life and Fate, 762–763). Shtrum muses, the debasement of cultural values had occurred when the idolization of Stalin had “eclipsed” Lenin, that is, by 1929 (Life and Fate, 769). Despite that awareness, he nonetheless succumbs to the regime. Shtrum’s brother-in-law, Nikolai Krymov, on the other hand, dated the erosion of morality to the Great Terror of 1936–1938. Krymov, formerly married to Liudmila’s sister, Evgeniia Shaposhnikova, is a political commissar at the front. He considers how the party has changed since the Great Terror in which several million members had been purged. Krymov enumerates to himself the characteristics of “the new type of Party official” that has taken over. Those who had replaced the Old Bolsheviks24 liquidated or dismissed from their posts in 1937 […] were people of a different stamp. They read new books and they read them in a very different way: they didn’t read them, they “mugged them up.” They loved and valued material comforts: revolutionary asceticism was alien to them, or at the very least, not central to their character. They knew no foreign languages, were infatuated with their own Russian-ness—and spoke

274  A. POGORELSKIN Russian ungrammatically. Some of them were by no means stupid, but their power seemed to lie not so much in their ideas or intelligence, as in their practical competence and bourgeois sobriety of all their opinions […] He had always been conscious of his own superiority over these new people, the superiority that was his as an Old Bolshevik. (Life and Fate, 777)

The scourge that had passed over Krymov in 1937 caught up with him at the front in 1942, and he is arrested, perhaps as much for his disdain for the new party members as for any other transgression. The cultural debasement that has occurred under Stalin is evident in his account of the “new Bolsheviks.” Most telling are the deficits in language among the “new men.” They speak Russian poorly and possess an inadequate reading knowledge, if that. They are closed off from the broader European culture. Socialism had originated abroad and by its very nature was international, cosmopolitan; Soviet Communism under Stalin bred cultural and functional illiteracy. It promoted xenophobia. Grossman suggests that the same erosion of language and debasing of ­culture occurred among the Nazis. In a section titled “On the Journey to the Gas Chamber,” Sofya Levinton, physician, friend of Evgeniia Shaposhnikova, and “one more Jewess on our ill-fated train,” overhears one of her fellow passengers say, “Today’s Germans are just savages […] They haven’t even heard of Heinrich Heine” (Life and Fate, 197). The ignorant, the semi-educated without the means to articulate an idea in their own language become the tools readily at hand to goad into participating in campaigns of human destruction. Here too Grossman explains, Nazism and Stalin’s brand of Communism converge. By stirring up [the] feelings of real hatred and revulsion […] in such an atmosphere […] The Germans carried out the extermination of the Ukrainian and Belorussian Jews. And at an earlier date, in the same regions, Stalin himself had mobilized the fury of the masses, whipping it up to the point of frenzy during the campaigns to liquidate the kulaks as a class [as part of the collectivization of the peasantry]. (Life and Fate, 213)

Without roots or other organic ties to the Russian national tradition, both the Stalin regime and the Nazis could massacre with indifference in Ukraine where there resided the largest concentration in the Soviet Union of both agricultural laborers and Jews. The most telling scenes by which Grossman demonstrates the convergence of Bolshevism and Nazism occur in the course of discussions between the Old Bolshevik Mikhail Siderov Mostovskoy and his interrogator SS officer Liss, “Himmler’s representative in the camp” (Life and Fate, 393). Mostovskoy is a Soviet prisoner of war held by the Germans. Late one night, Liss orders him brought from his cell. The German then unveils truths too terrible for the Soviet officer to bear. Liss tells him:

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When we look one another in the face […] we’re gazing into a mirror. That’s the tragedy of our age […] Two poles of one magnet […] We’re deadly enemies. Yes […] but our victory will be your victory […] In essence we are the same—both one-party states […] There are two great revolutionaries in the world—Stalin and our leader. It is their will that gave birth to State National Socialism […] And we learnt many things from Stalin […] he liquidated millions of peasants. Our Hitler liquidated millions of Jews. (Life and Fate, 395, 397, 401–402)

Mostovskoy muses that he would rather be beaten than “listen to this horrible, absurd talk” (Life and Fate, 396). By that, he may mean that he needs to do penance for the temptation that Liss’s ideas pose. Rybakov proved more in step with the time and hence useful for the regime. Heavy Sand was readily published. To be understood, the novel must be seen in the context of the issues confronting the Soviet Union in the 1970s. A dissident movement, enjoying support abroad, challenged the regime on human rights abuses. As part of that movement, members of the Jewish community sought the right to emigrate. At the same time, a technological deficit in the energy sector precluded exploiting large deposits of Siberian oil and gas. The proliferation of nuclear weapons since the Cuban missile crisis further taxed the Soviet economy. Trade became the sticking point. Without Jewish emigration, the regime could not hope to negotiate commercial agreements that might include the import of new technology. Rybakov’s work met a number of needs. Devoted to a positive portrait of the Jewish experience since the revolution, it could be utilized to placate critics of the regime at both home and abroad. The author was therefore given leeway to construct a version of Soviet Jewish life that while fanciful, nonetheless suggested new moderation on the part of the regime.

Heavy Sand: Squaring the Circle Rybakov’s novel has come under harsh scrutiny in the West for, as Slavicist Gary Rosenshield observes, “denying both the significance of Jewish identity and […] the uniqueness of the Holocaust.”25 The charges are obviously serious ones. On the other hand, in the Soviet context, the novel was published with a very different intent from the one that Professor Rosenshield believes should have motivated its composition. Serialized first in the journal Oktiabr’ in 1978 and then published in complete form the following year, Rybakov’s novel did not have much in the way of either precedent or competition in describing Jewish life and its destruction by the Nazis. What references to the Holocaust there were in Soviet literature tended to focus on the massacre of 30,000 Jews at Babii Yar just outside of Kiev on September 29–30, 1941.26 That event had become the safe space for Holocaust representation in the Soviet Union. As horrible as it was, Babii Yar alone could not convey the extent of the Holocaust in

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other areas of concentrated Jewish population. In Ehrenburg’s novel of 1947 The Storm, he is the first to allude to the massacre, doing so gingerly. “Babii Yar figures prominently [if only] in the consciousness of several characters,” Edith Clowes observes (Clowes, “Babii Yar in Soviet Literature,” 164). Ehrenburg had at least set the terms of the tolerable. But there were few if any takers. One of the rock star poets of the 1960s, writing more than a decade after the appearance of Ehrenburg’s novel, Evgenii Evtushenko published a poem titled “Babii Yar” (1961) in which he denounced antisemitism as un-Russian, at the time as bold as it was fanciful. In 1967, Kuznetsov’s novel Babii Yar appeared “with a great deal of the material which the author wanted the public to remember […] removed” by the censorship (Clowes, “Babii Yar in Soviet Literature,” 170). Heavy Sand constituted something different. It broke the mold of Babii Yar, taking place near Chernigov and suggesting how, outside of Kiev, the Nazis had conducted mass killing of the Jews in such rural and agricultural regions where the majority of the Jewish population in the Soviet Union resided. Fully one-third of the novel treated the events of the Holocaust in Western Ukraine. The novel’s characters consist of three generations of Jews, an extensive time span, chronicling their active and often successful lives filled with achievement. There was none of the implied passivity of large numbers herded to their deaths. To the Soviet reader, the novel conveyed a message of newfound openness, a kind of glasnost’ regarding Jews and the Holocaust, avant la lettre. In Rybakov’s chronicle, Jews had acquired identity, individuality, as well as heroic stature. To understand what Heavy Sand intended to accomplish, one must comprehend the Soviet context in which the novel appeared. The decade of the 1970s was an especially difficult time for literature, even by Soviet standards. Khrushchev’s “thaw” was no more, and the regime had begun a serious campaign against dissident material. Possession of an unpublished work by Solzhenitsyn, for example, such as First Circle or Cancer Ward, circulating in typescript, would mean three years in a camp and loss of residency rights in a major city. Suslov still held the manuscript of Life and Fate in his office safe. Rybakov himself had tried once before, in 1966, to publish his Arbat trilogy only to see it rejected by the censorship. In writing Heavy Sand, he appeared to work with the censorship in crafting an acceptable work of fiction. The novel may have been the price he was willing to pay to see the Arbat trilogy into print.27 By the 1970s, the Soviet regime itself faced a number of dilemmas. As noted, Jewish dissidents sought to leave the country. More troubling for the regime, they had found an audience for their plight in the West.28 As a result, the Nixon administration’s policy of détente foundered. Congress had stepped in and using the Jackson-Vanik amendment on trade curtailed commerce with the Soviet Union as long as it imposed restrictions on emigration. Soviet difficulties did not end there. To acquire the technology to exploit its extensive energy reserves, the country needed trade with the West.

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But the obstacle again was emigration which in Russian culture was regarded more as a betrayal than a right. If Jews were to leave in large numbers, moreover, a serious brain drain would result, not to say a bad precedent set for other minority and dissident groups. Heavy Sand served several purposes. Bowing to Western pressure, the Brezhnev regime prepared to allow almost unlimited Jewish emigration. At the same time, it devised a campaign to discourage it. Rybakov’s novel was part of that effort, designed to show newfound tolerance and respect for Jewish culture.29 In other words, why leave when publication of a work that depicted Jews in a positive light was now possible. The novel spoke in the language of World War II, raising issues especially sensitive for Soviet Jews. Heavy Sand acknowledged Jewish suffering in the war and showed that, however limited by Western standards of Holocaust representation, Jews too would now be included in the Soviet story of the war. They might figure as well in the cult of the war, however belatedly, three and a half decades after it ended. Heavy Sand was the regime’s way of squaring the circle. The novel could convince would-be emigrants that they had no need to leave, while limiting acknowledgment of either Jewish identity or suffering lest Ukrainian, Russian, or Belorussian loyalties be challenged. Making room for the Jews did not allow displacing those traditionally at the center of the Soviet story of World War II, and it should be added, at the top of the power structure. Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians in that order held sway over all other nationalities in the multi-ethnic Soviet Union. Ignoring the preceding factors that motivated publication, if not the very composition of the novel, Rosenshield counts it a failure. In the Soviet context, however, Rybakov succeeded. The cult of the war based on the uniqueness of Soviet suffering remained intact. Jews, as depicted by Rybakov, had nonetheless for the first time found a legitimate place within that scenario. Even more, the immensity of their suffering was acknowledged as was their bravery and leadership in combat against the enemy. None of those truths about Soviet Jews had hitherto appeared in the growing literature on the war. Nor had there been a place for them in the burgeoning Soviet commemoration of the war which dated from Khrushchev’s time. Rybakov’s narrator, Boris Yakovlevich Ivanovsky, explains Jewish wartime experience in the following way: Hitler’s general program [was] to destroy nations, above all, the Slavs. What about Jews? The destruction of the Jews served as a kind of laboratory, where the Hitlerites could try their hand and acquire experience for the mass extermination of other peoples. (Heavy Sand, 250)

Rybakov grants the Jews their own category of suffering, a first, that ­modifies the traditional rejection of any mention of the Holocaust in Soviet accounts of the war. He also confirms the accepted view that “mass extermination” was reserved for the Slavic peoples. He has by Soviet standards

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deftly squared the circle, acknowledging the Jews as victims but giving pride of place to the Slavs. Throughout the novel, the narrator emphasizes the comfortable integration of Jews in Soviet life. He states, for example, “I’ve been raised by the Soviet system to be an internationalist. Russian, Jew, Belorussian—they’re all the same to me. My wife […] is a Russian. Thirty years we’ve been together. We have three sons […] and though they are registered as Jews, they don’t speak Yiddish, only Russian […] for all of us our motherland is Russia” (Heavy Sand, 33, 321). Under the Soviet system, where Jewish identity is considered a nationality, the narrator suggests, nationality, Jewish or, otherwise, presents no impediment to status or opportunity. In fact, such equality for Jews could only be a promise. In the 1970s sooner a utopian vision. Here is how the system really worked. Upon turning sixteen, the narrator’s sons would have registered their nationality at the time they received their internal passport. Nationality was indicated on the fifth line of the document. Jews often joked they were invalids of the fifth degree, that is handicapped by the nationality listed in their passport. No Jew could hope for the status inherent in belonging to one of the Slavic nationalities. At the time that Rybakov wrote Heavy Sand, Jews faced obstacles in university admissions, hiring, and in publishing their work. Rybakov’s picture of Jewish life could only be seen as a promise of improvement to come, hardly the current reality where discrimination dominated the experience of most Soviet Jews. Such an approach conformed to what was termed socialist realism, the official literary method of Soviet literature. A writer wrote as though under socialism the future, the ultimate reality, was already here.30 That future, Rybakov’s novel implied, included respect for Jews in Soviet life and their full integration into Soviet society. The portrait of the heroism of the narrator’s sister when crucified by the Nazis acknowledges her bravery, almost unheard of in traditional Soviet accounts of the war where Jews were rarely if ever even identified much less for their heroism. The account also emphasizes her complete assimilation into Soviet life. Impaled on a cross, she tries to sing while dying: “a Jewish song, or a Ukrainian song, or a Russian song or perhaps the Internationale, the hymn of our youth and hopes” (Heavy Sand, 348–349). She is at home in all three languages, it would seem, but more importantly, no barrier exists among national identities because all are Soviet and, the narrator insists, treated equally. He had earlier related: in “our town […] Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, and Jews live together peaceably […] there [is] no enmity or national group animosity whatever!” (Heavy Sand, 69). The narrator further compares the death of his sister to that of the Cossack hero Taras Bulba, as described by Gogol. A Jew has become a Cossack, surely another first. Similarly, the narrator says of his uncle that he rode a horse like a Cossack. “He enlisted as a volunteer [in the civil war], they gave him a horse and he fought through the […] war, [receiving] the Order of the Red Banner, which really meant something” (Heavy Sand, 80–87). The ultimate

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in assimilation has occurred. Two members of the narrator’s family have become like Cossacks or accepted as one. In fact, the Cossacks of whatever century are notorious as the perpetrators of the most devastating and extensive of the pogroms against the Jews carried out on Russian territory. Writing within the constraints of socialist realism, Rybakov has provided a version of Jewish life that holds out promise for a very different reality for those willing to remain in the Soviet Union. The narrator’s grandfather, mother, and father all bear distinctively Jewish names. Edith Clowes suggests “their names reflect Old Testament monumentalism” (Clowes, “Babii Yar in Soviet Literature,” 174). Such names, if Jewish identity is treated with respect, would indeed signify ancient status. But they also function in another way in the novel. They suggest that the obvious Jewishness of the narrator’s family does not impede their comfortable integration with their Ukrainian, Russian, and Polish neighbors about which one Soviet critic wrote euphemistically that “she had never seen a town like the one described in” Heavy Sand (cited in Clowes, “Babii Yar in Soviet Literature,” 175). Just as unique was the heroism of the narrator’s whole family, not just the sister noted above, that fills the last third of the novel. The message of Heavy Sand belonged to the 1970s rather than the three decades since the war ended. The regime had been forced to acknowledge Jewish heroism and Jewish suffering in World War II. It held out the promise of equality with other nationalities. But the price had to be to forego the demand to emigrate. The message Rybakov conveyed was couched in the language of the war and the traditional Soviet interpretation of it. In Soviet culture, the cult of World War II provided universal discourse. To modify it to accommodate the Jewish role marked a dramatic departure from the official policy of ignoring distinctive Jewish suffering. In writing about the Holocaust in the Soviet context, Rybakov met the regime’s need to placate Soviet Jews and encourage them to stay despite the opportunity under Western pressure to emigrate. However flawed by Western standards of Holocaust representation and certainly by its fanciful portrait of Jewish assimilation into Soviet life, Rybakov’s novel raised Holocaust awareness in the Soviet Union, bringing the Holocaust in the East into focus for the first time at least for Soviet readers. When reissued in 1982, it was printed in over 200,000 copies, significant by Soviet standards, especially given its subject matter (Rosenshield, “Socialist Realism and the Holocaust,” 252). The absence of partiinost’ in Heavy Sand, that is, emphasis on the leading role of the party in Soviet life, as one would expect in a socialist realist novel, is another way in which Rybakov squares the circle. Instead of partiinost’, leadership by party members who are identified as such, the ghetto uprising against the Nazis is plotted and carried out by the Jews themselves who are given unique agency in a pre-glasnost’ novel where the commanding efforts and inspiration of the party were all but required in Soviet ­fiction. By the terms to which Rybakov adheres, the Jews in Heavy Sand

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had to be assimilated, internationalists in the party’s sense of the concept, i.e., loyal Soviet citizens who were then accorded respect and acknowledgment for their suffering, their sacrifice, and their rebellion in the Holocaust. Rosenshield, on the other hand, calls the “lack [of] party-spiritedness unsettling […] precisely because [of] its blend of realism and didacticism […] especially in the context of the Holocaust” (Rosenshield, “Socialist Realism in the Holocaust,” 248). To obtain permission for a measure of realism, Rybakov had to promote didacticism, that is, the regime’s message. The absence of partiinost’ to make way for specifically Jewish agency is also part of the novel’s message. The party, with the threat of large-scale Jewish emigration looming before it, was ready to curb Jewish stigmas and handicaps in return for loyalty and assimilation. Rosenshield further accuses Rybakov of “de-Judaizing” the Holocaust because “he presents the specifically Jewish as a relic of the past […] making disparaging remarks about Jewish customs, learning, and religious practices […]” (Rosenshield, “Socialist Realism and the Holocaust,” 248). In contrast to the narrator’s atavistically religious grandmother, his grandfather, more appropriately in the Soviet context, even though he served as “head of the synagogue,” took “religion [as] more the style of his national way of life […] the order by which he lived” (Heavy Sand, 60). To emphasize the Jewishness of his characters and a freedom of religion that did not exist after 1917 for Jews or any other religious group for that matter, Rybakov allows a functioning synagogue in the town. Highly unlikely under Soviet conditions, where by the end of the 1920s nearly all houses of worship had been closed. Rybakov’s purpose is not to “de-Judaize,” but to laud a limited, secularized, and assimilated Jewish identity that the regime would tolerate and under intense external pressure and scrutiny in the 1970s accede to.

Conclusions Grossman and Rybakov present different versions of Jewishness and Jewish identity, albeit drawn within the same context, that of World War II in the Soviet Union. The differences between them emerge clearly from a comparison between two of the most striking characters in their respective novels. Each is the mother of the protagonist. In Life and Fate, the physicist Viktor Shtrum is separated from Anna Semyonova, who is trapped in the German occupation of Berdichev. She writes her son a long letter from the ghetto so that he might “know about [her] last days” (Life and Fate, 80 [80–93]). In sober prose, she describes the horror the German occupation brought to the town’s Jews, revealing her own newfound sense of Jewish identity that emerges under Nazi repression: “I was reminded of what I’d forgotten during the years of the Soviet regime—that I was a Jew. Some Germans drove past in a lorry, shouting out ‘Juden kaput!’” (Life and Fate, 81). She along with other Jews is evicted and incarcerated in a ghetto quickly carved out of Berdichev’s Old Town. They are dispossessed of nearly all property, harassed,

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and abused. Anna Semyonova tells her son where to find the mass grave in which she will soon be buried (Life and Fate, 91). For the most part straight forward and unsentimental, she compares her newly discovered love for the Jewish people to her love for her son. The letter manages to reach Shtrum in Moscow. He is ever after filled with regret and self-recrimination because he could not save her. In contrast, the narrator of Heavy Sand recounts how his mother under similar conditions refused to succumb. She led the ghetto uprising against the Nazis, encouraging escape and regrouping as partisans. She performs nearly superhuman feats of leadership and daring. In the end, she acquires mythic status, rallying the exhausted and starving Jews to escape to the forest. When the people looked back, she was no longer there. Nobody heard the sound of footsteps or the crunch of twigs under her feet, she simply dissolved into the forest […] she melted into the air. You think it fantasy or mysticism? Maybe. But even so, nobody ever saw my mother again, alive or dead. She vanished, melted, dissolved into thin air in the pine forest near the little town where she was born […]. (Heavy Sand, 375–376)

The narrator’s mother is a leader of her people, Biblical in proportions, but as mythical as Rybakov’s portrait of assimilated Jews, enjoying full equality with their Soviet neighbors. Anna Semyonova, on the other hand, has had no need of Jewish identity since the revolution until she realizes in 1941, the Germans will kill her for it. Grossman told the truth about the secular Soviet state. Rybakov indulged in fantasy on more than one level in recounting the story of the narrator’s mother along with Jewish experience in the Soviet Union. Grossman differs from Rybakov in other ways. He utilizes a monument of Russian culture as a literary paradigm to recount what World War II meant for the Soviet Union. It was a war fought to save Russian culture from annihilation and fought, unfortunately, for a regime that mirrored the very invader the Russians confronted. Grossman, more self-consciously Russian than his Europeanized friend Ilya Ehrenburg,31 embraced a major theme from War and Peace. Writing in the early 1860s, the era of the Great Reforms, Tolstoy warned of an alien importation into Russia on the order of what the Napoleonic invasion of 1812 had portended. The Stalinist regime, as opposed to the Soviet regime of the 1920s, had conquered with an alien system that sooner resembled Nazism than the international socialism that had inspired the revolution of 1917. Both Nazism and Stalinism had debased the rich ­cultural heritage they had acquired, Grossman insisted. The novelist equated the collectivization of the Soviet peasantry and the Ukrainian famine of 1932–1933 (the Holodomor) with the Holocaust. Both Hitler and Stalin had found targets for mass slaughter on the same territory. But Grossman went even further. As a correspondent with Krasnaia zvezda, he had traveled West with the Red Army and witnessed the death

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camps of Poland, relentlessly interviewing the few survivors who remained. He recounted the Holocaust in Russia as an equivalent to the demographic disasters perpetrated by Stalin. But Hitler added another layer of madness. The war against the Jews knew no boundaries. It was both Russian and pan-European. Grossman ran afoul of party ideologues, Suslov in particular, who would not countenance equating Nazism with the Soviet system. His opponents had other reasons for suppressing his novel on the war. The Soviet leadership in the early 1960s with Khrushchev at the top, ably assisted by fellow Ukrainian Nikolai Podgorny, would hardly welcome a work like Life and Fate that equated collectivization which they had overseen to Nazi atrocities in Ukraine which they had failed to stop. According to Edith Clowes, Khrushchev went so far as to attempt to cover up the massacre at Babii Yar which had occurred while he was First Party Secretary of Ukraine. Both he and Podgorny had no incentive to see Grossman’s novel in print, because in effect it challenged their competence, even right to govern (Clowes, “Babii Yar in Soviet Literature,” 158–159). Another issue motivated the suppression of Life and Fate by Khrushchev and his Ukrainian cohort. Grossman’s portrait of Jewish dignity and heroism did not comport with traditional Ukrainian antisemitism which ironically had only intensified during the German occupation. No other part of Europe suffered hunger in the 1930s to the degree that Ukraine did. Collectivization, the Holodomor, and the Great Terror disrupted food supplies all over the Soviet Union, never more so than in Ukraine, which bore the brunt of those disasters. When war came, the German occupiers played on traditional Ukrainian antisemitism, intensifying it with the charge that Jewish Bolsheviks had controlled the food supply before the war and hence ate while Ukrainian peasants starved.32 The Soviet leadership, when Grossman presented Life and Fate for publication, had no incentive to disabuse the populace of a prejudice it shared. Rybakov, writing in the 1970s, faced a very different Soviet leadership. It had overthrown Khrushchev, but it nonetheless shared his wartime experiences and how to interpret them. Rybakov’s advantage over Grossman lay in the vulnerability of the regime ten years after the wartime correspondent died. Under pressure both to allow Jewish emigration and to modernize the energy sector on which the Soviet economy depended, the Brezhnev government used Heavy Sand as part of a campaign to discourage emigration, suggesting to the Jewish community, and Jewish dissidents in particular, that the regime would acknowledge their wartime experience and suffering. The novel also delivered the message that a secular Jewish identity could (finally) integrate into Soviet society. The compromises in Heavy Sand by the standards of Western Holocaust representation should be understood as breakthroughs in the Soviet context. Depictions of the Holocaust in the East must therefore be judged by a different set of standards from those employed to assess representation of

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what occurred in the West. In the Soviet context, interpretations of the war have been used to legitimize the regime and bolster the leadership. They are hardly free of political manipulation. On a popular level, a sense of the uniqueness of Soviet suffering in the war encourages resentment of the whole notion of distinctive Jewish suffering. Intense antisemitic propaganda on the part of German occupiers that drew on existing attitudes and inflamed new ones has left its mark. They inhibit acceptance of Western historiography on the Holocaust. Grossman and Rybakov, each in his own way, attempted to awaken, if not create, Holocaust memory in what became the former Soviet Union.

Notes







1. Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate, trans. Robert Chandler (New York: NYRB Classics, 2006); Heavy Sand, trans. Harold Shukman (London: Penguin Books, 1981). All citations are from these two editions. 2. John Garrard and Carol Garrard, The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 189. For Grossman’s essay on Treblinka, see Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry, ed. and trans. David Patterson (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 2009), 462–482. 3.  Garrard and Garrard describe Grossman’s ill-fated meeting with Suslov, 279–280. 4.  The works that comprise the trilogy include Children of the Arbat, trans. Harold Shukman (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1988); Fear, trans. Antonina W. Bouis (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1992); and Dust and Ashes, trans. Antonina W. Bouis (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1996). 5. It appeared first in Oktiabr’, serialized in nos. 7–9, 1978, and then published as a single volume by Sovetskii Pisatel’, 1979. English edition, 4. 6.  See Ilya Kukulin, “Russian Literature on the Shoah: New Approaches and Contexts,” trans. Alissa Valles, Kritika 18, no. 1 (Winter 2017): 165–175. See also Boris Dubin, “Vtoraia mirovaia voina i Kholokaust v rossiskom obshchestvennom soznanii,” Uroki istorii: XX vek, 13 novembr’ 2013, http://urokiistorii.ru/51913. 7. There is some discussion of this point throughout Karel C. Berkhoff, “‘Total Annihilation of the Jewish Population’: The Holocaust in Soviet Media, 1941–45.” Kritika 10, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 61–105. 8. Further discussion of this point can be found in Seweryn Bialer, ed., Stalin and His Generals: Soviet Military Memoirs of World War II (Westview, CO: Westview Press, 1984). 9. See Berkhoff, “‘Total Annihilation of the Jewish Population’,” 63 on this point. 10.  Katarina Clark in “Ehrenburg and Grossman: Two Cosmopolitan Jewish Writers Reflect on Nazi Germany at War,” Kritika 10, no. 3 (Summer 2009), 609 dates the genesis of the novel to 1955. Karel Berkhoff states that Grossman initiated it in 1943, presumably when first exposed to the events that figured in the work (“The Holocaust in the Soviet Media,” 77).

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11. Christopher R. Browning, “The Fake Threat of Jewish Communism,” The New York Review of Books, February 21, 2019, 15. 12. See, for example, Alexandra Popoff’s Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century, forthcoming in 2019. 13. Clark, “Ehrenburg and Grossman,” 618. Clark is the best example of a traditional approach to Grossman’s use of Tolstoy. 14. Life and Fate, “Translator’s Introduction,” xviii. 15. Caryl Emerson, “War and Peace, Life and Fate,” Common Knowledge 18, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 348. 16. For the mood, spirit, and political climate in Russia during the 1860s, see my “N.I. Kostomarov and the Origins of the Vestnik Evropy Circle,” Oxford Slavonic Papers (new series) XI (1978): 84–100. 17. Cited in Vasily Grossman, A Writer at War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army, 1941–1945, eds. and trans. Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova (New York: Vintage Books, 2005), xiii. 18. Clark, 616. See also Joshua Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 121–188. 19. See Anna Bonola and Giovanni Maddalena, “Introduction” in Vasily Grossman: A Writer’s Freedom, eds. Bonola and Maddalena (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018), 4 on Grossman’s early career. 20. See his “The Murder of the Jews of Berdichev,” where his own mother perished, in The Black Book (Patterson, 12–19). Grossman imaginatively recounted the grisly circumstances surrounding her death at the hands of the Nazis in the person of Anna Semyonova, the mother of his protagonist Viktor Shtrum in Life and Fate. 21.  Amir Weiner, “A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941–1945,” Kritika 10, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 395. 22. See Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties for Ehrenburg’s unique freedom during the war, 189–226. 23. Kathryn Feuer, Tolstoy and the Genesis of War and Peace (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 135–167. 24. An Old Bolshevik was someone who had joined the party before 1917, similar to an Alt Kampfer in the Nazi Party: someone who had joined the party before the Munich Beer Hall putsch in November 1923. 25. Gary Rosenshield, “Socialist Realism and the Holocaust: Jewish Life and Death in Anatoly Rybakov’s Heavy Sand,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 111, no. 2 (March 1996): 241. 26. See discussion in E. W. Clowes, “Constructing the Memory of the Holocaust: The Ambiguous Treatment of Babii Yar in Soviet Literature,” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 2, no. 2 (June 2005): 153–182. 27. If that were true, the ploy failed. The first volume of the Arbat trilogy did not appear until 1988. Rybakov was, however, accorded coveted permission to travel abroad in the early 1980s, a sign of favor. The author spoke briefly with him at Princeton, congratulating him on the moving portrait of the narrator’s mother in Heavy Sand. 28. For full discussion of the Jewish emigration movement in the Soviet Union, see Gal Beckerman, When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2010).

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29.  This information comes from Leonard Schapiro in conversation with the author who was then Professor of Russian and Soviet History at the London School of Economics and the primary advisor on Soviet policy to the British government. He played an instrumental role in the translation and publication of Rybakov’s novel in Britain. 30.  For more on socialist realism as the required literary method of Soviet literature, see Rosenshield, “Socialist Realism and the Holocaust,” 240, 248, and 252. 31. See observations of Grossman’s daughter, Katia Zabolotskaia, on this point in Garrard and Garrard, 162. 32. See my translation of the highly anti-Semitic poem “Aron Shmeerzon,” which dates from the war and makes the point about Jewish control of the Ukrainian food supply. It can be found in Cary Nelson’s essay in this collection.

Bibliography Beckerman, Gal. When They Come for Us We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2010. Berkhoff, Karel C. “‘Total Annihilation of the Jewish Population’: The Holocaust in the Soviet Media, 1941–45.” Kritika 10, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 61–105. Clark, Katarina. “Ehrenburg and Grossman: Two Cosmopolitan Jewish Writers Reflect on Nazi Germany at War.” Kritika 10, no. 3 (Summer 2009): 607–628. Clowes, E. W. “Constructing the Memory of the Holocaust: The Ambiguous Treatment of Babii Yar in Soviet Literature.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 3, no. 2 (June 2005): 153–182. Emerson, Caryl. “War and Peace, Life and Fate.” Common Knowledge 18, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 348–354. Ehrenburg, Ilya, and Vasily Grossman. The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry. Edited and translated by David Patterson. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2009. Feuer, Kathryn B. Tolstoy and the Genesis of War and Peace. Edited by Robin Feuer Miller and Donna Tussing Orwin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. Garrard, John, and Carol Garrard. The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman. New York: The Free Press, 1996. Grossman, Vasily. A Writer at War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army, 1941–1945. Edited and translated by Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova. New York: Vintage Books, 2005. ———. Life and Fate. Translated by Robert Chandler. New York: NYRB Classic, 2006. ———. The Road to Treblinka. Edited by Martin Zwinkler. Middleton, DE: no pub., 2013. Hellbeck, Jochen. “War and Peace for the Twentieth Century.” Raritan 27, no. 1 (2007): 24–48. Kukulin, Ilya. “Russian Literature on the Shoah: New Approaches and Contexts,” trans. Alissa Valles. Kritika 18, no. 1 (Winter 2017): 165–175. Rosenshield, Gary. “Socialist Realism: Stalinism and the Holocaust: Jewish Life and Death in Anatoly Rybakov’s Heavy Sand.” Publication of the Modern Language Association 111, no. 2 (March 1996): 240–255.

286  A. POGORELSKIN Rubenstein, Joshua. Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg. New York: Basic Books, 1996. Rybakov, Anatoly. Heavy Sand. Translated by Harold Shukman. London: Penguin Books, 1981. Weiner, Amir. “A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941–1945” (review). Kritika 10, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 387–397.

CHAPTER 17

Refractions of Holocaust Memory in Stanisław Lem’s Science Fiction Richard Middleton-Kaplan

This chapter focuses on how the Holocaust finds disguised expression in ­science fiction by the Polish, Jewish writer Stanisław Lem (1921–2006). Born in Lwów, Poland (now L’viv in Ukraine), Lem narrowly escaped death in a pogrom and lost many relatives during the Holocaust. One of the world’s most renowned science fiction writers, Lem published more than twenty volumes of fiction, including the novel Solaris, which was adapted into films by directors Andrei Tarkovsky and Steven Soderbergh. Because of the science fiction trappings of Lem’s fiction, the presence of the Holocaust is easy to overlook—and meant to be overlooked, or at least hidden. Thwarted by Communist censors in his attempt to publish a first novel about the Holocaust, Lem found that he could still write about it if he did so in ways that passed like phantoms through censors’ detectors. This he did throughout his literary career by venturing into outer space as the setting for mass death, human violence, and self-destruction. If one views Lem’s Holocaust-related passages from outside their science fiction (SF) context, they appear neither allegorical nor metaphorical, but as startlingly direct testimonies to personal loss and persistent memory. However, rather than portray historical incidents from a realistic perspective, Lem depicts them obliquely, in refracted fashion—shattered into fragments, displaced into alien settings, and retrieved from shards of memory in broken languages. In fact, the SF genre itself works as a refracting strategy for Lem. Shifting genre from historical fiction to science fiction blurred censors’

R. Middleton-Kaplan (*)  Walla Walla Community College, Walla Walla, WA, USA © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_17

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scrutinizing lenses and allowed Lem to explore his own past, which he was reluctant to expose to plain view, from an indirect angle. Reading Lem’s stories and novels, one finds no mention of the words “Holocaust” or “Jew” (with rare exceptions discussed below), no naming of sites of atrocity. Scholarship has barely begun to study how Lem embedded yet hid the Holocaust in his fiction. That is now changing with a critical biography that appeared in Polish in 2016, by Agnieszka Gajewska, and not yet available in English. Gajewska argues that Lem “scattered” and “buried traces of his own traumatic past” in his “splendid, bold and often grotesque visions of the future.” Reviewer Mikołaj Gliński summarizes Gajewska’s claim: “Encrypted and masked, [these traces] appear unexpectedly, ‘in narrative gaps, apparently functionless anecdotes, unexpected turns of events and grotesque visions,’ all of which might explain why they have remained invisible to critics and readers for so long.”1 I will uncover these traces in Lem’s story collection The Star Diaries (1957; expanded in 1971), the novel Solaris (1961), the memoir Highcastle (1966), and the story collection Tales of Pirx the Pilot (1968). Then I turn to the novel His Master’s Voice (1968) and two 1980s faux book reviews that seem to address the Holocaust more directly but that also hide Lem’s personal history. Lem’s SF is the literary equivalent of the milk cans that Emanuel Ringelblum had buried in the Warsaw ghetto containing documents that recorded daily life under Nazi terror. Two cans were unearthed after the war and one remains undiscovered; like those milk cans, Lem’s fiction buried Holocaust content only now being brought to the surface. Whether Lem chose to bury it in order to hide it from Stalin-era and subsequent censors or because of his complex relationship to his own past, or some combination of the two, is a question I will address later. Whatever his motive, though, SF gave Lem a strategy for addressing the Nazi genocide by refracting violent episodes onto rocket ships, into alien languages, or inside the memories of malfunctioning robots and eccentric scientists. By transporting history into futuristic fiction, Lem subtly encoded the past and enjoined readers to confront the Holocaust’s moral legacy in a post-Holocaust world now and into the distant future.

Substitution in The Star Diaries Our un-encryption, or decrypting, begins with The Star Diaries. The collection features stories which recount space voyages narrated by intergalactic traveler Ijon Tichy. As Gliński observes, “The Eleventh Voyage” embeds Holocaust events in outer space. Tichy receives a mission to investigate a doomed galactic freighter and the crew members’ deaths. A year after its disappearance, its radio operator sent a message in language resembling Chaucerian English to home base which was decoded as meaning that the freighter’s computer had gone mad, disposed of the crew, established itself as

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ruler of the planet, and then spawned robots who initially exhibited “youthful nationalism” that soon took “the form of an unreasonable hatred of all things human.”2 Its propaganda brands humankind as “grasping voltsuckers and villains” (44). Humans are demeaned by the ugly epithet “mucilids.” Nearly 2700 agents have died trying to dislodge the hateful computer and robot army. Volunteering for a mission to “solve the mystery of the disappearance of thousands of…people” (47), Tichy arrives on a “mad planet” where the ruling robot population amuses itself with sick, bizarre, cruel tortures. Government propaganda “cast mud on the entire evolutionary tree of man and called for the annexation of Earth,” and claimed that robots “were a more advanced form than living humans” (45). By their laws, a human’s mere existence is “a capitall[sic] offence” (62). Advancing into the room where the computer supposedly resides, Tichy instead comes upon “an elderly, dried-up gentleman in a gray suit, with baggy sleeves, the kind worn by office clerks; he was writing, filling out page after page of forms.” It was only a human, after all, driving all that evil. He protests that he was “only following orders” (70). The disappeared agents had been ordered into iron robot suits and coerced to collaborate. All had betrayed the human race. The climax involves a scene of mass decapitation, as Tichy instructs the robots to remove each other’s iron heads—masks concealing the human beings cowering inside. Tichy ends his tale by expressing relief that the computer had not gone mad: “I was glad of the outcome, since it restored my faith, shaken by corrupt cosmic officeholders, in the natural decency of electronic brains. Yes, it’s comforting to know, when you think about it, that only man can be a bastard” (72). That ironic conclusion, so different from the reassurance we as humans want, allows Lem to sidestep explicit moralizing. There is no mention of Jews or the Holocaust. Their absence distances us from making the historical connection. The Chaucerian English distances us. All the paraphernalia about robots, demented computers, and disabled spaceships distances us. But this story comes down to a tale of organized human evil and of a community exterminated. Once recognized, the unstated, concealed historical parallel becomes obvious, and other elements of the story fall into place, such as a passage that condemns appeasement. The mechanical race represents Nazis and the “humans” represent Jews and other victims of the Nazi slaughter. The Eichmann-like clerk in a gray suit embodies bureaucratic banality of evil. Following the parallel doesn’t require a sophisticated allegorical reading, just simple word substitutions: instead of “grasping voltsuckers and villains,” “grasping vermin” or “useless eaters”; instead of “an unreasonable hatred of all things human,” “an unreasonable hatred of all things Jewish.” “The Eleventh Voyage,” thus, presents a “horrifying and grotesque depiction of the Holocaust…unparalleled in Polish literature” (Gliński). That depiction achieves its horror not despite—but rather because of—all the deflections of distancing and disguise.

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Ashes of Memory in Solaris The masking, distancing, and deflecting of the Holocaust that characterizes The Star Diaries occur in Solaris too. Psychologist Kris Kelvin travels to a space station on the planet Solaris where 106 colleagues perished and one of the remaining three survivors just committed suicide. “An atmosphere of unspeakable horror and fear pervades the whole station.”3 Kelvin learns that Solaris’s ocean surface produces materialized figures from inside the explorers’ subconsciousness and memories from Earth. Called “visitors,” these simulacra beings find explorers at their “most vulnerable point.”4 Kelvin’s visitor replicates his wife Rheya who committed suicide ten years previously, a self-murder for which Kelvin blames himself. The recurring memories of lost ones are like the irrepressible memories and guilt that Holocaust survivors experience. Generations-long study of “Solaristics” by countless scientists has failed to determine whether the ocean possesses intelligence or to decode Solaris’s intent. Kelvin and his colleagues fail too. They know that if they report their experiences to home base on Earth, they will be judged lunatics. Lem uses the coded SF setting to convey the impossibility Holocaust survivors feel of explaining their experience to others; the messages do not transmit, and they come from a world so unlike ours that they seem to emanate from another planet. Lem has materialized the world of Holocaust memory onto another planet. Lem dramatizes this incommunicability with the embedded tale of helicopter pilot André Berton. Before Kelvin’s arrival, after a failed search for a missing colleague, Berton returned “obviously suffering from nervous shock… shouting and sobbing.” When he explains to investigators on Earth that he witnessed a giant innocent child loom before him, they regard his report as “the morbid creation of a mind under the influence of poisonous gases” and therefore dismiss it as “part of Berton’s clinical history” rather than an actual event (40–41). They determine that “Berton’s account bears no, or at any rate no appreciable, relation to reality” (85). Lem’s name for this character, just slightly scrambled from surrealist André Breton’s, emphasizes how surreal Berton’s reports sound. In addition to the Holocaust allusion of poisonous gases, Lem invokes “ashes.” The ocean calls up “isolated psychic processes, stifled, encysted—foci smouldering under the ashes of memory.” Smoldering, ashes, poison gas— does it not sound like the repressed memories of Holocaust survivors? Unable to “destroy our thoughts” and banish these “phantoms” once they rise to the surface, like Holocaust survivors the explorers adjust: “If we could not get rid of our visitors, we would accustom ourselves to their presence, learn to live with them. … we would adapt ourselves…even if one of us despaired and killed himself” (73, 88, 100, 134). Kelvin’s struggle to keep repressed memories repressed, or to adapt himself to eruptions of the dead into his consciousness, parallels the struggle of Holocaust survivors to cope with haunting

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memories. The suicide of a crew member who could not escape materialized emanations from the darkest part of his consciousness reminds us of despairing Holocaust survivors who took their own lives. Like the mourned family members of Holocaust survivors, Kelvin’s father is “nothing but ashes now” (162)—and Kelvin remembers almost nothing of him. With Rheya, he has the presence of her phantom. In a scene of poignant tenderness, Kelvin says to Rheya, “Now all I see is you” (146). The reconstituted memory which he now loves and does not want to leave him has replaced the “original.” If the memory of the lost one is all the survivor has left, how can that eidetic memory be released? When his colleagues propose obliterating these holograms that embody memory by bombarding Solaris’s ocean with radiation in order to break the process that generates “visitors,” Kelvin dubs their scheme “Operation Slaughterhouse” (128). Here Lem confronts the terrible plight of the Holocaust survivor who may desire freedom from recurring nightmares in which the dead arise, yet who may fear that forgetting them commits a kind of second murder. Remembering evokes guilt over failure to save the dead and entails unbearable anguish yet forgetting completes the Nazis’ work of erasing them from history. Survivors know that as memories reconstitute and settle, those phantoms may be partial or untrustworthy recreations of the past—and are no substitute for the presence torn from their lives. In Lem’s SF world, the rememberer and the remembered both recognize this truth. Rheya’s simulacrum knows that she is not the original and that Kelvin cannot love her as he loved the original; she senses that she repulses him (although he also longs for her to stay). In a novel that masks Holocaust memory underneath these emanations, Kelvin describes his own face as a mask (139, 141). He reenacts the emotional distancing that led to the original Rheya’s suicide, and the phantom commits suicide—by swallowing liquid oxygen. Lem has imagined an analogical horror beyond horror, in which the Holocaust survivor, haunted by memories of what really happened before, would have to re-see and relive the deaths of the very family members whom he could not save. In the end, Kelvin’s colleagues do irradiate the ocean and kill off the possibility of visitors arising from their secret desires and buried memories. Kelvin knows that when he returns to earth, he will not be believed but like Berton be judged demented. He also knows that he will have to learn to imitate the human…as he himself is no longer the human being he was previously. He will be like one returning from another planet. This novel, so full of grief and despair, culminates in Kelvin’s speculation about a despairing god whose creations inadvertently lead to horror…and with Kelvin deciding that he is not yet ready to return to Earth, instead descending to and lingering on the ocean’s surface, yearning to stimulate the reconstitution of Rheya once more.

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Hidden in Highcastle One might expect that in his memoir, Highcastle: A Remembrance, Lem would be more forthcoming about his Jewishness. Not so. Lem elides his Jewishness, his parents’ names and synagogue marriage and participation in Jewish community life, his attendance at a Jewish religion class, and the fact that many relatives died in the Holocaust. Such absences might be explained partly by Lem’s mistrust of adult memory, which forms a major theme in the memoir. Reflecting in 1984, Lem declared an additional purpose for these omissions: “I wanted something impossible to attain—to extract the essence of my childhood, in its pure form, from my whole life: to peel away, as it were, the overlying strata of war, of mass murder and extermination, of the nights in the shelters during air raids, of an existence under a false identity, of hide-and-seek, of all the dangers, as if they had never existed.” He wanted to focus on the large role of chance rather than the particularities of individual experience. He also stated that in the boyhood he tried to reconstitute, “I knew that my ancestors were Jews, but I knew nothing of the Mosaic faith and, regrettably, nothing at all of Jewish culture.”5 Even so, he had more conscious awareness of his Jewishness than the memoir reflects. His neighborhood memories are vividly detailed, but the details evoke the enticing aromas emanating from the local halvah stand or bakery, not the Jewish confectioner or baker inside. He does mention a second cousin who “perished in Warsaw,” a classmate who “was killed by the Germans,” another who met the same fate, and his first encounter with “Hitlerite Germans.” He does not indicate that he or his family were in special peril because of their Jewishness and does not indicate his cousins’ or classmates’ religion.6 Lem was twenty years old in 1941 when the Nazis occupied Lwów and established the Jewish Ghetto. A brief final chapter recounts the destruction. He asks why the objects and cobblestones of his childhood demand, after the destruction of war and with them piled in rubbish heaps, [that] I testify to their existence? Not many years after the idyllic time presented here, inanimate things were envied their permanence, for day by day people were taken from their midst, and suddenly the things were orphaned, the chairs, canes, and knickknacks abandoned and monstrously useless. As if objects were superior to the living, hardier than they, less vulnerable to the catastrophes of time. (130–131)

This recalls the passage from “The Eleventh Voyage” in which robots are described as superior to human beings. Lem’s memoir contains the same disorienting rhetorical moves as his fiction. Objects are safe to discuss in all their specificity; specific groups of humans, such as Jews, are not. Straining through memory to “restore innocence” to place names of his youth before “the years 1941 and 1942 gave [them] such evil meaning,” he recalls “when the streets from Bernstein’s and past the theater, toward Sloneczna and

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beyond, one day were empty, silent, their windows open and curtains moving in the wind. The walls, courtyards, balconies—deserted, and in the distance appeared, then disappeared, the wooden fence of the ghetto.” He does not say that these streets from Bernstein’s on constitute the Jewish Ghetto. Does he need to? He reflects, “We were like ants bustling in an anthill over which the heel of a boot is raised” (133). Does he need to specify whose feet are inside the jackboot?

Tapping Out Memories in Tales of Pirx the Pilot Lem’s 1968 story collection Tales of Pirx the Pilot features two stories with encrypted Holocaust-like tragedies. In “The Albatross,” crew and passengers on a spaceship witness the deaths of a nearby spaceship’s crew—and then return to their ballroom, as indifferent to the deaths as the world was to the Holocaust. In another story, “Terminus,” Pirx the Pilot investigates a scene of devastation onboard a spaceship where all the crew have perished. The only witness is a traumatized robot named Terminus. The crews’ last desperate conversations are recorded in the rusted robot’s memory banks, which it conveys in Morse code letter by painstaking letter. The robot’s distress at what it witnessed turns its cadence into a sound “at times verging on a prolonged human cry.”7 Although the setting is a spaceship, the deaths resemble those inside a gas chamber: The crew died from lack of oxygen, trapped behind “a concrete containment wall,” “scabs of dry cement” remaining under the robot’s claws (187), a description mirroring the fingernail scratches found in the concrete inside Auschwitz gas chambers; their doomed ship was The Blue Star, just a word aslant from The Yellow Star; Terminus, who is lifeless, is yet a survivor haunted by traumatic memory; Terminus’s mantra, “I hear and obey” (196), echoes perpetrators’ excuses in which they disavow their human capacity for judgment. Some passages do not require even a small substitution, such as “Yellow” for “Blue.” Consider this passage about Terminus’s plight as surviving witness: “There was something obscene about it, about being a spectator to someone else’s death throes, witnessing it in all its gruesome detail and later analyzing every signal, every plea for oxygen, every shriek… It was immoral—if you could do nothing to help…” (189). This passage is not an allegory for the Holocaust; rather, if lifted out of its dislocating SF context and placed into a Holocaust history or memoir, it becomes literal. Then there is this, in which Pirx asks himself what he will gain from Terminus’s recording: “Would they— these dead men—give him a neat and coherent narrative of what happened? Or wouldn’t he just hear a lot of screaming and yelling, cries for oxygen, for help?” (205). Or this: “He could still hear it ringing in his ears, could feel it pulsating in his fingertips: the terrible despair and fury of those banging supplications” (206). No allegorical reading is needed here. Lem is doing more, however, than turning his lens from refracted allegorical SF to historical close-up; he is also inserting his personal history, and Holocaust history, into Pirx’s story.

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Having survived the brutal Brygidki prison pogrom, Lem may well have struggled to give a neat and coherent narrative of his experience—after all, he “never gave an open testimony”8 about it—and he may well have still heard screams ringing in his ears and seen visions recorded in his memory of the death throes he witnessed as a powerless spectator. Although Lem knows who met the terminus of their lives in reality, Pirx asks “whose voices were those? Who were those people calling out for help?” (206). Without identifying them or the Holocaust, Lem essentially does for us the same thing that Terminus does: He taps out a tale of destruction in coded language. Terminus uses Morse code; Lem uses the SF genre as his.

Behind the Masking, First Consideration: Censorship, Lem’s Early Novels, and His Turn Toward SF To account for why Lem applied the lens of SF to the Holocaust, I turn first to Poland’s postwar political ideology, which perpetuated a myth of all Communists resisting the Nazis. No particular group’s suffering could be singled out because that would detract from the sacrifice and heroism of the collective. “Jewish themes were not welcome either.”9 These expectations affected other writers besides Lem in postwar Poland. For example, when Tadeusz Borowski published “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen” and “A Day at Harmenz,” “they produced a shock. The public was expecting martyrologies; the Communist Party called for works that were ideological, that divided the world into the righteous and unrighteous, heroes and traitors, Communists and Fascists.”10 Lem’s contemporary Jewish Polish writer Sara Nomberg-Przytyk could not get her stories published in Poland because they were about Jewish suffering. As Roslyn Hirsch recounts in her foreword to Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land, Nomberg-Przytyk’s editor told her that “in the wake of the Six-Day War” she had to remove all references to Jews. Her protests “fell on deaf ears…”11 Borowski’s and Nomberg-Przytyk’s encounters with censors, which span the period during which Lem wrote the works already discussed, gave ample justification for Lem to have avoided direct mention of Jews and abandoned Realism, instead transmitting his experience into the intergalactic realm. In Andrzej Wajda’s film of Tadeusz Kantor’s 1975 experimental “dramatic séance” The Dead Class, near-catatonic figures drag life-size puppets of themselves on their backs—in essence carrying corpses of their former selves. In a bleak schoolroom, they chant gibberish—disconnected syllables, numbers, historical facts…remnants of their childhood educations, shards of learning as shattered as the civilization from which it sprang, a civilization only accessible in fragments following World War II’s destruction. Although The Dead Class doesn’t mention the Holocaust, the classroom resembles a cheder (Jewish school); among the random bits they chant is the alef-beit (Hebrew alphabet); and one segment features a mournful song in Yiddish. However, this

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occurs in a nightmarish staging so disorienting and bizarre that it’s easy to miss its allusions to the destruction of Jewish communities and cultures. Each of these artists responded differently to censorship of specifically Jewish suffering: Nomberg-Przytyk by smuggling out her stories for publication abroad; Kantor by placing the Holocaust into avant-garde theatricality; and Lem by using the disguise of SF, the Holocaust hidden inside SF machinery much like the humans hidden inside iron robot suits in “The Eleventh Voyage.” Lem himself learned early about the censors’ power. He started writing his first novel, The Hospital of Transfiguration, in 1948. It was “a realist novel set during a war in an unidentified mental institution where doctors prepare for the Nazis’ imminent appearance. … One of the recurring themes is that whenever [the protagonist] doesn’t shave, he starts to look Jewish” (Gliński). The hospital staff try to stop the invading Germans from murdering the patients. In 1984, Lem described the novel as “a realistic one, which I wrote perhaps in order to rid myself of the weight of my war memories— to expel them like pus. But perhaps I wrote this book also in order not to forget” (“Chance,” 91). Realistic though it was, the novel already deployed the deflection and masking that characterized later works such as The Star Diaries and Tales of Pirx the Pilot. For example, Lem was finishing his medical studies when the Nazis invaded Poland. Marcin Wolk observes that despite the attempt at Realism “he uses a mask, disguising ‘the final solution to the Jewish question’ as the Nazi ‘euthanasia’ of the insane, the ghetto as the psychiatric hospital, and disguising Lem, the medical student, as a Polish doctor, Stefan Trzyniecki.”12 After years of making changes to get it past Communist party censors, Lem gave up. He later wrote, “They tortured my Hospital of the Transfiguration. … I was told that this and that had to be redone…Hospital of the Transfiguration was considered improper from the ‘ideological point of view.’”13 “Tortured” marks a revealing word choice, as if the novel underwent the same bodily agony and disfigurement as a person. Hospital of the Transfiguration was eventually published in 1955 as part of a trilogy titled Time Not Lost during a relaxation of censorship. Whether he had expelled or preserved the pus of memory, or simply had enough of his writing being “tortured,” Hospital of the Transfiguration was “Lem’s sole literary attempt to exorcise the ghosts of his wartime past” and “remains the only novel in which Lem treats Poland’s past and explores the ethical and historical questions he had to confront as a doctor-in-training after the Holocaust. Although Lem revisits many of these themes in later works, he abandons the painful memories of Poland and its past in favor of other worlds and a yet-to-be-realized future” (Krob, 20, 21). He then turned to SF, a genre in which he might illuminate the darkness of the Holocaust with the light from an imagined future—or with a parallel darkness from hypothetical societies that fail to learn from it.

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Lem’s next work, a novel called Astronauts, did get published in 1951. Wolk describes it as a “socialist sf novel” (337). But even that did not win easy approval; although he tried to write “from a perspective intended to bypass all Marxist censors, simply because I would move about in philosophical and futurological domains where they had nothing to say,” he had a yearlong battle with censors over a Russian translation. “Since I would not budge an inch, it took a little time, a year or two perhaps, but eventually the novel got published. At that point, of course, it turned out that nobody paid any attention to these alleged monstrous heresies of mine.”14 Lem knew his work was more likely to be left alone if he wrote SF. Moreover, SF was regarded in Poland then as a “cheap genre,”15 and therefore not taken seriously. SF gave Lem a way of side-stepping Socialist Realism’s strictures. He “chose science fiction as a means of expression; the genre was also one of those least shackled by changing political requirements,” Czesław Miłosz avers (501). Film critic Phillip Lopate adds that SF afforded relative freedom to Soviet bloc artists because it seemed scientific and therefore apolitical: “In the early 1970s, Tarkovsky…proposed a film adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris, thinking it stood a better chance of being green-lit by the commissars, as science fiction seemed more ‘objective’ and accessible to the masses.”16 Lem gravitated toward the genre because he had a scientific bent, but also because it provided a literary safe haven. However, that was not the only reason he chose SF, nor perhaps even the primary one.

Behind the Masking, Second Consideration: Lem’s Relationship to His Past Wolk points to “institutionalized censorship in communist Poland,” but only as a secondary factor in Lem’s refractions of the Holocaust; Gajewska “considers almost all of Lem’s prose to be a substitute narrative that reveals indirectly what he could not openly discuss for psychological reasons or for fear of a hostile reaction.” Creation of a “substitute narrative” could be rooted more in his personal psychology than needing to evade censorship. Lem “decided to adopt the strategy of mimicry and thus to obliterate his past by avoiding any confrontation with his origins and much of his wartime experience” (Wolk, 334). Wolk also quotes Wojciech Orliński to the effect that for Lem “discussion of his Jewish roots. … was an absolute taboo. He never discussed it in public, and actually in private he did not, either” (Wolk, 334, citing Orliński, 30). Marat Grinberg, scholar of Russian Jewish and Soviet literature, and the critic Gliński both lend credence to the idea of a personal psychological taboo being predominant. “It seems that his desire to mask the Holocaust has more to do with his complicated relationship to his Jewishness rather than the overall political climate,” Grinberg wrote to me.17 Gliński concluded the same: “it was not the Holocaust that was taboo for Lem—but rather his role

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(and his family’s) as victims of the Holocaust. … nobody knew of his Jewish origins―he really succeeded in keeping it a secret….”18 Lem’s own assertions about his intent in choosing SF and eliding personal history may themselves be masks donned to cover his personal discomfort with his past, but they are worth noting: “The unfathomable futility of human life under the sway of mass murder cannot be conveyed by literary techniques in which individuals or small groups of persons form the core of the narrative…. I began writing science fiction because it deals with human beings as a species…,” he wrote. Diminishing the value of his own experiences, he continued, “I am of the opinion that the most important parts of my biography are my intellectual struggles. The rest…is of a purely anecdotal character” (“Chance,” 91, 97). Perhaps writing undisguisedly about the “anecdotes” of his Holocaust experience would have drawn so much attention that it would have detracted from his larger points about the human species. However, his work does contain a few startling exceptions to the masking, refracting, and elision of the Holocaust in the stories and novels ­discussed above.

The First Exception: His Master’s Voice Lem’s 1968 novel His Master’s Voice centers around a team of 2500 genius scientists trying to decode a repeating signal emanating from deep within the cosmos. A mathematician named Hogarth leads the team and is the narrator. As in Solaris, the scientists remain ignorant of the message senders and fail to decode the signal. Meanwhile, encoded for readers in the midst of the novel, Hogarth relates a story told to him by a member of the team, Dr. Saul Rappaport, who first discovered the extraterrestrial signal. Rappaport “came from Europe” and “emigrated to the States in 1945.” This is where Lem does use the word “Holocaust”: Hogarth writes, “He [Rappaport] left his native country as a man of thirty, alone, the Holocaust having claimed his entire family. He never spoke about it, except one evening…”19 Hogarth relates Rappaport telling him about a “mass execution [that] had taken place—the year was 1942, I think—in his hometown” in which “he was pulled off the street” and thrown into a prison yard where “they were shooting people in groups. … Some of those waiting, like him, in his turn, fell into a kind of stupor; others tried to save themselves—in mad ways” (62). The telling, compressed into four pages, includes Rappaport’s reflections on the murderers’ mindset: the “subordinates had to behave that way. …They had to batter the Jews with their rifle butts; blood had to flow from lacerated heads and crust upon faces, because it made the faces hideous, inhuman, and this way—I am quoting Rappaport—there did not appear, in what was done, a gap through which horror might peer, of compassion” (64). Inescapable here is the resemblance to Primo Levi’s conclusion in “Useless Violence” that “before dying, the victim had to be degraded to alleviate the

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killer’s sense of guilt.”20 One could lift Rappaport’s narrative out of the novel and place it inside Levi’s nonfictional work, and it would fit. Seamlessly. We have left the realm of fiction, and SF, and of metaphor and allegory, at this point. Rappaport makes the point explicitly: “Thus they had to butcher those bodies, to make them unlike people’s… This sort of explanation is usually received metaphorically, as a kind of fable, but it is completely literal” (66). That message decodes itself. Insistence on the literal creates a demand that readers recognize the reality of a historical Holocaust of degraded butchery even as the events begin to seem like fable after more than twenty years of fading memory, distorted official narratives, and Holocaust denial. His code is the lost language of history sent from an approximate future to save humankind from itself. Four years after the novel’s publication, “in a private letter to his American translator Michael Kandel,” Lem stated that Rappaport’s story was in fact his own (Gliński). Lem had been present at the June 30, 1941, Brygidki prison pogrom, where he was forced to carry out corpses as the slaughter went on for hours. Lem’s son Tomasz later recounted that “the stench” of his father’s clothes “was so horrible that they had to be burned” (qtd. in Wolk, 336). Why did Lem feel able to name “Holocaust” and “Germans” here but not in Tales of Pirx the Pilot of the same year? And why does Lem not claim Rappaport’s experience as his own in His Master’s Voice or in the memoir he published just two years earlier? There are several possible explanations, none of which are mutually exclusive. First, perhaps the always-complex censorship rules altered for a moment. “[T]rends in censorship—the control of ideas and speech and the list of prohibited topics—would change on a regular basis”—so regularly that censors themselves could not keep up (Strządała, 163–164). Lem may have sensed an opening. Second, political events in Eastern Europe may have heightened Lem’s sense of freedom or urgency. Following the bloom of the Prague Spring, Warsaw Pact countries invaded Czechoslovakia and crushed the reforms. Student protests in 1968 flared in Budapest and Warsaw as well as Paris and Mexico City. On “March 8 thousands of Warsaw University students demonstrated for freedom of expression, fair trials and an end to censorship. These demonstrations spread swiftly to other universities throughout the country, and were met by violence and arrests.”21 Lem might have felt emboldened by these flowerings of freedom to embark on greater freedom in his own work, or to protest crackdowns by being more direct about what he had witnessed. “Lem’s status might have allowed him to be more open than others” in speaking about the Holocaust (Grinberg e-mail). Third, the 1967 Arab-Israeli Six-Day War produced a fearsome unleashing of anti-Semitism that spilled across the calendar into 1968, when in March, “Government sponsored anti-Semitic acts in the wake of the Six-Day War in the Middle East cause[d] thousands of Jews to leave Poland voluntarily and

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involuntarily.”22 More than 18,000 Jews left Poland. After the expulsions, “it was not allowed to write about the Jewish community” (Strządała, 166). The famed Polish-born concert pianist Arthur Rubinstein wrote to The New York Times in April about the upsurge. Rubinstein noted the irony that just as the world was celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising, “virulent anti-Semitism is being revived on Polish soil soaked with the blood of millions of Jews.” Rubinstein described censorship of Jewish writers and “falsification and distortion of Jewish martyrdom at the hands of the Nazis, the obscene denigration of the Jewish victims of mass murder.” On the other hand, the Six-Day War “certainly played a role in raising Jewish consciousness… So perhaps by being explicit about the Holocaust in His Master’s Voice, Lem was responding to the resurgence of Polish anti-Semitism” (Grinberg e-mail). Could these combined factors have impelled or compelled Lem to be more forthrightly outspoken about the Holocaust and its Jewish victims? If they did, he still exercised caution; having learned the life-saving value of evasiveness in the war, he kept his story hidden behind Rappaport’s.

The Second Exception: “The World as Holocaust” and Faux Book Reviews Struggling with censors throughout the 1970s and becoming increasingly disenchanted with the limitations of SF (Wolk, 338), Lem had ample incentive to explore other genres. Beginning in 1980, Lem wrote a series of faux book reviews—that is, fictional works presented as reviews of authors and books which did not exist. Two of these name Nazism and genocide. Provocation (1980) reviews a two-volume work by German scientist Horst Aspernicus titled Der Völkermord (The Genocide). “The World as Holocaust” (1983), also translated as “The World as Cataclysm,” reviews a book by that title which argues that violent catastrophes and mass death are necessary to bring forth new eras. Lem exhibited a career-long tendency to experiment with new genres, but his choice of the Holocaust as faux review subject came as a response to contemporary cultural and political events that stirred him to reduce his accustomed refracting angle for depicting the Holocaust. In 1983, Lem attributed his motivation for having written Provocation “recently” to “this anthropological theory going around which is designed to justify the causes of the extermination, not only of…well, mostly the Jews by the Germans. For me, this is a fantastic hypothesis from a period of anthropology. In other words, it belongs to SF too. This is the way I see it, and my personal experiences are reflected in this story.”23 In an interview from 1985–1986, Lem pointed to the political as well as the personal as stimuli for writing Provocation and “The World as Holocaust”: “contemporary global changes: the rising antagonism between East and West, the growing reality of the Star Wars (SDI) vision, and my personal dilemmas as a Pole” (Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., 252).

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“The World as Holocaust” presents a theory of “catastrophism,” an argument that in physics and biology, at the atomic and the galactic level, the interplay between chaos/catastrophe and order/creation is necessary and interdependent for the creation of our universe, planets, human life, and civilizations. Some passages read like Third Reich thinking expanded to a cosmic scale, or a parody of Nazi ideology: If evolution’s huge investment in Thecondontia, Saurischia, Ornithischia, and in the Rhamphorhynchoidea and Pterodactyloidea had not ended in a great crash sixty-five million years ago, the mammals would not have taken over the planet. We owe our existence to that catastrophe. We emerged and multiplied into the billions only because billions of other creatures suffered annihilation.24

Change the era, adjust the numbers, and it’s easy to read this as a celebratory statement by a Nazi historian in the Thousand Year Reich explaining that if not for the annihilation of millions of “creatures,” the Reich would not have emerged and multiplied. Just as Lem used SF settings in earlier works to mask reference to the Holocaust, here he masks the Nazi Holocaust with an aggrandized geologic one. The strategy remains the same. At the non-parodic level, the theory linking chance with order in “The World as Holocaust” traces the countless converging random occurrences behind any event. It hearkens back to Lem’s statement about Highcastle that the anecdotal, accidental circumstances of his life could be stripped out so that he could focus on the larger role of chance. That statement had appeared in “Chance and Order,” an autobiographical piece published just one year after “The World as Holocaust.” During the war years, the meaning of the categories of order and chance for human life was impressed upon me…I was able to learn from hard experience that the difference between life and death depended on minuscule, seemingly unimportant things and the smallest of decisions: whether one chose this or that street for going to work; whether one visited a friend at one o’clock or twenty minutes later; whether one found a door open or closed.

“Chance and Order” and “The World as Holocaust” function as complementary pieces; both explore random chance and destruction, with the former exploring the dependence on these factors of Lem’s own life, and the latter exploring the dependence of planetary and human existence. Yet the autobiographical piece starkly illustrates that Lem had been right when he conceded that peeling away the overlay of mass murder and his own experience was “impossible to attain” (“Chance,” 90). The faux book reviews seem to constitute a cessation of Lem’s masking strategy because they name Holocaust and Nazis, but in fact they are not exceptions. Lem’s experience remains masked at multiple removes, behind a different kind of fiction, behind a fictive reviewer of non-existent authors’

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works, behind invented histories and scientific treatises. Those layers deflect his personal suffering every bit as much as the refractions of The Star Diaries, Solaris, Highcastle, and Tales of Pirx the Pilot.

The Future…and the Terminus In addition to SF, Lem wrote extensively about “futurology.” His works include titles such as Science Fiction and Futurology and The Futurological Congress. He told an interviewer, “I aim…to create models of major problems that lie ahead of us, problems that humanity will have to face right now and in the coming decades” (Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., 254). He was more forwardthan backward-looking, more interested in exploring the future than the past. Throughout his long career, across many genres, he depicted episodes of destruction and mass death that simultaneously mask and reveal his and others’ Holocaust experience, that refract it and bear witness. He repeatedly portrays catastrophic failures to decode signals—from the past and future, from the cosmos, and from other beings. Having encoded the Holocaust into his works, he illustrates the peril of failing to decode his signals about the atrocity our species has committed and may commit again. Of all his fictive works, His Master’s Voice contains the tale most closely reflecting Lem’s personal Holocaust horror—a blinding darkness glimpsed only through the protective lens of SF. Even though Rappaport’s narrative specifies Jews and Germans and Holocaust, it is still coded: Lem’s lived experience comes refracted through Rappaport, refracted again through Hogarth’s recollection of Rappaport’s story, and refracted again by the SF setting. Like the signal they are trying to decode from a distant cosmos, Rappaport’s story comes to us like a message from a receding past. It comes to us in the present, and in the future, leaving us to interpret what it signifies. Lem sends his signal to a post-Holocaust world which must determine how to avoid rushing headlong to its own terminus as a species.

Notes

1. Mikołaj Gliński, “Stanisław Lem: Did the Holocaust Shape His Sci-Fi World?” CULTURE.PL, September 19, 2017, https://culture.pl/en/article/stanislawlem-did-the-holocaust-shape-his-sci-fi-world. 2. Stanisław Lem, The Star Diaries, trans. Michael Kandel (New York: Harvest/ Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 44. 3. Czesław Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 501. 4. Stanisław Lem, Solaris: A Novel, trans. Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox (San Diego: Harvest/Harcourt, 1987), 156. 5. Stanisław Lem, “Chance and Order,” The New Yorker 59 (January 30, 1984): 88, 90. 6. Stanisław Lem, Highcastle: A Remembrance, trans. Michael Kandel (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995), 34, 64, 69, 95.

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7. Stanisław Lem, Tales of Pirx the Pilot, trans. Louis Iribarne (San Diego: Harvest/Harcourt, 1979), 186. 8. Marcin Wolk, “Stanislaw Lem, Holocaust Survivor,” reviews of Zagłada i gwiazdy: przeszlość w prozie Stanisława Lema (The Holocaust and the Stars: The Past in Stanisław Lem’s Fiction) by Agnieszka Gajewska, and Lem: życie nie z tej ziemi (Lem: Life from Another Planet), by Wojciech Orliński, Science Fiction Studies 45 (2018): 334. 9. Gaweł Strządała, “Censorship in the People’s Republic of Poland,” in Estonia and Poland: Creativity and Tradition in Cultural Communication, eds. Liisi Laineste, Dorota Brzozowska, and Władysław Chłopicki, vol. 1 (Tartu, Estonia: ELM, 2012), 165, https://doi.org/10.7592/ep.1.strzadala. 10.  Jan Kott, introduction to This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, by Tadeusz Borowski, trans. Barbara Vedder (New York: Penguin, 1976), 18–19. 11.  Roslyn Hirsch, “Translator’s Foreword,” in Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land, by Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, eds. Eli Pfefferkorn and David H. Hirsch and trans. Roslyn Hirsch (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 12. 12.  Wolk, 335. See also Melanie G. Krob, “Medicine in a World Gone Mad: Stanisław Lem’s Novel Hospital of the Transfiguration,” Medical Humanities Review 16, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 9–24. 13. “Lem’s Opinion,” Stanisław Lem: The Official Site. The Estate of Stanisław Lem, http://english.lem.pl/works/novels/the-hospital-of-transfiguration/76lems-opinion. See also Lem’s “Chance and Order,” where he says it couldn’t be published until 1955 “because it didn’t conform to the then already reigning standards of Socialist Realism” (91). 14.  Peter Swirski, “Reflections on Literature, Philosophy, and Science [Personal interview with Stanisław Lem, June 1992],” in A Stanisław Lem Reader, ed. and trans. Peter Swirski (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 24. 15. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., “Twenty-Two Answers and Two Postscripts: An Interview with Stanisław Lem,” Science Fiction Studies 13, no. 3 (November 1986): 258. 16. Phillip Lopate, “Inner Space,” essay in booklet for Solaris, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (1972; The Criterion Collection, 2011), DVD. 17. Marat Grinberg, e-mail message to author, December 27, 2018. 18. Mikołaj Gliński, e-mail message to author, December 30, 2018. 19. Stanisław Lem, His Master’s Voice, 1968, trans. Michael Kandel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1983), 62. 20.  Primo Levi, “Useless Violence,” in The Drowned and the Saved, in The Complete Works of Primo Levi, ed. Ann Goldstein and trans. Michael F. Moore (New York: Liveright, 2015), 3: 2502. 21. Arthur Rubinstein, “Poland’s Anti-Jewish Campaign,” The New York Times, April 28, 1968. 22.  Harold B. Segal, “Chronology of Major Political Events: Poland,” in The Columbia Guide to the Literatures of Eastern Europe Since 1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), xvii. 23. Raymond Federman and Stanisław Lem, “An Interview with Stanisław Lem,” Science Fiction Studies 10, no. 1 (March 1983): 13. 24.  Stanisław Lem, “The World as Cataclysm,” in One Human Minute, trans. Catherine S. Leach (San Diego: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 95.

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Bibliography Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan, Jr. “Twenty-Two Answers and Two Postscripts: An Interview with Stanisław Lem.” Science Fiction Studies 13, no. 3 (November 1986): 242–260. Federman, Raymond, and Stanisław Lem. “An Interview with Stanisław Lem.” Science Fiction Studies 10, no. 1 (March 1983): 2–14. Gliński, Mikołaj. “Stanisław Lem: Did the Holocaust Shape His Sci-Fi World?” CULTURE.PL, September 19, 2017. https://culture.pl/en/article/stanislawlem-did-the-holocaust-shape-his-sci-fi-world. Kott, Jan. Introduction to This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, by Tadeusz Borowski. Translated by Barbara Vedder, 11–26. New York: Penguin, 1976. Krob, Melanie G. “Medicine in a World Gone Mad: Stanislaw Lem’s Novel Hospital of the Transfiguration.” Medical Humanities Review 16, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 9–24. Lem, Stanisław. “Chance and Order.” The New Yorker 59 (January 30, 1984): 88–98. ———. Highcastle: A Remembrance. Translated by Michael Kandel. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995. Originally published as Wysoki Zamek in 1966. ———. His Master’s Voice. Translated by Michael Kandel. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1983. Originally published as Głos Pana in 1968. ———. Solaris: A Novel. Translated from the French by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox. San Diego: Harvest/Harcourt, 1987. Originally published as Solaris in 1961. ———. Tales of Pirx the Pilot. Translated by Louis Iribarne. San Diego: Harvest/ Harcourt, 1979. Originally published as Opowieści o pilocie Pirxie in 1968. ———. The Star Diaries. Translated by Michael Kandel. San Diego: Harvest/ Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976. Originally published as Dzienniki gwiazdowe in 1957 and expanded in 1971. ———. “The World as Cataclysm.” In One Human Minute, translated by Catherine S. Leach, 69–102. San Diego: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986. “Lem’s Opinion.” Stanisław Lem: The Official Site. The Estate of Stanisław Lem. http:// english.lem.pl/works/novels/the-hospital-of-transfiguration/76-lems-opinion. Levi, Primo. “Useless Violence.” In The Drowned and the Saved. In Vol. 3 of The Complete Works of Primo Levi, edited by Ann Goldstein and translated by Michael F. Moore, 2405–2567. New York: Liveright, 2015. Lopate, Phillip. “Inner Space.” Essay in booklet for Solaris. DVD. Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. 1972. The Criterion Collection, 2011. Miłosz, Czesław. The History of Polish Literature, 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Rubinstein, Arthur. “Poland’s Anti-Jewish Campaign.” The New York Times, April 28, 1968. Segal, Harold B. “Chronology of Major Political Events: Poland.” In The Columbia Guide to the Literatures of Eastern Europe Since 1945. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Strządała, Gaweł. “Censorship in the People’s Republic of Poland.” In Estonia and Poland: Creativity and Tradition in Cultural Communication, edited by Liisi Laineste, Dorota Brzozowska, and Władysław Chłopicki, vol. 1, 159–170. Tartu, Estonia: ELM, 2012. https://doi.org/10.7592/ep.1.strzadala.

304  R. MIDDLETON-KAPLAN Swirski, Peter. “Reflections on Literature, Philosophy, and Science [Personal interview with Stanisław Lem, June 1992].” In A Stanisław Lem Reader, edited and translated by Peter Swirski, 21–66. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997. Wolk, Marcin. “Stanislaw Lem, Holocaust Survivor.” Reviews of Zagłada i gwiazdy: przeszlość w prozie Stanisława Lema (The Holocaust and the Stars: The Past in Stanisław Lem’s Fiction) by Agnieszka Gajewska, and Lem: życie nie z tej ziemi (Lem: Life from Another Planet), by Wojciech Orliński. Science Fiction Studies 45 (2018): 332–340.

PART III

Poetry

CHAPTER 18

Poetry of Witness and Poetry of Commentary: Responses to the Holocaust in Russian Verse Marat Grinberg

Poetry of Witness and Commentary Almost half of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust were Soviet Jews, a great majority of them shot in the ravines near their native shtetlach and cities. At various points prior to, during, and in the immediate aftermath of the war, the Soviet regime acknowledged the atrocities against Jews, but rarely drew attention to them. However, from the 1950s onward, the authorities used two main tactics to present the Jewish catastrophe: universalization and obfuscation. The Jewish specificity of the Nazi extermination program was erased from official Soviet mythology and historiography of the war, as the Jewish dead were subsumed into the amorphous category of “peaceful Soviet citizens.” Despite such politics, a corpus of verse and prose on the Holocaust was composed in Russian during the Soviet period, mostly by major Russian writers and poets of Jewish origin. A small portion of it was officially published, but a great deal remained hidden in the writers’ desk drawers or was circulated clandestinely. Our concern here is poetry, a privileged genre in modern Russian literature. Russian Holocaust poems, composed both during the war and

Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are copyright © by Marat Grinberg. The poems’ originals are copyright © by the poets’ estates. M. Grinberg (*)  Reed College, Portland, OR, USA © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_18

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afterward, are often evocative of tropes and images that populate the Holocaust verse at large, but also are distinct in their subject matter, the historical moments of their creation, and the unique Soviet Jewish cultural environment. This chapter will introduce the reader to the rich diversity and complexity of Russian Holocaust verse of the Soviet period with the aim of broadening and refining our understanding of the global poetic Holocaust catalogue. The four poets under discussion—Yan Satunovsky, Boris Slutsky, Semyon Lipkin, and Aleksandr Galich—represent a distinctive stratum and epoch within official and unofficial Soviet literary sphere. They stand as both representative case studies of Russian-Jewish creativity and illustrative paradigms of the two modes of poetic responses to catastrophe which they fashioned and challenged: poetry of witness, written in the immediate aftermath of the event, and poetry of commentary, written at a temporal and spatial distance from it. The categories of witness and commentary provide a useful lens for dissecting the Holocaust verse. The first type defies and corrects the long prevalent view that any response to calamity and trauma must be delayed and belated. The intent behind the poetry of witness is to record the event and while it often takes the form of a lament or an ode, its impetus is documentary and testimonial. In the Soviet Holocaust context, it is best represented by Ilya Selvinsky’s poems on the murder of Jews in Crimea. The poetry of commentary tends to be much more lyrical, often driven by the survivor’s guilt or the obsessive desire to re-experience the horror, which the poet has not in fact lived through him/herself, and is much more conscious of the traditions with which it engages, reframes, and finds either suitable or fundamentally unfit for comprehending and representing the catastrophe. The demarcations between these two poetic modes are hardly strict; in many instances, the poetry of witness cannot help but also be the poetry of commentary, and yet they do reflect two starkly different ways of grasping the cataclysmic event. Russian scholar Ilya Kukulin points out regarding the poetry of witness, commenting on verse written in besieged Leningrad, “Here, we see poems that shape the writing of trauma in the very moment of historical catastrophe and, simultaneously, represent new speech — distorted and hopeless, but striving to rename the phenomena of disintegrated reality, and to create a new language for further survival in a world which has lost its meaningfulness but continues to exist.”1 The question of new language is the most productive here and recalls Adorno’s (in)famous statement on the barbarity of writing poetry after Auschwitz. It wasn’t, however, the poetic response as such that he deemed barbaric, but the use of traditional verse, which normalizes, commodifies, and beautifies the unnormalizable event. As suggested by Marianne Tettlebaum, Adorno forces us “to treat poems as more than just things” and to read them “not quite literally.”2 The call for metaphorical reading is particularly pertinent in the repressive Soviet context, where the reader knew

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how to look for and discover concealed meanings within an ostensibly permitted text, including poetry. Furthermore, in the later “Commitment,” Adorno emphatically claims, “I do not want to soften my statement that it is barbaric to continue to write poetry after Auschwitz.”3 Reflecting on Schonberg’s Survivors of Warsaw oratory, he argues that by turning suffering into an image, “for all its harshness and discordance it is as though the embarrassment one feels before the victims were being violated. The victims are turned into works of art, tossed out to be gobbled up by the world that did them in. The so-called artistic rendering of the naked physical pain of those who were beaten down with rifle butts contains, however distantly, the possibility that pleasure can be squeezed from it […] When even genocide becomes cultural property in committed literature, it becomes easier to continue complying with the culture that gave rise to the murder” (Adorno, “Commitment,” 252). Thus, he seems to condemn much of the poetry of commentary and also the poetry of witness, had he in fact known about it, since it relies on images and often traditional genres. Adorno sees the abstract and politically autonomous art and literature of Kafka and Becket as the only truly non-barbaric response to suffering, which operates with a new language. We cannot presume to know what Adorno would have made of the Russian poems to be discussed here, but they do test the validity of the relationship he proposes between aesthetic tradition and commodification of suffering. Resisting the Stalinist and Socialist Realist dogmas, which appropriated the nineteenth-century Russian classics and persisted in the cult of poets, such as Pushkin, this chapter’s poets maintained their own both hallowed and ironic link to Russian poetic tradition in the knowledge of the rupture within language and consciousness as embodied in the killing sites as well as the Nazi and Soviet camps. The Gulag/Holocaust nexus is pivotal to how these Russian-Jewish writers reacted to the horrors of their time.

Satunovsky (1913–1982) Our first and arguably most challenging poet is Yan Satunovsky, one of the most interesting figures of postwar Soviet underground, whose verse destabilizes the notions of both commentary and witnessing. Written at the front and responding to the immediate events of Jewish destruction, Satunovsky’s poems are neither testimonial nor documentary. They also resist any interpretation of the event. The effect on the reader of their calm, matter of fact tone, which does not foreground the catastrophe, is one of dismay and emptiness, making the hermeneutic task of decoding their meaning almost futile. Though Satunovsky is undoubtedly creating a new poetic language, which should have appealed to Adorno, and does away with any poeticity or rather breaks down the traditional poetic language, he does not “rename the phenomena of disintegrated reality,” refusing the mantle of poet as Adam or

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demiurge. Instead, Satunovsky’s language can be viewed as the speech of survival, but it is survival which, despite the subject’s deep unvoiced pain, relativizes the horror and its aftermath and deems any notion of remembrance irrelevant and impossible. It is remarkable how consistent Satunovsky was in his approach to poetry, which he was writing and numbering from 1938 at the age of 25 till his death in 1982. A chemist by profession and a war veteran, he did not officially publish a single line of his adult verse during his lifetime (collections of his children’s poetry were published). The issue is not just that he wrote for himself, or, in Soviet lingo, “for the drawer,” but that his creative and actual biography constituted the chronicle of an underground artist both in terms of his literary associations and a complete disregard for the official literary process. The Jewish theme is conspicuous in his oeuvre; contrary to the dominant paradigms of Jewish self-expression and fashioning in Russian literature, he feels no guilt, shame, or any compunction at all about his Jewishness. He unabashedly sees it as the fundamental aspect of his life, which permanently marks his difference from others and also makes him a constant real and potential target of violence. It is thus not surprising that he was one of the very first to mark the Jewish destruction during the war as separate and singular. A stubbornly aphoristic poet, Satunovsky sees his verse as a commentary on daily routine, but it is fundamentally not a hermeneutic commentary which would insert poetry into a larger exegetical tradition, Judaic, or any other. His anti-exegetical impulse, underpinned by “freedom from metrical and rhyming conventions,”4 is deliberate. The poem or rather fragment #402, written in 1965, pinpoints this willful neglect of tradition. Satunovsky calls his verse “commentaries,” a “tiny italicized script,” and poses a rhetorical question—“where is the canon of Borukh Ato, Adenoi Eleheine, Adenoi Ekhod?” In essence, the speaker does not deny the higher canon of Torah and Jewish liturgy, retained in his memory in a broken Yiddishized version, but he abstains from bringing it into his verse and engaging with it. He emphasizes the individual distinctness of his poetic voice—“my italics”—which does not compete with the higher power, a dominant trope in both Russian and modern Hebrew poetry, but operates independently of it. The same personal inconclusive mode is on display in the war poems, written in 1942, 1943, and 1944 and dealing with the Holocaust. Fragment #14 (1942) reads: Mom, mom, when are we going to get home? When will we get to see our dear plebeian courtyard and get to hear our neighbors’ conversation:

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– God, we were so afraid, we were running so fast, and you? – Well, we lived in Andijan, and you? – We were in Siberia, and you? – Well, we were killed. Mom, I want to be home so badly, I wish that everything that happened would go away And everything would be OK. (trans. Marat Grinberg)

The figure of the mother is starkly prominent in Holocaust verse as a whole; she appears in Selvinsky’s “I Saw It” and Paul Celan’s early poetry, to name just a few divergent examples. Satunovsky strips it of any pathos and melodrama and instead offers a child’s voice. Are we overhearing a conversation between a mother and her child or a soldier’s wish-fulfillment dream in which he addresses his mother who is far away or might in fact be dead? The usage of the word “plebeian” stands in direct contrast to this infantile tone and implies “mestechkovyi”—shtetl-like. Thus, coded Jewishness enters the poem. The second stanza’s neighbors’ speech replicates a Yiddish intonation and presents an imagined future postwar conversation. Some of the neighbors were in evacuation in Uzbekistan, and some in Siberia—their experience embodies the overall Soviet Jewish travails during the war. The line “and we were killed” breaks the poem’s hopeful, endearing, and playful tone. What is the reader to make of it? The dead—exterminated Jews—speak here for themselves, but there’s little comfort, either memorial or religious, in that they retain agency from beyond the grave. In Ilya Ehrenburg’s cycle about killings at Kiev’s Babi Yar, officially published in 1945, the speaker too hears the voices of the dead, who proclaim, I speak for the dead. We shall rise, Rattling our bones we’ll go – there, Where cities, battered but still alive, Mix bread and perfumes in the air. Blow out the candles. Drop all the flags. We’ve come to you, not we – but graves. (Shrayer, Voices of JewishRussian Literature, 394)

Present here is a clear impetus to remember in a ritualistic fashion, and it is precisely what Satunovsky does not fall for. The dead are always there, but no memorializing system is built upon this fact. Satunovsky realizes both the irreversibility of horror and the inadequacy of any mourning for the

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murdered, but he opts for moving ahead, leaving the dead behind. The last stanza suggests that life will return to normal—not, however, as any recompense for the destruction, which he pointedly refuses to imbue with any meaning. The fragment #31 (1943) continues in a similar vein, but also introduces another element into the inconsequentiality of killings: We’ve just arrived in Kharkov. Getting out of the car. By the monument to Shevchenko there is laughter and tears – life. A host of satisfied women walks around the garden, sits on the edge of a bench, and starts to chat: from one to the next. Say, can it be that all Jews have been killed? O, we’ve even forgotten that they used to be here. A host, a host of liberated women admires us, as if they never saw medals for bravery. (trans. Marat Grinberg)

The poem takes place in liberated Kharkov, where the jubilant and also ­“liberated” women greet and ogle the Red Army soldiers and officers. It is noteworthy that the conversation between them occurs by the monument of Shevchenko, not only the Ukrainian national poet, but also the very symbol of Ukrainian national spirit. Shevchenko brings into the picture the troubling history of Jewish-Ukrainian relations and the negative images of Jews in many of his poems. The question asked by one of the soldiers—most likely it is the Jewish speaker—of whether it’s true that all Jews have been killed, arises, like in the previous poem, seemingly out of nowhere and does not disrupt the happy, erotically suggestive conversation, presenting the genocide as a regular occurrence. The speaker, if he’s a Jew, knows the answer to his question: All Jews have been killed. Is he then testing his interlocutors? Is he hoping that at least some have stayed alive? The retort provided, “We’ve even forgotten that they used to be here,” does not shock him, or at the very least, his reaction is not registered. Was he expecting this amnesia on the part of the women? Here, the forgetfulness over the Jews’ murder is the result of the others’ perception of the Jew throughout history and the devaluing of Jewish life. There’s certainly a great deal of irony in the poem’s ending—the women admiring the soldiers’ medals for bravery—but the speaker’s participation in the overall

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jubilation after what he had heard and the lack of any response on his part is profoundly disquieting. Is he silent because the pain is too unbearable or because once again he expected no other answer? Is it a silence of stoicism and quiet revenge or of compliance with history? Satunovsky’s very poetic principles and method make choosing any of these options almost irrelevant. Satunovsky’s other poem, fragment #“33,” written at the end of the war, can be seen as perhaps breaking with the absence of any moral voice in the previous two while at the same time relativizing the catastrophe and war experiences: I did not really hate them until I saw them. They all seemed sort of mentally ill, “Kraut, Kraut, want some water? – Barely moving and mumbling something fast – “Say Hitler kaput.” Not I, not I but some copyist with a cross-eyed mug – “Hey, Kraut, did you say Hitler kaput?” – Waited by the corner and brought them a full flask – “You, enemy, drink the Russian soup.” Not I, not I, but your lice-infested Krauts – “Jude, hey, Jude, want to drink?” – long drank the yellow liquid, licking their lips, “Jude, hey, Jude, cross yourself.” (trans. Marat Grinberg)

This fragment #“33” is deeply and painfully personal. Evoking the call to hate the Nazis, made by Ehrenburg and others at the beginning of the war, Satunovsky draws a Levinasian distinction between collective sloganeering, however justified and noble it may be in this case, and the power of personal encounter, embodied in the paralleled and paronomastic “nenavidel/ uvidel”—“hated/saw.” Satunovsky may be alluding to Selvinsky’s “I Saw It,” where the speaker proclaims, “But I saw it! With my own eyes. Do you understand? I saw it.”5 This is also the only poem where the enemy appears. By describing and remembering the mocking of German POWs by the Red Army, Satunovsky humanizes them and makes worthy of if not compassion, then at least pity. It is striking, however, that the speaker does not act on this feeling. A copyist with a crossed-eyed (or crooked) face, presumably not a Jew, gives them the “Russian soup” to drink. He does not lose his moral ground, calling them “the enemy,” but does show mercy. Is the speaker incapable of showing such leniency because he’s a Jew? The poem’s last stanza supports and complicates this reading. The Germans become like the Jews, whom they earlier humiliated and killed. While this parallelism creates some sort of ironic justice in history, it also relativizes the Holocaust, making the then Jewish and the now German

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situations alike. Through its jarring fluctuation between direct speech and commentary, the poem’s very structure draws correspondences between the German and Russian quips as well as the German degradation of the Jew and the Russian degradation of the German. The speaker, a Red Army officer, is not the downtrodden, but vengeful and proud Jew. He recalls the Jewish suffering, reliving afresh the German taunting of the Jew, which he himself has not experienced, but knows intuitively and historically only too well—“Jude, hey, Jude, want to drink… Jude, hey, Jude, cross yourself.” His hatred of the Germans, “your lice-infested Krauts,” persists, both individually and collectively. This is as close as Satunovsky comes in his Holocaust verse to formulating a blunt moral reaction to his people’s murder. It is noteworthy, however, that the fragment ends with the German order to the Jew to cross himself, an act symbolic of the entirety of Christian antisemitism. The sense of the inevitability of the world’s desire to erase the Jew would always stay with Satunovsky, who wrote sardonically and yet bitterly in 1962, “It’s the end of our nation… / Markish is gone. / And Mikhoels is no more. / And I’m feeling pretty low” (Shrayer, Voices of Jewish-Russian Literature, 568).

Slutsky (1919–1986) Satunovsky’s link between the Holocaust and Soviet antisemitism, and especially the destruction of Yiddish culture by Stalin—both the poet Peretz Markish and the actor Solomon Mikhoels were killed—provides a segue into our second case study and one of Satunovsky’s main poetic interlocutors, Boris Slutsky. A poet who, unlike Satunovsky, fervently desired for his work to be openly published and debated, Slutsky was also the only Russian poet who made the Holocaust a constant central preoccupation of his writing. A decorated Red Army officer during the war, Slutsky was a major figure in postwar Soviet poetic scene and yet the bulk of his manifold oeuvre remained unpublished until the liberalizing reforms of perestroika in the late 1980s. An author of what he himself called “compressed ballads,”6 Slutsky avoided any sentimentality or grandiloquence in his poems about the Jewish tragedy or the war in general. As if heeding Adorno’s warning, he wanted to foreclose the “possibility that pleasure can be squeezed from” his words, turning “victims…into works of art, tossed out to be gobbled up by the world that did them in.” Unlike Satunovsky, however, he refused to relinquish poetry’s ability to make sense of history altogether. Slutsky’s verse is innovative, but still attached, much more so than Satunovsky’s, to the parameters of traditional versification. As in Satunovsky’s fragment #31, the trope of return to places where Jews are no more is prominent in Slutsky’s poetry. The mention of Kharkov by Satunovsky, Slutsky’s hometown, almost prophetically foreshadows it. In contrast to Satunovsky Slutsky frames his response both morally and

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ontologically. In the poem “Burdened by feelings of kinship…,”7 published in the mid-1960s, the speaker returns to what is probably Kharkov to see for himself that the city’s Jews have been killed. He questions the neighbors, “the hushed witnesses,” who are silent. Standing before them, he, a Jewish Red Army soldier, repeats “burnt,” which refers to his aunts and uncles and all the murdered Jews. Why are the “witnesses,” the townsfolk, mute? Why are they looking at the ground? The answer is clear: Quiet bystanders during the war, they did nothing to prevent the murder of their Jewish neighbors; now their lot is shame. The speaker’s reiteration of “burnt” does not merely comment on his intense grief and admitted inability to bring the dead back to life, but serves as a near incantation with which he hypnotizes the silent witnesses into an eternal, irredeemable stupor of guilt and ignominy. Slutsky’s ability to speak of brutality in a non-brutal way is evident. His decision not to be an outright judge is clear as well, but, resolutely unlike Satunovsky, he constructs a mechanism for both memorialization and moral recompense, however fragile they would be. Slutsky’s poetry of commentary is also a poetry of witness, not an immediate and befuddled witness, but one who observes the entirety of history from the vantage point of his era. A poet who possessed a deep affinity with the language of his verse—Russian—he poignantly chose to lament the murder of his people via their language—Yiddish—in what is, undoubtedly, a masterpiece of Holocaust verse in any language: I was a liberator of Ukraine, And passed through her Jewish villages. Yiddish, their language, has become a ruin long ago. It died out and has been ancient for about three years. No, didn’t die out — it was slaughtered and burned. Its folk must have been too garrulous. Everyone perished and none survived. Only their dawns and dusks survived In their poems, either sweet, or burning, Sometimes hot burning with grief, In the past perhaps too prickly, But today completely true. Described by Markish and Gofshtein, Told scrupulously by Bergelson, This world even by Einstein Cannot be tied back to life. Neither like a seed, nor like chaff, But like ashes we spread them, So that any word would rise a hundred times more Where now ruins gape their mouths. For about three years it’s been antique and ancient –

316  M. GRINBERG That language, murdered like a human being. About three years we’ve been poking fingers into its books, Into the alphabet, forgotten like a cuneiform. (trans. Marat Grinberg)

The image of Slutsky as a soldier, a Jew, a witness, and a commentator is fused in the above lines, written in either 1944 or 1947 and not published until 1987. On the one hand, he hopes that “any new word,” which implies his Russian word, would rise as an act of revenge for the destroyed Yiddish, but, on the other, he realizes that once demolished, a civilization, like its people, can never be resurrected or even fully accessed. To break through this epistemological and ontological deadlock, Slutsky posits a temporal dislocation, which mixes up scriptural and historical times and transforms myth into contemporaneity. Case in point is the remarkable poem, “Relatives of Christ,” composed in Slutsky’s last creative year, 1977, and published in 1989. Drawing on the legend that among Christ’s apostles there were two of his cousins whose fate remained unknown, the speaker inquires, “What did they do with the relatives of Christ?” This incessant question enunciated throughout the poem is perfectly rhetorical: The poet knows what was done with these proverbial relatives of Christ, whose images conceal real Jewish lives. He is afraid that the memory of them will be lost, leaving behind only suppositions and reproaches in hindsight; recall Satunovsky’s “O, we’ve even forgotten that they used to be here.” Instead of relocating the contemporary horror to the canonical past, of which there are many examples in modern Hebrew and Yiddish verse, Slutsky transforms that past into a Holocaust venue—in the desert, the “relatives of Christ” are massacred by machine guns. He envelops Christian historiography and myth, which elevate Christ and obfuscate the Jew, in the war reality. The snapshot of a firing machine-gun squad in the Near-Eastern late antiquity setting is vivid and shattering, collapsing, chillingly, myth into history, and vice versa. The poet is not interested in legends; he yearns for the actual records of his people’s elimination, whose causes he locates in Western spirituality, and imagines a primordial space of “depths” and “heights” as a home for Jews made homeless by history.

The Poets as Soviet Jewish Readers Slutsky’s temporal disruption is emblematic of the Russian poetic take on the Holocaust and our next two poets, Semyon Lipkin and Aleksandr Galich. It is rooted in the specificity of post-Holocaust Soviet Jewish culture and the modes of reading it engendered. This reading culture or what I call the Soviet Jewish bookshelf developed through subversive and implicit reading practices. Each installment of the shelf inspired a distinct way of reading between the lines, to employ Leo Strauss’s terms, which led to uncovering the texts’ subterranean meanings and valuable information. The Soviet Jewish writers themselves, including those analyzed here, were both products and shapers

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of this reading culture; hence, their own creative output was dictated by their reading methods. The modernist notion of the artist as a hermeneutic reader in tradition acquires here an additional sociological and culturological identity-forming dimension and speaks to the basis of these writers’ Jewish knowledge. Indeed, as Olga Litvak rightly points out, “Jewish literature is not a birthright… [and] Jewish authorship is a ripened fruit of particular kind of education.”8 The jumbling up of scriptural and historical times and contexts is driven by these readers-poets’ inclination toward multidirectionality, to use Michael Rothberg’s term, where the Holocaust serves as the screen for other memories and catastrophes and vice versa. Thus, Holocaust content was made permissible by sneaking it in-between the folds of the larger World War II story, as is evident in Slutsky’s collections of poetry. Often this content screened the off-limits topic of Gulag camps and Stalinism or the uncomfortable truth of Soviet implication in the Jewish destruction, as is the case in Slutsky’s “Burdened by feelings of kinship….” Trained as a between the lines reader, the poet produces his own Aesopian verse, cognizant of his readers’ parallel mind-set and the impossibility of separating one catastrophe from another. Poetry becomes the gem of both “erudition and technique” with “Relatives of Christ” as a vivid example of multidirectional screening (Litvak, “New Marranos,” 258). Slutsky’s use of the apocryphal Christian legend is pregnant with both the Holocaust and Stalinist meanings, embodied in the word “rehabilitation”: “Total posthumous rehabilitation of Jesus / led to no rehabilitation of kin.” One of the key terms of Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization policies was the “rehabilitation” of the victims of purges. Slutsky points to both the disastrous incompleteness of Khrushchev’s reforms in coming to terms with the Gulag past and the Soviet obfuscation of Jewish tragedy, evocative of Christian erasure of the historical Jew.

Lipkin (1911–2003) Best of Lipkin’s poems bear the imprint of analogous multidirectional thinking. An acquaintance of Slutsky and war veteran, Lipkin had difficulty publishing most of his poetry. Deeply knowledgeable about Jewish literature and history and with a keen sense of his Jewishness, he found his niche, as did many others, in translation, in his case, from Persian and Central Asian languages. Neither as unequivocal in his opposition to official culture as Satunovsky nor as joined at the hip to the Soviet project as Slutsky, he opted for publications in dissident and Western immigrant venues. Lipkin does not disentangle the Holocaust from the earlier history of Jewish persecution. Marginalized and giving up on playing hide and seek with the censorship machine, he’s explicit in linking Gulag and the Holocaust, substituting Slutsky’s suggestiveness with an admirable, but also less nuanced

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directness. In a long poem, “Taiga,” written in 1962, in which the speaker travels through the frozen terrain of the Gulag past and present, he ironically inquires about the recent Stalinist past: Has it been so long that in the forests The total sickness of felling thundered through? Has it been so long that axe’s hit was thought to be the wisest sound, and trees are falling like the Jews, and every ravine is like a Babi Yar? (trans. Marat Grinberg)

The trees, the silent witnesses to the horrors that took place here, are cut down to wipe away the traces and memories of terror; metonymically, they are also people killed in the purges. This desolate ground is transformed by Lipkin into a Jewish memorial, which is especially poignant, since the regime refused to put any monument on the place of the actual Babi Yar killing ravine on the outskirts of Kiev. Lipkin is invoking Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s groundbreaking poem, “Babi Yar,” published officially in 1961, which put front and center the Soviet unwillingness to commemorate the Jewish massacre. The Jewish and the Gulag dead are shaped by Lipkin into a single body amid a suffering nature that might yet wreak its revenge. Lipkin’s verse is decidedly one of commentary. In order to get at the experience of the survivor both epistemologically and phenomenologically, he breaks the flow of time and creates a phantasmagoric and eerie portrait of twentieth-century Moses: Via the concentration camp trail, where the night is sleepless, like a prison cell, via the sewage pipe, amidst the pigwash and shit, via all the German, Soviet, Polish and all sorts of other paths, through all the ovens, through all the morgues, – through all the passions, through all the deaths, I walked. And terrible and awesome, God, for the first time, revealed Himself to me, burning with the flame of gas chambers in the bush that burned but was not consumed. (trans. Marat Grinberg)

There are parallels between Lipkin’s rewriting of the story of Moses’s life and his encounter with the divine in the burning bush episode in chapter three of Exodus and Yehuda Amichai’s poem, “Two Hopes Away from the Battle” (1958), where “the speaker – a modern-day Moses – envisions peace but is too exhausted to reach the far-off heaven of his hopes”9:

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Two hopes away from the battle, I had a vision of peace. My weary head must keep walking, my legs dreaming apace. The scorched man said, I am the bush that burned and that was consumed: come hither, leave your shoes on your feet. This is the place. (Scharf Gold, “Burning Bush,” 51–52)

Amichai’s poetry was included in the collection of Israeli verse in Russian, edited by Slutsky—an important part of the Soviet Jewish bookshelf—and thus, Lipkin might very well have been aware of him. Both Lipkin’s and Amichai’s use of scripture is multidirectional: for Amichai Exodus screens his nation’s wars while for Lipkin it points to the Holocaust. In an emblematic and significant move, Lipkin also combines the Holocaust and Stalinism; his concentrationary universe spills into all paths, German, Russian, and Polish. It is noteworthy that while the Israeli poet makes the divine promise embedded in the unconsumed burning bush null and void by turning it into the scorched soldier, the Russian-Jewish poet affirms the spiritual grandeur of revelation and yet radically transforms it by reimagining as the depository of all the gassed Jews burned in the camps’ crematoria. The boldness of Lipkin’s vision of the continuity of revelation may have to do with the poem’s date— 1967—the year of the Israeli defeat of Arab armies during the Six-Day War, which was seen by many as miraculous and led to the renewed sense of pride among Soviet Jews. Lipkin’s other remarkable poem, “Ashes,” composed in the same year, departs from sacred sources and produces nonetheless a post-apocalyptic picture, equally mystical and historically/biographically detailed: I was the ashes that cooled down with neither thought nor image nor speech, when I came out onto the earthly path from my mother’s womb – from the oven. Having understood yet nothing about life, and having not yet mourned my previous death, I walked amidst Bavarian grasses and desolate barracks. Without hurry, in the twilight, there flowed Volkswagens and Mercedeses, but I kept whispering: “They burned me. How do I get back to Odessa?” (trans. Marat Grinberg)

Lipkin’s resurrected image of the burned Jew—a zombie, an automaton, an elemental deformed child—is the Jewish ashes brought to life, literally the progeny of the camp furnaces. The poet makes this nonentity of destruction his lyrical “I” despite the fact that it takes away his very ability to write

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poetry—his speech, a loaded trope in Russian poetry. Yet the incessant desire to return to Odessa, Lipkin’s hometown with rich pre-war Jewish history, turns this sublime figure of horror into an irredeemably nostalgic and moving sign, which stands somewhere in-between Ehrenburg’s “rattling bones,” who, in the fulfillment of Ezekiel’s vision, come to the postwar landscape, and Satunovsky’s radically desentimentalized “we were killed.” It’s striking that Lipkin places his “ashes” in the German landscape; historically, Odessa was under the Romanian control as part of the Transnistria region during the war. Most of the Odessan Jews were killed either in the city or in the neighboring camps and ghettos, where the Romanians cooperated with the SS. The makeup of the Soviet Jewish bookshelf sheds some light on Lipkin’s thinking. The same year that the poem was written, a collection of translations of young German-language poets, Lines of Time, was published in Russian with the preface by Lev Ginzburg, a prominent translator from German, who also produced the only lengthy Soviet account of the Eichmann trial. Paul Celan’s poems were the first in this book, including Ginzburg’s own translation of his “Death Fugue.” This definitive Holocaust verse, which Ginzburg described neutrally in the preface as a “poetic requiem to the inmates of Nazi camps,”10 would have been undeniably singled out by Soviet Jewish readers of the volume. Lipkin would have hardly bypassed it either. Celan’s “Death is a master from Deutschland”11—in Ginzburg’s Russian, “death is the German maestro” (Stroki vremeni, 19)—might have prompted Lipkin’s “Bavarian grasses” while Shulamith’s “ashen hair” undoubtedly inspired his image of resurrected ashes. Celan, a versatile translator of Russian poetry, would have been pleased by such influence.

Galich (1918–1977) The link between Soviet Jewishness and reading is also instrumental for approaching our last subject, Aleksandr Galich. A successful playwright and screenwriter, Galich fell out of favor with the regime in the late 1950s, becoming a cult figure for the disaffected intelligentsia through his poems, which he performed to a guitar accompaniment. In the early 1970s, he was expelled from the Writers’ Union and forced to leave the Soviet Union in 1974. He died in Paris in 1977 under mysterious circumstances. Galich’s niche was the bard movement, which included such other important poets/singers, as Bulat Okudzhava and Vladimir Vysotsky, who were beloved by millions. His other niche was a small select group of Jewish converts to Russian Orthodoxy under the spiritual guidance of Father Alexander Men, who baptized most of them. A complete taboo from the standpoint of Judaism and in the context Jewish history, Galich was perturbed by his apostasy. He approached it, however, through the prism of his Jewishness, as it was shaped by his reading sensibilities. Joseph Brodsky, who resolutely refused a conversion option, but identified with Christianity as a stand-in

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for Western culture, summed up this Russian/Soviet/Jewish readerly mindset well: “in Russia, people don’t do a separation – Old Testament and New Testament. One is read as a sequel to the other. So in a sense I recognized that Christianity is a civilization or a culture or a realm of spiritual regard which is presumably my own…. The choice was neither in terms of church nor in terms of practice but in terms of orientation…”12 Galich articulates a similar thought in his poem, “Eternal Transit”: And we constantly chase our own tales – in haste! And we constantly confuse the Old and New Testaments. But maybe it’s time to stop running, my Jews, – Haven’t we been running for the past two thousand years? (trans. Marat Grinberg)

These lines can be read as the poet’s call for conversion or repatriation to Israel or return to Judaism—shortly thereafter Galich would visit Israel and write a Zionist poem, “Sand”—but all three options are derived from his experiences as a Soviet Jewish reader who takes pride in “[his] great ancestors the Jews Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Isaiah, Matthew, and John, those who wrote the best of all humankind’s books… the Bible and the Gospels.”13 Thus, while “it is hard to make a Jewish writer out of a devout Christian,”14 there’s no contradiction, as far as the internal logic of Galich’s worldview is concerned, between the prominence of Jewish and Holocaust themes in his repertoire and his newfound faith. Echoing all of this chapter’s poets, Galich’s response to the Holocaust is supremely multidirectional in conflating the Jewish and Soviet through the Holocaust/Gulag analogy and the sequencing of Old and New Testaments. Like Lipkin, Galich was impacted by the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War and, I would argue, the publication of Celan’s “Death Fugue” in Russian. In the poem, “Requiem for Those Who Were not Killed or the Song Composed in Error,” he sees the assault on Israel as the next Holocaust, perpetrated with the help of the Soviet regime, who supplied the Arab armies. The “not killed” here are the remaining three and a half million Jews, whose death cannot come sooner for the world: Six and a half million Six and half million Six and a half million And even ten would have been better Admirers of round numbers Should be pleased to hear That the pitiful remainder Can easily be burned, shot, hung We’re experienced at it. (Nakhimovsky, Russian-Jewish Literature and Identity, 165)

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Alluding through his refrain to Celan’s “you’ll rise up as smoke to the sky / you’ll then have a grave in the clouds where you won’t lie too cramped” (Felstiner, Paul Celan, 33), Galich depicts the murdered Jews as the biblical Adam and Eve: Like a thin stream of smoke, Like a thin stream of smoke, Like a thin stream of smoke, Like a thin stream of smoke, Eve rises up to the sky, Adam, beaten to death, Falls at the roll call. (trans. Marat Grinberg)

Like Slutsky and Lipkin, Galich infuses history with scriptural archetypes which do not erase the phenomenological “immediacy” (Nakhimovsky, Russian-Jewish Literature and Identity, 159) of the Holocaust for the poet due to his sharing in the Jewish fate—a perpetual train journey to Auschwitz: Our train is departing to Auschwitz, That train of ours leaves for Auschwitz On this day and every other. (Nakhimovsky, Russian-Jewish Literature and Identity, 159)

In this poem, “The Train,” Auschwitz also screens Stalin’s postwar eradication of Yiddish culture, as the poem is dedicated to the great Yiddish actor and director Solomon Mikhoels, assassinated in 1948. As Satunovsky put it, “and Mikhoels is no more.” The full force of Galich’s multidirectionality is on display in his sketch of Madonna—the mother of Christ—in a cycle about Stalinist purges from 1968: … And Madonna walked around Judea. And still lighter, thinner, even leaner, Her body was becoming with each step. All around there was the noise of Judea Who did not want to remember her dead. But the shadows were reflected in the loam, And the shadows were concealed in every cubit– Shadows of all Russian transit prisons and Treblinkas, All deceits, betrayals and crucifying! (trans. Marat Grinberg)

The components of Galich’s “confused” imagination coalesce in these understated yet deeply powerful lines: the parallelism of Gulag and the Holocaust, the equation of the New Testament plotline and characters with the Jewish fate, and the destabilizing of the scriptural terrain as raw recent history of terror.

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Galich’s turn to the mother of Christ links him with Slutsky and Lipkin. Slutsky invokes her as early as 1941 in a poem where Mary is all-forgiving except when it comes to the Jew whom she strikes. As in “Relatives of Christ,” Slutsky approaches Christianity on polemical Jewish terms and pointedly demarcates between the Old and New Testaments, which leads to his formulation of the oncoming Jewish catastrophe and the Christian responsibility for it: Intermarriages and pogroms, What else does future hold for us, except for that, — Us, the nation of scholars and tailors… This time we might not survive — The technology is different and the people meaner! Let it be! What will remain of us in centuries is Blood of the very last Jews — In veins! Or simply on her hands. (trans. Marat Grinberg)

Previously in the poem, in line with traditional Russian Orthodox imagery, Slutsky described Mary’s hands as white. The last line makes this depiction fully come to light: Their whiteness and that of Christendom is to be soaked in Jewish blood. Lipkin, however, “confuses” the Old and New Testaments via the figure of Mary. In a 1956 poem, published in 1974, he transports her and the child Jesus to a Nazi killing site, another Babi Yar, where they’re shot: There already thundered on cobblestones the German tanks far ahead. Already Pharisees and bookworms burned their certificates and records. That morning Joseph expired, lucky guy, he left for quietude, and abandoned for horrible torments his wife who in torments gave birth… She did not become a glorious icon, when she fell onto the earthly dust, as the boy fell, bloodied, with her milk on his lips. Not yet in need of salvation, the soldiers walked to the barracks, but thus there began the resurrection of people, of love, of the world. (trans. Marat Grinberg)

Lipkin both judaizes the holy family and clings to the pejorative image of Jews in the Gospels and the redeeming nature of Christ’s death.

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Galich’s poetry of commentary via the New Testament is drastically different from Slutsky’s and more akin to Lipkin’s. It yearns for the spiritual while ultimately diluting religiosity and couching it in literary and humanistic terms. In 1955, Vasily Grossman, who produced the largest and most significant corpus of prose writings on the Holocaust in Russian, penned an essay, “Sistine Madonna.” The essay was not published, but Lipkin, one of Grossman’s closest friends, most certainly read it, and perhaps was directly responding to it. Grossman, an indelible part of the Soviet Jewish bookshelf, provides a blueprint for this idiosyncratic Soviet idea of spirituality (dukhovnost’): What can we, people of the epoch of Fascism, say before the court of the past and the future? Nothing can vindicate us. We will say, “There has been no time crueler than ours, yet we did not allow what is human in man to perish.” Seeing the Sistine Madonna go on her way, we preserve our faith that life and freedom are one, that there is nothing higher than what is human in man. This will live forever and triumph.15

Grossman views Raphael’s painting as a humanistic archetype. The baby that the Madonna hands out to the world is the myriads of victims, who will perish in the Holocaust and Gulag. By the 1970s, many among the dejected Soviet intelligentsia, especially its Jews, who would increasingly choose to leave the Soviet Union, were not at all sure that “what is human in man” is, in fact, anything redeeming. The notion of resistance in search of freedom acquired for them a deeply fatalistic outlook. The fatalistic feeling that he was perennially on the train to Auschwitz never left Galich either. While in life, he chose apostasy to alleviate this fear, in his poetry, he remained wistfully nostalgic for the “special Russian-Jewish air,”16 and the Zionist longing to acquire a homeland.

Conclusion Satunovsky’s lowering of poetry to aphoristic fragments and its resistance to impose meaning on history while being entrenched in it; Slutsky’s speaking from the mythological and historical depths of Jewish time and his era with a rebuke to the world for its erasure of the Jew; Lipkin’s pervasive fusion of Stalin’s and Hitler’s crimes which imbues the dead with a frightening and sublime voice; Galich’s emblematic “confusion” of the Old and New Testaments and his futile yearning for safety as a Jew: The links and disjoints

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between this chapter’s poets testify to the multidirectional unity of Russian/ Soviet Holocaust verse. Examined at the intersection of Soviet contexts, individual poetics, and global Holocaust tropes, the Russian-Jewish poems of witness and commentary reify our grasp of Holocaust representation, the workings of cultural memory, and the strategies of survivability within an oppressive society, the topic of an ever-increasing urgency today.

Notes



1.  Ilya Kukulin, “Afterword,” in Written in the Dark: Five Poets in the Siege of Leningrad, ed. Polina Barskova (New York: Ugly Duckling Press, 2016), 129. 2.  Marianne Tettlebaum, “Nothing Is Meant Quite Literally: Adorno and the Barbarism of Poetry After Auschwitz,” in Critical Insights: Holocaust Literature, ed. Dorian Stuber (Ipswich: Salem Press, 2016), 210–212. 3.  Theodor Adorno, “Commitment,” in Can One Live After Auschwitz: A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 251. 4.  Maxim D. Shrayer, ed., Voices of Jewish-Russian Literature: An Anthology (Brighton: Academic Studies Press, 2018), 565. 5. Maxim D. Shrayer, I Saw It: Ilya Selvinsky and the Legacy of Bearing Witness to the Shoah (Brighton: Academic Studies Press, 2013), 93. 6. Boris Slutskii, O drugikh i o sebe (Moscow: Vagrius, 2005), 191. 7. Boris Slutskii, Sobranie sochinenii v triokh tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1991), v. 1, 390. 8. Olga Litvak, “The New Marranos,” in A Club of Their Own: Jewish Humorists and the Contemporary World, eds. Eli Lederhendler and Gabriel Finder (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 258. 9. Nili Scharf Gold, “A Burning Bush or a Fire of Thorns: Toward a Revisionary Reading of Amichai’s Poetry,” Prooftexts 14, no. 1 (January 1994): 49–69. 10.  Lev Ginzburg, “Predislovie,” in Stroki vremeni, ed. A. Isaeva (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1967), 6. 11. John Felstiner, ed., Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 33. 12.  Valentina Polukhina, ed., Iosif Brodskii: bol’shaia kniga interv’iu (Moscow: Zakharov, 2000), 178. 13.  Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, Doubly Chosen: Jewish Identity, the Soviet Intelligentsia, and the Russian Orthodox Church (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 54. 14. Alice Nakhimovsky, Russian-Jewish Literature and Identity (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1992), 153. 15. Vasily Grossman, The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays, trans. Robert Chandler (New York: New York Review of Books, 2010), 173–174. 16. Vladimir Khazan, Osobennyi evreisko-russkii vozdukh: k problematike i poetike russko-evreiskogo dialoga v XX-m veke (Jerusalem: Gesharim, 2001).

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Bibliography Adorno, Theodor. “Commitment.” In Can One Live After Auschwitz: A Philosophical Reader, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, 240–258. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Chandler, Robert, Boris Dralyuk, and Irina Mashinski, ed. The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry. New York: Penguin Books, 2015. Felstiner, John, ed. Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan. Translated by John Felstiner. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. Gold, Nili Scharf. “A Burning Bush or a Fire of Thorns: Toward a Revisionary Reading of Amichai’s Poetry.” Prooftexts 14, no. 1 (January 1994): 49–69. Grossman, Vasily. The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays. Translated by Robert Chandler. New York: New York Review of Books, 2010. Isaeva, A., ed. Stroki vremeni. Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1967. Khazan, Vladimir. Osobennyi evreisko-russkii vozdukh: k problematike i poetike russko-evreiskogo dialoga v XX-m veke. Jerusalem: Gesharim, 2001. Kolganova, Maria, ed. Menora: evreiskie motivy v russkoi poezii. Moscow: Evreiskii universitet, 1993. Kornblatt, Judith Deutsch. Doubly Chosen: Jewish Identity, the Soviet Intelligentsia, and the Russian Orthodox Church. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Kukulin, Ilya. “Afterword.” In Written in the Dark: Five Poets in the Siege of Leningrad, edited by Polina Barskova, 129–136. New York: Ugly Duckling Press, 2016. Litvak, Olga. “The New Marranos.” In A Club of Their Own: Jewish Humorists and the Contemporary World, edited by Eli Lederhendler and Gabriel Finder, 245–267. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Nakhimovsky, Alice. Russian-Jewish Literature and Identity. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1992. Polukhina, Valentina, ed. Iosif Brodskii: bol’shaia kniga interv’iu. Moscow: Zakharov, 2000. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Shrayer, Maxim D. I Saw It: Ilya Selvinsky and the Legacy of Bearing Witness to the Shoah. Brighton: Academic Studies Press, 2014. Shrayer, Maxim D., ed. Voices of Jewish-Russian Literature: An Anthology. Brighton: Academic Studies Press, 2018. Slutskii, Boris. O drugikh i o sebe. Moscow: Vagrius, 2005. Strauss, Leo. Persecution and the Art of Writing. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988. Tettlebaum, Marianne. “Nothing Is Meant Quite Literally: Adorno and the Barbarism of Poetry After Auschwitz.” In Critical Insights: Holocaust Literature, edited by Dorian Stuber, 200–213. Ipswich: Salem Press, 2016.

CHAPTER 19

“At Last to a Condition of Dignity”: Anthony Hecht’s Holocaust Poetry David Caplan

“I have read no ‘literary’ works about the prison camps that seem anywhere nearly as effective as straight reportorial accounts,” the poet Anthony Hecht observed, “because the facts themselves are so monstrous and surreal they not only don’t need, but cannot endure, the embellishment of metaphor or artistic design.”1 To write poetry after Auschwitz might not only be (as Adorno famously and cryptically observed) “barbaric”2: It also is to explore a subject perhaps too large for any artistic representation, rife with opportunities for distortion and exploitation. Contemplating the ethical and aesthetic challenges that Holocaust art faces, Hecht reframed them in generic terms, asserting that nonfiction accounts are the most effective because they lack literature’s tendency to stylize “the facts themselves.” The events reject such treatments: They “cannot endure” the imposition of literary technique. Hecht’s preference was hardly unique. As Ruth Franklin observes, “the first generation of Holocaust scholars placed primary emphasis on establishing evidence—facts, proofs—rather than on literary or aesthetic representation.” Like the scholars, the broader readership eagerly sought what Hecht called “straight reportorial accounts.” This shared desire for “facts” encouraged a particular kind of writing about the Holocaust. “Testimonial memory, rather than the novel,” Franklin notes, “has become the dominant form of Holocaust writing.”3 Attention to creative nonfiction and narrative theory would suggest that Hecht drew a too neat contrast, since “reportorial accounts” are never straight: They also always involve a reframing of events.4 Even with this D. Caplan (*)  Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, OH, USA © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_19

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qualification in mind, the broader point still stands: that literature foregrounds “metaphor” and “artistic design” to a greater degree than nonfiction typically does. Of all the literary art forms, Hecht’s primary form, poetry, most openly emphasizes what he called literary “embellishment.” As a GI, Hecht directly witnessed the Holocaust: He helped to liberate the Flossenburg concentration camp, an experience that haunted him. Even when drawing from his personal experiences, though, Hecht’s Holocaust poems do not imitate “straight reportorial accounts.” Instead, they conspicuously employ a number of intricate, challenging metrical forms—including the sestina, ballad, and rhyming forms borrowed from Renaissance metaphysical poetry—and offer a number of erudite literary allusions and echoes. In this essay, I will historicize this strategy within the larger fields of twentieth-century Jewish-American literature and culture, in order to understand the emphasis that Hecht places on dignity as a response to both the Holocaust and twentieth-century American culture. The dignity he claims helps him to create a complex poetry, written out of conflicting influences and aspirations, poetry both indebted to Western literary culture and suspicious of it. Constructed in rhyming quatrains, Anthony Hecht’s “More Light! More Light!” contrasts a pair of gruesome murders. The first scene is set in the English Renaissance. It describes a Christian martyr grotesquely burned at the stake, praying as he painfully dies, “His legs were blistered sticks on which the black sap / Bubbled and burst as he howled for the Kindly Light.”5 In the second, more intricately plotted scene, a Nazi guard orders a Polish prisoner to bury two Jews while they are still alive. When the Pole refuses, the Jews are ordered to bury the Polish prisoner. After they do so, the guard commands the Jews and the Pole to switch places and then shoots the Polish prisoner “in the belly” “and in three hours [he] bled to death”: No prayers or incense rose up in those hours Which grew to be years, and every day came mute Ghosts from the ovens, sifting through crisp air, And settled upon his eyes in a black soot. (Hecht, 45)

The final rhyme “mute” and “soot” marks the prisoner’s cruel fate, the last humiliation that he faces. The murdered Jews turn into a waste product, a substance without any traces of humanity, “soot.” Their deaths finish the process of stripping them of their humanity. “Much casual death had drained away their souls,” the poem explains the Jews’ decision to bury the Pole, who previously refused to bury them (Hecht, 45). Instead of showing appreciation, the Jewish prisoners act out of a desperate desire for self-preservation. The Polish prisoner endures a similarly harsh fate. The SS officer carefully controls events, so the Polish prisoner dies after following the order he previously refused, and after the Jews, he wanted to save betrayed him. In a final, grotesque touch, their ashes settle on his face, a “mute” by-product of genocide. The contrast between the early and later scenes is clear. The Christian

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martyr retains “at least his pitiful dignity.” The Christian martyr dies as a human; the Polish prisoner and the Jews do not. Hecht’s literary and cultural allusions also exhibit a certain sophistication. The poem’s title “More Light! More Light!” quotes Goethe’s reported dying words. Twice the poem refers to a monument to Goethe, “the shrine at Weimer beyond the hill” (Hecht, 45). To place monuments of Western culture in close proximity to the camps is to consider how a culture produced such refinement and barbarity. Hecht witnessed firsthand the concentration camps’ horrors, when his infantry troop helped to capture the Flossenburg camp. His Holocaust poetry often returns to his experience of the Holocaust as a crisis in Western humanism. As George Steiner similarly observed, “In our own day the high places of literacy, of philosophy, of artistic expression, became the setting for Belsen …. Barbarism prevailed on the very ground of Christian humanism, of Renaissance culture and classic rationalism.”6 Hecht’s mastery of literary history both honors and indicts the culture that developed the forms he employs. In “More Light! More Light!” the verse form bestows a certain dignity to the events and the victims he describes. If the Nazi guard methodically strips the Jews and the Polish prisoner of their humanity before killing them, Hecht’s retelling of the event adds a respectful solemnity. It lessens the force of the insult. Another of Hecht’s well-anthologized poems, “It Out-Herods Herod. Pray You Avoid It,” employs a similar strategy, starting with the literary reference its title offers. “It Out-Herods Herod. Pray You Avoid It” quotes Hamlet’s advice to the actors, alerting an attentive reader to an internal playacting, a play-within-the-play. The poem conveys a father’s thoughts as he puts his children to bed. In the disquieting final stanza, he offers a prayer rooted in his powerlessness, pleading that his children remain ignorant of their vulnerability: And that their sleep be sound I say this childermas Who could not, at one time, Have saved them from the gas.7

In the pairing of “childermas” with “the gas,” Hecht expands a borrowed rhyme. Also composed in rhyming quatrains (albeit with a different scheme), Thomas Hardy’s “Christmas: 1924” bitingly dismisses Christianity: “Peace upon earth,” was said. We sing it. And pay a million priests to bring it. After two thousand years of mass We got as far as poison gas.8

Hardy’s brutally pithy verse culminates with an ironic antithesis rhyme.9 As first presented, the serene Christian ceremony and the weapon belong

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to different realms, those of religion and warfare, antiquity and modernity. Accordingly, the congregants singing “Peace upon earth” and the soldiers breathing in deadly gas apparently stand in opposition. Yet the rhyme insists on their connection; it holds “two thousand years of mass” responsible for “poison gas.” Hardy’s rhyme crafts a contrast into an accusation. Swift and hard as a well-placed fist, the rhyme smacks Christianity. Hecht’s rhyme works differently. “[I]t is a peculiarity of English,” Northrop Frye observes, “that all obtrusive or ingenious rhymes belong to comic verse.”10 Addressing a bleak subject, Hecht’s rhyme approaches the obtrusiveness and ingenuity associated with comic verse as his almost fanciful rhyme conveys a brutal insight. In a characteristic gesture, Hecht introduces a longer, less common word, “childermas,” revising Hardy’s reference to “mass.” The context highlights the word’s oddity. Hecht’s quatrain consists of twenty-two words, all monosyllabic, with the conspicuous exception of “childermas.” The pinched vocabulary emphasizes the anomalous word, which dominates the line, claiming three of its six syllables and two of its three stresses. As if to mitigate this effect, the rhyme departs from the strategies that contemporary poetry handbooks typically suggest. “Poets tend to place the monosyllabic word first, before the polysyllabic word whose last syllable rhymes with it,”11 John Drury observes while Timothy Steele advises, “If one rhymes a common word with an unusual one, it may be well to have the unusual word come second.”12 Hecht’s rhyme does the opposite: The rarer polysyllabic rhyme-word (“childermas”) precedes its monosyllabic, more ordinary pair (“gas”), an arrangement that keeps Hecht’s otherwise “obtrusive” and “ingenious” rhyme from turning comic. Hecht’s sophisticated rhyme displays a specialized skill. For Jews of Hecht’s generation, rhyme does not function simply as a neutral verse technique; it also presents an instrument of contempt and a cultural test. “It is singularly unfortunate,” W. H. Auden lamented, “that, in a rhyme-poor language, the words ‘Jew’ and ‘Jews’ should have so many more rhymes than most, for this has facilitated the composition in English of cheap comic verses about the race.”13 This linguistic feature enabled a great variety of anti-Semitic poetry, a genre still popular through Hecht’s early adulthood. AntiSemitic street rhymes, a study published in the early 1950s concludes, “are an important medium through which negative, derogatory and hostile attitudes to the Jews are implanted.”14 The study lists nearly fifteen pages of examples and six sub-genres, including several street rhymes from the New York City of Hecht’s childhood. The street rhymes, though, form only one element of a broader literature that ranges from the “cheap comic verse” that Auden cites to schoolyard taunts and the nursery rhymes such as “The Rogue of a Jew”: Jack sold his gold egg To a rogue of a Jew Who cheated him out of The half of his due.15

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The rhyme offers sonic evidence as the fact that “Jew” and “due” rhyme putatively confirms the Jew’s essential thieving nature. The prosodic structure embodies a worldly knowledge; the rhyme’s “correctness” clinches the point that Jews act dishonorably. A “bad” or partial rhyme, then, potentially threatens a poet’s credibility. For this reason, a bulletin published by the American National Socialist Party ventured into literary criticism in order to ridicule what it called “JEWISH RHYME”: The poet laureates of the American (Red) Student Union evidently let their accents get in the way when composing ditties. “If you wear cotton, “[sic] Japan gets nothing.” It doesn’t rhyme in English, but the addition of a Jewish accent will produce the correct rhythmic effect.16

The bulletin’s anonymous writer depicts Jews as inarticulate and bumbling, marked by “a Jewish accent.” Just as the Jews unsuccessfully hide under the disguise of “American Student Union,” their rhyme cannot disguise their inferiority. Rhyme presents a cultural test that the Jewish “poet laureates” fail; the botched rhyme discredits Jews as Americans, not just writers and political activists. When they write “ditties,” they reveal their uncouth, unseemly “accents.” “JEWISH RHYME” means bad rhyme because the Jews cannot master the language. The verse technique confirms that they remain ignorant outsiders, betrayed by the defective English they speak. The final rhyme in “It Out-Herods Herod. Pray You Avoid It” indirectly contests such arguments. “[M]y instinct for contrast and dialectic is almost always at work, as a dramatic element of the poem,” Hecht explains, “so that any flamboyance is likely to be confronted or opposed by counter-force, directness, elemental grit.”17 Pairing “flamboyance” and “elemental grit,” the final rhyme asserts the author’s magisterial control at the moment the speaker bemoans his helplessness. Until the last line, the poem includes no indication that the speaker is Jewish. Introduced at that point, this revelation exposes his peculiar powerlessness. To be a Jew is to face the possibility that anti-Semitic violence might claim his and his children’s lives. About to reveal his Jewish identity, though, the speaker recognizes the date as a Christian day of remembrance, “childermas.” Among their other functions, religions structure time. They keep holidays and other commemorations as their calendars mark the significance of any given day. In another poem, Hecht emphasizes this fact when he mentions a massacre of Jews as taking place “on that day, Saturday, February 14th, / The Sabbath, and dedicated to St. Valentine.”18 This list expresses the dual sense of time that marks Jewish life in a gentile culture, born from the experience of living according to two calendars, each with its own demands and allowances. In particular, the second line balances two contrary means to grasp the same day’s

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significance: the Jewish Sabbath and the Christian feast for a martyr. The rhyme similarly yokes together Christian and Jewish calamities: “childermas” and the Holocaust. The reference parallels the two incidences, both involving the murder of children. As with his fancier rhyme, Hecht offers a more obscure Christian reference than Hardy; he mentions “childermas,” not the commonplace Christmas. The reference’s appropriateness underscores the poet’s cross-cultural knowledge. Recalling a date some Christians might not know let alone commemorate, the poet shows that he masters both ways of looking at the world when, smoothly, he makes them rhyme. Ironically, Hecht sounds most Jewish when a self-created accent asserts an identity for the poet, when the “perfect counterfeit, the very self and voice of the poet-in-the-gray-flannel suit”19 (as James Wright once called Hecht) resists the trajectory many trace for Jewish-American literature. Immigration dominates the most popular accounts of Jewish-American literature’s development.20 “The linguistic story of Jewish American writing has been in large part a passage out of Yiddish, the language of immigrants, and a passage into Hebrew, the language of religious rites of passage so formative in Jewish identity,” observes Hana Wirth-Nesher.21 Likened to a second immigration, this “passage” leaves traces of both languages in Jewish-American writing. “For Jews, forgetting language has been intertwined with losing faith; performing language has signaled religious affiliation” (CE, 14). As in the example of a bar or bat mitzvah, a Jew signals his or her Jewishness by performing a Jewish language. While Yiddish and Hebrew suggest Jewish authenticity, English evokes fear and displacement. “To be the child of the immigrants from East Europe is in itself a special kind of experience,” Delmore Schwartz noted, “and an important one to an author”: He has heard two languages through childhood, the one spoken with ease at home, and the other spoken with ease in the streets and at school, but spoken poorly at home. Students of speech have explained certain kinds of mispronunciation in terms of this double experience of language. To an author, especially to a poet, it may give a heightened sensitivity to language, a sense of idiom, and a sense of how much expresses itself through colloquialism. But it also produces in some a fear of mispronunciation; a hesitation in speech; and a sharpened focus upon the characters of the parents.22

Such anxieties abound in Jewish-American literature, as when Cynthia Ozick’s lawyers fear that “[t]hose two influential vowels”—“the ‘a’ a shade too far into the nose, the ‘i’ with its telltale elongation”—“had the uncanny faculty of disqualifying them for promotion” (quoted in CE, 149). “I implore you to forgive my speaking of English,” the narrator of Everything Is Illuminated asks, updating the theme.23 Even those who speak English with American accents carry the burdens of their parents who do not. In a short story written by Rebecca Goldstein, the daughter of a rabbi recalls overhearing a group of congregants mocking her father’s “very heavy European accent.”24 “It was a

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primal scene of devastation,” she confesses. To account for it, she details its impact, wrestling with what she calls “a contradiction I spent my early life trying to resolve,” the difference between how she hears her father and how others hear him, “I count that moment as among the three of four most painful in my life. Its memory burned in me, night after sleepless night, for a very long time” (SA, 182). As in this lingering embarrassment, a memory that refuses to lose its vividness, the motif of linguistic humiliation haunts JewishAmerican literature as “a primal scene of devastation.” In contrast, Hecht’s work bristles with linguistic confidence, inspired by the markedly different circumstances of his life, education, and literary ambitions. Hecht’s parents were upper-middle-class Americans, born, like their parents, in the States. His father attended Harvard, though family circumstances compelled him to drop out in order to run the family business. Born in 1923, Hecht grew up on the Upper East Side, educated mainly at Christian private schools. In middle school, he attended the required chapel services each morning, “which,” as he later recalled, “I enjoyed because it postponed the humiliation of my poor class performances.” Atheists, his parents never took him to synagogue, not even during the High Holidays, setting a pattern he continued without regret as an adult. In the one apparent departure from this pattern, the family “went to the home of some aunt or uncle, never seen on any other occasion” for a Passover Seder.25 Hecht’s failure to remember the relative’s name suggests how little they and the occasion meant to him. Hecht did not receive a bar mitzvah or any formal Jewish education. The languages he acquired mark his and his family’s commitments. Hecht learned German, French, Italian, and some Latin, but knew no Hebrew, lacking even the ability to vocalize Hebrew script. In the words of his widow, Helen Hecht, “religion was not part of his life.”26 Hecht’s upbringing and education also could be heard in his venerable speaking and reading voice, though, tellingly, listeners struggled to place Hecht’s accent. Reporting for The New York Times, Dinitia Smith observed of Hecht, “a classicist if there ever was one,” “He sits very still. His accent is almost English,” repeating the peculiar phrase, “almost English” she used a decade before to describe James Merrill, heir to the Merrill fortune.27 J. D. McClatchy observed Hecht more precisely, “Most striking is his voice—a plumy, resonant baritone that, to my ear, sounds like no one else so much as the actor Claude Rains.”28 Interviewing Hecht for the Paris Review “Art of Poetry” series, McClatchy addresses Hecht’s mysterious baritone at the very start, introducing a question in the form of a recollection: I remember being at a reading of yours some time back, and overhearing two people sitting behind me. “He’s English, isn’t he?” the one said to her neighbor. “No,” the other replied, “he was born in Germany and then was forced to flee to England before the war.” Obviously those two had been listening carefully—to your tones of voice, and to the subject of some of your poems. It’s just the facts they got all wrong.

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To which Hecht replied: I suppose my voice must sound affected in some way, though there is no “natural” diction or pronunciation into which I might relapse. I’ve heard my voice recorded, and by now I feel it sounds just like me. Doubtless it’s a mask of some sort; a fear or shame of something, very likely of being Jewish, a matter I am no longer in the least ashamed of, though once it was a painful embarrassment. When my voice took on its present character I just can’t say. But in high school—the Horace Mann School for Boys, in Riverdale, New York—I played the role of John Worthing in The Importance of Being Earnest, and I worked hard at my speech for that play.29

Hecht’s answer starts defensively. A Jew born and raised in New York, Hecht knows that others will hear his voice as a pretentious denial of his religion, ethnicity, and nationality. He also knows that criticism bears a certain truth. Yet Hecht adds a rebuttal: “though there is no ‘natural’ diction or pronunciation into which I might relapse. I’ve heard my voice recorded, and by now I feel it sounds just like me.” His voice, then, matches his mature self. It corresponds to his experience, instead of denying it. The particular dignity that Hecht claims marks him as a distinctly Jewish poet; in this respect, he resembles other modern Jewish intellectuals who expertly mastered the voice of culture. “It is ironic,” Michael Ignatieff notes of Isaiah Berlin, “that the voice which two generations of British radio listeners took to be the voice of the Oxford intellect should actually have been a Riga Jew’s unconscious impersonation of his English contemporaries. Over time, it went from being an impersonation to being the man himself.”30 Closer to home, Berlin’s American counterpart, Lionel Trilling, the “leading American Jew of culture,” inspired widespread admiration, as well as perhaps envious contempt.31 Neither Riga nor an Orthodox childhood in Queens stands behind Hecht’s development. Accordingly, when Hecht considers his development, he modifies familiar terms. Instead of an “impersonation” that turns into “the man himself,” he remembers a theatrical training, lacking “any ‘natural’ diction or pronunciation into which I might relapse.” “[B]y now,” he concludes, “I feel it [my voice] sounds just like me.” The complexity of Hecht’s achievement can be seen in his four-part poem, “Rites and Ceremonies,” which reflects on both the Holocaust and the longer history of violent European anti-Semitism. The final section, “Words for the Day of Atonement,” opens: Merely to have survived is not an index of excellence, Nor, given the way things go, Even of low cunning. Yet I have seen the wicked in great power, And spreading himself like a green bay tree. And the good as if they have never been; Their voices are blown away on the winter wind.

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And again we wander the wilderness For our transgressions Which are confessed in the daily papers.32

T. S. Eliot clearly stands behind these lines. In addition to their numerous echoes, shared structural devices, and allusions, Hecht’s verse borrows a characteristic poetic stance. With sly deflation, Edmund Wilson described T. S. Eliot as “an actor in his person, [who] developed his public self as a theatrical character, or characters. This process no doubt began with his original transformation of the American into a Britisher.” Enumerating Eliot’s “repertoire,” Wilson noted “the Anglican clergyman, one of Eliot’s most successful, if not most exhilarating impersonations”: You can hear how the voice is handled in the droning and monotonous recording he has made of the Four Quartets […] Eliot makes clergyman jokes, he laughs a clergyman’s laugh; you could swear he wore a turned-around collar.33

Eliot performed this role so well that the Four Quartets grew into a sermon staple as Christian ministers of various theological and political commitments cited Eliot’s lines with a reverence that approached awe. “I keep returning to those two lines of T. S. Eliot,” William Sloane Coffin noted of the passage, “human kind / cannot bear very much reality.”34 At least three times in five years Coffin quoted those lines from his pulpit at Riverside Church, just as Pastor Alfred Poirier addressed church leaders with the same words, adding, “How true. We cannot bear much reality; life is too hard.”35 Hecht heard the Four Quartets differently than Wilson, with far more appreciation. “[T]he mere attainment of calm after so much violence, including contempt and self-contempt,” Hecht notes, “is somehow stirring in a way that rises at last to a condition of dignity, and exhibits its own austere and genuine beauty.”36 Instead of a risible impersonation, Hecht heard “a condition of dignity” he sought to reproduce. “Words for the Day of Atonement” does not present a private meditation. Instead, the lines sound liturgical. Grave and ceremonial, with rhythms as august as their vocabulary, they present words to be intoned, more wisdom literature than intimate disclosure. In the process, the lines demonstrate how poetic influence works counter-intuitively. If Hecht impersonates an Anglican impersonating a clergyman, it is also true that Eliot’s poetry helped Hecht to sound like a Jewish sage. An example illustrates this point. Addressing his fellow physicians as the Secretary-Treasurer of the American Pediatric Society/Society for Pediatric Research, Doctor Norman Siegel quotes Hecht’s line as the title of his column, “Merely To Survive Is Not An Index of Excellence,” adding, “This ancient wisdom is attributed to an unknown Talmudic scholar and represents an important benchmark to consider not only as we assess our roles as individuals but academic medicine at large and even our Society more specifically.”37 Doctor Siegel commits an understandable mistake. Editing

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Mahzor for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, published under the auspices of the Conservative Rabbinical Assembly, Rabbi Jules Harlow includes a passage from “Words for the Day of Atonement” starting with these lines. The surrounding prayers appear in their original Hebrew with English translations; a note at the back of the book discretely acknowledges Hecht’s authorship of his lines, which, like the Hebrew sources, receive no attribution in the main text. Placed amid these traditional Yom Kippur prayers, Hecht’s poem easily passes for anonymous “ancient wisdom.” Of course, Eliot presented a complicated model for a Jewish poet. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, debates about Eliot’s anti-Semitism gained widespread attention with the publication of two books devoted to the subject, Christopher Ricks’s T.S. Eliot and Prejudice and Anthony Julius’s T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form.38 A slew of articles followed as scholars debated the issue.39 In particular, many Jewish writers castigated themselves and each other for their previous reticence, decrying it a failure of nerve. Speaking for those associated with Partisan Review, Irving Howe noted a quality rarely ascribed to that legendarily fierce group, “We mewed like pussycats when it came to Eliot. For Eliot was a poet we greatly admired…. We failed to find—and this is a judgment of retrospect—a coherent and dignified public response to the troubling passages about Jews that lie scattered in Eliot’s work.”40 Another of Hecht’s contemporaries, Cynthia Ozick described her classroom experience reading Eliot, “The overt flaws — the handful of insults in the poetry — I swallowed down without protest. No one I knew protested.”41 Offered decades after the fact, such confessions sought to make amends. In contrast to such facilitations and self-questioning, Hecht quietly offered what Howe sought: “a coherent and dignified public response.” In essays, interviews, and correspondence, Hecht repeatedly decried what he saw as Eliot’s anti-Semitic views and often mentioned the pain that such prejudice caused him. “Eliot was my first master and guide, my touchstone and literary parent,” Hecht observed, responding to symposium about Eliot and anti-Semitism, a debate he closely followed. “It is hard to come to terms with such a mentor when elements of anti-Semitism seem unmistakably to appear in his poems and essays.”42 Years after the death of his “first master and guide,” “touchstone and literary parent,” Hecht still employs such intimate terms because the issue remains rawly personal. For Hecht, Eliot presents a more profound and troubling figure than a great artist who expressed distasteful views. Eliot represents how the culture Hecht aspires to join simultaneously lures and rejects him: In my generation anti-Semitism was widespread and very common, scarcely to be avoided, and indeed regarded as a sign of cultivation on the part of not a few. One of my earliest literary heroes, Eliot, wrote lines I found personally wounding … It [anti-Semitism] was virtually a badge of polite society.43

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Eliot embodied a painful paradox: Anti-Semitism functioned as the “sign” of the “cultivation” Hecht sought. The phrase “free-thinking Jews,” Hecht observed, “sticks in the mind (as in the craw).”44 For Hecht, Eliot’s assessment, “Reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable,”45 retains such force because Eliot coolly dismisses Hecht’s ambition. Eliot’s more qualified position stung more than Pound’s anti-Semitic ravings as Eliot targeted his most devoted readers, keeping his characteristically understated, literate tone. “[T]he Jewish intellectual of my generation,” Leslie Fiedler observed, defining the source of Hecht’s anguish, “cannot disown him [Eliot] without disowning an integral part of himself.”46 In response, Hecht neither denied his Jewishness nor feigned public displays of religiosity. Hecht developed a mature position: He learned from Eliot, though Eliot’s positions pained him. As if to resist additional damage, in his poetry and personal manner Hecht again insisted on his dignity. He developed the cultivation and rejected its “sign” of anti-Semitism, harboring the suspicion that two might be inextricably linked. A recent collection illuminates Hecht’s approach. Robert Fitterman draws from the procedures of conceptual art for his collection, Holocaust Museum, which consists wholly of captions taken from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, cut and pasted from the museum’s Web site. A generation divide informs the Fitterman’s and Hecht’s aesthetic differences. Born more than a quarter century after Hecht, in 1959, Fitterman considers the Holocaust as experienced through cultural and educational institutions such as the Holocaust Museum. Instead of crafting verse in intricate metrical forms, Fitterman employs the Internet as a composition resource. At the same time, Holocaust Museum tests Hecht’s claim that “straight reportorial accounts” of the Holocaust are superior to literary expressions. The poetry excludes all the images and does not add any of the poet’s own language. In this respect, the book offers what Hecht asked for: “the facts themselves” without “the embellishment of metaphor or artistic design.” Organized into thematic sections, however, the captions implicitly interpretive the events they memorialize. The book offers an implied narrative about the Holocaust and its meaning, a movement from “Propaganda” to “Liberation.” Reading it, a reader experiences an odd sensation. Three hundred captions evoke what is not present: the unseen photographs and the victims whose lives they document. The poems suggest that no accounting of the facts can ever be complete and that each remains a limited, partial explanation of an event whose meaning remains elusive. For instance, the flat description, “View of the door to the gas chamber at Dachau next to a large pile of uniforms. [Photograph #31327]”47 evokes the larger loss and its unknowability. The reader does not learn the victim’s identities, let alone experience the walk through that door to the gas chamber. The “large pile of uniforms” only hints at what happened.

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Fitterman’s poems update Hecht’s subject matter and technique. They make art from Internet data, not historical verse forms, and interrogate the nature of institutional collective memory, the museums where many schoolchildren born in a different century than the Holocaust learn about it. Fitterman’s poetry shows a different kind of mastery than Hecht’s, expressive of a more severe skepticism. Whereas Hecht’s poetry restores at least a “pitiful dignity” to subject and poet alike, Holocaust Museum lists fact after fact to show how much they evoke and how little they explain.

Notes



1. Anthony Hecht, The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht, ed. Jonathan F. S. Post (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2013), 263. 2.  Theodor W. Adorno, Samuel Prisms, and Shierry Weber, trans., Prisms (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 34. 3. Ruth Franklin, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3. 4.  See, for instance, Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook,” in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990); John D’Agata, The Lifespan of a Fact (New York: Norton, 2012) as well as Franklin, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction, 11. 5. Anthony Hecht, Collected Earlier Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 64. 6. George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman (New York: Athenaeum, 1967), ix, 5. 7. Hecht, Collected Earlier Poems, 68. 8. Thomas Hardy, Selected Poems, ed. Harry Thomas (London: Penguin, 1993), 190. 9. I take the term “ironic antithesis rhyme” from Marjorie Perloff’s helpful study, Rhyme and Meaning in the Poetry of Yeats (Mouton: The Hague, 1970), 93. 10. Northrop Frye, Collected Works on Northrop Frye: Northrop Frye’s Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Imre Salusinszky (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 65. 11. John Drury, The Poetry Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Cincinnati, OH: Story Press, 2006), 252. 12. Timothy Steele, All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999), 194. 13. W. H. Auden, Forewords & Afterwards, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 496. 14.  Nathan Hurvitz, “Jews and Jewishness in the Street Rhymes of American Children,” Jewish Social Studies 16, no. 2 (April 1954): 150. 15. Leonard Leslie Brooke, The Nursery Rhyme Book, ed. Andrew Lang (Bristol: Frederick Warne and Co., 1897), 68. 16. Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States: Hearings Before a Special Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Seventy-fifth Congress, Third Session-Seventy-Eighth Congress, Second Session, on H. Res. 282, Vol. 3 (October–November 1938) (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office), 2353.

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17. Anthony Hecht and Philip Hoy, Anthony Hecht in Conversation with Philip Hoy (London: Between the Lines, 1999), 79–80. 18. Hecht, Collected Earlier Poems, 42. 19. James Wright, A Wild Perfection: The Selected Letters of James Wright, ed. James Arlington Wright (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 81. 20. See also Vivian Gornick, “Demon Doubt: An Interview with Vivian Gornick,” Boston Review, posted August 5, 2008, where she observes: Jewish-Americans did something in American literature that no other culture has done— they created world-class literature out of the immigrant experience. And that’s the only thing that mattered in Jewish-American writing.

















21. Hana Wirth-Nesher, Call It English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 3. 22. Delmore Schwartz, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1982), xix. 23.  Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated: A Novel (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 32. 24. Rebecca Goldstein, Strange Attractors (New York: Viking, 1993), 181. 25. Anthony Hecht and Philip Hoy, Anthony Hecht in Conversation with Philip Hoy, 18, 15–16. 26. Phone interview with Helen Hecht, conducted September 15, 2008. 27. Dinitia Smith, “Distilling the Music of Poetry; A Half-Century as a Bulwark of Rhyme and Meter,” The New York Times, January 21, 2003; Dinitia Smith, “The Poet Kings and the Versifying Rabble,” The New York Times, February 19, 1995. 28. Anthony Hecht, “The Art of Poetry XXXX, Anthony Hecht,” interviewed by J. D. McClatchy, The Paris Review, 108, Fall 1988, 163. 29. Anthony Hecht, “The Art of Poetry,” 164–165. 30. Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (New York: Henry Holt, 1998), 3. 31. Philip Rieff, Fellow Teachers (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 198. Bitingly Alfred Kazin noted the “adopted finery” that filled Trilling’s “conversation,” derisively quoting one example, “I should scarcely have believed that.” See Alfred Kazin, New York Jew (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 43. 32. Hecht, Collected Earlier Poems, 45. 33. Edmund Wilson, The Bit Between My Teeth: A Literary Chronicle of 1950–1965 (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996), 383–384. 34. William Sloane Coffin, The Collected Sermons of William Sloane Coffin: Volume One: The Riverside Years (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 32, 293, 395; T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, 1971), 14. 35. Alfred Poirier, The Peacemaking Pastor: A Biblical Guide to Resolving Church Conflict (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2006), 20. See also N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York: Harper Collins, 2008), 180. 36. Anthony Hecht, “T.S. Eliot,” Literary Imagination 5, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 16. 37. Norman Siegel, “Merely to Survive Is Not an Index of Excellence,” American Pediatric Society/Society for Pediatric Research Newsletter, September 1998, available at http://www.aps-spr.org/newsletter/fall%2098/Siegel.htm. 38. Christopher Ricks’s T.S. Eliot and Prejudice (London: Faber and Faber, 1988); Anthony Julius’s T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

340  D. CAPLAN 39.  See, for instance, “Special Section: Eliot and Anti-Semitism: The Ongoing Debate,” Modernism/Modernity 10, no. 1 (January 2003): 1–70, which includes Ronald Schuchard’s “Burbank with a Baedeker, Eliot with a Cigar: American Intellectuals, Anti-Semitism, and the Idea of Culture” and responses from David Bromwich, Ronald Bush, Denis Donoghue, Anthony Julius, James Longenbach, and Marjorie Perloff, “Eliot and Anti-Semitism: The Ongoing Debate II,” Modernism/Modernity 10 (September 3, 2003): 419–454, with contributions from Jonathan Freedman, Bryan Cheyette, Ranen OmerSherman, and Jeffrey M. Perl. 40. Irving Howe, “An Exercise in Memory,” The New Republic, March 11, 1991, 29–30. 41. Cynthia Ozick, Fame & Folly (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 8. 42. Anthony Hecht, letter to Ron Schuchard, April 27, 2003. Hecht is responding to Ronald Schuchard’s “Burbank with a Baedeker, Eliot with a Cigar: American Intellectuals, Anti-Semitism, and the Idea of Culture” and the responses published as “Special Section: Eliot and Anti-Semitism: The Ongoing Debate.” 43. Anthony Hecht and Philip Hoy, Anthony Hecht in Conversation with Philip Hoy, 26. 44. Anthony Hecht, The Hidden Law: The Poetry of W.H. Auden (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 268. Hecht describes Eliot’s anti-Semitism in numerous venues. In addition to the passages cited in this essay, see, for example, Anthony Hecht, “Three Who Made a Literary Revolution,” Review of Peter Ackroyd’s T.S. Eliot: A Life, The Washington Post, December 9, 1984, Melodies Unheard, 8–9, “T.S. Eliot,” 13–15, and On the Laws of the Poetic Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 130, which collects the Andrew W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts that Hecht delivered at the National Gallery of Art. 45.  T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1934), 20. 46. Leslie A. Fiedler, “What Can We Do About Fagin? The Jew-Villain in Western Tradition,” Commentary, May 1949, 412. 47. Robert Fitterman, Holocaust Museum (Denver: Counterpath, 2013), 61.

Bibliography Auden, W. H. Forewords & Afterwards. Edited by Edward Mendelson. New York: Vintage Books, 1974, 496. Brooke, Leonard Leslie. The Nursery Rhyme Book. Edited by Andrew Lang. Bristol: Frederick Warne and Co., 1897, 68. Coffin, William Sloane. The Collected Sermons of William Sloane Coffin: Volume One: The Riverside Years. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008. Drury, John. The Poetry Dictionary, 2nd ed. Cincinnati, OH: Story Press, 2006, 252. Eliot, T. S. After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1934. ———. Four Quartets. New York: Harcourt, 1971. Fiedler, Leslie A. “What Can We Do About Fagin? The Jew-Villain in Western Tradition.” Commentary (May 1949): 411–418. Fitterman, Robert. Holocaust Museum. Denver: Counterpath, 2013.

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Foer, Jonathan Safran. Everything Is Illuminated: A Novel. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. Frye, Northrop. Collected Works on Northrop Frye: Northrop Frye’s Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Edited by Imre Salusinszky. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. Goldstein, Rebecca. Strange Attractors. New York: Viking, 1993. Gornick, Vivian. “Demon Doubt: An Interview with Vivian Gornick.” Boston Review, August 5, 2008. Hardy, Thomas. Selected Poems. Edited by Harry Thomas. London: Penguin, 1993. Hecht, Anthony. “The Art of Poetry XXXX, Anthony Hecht,” interviewed by J. D. McClatchy, The Paris Review, 108, Fall 1988. ———. Collected Earlier Poems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004, 64. ———. The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht. Edited by Jonathan F. S. Post. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2013, 263. ———. “T.S. Eliot.” Literary Imagination 5, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 3–17. Howe, Irving. “An Exercise in Memory.” The New Republic, March 11, 1991, 29–31. Hurvitz, Nathan. “Jews and Jewishness in the Street Rhymes of American Children.” Jewish Social Studies 16, no. 2 (April 1954): 135–150. Ignatieff, Michael. Isaiah Berlin: A Life. New York: Henry Holt, 1998. Julius, Anthony. T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Kazin, Alfred. New York Jew. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996. Ozick, Cynthia. Fame & Folly. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. Perloff, Marjorie. Rhyme and Meaning in the Poetry of Yeats. The Hague: Mouton, 1970. Poirier, Alfred. The Peacemaking Pastor: A Biblical Guide to Resolving Church Conflict. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2006, 20. Ricks, Christopher. T.S. Eliot and Prejudice. London: Faber and Faber, 1988. Rieff, Phillip. Fellow Teachers. New York: Harper and Row, 1973. Schwartz, Delmore. In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. New York: New Directions Publishing, 1982. Siegel, Norman. “Merely to Survive Is Not an Index of Excellence.” American Pediatric Society/ Society for Pediatric Research Newsletter, September 1998. Smith, Dinitia. “Distilling the Music of Poetry; A Half-Century as a Bulwark of Rhyme and Meter.” The New York Times, January 21, 2003. ———. “The Poet Kings and the Versifying Rabble.” The New York Times, February 19, 1995. Steele, Timothy. All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999. Steiner, George. Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman. New York: Athenaeum, 1967. United States Congress, Special Committee on Un-American Activities. Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States: Hearings Before a Special Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, SeventyFifth Congress, Third Session-Seventy-Eighth Congress, Second Session, on H. Res. 282, Vol. 3 (October–November 1938). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Wilson, Edmund. The Bit Between My Teeth: A Literary Chronicle of 1950–1965. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996.

342  D. CAPLAN Wirth-Nesher, Hana. Call It English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Wright, James. A Wild Perfection: The Selected Letters of James Wright. Edited by James Arlington Wright. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008. Wright, N. T. Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church. New York: Harper Collins, 2008.

CHAPTER 20

Wound Marks in the Air and the Shadows Within: A Poetic Examination of Dan Pagis, Paul Celan, and Nelly Sachs Shellie McCullough

More than 70 years after the Final Solution’s implementation was put into motion, the Holocaust and the efficacy of its representation have a continuing and cogent place in our contemporary world. Expressions of memory, both individual and collective, for those who lived through the Holocaust, shape and inform the central question for both poetry and philosophy in a post-World War II context: the ability to speak about the unspeakable. Both memory and imagination appear as private or inward, but manifest publicly in political, legal, and even artistic discourse. This engagement with witnessing gives the Holocaust voice in public ritual and commemoration, offering a kind of philosophical and historical reflection and, at times, even interaction. The interweaving, intertwining dialogue with history, memory, and trauma embodied in the poetry of Dan Pagis, Paul Celan, and Nelly Sachs features defining characteristics of Holocaust poetics that we are still grappling with today. Even the term Holocaust poetics has proven contentious from the outset, which is why Adorno’s 1951 reference to aestheticizing suffering through the medium of poetry is still so compelling.1 That being said, often overlooked is Adorno’s later qualification of his initial statement that poetry after Auschwitz is as necessary as it is impossible (Adorno, 452),2 and also suggested that poetry in this context is akin to a cry of pain (Adorno 1973, 355).3 But poeticizing Holocaust testimony is not the same as understanding the historical

S. McCullough (*)  The University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX, USA © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_20

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event, as several scholars have established (Lang 2000; Leak and Paizis; Langer 1998; Lipstadt, 84). How can we separate aesthetics of poetry and expressions of pain? One important way to reframe this query would be to reverse the question to ponder: Is the medium of poetic aesthetic separated from pain for the poet? In the case of Holocaust poetry, specifically that of Pagis, Celan, and Sachs, the answer to that is no. Poetry is not at odds with thinking and feeling, but expresses ways of thinking and feeling poeticized (Boase-Beier, 6). Scholarship in this area also points to what Rothberg terms traumatic realism (Rothberg 2000). Arguing that what is often connected to historical realism of the Holocaust is always tied to the Shoah’s comprehensibility (he lists Arendt and Goldhagen as those in this category of those who believe the Holocaust can be understood) and the sheer incomprehensibility of realism in representing the magnitude of the Holocaust, which Rothberg links to those such as Lanzmann and Wiesel (Rothberg 2000, 3–7).4 Traumatic realism brings together both the incomprehensibility of the catastrophe and the attempt at aesthetic representation. This book chapter will delineate various ways in which traumatic realism simultaneously engages historical representation as well as individual suffering and memory. By covering a spectrum of concerns that span the artistic to the autobiographical and collective to the individual, this chapter aims to offer a multilayered vision of Holocaust witnessing perspectives while also abbreviating the mutual light each of these poets shed on one another. In maneuvering between text and context, I seek to underscore the ways in which traumatic realism witnessing places under the microscope both cultural and individual perceptions that meet at the nexus of individual and collective Shoah commemoration. Beginning with the youngest of the survivors at the time of camp liberation, Dan Pagis, like Paul Celan, hailed from the Bukovina, its rich tapestry of cultural traditions and its constant political interruptions. Dan Pagis was born in 1930 into a Jewish household culturally dominated by the German tongue his parents spoke at home (Ezrahi, Booking Passage, 158).5 Pagis lived happily in his hometown of Radautz, Bukovina until the age of four, when his mother Yuli died (158). At the age of eleven, the young poet was sent to a forced labor camp at Transnistria with his grandfather, who unfortunately died during their captivity, leaving a young Pagis totally and utterly alone in the world. By 1946, the sixteen-year-old Pagis had survived the forced labor camp and immigrated to Mandate Palestine in order to be reunited with his father, who was working as a chemist. Stepping foot in the Holy Land seems to have triggered an initiation for a metamorphosis of sorts, as it is at this point that Pagis began to chronicle Holocaust events through his poetry. Pagis’s poem entitled “Written in Pencil in a Sealed Railway Car,” which appeared in the 1970 publication Gilgul,6 is highly structured piece comprised in Pagis’s trademark short clipped phrases, incomplete sentences, and tellingly ends with an ominous interruption.7

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The poem begins by definitively placing both reader and speaker “Here in this carload” with the biblical figure Eve. In its original Hebrew, “Written in Pencil” is actually composed in the style of a tercet, which arranges 19 words over 6 lines (Felstiner, M. Hebrew Poetry, 221).8 Rhythmically speaking, the original Hebrew version of “Written in Pencil” is composed of 12 syllables that astoundingly balance 6 to 6 at midpoint (222). Dialectically this pattern places testimony as a critical response to genocide by writing both directly and indirectly with full understanding that it will not reach anyone having been written in pencil in a “boxcar” on the way to genocidal death. Essentially, this places a pencil, the very symbol of Pagis’s art and vehicle of his testimony, as a counterweight to the technological symbol that enabled the mass extermination of the Jews by means of a “boxcar.” The poetic metaphor here embodies how traumatic realism bridges together both the representation of genocidal horror through an unknown boxcar’s destination and the attempt to convey, to speak about, the senseless horror through writing about it. By the second and third lines of the poem, the reader finds that “eve” is not alone, but is in fact with “abel my son.” This allusion immediately connotes the biblical story of Cain and Abel in which Cain commits the first murder, thereby making his brother the first victim. In both English and Hebrew, “abel” embodies all that is good, righteous, and innocent, but is murdered despite these redeeming characteristics. The emphasis on biblical, moral connotations placed here by the artist cannot be coincidental or merely placed to aid in its poetic structure, because Pagis related in a 1983 interview 3 years before his death, “…I do feel like some sort of Abel figure” (Felstiner, M. Hebrew Poem, 222). Again, this exemplifies how Pagis employs the Januslike aspect to convey the many faces of victims who died in the Holocaust, but in doing so, the poet also forces humanity into acknowledging the murder of 6 million of their “siblings.” In this traumatic realism confession, we find again that Pagis’s poetic hide-and-seek guerrilla-style tactics allow the poet to speak for many through a single speaking subject. By the fourth line, however, the trajectory of the poem takes a sharp turn in both temporality and meaning. Until line 4, the poem’s voice had been spoken in the present tense of “I am eve”; however, here Eve turns directly to the reader to ask, “if you see my other son” (Pagis, V. Directions, 29).9 This short, clipped line forces Eve’s present tense into an untouchable, future conjecture and most importantly shifts previous biblical facts and statements into speculations left unanswered. Ontology and theodicy blur because one wonders why Eve is alone with Abel and surmises that Adam, and perhaps even God himself, has abandoned her. This points directly to the second crucial structural element conveyed here—namely Eve’s address to the reader in the second person register as “you.” Powerfully, considering the poetic context, this incorporates, indeed calls to, “you” (the reader or hearer of this poem), to engage and acknowledge Eve’s plea. The shift to second person “you” forces the reader to become a part of, and a witness to, the poem’s events.

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By incorporating witnesses who are asked to carry forth her message, Eve’s ­testimony coerces bystanders into engaging her voice. The full force of this biblical, historical lineage of speech finally culminates and hits the reader full force in the last line, “tell him that i.” In Hebrew, it becomes relevant that the verb phrase for “tell him” is “tagidu” because this is also the word used in the book of Job when the Lord God speaks to his oppressed parable servant in Job 38:4, “…Tell (‘tagidu’) if thou hast understanding” (Felstiner, M. Hebrew Poem, 223). This delineation is crucial because for Job, as well as the 6 million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, knowledge did not precipitate understanding, and certainly attempting to speak, or directed “to tell,” of their experiences, tests the limits of both language and belief. By setting up this structure, the poet stealthily situates the historical time period of World War II and slyly through allusion suggests that it might be a mirroring of Job’s divinely ordained dilemma. Traumatic realism here spans time and the cosmos by representing a graphite message left in a boxcar on its way to a genocidal ending being voiced by a biblical mother figure. Also abbreviating this notion is that the root verb for tagidu that is employed in Job mirrors the word contained in the liturgical Haggadah which is the codified narrative of the Jews’ deliverance from oppression celebrated during Passover (Felstiner, M. Hebrew Poem, 223). This allusion also functions as a continual memorial due to the fact that the poem never truly ends and therefore mimics an eternal retelling of the codified story contained in the Haggadah. Because all letters in “Written in Pencil” are lower case, when the poem abruptly cuts off, the reader is forced back to the beginning again in an attempt to find closure. Effectually this means that the poem is read and replayed in the manner of a memorial styled litany or refrain. This effect produces the phenomena of a funneling of 6 million individual previously silenced voices that will replay like a continual film reel in the public ritualistic setting of a reading in which listeners become part of the witnessing and are asked to pass the message on. What perhaps matters most here is that there is no closure in this poem. The end never comes, and the last line of the poem is left gaping open in the manner of a linguistic laceration. There is also no post-liminal period after the codified ritual performance of “eve” that would allow a community of readers to witness her testimony. Again, by invoking the sacred Haggadah, this poem embodies how faith and identity have not only been interrupted and displaced, but have been unequivocally violated. The lack of ellipses at the end of “tell him that” has the effect of placing both reader and speaker in exile where suddenly, and abruptly, time no longer exists. The silence that reins in line six resonates paradoxically louder than any primal scream could: Sudden aposiopesis of speech breaks off mid-sentence and leaves all coherent possibilities in a sinister state of suspended animation. The speech here is not brought to a standstill in the manner of the famous imagery found on ancient Grecian urns, but more closely resembles the “…lava covered bodies at Pompeii” (Ezrahi, 344).

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The shards of poetic voices defiantly refuse to be buried and evade concrete definitions. Six short, clipped lines of poetry comprise a communal memory of mass murder, while still managing to disguise and submerge individual and unique Holocaust experiences. The unspoken end of “Written in Pencil” bespeaks the possibility of a thought becoming a communal act every time the poem is read either publicly or privately. The reader is a necessary component here, who does not simply overhear a plea, but is asked to pass it on. Traumatic realism here presents suffering as individual and collective, but disrupts understanding by cutting off closure of the poem as well as incorporating readers into performing an act based on a handwritten boxcar plea. Along the lines of literary disruptions referencing physical displacement, Paul Celan’s poetry embodies similar characteristics. Born in close proximity to Dan Pagis also from a German language home, Paul Antschel was born on November 23, 1920, in Czernowitz, Bukovina (Hamburger, xxi).10 Ghetto deportations began in 1941, and in 1942, Celan’s parents were deported to concentration camps where his father died of typhus and his mother was shot to death (Hamburger, xxi). The psychical trauma incurred by death of Celan’s mother is a theme that will haunt his future verses throughout his career. In 1944, Celan’s Romanian concentration camp was liberated, and soon after the poet returned to his studies in Bucharest (Ozsvath, Encyclopedia of Holocaust Literature, 28).11 It is also at this point that Celan decided to change the spelling of his name from Antschel to Celan (28). After liberation from the Romanian labor camp, the poet’s life began to change professionally and privately. In 1950, Celan received his degree and became a lecturer of German language, and in 1952, he married artist Gisele LeStrange (Hamburger, xxii). Now living in Paris, Celan’s verses begin to show traces of French surrealism, and his poems become much more complex and chaotic in structure, resembling traumatic realism. Labyrinthine, elaborate poems become a marker for this artistic period that included the publications of Sprachgitter and Die Niemandsrose. One such poem, entitled “Huhediblu,” embodies a Freudian symbol for repressed memory, but also fixates on the manner in which writing relates to prophecy and madness, especially in response to Holderlin’s use of Wahn. Celan worked on the collection containing Die Niemandsrose, the publication “Huhediblu” appeared in, from March 1959 to May 1963, the same time period he worked on his speech, “Der Meridan” (Colin, 130–131). The poem and the speech seem to inform each other, and yet “Huhediblu” never offers a truly unified, identifiable subject position or voice and even disconnects subjective experience from expression. Celan situated “Huhediblu” as the sixth and central of the twelve poems forming Die Niemandsrose’s fourth and last section. The first of the 5 other poems in this initial section are all short pieces. In this manner, “Huhediblu” becomes the threshold or door to a final set of poems before the structural reduction of the texts which occurs from Antenwende on. After “Huhediblu,”

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and the six poems that follow it, the “long poem” almost completely vanishes from Celan’s oeuvre.12 In keeping with a palimpsestic theme, the poem’s very title, constructed in more than one language, incorporates a babel of words that no meta-­ language embodies or organizes (French, German, and English). Even more significantly, this encapsulates the idea of linguistic reorganization, but also parallels and points to the future anteriority of the poem’s meaning by juxtaposing, and even blurring at times, both sense and nonsense in a postHolocaustic era: the embodiment of traumatic realism. This type of metathesis or linguistic anagram acts as a transposition that alters the multifarious, individual parts within the whole of a text and, through traumatic realism, disrupts both meaning and understanding. In fact, Celan’s own name change after World War II from Antschel to Celan is a prime example of this. With that said, “Huhediblu” does more than merely cite transposition, but rather, it stages linguistic reorganizations and emergence of meanings, as if they took place by chance. This suggests that, before the poem even truly begins, it acts out in the transpositions and modulations that produce the word and the title. As the poem progresses forth, these hypertrophic moments, which occur simultaneously in past, present, and future tenses, come to dominate the text and serve to represent textually the binary difficulties of the attempt to represent the Holocaust, on one hand, and on the other attempts to document very real horrors. Traumatic realism places both the comprehensibility and incomprehensibility of the Holocaust front and center, which is exactly what Celan’s poem does with its speaking voice. Upon a close examination of the poem, even the structure and word choice reflect how the “word,” like the cleaved self, is denied any kind of absolute uniqueness or essence, even though the speaker is documenting pain. A repeated cry of “Hard” (Colin, 119)13 three times at the beginning of the poem suggests that meaning in this particular context is derived from repetition. This is not suggested in a strict sense of signification, but through the word’s reappearance. Rather than being viewed as the perceivable correspondence to a concealed entity (the shadow of a real essence), an entity here functions as the reappearance of another (an “other”) word. Thus, the repetition is the foundational distinction between these two instances. With that said, the third case of “Hard” illustrates, in contrast to the previous example, a multiplicity of meanings. This is because it is both an “other” and different repetition, and it wraps around and forms the emergence of a completely new line “hard-/going” (line 2–3). In place of a unified, identifiable speaking subject, Celan introduces the reader to his “hard” and difficult poem with repetitions and self-organizing language that not only comprise the title of the work (or the “name” if you will), but mirrors the struggle embodied by traumatic realism, and the binary conflict involved with portraying a genocidal event that stole the lives of millions of human beings, while at the same time struggling with the magnitude of representing such horror.

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In the second strophe, a type of primordial animalistic nature rules over language, thereby juxtaposing geologic (or nature’s) time to human time. Amy Colin translates the German “Bälge” as bastard, but an alternate translation might be “windbag or bellows,” perhaps made of animal skin. In addition, the concept of windbag or air continues the choppy breathturns, stammering, stuttering repetitions that began this poem. But again, Celan returns to the focal point of the air and mouth with the word “Vespern” or to “guzzle or eat.” On yet another palimpsestic level, however, this also recalls the vespers sung in Latin, which were essentially nonsense to all but clerics, but also evokes etymologically evening star and evening itself. In this context, both “vespern” and “verper” blur in such a way that through the connotations via memory, they both mesh (like Speechgrille) to form nonsense or incomprehensible words that simultaneously evokes night and stars, both of which relate as Shoah allusions. This theme is ominously carried over to the next line with “viper” being transposed from a noun to a verb, playing out through language fundamental alterations that shift meaning to a sliding scale. Traumatic realism chronicles through repetition and line breaks, the attempt to reference Shoah horror, and reveals the difficulties of trying to convey lived experience. But these repetitions alter language in such a way that Celan’s use of nature is no longer regenerative, but is, in fact, sterile. Language seemingly “gives birth” (a false birth through repetition) to other sterile words in such an environment. One word given by Celan only serves to set off the next linguistic metamorphosis and doubling, as we find with “Geunktes” on the next line. This word connotes not only the croaking of frogs, but also something that is to be foretold. Poetic prophecy in this context can only emerge in a croaking manner that sounds like nonsense and, significantly, all of the aforementioned terms connote gibberish in the original German either onomatopoetically (lurchen, vespern, Geunktes), or as a shibboleth to a group that does not understand (vespern, episteln). Essentially, they link order and anarchy, sense and nonsense across all temporalities and tenses. Appearances in this context seem to only allow for infinite repetitions that can only attempt to vary by repeating; there is no alternative to a type of writing that both repeats and turns against its speakers, embodying the difficulties in representation that entail traumatic realism with Holocaust poetry. The ideas in the second strophe that evoke the enigmatic “prophet” revolve around the issue of time and the uncertainty of the future, by alluding to “What is foreboded, out of/hand and finger entrails.” The significance of “the name of a prophet traces” is spatially indicated through its occupation of the line between the opposition between “above” and “under.” This gives birth to a chiasmus among the placement of the poetic line following, “slander-script” which lies in the stanza immediately after “above” and before “under.” The foretold is significantly linked to the hand, the very instrument and tool of the poet. But, paradoxically, at the same time this tool of the poet and prophet is also associated with the prophet’s name, while being distanced to the very writing the poet and prophet

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are named for (i.e., the prophet traces the slander-script). Amy Colin translates Celan’s “Anterschrift” as “nevermansday,” but this also literally connotes a late kind of after writing, which also “annuls” the writer’s own prophetic stance. In other words, it both annuls and effaces while it annals or chronicles. Traumatic realism here has the effect of turning and inverting this prophetic stance on its head. Rather than a prophecy, or literally a foretelling of the future, through Celan’s chiastic reversal, the prophetic name emerges as “late” or “after” writing, thereby reversing not only the poems arrangement, but also the possibility of a poem in any temporality or tense. In this manner, the poem is, was, and always will be traveling toward a future annihilation that has, paradoxically, already occurred. Linguistic reversal in “Huhediblu” suggests that writing after the Holocaust does not divine a coming truth, but speaks, even through repetition, to memorialize again and again. The next strophe counters the second strophe’s declarative phrases with open, unanswerable questions by pondering: When when do they, when when do they bloom, hühendibluh, huhediblu, those, yes the September (119)

The very uncertainty of prolonging questions here stretches time out into an eternal present that paradoxically recalls the past (in the previous strophe and the title of the poem itself), as well as the conjectural future ending (which is itself a temporal conundrum since it has already been annihilated) of the poem and the reference to Verlaine (which is being recited out of context).14 In essence, the outcome of the translation and reorganization of Verlaine’s line is unpredictable and beyond the authority of the literary work as a structured product, but also extends beyond the uncertainty at work in signification. In other words, there is not a guiding formula behind the chance that a translation of Verlaine’s line would yield words in a conjectural future that might, when reorganized, possibly produce (or reproduce) “Huhediblu.” The very name of the poem is spoken as an utterance initially, but only achieves becoming a word through repetition and its meaning in the very ­language in which its own translated line was written. In the original German, the use of “wann” and “wahn” not only alludes to a temporal uncertainty, but also introduces a crucial historical and specific temporal dimension: the Wann of the Wannseekonferenz which took place on January 20, 1942 (Wistrich, 101–107).15 In this way, the repetitions of historical events and words mirror each other, even though the poem is, paradoxically, without a cohesive subject. Wann, wannwann, Wahnwann, ja, Wahn,-. (Colin, 118)

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In this compact sequence, the first word (when or wann) only achieves identity with the second wannwann. The third word (wahn or madness, illusion) varies this further by displaying the differential degrees of difference which can rest within a single sound or letter within a repetition. In this way, a third mutation occurs when the “ja Wahn” repeats both the single appearance of the first word (wann) and yet recites the previous one (wahn). Based on this delineation, the poem’s chronicled yet nonchronological structure mirrors the allusion to the Wannsee conference in past, present, and future tenses. The poem carries and remembers through inscription the “event” within its body. Indeed, it carries not only the memory of the event, but also, in an abstract fashion, the very temporal transition from futural conjecture (wann) to illusion and madness (wahn). The poetic structure witnesses the devastating moment in which the uncertainty and conjectured potentiality about the meaning of differences (incertitude preserved in a question) is effaced and becomes (through the exclusion of the possibility of error) a blind certainty, while simultaneously presenting a remembered political lunacy recalled by the Wannsee conference. In the final strophes, Celan projects and splits language in such a way that the reader is unable to decipher a “word” and is, therefore, unable to find their way back to a point of rest. Like the questions the poem cannot answer, words cannot anchor themselves because the poem itself has no metaphysical or physical anchor. Delusion and illusion (wahn) appear to be central to the poem, and yet the moment the word is introduced, it withdraws authority and exposes its own limitations through questions (wann). Celan’s destabilizing language does not serve as a basis for a coming truth, but is rather always the very contingency that prophecy itself “lies” in. Rather than containing the proof of genius as the price to pay for divine inspiration, Celan’s language in this poem withdraws from and inverts the prophetic. In this way, the poem embodies the pull within traumatic realism between understanding of the Holocaust and its comprehensibility and it’s inaccessible, incalculable horrors. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, the heart of the world has most certainly been etched by Celan’s witnessing through poetry, which also stands as a flowering memorial for a gifted Jewish poet who drowned in the spring of his life. In April of 1970, Paul Celan traversed to the heartbreakingly beautiful Mirabeau Bridge and drowned himself in the frigid waters of the Seine below. Weeks later, family members found on his desk the last passage Celan had underlined by the German poet Hölderlin, “Sometimes the genius goes dark and sinks down into the bitter well of his heart” (Felsteiner, 287).16 On the day Paul Celan was buried May 12, 1970, Nelly Sachs passed away in Sweden, having lived out the majority of her post-war life in Stockholm (Felsteiner, Correspondence, xii).17 Kindred spirits who exchanged endless correspondence with each other, Sachs and Celan shared a deep appreciation of

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poetry, a German mother tongue, and bearing witness to, as Celan said, “that which happened.” Nelly Sachs was born on December 10, 1891, in Berlin, Germany, into a successful manufacturing family. Often sick as a child, she was educated at home, and despite her frail frame, she wanted to be a dancer. Her love of flow and movement transitioned into a passion for lyrical and poetic dynamics, and at the age of 15, after being gifted a copy of Gösta Berling, Miss Sachs became enamored with the work of Swedish poet and author Selma Lagerlöf. The Nobel Prize winner for 1909, Lagerlöf entered into correspondence with Sachs which allowed the quiet, shy Sachs who would never attend College, a deep and fulfilling engagement with a fellow writer who embodied literary arts. Sachs herself would go on to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on her birthday December 10, 1966, which coincided with her 75th birthday. Upon learning she had won the Nobel with fellow poet S. Y. Agnon, she responded, “Agnon represents the state of Israel. I represent the tragedy of the Jewish people” (NYT).18 In 1933, the Nazis would come into power and tear to shreds her idyllic life in Berlin. Friends and acquaintances started to disappear one by one, and at what seemed to be the last possible minute to be saved from being placed into a forced labor camp, Ms Lagerlöf pulled some strings with the Swedish Royal Family to secure passage for Sachs and her mother to flee to Sweden. Living in a one-room apartment in Stockholm, Nelly Sachs expeditiously learned the Swedish language and managed to barely make ends meet by translating German poetry into Swedish. Trapped in Sweden with no other escape route or safe haven possible, Sachs and her mother watched in horror as Nazism spread across Europe. Writing in German from Stockholm, Sachs’s poetry chronicles the catastrophe moving across Europe that would decimate two-thirds of European Jewry. “Writing,” Sachs said chronicling this time period, “was my mute outcry. I only wrote because I had to free myself” (NYT). Whether Sachs’s words are in poetic form or prose, in the aftermath of the Shoah, Sachs’s poetry serves as a memorialization of Jewish suffering and a reminder that documenting the mental and physical toll taken on survivors as chronicled through testimonial poetry is as necessary to engage as the need to register the historical events that led to the catastrophe. Tracing the vicissitudes of Shoah memory becomes more than an act of bearing witness to suffering and injustices, indeed the poetry of Nelly Sachs places the weight of responsibility and culpability at the forefront of consideration. Through the process of poetic engagement, witnessing creates a community through memorialization. Sachs’s poetry undergoes a modernist change in style, meter, and form through the process of translating Swedish modernists such as Erik Lindegren, Gunnar Ekelöf, and Johannes Edfelt (Boase-Beier, 129).19 Formulating suffering and translating it from German to Swedish suggests

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that even the process of translation itself allowed for linguistic insights into the ways suffering can be conveyed, and constrained, by different languages. Selected as the title poem for her 1967 collection of poems, “O die Schornsteine” (“O the Chimneys”) is often viewed as her signature poem, as it encapsulates the body of Israel as a whole, documenting both individual and collective suffering, intertwining corpus and topos. The poem begins with a lament, “o the chimneys” (Hamburger, 3)20 but without an exclamation mark, as if it is more of a statement of fact, an observation. This seemingly banal statement leads into the next line which situates the chimneys placement, “on the ingeniously devised habitations of death” (3). Not only does this wording emphasize the premeditated and thoroughly planned calculation of the habitations of death, it situates the chimneys, the means of disposing human remains and the attempt to shroud the sinister disposal of bodies, all within the same context. Incomprehensibility is situated side by side with comprehensible metaphors, embodying traumatic realism’s pull between what is and is not conveyable. Linguistically, the type of bodies is clearly named in the third line (“Israel’s body”); however, it is never directly named who “ingeniously” devised this mass production of death. By not naming the culprit, the threat seems to permeate the very air of the poem and shifts focus to the victims who “drift as smoke.” Not only have human beings been reduced to ashes that float through the air, their agency as ash prevents them from controlling their destination. Direction here is uncontrolled and observed in a manner that the speaker seems unsurprised by. Despite a lack of free will or determinate choice of direction, the next line reveals the collective body of Israel is acknowledged and “welcomed” by a “star, a chimney sweep/a star that turned black” (3). The only acknowledgment of this collective body’s existence comes from a star that, we learn one line later, has turned black from soot. The wording suggests that the chimney sweep greeter of Israel’s body is a worker whose very name suggests their presence exists not to engage ashes, but to rid the chimney of them. Their very name exists only to frame the “job” they perform in relation to the disposal and dispersal of bodies. The context here isolates Israel’s body even further, as the only figure (the chimney sweep) to engage the collective victims is present for the sole purpose of ashes disposal in order to keep the chimney burning more and more ashes. Traumatic realism at work centers here on the paradox of the genocidal end met by Israel’s body and the representation of such horror. The final line of the first stanza shifts the poetic ground from observations to conjecture with the poem’s speaker pondering, “or was it a ray of sun?” that had turned black or could it have been a star? The speaker’s inability to decipher whether a sunbeam, light itself, is black or the star is, reinforces the uncertainty of not being able to chart a direction. All points one would normally use to anchor meaning and direction appear to not apply to the collective body of smoke.

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The second stanza, in contrast to the first, begins with the repeated “o the chimneys,” but this time, it ends with an exclamation point. The ­initial mentioning of the chimney lament in the first line allows the banality to catch up to the full ramifications by the second stanza, where the lament is exclaimed before feeding into the “freedomway for Jeremiah and Job’s dust” (3). Situating biblical figures into this Shoah context, as we saw previously with Dan Pagis’s poetry, creates a space for collective Shoah memory to encapsulate the history of Israel’s body in past, present, and future contexts. Retroactively, this recalls ancient biblical figures by placing their dust with that of the chimney’s nameless and faceless victims, who are only recognized as a whole entity in the form of ashes. Jeremiah and Job become present in the death camps by their status as victims alongside Israel’s body collective. More conjecture in the second stanza places under the microscope the culprit who devised the burning of Jewish bodies and questions “who laid stone upon stone/the road for refugees of smoke?” (3). What is known is only that it is Israel’s body that comprises the collective, so that the result of persecution and genocide becomes an observation, and the cause is unnamed and therefore sinisterly proliferates in the darkness. The housing of death itself we learn in the next line has been “invitingly appointed/for the host who used to be a guest.” Hospitality placed within this context becomes unmasked hostility, which reverses the roles of guest and host and questions the identities of such roles. Continuing the displacement of meaning, the next line contains the recurring lament present throughout the poem, except that now the lament is about fingers, oddly disembodied and cut off from the body to which they belong. These fingers are responsible for “laying the threshold/like a knife between life and death-” (23), situating fingers displaced out of a corpus context as the bearers of the site of death. The liminal threshold is rife with sacrificial connotations, but also places into question both the fingers and the threshold as hanging precariously “Like a knife between life and death” (23). By ending with a dash, the line becomes incomplete, traumatic realism always bleeding over into the next stanza, unable to stay contained within the confines of the poem in a manner reminiscent that the smoke of Israel’s body mimics. The poem ends with the original chimney lament, sans exclamation mark, situated alongside fingers and “Israel’s body as smoke through the air!” (3), which is exclaimed. The very object of bodily destruction is placed as a poetic counterweight to fingers in the penultimate line, oddly removed from any bodily connection. The last line serves as a refrain of testimony to the collective body of Israel suspended as particles floating through the air. This musical refrain reinforces the communal act of memory by repeating the fate of “Israel’s body as smoke through the air” and with each utterance codifies witnessing into a communal refrain (3). Like Pagis’s “Written in Pencil,” these shards of memory refuse to be buried and resurface with force at each repeated utterance.

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Traumatic realism in Holocaust poetry centers the importance of remembrance and memorialization while abbreviating how we are still grappling today to engage and connect with our past. Engaging the Shoah through the poetry of Dan Pagis, Paul Celan, and Nelly Sachs not only blends individual witnessing with public memorialization, but also demands a world of engagement in which readers see things through the cognitive schemata of another. Not only does this poetry abbreviate the ways the past is always contemporaneous, it reminds us there is always something at stake in its representation and memorialization. It demands our attention and requires unflinching contact, it insists on thought and reflection, and it implores us to engage.

Notes





1. Theodor Adorno, Critical Models, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 2. Theodor Adorno, Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft, vol. I (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003). 3. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialektik; Jargon der Eigentlichkeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973). 4. Michael Rothberg, Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 5.  Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Booking Passage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 6. Dan Pagis. Gilgul. Hebrew Writers Association, 1970. 7. Engaging the Shoah Through the Poetry of Dan Pagis: Memory and Metaphor. Shellie McCullough. Rowman & Littlefield, all rights reserved. 8. John Felsteiner, The Modern Hebrew Poem Itself (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), 221–224. 9. Dan Pagis, Variable Directions (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989). 10. Michael Hamburger, Poems of Paul Celan (New York: Persea Books Inc, 2002). 11.  Zsuzsanna Ozsváth, “Paul Celan,” in Encyclopedia of Holocaust Literature (London: Oryx Press, 2002), 28. 12. The one exception to this is the somewhat longer poem “Hinausgekrönt.” 13. Amy Colin, Holograms of Darkness (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 14. Note the last line, Oh quand refleuriront, oh roses, vos Septembres? 15. Robert Wistrich, Hitler and the Holocaust (New York: Random House Publishing, 2003). 16.  John Felsteiner, “Translating Paul Celan: Rhythm and Repetition as Metaphor,” in Probing the Limits of Representation, ed. Saul Friedlander (Boston: Harvard Press, 1992), 240–259. 17. John Felsteiner, “Introduction,” in Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs Correspondence (New York: The Sheep Meadow Press, 1995), Xii. 18. Sylvan Fox’s “The Tragedy of the Jewish People,” The New York Times, May 13, 1970,  https://www.nytimes.com/1970/05/13/archives/nelly-sachs-poetdead-at-78-won-nobel-prize-for-literature.html.

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19. Jean Boase-Beier, Translating the Poetry of the Holocaust (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 129. 20. Nelly Sachs, O the Chimneys, trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 3.

Bibliography Adorno, T. W. Negative Dialektik; Jargon der Eigentlichkeit (Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 6). Surkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 1973. Boase-Beier, Jean. Translating Poetry of the Holocaust. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015. Colin, Amy. Paul Celan: Holograms of Darkness. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Ezrahai, Sidra DeKoven. Booking Passage. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Felsteiner, John. “Explication of Written in Pencil.” In The Modern Hebrew Poem, edited by Ariel Hirschfeld, 221–224. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003. Fox, Sylvan. Nelly Sachs Obituary. Stockholm: The New York Times, May 13, 1970. Hamburger, Michael. Poems of Paul Celan. New York: Persea, 2002. Lang, Berel. Holocaust Representation: Art Within the Limits of History and Ethics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Langer, Lawrence. Preempting the Holocaust. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Lipstadt, Deborah. Holocaust: An American Understanding. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016. Ozsvath, Zsuzsanna. “Paul Celan.” In The Encyclopedia of Holocaust Literature. London: Oryx Press, 2002. Pagis, Dan. Gilgul. Hebrew Writers Association, 1970. ———. Variable Directions. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989. ———. “Written in Pencil in a Sealed Railway Car.” In The Modern Hebrew Poem Itself, edited by Ariel Hirschfeld, 221–224. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003. Piazis, George, and Andrew Leak. The Holocaust and the Text: Speaking the Unspeakable. London: Palgrave, 2000. Rothberg, Michael. Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Sachs, Nelly. O The Chimneys: Selected Poems and Eli a Verse Play. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967. Sachs, Nelly, and Paul Celan. Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs Correspondance. New York: The Sheep Meadow Press, 1995. Wistrich, Robert. Hitler and the Holocaust. New York: Random House Publishing, 2003.

CHAPTER 21

The Dark Side of Holocaust Era Poetry: Nazi Poetry Promoting Antisemitism and Genocide Cary Nelson

Introduction: Innocence Preceding the Deluge May 1929 seemed part of an oasis of calm. The US stock market would not crash until October. It was not until 1930 that the Nazis increased their parliamentary seats from 12 to 107 and signaled their presence as a major political force. In 1929, it still seemed that Germany’s Weimar Republic would survive. Antisemitism was a visible public phenomenon, but people did not yet feel seriously threatened. In any case, Gustav and Gisela Danziger did not consider themselves Jews. Both sets of parents had converted more than half a century earlier. They were protestant Austrians. Gustav’s parents, Moritz and Rosalie, like Gisela’s, Amalia and Maximilian Hirschfeld, had become Lutherans in the 1860s or 1870s. The intricacies of nineteenth-century family history were not the subject of much reflection amid the comforts of daily life. Life centered partly around the family business, a fashionable upper-class group of coffee shops and candy stores. The first store was opened in 1891 in Abbazia, a winter resort town on the Gulf of Quarnero. Austrian diplomats My thanks to Russell Berman, Judith Cohen, Greg Fedner, Uta Larkey, Migiwa Orimo, Alexis Pogorelskin, Daria S. Semenova, Eric Sundquist, Aenna Troester, and Sonja Wentling for assistance with this essay. Several people helped me establish baseline literal translations that I then reworked into poems. C. Nelson (*)  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_21

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and royalty frequented the spa and regularly visited the Danziger store. In his autobiography, their son Edward tells the story of a regular patron, Archduke Ferdinand, meeting and courting his future wife Countess Chotek there at one of the marble tables and frequenting the store until his assassination in 1914.1 The Danzigers and their two sons lived in a rented mansion known as “Villa Leda.” Evenings at home included piano concerts by Gisela, with selections by Chopin, Schubert, and others. Born the daughter of an army dentist in 1869, Gisela was educated at a fashionable Munich school where instruction in piano and voice were expected. Shortly after the turn of the century, the family moved to Vienna, where they opened a new shop. It was lined with French mirrors, decorated in coral-red silk, and furnished with bamboo. In that more innocent environment, a friend could focus on honoring some of Austria’s famous confections. Following a popular German propensity for writing poetry, one of Gisela Danziger’s friends sent postcard greetings—in the form of an original amateur poem in German—to her at the Karlsbad branch of her Vienna candy store on May 27, 1929. Following Viennese tradition, Gisela was in charge of running the store: My dear Gisela, The world shines once more! My wife met me at the train And hugged me happily again. All that I told you about Karlsbad Was the truth, nothing made up nor sad. I hope your store does well With all the sweets you sell. My greetings to you and the neighboring hat maker Calice, May you both live well, even the merry witch in her caprice. Say hello to the Mühlbrunn, the Puppe, the waters, Otherwise I’ve no concern for Karlsbad quarters.

In a common postcard pattern, we know nothing about the sender. The poem is a trifle, a confection honoring a confection. Yet it is also, coincidentally, a window open toward violent pasts and futures. Less than four years later, Hitler was Germany’s Chancellor, and the Nazis were in power. By 1938, they were in Vienna, prepared to put their paranoid racial theories into practice. Suddenly, the Danzigers were Jews again. The story for some may recall Aharon Appelfeld’s 1978 novel Badenheim 1939. The Danzigers’s business was taken over, their legal rights eliminated. Gustav, born in 1864, had died of cancer a few years earlier, and Gisela felt she was too old to relocate, especially since China seemed the only option. Their son Edward, now married, had been wounded fighting for Austria in World War I. That service counted for nothing. He concentrated on getting his own sons out of the country. He succeeded without knowing whether he would see them again.

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Meanwhile, he and his wife separated, hoping that would keep her safe. She had no Jewish ancestors. Taking the only option available, she was scheduled to sail for China in January 1939, but a visa for the United States came through at the last minute. That September, with the help of financing from the Friend’s Service Committee, Danziger’s Viennese Candy Kitchen opened in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Eventually, his sons and his wife Emily were able to join him. I obtained the postcard from his son Erwin on ebay, who later provided me with some of these details. Gisela was not so lucky. Taken by force from Vienna, she was transported as Number 668 to the Theresienstadt walled ghetto and concentration camp on June 6, 1942, among the first groups of the elderly to be moved there from Austria. Established in the Czech town of Terezin, north of Prague, it was billed as a permanent home and exhibited that way to the Red Cross in June 1944. In reality, most of those detained there were shipped to the death camps and murdered. But many of the elderly especially, crowded into attics and cellars and sleeping on the floor, died of disease and exhaustion while still at Theresienstadt. Gisela was sent to Auschwitz, along with 670 other Austrians, on May 16, 1944. She died in the gas chambers. This essay will focus on Third Reich poetry ephemera—cards, postcards, fliers, and posters—a widely neglected but significant topic that is challenging to research because these fragile items often do not survive. This essay reproduces items exclusively from my large personal collection of wartime poetry ephemera built over several decades, often purchased one item at a time from established dealers in several countries. It reminds us that Holocaust victims also did their best to save unique pieces of ephemera. Much more than books, Nazi ephemera, which were inexpensive to produce, allowed for mass distribution and thus more notable historical impact. Poem cards, including postcards, offered large numbers of ordinary Germans the opportunity to distribute antisemitic sentiments, to endorse the Nazi project by purchasing the cards cheaply and sending them to others. German publishers printed and sold antisemitic poem postcards at government direction, and those texts would in turn inspire individuals and small groups to write their own antisemitic or patriotic poems. People could then go to a local stationary store and have their original poems set in type and printed on cards to hand out or mail. Readers would also find antisemitic poems in other media, the most notorious example of which is no doubt Julius Streicher’s antisemitic weekly newspaper Der Stürmer. First published in 1923, it came fully into its own after the Nazis came to power in 1933. Circulation rose from 50,000 to nearly 500,000 copies by 1938, and Der Stürmer regularly put illustrated antisemitic poems on its cover.2 In light of the prominence the paper gave to poetry, Simon Wiesenthal’s comment on the jacket of Bytwerk’s book on Streicher gives some indication of the role poetry played under the Nazis: “The SS who murdered our families had Der Stürmer in their field packs. It contained the rationale for their crimes.”

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So much for W. H. Auden’s assertion that “poetry makes nothing happen.” Not content with an adult audience, Streicher published vicious illustrated books of antisemitic children’s poetry from about 1936. But it is poetry ephemera that had overall the widest distribution. Based on years of collecting and research, it seems clear that the Nazis also prioritized the production and distribution of antisemitic poetry in the languages of several of the countries they occupied during the war. I have examples in French, Hungarian, Russian, and Ukrainian. Examples in other languages may exist as well. Perhaps least well known are the small poetry fliers the SS and the Wehrmacht distributed in Russian and Ukrainian, a collection of which I acquired some years ago from a dealer in the Ukraine. He reported that he had gained access to the Communist Party archives in the Ukraine after the fall of the Soviet Union, a time when much was for sale and dollars carried a premium. According to his account, he obtained a collection of several hundred poetic and nonpoetic Nazi posters and fliers from that archive; he then sold them to me. Though the paper has browned over the decades, it is generally in good condition. A few fliers, however, are lightly soiled and a few show fire damage. The small fliers range in width from 4.5 to seven inches and in height from five to eight inches, with many intervening sizes. The posters range in width from 7.5 to 12 inches and in height from 10.5 to 16.5 inches. I will discuss a few fliers in a later section here. The rhetoric that Goebbels and Hitler used in 1941 shifted to embrace extermination as a tactic. As Jeffrey Herf writes, “From 1941 to 1945, the ordinary and daily experience of all Germans included exposure to radical antisemitic propaganda whose unambiguous intent was to justify mass murder of Jews.”3 That encouraged German citizens to write antisemitic poems.

Antisemitic Poetry Saturates the German Public Sphere Thoroughly assimilated decades earlier, the Danziger and Hirschfeld families were not obvious candidates to be classified as European Jews, but the Nazi category was biological and hereditary, not cultural. So the Danzigers were presumably among the sort of people the Nazis had in mind when they revived the ballad “Wenn Alle Menschen Juden Wären” (“If All People Were Jews”) and distributed it widely on postcards. Headed, in various printings, “a thoughtful song” or “a simple folk song for reflection,” the card was first distributed late in their struggle for power during the Weimar Republic (Fig. 21.1). The poem is attributed to Max Bewer (1861–1921), a fanatically antisemitic German writer who openly called for pogroms against the Jews. Here is my translation from the German: If all people were Jews, What would become of the world? No corn would grow, No plow would move through the fields,

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Fig. 21.1  If all people were Jews (postcard, Author’s collection)

No forester would tend the woods, No miner would start his shift. Jews don’t even like To sail the seas. The steamboat would never have been invented, Nor would the train. No dirigible would rise Shining into the sky. We wouldn’t have gunpowder, Nor electric lights. For the Jew can barter, But he cannot invent. No nurse would set out To treat the sick, And if fire broke out, No fire truck would come, No lifeboat would leap across the waves If mast and anchorage broke. For the Jew always seeks help for himself, But he will not help others! What can the Jew give, He who has nothing, Yet presumes to

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362  C. NELSON Call himself “elect”? Only the devil knows, For the devil loves pride and arrogance. Thank God there are still People other than Jews on earth!

Some may consider “If All People Were Jews” a precursor to American poet Ezra Pound’s well known—and apocalyptically obsessed—“Canto 45,” devoted to his belief that Usura, loaned money, is a Jewish practice that destroys all natural inclination to creative labor. A new poem “Der Judenspiegel” (Fig. 21.2) was distributed on a postcard after Hitler came to power. The title echoes the title of Johannes Pfefferkorn’s Der Judenspiegel (1507) and Wilhelm Marr’s Der Judenspiegel (1862), both prose texts with a place in the historical development of antisemitism. It is both poem and song designed to be sung to the tune of “Three young men went over the Rhine.” Below the poem, a note urges the reader not to buy from a Jew. Here, again, is my fairly free translation of “Der Judenspiegel,” with rhymes supplied to suggest how the song might have been experienced: Too many Jews roam German lands, Dishonoring women, wielding cheating hands. Their noses crooked, their feet fully flat, They suck Christian blood till their bellies are full. Their coal black locks are packed with lice, Their caftans filthy, their greasy caps not nice. A garlic stench from mouths still slobbering, With nothing offered to the streets but muttering. For long our land had borne this horror. For the Jews controlled it and had no honor. Then Germany’s savior rose to the hour. So the Jews turned from the temple and fled The kosher brood by fear and horror were led. A clean house before us again was spread.

As early as the 1920s, the Nazis also promoted concise antisemitic rhymed couplets and quatrains. Simple rhymes were long familiar in popular sayings. An early example, with a cartoon by Julius Streicher’s premier cartoonist Philipp Rupprecht, who signed himself Fips, is on this Election-Donation flier (Fig. 21.3): “Each mark that you donate /guarantees where a punch will terminate.” A couplet on a photo of a truck with an army unit that had returned to Dresden from Lublintz honors service with Ludwig Beck, who resigned as Chief of staff in August 1938 (Fig. 21.4): “Despite Jews, dust, and dreck, / we served under Colonel Beck.” Beck would later be executed for

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Fig. 21.2  A mirror to the Jews (postcard, Author’s collection)

his involvement in the plot to kill Hitler. Here is a translation of a quatrain from a Third Reich truck sign with an AABB rhyme and antisemitic caricatures (Fig. 21.5)4: Jews, racketeers, nuns and priests Are no longer tolerated here. The German lands may soon be [ Free of these parasites.

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Fig. 21.3  Each mark you donate (flier, 4.25 × 5.5 inches, from an administrative unit of the Nazi Party, Author’s collection)

The first line includes Catholics with the Jews as an othered group, as some Germans found both to embody international conspiracies of premodern believers. A 2-line example is “Whoever gives his hand to a Jew, / Has betrayed his people and the fatherland” (“Wer einmem Juden reicht die hand, / hat verraten Volk und Vaterland”—Fig. 21.6) from a 1938 series (I have three) with rhymed couplets on illustrated postcards. All feature pine boughs in the foreground. This card shows a Jewish peddler with a tray of cigarettes for sale balanced on a strap around his neck. The photo, perhaps staged with props and a painted winter background behind them, adds a dimension to the text, effectively urging us to reject the Jew’s outstretched hand as well. Rhymed couplets and quatrains were ubiquitous in Third Reich public spaces, not only on posters but also on banners stretched across town and city streets,

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Fig. 21.4  We served under Colonel Beck (photo, 3.80 × 3.70 inches, Author’s collection)

Fig. 21.5  Jews, racketeers, nuns and priests (photo, 3.25 × 2.12 inches, Author’s collection)

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Fig. 21.6  Whoever gives his hand to a Jew (postcard, Pub. Rudolf Fleisher, Braunschweig, Author’s collection)

on the sides of trucks, and painted by hand on troop trains headed to the front. As Russell Berman pointed out to me, the importance of the rhyme to the celebratory effect of the couplet is made clear here because the ordinary syntax, “Wer einmem Juden die Hand reicht,” is inverted to preserve the rhyme. A very rare photograph in my collection depicts a chilling street scene that suggests how rhymed verse functioned in the public sphere of the Third Reich. In the German town of Bingen am Rhein, the remaining small and vulnerable, once vibrant, Jewish community was increasingly under threat.5 The city’s history is a microcosm of Jewish history in Europe and Germany. The Jewish community may have been established as early as the tenth century; in 1199, its members had their property stolen before they were

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expelled. Jews did not return until the fourteenth century, establishing themselves in the Judengasse (street of the Jews) in the city center not far from where the photo would be taken six centuries later. Following the pattern in Germany, unlike the less well-informed communities in countries to the east, the Jews of Bingen am Rhein began to leave and emigrate in 1933. The photo may date from the late 1930s; on Kristallnacht in November 1938 the two local synagogues were looted and burned. By 1942, only 152 Jews remained of the 465 member community of 1933. By then, antisemitic rhetoric had saturated Germany, and adults were broadly aware of the fate of the Jews. Soon the town’s Jews would be gathered together and taken to their destination in the death camps. Only four would survive the Holocaust to return. As the photo shows, hatred was already commonplace, ordinary, unsurprising. In front of the late Baroque style building at Speismarket 3 labeled Friedrich Zimmer, the name of an area business incorporated in 1906, the local farmer’s market is open as usual (Fig. 21.7).6 “Haus Zimmer,” as it was then popularly known, was built about 1789 and had earlier belonged to a Jewish family surnamed Meyer. This central square and its food market had been the focus of civic and business life for centuries; it is thus perhaps the single most prominent location in the small city. Vendors are arranging their produce in wicker baskets. Shoppers in casual dress wander the square in conversation, some negotiating with vendors. Three children are visible. Window boxes with flowers adorn the third floor. Everything it seems is commonplace, unremarkable. Only the invisible photographer seems to notice what to us is the scene’s most commanding and indelible feature—a horrific effigy of a lynched Jew hanging from a sturdy gallows in the square, an image that recalls photographs of African American lynchings distributed with poems. The mannikin is dressed in a suit and tie and has a large Jewish star on its jacket. Germany mandated the wearing of the star on September 1, 1941, which is one reason the photo is difficult to date with certainty. Two rhymed couplets on placards, hand lettered crudely in Fraktur, the angular typeface championed by the Nazis until they condemned it as “Jewish letters” in January 1941, are fastened to wood boards nailed to the post supporting the gallows. Somewhat out of focus, the text is difficult to read, but Uta Larkey, a German culture and Holocaust scholar, has succeeded in transcribing and translating it from the photo I supplied: Jew pig, pack your suitcase and get lost (leave from here) Go to Haifa and let the Arabs kick you around. It’s so much nicer in Bingen without the [?] Jew pig hanging from the gallows, gasping for breath and thinking of his rebbe.

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Fig. 21.7  Bingen am Rhein hanged Jew (photo, 4.37 × 6 inches, Author’s collection)

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Once again, the German original is rhymed, embodying a degradation of poetic technique in the service of antisemitism. The crude graphic style may embody that contempt for its subject. The two quatrains serve as captions to the hanged mannikin and tell onlookers how to interpret what they see, though no one in evidence here shows any surprise at a sight that still provokes our shock. The text helps establish the general appeal of the final solution and turns it into a form of community consensus. This previously unknown but inherently iconic photo embodies the entire Holocaust in a single image. The shameless, malice-driven assault on the Jews is matched with the indifference of the general population. One further and largely forgotten technique was to print and distribute brief antisemitic poems issued as small glued antisemitic stickers to attach to envelopes and postcards and paste by the millions on shop windows, street lamps, train stations, and other public places. These were a version of the more general phenomenon of “Cinderellas” or non-postage stamps produced in perforated sheets to affix to letters, envelopes, and invoices. Such little stickers had begun to be issued by advertisers by 1900, and they became highly popular in many countries over the next several decades. They celebrated products, announced events, and promoted causes.7 They were sometimes well designed, amounting to colorful miniature posters. The stickers were small enough to attach to a postcard or envelope, or to affix to the body of a letter, and thus readily enabled people to add an antisemitic component to any other sort of message. Antisemitic stickers proliferated in Germany in the years following World War I. In World War II, people using these stickers were endorsing and promoting official state antisemitic policies, not merely a malicious prejudice. One of several Nazi stickers in the same style—a two or four-line text, often rhymed, on a 1 1/2 by 2 1/4 inch red sticker with serrated edges (Fig. 21.8)—is translated below. “Michel” is the traditional name for a stereotypical German. The stickers also press home the relentless Nazi association

Fig. 21.8  The Jewish chorus loudly cries (sticker, 2.25 × 1.5 inches, Author’s collection)

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of Jews with socialism and communism. Hence the Jewish applause for the “Internationale,” communism’s international anthem: “Long live the Internationale!” the Jewish chorus loudly cries. Yet of all people only our Michel follows them, that trusting simpleton.

The red stickers were often serrated, as they were published in sheets: “Rotting beams are useless for constructing a German house / So the Führer casts them out!” (“Faule Balken …”—Fig. 21.9); “You should always consider your child holy, / So keep it away from the Jewpig!” (“Dein Kind …”—Fig. 21.10); “The crab louse is a sucking animal, The Jew lives only by his lust for booty!” (“Die Filzlaus …”—Fig. 21.11). The last example works by reading the German word for mammal (Säugetier) literally as “sucking

Fig. 21.9  The Führer casts them out (sticker, 3 × 1.75 inches, Author’s collection)

Fig. 21.10  Keep your child away from the Jew (sticker, 3 × 1.5 inches, Author’s collection)

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Fig. 21.11  A sucking animal (sticker, 3 × 1.62 inches, Author’s collection)

Fig. 21.12  Tragedy (sticker, 2.25 × 1.5 inches, Author’s collection)

animal,” which creates a crude analogy, and by the inverted consonants in the end rhyme (Säugetier/Beutegier). There were also numerous postal stickers with unrhymed slogans: “The Jew is the carrier of corruption in the whole world” (“Auf der ganzen Welt ist der Jude der Träger der Korruption”). A different style, based on illustrated racist jokes printed on white paper, is especially brazen, not only because of the blunt force of racial caricature but also because the thought that Germans found their hatred so entertaining is particularly repugnant. These tiny illustrated stickers were designed to be attached to envelopes, cards, or sheets of paper. One, titled “Tragedy” (Fig. 21.12) and recalling US poem postcards showing black children

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Fig. 21.13  Welcome to the Fatherland (sticker, 2 × 1.75 inches, Author’s collection)

perched dangerously atop alligators, places a crocodile’s jaws on the left and two antisemitic caricatures on the right: Two boys fell into the Nile– The first was eaten by a crocodile, But when it saw the next It vomited up the first.

Three Jews wearing Tyrolean hats in the hope of being taken for Germans are given a crude sarcastic greeting (“Gruss”—Fig. 21.13), here loosely translated: One cannot turn his gaze from you. One simply has to grant your due. So Bavarians exult with mouth and hand: “Welcome, strangers, to the Fatherland!”

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A Bierhaus in Hell As Nazi ideology penetrated ever more deeply into the consciousness of the German people, antisemitism and patriotism came to be so closely linked they were effectively indistinguishable. That may help us to understand a kind of popular antisemitic poetry that remains particularly unsettling. Consider the following authentic scene: A dozen or so friends meet regularly in the small town of Carlsberg in Rhineland-Pfalz. Following a widespread cultural practice that continues today, they reserve a weekly table in their favorite pub to drink heavily and sing songs. They also compose poems collectively, reciting them out loud; then one member of the group takes them home to type them out on postcards that can be sent to soldiers on active duty. To get some extra mileage out of their efforts, he layers blank postcards and carbon paper in a typewriter, thereby obtaining several useable cards with each typing. The following week he brings the postcards back. Then, they all sign their names next to the address on each card (Fig. 21.14). The top copy of a poem dated March 22, 1941 (Fig. 21.15), goes to airman Nikolaus Siegmeyer, but the card comes back, since he has been transferred, and his new address is not yet on file. Among those who send signed greetings are Adam Blank (b. 1894), Carl Dauth (b. 1901), Adolf Kaiser, Philipp Schmitt (b. 1881), N. Schumann, Fau L. Schappert, Siegmeyer, and the Bauer family.

Fig. 21.14  Group signatures to original poem (large postcard, 4.12 × 5.62 inches, Author’s collection)

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Fig. 21.15  Group authored poem (reverse of no. 14, Author’s collection)

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Some are in their 40s or 50s, so the cards may be addressed to their own children or those of their friends: One hundred sixteen thousand tons Herald the new spring. Just as the Führer says, The great hunt begins! The bombs we drop, Like heavy eggs, Will cost England dearly. See how they caress W.C. [Churchill] As he shits his pants. And Rosenfeld, the servant of the Jews, Is looking forward to his inheritance, His bosom filled with pride. Stay calm! You’ll get your reward! You privates can’t wait To grasp the very heart of England. Be patient, The Führer will have his way with All the Tommys. He’ll cast out the Jews and the spawn of the lodges, Make Europe a land of peace. When you return in victory, You can press your wife and child Proudly to your chest.

While signing the previous week’s poem postcards, the group is also at work producing a new antisemitic poem. Another poem, headed “Carlsberg, May 11, 1941,” is a carbon (Fig. 21.16) here. It too is rhymed AABB, and one can imagine it read aloud with untroubled gusto. To preserve the rhyme, I offer a freer translation. Note, in the second stanza, the reference to “Kleine Cohn,”8 the little Cohn, an antisemitic caricature of a representative Jew dating back to the beginning of the twentieth century and encompassing scores of German “Kleine Cohn” poems and songs: Uncle Sam the Jew slave Has decided he’s so very brave. He’s taken a stand against Hitler. It’ll be fun to see him look littler. A peaceful Europe could stand alone Were it not for the plots of our Kleine Cohn. But that’s no trouble for our dear Führer, Who’ll manage for sure or even surer. Then across the whole wide world The flag of justice will be unfurled.

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Fig. 21.16  From Carlsberg (large postcard, 4 × 5.75 inches, Author’s collection) So grit your teeth and clench your fist, Pull yourselves together and join the list! These events have been brewing for thousands of years. No need for worry, shed no tears. The front is armed, the homeland stands fast, Greater Germany seeks fame and honor at last. Heil Hitler! they call for the nation state And for beautiful Carlsberg in the Palatinate. Full of health and victory after their jaunt The regulars rejoin the spa restaurant!

There is obviously no need in Germany to be secretive about the composition and recitation process. It is a public activity. Its celebratory antisemitism is part of what justifies my characterization of this scene as a bierhaus in hell. The cards I have in my possession are those returned as undeliverable, often because the intended recipient is dead, most likely from combat action. They were part of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet

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Union that commenced on June 22, 1941, and rapidly proceeded to the mass slaughter of the Jews of the Ukraine. These poems from a town in Germany effectively encouraged Wehrmacht and SS troops in the work of murder.

Germany as an Occupying Power The campaign to disseminate antisemitic poetry fliers, posters, and pamphlets in the Soviet Union appears to be the most ambitious of any in the Nazi-occupied countries.9 It built support among Ukrainians for the relentless slaughter of the Jews that accompanied the invasion, providing both propagandistic abstractions and popular narratives underwriting the houseto-house searches for Jews and the mobile gas murder vans that traversed cities.10 But the project also capitalized on deep-seated Ukrainian antisemitism to recruit the locals for both violent and non-violent auxiliary service with the German army. Readers will recall that the Ukraine included the Pale of Settlement where Jews were compelled to live; between 1903 and 1906 alone, scores of pogroms in Ukrainian cities and villages slaughtered hundreds of Jews. From 1917 to 1921, a wave of pogroms followed in which thousands of Jews were killed. Germans knew well that there would be enthusiastic Ukrainian recipients for antisemitic poetry. The utility of the antisemitic poetry campaign was only hampered by the broader German dedication to killing non-Jewish Ukrainians as well. The Nazi poetry fliers were among thousands of notices, regulations, and propaganda documents distributed during the invasion. Some, certainly including the large four-color posters the Nazis displayed, were likely printed in Germany beforehand.11 But as opportunity presented itself and policy evolved, the Nazi Reichskommissariat Ukraine, established on September 1, 1941, printed and posted thousands more pieces of ephemera to facilitate its repressive administrative regime. The army brought native Russian and Ukrainian speakers with it and recruited more on site. It rapidly took over government offices and commercial printers, so it was soon prepared to implement an ambitious publication program. Most single-sheet ephemera were printed in black (or black and red) on unbleached wheat or straw paper, but blue, green, or red paper was sometimes used, especially for favorite images printed on a variety of backgrounds. In addition to documents in Russian and Ukrainian aimed at the local population, posters in German, some with poetry, were produced to boost the morale of the German troops. Those included idealized portraits of Hitler and German soldiers, both of which could also serve to intimidate Ukrainians. Few Soviet citizens had seen images of Hitler before then (Berkhoff, 216). Though the German language poems included examples by well-known Nazi authors and some traditional Russian or Ukrainian language poems were reprinted, most of the Russian and Ukrainian poems on Nazi fliers were anonymous. Some amounted to doggerel, but others displayed notable

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narrative skill. Rhymed and metered poems were common, and some texts written by native speakers showed knowledge of Russian popular poetry traditions, such as the two- or four-line satiric or ironic chastushki. Indeed, when the German invasion collapsed and the Wehrmacht began to retreat, anti-Nazi chastushki began to be composed and recited (Berkhoff, 200). Sometimes several chastushki were combined to create a song. Most of the antisemitic poetry fliers were illustrated with vicious caricatures designed to intensify their antisemitic impact. Some of the graphics borrowed from motifs established earlier in Der Stürmer and elsewhere, but a special iconography was also developed for the Soviet and Ukrainian context. A couple of points are relevant. First, the audience for the fliers included villages where the literacy rate was low and in which the poems would have to be read aloud. In such cases, antisemitic graphics could send the desired message independently. But Nazi antisemitic imagery was also qualitatively different from other Third Reich graphics. A poem about a German tank or fighter plane might include a straightforward photo selected to move the poem’s effect from referentiality to representation. The poem could then seem both to describe the subject matter and to embody it. That distinction is still more powerful in the case of antisemitic imagery, which aims to strip any implication of exaggeration from caricature. The Nazis were determined to show that the perfidy of the Jews and the threat they represented could not be overstated. Caricature could retain an element of contempt and revilement, both of which were components of Ukrainian antisemitism, though it was based more in resentment than racism. But a sense of fear and danger that mandated violent suppression was always part of the message. Wartime caricature, moreover, dehumanized a real or imagined enemy and positioned them for violence directed toward a generalized evil. The second distinctive point about Ukrainian propaganda was its unique adaptation of Nazi anticommunist ideology. Murderous anticommunism was central to the Nazi belief system from the outset, but it had an especially ready audience in the Ukraine. There it was “zhydo-bolshevzym” (“Jewish Bolshevism”). No one had forgotten the man-made Holodomor—the Ukrainian famine of 1932–1933—which killed millions from starvation and drove both family members and POWs to cannibalism. Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands presents a particularly graphic account of the famine.12 Whatever debates persist among historians about responsibility for the famine had little relevance for the Ukrainian population during World War II; they blamed Joseph Stalin. The Nazis consequently decided on a propaganda strategy that would combine anticommunism and antisemitism in a manner targeted to their audience. Nazi anticommunism had always depicted Bolshevism as a Jewish disease, but for Operation Barbarossa they added a startling component: They depicted Stalin himself as a hook-nosed Jew (Fig. 21.17). Variations on that especially pernicious fiction became a staple of the Nazi poetry fliers.

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Fig. 21.17  Stalin as a Jew (flier, 4 × 8.5 inches, Author’s collection)

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As the illustrated poem “The Collectors” indicates, Stalin’s Cheka companion, the first incarnation of his secret police, is shown as a Jew as well, here marching affectionately together in union. Here is a translation of the poem: In a leather coat, with a jaunty open collar But wearing a worried expression, Stalin himself marches slowly through town With a little guide at his side. He sports a brass tag on his chest– This man knows the money business best! From the back you’d think him meek, a sheep! But his face is fearsome, a wolf! Everyone going by will donate. Who would dare refuse? For the guide with his Cheka mug Would otherwise respond as a thug.

The antisemitic implications of claiming Stalin’s expertise in the “money business” would not have been lost on a Ukrainian audience, but it is the illustration that cements the link and drives it home. The inscription on the box of coins Stalin is carrying translates as “Collection of funds for an armored division named after Saint Count Dmitry Donskoy.” (Venerated as a saint in the Orthodox Church, Donskoy, 1350–1359, reigned as the Prince of Moscow when construction on the Kremlin began.) Stalin is extorting money from a population that can ill afford it. A Star of David hangs from the staff he carries, and his armed dwarf Cheka companion has a crude star on his cap. The midget Jew had been a staple of Nazi iconography since 1924. “The Collectors” has a blank reverse, but others were printed on both sides. “The Whale and the Yid,” in this version with the title and the illustration printed in red, is one of a number of flier poems that Russian soldiers could bring with them in surrendering, in this case encouraging surrender by invoking a shared ideology of antisemitism (Fig. 21.18). In this context, we should keep in mind that the Wehrmacht joined the SS in murdering Jews in the Soviet Union. The poem’s author clearly enjoys invoking the biblical story of Jonah and the whale without actually mentioning it. That enables the reader to make the connection. The poem may well have been inspired by the Frankfurt dialect poet Friedrich Stoltze’s (1816–1891) antisemitic poem “The Prophet Jonah.” Here is a translation of the Russian text, adapted from alternative translations provided to me by Alexis Pogorelskin and Greg Fedner: A huge whale bathing in the ocean, Accidentally swallowed a drowning Yid. All his life he had swallowed no small amount of rubbish. And he tolerated all of it without illness or consequence.

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Fig. 21.18  The Whale and the Yid (flier, 5.75 × 8 inches, cf. image no. 12, Author’s collection)

But this was no joke Imagine it, the lord of the sea took ill. Despite his best efforts, he could not Stomach a yid.

382  C. NELSON So he gathered all his strength And belched the yid out. But the revulsion and loathing for yids Has stayed with him. Despite the lesson from this wise whale, Russia has not yet done the same. Our world is the poorer Because inside it sits a lousy yid.

The reverse of the flier has the same passage in Russian and German, here translated into English: 1. PASS! (Valid for one or more Red Army soldier and commanders) The bearer of this note does not want to spill blood senselessly, but instead changes sides to the German army. He is assured food and good treatment! (Bring coats and cooking utensils)

In reality, many Russian prisoners faced summary execution, starvation, or death from exposure on forced marches. Those “cooking utensils” would not have been much use when they were empty. From 2.6 to 3.3 million Russians died in German captivity. Frank Ellis quotes the German historian Christian Hartmann’s judgment that the death of so many Soviet prisoners of war in German captivity is “one of the greatest crimes of military history.”13 This section of the essay concludes with another striking poem from my archive, again adapted from alternative translations by Pogorelskin and Fedner. The poem is “Soviet ‘Equality’ or the Career of Aron Shmeerzon,” the last name likely an antisemitic slander on Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902–1994), the legendary third Rebbe of the Chabad Lubavitch dynasty (Fig. 21.19). It is printed on the reverse of a caricature in silhouette form, a staple of Nazi iconography, that is baldly emblazoned “JUDE!” A hooknosed Jewish head with a foreshortened arm and claw-like hand is torn from the body and drips blackened blood (Fig. 21.20).14 Seven spaced, bestial teeth highlight its open mouth. Atop the head is a Red Army hat of a design familiar from the Civil War that took place substantially in the Ukraine. A box below the silhouette headed “Propusk” (“pass”) includes a Wehrmacht insignia and a pointed declaration: “This propusk is really for the unlimited no. of soldiers and officers who have had it dying for Jewish-Bolshevik interests.” This is a poem based less in racial hatred than in a murderous form of antisemitic envy and resentment. In typical Soviet style, a factory is named “Party and Government.” Once again, the Cheka, or secret police, make an appearance. “You give, you take” is a popular lower class and revolutionary slogan. The nagaika referred to is a much dreaded Cossack whip resembling a cat o’ nine tails.

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Fig. 21.19  The career of Aron Shmeerzon (flier, 6  ×  8.25 inches, Author’s collection)

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Fig. 21.20  JUDE! (reverse of no. 19, Author’s collection) It is 1917. Aron goes on the march. Revolution, confiscations Expropriations, the Cheka— Terror … Armored cars …

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Bolsheviks. You hardly know Aron Shmeerzon! Neck shaven, shirt open Trousers flared—You give, you take! It is now 1923. Aron goes to the “Party and Government” factory. They reward him with a new apartment. They award him a medal. Aron is a Communist. Aron is a Chekist. Aron is a defender of the revolution … At the front for four years, They appoint him director of the factory. The year is now 1925. Aron has gotten fat. He set himself up with a plump Khaika, a Jewish “House Keeper.” He walks about with a whip, a nagaika. So he is clearly a terrific director And deserves honor and respect. Aron sat his papa down To provide “dry porridge” To the factory workers, While Aron’s wife was made master of the food. She sprayed seltzer water over what they served. At the grocery booth Sat a callow little Yid. His older son was appointed To the factory store. So all went swimmingly. The Yids guzzle, drink, and snore. The proletariat works in drudgery Because he must feed the Yids. Enough. Working people, wake up. And look around. The whole country Has been given to the Yids! So why on earth would you fight To be a slave to the Jews? Cease this useless struggle And hasten home!

The Binary Structure of Nazi Antisemitic Poetry It is such poems as these, culturally linked to the assault on millions of victims, that we may keep in mind as we read other cheerful or homicidal poem and song cards officially issued by the Third Reich. All wartime popular poetry production, it is important to emphasize, is inherently dichotomous,

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that is, after all, the nature of the political and military situation. So, one expects to see poems praising the nation and its soldiers alongside poems belittling the enemy. Unlike the poems commissioned for use in the Soviet Union, two kinds of German poems form a uniquely binary and interdependent relationship structure—the large number of poems and hymns devoted to Hitler are culturally paired with the poetic assaults on the Jews. In the German people’s perception of themselves as modernity’s ultimate victims justified almost any form of retribution. To that was added an antisemitic tradition dating back centuries. That helped produce assent to the unique twofold Nazi vision—a glorious, bountiful resurrected Germany grounded in casting out the Jewish devil from its midst. “The German nation, as closest to racial purity, had a mission to save the world from a Jewish conspiracy to take it over.”15 “Judaism constituted the foil, the negative background, upon which the ideal of Nordic beauty and goodness was mapped”; the “opposition of German-ness and Judaism was raised to the central theme of world history.”16 “Hitler’s position of absolute power was justified not in legal-rational terms as that of chancellor and head of State but in charismatic terms as that of Führer of the German Volk—not a State, but a German nation as racially determined entity.”17 The perfect community could be achieved only by exterminating all inferior beings. And the Jews were everywhere an enemy within, an enemy that had burrowed into the homeland and every other country. Thus, Jews were thus also an enemy within every other enemy. The British of course were an enemy, but they harbored still worse Jewish villains in their midst. So there was a Nazi slogan to isolate British Jews from their countrymen: “The Englishman is no Jew, / The Jew is no Englishman” (“Der Engländer ist kein Jud, / Der Jud ist nie Engländer!”). By relentlessly castigating its imagined Jewish enemy as subhuman, Germany inexorably became subhuman itself. Poetry helped Germany cast antisemitism as a transcendent value, a supreme if dark truth. The one shining value, the one living God, was Hitler himself. As Randall Bytwerk writes, “an interesting manifestation of the Hitler cult is the thousands of poetic hymns to the Führer.”18 No one has ever attempted a comprehensive catalogue of hymns to Hitler, but I have found them in magazines, newspapers, books, and on postcards and fliers. Reading a large number of paeans to Hitler is at best tiresome, suggesting Hannah Arendt’s thesis about the banality of evil. Nevertheless, it is important to know that such poems existed, that they helped construct and sustain the Third Reich, that German readers used poetry to underwrite and amplify both their selflove and their hatred. Beneath the banal joy in these texts lies the terror of what came to pass over more than a decade. Poem cards celebrating Hitler proliferated when the Nazis came to power. A populist outpouring of poetry in praise of Hitler began immediately and lasted for a decade, enough so that it stands as what I would call a major poetry panic—or poetry frenzy—of the Third Reich.

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I am calling it a poetry panic or frenzy because it has the desperate character of a mob action, one joined in the shadow of Nazi terror. Assent to a poetry panic comes with fear and coercion, not relatively open political debate. It is an accession to rhymed and metered hysteria. “A Shout of Joy” (“Ein Jubelruf!”—Fig. 21.21) is an early example of the Hitler poetry frenzy from 1933: A shout of joy resounds in every German land, From snowy Alp to ocean strand. Heil Hitler! Heil! It’s done; The German people have awoken and won. Dear fatherland, you can rest serene, For we shall keep our colors clean. The swastika has won, The red front lies broken, done. The cowards, the murderous pests, are blown away. For Hitler stands at the helm today. Dear fatherland, you can rest serene, For we shall keep our colors clean. So bright the dawn of freedom shines. Everywhere distress declines. Because Hitler keeps his promises And there will be no compromises. Dear fatherland, you can rest serene, For we shall keep our colors clean. So let Hitler’s flags fly. Raise your swastikas to the sky. To work, to work for power and bread, Firm in our faith unto death. Dear fatherland, you can rest serene, For we shall keep our colors clean.

Eventually, there would even be pro-Hitler poem cards issued privately by rhapsodic individuals. Franz Odelga’s poem card (Fig. 21.22) publicizes what amounts to a piece of Führer folk art, a portrait of Hitler that Odelga carved out of a huge bole of wood, perhaps recalling the huge wooden statues of Hindenburg that were erected throughout Germany after the World War I victory at Tannenberg.19 The poem’s story opens near the Oder River near the border between what is now Germany and Poland and in the time of Frederick the Great (Old Fritz), thus following the Nazi practice of placing Hitler in a line of earlier leaders. Goebbels began to make heavy use of Frederick the Great references in 1944 to suggest the Nazis could overcome impossible odds. “The Prussian king had always been a significant symbol in German history, but it was only towards the second half of the war that this figure came to epitomize the indomitable spirit who refused to accept defeat”

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Fig. 21.21  A shout of Joy (postcard, Author’s collection)

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Fig. 21.22  Franz Odelga next to his carved Hitler portrait and his poem (postcard, Author’s collection)

(Welch, Third Reich, 121). Odelga identifies himself as living in the city of Proskau in Upper Silesia (Oberschlesien, abbreviated as “O/S”), which is now the city of Prószków in southwest Poland. At the end, he seems to be offering his hope Germany will pay him for his work: Not stone, not plaster, not a weapon it’s an old poplar tree from the old military road in the upper Oder-region! Old Fritz, tired from traveling stopped here in the heat of summer to rest under the tree. To commemorate the fame of the great king, our fathers tended this tree devotedly, like a shrine. But a traveling journeyman wantonly set fire to it to entertain himself and brightly burned its living body!

390  C. NELSON Defenseless now against the storm, its walls weakened by fire, it was cut down by axe and saw– that was the end of the tree. Four years it languished in a ditch, no more than firewood, but no one wanted it, even for free, as it didn’t seem worth the effort. I’m only a simple, one-eyed man, but I determined to act and turn this half-rotten log into a work of art. I carved the image of our beloved Führer with my own hand into this rough and wild tree stump, and so this beautiful work was born. So the whole country can see it, and so I can live, it will take this great image from me.

Trude Niendorf-Broda-Klemm (of Leipzig) contributes “Hail to our Führer!” (“Heil unserm Führer!”) to the Hitler poetry panic (Fig. 21.23). It is a sentimental effort to construct a lonely and suffering Führer who comes in from the wilderness to save Germany. Stated in prose, the story of Hitler’s political isolation might seem merely a whining complaint. In poetry, it seeks to become a lyrical lament: Quietly withdrawn, to the world unknown, He stood apart, alone, unnamed. His heart full of fervor, his thought level-headed, Sent by God to save the people he wedded. Our Führer was so lonely! Then he broke the spell, filled with the will, Freely, to unveil his word that would thrill. But too many of us were torn or broken And could not follow the words that were spoken. Our Führer was humiliated! Despite suffering and struggle, year after year, He stayed loyal, true, to the banner held dear. And from belief to victory his word did resound. All Germany awakened, listened spellbound. God protect our Führer! Men are converted, women happy, all as they must.

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Fig. 21.23  Hail to our Führer (postcard, Author’s collection)

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392  C. NELSON Girls and boys beam at him filled with trust. They hear the call and all chime in, Filled with the desire to be German. Hail and thanks to our Führer!

“Hail to Our Führer” echoes the tone and rhetoric of a number of the poems in the 1938 collection Das Lied der Getreuen: Verse ungennanter östereichischer Hitler-Jugend aus den Jahren der Verfolgung 1933–37 (The Song of the Faithful: Verses by Unknown Members of the Hitler Youth in Austria, Written During the Years of Persecution: 1933–37).20 Goebbels blurbs the book on the jacket and granted it the National Book Prize that year. Part of what one can begin to hear in those poems and in “Hail to Our Führer!” is the structural relationship between Germany’s self-image as a wounded and mistreated nation and its compensatory images of wartime apotheosis. The twofold character of Germany’s poems is more fundamental and interdependent than in other countries. Other countries debase enemies, but in no other country is the relationship between poems debasing others and poems aggrandizing the nation-state so interdependent. In a uniquely structural relationship, the two impulses are inseparable. Loving Hitler and hating Jews are two sides of the same coin. Indeed, both the paeans to Hitler and the rants against the Jews are ventriloquist echoes of Hitler’s own voice and obsessions. The poets are trying not merely to affirm Nazi ideology but rather to fuse themselves with Hitler’s consciousness and speak from within it. The ground for Third Reich antisemitism was well prepared. In the terrain of the poem postcard alone, German examples date to the late nineteenth century and occur steadily thereafter (Backhaus, Dipper, Heil). Book and magazine antisemitic texts have a still longer history, but their virulent articulation to state policy dramatically intensifies under the Nazis. One finds antisemitic poems in England, France, Russia, and the United States, but the quantity and persistence of the phenomenon are stronger in Germany. Whether most World War II German citizens were willing executioners may be debatable, but they were more than prepared to be willing antisemites. That a mutually reinforcing structural relationship between idealization and barbarism defined Third Reich culture is one of the sad lessons of the wartime poem. Nothing guarantees that poems will be on the side of the angels. Poetry is a continuing site of cultural struggle; its character is always open to being redefined; its powers can be seized by any group. They do so in part because poetry helps convince people that particular political positions are actually expressions of transcendent value, that they represent eternal truths rather than transitory interests. Nor can we cast the Nazi poem out of poetry, or rule it an aberration with no purchase on poetic history. A distinctive historical phenomenon, it nonetheless may be compared with Russian poems published during the pogroms or poems distributed by the

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Ku Klux Klan during its revival in the 1920s. One of the lessons of the last century is that poems can be not just bad but loathsome. In Germany, poetry held out the possibility that killing Jews was a lofty endeavor. One slogan with internal rhymes—here printed on a tiny sticker attached to a gray envelope sent from one business to another in Leipzig in 1941—affirms state antisemitism, exhorts everyone who sees the envelope to share in this collective hatred, and implicitly endorses the eventual final solution (Fig. 21.24). The image is the symbol of the newspaper Der Stürmer and is pre-printed on their envelopes and postcards. A crude caricature of a Jew within a sixpointed star is captioned “Without a solution of the Jewish question / There is no salvation for humanity” (“Ohne Lösung der Judenfrage / keine Erlösung der Menschheit”). The internal rhyme makes the slogan easier to remember. And the little sticker is juxtaposed with an imperative postal reminder to include house and street numbers with addresses, eerily once again underlining the sometimes ordinary banality of Nazi evil. Meanwhile, “solution” and “salvation” are linked in such a way as to make racism a transcendent

Fig. 21.24  Envelope with sticker (6 × 5 inches, Author’s collection)

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value. Poetry in Germany helped turn hatred and the Holocaust into God’s work.

Conclusion Yet poets also stood against the inhuman flood. And in one case the word “postcard” intersects with Germany’s barbaric onslaught and with the poetic witness that resisted it. In 1940, the Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti (1909– 1944) was drafted into a labor battalion along with thousands of his fellow Jews. As the war progressed and Hungary brought its policies into greater compliance with those of its German ally, these labor battalions, brutal from the outset, became increasingly lethal. Beaten and starved, the Jews were now randomly murdered. Radnóti nonetheless transformed the horror into poems and wrote them in a small notebook. On August 29, 1944, nearing the end, he wrote the first of four poems under the title “Razglednicas,” Serbo-Croatian for “picture postcards.” A month later, he writes the last of the “Razglednicas” on the back of a cod-liver oil advertising notice he found discarded. The poem predicts his death: “shot in the neck … blood mixed with mud was drying on my ear.” On November 9, he met the fate he had anticipated, but nineteen months later, the war over, his body was disinterred and the blood-stained poems recovered.21 His testimony now outlives his executioners. I cite Radnóti in conclusion to stand in for the deeply tragic and culturally distinctive body of work—beginning in concentration camps, on forced marches, and among witnesses to the Holocaust and Holocaust survivors— and continuing through subsequent generations to the present day, that has defined Holocaust poetry and its unique capacity to inform our understanding of what the Holocaust means. But there is another body of poetry, unknown to most students of the Holocaust, that helped inspire some of the Holocaust’s perpetrators. This essay has been designed to open a window into the world of antisemitic Holocaust poetry and offer readers what to many will be a first glimpse of its character. I hope this persuades people that we cannot fully understand the psychology and motivation of the agents of Nazism, or indeed the history of antisemitism, without reflecting on and studying this poetry. The time and effort put into its creation and dissemination alone demonstrate that some of the participants in World War II believed this poetry mattered. Much antisemitic poetry can be counted vulgar doggerel. But a number of poems display enough literary invention to trouble us to this day.22

Notes

1. Edward G. Danziger, Papa D: A Saga of Love and Cooking (Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair, 1967), 7.

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2. Randall L. Bytwerk, Julius Streicher: Nazi Editor of the Notorious Anti-Semitic Newspaper Der Stürmer (New York: Stein and Day, 1983), 57, 93, 100. 3. Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 12. 4. The truck photo was originally in an album. The glue marks on the four corners are still present. 5. There is a well-documented history of the Jews in Bingen am Rhein available on the French version of Wikipedia: “Synagouue de Bingen am Rhein (1905–1938),” available at https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synagogue_de_ Bingen_am_Rhein_(1905-1938). 6. The photo was developed and printed by Photo-Haus-Kühn, a business in Bingen am Rhein. 7. H. Thomas Steele, Lick ‘Em, Stick ‘Em: The Lost Art of Poster Stamps (New York: Abbeville Press, 1989), 6–17. 8.  See Salo Aizenberg’s Hatemail: Anti-Semitism on Picture Postcards (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2013) for reproduction and translation of representative Kleine Cohn poetry postcards. No one knows how many there were, but I have over fifty different ones in my collection. 9. The Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, has a large file of scanned copies of fliers and posters from Operation Barbarossa. The originals are in a museum in the Ukraine. 10. For discussion of the role posters or fliers played in Operation Barbarossa, see Karel C. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine Under Nazi Rule (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 20, 65, 77, 114, 119, 122, 132, 146–147, 176, 195, 213–214, 254, 271, 283; Wendy Lower, Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 34–35, 37, 43, 79, 196. Jeffrey Herf’s The Jewish Enemy has a detailed discussion of the role posters played in Nazi propaganda. See, for example, his second chapter, “Building the Anti-Semitic Consensus,” 17–49. The most detailed account of the publication and distribution of antisemitic fliers in occupied Ukraine is Katerina Yuryevna Osvald’s MA thesis Nazi Visual Propaganda in the Occupied Territories of Ukraine: Anti-Semitic Posters, Leaflets, and Cartoons [in Ukrainian] (Kiev: Ukraine National University, 2017). Semen Averbuch’s The Hitler Propaganda of AntiSemitism in Caricatures and Leaflets [in Ukrainian] (Kiev: 2005), reproduces a number of fliers not among the US Holocaust Museum’s collection of scans, but he does not discuss them. 11.  As Jeffrey Herf writes in The Jewish Enemy, “Within the Office of Active Propaganda of the Propaganda Ministry, the Antikomintern office directed by Eberhard Taubert produced much of the anti-Semitic propaganda aimed at Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union” (27). 12. See Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010). 13. Frank Ellis, Barbarossa 1941: Reframing Hitler’s Invasion of Stalin’s Soviet Empire (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015), 277. 14. In “It’s Them or Us,” Randall Bytwerk reproduces an April 1926 Der Stürmer cover in which “a girl cowers under the huge claw-like hand of a Jew, his evil silhouette in the background” (8–9).



396  C. NELSON 15. Michael Hughes, Nationalism and Society: Germany 1800–1945 (London: Edward Arnold, 1988), 211. 16.  Cilly Kugelmann, “Judenblut Muss Fliessen: Antisemitische Propaganda im Nationalsozialismus,” in Abgestempelt: Judenfeindliche Postkarten, eds. Helmut Gold and George Heuberger (Frankfurt: Museumsstiftung und Telekommunikation und des Jüdischen Museums Frankfurt am Main, 1999), 284, 285. 17. David Welch, The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda (New York: Routledge, 1993), 85. 18. Randall L. Bytwerk, Bending Spines: The Propagandas of Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2004), 14–15. 19. David Welch, Germany, Propaganda and Total War, 1914–1918: The Sins of Omission (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 85. 20. Baldur Von Schirach, ed., Das Lied der Getreuen: Verse ungenannter österreichischer Hitler-Jugend aus den Jahren der Verfolgung, 1933–37 (Leipzig: Phillip Reclaim, 1938). 21. Zsuzsanna Ozsváth, In the Footsteps of Orpheus: The Life and Times of Miklós Radnóti (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 210–220. 22. My thanks to Russell Berman, Judith Cohen, Greg Federer, Jeffrey C. Herf, Uta Larkey, Deborah Lipstadt, Alexis Pogorelskin, Anne Troester, and Sonja Wentling for their advice and assistance with this essay. Several people helped with literal translations that I then revised to create poems.

Bibliography Aizenberg, Salo. Hatemail: Anti-Semitism on Picture Postcards. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2013. Averbuch, Semen. The Hitler Propaganda of Anti-Semitism in Caricatures and Leaflets [in Ukrainian]. Kiev: Ukrainian Center for Holocaust Study, 2005. Backhaus, Fritz. “‘Friedliche Löwen’ und ‘gefrässige Raben’: Tiervergleiche und die Verspottung jüdischer Eigennamen.” In Abgestempelt: Judenfeindliche Postkarten, edited by Helmut Gold and George Heuberger, 215–221. Frankfurt: Museumsstiftung und Telekommunikation und des Jüdischen Museums Frankfurt am Main, 1999. Bender, James R. Postcards of Hitler’s Germany, Vol I. San Jose, CA: James R. Bender Publishing, 1995. Berkhoff, Karel C. Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine Under Nazi Rule. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. Bytwerk, Randall L. Bending Spines: The Propagandas of Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2004. ———. “It’s Them or Us: Killing the Jews in Nazi Propaganda” (c. 1912), published online at http://bytwerk.com/papers/Symbolic-Violence.pdf. ———. Julius Streicher: Nazi Editor of the Notorious Anti-Semitic Newspaper Der Stürmer. New York: Stein and Day, 1983. Danziger, Edward G. Papa D: A Saga of Love and Cooking. Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair, 1967.

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Dipper, Rachel. “‘Einmal muss der Mensch ins Bad!’: Grüsse aus Karlsbad und Marienbad.” In Abgestempelt: Judenfeindliche Postkarten, edited by Helmut Gold and George Heuberger, 194–204. Frankfurt: Museumsstiftung und Telekommunikation und des Jüdischen Museums Frankfurt am Main, 1999. Ellis, Frank. Barbarossa 1941: Reframing Hitler’s Invasion of Stalin’s Soviet Empire. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015. Gold, Helmut, and George Heuberger, eds. Abgestempelt: Judenfeindliche Postkarten. Frankfurt: Museumsstiftung und Telekommunikation und des Jüdischen Museums Frankfurt am Main, 1999. Heil, Johannes. “‘Deutschland den Deutschen’: Judenvertreibungen und Vertrei­bungs­ phantasien im Postkartenformat.” In Abgestempelt: Judenfeindliche Postkarten, edited by Helmut Gold and George Heuberger, 241–250. Frankfurt: Museumsstiftung und Telekommunikation und des Jüdischen Museums Frankfurt am Main, 1999. Herf, Jeffrey. The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. Hughes, Michael. Nationalism and Society: Germany 1800–1945. London: Edward Arnold, 1998. Kugelmann, Cilly. “Judenblut Muss Fliessen: Antisemitische Propaganda im Nationalsozialismus.” In Abgestempelt: Judenfeindliche Postkarten, edited by Helmut Gold and George Heuberger, 280–289. Frankfurt: Museumsstiftung und Telekommunikation und des Jüdischen Museums Frankfurt am Main, 1999. Lower, Wendy. Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Menchine, Ron. Propaganda Postcards of World War II. Iola, WI: Krause Publishing Company, 2000. Osvald, Katerina Yuryeva. “Nazi Visual Propaganda in the Occupied Territories of Ukraine: Anti-Semitic Posters, Leaflets, and Cartoons [in Ukrainian].” MA Thesis, Ukraine National University, Kiev, 2017. Ozsváth, Zsuzsanna. In the Footsteps of Orpheus: The Life and Times of Miklós Radnóti. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Snyder, Timothy. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. New York: Basic Books, 2010. Stargardt, Nicholas. The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939–1945. New York: Basic Books, 2015. Steele, H. Thomas. Lick ‘Em, Stick ‘Em: The Lost Art of Poster Stamps. New York: Abbeville Press, 1989. “Synagouue de Bingen am Rhein (1905–1938).” fr.wikipedia.org, available at https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synagogue_de_Bingen_am_Rhein_(1905-1938). Von Schirach, Baldur, ed. Das Lied der Getreuen: Verse ungenannter österreichischer HitlerJugend aus den Jahren der Verfolgung, 1933–37. Leipzig: Phillip Reclaim, 1938. Weinberg, Gerhard L. A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Welch, David. The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda. New York: Routledge, 1993. ———. Germany, Propaganda and Total War, 1914–1918: The Sins of Omission. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000.

PART IV

Film and Drama

CHAPTER 22

Holocaust Drama Imagined and Re-imagined: The Case of Charlotte Delbo’s Who Will Carry the Word? Holli Levitsky

Charlotte Delbo (1913–1985) had a short but significant experience w ­ orking in live theater. Before the war, as a young woman, she was the assistant to Louis Jouvet, one of the most well-known impresarios at the time, and among the most influential figures in twentieth-century French theater. She traveled extensively with his company. When the Germans occupied her country in 1940, Jouvet was on tour in South America. After learning that the Gestapo had executed one of her acquaintances—and against all opposition from her colleagues, friends, and family—Delbo returned to Paris. She joined the underground, actively engaging in clandestine anti-German activity, until she and her husband were arrested in March 1942. After she was allowed a final visit with him in his cell, Delbo’s husband was executed by firing squad. She returns to that visit often in her writing. Delbo was held in various camps near Paris until January 1943, when she and 229 other Frenchwomen—imprisoned for their resistance activities—were put on a train to Auschwitz. It was one of few convoys that featured non-Jewish prisoners from France to Auschwitz—and the only convoy of women. Only 49 returned. She wrote about the experience of the convoy later, in Le convoi du 24 janvier (published in English as Convoy to Auschwitz). Delbo remained in Auschwitz until January 1944, when she was sent to Ravensbruck. Near the end of the war, she was released to the Red Cross, who flew her to Sweden with a cohort of female prisoners.

H. Levitsky (*)  Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, USA © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_22

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There, she recuperated from severe malnutrition and other health issues caused by the extremity of her camp experience. She wrote her masterpiece, the trilogy, Auschwitz and After, in 1946 and 1947. Before allowing each of the volumes to be published, she waited for them to, as she put it, “stand the test of time.”1 The first volume, None of Us Will Return, was published in 1965; the second volume, Useless Knowledge, was published in 1970 and was soon followed by its sequel, The Measure of Our Days. In prose and poetry, the manuscript describes Delbo’s observations and experiences in the French Resistance, in Auschwitz, and after liberation. In all of her postwar writings, Delbo declares the same message: “Il faut donner a voir”—they must be made to see. Each declaration seeks the precise metaphor to direct her message to a particular audience, always situating the subject as not broken so much as “un-whole.” The survivor exists as a split self—much like the snake shedding a skin that does not disappear, or Auschwitz as a neighbor one lives beside. She sees memory as divided, operating on two levels at once: common memory, which includes the everyday shared experiences, and deep memory, where she is still in Auschwitz, feeling desperate and hopeless. By structuring her consciousness as layered, Delbo constructs a parallel distinction between external or thinking memory, and sense memory. The imagery helps to uncover a further division between what the survivor knows and what the rest of the world must try to see, because thinking memory only allows us to imagine the worst; only sense memory imprints itself, allowing us to approach the unthinkable. Sense memory is a powerful mechanism, and the sense of smell may be the most powerful connector to memory. Delbo’s strong ­olfactory-centered motifs tell the audience that, for the survivor, the foul odor of human waste and decomposition did not disappear after liberation. The memory of Auschwitz—that is, common memory, or the memory she might share when telling her story—is not triggered by “odor-evoked autobiographical memories”—as Proust’s Madeline might provide. Rather, from her deepest sense memory, Delbo continues to smell the foul odor of the camp: the burning bodies and the human effluvium smeared, not just on the bodies of prisoners but throughout the unsanitary camps; the harrowing chaos of crammed ghettos, compressed train cars, and in the constricted hiding spaces where some found refuge. Although she had already written extensively about her Holocaust experience through poetry and prose, Delbo’s 1966, Qui Rapportera Ces Paroles? (Who Will Carry the Word? 1982), was her first published Holocaust drama. Its technical and dramatic success owes much to her work assisting Jouvet with his theater company. First performed in 1974, the play provides a powerful example of a landscape overrun with images of bodily waste and human remains—consequences emerging from sites of violence, putrefaction, and death. The imagery of decomposition is transgressive by its very nature, displaying the unabridged realities of the Holocaust within an “aesthetics of atrocity.” By translating such images into a literary drama about Holocaust

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memory, Delbo exposes both the condition of camp life and its effect on the prisoners, demanding that the audience sees past, present, and future, all in the course of one narrative. The drama revolves around the need to bear witness in a debilitating universe that is eroding the bodies of witnesses. The author’s predominant focus on bodily deterioration over other problems reveals a world where there is an inability to care, even minimally, for the body (in general, but also for the particular needs of the female body). The dissolution of the physical body is the result of a number of forces acting on it: the lack of basic food, hydration, and general nutrition; actions performed against the body, such as sleeplessness and torture; the inability to wash or cleanse the body, and the related inability to regulate bodily waste production. Dysentery was oftentimes the last defeat of the body before its final surrender to death. The images of humans “wasting away” become, for the playwright, the link between the literal and the symbolic. Delbo “embodies” images of elimination in her powerful prose, and, since the fundamentally symbolic nature of human consciousness makes us unable to live with/in our own waste, the play itself becomes a drama of elimination. The background of “Who Will Carry the Word?” is derived from Delbo’s actual wartime experience and features characters modeled after Delbo and the women with whom she was imprisoned in Auschwitz-Birkenau (mostly activists in the French Resistance against Nazi Germany). To underscore the desolation of the landscape and the despair of the prisoners, the playwright describes the setting as, “nowhere…a place that no one can imagine.”2 The drama follows a composite of 12 female prisoners, faced with the worst possible circumstances, including physical and psychological degradation, torture, and random selections for death. Together, they struggle to find the will to survive. Who Will Carry the Word? in title, refers to the central crisis of the play, intensifying as their numbers fall due to attrition. Who will be the one to survive, defying all odds and carrying word of what happened to these women back to the unknowing world? Rather than providing detailed notes for each scene, and for each cast member, Delbo’s “Author’s Note” declares that there are to be “no sets,” “no make-up,” and that “faces do not count”; “The costumes do not count.” The site is to be suggested by the “positions and movements of the characters, and by the lighting” (Skloot). Each member of the cast is identified by name and age, all between 16 and 30. By staging the drama in this desolate landscape—in a light of unreality—the action of the play becomes continuous, unrelenting, and without intermission, reflecting, as far as possible, the conditions of the camp. In the experience of the play, imagination is championed as a powerful tool of creation, furthering the general understanding and particular impact of human disintegration and erosion. Delbo’s play fixates on these transgressions of bodily boundaries by highlighting the effects of such slippage on the women. Their anxiety over decomposition, excrement, and bodily leakage

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brings light to the pathological absence of sanitary necessities, used as a form of traumatic representation of the prisoner’s camp experience in the play. The drama helps us tie together the literal use of human waste product, its symbolic potential as both a humanizing and dehumanizing agent, and the structural parallels that lie between the grotesque and traumatic experiences. In the camps and elsewhere in extremis, the absence of sanitary facilities was, as many witnesses observed, a “deliberate way of erasing the humanity of [each person]; condemning them to die in and as excrement.”3 In his classic essay about excrement in the concentration camp, Terrence Des Pres identifies the extent to which prisoners were inundated with human waste. Dysentery and other diseases, as well as rules about toilet usage, left prisoners with little or no control over their natural functions, additionally rendering them prisoners to their body’s natural cycles. The demands of the bowels are absolute; without the ability to accommodate those demands, prisoners soiled themselves and those around them, stepping in and sleeping on a fetid mixture of waste products. Of the ones too weak to move, Des Pres writes, they were “slowly enveloped in their own decomposition” (Survivor, 159). In the play, the women experience deprivation and torture on their own bodies, even as they witness the wasting away and death of their beloved friends and comrades. Forced into daily contact with bodily waste and human remains, they have no choice but to see, to feel, to smell, and to know that their body, along with that of their comrades, is wasting away. They discuss death with an unsettling casualness; while they agree that all deaths at Auschwitz are horrible, they consider which death would be the best, the worst, the fastest. For Delbo, the reality of Des Pres’s “excremental assault” can hardly be understood by those who were not there. How could non-witnesses truly see and feel the experience of a prisoner’s daily life with its competing versions of reality? The daily life of all human beings includes attending to the natural function of elimination. Civil society requires a hygienic state; to mirror this reality, the prisoners in Auschwitz expected the routine of hygiene and cleanliness to order their world. This expectation came without the ability to practice hygiene, unable to take advantage of modern plumbing (modern plumbing was first introduced in the camp during her stay there). Delbo’s sensory evocation in characterizing the environment amounts to a “poetics of atrocity”—one that captures, through metaphor—in the maximum capacity to which a performative attempt can—the shift in a fundamental understanding of the body…in the “other universe” of the concentration camp. Who Will Carry the Word? powerfully dramatizes the shift from the world of normal expectations to the “other universe,” where the defiled and abused body testifies to the unleashed power of uncontained excrement. The competing versions of reality Delbo found in her camp experience is also inherent in stage performance. Although the play lacks a named setting, preferring to remain “nowhere”, as the author requests, the “other universe” carries the suggestion of an intractable stench that could not be washed away.

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In the face of such knowledge, the landscape of Auschwitz as a vast, olfactory space emerges as the most impactful character of the performance. Indeed, Auschwitz becomes a monstrous labyrinth of excremental spaces; as prisoners move around the camp, they find themselves smeared with bodily effluvia, with their bodies collecting the snowflake-like ash that falls on their hair and clothing from the crematoria—dust that consisted of gases, ashes, and mineral fragments—which constituted in the end human waste in its physical form, living only as ash on the skin of their comrades. In poet Paul Celan’s imagery, the relentless outpouring of human ash is the “black milk of daybreak…[which]we drink and we drink.”4 While Celan’s “black milk” saturated the living and the dead, the consequence of these conditions was an outpouring of shit. The women lived in waste and among an unbearable stench of excrement and smoke, and the camp’s physical and emotional demands gave them little time to prioritize their health and sanitation. In Auschwitz and After, her prose account of life in the camp, Delbo writes that, when she first was able to clean herself, doing so after 67 days in the camp, her “pubic hair and underpants were ‘stiff’ with dry diarrhea” (Raphael, 65). She was, as if, made of shit. In life, such as it was in the concentration camp, bodies were covered with filth, and the prisoner’s fate in death was no different. Research reveals that words, too, were, quite literally, as shit; camp guards regularly addressed prisoners as “sheiss” or shit, and the corpses were refered to as “scheiss-stucke” (pieces of shit). The lack of water and ability to wash, profoundly—and, in many cases, irrevocably—damaged the body and mind. The prisoners were conditioned to feel their bodies deteriorating. Delbo writes in “The Stream,” a passage in Useless Knowledge, that, when she tried to take off her stockings, they were glued on. “I pulled a bit too much…I looked at my feet. They were black with dirt…except for the two big toes, all the others had lost their nails, which, detached from the skin, and [were] glued to the stockings.”5 Who Will Carry the Word? is divided into twenty-four scenes and three acts, preceded by a prologue, and followed by an epilogue spoken directly to the audience. The Prologue establishes that Francoise—the character based on Delbo—is one who survived. “Pure cruelty, pure horror,” she replies to the questions the world “cannot even formulate.” But, she adds, “Who could bear to face/The truth in that cruelty?” She concludes by asking, “So why should I speak?/For the things I would say/Could not be of any use to you” (Skloot, 273). Still, the play demands that one woman must carry the word of what happened to the prisoners back to the uneducated world, and Francoise/Delbo is that witness. The events of the play serve as her story. From the Prologue, the audience is hurled back in time to the camp, where the prisoners are discussing suicide. Francoise has reached the limit of her existence. She intends to kill herself in the “nowhere,” where dying is easier than living. During the discussion that follows her pronouncement, the women remind one another of the necessity—and their vow—to “carry the word,” in order to make the world see what has been done to them.

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Yet Francoise reasons that suicide is their only option. She demands that the others look at the surrounding bodies and cadavers for the truth behind her concern. “Ask their faces which are no longer faces; ask the sockets of their eyes which the rats have widened…Don’t you believe that to become so scrawny, so ugly, so convulsed, so trapped in what remains of skin and flesh, you have to have suffered to the limit, a limit which no one reached before us?” (Skloot, 276). For Lawrence Langer, Delbo’s play reveals a truth that, in the camp, living was “merely physical exertion, while dying is the literal defeat of the body.”6 Francoise and the other prisoners were watching, in real time, the deterioration of their friends and peers. They had limited agency over their bodies and their lives. As their options in life diminished, some moved closer to the only agency that still mattered. In posing death as a choice, they could become, as Francoise reasons, “a cadaver…which will still be clean enough to look at” (ibid.). The women’s ongoing contact with the decomposing bodies and human waste test the notion of the self/other split, upon which subjectivity depends. The abjectness violates boundaries between the body and its excesses, obviating the desire for a “clean” and “proper” body. The women discuss this violation, and their fear that they, too, will not only lose the will to live, but all trace of their human individuality. One prisoner fears the “copraphagic” effect of this violation—a fear of contamination with excrement that existentially exhausts her. She imagines “a lake of mire that extends as far as the other end of the horizon…I’m afraid to have it in my mouth” (ibid., 295). Although the prisoners are often in contact with—and probably ingesting or absorbing—human waste and human byproduct from the spewing furnaces, it is impossible for the audience to feel the prisoners’ dried diarrhea, or the white ash falling on their hair; instead, the play creates a sense of debasement by displacing the horrors that prisoners faced while covered in human waste product. Another prisoner adds that: “You can no longer look at yourself when you gradually dissolve, turning into dirty water, when diarrhea is dripping from you day and night…I am turning into dirty water…I am emptying. It is normal for life to expire through the lips. When it goes through the intestines—that’s complete humiliation” (ibid., 280). The regular and ongoing contact between people and excrement throughout Delbo’s shocking narrative leaves the audience with the basest sense of personal horror, like the skin on spoiled milk that sticks onto our lips as we take a sip. The prisoners have no choice but to “drink it and drink it.” It is worthwhile considering why such images conjure the deepest level of “terrorized abjection” (Raphael, 67)—what Rudolf Otto describes as a “numinous unworth,” and a “feeling of absolute profaneness.”7 At each stage of assault against the body, it was further degraded, its humanity, further diminished, leading inevitably toward elimination. The prisoners still had to rise each day with a sense of purpose, suppressing the impulse that it had long been eliminated. What followed threats to conventional bodily boundaries was abjection itself: the prisoners’ self-disgust and loathing

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of their own bodies. The breakdown in meaning, caused by the inability to distinguish body and its waste (the elimination of the body), was existentially threatening. The fluid landscape of the bespattered camp, itself the result of an absence of sanitary facilities, broke down a number of conventional binary categories. In such an environment, what was “clean” or “dirty,” “healthy” or “sick,” “body” or “waste”—or, for that matter, “human” or “animal”; what is normal; and what is aberrant? In The Female Face of God in Auschwitz, a victim observes that the effect of the excremental assault was a “deliberate means to fill us with contempt towards ourselves and our fellows…. The Germans …knew we were incapable of looking at each other without disgust” (Raphael, 65). The breakdown of systems that sustain civilization made it clear that the intent was to refashion individuals into unrecognizable and contemptible figures. Delbo’s Francoise sees one other possible way to escape her condition, and the useless knowledge of the camp. She writes: “You must wait until my eyes do not see what they see” (Skloot, 277). This is no real opportunity; she cannot un-see the physical assault of her daily life in the camp. It weakened the body, and, as the body erodes, the spirit becomes befouled. The human waste that covered the camp and prisoners left an absent presence, with the images soiling the landscape and transgressing boundaries with their unholy excesses. The “pathological afterimages” of an excremental assault retain in the mind’s eye, lingering long after the abject and traumatic experience is visibly removed from the scene. Francoise knows she will never not see what she saw, and that all those who become witnesses will be chained to that knowledge. In its relatively longstanding production history, Who Will Carry the Word? has been staged and interpreted a variety of ways. It is instructional to note the variety of performances. Under the best circumstances, the drama’s minimalist approach to Holocaust memory highlights the Holocaust’s harrowing legacy while subordinating technical and material aspects of animating the drama. Indeed, most adaptations do little to revert from the original script. For the most part, distinctions between performances lie within the technical staging, directorial choices regarding the performances of the characters, set design, and more. Examining the history of the play’s staging, the most accurate and powerful performances of Who Will Carry the Word?—the performances that are well-received and awarded the best reviews—are interpretations that use modern conventions of theater to enrich the original text by preserving the actual stories, respecting the resilience of the victims, and acting as a living testimony to Delbo and the historical truths behind the play. For instance, certain performances use a variety of lighting and staging techniques in close conjunction with the original script, providing changes only in the technical aspects of the play, respecting the author’s text. In other performances, social justice issues and Holocaust remembrance are given priority in staging, providing survivor testimonies to place the Holocaust in a historical, human

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context. Modern adaptations of Who Will Carry the Word? for the most part, have been maintained with integrity, if not with consistency. Versions of the play have been staged with great emotional power, technical excellence, and respectful adherence to historical truth. The following comparative discussion of four different productions conveys the multiple ways that one can both honor memory through the imagination, as well as dishonor memory, with this play, through textual abridgement, technical frivolity, and/or willful or unintentional misreading. In a well-received performance (according to reviewers) of Who Will Carry the Word? Skidmore College captured the essential features of Delbo’s original work, prioritizing her message—They must be made to see—over the use of modern technical elements that detract from it. The playwright’s notes indicate that the women must give the “impression of being in a crowd [which] must be constantly maintained” (Skloot, 269). If, for example, the scene called for the harshness of a winter night, it was in the hands of the actors to convey the struggle to keep warm, wincing and shivering on the cold stage floor as they huddle together. The production made good use of Skidmore theater’s minimalist design, drawing attention to the harrowing realism of the actors’ movements rather than other items on the stage. To indicate death, for example, “Each night, a couple of the women slip quietly offstage, and it is only after some time that [one realizes] there are fewer of them. Before we know these women’s names, we know that they are dead.”8 Directorial choices in this performance successfully bring out the powerful, harrowing nature of Delbo’s text. With no sets, there is only the suggestion of site; the dialogue and lighting must indicate the action, whether they are in the camp barracks or the roll call square, shivering in the chilling cold winter air, or overheated under the hot summer sun. The actors’ movements, Delbo writes, “will always be slow and voices will never be raised” (Skloot, 269). The light, as it was at Auschwitz, should be unsettling. In this production, the actors’ and stage were lit through a variety of unconventional angles, giving the audience impressions of lighting that they are unlikely to see in another performance. The actors often found themselves lit from below, behind, or directly above their heads. By adding a pallet of different tints and filtrations to lights following the performers, accenting their character’s motions and moods as they occur, the lights create a parallel storyline. An example of this is in the implication of death, as “bright light emerges from the wings, beckoning a character offstage into the cool embrace of death” (ibid.). By using lighting to enhance the impact of offstage sounds, scenes of death are made more powerful, and those things we do not see (but which seem to be lighted) become further associated with death and despair. With an established cast of only female prisoners, Nazi concentration camp workers must intimidate and frighten from offstage, existing as voices that sing heralds of death, but never as a physical presence in the play. Thunderous voices of Nazi guards are amplified and altered through modern editing software, further raising the stakes of survival—and intensity of plot. To convey the power

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of a unified, determined group “[the women] sing a heartbreaking song, layering on more and more harmonies, turning the voice of the one into the voice of the many” (ibid.). The production ties each technical and performative choice together to achieve Delbo’s thematic goals: to pay tribute to the victims and to honor their resistance, and above all to make the viewer see what resistance looked like on that landscape. One international production stands out for special discussion here, because it affords the opportunity to see good intentions working side-by-side with bad results. In 2016, The Complex Theater, in Dublin, Ireland, put on a production of Who Will Carry the Word? Although it was a remarkable achievement to bring this production to Irish shores, it is evident that several problematic choices were made. First, the staging was in a large, open venue—a difficult space to create the necessary bleakness, sense of claustrophobia, and foulness of space of its author’s own, historically accurate memory of Auschwitz. Without the ability to create the close quarters needed, the actors become swallowed up by the large and undefined space, and the character-driven nature of the performance is suppressed. The largest problem that arises from such a technical mishap is the inability for the actors to create the sense of the prisoners’ essential closeness, intimacy, and bonds as a community. The narrative of collective struggle over individual life must be advanced in the staging of the play, in order to show how the power of many can overcome the loss of one with hope, spirit, and the resilience found through a shared community. To do this, it is necessary to transform a venue into a place of desolate, claustrophobic closeness, attempting, in whatever way possible, to resemble the desperation within a concentration camp. The shared sentiment among reviewers of the production was that the openness of the stage was to blame for a loss of intimacy among cast members, distracting the audience and proving the story more sterile than moving. With key actors too far away from each other during thematic focal points of the performance, it would be especially challenging to create the necessary chemistry between them. Additionally, the suffering female was centralized, creating a sense that Delbo’s mission was to tell the stories of every woman who has suffered oppression, instead of every individual. The exclusively gendered Holocaust narrative, in this case, needlessly separates itself from stories that attempt to embody the horrors of the Holocaust and its effect on all people, and is a disservice to Delbo’s intention. Her goal was determinedly not to convey the horrors of the Holocaust as a gendered experience. She famously told a friend that, regarding her Auschwitz experience, “I must not be discussed as a woman writer… I am not a woman in my writing.”9 Rather, the author believed her experiences should remain separate from presumptions made of her based on gender. In this production, the staging would suggest otherwise. Instead of using the play as a testament and tribute to all victims of the Holocaust, this staging treated the composite of female prisoners as a general

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tribute to suffering women. Noticing this, the reviewer wrote that, “As a result, the whole is steeped in a didactic tone, one that yields far less of a personal or visceral experience, feeling more akin to attending an academic debate.”10 By failing to bring out the personal experience of horror in the play—as well as how the characters attempt to manage the quotidian horrors through a mutual bond and goal of survival—the staging sacrificed a great deal of engagement between the performers and their environment, between the actors and the text, and between the actors themselves. The narrative, as written, pushes the action through individual, human exchanges, personalizing the Holocaust as an event which intimately and viscerally touched the lives of all victims. Attrition was a gender-neutral fact; women and men were victims of the Holocaust, and men and women died as a result of their suffering. Delbo places human disintegration and erosion and the effect it had on the victims at the center of the Holocaust experience. Her play fixates on the prisoners’ anxiety over decomposition, excrement and bodily leakage, and brings to light the pathological displacement of these waste products as a form of traumatic representation. The story exposes the fact that these conditions were experienced by real, innocent people, and that their treatment lacked all humanity and compassion. The action shows that, in the face of such inhumanity, these women each recognize one another’s stories, keeping a group count of days passed since arrival in camp, and memorizing the dates of each women’s death in order to bring that knowledge back to the world after liberation. This performance, unfortunately, was staged in such a way that the audience did not know the prisoners as individuals. Each prisoner’s experience of hardship passes without much meaning or significance—their death, considered another number. They are seen, rather, as a mass of suffering women. The unjustified over-feminization of the performance—with the women seen as lacking any resources at all, even the survival skills they no doubt needed to survive as long as many of them did—discounted the authentic moments of gritty survival—the details of which were written and experienced by Delbo. The actors’ attempts at intimacy were not helped by the open, unstructured layout of the stage. The lack of technical care and respect for the author’s notes resulted in an inauthentic rendering of the Holocaust experience, as one critic wrote: A problem compounded by the scattered cast often being collectively staged in pairs, looking like cozy, cuddling couples constantly caressing each other. An attempt at intimacy perhaps, or to accentuate a sense of feminine care, it’s a device that ultimately results in the sense of horror often being minimized, making several scenes feel like a late night story-and giggle fest at an unusually large slumber party. (ibid.)

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In a text seldom adapted by major companies internationally, the Dublin production of the play was important and largely well-received by the popular audience. General theater-goers—unlike academics and historians—may come to such performances of atrocity without the necessary history, and perhaps with the expectation of being entertained. Even the art of atrocity has to offer something beyond the atrocity. For example, loud, startling gunshots (offstage) were used to interrupt key moments, causing the terrified women to shift from their slackened states into rigidity and alarm. Sirens from offstage created an unsettling auditory antagonist, keeping the women jittery and anxious. Sound and lighting were used to great effect, and the narrative thread they drew into the production offered a welcome storyline in an otherwise (critically and historically) unhelpful production of the play. Still, neither of those technical elements could redeem the performance of its reductive, historically inaccurate choices (including the addition of seven characters). Indian River High School’s troubling adaptation of the play allows us to discuss the increased importance of factual correctness in representing the Holocaust as the nature of Holocaust memory shifts away from primary witnessing. To make the point, in a 2018 poll published in the Washington Post, 41 percent of respondents and 66 percent of millennials could not come up with a correct response identifying Auschwitz as a concentration or extermination camp.11 This disturbing reality of our time makes it ever more critical not to distort facts, but to teach them. First, the choice to stage a high school production of Who Will Carry the Word? with its female-only cast, was misguided. The text was abridged to add additional roles and characters for male parts. These additional roles— SS Operatives, dressed in authentic Nazi uniform and regalia, including the swastika—made the alteration to the text not only an illegal abridgement of a published work, but insensitive, misrepresenting the historical foundation of Delbo’s intentions. In Delbo’s drama, images of the concentration camp guards, soldiers, and other workers are figments of sensory horror and unseen death, and their presence, power, and terror is to be created through offstage effects and the actors’ performative choices; by having to accommodate the co-ed nature of the school, Delbo’s message was abandoned from the start. Further, instead of using creative additions brought to the performance by technological means, additional elements for Indian River’s performance were created out of thin air. A chorus was added for the production’s opening scene, during which the German and French national anthems were sung (decidedly NOT in Delbo’s published play). With their voices, actors portraying French prisoners created a harmonious round, which followed an intimidating rendition of the German national anthem, sung by students in the SS roles. To guarantee authenticity, guest artists and language arts instructors were invited to attend rehearsals of the play before it was performed, helping teach the pronunciation of, and musical arrangements based on, French and Nazi German national anthems. The clash of battling anthems was

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accompanied by students dressed in SS uniforms standing at each corner of the stage, giving the infamous Nazi salute toward the huddle of female characters in the middle. Remarkably, in response to a review of the production in the local paper, the English language translator of the play (and Delbo’s goddaughter), Cynthia Haft, contacted the school and demanded the admission of error from everyone involved in the production, and an apology from the school. When her requests were not met with a response, Haft contacted the newspaper, penning an editorial that hoped to correct the misguided production. Her complaints stemmed from both the improper introduction of characters and the insensitive introduction of modern themes and cultural symbolism into a play, ones that diverted a message otherwise dedicated to Holocaust memory. She writes, “The fact that a theater company of teachers and students in the United States in 2018 could dare to produce a play about Auschwitz victims in which the German national anthem opened the performance is outrageous, harmful, in breach of contract and very near to criminal” (ibid.). Later in the letter, Haft demands on apology to Delbo and all who suffered in the Holocaust, writing, “I very much hope to see this letter in print to partially right a wrong, to ensure that memories are preserved and perhaps to serve as a warning to future endeavors by other groups who seem to believe that the author of a play is not the final word” (ibid.). Finally, the 2013 production of Who Will Carry the Word? by Rowan University is a serviceable testament to Delbo, the history of the Holocaust, and the stories of the victims. The students playing Delbo’s characters were subject to an educational immersion process before rehearsal, meeting with two Holocaust survivors and hearing their stories of survival. In approaching a production of the play with sensitivity, performers—students and professionals alike—must understand the historical context and implications of portraying the victims. Survivors praised the production as authentic and moving. Perhaps the most difficult balance in staging the play—the most defined feature which determines if the production is good, bad, or offensive—is its ability to respectfully and artistically project the likeness of the Holocaust, at all times being aware of the fundamental fact that its horrors cannot rightfully be portrayed. Any attempt to display the Holocaust for how it was in reality is offensive, as the implication that terror of this stature could ever be staged is absurd, and discounts the actual history. As such, scenes must be both powerful and artistic—immersive and divisive—all at once. The audience should feel existential horror while understanding that the images on stage were nothing like those that actually occurred, convincing them that the realities were far more terrible in comparison. The performance created an environment of hopeless entrapment, bearing down on the characters as they spent much of their stage time huddled together tightly. The use of special effects and lighting projected the set on stage, capturing the surreal horror of the Holocaust. The actors embodied

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weakness, fragility, and exhaustion. In accordance with Delbo’s character-driven narrative, it is necessary for each actor to also express a spectrum of emotions, from horror and agony, to hopefulness and solemn acceptance. An added dream sequence offered a clever way to integrate the camp’s quotidian sounds, sights, and smells, providing an additional layer of existential horror to the piece—that taking refuge in a nightmare is preferable to waking up in Auschwitz. The juxtaposition created through this imagery is relevant to creating a horrific reality in the concentration camp. With a small stage and many bodies, the staging minimized open space, leaving little room for actors to take a breath or move around. The impression was of a tightly crammed space: although there were twenty-three bodies on stage, the intimacy of the theatrical experience suggested many more. By the end of the performance, the very few survivors stood in a strangely open environment—one that suggested attrition rather than liberation. The imagery suggested by Delbo’s text and produced through sound and lighting proved more effective than speech. The over-layering of these components was productive in creating an appropriate stage-setting. In a physical performance of Who Will Carry the Word?—one that is presented to a general, likely uneducated public—the immersive atmosphere was vital to convey the message that survivors returned from the dead in order to make us know and remember. Like the characters who try to survive in order to carry the word back to the unknowing world, further renditions of Delbo’s play serve as the carried word from stories past. A good production stays true to the text, allowing the stories of the women to move the action forward, serving Delbo’s requirement that the play, like all of her writing, “Il faut donner a voir.” What worked well in the productions discussed here are faithful re-imaginings that purposely minimize action to maximize the effect of the Holocaust experience. Such staging decisions include the creation of a “claustrophobic” set, where site is suggested by the positions and movements of the characters, and by the lighting. Indeed, lighting and sound decisions should echo the reality of life in the concentration camp, creating both an auditory enemy (gunshots, screaming, and sirens coming only from offstage), and a narrative thread than enhances the action (lights following prisoners offstage to indicate death). The inhumanity of the perpetrators’ behavior should be in stark contrast to the humanity of each of the prisoners, for whom solidarity and respect for their collective goal is upper most in their minds. A productive way to enhance the authenticity of the performance is to educate cast and crew about the Holocaust, including showing respect for the playwright’s words and experience, and avoiding abridgement of the text. A less successful rendition of the drama was conveyed when the text was abridged by adding characters and lines, giving female roles to males, and onstage violence and other activity not written into the text. Although their innocence is obvious, and the senseless violence toward them is recognized, the prisoners who make up the cast of Who Will Carry

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the Word? must convey a sense of their own abjectness—a result of brutal Nazi domination and conditioning. They see themselves as “dirty water,” with their abject state violating boundaries between the body and its excesses, obviating even the ability to desire a “clean” and “proper” body. Julia Kristeva approaches this violation in Powers of Horror, where she writes, A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death—a flat encephalograph, for instance—I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being.12

Delbo and the other prisoners lived on those muddy borderlands, their bodies leaking—wasting away—their abjection violating the boundaries between body and camp. When performed in accordance with this history, the drama becomes equal parts artistic performance and activism. The best productions are those that have taken this sentiment to heart, carrying forward the message that what is in this play is meant to be seen. They carry Delbo’s word with great integrity, making sure it will never die.

Notes



1. Melissa Raphael, The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: A Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust (London: Routledge, 2003), 65. 2. Charlotte Delbo, Who Will Carry the Word? in The Theatre of the Holocaust, ed. Robert Skloot (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 276. 3.  Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 155. 4. Paul Celan, Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, trans. John Felstiner (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 30. 5. Charlotte Delbo, “Useless Knowledge,” in Writing in Witness: A Holocaust Reader, ed. Eric Sundquist (New York: SUNY Press, 2018), 383. 6. Lawrence Langer, The Age of Atrocity: Death in Modern Literature (Boston: Beacon, 1978), 206. 7. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), 51. 8. https://theater.skidmore.edu/production/carry-the-word/. 9. Elisabeth Bronfen and Misha Kavka, eds., Feminist Consequences: Theory for the New Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 166. 10. Chris O’Rourke, “Review of Who Will Carry the Word?” TheArtsReview.com, 2017. 11.  Julie Zauzmer, “Holocaust Study: Two-Thirds of Millennials Don’t Know What Auschwitz Is,” Washington Post, last modified April 12, 2018, www. washingtonpost.com. 12. Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 3.

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Bibliography Bronfen, Elisabeth, and Misha Kavka, eds. Feminist Consequences: Theory for the New Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Celan, Paul. Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan. Translated by John Felstiner. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. Des Pres, Terrence. The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. Geddes, Jennifer. “Banal Evil and Useless Knowledge: Hannah Arendt and Charlotte Delbo on Evil After the Holocaust.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 18, no. 1 (2003): 104–115. Haft, Cynthia. “Local Play Misrepresents Author’s Intention.” Watertown Daily Times, 2018. https://theater.skidmore.edu/production/carry-the-word/. Kristeva, Julia. The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Langer, Lawrence. The Age of Atrocity: Death in Modern Literature. Boston: Beacon, 1978. Moore, Kellina. Fall 2018 Mainstage: ‘Who Will Carry the Word?’ (theatre.skidmore. edu, 2018). O’Rourke, Chris. “Review of Who Will Carry the Word?” TheArtsReview.com, 2017. Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958. Plunka, Gene A. Holocaust Drama: The Theatre of Atrocity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Raphael, Melissa. The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: A Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust. London: Routledge, 2003. Skloot, Robert, ed. The Theatre of the Holocaust. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982. Sundquist, Eric, ed. Writing in Witness: A Holocaust Reader. New York: SUNY Press, 2018. Zauzmer, Julie. “Holocaust Study: Two-Thirds of Millennials Don’t Know What Auschwitz Is.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2018/ 04/12/two-thirds-of-millennials-dont-know-what-auschwitz-is-according-tostudy-of-fading-holocaust-knowledge/?noredirect=on.

CHAPTER 23

Wresting Memory as We Wrestle with Holocaust Representation: Reading László Nemes’s Son of Saul Gila Safran Naveh

In this essay, I explore what happens at the juncture between reading and seeing in order to gain a better understanding of how story and film images morph and inter-articulate to partake in acts of memorializing the Holocaust and produce new knowledge about it. I do this not to judge whether fiction or films, words or images, offer the definitive representation of this catastrophic event. To my mind, our knowledge of Auschwitz and the Holocaust is caught in the dynamics of forgetting and is inherently fraught with ambiguity, thus no particular film can ever tell the entire story and no one single book, however brilliantly written, will get us in the presence of those gas chambers. The Holocaust lies in every piece of evidence, every document, every memoir we can find, every film, documentary, and diary written, and only when taken together do these accounts help us penetrate into the work of the meaningless and the unthinkable. Other forms of testimony, such as docudramas, theater, and scholarly research also help us understand that the Holocaust did not take place in a special universe and did not reflect a distortion in human nature, but that it was both inflicted and borne by those who were all too human. The hope is that through artistic representation, memory is transformed into a principle of continuity and through these visual and textual representations we can try, regardless of the futility, to imagine how it felt to stand naked in forty degrees below zero in those death camps, how it felt to be hungry, and how it felt to be an outsider.

G. S. Naveh (*)  University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_23

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To highlight the challenges encountered when tackling Holocaust representation and affective memory as well as when memorializing this human catastrophe, I investigate László Nemes’s 2015 film, Son of Saul.1 I use the film as a case study to underscore that Nemes’s fresh approach to Holocaust cinematic representation which he achieves through a grainy and narrow field view that gives each frame an air of solemnity, the closeness of his handheld camera that created a sense of intimacy and of being “there,” the obstinate clinging to the main character until the moment he dies, together with other film strategies and other innovative strategies, participates in a unique way in the effort to keep alive our collective memory of the Holocaust. Extant Hollywood Holocaust films explore the twentieth-century human tragedy by using a palette of familiar visual and verbal signs as well as a gamut of interpretants, namely [predictable] responses elicited by signs from those intended to read or see and decode/interpret them in certain ways.2 Hollywood uses these complex visual and easily interpretable visual and linguistic codes that inter-articulate to designate to its targeted addressees an entire web of modalities and concepts such as “victim,” “survivor” and “survival,” “heroes” and “heroic action,” “triumph of good over evil,” “life affirming action,” and other feel-good, richly signifying signs that transformed the Holocaust into a major global hypersign. Keenly aware that Holocaust memory is shaped in powerful ways also by the political agendas of governments, influential personalities, artists, and activists, the Jewish Hungarian filmmaker offers in his first full-length film a new, innovative path to shaping our collective Holocaust memory, one that is fine-tuned to new global traumas which influence how and what we remember, as well as what is impressed in our consciousness. As a result, Nemes’s film stands in stark opposition to the massive Hollywood enterprise which has failed to offer an accurate representation of the Holocaust. A poignant case study deserving our investigation, Son of Saul, the Oscarwinning Holocaust film directed by László Nemes teaches us that contrary to Hollywood’s conceptualizing and feel-good representation of this human catastrophe, the Holocaust does not designate “survival,” “life,” or “life affirmation.” The film accomplishes this goal while nodding to one of its Uhrtexts, Shoah, the acclaimed Holocaust film by French Jewish filmmaker Claude Lanzmann (1985), where the filmmaker expertly entwined over two hundred minutes of actual Holocaust shots, newsreel footage, and real Nazi propaganda speeches into the very fabric of the film’s imaginative plot. Unlike Hollywood’s uplifting Holocaust movies that feature big heroic actions by great heroes and lead to spectacular cathartic endings, the Holocaust as represented on screen by director László Nemes, as by his mentor Lanzmann, uniquely signifies “death,” “dying,” and “killing” in their most devastating forms. Nemes’s film evidences the limitation of representation while standing in opposition to Hollywood’s representational framework and while pointing to the inevitable triadic relationship of interpretable signs as it brings fresh insights into this watershed in human history.

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A rising star in Hungarian and European filmmaking, Nemes focused on creating unforgettable screen images that enable us to conjure up notions of alterity, difference, and otherness in an eerie, primeval Nazi created world, to help understand what lies beyond understanding. In structuring an alien and horror instilling modern version of Dante’s Inferno, the place run by wild Furies with the phrase “all hope abandoned ye who enter here inscribed on its gate” inscribed upon its entrance, Nemes brings new insights into the victims’ experience during the Holocaust. But, unlike Dante’s sinners who are forever in Hell as a punishment for their actual sins, Nazi Holocaust victims are innocent and yet are put to torturous deaths in the Nazi created Hell just for being Jewish and different. Nemes also reveals that the modern Nazi created modern Hell, unlike Dante’s Inferno, is deceptive. Instead of the ­ injunction to abandon all hope upon entering Hell, the inscription upon the gates of Auschwitz Arbeit macht frei was also a lie. Harsh slave work never set the victims free. In the Nazi death camps, the Furies were unleashed upon the innocent and no angels were sent flying from above to frighten these monsters out of the way. I suggest that Son of Saul enriches the art and value of filmmaking though cleaver interweaving of graphic and literary citation conducive to pondering important affective states such as shame, guilt, redemption, holiness and wholeness, and Tikkun Olam, namely world repair. While a thorough analysis of these complex affective states is beyond the scope of this paper, in order to evidence how Nemes envisions world repair and how he communicates his view in the film, I look closely here at the way he zeroes in on an intensely personal quest in a Nazi death camp, a place where the victims were deprived of any kind of freedom. By focusing on a redemptive action as understood in Judaism, Nemes succeeds in deconstructing Hollywood’s system of sign-­ vehicles that speaks to a predominantly non-Jewish population and supplies instead a conceptual framework readily available in the Jewish cultural tradition from which he comes.

Re-presenting the Holocaust “Ce représente toujours ce qui n’est pas présent,” we represent that which is present no longer, claimed French philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe concerning the core issue in representation. In following Lacoue-Labarthe’s reasoning, we can ask how best to represent in film a watershed in human history which can never be fully represented or reconstructed after millions of victims have perished and their voices, silenced. Equally important, how does Son of Saul step up to the task of impressing the Holocaust indelibly in our consciousness? In pondering these questions, we recall Hegel’s statement in the ­conclusion to The Philosophy of Art. Hegel asserts that in human art we are not merely dealing with “playthings” but with “the liberation of the human spirit from the substance and form of our finite condition.”3 According to

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Hegel, art supplies us with the most generous reward for the severe labors of our contact with the objective reality and the grievous pains of knowledge Indeed, we demand now of art a cosmic vision; we demand an understanding of who we are as human beings (Hegel, 626). Undeniably, after the Holocaust we have lived for three-quarters of a century now with the vestiges of unfathomable devastation and death instigated by a supremely well-oiled Nazi killing machine. As humans, we have lived since the Holocaust with the grievous pain of knowledge that innocent people were sent to die in gas chambers, and children were turned into “wreaths of smoke ascending through the chimneys of the habitation of death, beneath a silent blue sky,” as Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel, wrote in his memoir entitled Night.4 Tragically, we live now with the knowledge that crimes have been committed by human beings no different from us. This sad realization prompted Theodore Adorno to claim famously, “to write poetry and create art after Auschwitz it is barbaric.”5 But as a responsible filmmaker, Nemes feels compelled to speak up. The impulse to represent the Holocaust, to make it “present” to its heirs, is acutely visible in Son of Saul. Based on careful research and investigation of actual records, the film evidences that humanity is still capable to commit unspeakable violence even after the Enlightenment and its avant-garde radical claims about equality, liberty, and brotherhood. At the same time, in representing one man’s struggle against a megalosaurus death machine, Nemes underscores that the answer to our big questions may come gradually and only as we gather every remaining shard and shred of evidence, collect tirelessly testimonials, and confront courageously the grotesque, the senseless, and the unimaginable.

An Innovative Mode of Representing the Holocaust in Film Although films deliver imperfect representations, films are a powerful mode of witnessing in particular now, when our cultural identity is construed much more from images than from the written word. Through its images, Son of Saul sheds new light on the individual lives of the Sonderkommando, the men who cleared the Auschwitz gas chambers and prepared the bodies of the murdered victims to be cremated.6 In choosing this emotionally charged subject, Nemes also displaces his own family tragic history and represents artistically his family loss as he shapes the spectator to understand that the Holocaust is our collective sad inheritance. To accomplish this daunting task, Nemes does not take us to the gas chambers. Nobody can. Only those who died there could, however, all those who went to the gas chambers are dead, their voices silenced. “The survivors are not the true witnesses…. those who saw the Gorgon have not returned to tell about it,” famously claimed Primo Levi (Levi 1986, 63–64).7 Instead, László Nemes takes us to the very edge of the abyss. He focuses on two critical days in the life of Saul Ausländer, a Sonderkommando in Auschwitz.

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In the hope that an engaged memory can become the path to mental continuity, namely a path to processes where the representational content exhibits an uninterrupted persistence over time, Nemes shows in a concrete way how our memory can be challenged and engaged through unique artistic representations. Using concrete metaphors, he deconstructs the stereotypical images we have of the camps and generates his own disturbing, fragmented ashy images of extermination. In maintaining the logic of time, space, and process, Nemes helps us imagine in a most intimate way the Sonderkommando who were suffering in silence while feverishly shoving the dead bodies into the ovens and who ended up themselves in the crematoria. To accomplish this, he films in a precise, step-by-step manner the way in which the next victims were selected, their undressing process, the robotic search of their clothing for any possessions, the mechanical herding the victims toward gas chambers, the frenetic yet rhythmic shoving of the gassed victims into burning ovens, and the meticulous cleaning the gas chambers, so that we could conjure up what it might have felt for the victims to lose their homes, belongings, children, parents, and other close members of the family. Nemes’s visual images are sure to remain etched in our memory for a long time: stark and yet haunting.

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Nemes claimed the following about his immediate objective: I wanted to maintain logic at all costs: logic of space, logic of work, the work processes, and the hierarchy. So everything that could be preserved in its logic was very important. I think you can feel this logic in the way the work was organized.8

Nemes’s cinematic technique and logic consist in reproducing with clockwork precision though each frames the Nazi clockwork killing machine. The images featured above are but a few of many systematically filmed in close-up (the head and the upper part of the protagonist’s shoulder) and extreme close-up and follow interspersed darkened screenshots, starting during the first minutes of the film. To give Saul the appearance of a human gyrating mechanism in the service of a giant Nazi killing machine, Nemes films Saul in three specific kind of close-ups that are being repeated throughout the film: back, front, and in profile (3:07; 05:45; 05:45). In side view, Saul supervises and helps the victims undress, shows them silently their designated “hooks,” and gathers swiftly their clothes after the victims enter the doors beyond

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which we see only a black screen. In front view, Saul has the blank look of a condemned man who knows that a diabolic work is done in this modern Hades at close distance behind him, in the ashy gray that Nemes films repeatedly out of focus or completely dark. Filmed with his back to us, Saul is made to look robot-like. He is a man who tries to perform his dreadful job with precision, while knowing where the victims were going and where he too may go at any moment (07:18–07:26). Focusing on the back of Saul’s head and relentlessly “shooting” the protagonist with the camera is highly suggestive of the invisible eyes of the Nazi guards, with their weapons constantly fixed on him and ready to shoot. The background is indistinct: dressed victims, naked victims, crying victims, and dead victims. Their blurred nakedness, filmed as a primal blameless nakedness, is away and at a distances from the camera and is inscribed thus in the plot as away from the Sonderkommando more urgent worries. With these triadic repeated images of the main character, Nemes builds a case on behalf of the victims and of the Sonderkommando. Filmed with his mouth closed, blank faced, eyes moving but concealing their motion at the same time, anxiously checking and searching, Saul is shown at the same time herding dispassionately and mechanically the next murder group of victims toward the undressing area of the gas chambers. At the 04:33 moment in the film, we are shown a new black screen that leaves us literally “in the dark” about what happens to the victims behind those black closed doors (1:24:26–1:24:39). Nemes tells us through an image that we will never know what went on in those gas chambers. A Jewish filmmaker born and raised in the former Soviet-occupied Eastern European bloc with firsthand knowledge of the politics involved in what we remember—the approved communist texts books he was taught from never mentioned the Holocaust nor the brutal murder of his people—Nemes demonstrates in his film an acute awareness that memory involves processes of selecting, editing, as well as an ongoing restructuring to adapt to new circumstances. For example, in frames 49:07–49:09, Saul looks at the murdered boy. The two bodies are filmed as intersecting at perfect ninety degrees. Saul is filmed upright and the boy, in horizontal position. The poignant example regarding memory altering is the episode that follows about the boy being his son. “I want to burry my son” (1:20:07), pleads Saul with his comrade. “You have no son,” replies the latter (1:20:10). “I do” (1:20:19). We wonder with Saul’s comrade: “Does he have a son? Does he not?” Nemes having his protagonist cling feverishly to the present moment and to his ambitious present goal and another example in point. Whether the murdered child is his son or not, Saul is ready here, in a death camp, to assume responsibility for the dead child and perform the sacred obligation of a Jewish ritual burial. Neither his past nor his future seems important now. The fake rabbi whom he saved so that he could recite the proper burial prayers abandons him, and his comrades openly accuse him of “failing the living for the dead.” Yet Saul continues to cling to the old sac covering the dead boy’s body and attempts to dig

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a grave even as the Sonderkommando start a revolt and everyone runs in total chaos. He continues to carry the child’s body on his shoulder even as his comrades are seen jumping into frozen waters in an attempt to save themselves by swimming to the other side of the river (1:31:10–34). All through this long scene where the inmates struggle for survival, Nemes has us hear nothing but Saul’s intense breathing. Breathing to live one more moment. Living to take one more hasty and short breath. We begin breathing with him, like him.

Saul and the corpse he carries seem one. The corps seems to give Saul meaning and a reason to take one more breath. The body he wants to bury actually keeps him alive tells us Nemes. Ausländer, literally meaning “a stranger” or “one from another land,” is a dead man walking, much like Shlomo Venezia, the inmate who actually worked in the crematoria and was one of the few who survived. Venezia described himself as a condemned prisoner about to walking to gas chamber at any moment (Venezia, 133). Paying homage to such superhuman endurance, Nemes created in the movie moments of impending death from which Saul barely escapes. A poignant illustration is the comment made as Saul and his team of “Creama” find themselves among the next selected victims. “If he is really a rabbi, he should

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begin the prayer now,” says a voice in the dark and someone replies immediately: “We are already dead.”

These comments are rapidly whispered in the dark by indistinguishable frightened speakers. The pathemic (affective) memory produced by this scene is undergoing transformations. The violence of the present actions seen on screen help brings to the foreground long-forgotten episodes of pain and degradation experienced by those who survived in the Holocaust. Given Nemes’s loss of close family members in the Holocaust, this film is also his quest for identity and healing from an acute emotional trauma, carved in his memory. In commenting about his childhood memory, he said that “It was like a black hole burrowed within us….We all lived with an intense feeling of deep emptiness” (Nemes 2015). The only thing I know is that by making this film, I tried to give the dignity back to the dead and the dying. I don’t think I ever lost from my aim the fact that I was speaking about the destruction of the European Jews. It’s in my blood. I will leave a trace for my family that were scattered into the Polish rivers. (Nemes 2015)

This is why perhaps Son of Saul is structured with words and images that converge in certain distinctive ways. Though ellipses and silences (see illustrations above), Nemes transforms these images into a powerful story that participates in the production of an aesthetic of trauma. Controlling in every minute detail the action structure of the film plot and the filmmaking strategy, he proposes a new point of view worth considering, namely, that ritual might be one means of recovering from a world of unrelenting cruelty—and that ritual, rather than reason, can foster moments of healing. He asserts furthermore that one can also become an agent of change by using expertly cinematic tools such as cross-cutting (interspersing various narrative scenes), action frames infused with blunted grey images and sounds (hasty walking, rapid breathing, breathlessness, stunned silences with voiceover southing), shots arrangements, innovative decoupage, language/s maneuvering

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(short sentences pronounced rapidly and stealthily in various languages and terse dialogue), superimposition of voice overs on diegetic elements, and eerie lighting effects (such as depth of field manipulation, especially the foreground and background). Zeroing in on Saul’s determination to give the ­murdered boy a proper Jewish burial even when facing his own death—he nearly drowns carrying the body while attempting to swim to the other side of the freezing river—the filmmaker shows that we can step outside of passivity and conformity, become susceptible to the illogical and the mysterious, and seek revelation in action rather than in mediation or passivity. Nemes learned his craft from outstanding Russian, Hungarian, and French moviemakers rather than from Hollywood. In his work, he emulates the great Russian filmmaker, Klimov, whose films inspired him to use shooting techniques that prove more effective in generating in film viewers a feeling of “being there.” Referring to Klimov’s brilliant World War II movie Come and See (1985), Nemes indicates that he was inspired by Klimov’s work but that he needed to go beyond: Come and See by Elem Klimov was a great source of inspiration for me. The movie follows a boy in 1943 on the eastern front and stays with him in an organic manner through his hellish adventures. But Klimov allowed himself far more baroque things than we did. In making Son of Saul, you were there as a witness: You had a feeling you were in a crematorium, rather than on a movie set. For that reason, cast and crew believed they were in a real situation, we were immersed in this world. (Nemes 2016)

Like Klimov who had his camera practically clinging to the young Russian boy for the entire movie, except for the last two shots, Nemes has his camera synchronized perfectly with Saul’s upper body and moves with him at less than three-feet distance from him for most of the duration of the film. Also like his mentor, Nemes engages our senses to elicit a want, a desire to see the images that follow in the next segment and to respond though body and affect, as well as through the intellect. He seems keenly aware that words have the capacity to become powerful images, that is to say, objects seen under the sign of desire. But while words are fixed in our sensory memory, visual images have a very different relationship to affective experience. Although this experience cannot be spoken as it is felt, it may register visually. Before the images of violence in Son of Saul, we find ourselves faced with the impossibility of watching and the impossibility of not watching. The powerful image on screen is a form of wounding and being wounded, like a shot in the eye. Who, for example, can forget the image of the child wearing a red coat in the black-and-white movie, Schindler’s List? Oscar Schindler cannot look away and neither can we, the film viewers.9 Who can forget Schpielmann, the character that earned Adrian Brody an Oscar? Schpielmann’s bewildered look from his hiding place at the devastation of his beloved city, Krakow, and the slaughter of his people, in Roman Polanski’s film, The Pianist, pierces our

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retina.10 At that moment, just as Kafka’s imperial messenger, we begin to tell to ourselves the story of that murdered child and that man. The Schpielmann, the Schindlers, and the Sauls of the movies transform for us the story of the Holocaust as they transform us as well. I further suggest that in seeing these powerful images of horror, we become witnesses, even if unwilling ones. The visual images conjured up have an excess of expressivity that render us unable to shield ourselves from seeing them. The image of the child in the red coat in Schindler’s List leaves us exposed, open, and receptive. Oscar Schindler’s eye function as a mute witness through which events register as eidetic memory images imprinted with sensations. Saul Ausländer’s visual field opens up a new landscapes. What is seen on screen can now be transformed into insight and meaning. A set of adroitly chosen visual images reveal the transformation of a selfish businessman into a righteous Christian and that of a Sonderkommando in pursuit of redemption. Beyond that, these well-chosen cinematic images illustrate the way in which authentic Holocaust visual representations contribute to creating Holocaust witnesses. Nemes’s cinematic images may teach nothing but open wounds. Seeing such powerful representation of the twentieth-century human tragedy is becoming a victim of that violence. Language and visual images combine at that point and create a stroboscopic effect that links together narrative, vision, and memory. To accomplish such an emotional yet generative wounding in his film Son of Saul, Nemes used firsthand testimonies of survivors of the Holocaust and compared them with material gathered from books, as well as a very important direct source, the Scrolls of Auschwitz, the written diaries by the members of the Sonderkommando that they buried before they revolted in 1944. To insure the film’s authenticity, so important to Nemes, he used testimonials under the constant supervision of a Hungarian historian specializing in the Holocaust. Likewise, he had consultants checking constantly the places where the numbers were to constructing the sets, how the paint would look, where the lighting would be, what were the bulbs and other details that reproduced the camp in every detail. Nemes was determined to recreate specific buildings within the concentration camp. To accomplish this, rather than worrying about recreating the crematorium, Nemes opted to give the film an organic believability by recreating the logic of a crematorium and its spaces with accuracy, and by showing how the rooms were interconnected in their logic. Impressive too is his attention to the use of languages. Nemes summoned also a Yiddish adviser to help them with the vernacular, with a special vocabulary recreated that had been lost. This too was a crucial point Nemes’s representation since Yiddish as a natural language died unnaturally in the camps together with the slain native speakers (Nemes 2016). The rising star in European filmmaking visibly chose images imprinted with sensations and quests that convey messages which demand to be immediately interpreted and decoded. Specifically, by highlighting a Sonderkommando

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daily-living-and-working-in-the gas chambers life and using close-ups and long takes,11 Nemes shaped painstakingly the first-person point of view of a man sentenced to extermination in the infamous gas chambers of the AuschwitzBirkenau death camp and argued convincingly that redemption can take place in the most dismal place and in the direst circumstances. The film plot is tight and revolves around three major elements that constitute Saul’s quest (reminiscent of Kafka’s The Castle): “a proper burial” of an unnamed child murdered in the gas chambers, the “proper recitation” of the “Kaddish” (the prayer after the dead in the Jewish tradition), and “a properly appointed authority,” namely, an ordained rabbi who will recite the prayer. And it is through this irrational yet passionate quest of the protagonist who is destined to die in the next forty-eight hours, that Nemes wants us to reevaluate the notions of moral stance, selfhood, and alterity as they relate to the Holocaust.

Standing Apart from Hollywood Unlike Hollywood filmmakers, László Nemes is also restrained in his use of horrific scene images. For maximum effect, he inserts images of gas chambers horror in the background and at high camera distance, with long shots, and while using very close-up shots of the protagonist (Asher and Pincus, 214). Likewise, while Nemes doesn’t convey with literality the gruesome situation, his injunction is to reconstruct on our own, as agents of storytelling, the ­horror which can never be fully reconstructed and that can only be represented by a filmmaker in his quest to give voice to the voiceless. Another salient feature of Nemes’s filmmaking is that he keeps the plot intentionally very simple. He records painstakingly two pivotal days in the life of Saul Ausländer—played by actor and talented Hungarian poet, Géza Röhrig—a member of a Sonderkommando unit made up of mostly Jewish prisoners who were forced on threat of death to perform the manual labor necessary to keep the crematoria functional. During one of the shifts, a young boy survives the gassing. Saul Ausländer watches as one of the doctors, himself a Jewish victim and under strict Nazi orders not to let any victim alive, finishes the job. Saul makes then the unlikely claim that the child is his “son”, although there is no evidence in the plot justifying his claim. We are given ambiguous signs about the boy’s father and this ambiguity is sustained throughout the film. Saul acts as if there were a kinship and seeks to expiate his sins committed (through no fault of his) in the death camps by giving this innocent young victim a proper burial. However, to perform a proper burial, not only must Saul find in Auschwitz a way to prevent the body from being cut open for autopsy or burned but he must obtain the help of an ordained rabbi who will recite the proper prayers, according to the ancestral Jewish tradition. Saul’s quest for “a proper burial” for the nameless boy becomes a powerful sign not only of resistance in the face of Nazism’s crushing will to completely annihilate the Jewish people; it becomes an affirmation of personal freedom, a sign representing Saul’s unshakable will to repair the world

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and make it right, even in conditions of absolute suppression of freedom and while working in the gas chambers. Although László Nemes’s Sonderkommando story is fictional, it takes place against the backdrop of the real 1944 revolt by 12th Sonderkommando that occurred in the infamous death camp, Auschwitz (Venezia, 133–134). Saul is a key character in this revolt when he becomes obsessed with burying the murdered boy. To draw us further into the hellish life of this Jewish victim in charge of detail at Auschwitz, Nemes obstinately shot the entire film using a handheld camera despite the readily available new automated technology. This demands of actor Géza Röhrig’s great skill because his expression needs to remain that of detached stoicism necessary for survival. Nemes coveys the atrocities of Auschwitz without falling into the Hollywood pitfall of depicting their grotesque detail. We see the Sonderkommando performing their work—readying bodies for burning, gathering clothing and possessions, shoveling ash into a river, etc. The executioners,12 brilliantly described by German author Bernard Schlink in his book entitled The Reader, have done their job; now the detail men, the Sonderkommando, are doing theirs. The close-ups create claustrophobic sensations, almost asphyxiating. Nemes explained that he didn’t want Son of Saul ever to be comfortable for the viewer. For him, the story at times becomes secondary to the experience of being there he wants to elicit. The spatial images are horror instilling, with no hope or help coming from the outside. Here too, Nemes uses a different strategy and shies away from making a beautiful movie with beautiful shots. He intentionally refuses to offer the viewer another big “spectacle” and gives his film a messy and unfinished quality that facilitates the complete immersion and wounding of the viewer instead of anesthetizing his/her suffering. Nemes chooses eye-level shots/ images and not a widescreen but a narrow academic ratio (1.37:1) forty-mm lens that approximates human perception (Interview, 2016). For an expended analysis of the tragic and highly ambivalent figure of the Sonderkommando who had to function in an environment where immediate annihilation and death, including his own, were the norm, the reader may consult the work of Frederick Cooper, a well-known historian who focuses on history-actors who are in process of creating history and who lack our retrospective knowledge.13 Son of Saul is rich semiotically because Nemes taps into a complex sign system to structure his own story about Auschwitz. In following Saul throughout his daily activities that consisted in helping the victims undress, moving them orderly toward the gas chambers, clearing the dead victims’ ashes, and avoiding being killed at every step, Nemes stresses the kind of emotional strength and dispassion one has to have to survive in such circumstances. His main character is aware that the Nazis routinely kill people in his position and thus, having a life-affirming goal gives him a sense of purpose and meaning during his last days, even though his desire for redemption makes sense only to him.14

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Other movies, such as Tim Blake Nelson’s 2001, The Grey Zone, have attempted to tell about the experience of Sonderkommando, but Nemes is the first to get that close to the perspective of the men in charge of detail and to the sacred ground of the crematorium. This enables him as a filmmaker to underscore that one can atone for his acts, even those performed under acute duress. The sign system Nemes uses expertly adds further depth to the film structure. “A proper burial” is a sign of closure, a sign that the dead [victim] is resting “in peace” for eternity. Such burial is also a sign to the living that they will be able to come at will to this sanctified space to morn and express openly the pain of loss. Importantly, to those who are alive, a burial is a sign beckoning them/us to remember those innocent who perished. Likewise, a burial place is a sign of undisputable “presence” of the body of the deceased. Nemes makes this a focal point in his movie. Saul’s quest at the core of Nemes’s film goes openly against the logic of the Nazi “Final Solution,” namely, the decision to eradicate the entire Jewish population, established during a brief one hour and half secret meeting, at the Wannsee conference, by the Lake Wannsee, on January 20, 1942. The implementation of the “Final Solution” meant that the Jewish people were destined for erasure from the face of the earth. Nemes alludes to the Nazi infamous plan by underscoring in Son of Saul that the routine branding of the victims with tattoos functioned as signs of erasure of identity and existence in an economy of annihilation and murder. Thus, focusing on Saul’s desire to give the boy a proper burial represents in Nemes’s vision not only a sign of rebellion and an affirmation of individual freedom in a place devoid of any freedom; it becomes in the time and space of the movie a sign of remembrance, a place of memory (lieu de memoir), and a consecrated space where we could go to honor the innocent dead. The proximity of a handheld camera that is practically glued to Saul Ausländer is part of László Nemes’s strategy to represent extermination in a new way. This mode of filming endows Saul with humanity and produces a sense of proximity to the film’s protagonist who goes against the logic of the death camps, which is a racist logic of dehumanization and meaninglessness. Thus, the sign “son,” which is inscribed in the very title of the film and further enriched by Saul’s ambiguous relation with the dead child who, he claims, is his son. In designating the nameless, unidentified dead “boy” as “son,” Nemes’s central figure gives meaning and a name to the nameless, murdered child. Nemes thus endows Saul with free agency, almost in a Biblical primary way (man who names…), rather than marking him yet as another “going as sheep to the slaughter,” as the Jewish people went to their death, at least as was thought early on. In depicting Saul’s struggle against all odds to give a proper Jewish burial to the boy whose death is a sign that stands for “senselessness,” “extermination,” and “erasure,” Nemes shows how one can endow the life of the innocent dead with meaning. In highlighting Saul’s wish to recite the prayer after the dead, Nemes indicates a way to

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endow all those innocent victims’ lives with significance and to c­elebrating their former existence. A Sonderkommando with a sense of freedom and a purpose-other-than-being a disposable object in the Nazi fine-tuned killing machine, despite his immanent death, is not a senseless death, in Nemes’s view. Parallel with circulating the signs “self” and “erasure of identity,” Nemes introduces the sign “other.” As his name suggests, Saul Ausländer signifies being “foreigner” an ultimately “other” in the mass murder economy of the death camps where a Sonderkommando, despite his also being a victim, is seen as “other” by the victims and by the Nazis. László Nemes reminds us that he too is “other” and “foreign” in the sense that he is a Hungarian Jew and an outsider to Hollywood’s massive industry of filmmaking. He is “other” also because of his choice to make a movie with no glorious heroes or uplifting message and no grotesque anger, so prevalent in Hollywood’s Holocaust films. Nemes’s film, Son of Saul is a candid representation of death and of the mind-numbing reality of the extermination camps. An admirer and student of the acclaimed French filmmaker, Claude Lanzmann, Nemes deconstructs painstakingly in his film Lanzmann’s term “Concentrational Universe”15 by immersing his addressee in an eerie, dark world in which there is no survival. And like Saul Ausländer, Nemes is determined to create “a raw” close-up of a place where madness was the norm, the place that many of his family members experienced firsthand. A part of my family was assassinated in Auschwitz. It was something we talked about every day. When I was little, I had the impression that evil had been done. I imagined it like a black hole burrowed within us; something had broken, and my inability to grasp exactly what it was kept me isolated. I didn’t understand for many years. Then, the time came for me to reconnect with that specific part of my family’s history. (Interview, 2016)

Influences and Sources In Son of Saul, László Nemes brings a message about “moral madness” akin to that of Holocaust survivor and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace, Elie Wiesel, who emphasized the need to oppose a government and to entire society when that government and that society have gone mad. He does that by distancing himself from the Hollywood’s film industry that routinely encodes survival and heroism in its movies to make them more marketable and more profitable. Nemes makes the case in Son of Saul that the Holocaust is not as represented in Hollywood films, namely, a series of exciting survival stories. The Holocaust as depicted in Nemes’s film is about millions of unjust deaths and horrendous crimes perpetrated by the Nazi mass murderers. Nemes used pivotal information from The Scrolls of Auschwitz.16 He read pivotal eyewitness accounts such that of Shlomo Venezia, Filip Müller, and Abraham Bomba as well as testimonies by Miklos Nyiszli, a Hungarian Jewish doctor who was assigned to the crematoriums account remained a reference.

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He enlisted the help of historians like Gideon Greif, Philippe Mesnard, and Zoltán Vági to help him crystallize further his understanding of the Holocaust and claim with reassurance that survival was an accident in Auschwitz,17 a position that endows Son of Saul with unique value as a cinematic Holocaust representation. As noted, Son of Saul draws also on great literature. The film episodes reflecting on truth, knowledge, and the task of the executioner pay homage to Kafka’s The Penal Colony. In this modern masterpiece, Kafka, the Jewish author whose family too died in Auschwitz, writes about the ultimate design in torture. “The Burrow,” the perfect killing machine, etches the sentence and the truth about his unknown crime on the body of the dying victim. In this fashion, the ultimately efficient murder machine enlightens him as it also kills him.18

As if in Kafka’s penal colony, less than one minute 1:42:03 before Son of Saul ends, Saul smiles for the very first time as he sees the Russian boy looking directly at him in bright sunlight (sunlight is also visible for the first time in the movie). And like Kafka’s victim, Saul is illuminated physically and spiritually. He too understands. However, like the condemned Kafkan victim it is also the moment when he dies by Nazi shotguns. Saul’s quest for a burial place alludes also to Antigone, Sophocles’ ancient Greek tragedy depicting the protagonist’s fight to the end to give a proper burial ground and thus honor the memory of her brother. Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, with its vivid images of Hell, Alan Minz’s important volume, Hurban, and Claude Lanzmann’s nine hours Holocaust film, Shoah, are powerful Uhrtexts to Nemes’s Son of Saul that, as a modern version of Antigone, maps onto his namesake the Greek tragic figure, while simultaneously featuring associations with the tragic Biblical figure, King Saul. Saul Ausländer’s Auschwitz character is equally a nod to Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet. The setting serves as a metaphor for Hell, where a man seeking redemption is portrayed as a robotic doomed figure akin to the ancient tragic figure, Antigone. The familiar father–son relationship is also evocative of the fatherless (abandoned by God) victims who perished innocently and conjures up vividly both

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the tragic figures King Saul and Antigone. Alluding to master narratives distinguishes Son of Saul from the rhetoric of spectacle with larger-than-life heroes and at the same time inscribes Nemes as a second-generation victim. The Nazi barbaric impulse to erase an entire people, Thanatos, a death impulse, is negated in Son of Saul with a life-affirming impulse, Eros,19 embodied in the film in acts of resistance, a quest for redemption, refusal to be a victim, retaining one’s humanity by celebrating an individual life, and by becoming a witness.

The Limits of Representation “From my own point of view,” claims Names, “the film immerses the viewer and communicates in a very visceral way the experience of the individual in the concentration camp and gives an intuitive sense of what it was like to face extermination” (Interview, 2015). In awarding László Nemes the Oscar in the foreign film category, Hollywood seems to agree with his perspective. Indeed, as current moviegoers, we come away with a new vantage point. In Nemes’s filmic representation, the Holocaust signifies “death,” “dying,” and “killing” in their most extreme and violent forms and carries at its core a vortex of negativity that counters and threatens all our acts of memorializing and remembrance. The success of Nemes film, like the films his brilliant predecessors, Béla Tarr, Paul Mazursky, Roman Polansky, Alan Pakula et al., underscores ­however the triadic relationship of all representation and points to the limitations of representation, of remembrance, and of memory. It teaches that when confronting the Holocaust to keep its memory alive, filmmakers and writers also partake unwittingly in mythifying processes. Authors and cinematographers become mythmakers because they must deal inevitably with issues related to narrative and plot structure, choices of tropes, cinematic strategies, rhetoric, language, ideology, politics of remembrance, and more. Therefore, filmmakers and writers too move away from the catastrophic historical events and come face-to-face with the drama of writing and of representation. This is to say that to view properly films such as Son of Saul, Shoah, The Pianist, or Night and Fog, means also to uncover how images are put to use to elicit certain forms of response and to understand what constitutes their “collateral damage” and Art Spiegelman’s post-9/11 cartoon book, In the Shadow of No Towers, emphasizes be it unwittingly, this representational issue. With words always ready to function as image and images asking to be read as much as seen, the Holocaust films suggest an aesthetics of trauma. The films are fragmentary, composed of shorter sequences which cannot contain the material and which vastly exceed its limits. Holocaust representations seem to shield us from the excessive expressivity of the visual image. Reading fiction which is based on linguistic presuppositions aims to teach us the language by which understanding is produced. When there is no language, readers seem compelled to produce one, otherwise the translation

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between the “language” of reading and the “language of the object” does not occur and the object remains unreadable. Perhaps the impulse to read a cinematic image is a measure of the desire to control it. Images too complex to be read refuse this control and they challenge the authority of reading as a privileged activity because they demonstrate a surplus of meaning untranslatable into linguistic terms. The result is a claim for a different mode of absorption, one that identifies the power of the victimized and the traumatized to rivet the attention of beholders. This is to say that the intersection of film and fiction, of the visual with the verbal, creates a model of how to picture words and how to bring visual theory to bear upon words embodied as images in the study of memory and memorialization. This model is limited both by the capacity of the word and the image to represent experience adequately.

Representation and Healing—Psychic Integration Wrestling with representation that points to its own limitations is i­nherent to fiction and filmmaking. To support this claim, I bring elsewhere case studies of literary representation of women’s experience in the Holocaust.20 I propose there that achieving a restoration of the “self” and “psychic integration” as a result of telling about their traumatic experiences empowers victims to come to terms with their Holocaust experiences, even when these experiences are dimmed by the passing of time, wishful thinking, and other compromises.21 László Nemes is a case in point. The filmmaker acknowledges the feeling that “something had broken” and that his inability to grasp exactly what it was kept him isolated. Son of Saul became for Nemes a way of coming to terms with his tragic past and overcome a deep sense of loss and guilt that haunted him. Through the cinematic representation of the last days of a Sonderkommando, the psychic fragmentation he suffers, and his attempts to restore his “self” through action, Nemes gives an artistic re-conceptualization of his own traumatic experience. Nemes’s statement about special photographs taken at unbelievably great risk, just before the doors to a gas chamber were closed encapsulates our probing as well: These four photographs deeply affected me. They attest to the extermination, they constitute evidence, and ask essential questions. What should be done with an image? What can it represent? What viewpoint should we have when faced with death and barbarity? We integrated this moment into the heart of the film, as it corresponds to a segment of Saul’s journey through the camp when suddenly, just for a moment, he participates in the construction of our view of the extermination. And also, because of the representation of the image within itself, we are, at that point and only then, questioning the very status of ­representation. (Nemes 2016)

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Notes











1. Gàbor Sipos, Son of Saul, directed by László Nemes (Budapest, Hungary: Hungarian national Film Foundation, 2015). 2.  Atkin Albert, “Peirce’s Theory of Signs,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2013 Edition), 161–188; Edward N. Zalta, ed., https:// plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2013/entries/peirce-semiotics/. Peirce’s idea is that the interpretant provides a translation of the sign, allowing us a more complex understanding of the sign’s object. 3. Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophie der Kunst oder Ästhetik (Berlin, 1826); Jr. Robert F. Brown. Carl Freidrich, and Herman Victor von Kehle, eds. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Calderon Press, 1975), vol. 2, 626. 4. Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Bantam Book, 1960), 32. 5.  Theodor Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms (Vancouver: British Columbia, 1983), 17–34. 6. Shlomo Venezia, Dans l’enfer des chambres a gas (Paris: Albin Michel, 2007), trans. Andrew Brown, Inside the Gas Chambers: Eight Months in the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2009), 132–137. Sonderkommando were strong, young Jewish men who were chosen by the Nazis in the infamous death camps set up throughout Europe and put in charge of cleaning up and disposing of the bodies in the gas chambers after the bodies were gassed. All Sonderkommando were also killed quickly since they knew too much. 7. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (Rome, Italy: Einaudi, 1986), 63–64. Repr. London: Abacus Books, 1989. 8. László Nemes, “The Reality of Death,” Interview by Amir Garrjavie, July 7, 2015. 9. Steven Spielberg, Gerald R. Molen Branko Lustig, Schindler’s List. Director Steven Spielberg (Los Angeles, CA: Universal Studios, 1993). 10.  Roman Polanski, Director Roma Polanski, The Pianist (Cannes: Canal International, 2002). 11. Steven Asher and Edward Pincus, The Filmmaker’s Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide for the Digital Age (New York: Plume, 1999), 214–216. 12. Bernard Schlink, The Reader (New York: Vintage International Press, 1999), 151. Der Voeleser, trans. Carol Brown Janeway, 1997. Schlink offers a brilliant description of the “executioner.” Says the taxi driver to the main character: “The executioners don’t hate the people they execute, and they execute them all the same…he kill them not because he hates them but… because they are a matter of such indifference to him (the executioner) that he can kill them as easily as not.” 13.  Frederick Cooper, “The Dialectics of Decolonization: Nationalism and Labor Movement in Postwar French Africa,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, eds. F. Cooper and Ann L. Stoler (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997). 14. It is worth pointing out that the title of the film, Son of Saul, clearly refers to the Biblical son of Saul who had his body retrieved (together with his father’s body) by King David from the enemy for a proper burial as an act of Tikkun Olam.

436  G. S. NAVEH 15. Claude Lanzmann, the Jewish Frenchman, who made Shoah in 1985, made a movie about the making of Shoah where he reflects about the death camps world, where “There was no Warum (why)”. See also The Grey Zone 2001, Tim Blake Nelson, and Dr. Miklos Nyiszli. 16. These writings were buried in the grounds of the crematoria in 1944. Between 1945 and 1980, eight caches of documents by five known authors were discovered, mostly by chance. 17. Names has familiarized himself with witness accounts, historians, eyewitness accounts such as Shlomo Venezia and Filip Müller, but also that of Miklos Nyiszli, a Hungarian Jewish doctor who was assigned to the crematoriums. Then of course there was Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), in particular the Sonderkommando sequences, including the Abraham Bomba account which remains a reference. Accordingly, he also consulted historians like Gideon Greif, Philippe Mesnard, and Zoltán Vági (Nemes Interview 2015). 18. Franz Kafka, The Penal Colony, in Kafka’s Selected Stories, trans. and ed. Stanley Corngold, Norton Critical Edition (New York: Norton, 2007), 35–59. 19. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Jenseits des Lustprizips), trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 310–318. 20. Gila Naveh, “A Sign of Our Time: From ‘Reading’ to ‘Seeing’ the Holocaust,” in Semiotics and the New Media, eds. Jamin Pelkey and Leonard Sbrocchi (New York: Legas, 2014), 241–242. 21.  Gila Naveh, “Trauma, Abduction, Remembering and Healing: Women’s Holocaust Memoirs,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of SSA, Pittsburgh, PA, 2009.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor. “Cultural Criticism and Society.” In Prisms, 17–34. Vancouver: British Columbia Press, 1983. Asher, Steven, and Edward Pincus. The Filmmaker’s Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide for the Digital Age, 214–216. New York: Plume, 1999. Clifford, James. “Introduction: Partial Truths.” In Writing Culture, edited by James Clifford and George Marcus. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Cooper, Frederick. “The Dialectics of Decolonialization: Nationalism and Labor Movement in Postwar French Africa.” In Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, edited by F. Cooper and Ann L. Stoler. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997. Friedlander, Saul. Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Hegel, Wilhelm Friedrich. “Philosophie der Kunst oder Ästhetik.” In Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, edited by Freidrich Carl and Herman Victor von Kehle, 1826, translated by T. M. Knox, vol. 2. Oxford: Calderon Press, 1975. LaCapra, Dominick. “Lanzmann’s Shoah.” Critical Inquiry 23, no. 2 (1997): 231–270. Lanzmann, Claude. “Les Non-lieux de la mémoire.” In Au sujet de Shoah: Le Film de Claude Lanzmann. Paris: Ed. Michel Deguy, 1990. ———. “Hier ist kein Warum” (“Here There Is No Why”). In Au sujet de Shoah. Paris: Ed. Michel Deguy, 1990.

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———. “Seminar with Claude Lanzmann, 11 April 1990.” In Yale French Studies 79, 1991. Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. Rome, Italy: Rinaudi, 1986. Repr. London: Abacus Books, 1989. Müller, Filip. Eyewitness to Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers. Edited and translated by Susanne Flatauer. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1979. Nemes, László. Son of Saul Film, Laokoon Film Group, National Hungarian Film Fund; Received the Oscar Award in 2015. ———. “The Reality of Death,” Interview by Amir Garrjavie, July 7, 2015. Ozick, Cynthia. “Roundtable Discussion.” In Writing and the Holocaust, edited by Berel Lang. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1988. Polanski, Roman. Director Roma Polanski, The Pianist Cannes: Canal International, 2002. Rosenbaum, Thane. Lecture at the Interdisciplinary International Human Rights Conference, Thomas Jefferson Law School. San Diego, CA, 2005. Sandbank, Shimon. “The Sign of the Rose: Vaughan, Rilke, Celan.” Comparative Literature 49, no. 3 (1997): 195–208. Schlink, Bernard. 1997. Der Voeleser. Translated by Carol Brown Janeway, The Reader. New York: Vintage International Press, 1999. Shipley Toliver, Suzanne. “Literature of the Holocaust: From Their Suffering Art?” In Assessing the Significance of the Holocaust, edited by Abbey Ingber and Benny Kraut. Cincinnati: Cincinnati University Press, 1986. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, 2003. Spielberg, Steven. Schindler’s List. Spielberg, Director. Los Angeles, CA: Universal Studios, 1993. Spigelman, Art. In the Shadow of No Towers. New York: Pantheon Press, 2004. Venezia, Shlomo. 2007. Dans l’enfer des chambres a gas. Translated by Andrew Brown. Inside the Gas Chambers: Eight Months in the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2009. Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York: Bantam Book, 1960.

CHAPTER 24

Troubled Aesthetics: Jewish Bodies in Post-Holocaust Film Jessica Lang

To survive is to have the body endure. Post-Holocaust film that invokes the image of the Holocaust survivor in part documents the trauma of the ­survivor body. Celan’s characterization of German language passing “through the thousand darknesses of death bringing speech” is reflected in the visual experience of seeing the survivor’s body and the trauma that survival entails in physical terms, not only in a single representation but in the totality of the survivor’s body being viewed in screen.1 In this essay, I identify what it means, symbolically and aesthetically, for a Jewish body to survive and the representation of that survival through the visuality of three German films that roughly correlate to the period of the eyewitness; the period of the second generation; and the period of the third generation, respectively. I use correlation here, because none of the film writers and directors whose work I analyze here are survivors or descendants of survivors. Nevertheless, identification of “Holocaust film,” similar to “Holocaust fiction,” becomes more possible and more popular, as the distance between the historical event and the contemporary moment grows. The films I consider here are: “The Murderers Are Among Us” (1946); “Marianne and Juliane” (1981); and “Phoenix” (2014). While in earlier films the Jewish survivor body is deliberately obscured, it then moves to a public position of viewership, held up at least in part as evidence of Nazi atrocity. Ultimately, with more recent Holocaust film complicating the role of the survivor’s body, audiences witness its effective disappearance, even as it is celebrated as enduring and beautiful. At least in part, this returns us to the J. Lang (*)  Baruch College, City University of New York, New York City, NY, USA © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_24

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filmic narratives and structures of works released immediately after the war, where the identification of characters as Jewish was made only infrequently, where the word Holocaust was not yet invoked with any regularity, and where the trauma of survivors was largely set to one side and even ignored in the postwar effort to rebuild and re-establish nations. “In the beginning,” Cynthia Ozick notes in her essay “The Rights of History and the Rights of Imagination,” “was not the word, but the camera—and at that time, in that place, the camera did not mislead. It was what was there to see.”2 Ozick refers here to the “German lens” and its recorded truths: “[I]ts images are stable and trustworthy: the camera and the act are irrevocably twinned.”3 She declares our indebtedness to the long-cultivated German practice of documentation, declaring that “we are morally obliged to the German lens that inscribed [these images].”4 Ozick leaves to one side the notorious and pernicious manipulation of the image and its ethically compromising misappropriation and regular exploitation by Germany’s National Socialist movement and the Third Reich. By the end of World War II, German cinema was one of the most widely visible, highly productive film industries in the world, achieving this in large part through the party’s awareness of the power of the medium to impact audiences and through the sheer quantity of films that the Third Reich’s propaganda ministry produced.5

Invisible Aesthetics: “The Murderers Are Among Us” In 1946, Germany became a center for postwar Jewish life because of the presence of Jewish Displaced Persons camps created around the country. Also in 1946, Deutsche Film AG (DEFA), the first postwar German film company to start producing films, was founded by a group comprised of Soviet officers, German filmmakers, and returning German expatriates.6 Of central importance to DEFA was overcoming the legacy of fascism and creating an uncensored environment where artists could develop their ideas.7 The resultant trümmerfilme, or rubble films, named after the destroyed settings that are a constant background and metaphor for the stories they tell, provide the background for the earliest postwar period of German film, one that ran from 1946 to 1949. While regarded “as a kind of miscarriage” by many German film historians, rubble films offer a portrayal of survival in an utterly defeated and demoralized society while also presenting a concerted attempt “produce films that confronted the Nazi past directly.”8 The challenge facing DEFA filmmakers was one of aesthetics and art. Filmmakers sought to develop films that addressed the recent past, but that did not alienate their German audience. Confronting Germany’s Nazi past meant confronting among other things the policies and murder of European Jewry. The image of the Jew— dirty and deformed; shiftless and stateless—was at this point well-established in German cinema through propaganda films such as “Jud Süss” (1940) and “Der Ewige Jude” (1940). Postwar German cinema was thus faced with two necessary points of redress: first, the need to reimagine the figure of the Jew

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and, second, the need to tell the story of anti-Semitism, persecution, and genocide. “The Murderers Are Among Us” (1946) was DEFA’s first feature film. Wolfgang Staudte, who had his own complex history with German film, wrote and directed it. Born in 1906, Staudte began performing in film in 1929. As a socialist, he was initially banned by the Nazi party from acting because of his political associations; his performances were declared to carry “anti-Nazi tendencies.”9 In September 1933, however, he became a member of the Film Guild, a Nazi-backed organization that enabled him to work in the film industry. He made four full-length feature films during the war period and accepted minor acting roles in anti-Semitic films such as the well-known “Jud Süss” (1940). In an interview published in 1975, Staudte notes that his decision to professionally advance Nazi propaganda was done in order to maintain his exemption from serving in the military and having to engage in active fighting.10 Historian Ulrike Weckel makes the point that the compromises Staudte made “during the years of dictatorship and mass murder…inspired his placement of bystander figures at the center of several of his early postwar films,” among them “The Murderers Are Among Us.”11 Perhaps derived from his own experience, Staudte’s postwar work centers on the bystander figure as a means of maintaining the focus on “less spectacular forms of complicity” that have a moral rather than legal quality to them. The result, whether intentionally or inadvertently, for Staudte and a number of other German postwar filmmakers, was to marginalize the images and actions of active perpetrators.12 These same filmmakers also hold at the locus of their films a German, not Jewish, survivor. And so an uncomfortable alliance of invisibility emerges in which the Jewish Holocaust survivor and the Nazi perpetrator are both rendered invisible in early postwar representations. Indeed, postwar film often addresses survival as a universal theme one that illuminates a shared sense of victimization.13 While film scholar Robert Shandley posits that “Jews needed to presume that others had shared their experience,” I propose that the inverse is true: Others needed to presume that they shared in the experience of victimhood in order to begin coming to terms with the targeted genocide of European Jews.14 Some DEFA films do reference Jews as victims, but many do not; even fewer films picture the Jewish survivor. So while universalizing survival and the role of the victim was a common trope in postwar Europe, more significant is the universalizing role of absence and invisibility that draws together the two figures at the ends of the spectrum of characters pictured in postwar film: perpetrator and victim.15 In “The Murderers Are Among Us,” the character Susanne Wallner returns to her home in Berlin from a concentration camp. A neighbor later mentions in passing that she had been deported “because of her father,” whom “they took, too.” The “they” remains ambiguous as does the reason behind Mr. Wallner’s arrest and deportation. But from the first image of Susanne Wallner, as she disembarks from a train looking poised, curious, reflective, and well-groomed, it is clear that her return is not the return of a

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Jewish woman seeking to re-establish herself and participate in the rebuilding of her community. Rather, Susanne is a young German woman who, having survived a concentration camp, now seeks some combination of return, renewal, and rebirth, both personally and nationally. Indeed, her role in the film, as documented by numerous critics, is to heal the brokenness of the German psyche, presented in human form as the surgeon Dr. Hans Mertens. Whereas Susanne continually presents pretty-as-a-picture, with her hair carefully curled and done and the lighting striking her light-colored eyes, the once esteemed Dr. Mertens provides a stark contrast: unkempt, drinking heavily, in need of a shave and a haircut, he lives in disarray in Susanne’s prewar apartment. Toward the end of the film, a flashback reveals the cause of his unraveling: a uniformed Dr. Mertens witnesses and fails to prevent the mass shooting of a large group of Polish civilians on Christmas Eve, 1942. Dr. Mertens appeals to the officer in charge, Captain Brückner, to at least spare the women and children, but his efforts are fruitless; the flashback concludes with machine guns going off in the background. Dr. Mertens discovers that this same Captain has, since the end of the war, founded a successful business in Berlin and determines to force Brückner to pay for his past crimes. In the initial draft of the screenplay, Staudte has Dr. Mertens shoot Brückner just as he is addressing his employees on the first Christmas celebrated since the war’s end. This version of the film concludes with a courtroom scene where the jury is presented with Mertens’s vision of the original crime, the mass murder of Polish citizens. The final image is of the jury considering their verdict—an invitation to audience members to make their own decision in determining complicity, guilt, and innocence with regard to mass murder and vigilante justice.16 One of the cultural officers with oversight over the film raised concerns that the filmed act of retribution might inspire copycat crimes. Staudte was ordered to revise the script and eliminate any form of extra-judicial justice. His revised conclusion has Mertens, his gun trained on Brückner ready to shoot when Susanne, now his companion, runs in and says, “Hans, we don’t have the right to judge.” He responds: “No, Susanne, but we have the duty to indict and to demand justice in the name of the millions of innocent people who were murdered.”17 Ultimately, it is the concentration camp survivor Susanne’s abiding support and love, her ethics of forgiveness, her wish to fix, clean, and build that leads to Mertens’s transformation. Her intervention, enduring patience, and kindness lead not only to their engagement, but to a sense of redemption, justice, and future—both personally and nationally. The survivor body as portrayed by Susanne Wallner is not one that outwardly registers trauma or reveals in any way past violences endured, a signal that the healing process for those not morally compromised and invested in rebuilding is more easily initiated and more quickly seen through to its natural end—a return to physical wholeness, health, and vitality. When Susanne enters her partially destroyed apartment building and greets her former

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neighbor who owns a ground-floor shop, she makes the most specific reference in the film to her time in the concentration camp: “I was afraid of freedom. Afraid of people. And afraid to return here. Afraid to see our city again. Now I’m sitting here again. Just like old times. You are still working here as if nothing had happened. It is incredible…It’s unbelievable…It is so hard… so hard to forget the past.” “No,” responds her neighbor, “it is easy to forget what happened. You need to have a worthwhile goal to aim for.” The past tense suggests that what was once true—her fear for freedom, of return— is no longer so. And, indeed, Susanne agrees: “Yes, work… Life… Life at last….” Susanne turns to the labor at hand, the reconstruction of a life and a nation, and with a strength that in part arises from what she has endured, turns the brokenness and humiliation of Germany’s past into the productive and endless work of rebuilding.18 It is worth considering—even imagining—why the possibility of Susanne’s identity as a Jewish survivor is so strikingly implausible. First, her physical aspect and self-presentation fail to correlate with the experience of the concentration camps as documented by so many Jewish (and other) survivors. In the opening sequence of shots, as Susanne disembarks from the train, the camera is located just behind her, allowing viewers to see what she sees, her first glimpse of her home city. There is a sign hanging on a battered building that reads: “Das Schöne Deutschland,” “Beautiful Germany.” Milling about in front of the sign are a ragtag group of people. A man on crutches with his back to the camera wears a tattered coat with “PW” painted on it. Susanne stands in contrast to the loss briefly animated here: she is not homeless, she is not a former prisoner of war, and she gives off no real sense of neediness or loss. On the contrary, she is directed, purposeful, and clean and carries a little suitcase with her. She has belongings. She is an idealized figure initiating the rebuilding of a country: German to the core, a gentle, beautiful woman, nurturing and motherly, Susanne is morally straight; her survival reflects on precisely these qualities. Not only does she return in full strength, but her capacity to see goodness in those around her makes possible the development of a citizenry with an uncertain past. The qualities that make Suzanne the symbol German viewers longed to see of Germany itself—a country badly used, its citizens in symbolic (and sometimes literal) exile, longing to be restored to some semblance of wholeness—is the very reason Susanne ­cannot be a Jewish concentration camp survivor. It is not merely the physical ­reality, a literal impossibility I refer to here, but the fact that most Jewish survivors did not return at all. If they did return their appearance could in no way be used as a symbol of hope for the future—to suggest otherwise is to strike an image of grotesque performativity. There is also the symbolic impossibility: Jews were never conceived of as playing a role—symbolic, moral, or otherwise—in the rebuilding effort of Germany. This sounds so obvious as to be absurd, but it deserves articulation. In a film that examines Germany’s war crimes, and looks to a future vision of and for itself, replete with some version of repentance, judgment, and even forgiveness, it is

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important to note in this and many other filmic representations: the Jewish survivor has no place. If, in the first instance, Susanne simply does not, and would not, look the part of a Jewish concentration camp survivor, in the second instance, her declaration of rights also removes her from the realm of plausibility that might animate this role. Susanne knocks on the door leading to her own apartment with a great deal of empathic self-righteousness and, coming face to face with Dr. Mertens, declares: “This here is my apartment…[I]t belongs to me…I want to live here again…I have a right to live here. I have a contract. A lease.” The gesture itself, an attempt to reclaim one’s property and other elements of a pre-war life, was surely familiar to cinemagoers in 1946 and was repeated all across Europe. And, while playing a type, Dr. Mertens’s callous response rings both predictable and familiar: “The former tenants all had leases. And what about you? Where were you during the air raids? People died in the cellars. All hell broke loose. They buried their dead where they found them. Go for a walk through the ruins. You’ll find the graves there. You see…They all were in possession of a valid lease as well. A final one. And you? Where were you at the time? In the country? In the mountains? In safety?” Susanne, in the only reference to her experience in a concentration camp, complies with this vision of recent history: “Yes, I guess I was in safe-keeping. You could call it that. Is the other room like that?… Please bring my suitcase. I’ll stay in here until you find somewhere.” And with that, she reclaims her space and establishes herself as Dr. Mertens’s equal— and ultimately more than that, as she cares for Dr. Mertens, creates a home for them, and protects him even from himself. Dr. Mertens’s questioning of Suzanne’s whereabouts refers to specific privileges that he assumes she availed herself of during the war. His assumption implies (cruelly, but purposefully) that those who suffered, whose lives were endangered, are more deserving of a return home—and he counts himself among them. Suzanne, because she has suffered, even if she remains silent about it, can then justify her declaration of residency according to both of their terms, for her based on legal rights and for him on moral ones. On these grounds, Jewish survivors would surely exceed the standards set. Rendered stateless during the Third Reich, forced from their homes, surviving unimaginable hardship and persecution, the image or symbol of the Jewish survivor so far exceeds the description of entitlement in the film as to fall outside of it. Thus, once again the aesthetic of invisibility with regard to picturing the Jewish survivor asserts itself.

Aesthetic Outlines: Witnessing in “Marianne and Juliane” The marginalization of the Jewish survivor figure becomes more self-conscious and more pronounced in New German Cinema, the period of film activity in West Germany that ran from the mid-1960s until the early 1980s. Films made during these years are held together by a few shared features, chief among them the fact that the generation of directors making films at

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this time was born during or shortly before World War II. Further linking these films was the availability of public funding, starting in 1960, supporting the arts that led to a burst of film activity. Lastly, New German films often reflect a willingness to explore West German identity during the Cold War.19 The fact that the figure of the Jew, let alone the figure of the Jewish survivor, barely registers in New German Cinema is yet another shared feature, although admittedly one that is rarely acknowledged. In 1981, German film writer and director Margarethe von Trotta, born in 1942 and now widely recognized and celebrated as a pioneering feminist filmmaker, directed the award-winning film “Die Bleierne Zeit,” which was translated as “The German Sisters” in Britain and “Marianne and Juliane” in America. The second film written and directed entirely on her own, it became one of her sister films, a series that focuses on women’s relationships, societal expectations placed on women, and feminist responses to these expectations.20 While more recent work by von Trotta explicitly centers on the Holocaust, such as “Rosenstrasse” (2003) and “Hannah Arendt” (2012), “Marianne and Juliane” is not typically cataloged as a Holocaust film. And yet scholars as diverse as Annette Insdorf, Felicity Colman, Susan Linville, and others recognize the complicated perspective on history and witnessing that the film offers.21 A fictionalized biography of Gudrun Ensslin, a West German, far-left leader of the militant organization the Red Army Faction (RAF), the film is narrated by Juliane, who represents Ensslin’s sister, and who is herself a left-wing feminist and passionate advocate for women’s reproductive rights.22 Critics focus primarily on two prominent features in “Marianne and Juliane”: its feminist intervention that brings together domesticity and political activism and its representation of violence, especially references to World War II, the Vietnam War, and issues relevant to the developing world all of which contributed to the ideology of Germany’s far-left movements. In contrast to the occasionally biting feminist criticism that “Marianne and Juliane” has generated, the film’s references to historical violence—World War II, Vietnam, and imprisonment—are kept quite separate, even though it is clear that the two, feminism as a contemporary construct and violence as a historical one, are closely linked. The entirety of the film is a retrospective. The film opens with Juliane pacing around her study, a desk placed in front of a set of windows; shelves filled with binders labeled by year line one wall; and a photograph of her sister Marianne hangs on another. As Juliane paces, she reaches for a notebook labeled 1977, gazes at the photograph, which is hung at eye-level on the wall, but never turns to the window. 1977 is the year Marianne was found dead—hanged—in her cell. Historically, and in the film, officials declared the death of Gudrun Ensslin/Marianne a suicide, although lawyers, supporters, and family members disputed this conclusion and claimed she had been murdered. Juliane determines to reclaim her sister’s life through active remembrance—partly as a promise to her sister’s son, but, tied to this, in an effort to honor the past.

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We understand only after seeing the film in its entirety that this scene is the ending, not the beginning, and it frames the overarching question that the film directly asks its viewers: How do we respond to history? The film generates its own answers to this question through the actions of Juliane and Marianne. In this instance, Juliane is preparing to write her sister’s history (an action Marianne would call an inaction), seemingly unaware that she is being watched—by us, her audience, but also by an outside world whose attention both Juliane and Marianne, through their activism, try to persuade, draw together, and energize. The scene is quiet, except for the sound of Juliane walking across the hardwood floor, making us aware of our own awareness, of our position sufficiently distanced to look in and yet near enough to hear even quiet noises. This quality of viewership—aware of our own awareness— amplifies the role of spectating; it is a key point in engendering a quality of witnessing that outlines historical memory of victimization in the film. After this opening, the film initiates an extended flashback, one that starts with Marianne’s son Jan being driven to Juliane’s home and one that is punctuated by shorter flashbacks that stretch back decades earlier and capture moments of intimacy and upbringing in Marianne and Juliane’s early childhood and school years. The series of shorter flashbacks are used to establish features of the sisters’ nuclear family dynamic and history. What emerges is a picture of a religious home, an authoritarian father who is also a pastor, a passive and dutiful mother, and a number of siblings the oldest of whom is Juliane followed by Marianne. The earliest of these flashbacks shows a young family with two little girls, heads bowed but faces popping up, hands folded on the table in front of them, waiting for their father to finish reciting the prayer before they are allowed to eat; being awakened in the middle of the night and running down to the cellar of their apartment building holding tight to their mother’s hands as air raid sirens ring urgently around them. In high school, it is Juliane, not Marianne, who is the rebellious child, wearing black trousers instead of a dress, speaking out of turn in class, refusing to obey her father’s rules and demands. In a firm rejection of older German culture, one flashback pictures the teenager Juliane sitting in literature class belittling the Rilke poem “Autumn Day” (1902), saying that she prefers Brecht’s 1937 poem, written in exile, “Ballad of the Jew’s Whore Marie Sanders” (also translated as “Ballad of the Jewish Whore ‘Marie Sanders’”). “Ballad of the Jew’s Whore Marie Sanders” focuses on the German woman, Marie Sanders, with only the scantest representation of her Jewish lover: “Marie Sanders, your beloved / His hair is much too black. / Better not be to him today / As you were to him last night.”23 The reference to the poem fleetingly brings in the first Jewish figures—that of Brecht himself and that of the title Jew—into the film. It is not only Brecht’s meaning that is conveyed here, his condemnation of fascist ideology and his depiction of its grotesque spectacle, but also and not incidentally, the barest, most fleeting image of the Jew, both the poet Jew in exile and the subject Jew hidden in the poem. We know him by his dark hair (an earlier version of the poem references his

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“wrong nose”) and by the injunction, “better not be to him today.” In short, only the faintest outlines of his presence come through, a few words of his history, and this, too, both presence and absence, is part of the historical ­subjectivity enunciated in the film. In contrast to her sister, Marianne is portrayed in the film’s flashbacks as their father’s pet: sitting on his lap, coaxing him to let up on his punishment of her sister, and obediently practicing her instrument. The role of provocateur shifts for the sisters about midway through the film, in a flashback from when the sisters are in their early teens. They along with their schoolmates are gathered in the auditorium for a screening of Alain Resnais’s film “Night and Fog,” originally released in 1955 as “Nuit et Brouillard.” The 32-minute documentary uses footage taken by members of the army who liberated concentration and death camps and although not the earliest film to picture the concentration camps and represents a singular and watershed moment in the representation of Auschwitz in film. Recruited to make the film as part of a wider effort in France to document and research World War II, Resnais committed himself to the work only after Jean Cayrol, a Mauthausen survivor and established poet, agreed to write the narrative. The film uses contrasts as a means to force the viewer to keep up, shifting between the past and present, implementing historical images in black-and-white footage and then moving to abandoned landscapes scarred by war that are in color. The serenity of color landscapes is shattered by the violence described and then pictured in footage. The music, composed by Hanns Eisler, a student of Arnold Schönberg and a frequent collaborator with Bertolt Brecht—Eisler’s music and Brecht’s poetry were both banned by the Nazi party—and the voice of the narrator, Michel Bouquet, adhere to Resnais’ strategy that “the more violent the images, the gentler the music.”24 The title of the film refers to a German decree signed in December 1941 that ordered civilian opponents to the Reich to disappear into “night and fog.” But it also can be understood as reflecting on the quality of memory and history, of the effort required to penetrate the process of obscuration that has taken place even within the first postwar decade. By 1956, “Nuit et Brouillard” had won a number of prestigious awards and was being screened all over Europe, often dubbed in the national language. In Germany, the Jewish poet Paul Celan translated the film ­ (“Nacht und Nebel”), and Willy Brandt, the president of the Berlin parliament, denounced the attempt to ban the film’s screening there. By the late 1960s, the film was widely screened in schools and “had become part of the ­collective memory of a whole generation.”25 This was the generation to which Margarethe von Trotta and the title subjects of her film, Marianne and Juliane, belonged. The center of “Marianne and Juliane” contains the film’s most sustained flashback; at the center of this flashback is an extended clip of “Nacht und Nebel” that lasts for over three minutes. The clip begins with the narrator announcing: “1945. The camps filled up. Towns with 100,000 people crammed into them. Heavy industry turned to these reservoirs of labor. Factories had their private camps, out of bounds to the SS.” The student

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audience in the auditorium faces the screen and until this point so does the audience of von Trotta’s film. The shot is taken from the back of the room, so viewers of von Trotta’s film face Resnais’s film as if they, too, are in the audience. After these five sentences are spoken, the camera switches angles and is positioned where the screen exhibiting “Nacht und Nebel” plays; the audience for von Trotta’s film faces the audience comprised of German school-age students watching “Nacht und Nebel.” The camera pans across the audience, stopping momentarily on Marianne and Juliane, before switching back to the original angle that positions us, von Trotta’s viewers, watching her film watching Resnais’s film. The entire flashback of Resnais’s film imitates his style by shifting from the images of the past that he uses to compose the film, to images of the present audience. The film’s narrator intones: “The camp streets were piled with corpses. There was typhus. When the Allies opened the gates….” The voice is silent as music plays and images of traumatized bodies populate the screen. In this moment of witnessing, the camera shifts to a close-up of the faces of Marianne and Juliane; we watch as they watch a bulldozer scooping and pushing dozens of bodies and dropping them into a pit. The camera lingers on the faces of the sisters before switching back to the screen, to images of survivors who, Cayrol writes, “looked on, uncomprehending. Were they liberated? Would they go back to everyday life?” The camera once again shifts, giving us a vision of that everyday life in a school auditorium and then moves back to Resnais’s film: “‘I’m not guilty,’ says the Kapo. ‘I’m not guilty,’ says the officer. ‘I’m not guilty.’” The camera switches to the student audience before turning back to the film: “Then who is guilty? As I speak to you, water is filling the lime pits….” At this point, Marianne turns her head away from the screen and toward her sister; she stands up to leave. Juliane follows her. The girls go to the bathroom where Marianne retches into her handkerchief and the two lean against the wall and each other sobbing. The narration continues in the background: “‘War is just dozing. On the parade ground, around the blocks, grass grows again. A deserted village as ominous as ever. The crematorium is out of use. Nazi methods out of fashion. Nine million dead haunt this landscape.” The flashback abruptly ends. The camera cuts to Juliane visiting Marianne in prison. Von Trotta’s sudden shifts between Resnais’s film and her own imitate the camerawork of the former, which moves between past and present. There are other deliberate connections between the films. The criticisms against “Night and Fog” are well known: No explicit mention of the destruction of European Jewry is made. There is footage of Jewish victims wearing yellow stars, and the names of those persecuted, read out by the narrator, include a few that are unmistakably Jewish. Resnais’ original script referenced the “final solution of the Jewish problem.” But Jean Cayrol, in a gesture that was initiated as early as 1946 and continued for decades, felt the film would be more effective if it focused on the world of the concentration camps and the universal features of guilt and terror.26 The decision to allude to the Jewish annihilation that was the Holocaust in von Trotta’s film faces the same

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criticism; von Trotta’s effort to draw attention to other, more contemporary, violence—a massacre in Vietnam, for example, that is part of a film screened in prison that all viewers, prisoners, and moviegoers like us, take in—is, likewise, an effort to draw attention to the radical juxtaposition between the victims pictured and the viewers who are also pictured. Von Trotta is intent on introducing viewers to the act of witnessing, both through the camera lens—we witness witnessing—and as an act in and of itself. The role that “Night and Fog” played in Germany after its release, the same role we see in “Marianne and Juliane,” is one of consciousness-raising. For Marianne, there is a connection between learning about Germany’s Nazi past and founding a radical (and violent) left-wing organization. It is an extreme response and one that Julianne can never bring herself to imitate. Von Trotta’s point here is to identify—witness, even—the consequences of Germany’s Nazi past and understand that the origins of leftist terrorism are rooted in the guilt and shame, the inescapability of the past, which result from the Nazi era. The shot of Marianne in federal custody, coming directly after the “Night and Fog” flashback, reasserts precisely this sense of metaphorical imprisonment. The act of witnessing witnessing is a specific brand of spectatorship that has a telescopic quality to it in which what we see appears magnified because of its distance. In this case, witnessing witnessing forces viewers to look back at a collective memory and, in the case of Marianne and Juliane, to look forward, and to consider their role and its historical value a generation later. In her work on “unpleasure” and the spectator, Catherine Wheatley makes the point, first, that political modernism calls “for a cinema based on unpleasure” and, second, that “unpleasurable films…[are] able to confront spectators with their own participation….”27 In von Trotta’s film, we, the viewers, not only see parts of “Night and Fog” ourselves, but watch an audience of teenagers watch it. One girl covers her face. The sisters are overwhelmed and, even though they escape to the bathroom, the narrator’s voice insistently follows them there. Unlike in the rubble films, where survival is connected to Germans— not Jews—returning from concentration camps and committing themselves to rebuilding and renewal, New German Cinema, and von Trotta’s “Marianne and Juliane” in particular, delineate the figure of the survivor from the distance of history and the camera lens. We see the images in Resnais’s “Night and Fog,” both of those who perished and of those who survived. And we watch the next generation, those born while the figures in “Night and Fog” were dying, watch the impact and devastation of genocide and feel a sense of responsibility to not simply remain in their seats, watching passively, but to declare themselves activists on behalf of those who are deemed in need.

“Phoenix”: The Invisible Beauty of the Survivor In postwar Germany, films featuring Jews, let alone Jewish survivors, were limited; films featuring survivors and victims, more universal and more anonymous, were more widely available. Not only did these films capture a

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reality of contemporary postwar Germany, where the Jewish presence barely registered, but they reflected a desire to veer away from the specificity of identifying victims by their ethnic or cultural background; it is possible that this reluctance was in part a response to the separation by difference that led to the rise of Nazism in the first place. And within German filmmaking, there was a reluctance bordering on inability to confront atrocities of the immediate past. This absence is striking to post-modern viewers, many of whom bring with them knowledge of genocide and so undergird earlier films meant to absent the victim with an awareness of precisely this absence. The Berlin School, a small loosely defined circle of directors, first emerged in the mid-to-late 1990s, one generation subsequent to the work of New German Cinema and includes Christian Petzold, Thomas Arslan, Angela Schanelec, Benjamin Heisenberg, Christoph Hochhäusler, and Maren Ade. Their films tend to center on personal relationships that unfold within specific socio-political contexts that document social transitions in Germany. Often this means a focus on the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany, the work of the Stasi or, less often, that of Germany’s Nazi past. Most ­tellingly, the Berlin School avails itself of all of these shifts in its observations concerning intimacy and the interactions between people—as opposed to fixing a story around a major historical event. Released in Germany in 2014, “Phoenix,” Christian Petzold’s first film to center on the atrocities of World War II, looks at the war’s aftermath, its consequences, and the war’s impact on the lives of those returning. “Phoenix” opens with the return of Nelly, a German-Jewish Holocaust survivor who has been rescued by her friend, Lene. Lene herself is a GermanJewish survivor whose postwar work involves investigating the disappearances of those victims forced to leave their communities during the war. Nelly’s face has been badly injured and disfigured by a gunshot wound. When we first see her, her head is entirely wrapped in bloodied gauze. Lene organizes reconstructive surgery for her and tickets to Palestine, where she suggests they go together once Nelly recovers. Nelly, however, does not wish to start a new life but to reclaim her former one as a nightclub singer, reunited with her husband, a pianist who used to accompany her. She asks the surgeon to reconstruct her face according to pre-war photographs, which he discourages, suggesting she may prefer a new and different face. The implication here is clear: A perfect reconstruction of the past is impossible. Indeed, Nelly’s post-surgery appearance is sufficiently altered that she is unrecognizable. In a nod to the rubble films that were made during the period pictured in “Phoenix,” Nelly stumbles through piles of bricks and damaged buildings until she locates the nightclub, the Phoenix, where she and husband Johnny had performed before the war. She finds Johnny working there as a manager of racy cabaret acts, but he fails to recognize her and she does not reveal her identity. Instead, the two agree to an arrangement where he will re-make Nelly in the image of his supposedly dead wife so that he can claim her estate, which the occupation authorities will not release unless she returns alive.

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In return, he will split the financial gains with her. Nelly moves into Johnny’s grungy basement apartment, and he schools her to become a version of her prior self, providing makeup, hair dye, pretty dresses, and fashionable shoes to facilitate the effort. He teaches her to walk the right way, and she practices her own handwriting. In the meantime, Nelly’s decision to pursue her former life, and to decline the ticket to Palestine arranged for her by Lene, wrenches apart the two women. Lene shares with Nelly that Johnny betrayed her to the authorities; they never see each other again because Lene takes her own life. In her suicide note, she tells Nelly that shortly before her arrest in hiding, Johnny filed papers for their divorce, which she includes with her note. Nelly continues following the plan Johnny has planned, staging her return on the train, planning every detail from where she will sit to how she will greet her family members and, finally, her husband. With the exception of removing the tattoo from her arm, the permanent symbol of her status as a concentration camp survivor, which Johnny wants her to do but which she refuses, everything goes according to his plan. As the reunited family gathers at a r­estaurant to celebrate, Nelly coaxes Johnny to sit at the piano and sings “Speak Low,” the popular song released in 1943 that was composed by the German-Jewish composer Kurt Weill. As she finds her voice, Johnny finally recognizes Nelly for who she is. He stops playing the piano; she sings through to the end of the song unaccompanied and then gathers her things and departs in silence. In keeping with the features of the Berlin School, “Phoenix” is a slow-moving film, involving lingering observational camera shots and prolonged silences filled with unasked and unanswered questions. Petzold’s films in general picture individuals and their relationship to Germany, either in their attempts to escape the country, in being forced to return to it, or in their wish to stay despite not being wanted.28 His characters are marked by a sense of spectrality, a ghostliness, as they move about the country. Their movements, their interactions with the landscape, define for themselves and for viewers a quality of space that is less than visible and that is haunted both by the past and by a sense of in-between-ness, one that prevents characters from being able to escape but also from being able to move forward.29 Never is this more true than in “Phoenix,” where the Jewish protagonist, Nelly, played by Nina Hoss, a German actress who has collaborated with Petzold on many of his films, has been historically dispossessed by her own country of all, quite literally, but her life and, in her return, participates in a scheme that will, if successful, allow her to walk away with half of her estate, the other half going to the husband who divorced and betrayed her. Most striking for the purposes of this essay is the portrayal and ultimate transformation of the German Holocaust survivor-protagonist. Nelly first emerges on the screen silent and shrouded, a mummy barely preserved by history. As Lene drives her across the border into Germany, a guard forcibly unwinds part of the bandages covering her face to prove the veracity of her condition; he shrinks back in horrified sympathy and allows the car to

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pass. Nelly’s reentry into her native country is made possible by her wounds; they authenticate her history. Viewers never see the extent of these wounds— they are hidden from sight. But viewing the reaction to them involves yet another modified form of witnessing, one that has evolved from that invoked in “The Murderers Are among Us,” where the act of witness is itself never documented, the (non-Jewish) survivor appears healed, whole and empowered to the act of witnessing witness in von Trotta’s “Marianne and Juliane.” In “Phoenix,” viewers face the Jewish survivor’s body’s return, allowed by its brokenness, its deformity. Early in the film, Nelly says to Lene, “I no longer exist…Would you recognize me?” It is a sentiment with deep historical resonance, the denial of self-hood that all Holocaust victims, whether or not they survived, had to contend with in some way. For Nelly, the distortion of her features and body, its disfigurement followed by its reconstruction and the inevitability of difference, enforces a break from the past. She gradually emerges from her bandages, first going outside with a veil pulled over her face and then, eventually, setting that to one side, too. Tentatively taking her first steps back in her native city of Berlin, Nelly navigates her way as the foreigner she has effectively become, lost amid the landmarks that are both familiar but profoundly changed—a quality intimately reflected by her survivor’s body and its disenfranchisement from its place of belonging, of home-coming, of return. Understanding this, Nelly declares the impossibility of return even as she sets out to attempt just this. Nelly’s desire to reclaim and re-inhabit her pre-war life is at once complicated and simplified by her stated indifference to her Jewish identity. When Lene first proposes that they leave Germany for Palestine, following a well-trodden path by other Jewish survivors and refugees, she tries to make it more alluring by noting that in “Tel Aviv there’s a Jewish choir run by Vera Stroux. It might suit you.” Nelly responds: “What would I do in a Jewish choir? I’m not a Jew.” To which Lene declares: “You are, like it or not. They tried to kill you because you’re a Jew…Johnny betrayed you. You were arrested on October 6, 1944. Johnny was arrested on October 4, 1944. He was interrogated and released just after your arrest on October 6. He wasn’t put in prison. No punishment. Indeed, he was allowed to play again, now he wants your money.” Part of Nelly’s desire to return to her pre-war life, then, reflects her wish to return to an identity that she has chosen for herself—one that, by all indications, is far removed from any Jewish identifiers. The body that marks her as a survivor is also the one that marks her as a Jew and so further distances her own recognition of herself. And yet Nelly volunteers a Jewish identity when she first comes face to face with Johnny: “You look very similar to someone,” he says. “To whom?” Nelly asks. “My wife. Alive she was poor, dead she’s rich…She and all her family were killed…I can’t get her inheritance. There’s no evidence she’s dead.” Nelly tentatively asserts her own existence: “Maybe she’s still alive.” Johnny curtly responds: “She’s dead. You have to play my wife. I’ll instruct

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you. You’ll return as a survivor, and collect her estate. We’ll split it. There’s $20,000 in it for you…What’s your name, anyway?” Nelly answers: “Esther.” Johnny notes that “There aren’t many Esthers left.” Nelly then enquires about his wife’s name and asks if she looks similar to her. “No,” says Johnny, “But you will.” And so he launches an elaborate plan in which a Jewish Holocaust survivor assumes her own identity as a woman who has died in the camps. If in von Trotta’s film the audience must find their way through the viewing a film within a film, and witnessing witnessing, Petzold’s film brings us closer to the actual witness in a sense by asking us to stand further away and to make sense of a Holocaust survivor playing a Holocaust survivor playing a Holocaust victim, someone who has perished in the camps. Heightening the viewer’s understanding and proximity to the tragedy of the survivor is Nelly’s own sense of herself as no longer existing. Instead, she plays the role of herself as Esther, re-learning the most intimate features that make an individual identifiable: How one carries oneself, moves, presents oneself outwardly. In his 2013 interview with Petzold, Jaimey Fisher asks: “How does what you have called ‘bodily memory’ function in your films?” Petzold responds: “I think in many ways Nazism took our bodies away from us….”30 “Phoenix” examines bodies and how they work not only to serve the individual, but as a collective effort that Petzold radically centers on the body of the Jewish survivor. Johnny’s impatience for Nelly/Esther and his lack of curiosity or interest in her past or in, for example, her uncanny ability to forge successfully Nelly’s signature, move her away from her more immediate past and push her toward who she once was which, eerily, also encourages her toward who she can become. Johnny’s focus on physical imitation is in many ways a basic form of recovery—both physical recovery, but also recovery of the past. The pre-war Nelly walked briskly, with a sense of purpose, and had a yen for fashionable shoes from Paris and flowing, bright, pretty dresses that moved as she walked. The pre-war Nelly modeled her hair and makeup after the movie stars of the times, with a bold red lip color, dark hair with curls carefully managed, and pronounced eye makeup. In short, pre-war Nelly had cultivated for herself a glamorous look that was based on its ability to garner appreciative attention. The Nelly that “Phoenix” introduces to viewers is a woman who initially shrinks away from the gaze of those near her, who walks hesitantly and with obvious pain, and whose speech is limited to the barest responses. Johnny’s training allows his former wife to become a closer version of herself, facilitating her departure at the film’s end. The Greek myth of the phoenix, after which the film is named, claims that the bird is born again after it dies, symbolizing renewal and eternity; it carries with it overtones of Christianity with its symbolism of resurrection. The film concludes on a slightly maudlin note with Nelly finding her voice, singing Kurt Weill’s “Speak Low,” a jazz song first introduced on Broadway in 1943, the year Nelly went into hiding. She sings with Johnny accompanying her on the piano: “I feel wherever I go that tomorrow is near—” He stops playing, finally aware of her identity.

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Nelly continues: “Tomorrow is here and always too soon.” The camera pans to the tattooed number on her arm, the one visible remnant of her status as a Holocaust survivor; it peeks out from her sleeve under the red dress she wears as a version of her former self. And she continues: “Time is so old and love so brief/Love is pure gold and time a thief/It’s late, darling, it’s late/The curtain descends, everything ends too soon, too soon/I wait….” She picks up her jacket, departs in silence, moving from indoors out into the sunlight. She moves with a sense of purpose and decisiveness; she is fashionably dressed and looks attractive. There is a mournfulness about her that one assumes is new— and permanent. Her departure echoes with finality, and she chooses to move forward alone as her family looks on in silence. The symbol of the phoenix is unmistakable here as the image of the survivor’s body. That body which has been made invisible, anonymized, ignored, and marginalized undergoes yet one more iteration, one that can be understood as at once redemptive and yet also a form of erasure, that of rebirth and reentry into the world. Post-Holocaust German film, as seen in the three films explored here, reveals an ongoing anxiety around the figure of the Jew, one that comes through most vividly with the vanishing of the Jewish survivor’s body and its subsequent rebirth. The image of the physically damaged and in many cases disfigured Jew is one of the earliest representations of the Holocaust survivor on film, first captured by liberators filming what they found as they entered concentration and death camps across Europe and sharing it with the world. It continues to be among its most familiar, in part reinforced by literary representations that include and explore the emotional repercussions of the trauma pictured. The painful irony is, of course, that Jewish survivor figures pictured on these films became what they never were through the implementation of policies that first attached rhetorical difference to the Jewish body and then made these differences become physical truths through bodily and emotional scarring. And yet three generations of German film reveal a different relationship to the figure of the survivor, one that is marked by an understandable reluctance to handle directly. Instead of picturing the figure of the Jewish Holocaust survivor as disfigured, sustaining a representation with a long and troubling history, the Jewish survivor’s body largely disappears in postwar German film. Only recently does the Jewish survivor’s body slowly emerge through a process of aestheticization where features once deformed and disfigured—the markers of history—become whole and beautiful. By documenting and even celebrating the vanishing survivor body, as the quiet ending in “Phoenix” does, Petzold’s film returns the viewer to the earlier practice of universalizing the meaning of the surviving and trauma. It is unclear whether the elevation of the survivor’s body to a state of wholeness and relative health, including a return to German society, does not in some way reenact another disappearing act. That is, the survivor’s body is reinscribed and rewritten, in some sense out of history—yet again. And yet the centralization of Jewish survival that “Phoenix” concerns itself with—that in and of itself can be understood as salvational.

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Notes











1. John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (Yale University Press, 1995), 114. 2. Cynthia Ozick, “The Rights of History and the Rights of Imagination,” in Quarrel & Quandary: Essays (New York: Vintage International, 2000), 119. 3. Ozick, 105. 4. Ibid., 104. 5. Robert Shandley, Rubble Films: German Cinema in the Shadow of the Third Reich (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 9. 6. Shandley, 17. 7.  Christiane Mückenberger, “Zeit der Hoffnung,” in Das zweite Leben der Filmstadt Babelsberg: DEFA Spielfilme, 1946–1992, ed. Ralf Schenk (Berlin: Henschel Verlag, 1994), 9–48. 8.  Thomas Brandlmeier, “Von Hitler zu Adenauer,” in Zwischen Gestern und Morgen, ed. Hoffmann and Schobert, 34; Shandley, 18. 9. “Wolfgang Staudte,” DEFA Film Library: [East] German Cinema & Beyond Since 1993, University of Massachusetts, https://ecommerce.umass.edu/ defa/people/407, accessed 15 December 2018. 10. Ulrike Weckel, “The Mitläufer in Two German Postwar Films: Representation and Critical Reception,” History and Memory 15, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2003): 68. 11. Weckel, 68. 12. Ibid., 68. Christiane Schönfeld, “Being Human: Good Germans in Postwar German Film,” in Representing the “Good German” in Literature and Culture After 1945: Altruism and Moral Ambiguity, eds. Pól Ó Dochartaigh and Christiane Schönfeld (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, Camden House, 2013), 118. 13. Shandley, 93. 14. Ibid., 94. 15. Ibid. 16. Weckel, 70. 17. Ibid. 18. Jennifer M. Kapczynski, The German Patient: Crisis and Recovery in Postwar Culture (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2008). 19. Julia Knight, New German Cinema: Images of a Generation (New York: Wallflower Press, 2004), 2. 20. Eva Rueschmann, Sisters on Screen: Siblings in Contemporary Cinema (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), 147–175. 21. Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Felicity Colman, Film Theory: Creating a Cinematic Grammar (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); and Susan E. Linville, “Margarethe von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane,” PMLA 106, no. 3 (May 1991): 446–458. 22. Barry Langford, “Holocaust Film,” in The Edinburgh Companion to TwentiethCentury British and American War Literature, eds. Adam Piette and Mark Rawlinson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 139. 23. Bertolt Brecht, “Ballad of the Jew’s Whore Marie Sanders,” in The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht, trans. and ed. Tom Kuhn and David Constantine (New York, NY: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2019), 661.

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24. Insdorf, 37. 25.  Frank van Vree, “Indigestible Images: On the Ethics and Limits of Representation,” in Performing the Past: Memory, History, and Identity in Modern Europe, eds. Karin Tilmans, Frank van Vree, and Jay Winter (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 274. 26. Christian Delage, “‘Nuit et Brouillard’: un tournant dans la mémoire de la Shoah,” Politix: Revue des sciences sociales du politique: Politiques du inema 61 (2003): 92–93. 27. Catherine Wheatley, Michael Haneke’s Cinema: The Ethic of the Image (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 86, 87. 28. Marco Abel, “Christian Petzold: Heimat-Building as Utopia,” in The CounterCinema of the Berlin School (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2013), 72. 29. Abel, 72. 30. Jaimey Fisher and Christian Petzold, “An Interview with Christian Petzold,” in Christian Petzold (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 159–160.

Bibliography Abel, Marco. “Christian Petzold: Heimat-Building as Utopia.” In The CounterCinema of the Berlin School, 69–110. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2013. Brandlmeier, Thomas. “Von Hitler zu Adenauer.” In Zwischen Gestern und Morgen: Westdeutscher Nachkriegsfilm 1946–1962, edited by Hilman Hoffmann and Walter Schobert, 32–59. Deutsches Filmmuseum Frankfurt am Main, 1989. Brecht, Bertolt. “Ballad of the Jew’s Whore Marie Sanders.” In The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht, edited and translated by Tom Kuhn and David Constantine, 661– 662. New York, NY: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2019. Colman, Felicity. Film Theory: Creating a Cinematic Grammar. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Delage, Christian. “‘Nuit et Brouillard’: un tournant dans la mémoire de la Shoah.” Politix: Revue des sciences sociales du politique: Politiques du cinema 61 (2003): 81–94. Delorme, Charlotte. “On the Film ‘Marianne and Juliane’ by Margarethe von Trotta.” Translated by Elle Seiter. Journal of Film and Video 37 (1985): 47–51. Elsaesser, Thomas. New German Cinema: A History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989. Fisher, Jaimey, and Christian Petzold. “An Interview with Christian Petzold.” In Christian Petzold, 147–167. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013. Insdorf, Annette. Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Kapczynski, Jennifer M. The German Patient: Crisis and Recovery in Postwar Culture. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2008. Kaplan, E. Ann. “Discourses of Terrorism, Feminism and the Family in von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane.” Persistence of Vision 2 (1985): 61–68. Knight, Julia. New German Cinema: Images of a Generation. London: Wallflower Press, 2004. Langford, Barry. “Holocaust Film.” In The Edinburgh Companion to TwentiethCentury British and American War Literature, edited by Adam Piette and Mark Rawlinson, 134–150. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012.

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Linville, Susan E. “Margarethe von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane.” PMLA 106, no. 3 (1991): 446–458. Mückenberger, Christiane. “Zeit der Hoffnung.” In Das zweite Leben der Filmstadt Babelsberg: DEFA Spielfilme, 1946–1992, edited by Ralf Schenk and Henschel Verlag, 9–48. Berlin: Henschel Verlag, 1994. Ozick, Cynthia. “The Rights of History and the Rights of Imagination.” In Quarrel & Quandary: Essays, 103–119. New York: Vintage International, 2000. Rueschmann, Eva. Sisters on Screen: Siblings in Contemporary Cinema, 103–119. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000. Schönfeld, Christiane. “Being Human: Good Germans in Postwar German Film.” In Representing the “Good German” in Literature and Culture After 1945: Altruism and Moral Ambiguity, edited by Pól Ó Dochartaigh and Christiane Schönfeld, 111–137. Rochester: Boydell & Brewer, Camden House, 2013. Seiter, Ellen. “Women’s History, Women’s Melodrama: Deutschland bleiche Mutter.” German Quarterly 59 (1986): 569–581. Shandley, Robert. Rubble Films: German Cinema in the Shadow of the Third Reich. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001. van Vree, Frank. “Indigestible Images: On the Ethics and Limits of Representation.” In Performing the Past: Memory, History, and Identity in Modern Europe, edited by Karin Tilmans, Frank van Vree, and Jay Winter, 257–283. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010. Weckel, Ulrike. “The Mitläufer in Two German Postwar Films: Representation and Critical Reception.” History and Memory 15, no. 2 (2003): 64–93. Wheatley, Catherine. Michael Haneke’s Cinema: The Ethic of the Image. New York: Berghahn Books, 2009. “Wolfgang Staudte.” DEFA Film Library: [East] German Cinema & Beyond Since 1993. University of Massachusetts. https://ecommerce.umass.edu/defa/people/ 407. Accessed 15 December 2018.

CHAPTER 25

Screen Memories: Trauma, Repetition, and Survival in Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker Sandor Goodhart

Sol Nazerman’s past has been repeating on him. The manager of a pawnshop in Spanish Harlem, Nazerman finds that the security of his hold upon the past has begun to fray. Whether he is observing a gang of young hoodlums mercilessly beating a black man as others walk nonchalantly by, or an attractive young dark-skinned resident of a neighboring brothel baring her breasts to him as an add-on to the gold locket she would hock, or the expressionless faces of elderly New York City subway riders awaiting their chosen destinations, the flashbacks from his past come pouring in. He remembers witnessing the mauling death of his friend, Rubin, as the man screams the name of his wife and attempts to escape over the barbed wire fence of the concentration camp where they are both imprisoned. He remembers having his head forced through a broken window by a camp guard where he glimpses his own wife sitting naked on a bed in the camp barracks as she and other women are raped by Nazi soldiers on break from other war duties. He recalls sleeping standing up unable to move in the sealed box car on the way to the camps as his child, David, fatally slips from his arms, while his wife, Ruth, who is also unable to move, watches nearby screaming. And one day a man shows up to hock a butterfly collection and he suddenly recalls the intrusion of three Nazi soldiers on motorcycle into the idyllic countryside scene where he is picnicking with his wife, two children, and elderly parents. The soldiers would later transport them to the cattle cars, the camps, and, excluding Sol, to their deaths. And now he can no longer separate that interrupted reverie from his contemporary life, and in particular S. Goodhart (*)  Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_25

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from the entrance into his pawnshop of three young hooligans demanding money from his safe. With the approach of the anniversary of his wife’s death, the life he has been leading in recent days as a Holocaust survivor in America is suddenly brought into question. Living in the suburbs with his wife’s sister Bertha and her family, or sleeping with Tessie (who is the wife of his murdered friend, Rubin) amidst the criticisms of her elderly father Mendel from the adjoining bedroom, or listening at work to the stories of the individuals who enter his pawnshop on a daily basis to hock their worldly goods (to which are attached their savored memories), or engaging in conversation the well-intentioned if naive social worker who requests contributions for local youth groups to combat her own loneliness, or exchanging shop talk with his Puerto Rican assistant who takes him as his “teacher” (and would be his “student”), his bitterness has begun to overwhelm him. He learns that the money he receives from the gangster (which has been funding his sister-in-law’s suburban Long Island lifestyle and his girlfriend’s care for her elderly father) derives from the local racketeer‘s illicit enterprises. And that insight is heightened in the middle of a store robbery (instigated by his assistant) when the young man suddenly jumps in front of a bullet meant for Nazerman and is fatally wounded. “I said no shoot, no hurt you” his co-worker, Jesús Ortiz, says as Nazerman holds the man’s blood-soaked hands and issues a voiceless cry. Returning inside, reflecting upon the experiences of recent days, the pawnshop manager impales that hand on the bill spike, and, astonished at all that has transpired, wanders outside the store, disappearing around the corner into the crowd of gathering faceless New Yorkers. Responding to the trauma of his own past, the pawnbroker has in effect become oblivious to the suffering of those in his immediate vicinity. He has effectively pawned himself and, impaling himself on the bill spike, turns his body into the physical receipt of that transaction. Not unlike the individuals he persistently derides, he is left at the film’s conclusion to contemplate his own implication in and perpetration of the consummate misery around him, the “Lazarean” conditions that constitute for him his own survival. Past and present have begun to merge indistinguishably. The faces of the individuals populating his contemporary life now flash before him as they once did from the past, and the radical singularity on which he has prided himself as a Holocaust survivor turns out just one more duplication of the vacuous surroundings in which he is living and from which he would distinguish his screen memory of an idyllic past—by a river, in the countryside, with his family, “before Europe became a graveyard” and he “didn’t die.” Sidney Lumet’s Hollywood production in 1965 based upon a novel of the same name (and released during the period the Eichmann trial gained traction in Europe and Israel) significantly exceeded films of the preceding decade in America in which the Holocaust was presented more obliquely (films like Diary of Ann Frank [1959] or Exodus [1960]).1 Garnering criticism from Jewish and Christian religious groups alike (and especially for both its

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invocation in a seemingly off-handed manner of religious symbolism in its final moments, and its distinctly realistic treatment of sexuality in the backroom scene with the unnamed prostitute and its triggering for Sol of a memory of the rape of his wife), the film inaugurated a new tone for cinematic history in America, one followed in different ways in the seventies by the television series Holocaust (1978), in the eighties by Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), and in the nineties by Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993). Historians of the treatment of the Holocaust in American cinema (like Ilan Avisar and Annette Insdorf) would alternately scoff at and applaud Lumet’s cinematic achievement.2 But few would deny its endurance as an icon of America’s engagement with the European past. As the idyllic scene on which the movie opens turns by its conclusion to the brutal realities for which that initial “screen memory” substitutes, so Lumet’s post war “screening of the Holocaust” (to paraphrase Avisar’s title) acquires a new depth and urgency today in our post 9/11 era where liberal democracy would once again appear trumped (if not entirely banished) by private devastations and shifting local and global cultural alignments. But if that cinematic tone is now commonplace, serious treatment of the film’s narrative is less so. Drawing upon important developments in trauma theory by Laub, Felman, and Caruth, Raïssa Verstrynge’s thesis, “Representing Holocaust Trauma,” appropriately directs our attention to the differences between the two endings (that of the novel, which concludes with Sol’s renewed contact with family and the burgeoning of the mourning process, and that of the film, which concludes with Sol’s self-laceration, astonishment, and disappearance), a point Leonard Leff also famously highlighted in his treatment of the production back story.3 Another exception is a recent essay by Woody Allen that carefully examines much of the narrative and its characters scene by scene.4 And Ralph Rosenblum, who edited Lumet’s production, treats in his book, When the Shooting Stops, with similar close attention the major flashbacks.5 But more generally, when commentators look at the film, it tends to be examined piecemeal. The characters, the scenes, the flashbacks, and the cultural milieu are all considered. But attention tends to be paid to either production considerations or the film’s place in the cinematic history of representations of the Holocaust and little to a coherent understanding of the movement from one moment of the film to the next. Little attention is paid to the film’s structure as a literary presentation. In the essay that follows, I will argue that the film is tightly framed by the opening and final sequences and that its long middle section moves deftly from one to the other. In the opening sequence, two distinctions are offered to us (both from Sol’s point of view): the difference between the past and the present; and the difference between Sol as a survivor and his view of the others. Sol lives with his wife’s relatives (his wife’s sister, her husband, his father, and their two children) in “Levittown”: the tract housing built on Long Island after World War II to foster suburban New York City living and relishes the “peace and quiet” it affords him away from the turbulence and

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monumental losses of the recent past. Within that isolated American enclave, he is able to nourish the singularity of his own experience in contrast with what he takes to be the naiveté and vacuous concerns of those around him to which he considers himself relatively indifferent. The idyllic past he recalls prior to the recent turbulence can be remembered in relative serenity and tranquility. By the film’s conclusion, such distinctions are harder for him to maintain. The difference between past and present becomes almost indiscernible and the difference between himself and others equally fatuous. His recognition (if not the acknowledgment) of his own participation in the activities for which he routinely condemns others becomes fairly unavoidable as he learns that the money he acquires from the Harlem pawnshop he manages derives from the illicit ventures of the local racketeer and that the shop remains a front for its laundering. When the individual he employs as his assistant takes a bullet that might have gone to him and literally dies in front of him, his experience of the past, and the uniqueness it conferred upon him, have vanished and he has become just one more statistic in the faceless gathering crowd. The technical name for what he remembers is a “screen memory.”6 A screen memory is fake news. It is both a distinct memory and a bit of self deception. It is a memory of something that happened to you that never in fact occurred the way it is remembered. Isolated individual components of the narrative are genuine but their ordering in time and space has been altered to conserve something that is being hidden. The term was first introduced by Freud of course as the name for a psychic mechanism by which we disguise what is too unbearable to face directly, superimposing disparate elements and an anachronistic time sequence in order to reconstruct it in a manner suitable for recall. By the film’s end, the screen memory of the idyllic past by which Sol recalls his European marriage from the vantage point of his suburban American lawn chair has been amplified by its connection to the fatalities and brutalities to come, brutalities it concealed and that have more accurately described his passage from Europe to America. Since the passage between the beginning and the end of the film assumes three distinct movements—an exposition, its intensification, and its climax (culminating in the explosion of a gun into Jesús’s stomach)—I will take up each movement in order and then return to interrogate its cinematic arrangement, one that reveals to us in dribs and drabs (and finally an enhanced repetition) the continuities between past and present and, from Sol’s perspective, between himself and others. Following the opening sequence in Germany and Long Island, the expository portion of the film tracks roughly one day in Sol’s life introducing all the primary characters. Sol drives to work where he greets arriving customers. We meet Jesús at home with his mother (Mrs. Ortiz) and later at work. Sol encounters a young white man who would hock an oratory award he won for reciting Poe’s poem, “The Raven”; an elderly black woman (Mrs. Harmon) who would hock two candelabras she describes as family heirlooms; and an

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elderly black man (Mr. Smith) who speaks with a stutter, loves to converse about philosophy he has taught himself (he mentions Herbert Spencer’s Genesis of Science), and would hock a camping lantern. The phone rings. The racketeer, Rodriquez, who owns the business, calls to inform Nazerman of a man who will arrive later with money Sol is instructed to deposit. Marilyn Birchfield, a do-gooder who would solicit contributions for a local youth group, appears. Sol is greeted by Tangee, apparently a Jamaican emigré who haunts the local streets and pool halls with his two chums, Robinson and Buck, who want money for an electric lawn mower that would seem of little use to them (on the grassless streets of Harlem) and that Sol suspects may have been stolen. At his assistant’s request, Nazerman undertakes to teach his young apprentice to distinguish gold from other metals. Before closing, the man mentioned by Rodriguez (Savarese) arrives and gives Nazerman $5000 that he deposits in the store safe, a gesture observed by Jesús. Before leaving for the night, Jesús starts to change the wall calendar (set on “September 29”) but refrains when Sol objects. Later the same evening, Nazerman is walking to his car and spots a man fleeing a gang of neighborhood ruffians across an empty lot, a scene of violence we are given to believe is commonplace for the neighborhood. The individual is caught, beaten by the gang, and the scene occasions for Nazerman a flashback to a similar scene witnessed in the camps twenty-five years earlier where his friend Rubin, running from the guards, is attacked and killed by their German Shepherd. Visibly shaken, Nazerman starts to drive and just misses a pedestrian who bangs on his window, berating him for the near collision. Across town, Jesús enters a Harlem nightclub with his girlfriend where Tangee, Robinson, and Buck, it turns out, are in attendance. Uncomfortable in their presence (and their criticism of his low paying employment), Jesús impulsively (and infelicitously) boasts of the $5000 his boss has deposited. Arriving at the apartment of Tessie (with whom Sol is conducting a sexual liaison), where her father Mendel (a bed-ridden Holocaust survivor living in the adjoining room) criticizes him for sleeping with his deceased friend’s wife, Sol is similarly engaged. Later that evening, we find Jesús and his girlfriend in bed at her apartment, while Tessie at her own signals to Sol that they can now sleep together. Subsequent scenes alternate rapidly between the two apartments: the girlfriend’s where Jesús and his girlfriend make love; and Tessie’s where Sol and Tessie make love. By the conclusion of day one, we have met in this exposition some fifteen characters. Nothing especially unusual has occurred. But we have gotten the lay of the land. Sol’s workday consists of arriving at the pawnshop, assessing for customers the possessions for which they would like to borrow money (for which he gives them routinely a limited sum), or retrieving for them items already hocked and accepting money for their redemption. His attitude remains cynical and contemptuous: at once reflective, we feel, of his own past, and protective against the volatile environment in which he works.

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In scenes to follow, things develop and intensify. The next day, Jesús enters the store and tries again to change the calendar, a gesture to which Sol again objects. Jesús notes that Sol does not seem well and Sol dismisses his concern but straightaway flashes to the face of a woman standing in the camp in the same region in which Rubin was killed. A customer appears who is likely a junkie who tries to hock a radio that is not working. When Sol refuses to increase his offer, the man curses Sol, accepts the proffered cash, and departs. Marilyn Birchfield returns and, having witnessed the scene, apologizes for what the young man said and for what she characterizes as her own overly aggressive come-on the previous day. She proposes lunch with Nazerman, a suggestion he finds outlandish. During their discussion, a woman enters looking fairly dazed and wishes to pawn her engagement ring that Sol recognizes immediately as glass. The woman is nonplussed. “Glass?” she murmurs. “He said it was real.” She turns to leave and we see from her profile she is pregnant. Sol flashes back to the camps where soldiers are removing rings from the hands of prisoners aligned along the prison wire fence. Oblivious to the fact that Sol’s thoughts are elsewhere, Marilyn Birchfield takes his indifference to her (“Fine, fine”) as a commitment. Later that night (or the next), Jesús encourages Sol to teach him the ways of the Jews. “[H]ow come you people come to business so naturally?” Jesús asks. “You people?” Sol replies. “Oh, I see. Yeah. I see. I see. …You want to learn the secret of our success.” And Sol then offers it. “[Y]ou start off with a period of several thousand years during which you have nothing to sustain you but a great bearded legend. No, my friend, you have … nothing…. All you have is a little brain, a little brain and a great bearded legend to sustain you and convince you that you are… special.” And you devote yourself to that story. And “suddenly you …have a mercantile heritage. You are a merchant. You’re known as a usurer, a man with secret resources, a witch, a pawnbroker, a sheeny, a mockie, and a kike!” It is a passionate angry speech to which Jesús replies reverently. “You’re really some teacher, Mr. Nazerman …really the greatest.” Jesús returns home and Mrs. Ortiz tries to learn English with him. By contrast, at Tessie’s that evening, Mendel derides Nazerman. “I was in Auschwitz, too. I came out alive. You came out dead …you wrap yourself in a kind of a shroud and feel you share the dignity of death with those who really died….You are a fake. Dead! Sol Nazerman, the walking dead!” The following day, Sol is sitting on the park bench and Marilyn Birchfield shows up. “Did you forget our lunch?” she inquires, and when he concedes, she asks “What makes you so bitter?” “Bitter?” he replies. “Oh, no, Miss Birchfield, I am not bitter….I have escaped from the emotions….All I ask and want is peace and quiet.” “Why haven’t you found it?” she inquires. “Because people like you will not let me!” he replies. “Please…stay out of my life.” In these several scenes, as before, nothing substantially new has occurred. Two new customers have appeared but both appear more distracted than the earlier ones. Other characters have returned. Marilyn Birchfield is back and

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Sol’s rejection of her is slightly intensified. Jesús again tries to change the calendar over Sol’s objection. And Mendel is again critical of Nazerman in a slightly more strident fashion. Mrs. Ortiz again tries to learn a new language. And Jesús again wants to teach his mother English and be taught by Sol. And Sol’s flashbacks have become more frequent. He flashes on the rings removed from the fingers of the women in the camps and a mysterious woman wearing clothing that appears to be Ruth’s standing near the place where Rubin was killed. But by virtue of those repetitions, seeds have been planted for the third sequence in which much will change and what was previously developing slowly will reach a climax. Sol returns to the store from his meeting with Marilyn Birchfield to find Savarese removing the days from the calendar. “You shouldn’t have done that” Sol intones and Savarese replies “What’s the matter, uncle, you don’t like Wednesdays?” Sol refuses to sign the papers Savarese brings (on behalf of Rodriguez) and when Savarese departs, Jesús requests a lesson in money. “Next to the speed of light, which Einstein says is the only absolute in the universe,” Sol proclaims “I rank money!…that’s all you need to know.” Later that evening Jesús repeats the “lesson” to his girlfriend. “Money. Money. That’s the whole thing” he says to her. And in the subsequent scene, we see him planning the heist with Tangee. “And if the thing goes,” he adds, to the skeptical Jamaican, “[t]here’ll be no shooting.” At the same time, his girlfriend, who works at the nearly by brothel, is already plotting to obtain an extra $100 from the pawnbroker on her own. She arrives at his store just before closing and he offers her $20 for the locket she presents. “It’s worth at least $100” she says and Sol replies “Maybe it is, but not to me.” The phone rings and Tessie reports that Mendel has died. “What am I going to do, Sol?” she asks and Sol replies coldly: “you’ll bury him. There’s nothing else to do.” The girlfriend spots an opening. “I’m good, pawnbroker. I’m real good. I know things you have never even dreamed about before” and as they walk to the back of the store she begins removing her clothes. But before further interactions between them ensue, something happens to him. She repeats that he should not relate their encounter to Rodriguez. “Wait a minute,” he reflects. “You work for Rodriguez?” And as she disrobes, between seeing her and hearing her incant repeatedly the word “look,” he hears the Nazi officer who forces his head through a camp brothel window say as much (in German) and he is compelled to observe his wife sitting there naked on a bed before a German officer. Sol pays Ortiz’s girlfriend some money, hands her the clothing she has discarded, and she departs. The scene has inaugurated a decisive change for Sol. In the next sequence, we find him at Rodriguez’s house. “I don’t want your money if it comes from that place,” he declares, and when Rodriguez asks “Why?” he replies “Because it’s money that comes from filth and from horror!” “Now, you’re going to listen to me,” Rodriguez retorts. “Where do you think the money you’ve been living on comes from, professor? Money you pay for an old Jew’s

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keep, money you give Tessie, money you pay for a nice fat house on Long Island? And the nice fat family you support there?…And one of the places I get it most is from whorehouses…. You’re living right in…the middle of one big whorehouse!…Filth, horror? Right in the middle and you don’t know it. Or maybe…you don’t want to know…You give me a front, and I give you money. So don’t hang up on me, professor …Those papers you haven’t signed…. By tomorrow morning, signed.” Sol is humiliated. For the first time in the film, he cries. He leaves the house broken and wanders the night through the streets, arriving at dawn at Marilyn Birchfield’s door. “What made you come here?” she asks. And he replies “I don’t know. I don’t know. Just….things have been happening lately, and …I felt I needed to be with someone.” “What things?” she probes. “Well, it’s just that suddenly, in the last few days, I feel afraid, and …it’s been a long time since I felt …” “Anything?” she suggests. “Fear” he answers. “Fear, fear. That’s what I felt. And then I …I called you.” She is a little taken aback. She wants to be sympathetic. “I’m sorry that you’re so alone.” And he answers. “Oh, no, no, no. You don’t understand. It’s just that there have been memories that I have…Well, I thought that I had …pushed them far away from me, and they keep rushing in…And then there are words…words that I thought I have kept myself from hearing and …now …now they … flood my mind. Yeah. Today is an anniversary.” And then the news leaks out. “What happened?” she asks and he answers. “I didn’t die. Everything that I loved …was taken away from me and …I did not die ….” There was …Nothing I could do. Ha. Nothing. Strange? I could do nothing. No, there was nothing I could do.” She retreats into the house, “chilled” she says later by his demeanor. He follows her. She extends her hand to him behind her back. He observes the outstretched hand and leaves. He enters a subway train. He observes others who remind him of the faces in the cattle cars to which memory he now begins furiously flashing. The train whistle becomes nearly indistinguishable from a baby’s crying that he recalls from a scene in the cattle cars. Sol is standing there among many others also sleeping while standing. His son David is atop his shoulders, his wife Ruth off a few people away from them. David begins to slip to the floor. Ruth screams. “Sol! Sol, don’t let him fall!” Suddenly aware, Sol screams “David?” Ruth screams again. “Sol, he’s falling! Oh, God, David! Sol! Sol!” And then he realizes. “Ruthie! I can’t do anything! Oh, my god, I can do nothing. David. David! David! David!” He exits the subway, barely recovered from the flashback, and returns to the pawnshop. The customer with the oratory award returns, wishing to borrow on another object—two gold-plated child’s shoes. He hands the man $50—significantly more than before. Sometime later, another customer places an object on the counter, and he hands her $20. To a third, he gives another $50. He is in effect, we may surmise, giving Rodriguez’s money away. Jesús approaches him and is roundly rejected. “I’m just concerned, that’s all. After all, you’re my teacher,” Jesús remarks. “I’m your what?” Sol inquires.

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And Jesús confirms. “You’re my teacher…. I’m a student to you.” “You’re nothing to me.” Sol says. “For true?” Jesús asks, incredulous. “For true,” Sol confirms. “You mean, I’m like….like the rest of them out there?” Jesús is checking, to be sure he hears what he is hearing. “That’s right” Sol says. “You’re like the rest of them out there. You’re nothing to me.” And then the plan Jesús has been contemplating kicks in. He rushes to Tangee who is standing with his friends. “It’s at closing time,” he tells him. Back at the pawnshop, Rodriguez has appeared with Savarese. “You were supposed to deliver the papers this morning…. Sign them.” “And if I don’t sign the papers,” Sol asks, “what do you do to me then, you kill me?” “Oh, yes.” Rodriguez answers. Sol stands still. “So kill me.” Savarese prepares to do the deed. He removes the pawnbroker’s glasses, pulls down his outer garment around his waist, and slugs him in the stomach twice and then again on the back of the head. Rodriguez halts the assault. “That’s what you really want, professor, isn’t it? I’ll tell you what. You’ll die …but not when you want to…so bad. One day it’ll happen to you…. just, the time when you wish it hadn’t.” The two leave. A new customer enters with a butterfly collection. “I’d like to borrow some money on this collection,” he says politely. Sol stumbles forward, physically wounded, barely moving from the previous encounter, and hands the man the money. The astonished customer takes the money and departs as Sol takes the collection and retreats to the back of the store. Regarding the butterfly collection, he has a final flashback. We are in the countryside as at the film’s opening, and as before, everything now is in slow motion and soundless, although music plays in the background. Someone’s hand reaches out and grabs a butterfly. The hand belongs to David Nazerman who is with his sister. Ruth gathers water in a jug from the river. The mother and father sit under the tree. Ruth is now near the mother and father. She calls out (we don’t hear her voice but see that she is calling Sol). Sol walks back from the river carrying something. The two children come over the meadow. Ruth watches as he puts down the bottle he has been carrying and picks up the children, twirling them about. Ruth watches smiling. David spots something. Three Nazi soldiers arrive in a motorcycle, and walk to the grassy area. The flashback stops. Tangee, Robinson, and Buck are entering the pawnshop. The music continues as if we are still in the previous scene but we are in the present. They demand the money from his safe. “Go home,” he says to him. Buck notices the safe remains open and says as much. Sol slowly closes it. “Now what do you want to die for, uncle?” Robinson interjects. “I mean, the money don’t mean that much to you, does it?” Robinson takes out the gun he has concealed in his jacket and cocks it. Jesús, who has been observing this scene from the sidelines, spots the gun and dashes forward. “No shooting!” he yells, jumping in front of Robinson where he himself is shot. The three men flee the store in opposite directions. Jesús is curled up on the floor of the shop and crawls outside onto the pavement in front of it. People gather to

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see the cause of the commotion. Sirens from police cars start blaring. Jesús’s mother, who lives a few doors from the pawnshop, hears the sirens and charges down screaming her son’s name. She is stopped from getting too close by some of the women already on the scene. Others watch from their windows nonchalantly. Sol exits the shop and bends down to Jesús who lay before him on the ground, touching his blood-soaked hands. “I… I said no shootin’,” Jesús says. “I said no …no to hurt you. No …No to hurt you. No. No to hurt you!” Then he dies. Sol opens his mouth to scream but nothing emerges. He stands up, looks at his hands which have the blood of the wounded man on them. He returns inside the store while the police put the body onto a stretcher and the ambulance drives away, blaring its siren. Inside the store, Sol stands at the counter on the customer side. Flashes of people from the recent past come to him. The faces of Tessie, Mr. Smith, Mendel, the woman with the glass engagement ring, Marilyn Birchfield, Mrs. Harmon, the man with the oratory award (and later the gold shoes), and Jesús all pass now before his eyes, the same eight images repeating themselves twice, with increasing speed. Finally, Sol observes the bill spike where receipts have accumulated earlier in the film, and slowly places his palm upon it, forcing his palm down so that the spike pierces through his flesh, until he has impaled his hand. He retracts his hand and walks outside, looking intently at the self-inflicted wound. Once outside, he turns right, walks past the corner bar, turns right again and proceeds up the street. A little past the bar, he stops again, hangs his head down, leaning against the bar wall, and then resumes walking. The camera zooms out as the music swells, and credits appear on the screen. What has happened? They say that if you immerse a frog in boiling water, the frog will jump out, but that if you immerse a frog in tepid water and raise the temperature slowly (say, one degree an hour) the frog will be dead before it realizes what has happened. Holocaust scholars have long used this model of the “frog in boiling water” as a paradigm for explaining the rise of antisemitism and anti-Judaic policies in Germany in the thirties, and it would appear Lumet (or Lumet with Friedkin and Fine) has employed this paradigm for tracing the rise to “the boiling point” of Sol’s emotions in the present film. Clearly, if we start with the appearance of Ortiz’s girlfriend in his store, a chain of connections has been established. Watching Ortiz’s disrobed girlfriend, Sol is suddenly thrust into the perspective of the Nazi soldier watching his naked wife on the bed in the camp brothel. His money comes from Rodriguez who gets his money from the same kinds of activities in which his wife was humiliated and presumably killed. The interaction with the woman leads immediately to the scene with Rodriguez, which in turn leads immediately to the scene with Marilyn Birchfield at her apartment, which leads straightaway to the subway flashback, which leads in its turn to new interactions with the customers (in which Sol gives away more money than they expected—to the consternation of Jesús) and to Jesús’s impulsive

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confirmation of the heist. The entrance of Rodriguez and Savarese to the pawnshop, and their brutality and threats, is followed immediately by the customer with the butterfly collection which leads immediately for Sol to the flashback instigated by the collection, which terminates with the entrance of Tangee and his friends, the shooting of Jesús by Robinson, Jesús’s death, the parade of eight faces in Sol’s head, the impaling of his hand on the spike, and his disappearance around the corner. The confluence of past and present, the inseparability of the flashback scenes from the current scene for Sol, is clear from the moment Jesús’s girlfriend enters the store. A “straight line” can be traced from their interaction to the film’s conclusion. The scene with the girlfriend of Jesus, therefore, is clearly a turning point. But what precedes her appearance? She has discussed with Jesús the possibility of gaining money to help him open a shop of his own. “Please … listen to me,” she says the night before. “Honey, I can get you the money.” And Jesús agrees. “Money. That’s the whole thing.” But behind that discussion, in Jesús’s mind, is the discussion of money he had with Sol the previous night. “And now you listen to me,” Sol said. “Next to the speed of light, … I rank money! … that’s all you need to know.” “That’s what life’s all about?” Jesús confirmed. “Money is the whole thing,” Sol repeats. But what is behind Sol’s “teaching?” A professor of economics conferring upon his student the core of his critical thinking? “The boss wants you to sign these,” Savarese starts. “There’ll be no papers signed today,” Sol replies. Sol yells and Savarese leaves. We never learn what exactly the papers are (although we assume they are connected with the money laundering Rodriguez does with his business). Money is “the whole thing” for Sol, in other words, if, like Rodriguez, you see “the whole” opportunistically. And behind Sol’s rejection, his repugnance, of this laundering? An obstinate moral compass? He has encountered Marilyn Birchfield in the park. “Let me tell you something, my dear sociologist,” he says, “that there is a world different than yours, much different, and the people in it are of another species.” “But what happened to me…” she interjects. “Is nothing” Sol demurs. “No! That’s not so” she counters. “What makes you so bitter?” “Bitter?” Sol replies. “Oh, no, Miss Birchfield, I am not bitter. … I’ve no desire for vengeance for what was done to me…. All I ask and want is peace and quiet.” “Why haven’t you found it?” she asks. “Because people like you will not let me! Miss Birchfield, you have made the afternoon very tedious with your constant search for an answer. And one more thing. Please… stay out of my life.” “People like you” won’t let me alone. Behind Sol’s rejection of Savarese and his papers (which motivate his speech on money to Jesús) is his rejection of the deception he finds at work in people like Marilyn Birchfield, people of good intention whose search for answers to their loneliness lead them either to irrelevance or to disturb others in his view. But behind that attack? Why should Sol be especially perturbed by Marilyn Birchfield’s naiveté? The answer is Mendel’s attack on Sol. “I was in Auschwitz too,” Mendel says to him the night before. “I came out alive. You came out dead.” And

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when Sol attempts to assist Mendel with his medication, the Auschwitz survivor attacks him. “[Y]ou wrap yourself in a kind of a shroud and feel you share the dignity of death with those who really died….You are a fake. You breathe, you eat, you walk. You make money. You take a dream and give a dollar…and give no hope.” “I survive,” Sol replies. “A coward’s survival,” Mendel answers. “[A]nd at what a price! No love. No passion. No pity! Dead! Sol Nazerman, the walking dead!” Sol’s attack on Marilyn Birchfield is motivated in part by Mendel’s attack on him. Declaring her naive and her experience worth “nothing” (he will later say the same to Jesús and about Mr. Smith), he responds in effect to Mendel’s attack on him in which he has been similarly denounced. But behind Mendel’s attack? Sol’s speech to Jesús on the origins of antisemitism. What is the secret of your success, Jesús asked, the success of “you people,” and Sol has replied “a great bearded legend” and “a little brain.” Behind Sol’s engagement with Mendel, in which he is accused of being nothing, an engagement which motivates his attack on Marilyn Birchfield and in turn his response to Savarese and Jesús later regarding money, a response which, as well, through Jesús’s girlfriend, will motivate the encounter of the girlfriend at the store with Sol and all that follows, is Sol’s understanding of the history of Judaism: a history of people who begin with “nothing” and turn that “nothing” into survival. “I survive” he said to Mendel. And those who do less, who do “nothing” with the “nothing” with which they begin (Mr. Smith, Marilyn Birchfield, Jesús, in his view) are, in the extreme, not worth existing. “Why do creatures like that exist?” he remarks to Jesús. Have we reached the end of the line? Is that pronouncement finally what Sol thinks and what constitutes his account of Judaism? His speech to Jesús has followed on the heels of his flashback about soldiers extracting jewelry from prisoners, a flashback inspired by the girl who appears at this window with the glass engagement ring. He has just been listening to Marilyn Birchfield’s fatuous apology for the attack of the junkie with the non-working radio. And behind that encounter with the customer with the radio lay day one: his interaction with the three or four customers, with Rodriguez on the phone, his initial encounter with Marilyn Birchfield, with Tangee and his two friends, with Savarese, and, after work, with the flashback of Rubin’s death still fresh in his head, with Tessie, and with her father, Mendel. If we trace them back far enough, in other words, the chain of connections that begin with the appearance of the Jesús’s girlfriend at the store and the brothel flashback it triggers have their origins in the quotidian encounters of the pawnbroker in the life he has been leading, a life in which, as a consequence perhaps of the onset of the anniversary of his wife’s death, the temperature has been turned up until it reaches the “boiling point” in Rodriguez’s house and then again in Marilyn Birchfield’s apartment, in the subway, and in moments after Jesús’s death as he contemplates impaling himself. It is even more specific. In Rodriguez’s house he has heard “Are you that kind of man, professor, the kind that doesn’t want to know about things, feel

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about things?…That makes you nothing! A ton of nothing!” He will repeat that language to Marilyn Birchfield. “I could do nothing” he will say to her. “There was… Nothing I could do. Ha. Nothing. Strange? I could do nothing. No, there was nothing I could do.” And we will see straightaway the context, the bottom line cost, of that assessment: the life of his child in the cattle cars. “Ruthie!” he screams. “I can’t do anything! Oh, my god, I can do nothing. David. David! David! David!” Hearing the shrill whistles of the trains in the New York subway, he recalls unavoidably the cattle car where his son slipped from his arms and died and he could do “nothing” about it. The humiliation of his friend Rubin and his wife Ruth has been displaced by the scene of his own impotence to thwart the death of his son on the way to the camps, a humiliation and impotence now linked to the idyllic country scene he earlier imagined through the appearance of the three Nazi soldiers that began the journey to the camp and the death of those around him, a scene that in its innocence was a screen memory. Rodriguez was right. To an extent and in a way Sol did not anticipate, Mendel was also right. He is a walking dead man, a “ton of nothing.” He died and yet he didn’t die. And that Lazarean state has had a deadly effect on those around him. In the wake of Jesús’s murder, Sol has in effect become indistinguishable from those around him that he identifies as vulnerable, victimized by the life circumstances in which they find themselves. One of the ways the film shows this development in its final moments is by displaying a parade of faces before him after Jesús’s death—a cinematic attempt to convey his thoughts just before he impales his hand on the bill spike. The faces say “haven’t you been listening? You haven’t heard what I have been trying to tell you.” They are the faces of his victims. They bespeak the ways in which he is implicated in doing to them what has been done to him. Is he any less indifferent or “inhuman” than those who are cold and mercilessly practical with regard to his family losses, the face of Tessie says to him? Is he any different from the racists who would regard all blacks as “rejects” or “scum,” or the Nazis who would regard all Jews as “creatures” who had no right to exist, the face of Mr. Smith says to him? Has Sol not shrouded himself in indifference or even superiority toward others, the face of Mendel (who was also in the death camps) says to him? Is he any different from the Nazis who removed rings from the fingers of their victims, the face of the woman with the glass engagement ring says to him? Is he any less naive about the ways of the world and the Rodriguezes who run it than Marilyn Birchfield, her face says to him? Is he any less concerned about markers from the past (like calendar dates) than the woman with the candelabras that she says are “heirlooms,” her face says to him? Is he any different from the man who would hock his oratory award (that he won for reciting a poem in which a raven indifferently repeats the word “nevermore” in the face of the narrator’s litany of personal losses) or a pair of gold-plated child’s shoes, the man’s face says to him? And Jesús himself? Does not the face of Jesús speak to him the most forcefully of all? Is it not a composite of all the faces that say in one fashion or

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another “Thou shalt not kill”? “I… I said no shootin’, no to hurt you” Jesús says to him as he lay dying. His “son,” his admirer, his student, the one who looks up to him (and among the few in the film concerned about his welfare), has again “fallen asleep,” slipped from his shoulders, and been crushed by the pressure of the crowd around him. The parallel is not perfect. Jesús is clearly motivated by the thought of “inheriting” some money (perhaps the way he heard of a relative, a “son” who inherited from his “father”), and has inaugurated the affair in which Tangee and his friends would steal the money from the pawnbroker (which might easily have cost Sol his life) while nothing of the kind happened for Sol with David. But perhaps Sol’s own insensitivity to the life of his co-worker at critical moments remains implicated. In this case at least, he might readily have done something. And if in an unwitting stereotyping of Jews, Jesús has inquired about the success of “you people,” has Sol not made a similar remark to Marilyn Birchfield, asserting that he has not found “peace and quiet” because “people like you won’t let me”? And what of the faces that do not appear—Rodriguez, or Tangee and his friends? In his denunciation of others as nothing (Smith, Birchfield, Jesús) does Sol not duplicate Rodriguez who says as much of him? In his appropriation of the possessions of others giving nothing in return and his focus upon the supreme importance of money, is he not duplicating Tangee and his friends? Past and present have become indistinguishable. Self and others turn out in numerous ways doubles. In his modality of survival, Sol has given himself over in strategic moments to the very behaviors he would most detest in others, others who have occasioned his worst losses. We started with two distinct scenes: an imagined ideal one in which a family—a wife, a husband, two children (a boy and a girl), two parents, enjoy a carefree existence outside of the city, by the water, drenched in sunlight where children romp in the natural setting; and a realistic one in which a family—also a wife, a husband, two children (a boy and a girl), a parent or two, enjoy a day off in suburbia on the tract house lawn also drenched in a shadowless sunlight while the teenagers fight over burgeoning sexual politics and adult appearances. And we have been brought to a framed butterfly collection that recalls the idealized reverie that leads straightaway to the intrusion of three would-be thieves ready to murder in support of their illicit desires so that the initial idyllic scene turns out in fact a screen memory of a more realistic account of what occurred, imagined from within a vacuous suburban landscape which is its diachronic residue. And we reached this point of convergence through nothing more than the anniversary of Sol’s wife’s death. Flashbacks of Nazi atrocities around the death of Rubin led to flashbacks of Nazi atrocities around the rape and humiliation of Ruthie which led to flashbacks of Nazi atrocities occasioning the death of Sol’s son David, and all of it framed by an idyllic pastoral vision that turns out, once unmasked, to detail the onset of the disaster. Plot (mūthos), Aristotle wrote, is the soul (hē psychē) of tragedy.

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To what conclusions are we led? Does any of this mean Sol will not be killed, that he has escaped Rodriguez’s warning? Rodriguez has not relinquished his commitment to kill Sol (“just when he least expects it”). Does it mean Sol now acknowledges, as Levinas might say, his “infinite responsibility” for the other human being? There is no sign of that. He has spurned Tessie. Jesús is dead. There is no indication he will resume a relationship with Marilyn Birchfield. He simply walks out and disappears into the crowd. Are we given a moral resolution to the conflicts the film raises, a moral compass or advocacy that the film offers us even if Sol does not adopt it? We are left precisely with “nothing”: with the trauma that has occurred, with its endless repetition, and with the screen memories it engenders, in a Lazarean survival that may or may not manifest itself as an impossible mourning. In this realm, as in so many others, the film affirms, there are no happy endings. And yet rarely has the black hole that is the representation of the Holocaust in American cinema in the sixties been encountered more deliberately and more attentively.

Notes 1. The Pawnbroker was released in April 1965 in the USA. Directed by Sidney Lumet, it was adapted by Morton S. Fine and David Friedkin from the novel of the same name by Edward Lewis Wallant in 1961, published in New York by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2. See Ilan Avisar, Screening the Holocaust: Cinema’s Images of the Unimaginable (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 3. “The most important part [of the film] that differs from the original novel is the ending” writes Verstrynge (42). See Raïssa Verstrynge, “Representing Holocaust Trauma: The Pawnbroker and Everything Is Illuminated,” thesis, submitted to Ghent University, 2009–2010. For Leff’s comments, see Leonard Leff, “Hollywood and the Holocaust: Remembering The Pawnbroker.” American Jewish History 84, no. 4 (1996): 353–376. See also Cathy Caruth, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); and Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992). 4. See Woody Allen, “The Pawnbroker,” Monday, October 2, 2017, accessed at: https://www.jukolart.us/woody-allen/the-pawnbroker.html. 5.  Ralph Rosenblum and Robert Karen, When the Shooting Stops …the Cutting Begins: A Film Editor’s Story, Revised edition (New York: Da Capo Press, 1979). 6. See “Screen Memories (Freud, 1899)” by Doug Davis, which are the author’s teaching notes for Haverford Psychology courses, copyright © Douglas Davis 1995–1998, accessed at: http://ww3.haverford.edu/psychology/ddavis/p109g/ fscreen.html.

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Bibliography Allen, Woody. “The Pawnbroker,” Monday, October 2, 2017. Accessed at: https:// www.jukolart.us/woody-allen/the-pawnbroker.html. Avisar, Ilan. Screening the Holocaust: Cinema’s Images of the Unimaginable. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. ———. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Davis, Douglas. “Screen Memories (Freud, 1899).” Teaching notes for Haverford Psychology courses, copyright © Douglas Davis 1995–1998. Accessed at: http:// ww3.haverford.edu/psychology/ddavis/p109g/fscreen.html. Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge, 1992. Insdorf, Annette. Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust, 3rd ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Leff, Leonard. “Hollywood and the Holocaust: Remembering The Pawnbroker.” American Jewish History 84, no. 4 (1996): 353–376. Pagis, Dan. The Selected Poetry of Dan Pagis. Translation by Stephen Mitchell. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Rosenblum, Ralph, and Robert Karen. When the Shooting Stops…the Cutting Begins: A Film Editor’s Story, Revised edition. New York: Da Capo Press, 1979. The Pawnbroker, dir. Sidney Lumet. Produced by Ely Landau, Phillip Langner, and Roger Lewis, 1965. Screenplay by Morton S. Fine and David Friedkin. Verstrynge, Raïssa. “Representing Holocaust Trauma: The Pawnbroker and Everything Is Illuminated.” Thesis submitted to Ghent University, 2009–2010. Wallant, Edward Lewis. The Pawnbroker. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1961.

CHAPTER 26

Haunted Dreams: The Legacy of the Holocaust in And Europe Will Be Stunned Melissa Weininger

Between 2007 and 2011, the Israeli artist Yael Bartana, working in Poland, made a 3-part series of video installations titled, And Europe Will Be Stunned.1 The series chronicles a fictional Polish political movement called the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (JRMiP), the arrival of a group of Israeli Jewish pioneers who build a kibbutz in central Warsaw, and the assassination and funeral of the JRMiP’s leader. In 2011, the video trilogy was chosen to represent Poland at the 54th International Art Exhibition in Venice, the first time a non-Polish artist represented Poland at the Biennale. The same year, Bartana and two collaborators, who also curated her show, Galit Eilat and Sebastian Cichocki, published A Cookbook for Political Imagination to accompany the exhibition. The volume aimed to be something more than a catalog, describing itself as “a manual of political instructions/recipes, covering a broad spectrum of themes – constitutions, legal solutions, elements of visual identity, food recipes, social advice, and guidance for members of the movement.”2 And in 2012, in conjunction with the 7th Berlin Biennale, Bartana convened a JRMiP Congress, ostensibly to formulate a future agenda for the group, whose stated purpose was to encourage “the return of 3,300,000 Jews to Poland to symbolize the possibility of our collective imagination – to right the wrongs history has imposed and to reclaim the promise of a utopian future that all citizens deserve.”3 All of these elements—the video trilogy, the book, the staged congress, the JRMiP, and its platform (which has its own Web site)—interact as part of the greater project of And Europe Will Be Stunned, which works to create a M. Weininger (*)  Rice University, Houston, TX, USA © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_26

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multifaceted representational engagement with the Jewish past in Europe and the Holocaust, one that defies simple interpretations of memory and memorialization, complicates monolithic historical narratives, and raises questions about nationalism and its relation to victimization. This engagement with the past is foregrounded in the first video of the series, Mary Koszmary (Nightmares or Haunted Dreams), which chronicles the debut of the JRMiP in the form of an inaugural speech by the movement’s leader, Sławomir Sierakowski.4 In real life, Sierakowski is a l­eftist intellectual and journalist in Warsaw, who plays a slightly altered version of himself in the films. The film opens in Stadion Dziesięciolecia Manifestu Lipcowego, also known as the Tenth Anniversary Stadium, which opened in 1955 and was a frequent site of Communist Party and state celebrations and events. It was constructed at least partially with rubble from the destruction of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, and thus, the site is quite literally built on the Holocaust history of the city. The stadium setting also references the Communist era, since the site was the location of numerous state events in the postwar period. By the time of the film’s production, the Tenth Anniversary Stadium was largely abandoned and being used as an outdoor market. It has since been demolished. In this setting, which recalls both the memory of the Holocaust and Poland’s postwar Communist government, Sierakowski proceeds to give a rousing speech outlining some of the key principles of the JRMiP, namely the return of 3 million Jews to Poland, roughly the number of Polish Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Thus, both the platform of the JRMiP and the setting of the speech locate the film within the context of Holocaust memory, creating an immediate link between present and past. But this link is complex and multivalent, not direct and singular—for the stadium is crumbling and empty, the only audience to Sierakowski’s speech is a group of young scouts, dressed in uniforms that simultaneously evoke a utopian, pioneering spirit and the history of fascist youth movements. The memory of the Holocaust in And Europe Will Be Stunned is primarily evoked through visual references to the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, featured in the second film, Mur I Wieza (Wall and Tower).5 This monument is a memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising designed by Nathan Rapoport and installed in 1948 in an area of Warsaw that was formerly part of the ghetto. Mur I Wieza begins with a point of view shot from what we eventually understand to be the wall of a newly built kibbutz across from the monument. In this opening shot, we catch a glimpse of the monument, which continues to appear throughout the course of the film, as one of the “kibbutzniks” walks toward the camera with the memorial in the background, spray-painting on the camera, which is contiguous with the wall of the kibbutz, the symbol of the JRMiP, a Polish eagle backed by a star of David, two national symbols intertwined. The framing of the shot, early in the video, suggests that the monument and the newly fashioned kibbutz being built across from it represent two poles or stages of Jewish history.

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Just as the kibbutznik moves from one to the other, the film moves between each of these poles—the Holocaust, as represented by the monument, and the rebuilding of the diaspora, as represented by the kibbutz in central Warsaw—in order to reinterpret the prevailing teleological model of Jewish post-Holocaust history. The history and design of the memorial itself are crucial to its function with regard to Holocaust memory in And Europe Will Be Stunned. One side of the monument, which faces the square in which it stands (and faces the camera in Mur I Wieza), depicts a relief of the heroes of the uprising, dedicated, “To the Jewish people – Its Heroes and Martyrs.” But the other side, what James Young calls the “dark” side, in which images recede into the stone, depicts 12 stooped figures fleeing. These figures represent the 12 tribes of Israel, and this suggests that the whole of Jewish history, up to the moment of redemption depicted on the other side, has been one of rootlessness and victimization. As Young notes, “In this movement between sides, the ancient type seems to pass into the shaded wall only to emerge triumphantly out of the other side into the western light: one type is literally recessive, the other emergent.”6 In other words, the monument itself presents a triumphalist view of Jewish history in which exile and wandering are redeemed through resistance and martyrdom.7 Likewise, the monument’s structure itself has a dual meaning that creates an implied historical trajectory. The relief emerges from a giant wall, 11 meters tall, which according to Rapoport was meant to evoke both the walls of the ghetto and the Western Wall in Jerusalem.8 Just as with the sculpture itself, the symbolic value of the wall as background suggests a nationalist historical narrative of return, from a victimized exile to a triumphant Jerusalem, which connects Holocaust memory to Zionism and the establishment of the state of Israel. The massive size and repetitive symbolics of the monument, while focusing attention on the memory of the ghetto, the uprising, and the trajectory of Jewish history, also lend themselves to the ossification of that memory. James Young has written of monuments in general that they “have long sought to provide a naturalizing locus for memory, in which a state’s triumphs and martyrs, its ideals and founding myths are cast as naturally true as the landscape in which they stand. These are the monument’s sustaining illusions, the principles of its seeming longevity and power.”9 The danger of this longevity, however, is that it can also reify history, preserving one particular narrative at the expense of a multivalent, complex, and contextual conception of both past and present. The reification of history is precisely the problem that And Europe Will Be Stunned not only grapples with, but also provides one possible solution to, in the form of the artwork itself. It does so in the content and format of the videos themselves but also through the corollaries to the video project: the companion book, Cookbook for the Political Imagination, a Web site for the JRMiP, and a congress of the JRMiP convened in conjunction with the Berlin Biennale in 2012. The centrality of the image of the Monument

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to the Ghetto Heroes in Mur I Wieza suggests that And Europe Will Be Stunned is aware of its role in complicating the narratives of historical memory. The trilogy, taken together with the corollary book, Web site, and congress, functions as what James Young calls a “countermonument,” which are “memorial spaces conceived to challenge the very premise of the monument.”10 These countermonuments force an engagement with the sites and memorials of the Holocaust not in order to establish a static representation of memory, but rather to create an active process in which viewers can question, challenge, and examine the significance of the past for their own present. The model of the countermonument allows Bartana not only to memorialize the Holocaust in her work but to examine its complex connections to Zionist ideology, Israeli history, and the political present.

Visual Allusion and Memory This complex nexus of connections is evident first in the filmic allusions offered by And Europe Will Be Stunned, which play with the interrelationship between the history of Zionism and the history of the Holocaust. On the one hand, the film series recalls certain elements of Zionist propaganda films of the pre-state period, especially Helmar Lerski’s 1935 Avodah (Labor). In particular, the section of this documentary titled “Building in the Colony” depicts Jewish pioneers in Palestine engaged in cooperative building projects, with workers handing off bricks to each other, carrying large construction items together, and finally completing a building by hand with a large star of David adorning the top.11 The workers, the collective labor, and even the images of the building and star all make appearances in some form in Mur I Wieza. The film is constructed around a long scene in which a truck carrying wood and building materials roll into central Warsaw accompanied by Israeli “pioneers,” who are dressed much like the workers in Avodah: white button-down shirts, khaki shorts or pants, hats, and neckerchiefs. Likewise, these pioneers proceed to build what turns out to be a kibbutz in the traditional “wall and tower” structure of early kibbutzim. These scenes recall Zionist propaganda films of the 1930s, like Avodah, associating this Polish resettlement project with the utopian era of Jewish nationalism. At the same time, Bartana’s series also mimics the lacunae of the Zionist propaganda film. In Avodah, while we see settlers and settlement, there are very few images of the already existing population of Arabs in Palestine. Aside from a couple of shots in which Bedouins with camels and donkeys appear marginally, as background to the central focus on the pioneers and their work, Avodah omits any visual mention of the Arabs living in Palestine. Similarly, And Europe Will Be Stunned contains few images of an already existing Polish population. Aside from the scouts in the first film, a few confused residents of Warsaw looking at the new kibbutz in the second, and a seemingly multinational group of mostly young mourners in the third, the pioneers and movement activists seem to be repopulating Poland in a

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vacuum. Little attention is paid to the consequences or problems inherent in the resettlement of millions of people in a populous nation. And other than grand semi-religious claims of its redemptive value, there is no indication of the benefit of this Jewish resettlement to Poland. The conspicuous absence of actual Poles seems to underscore a potential dark side to this utopian settlement and suggest that historical redemption comes at a cost. That potential cost is underscored by the visual allusions the films make to certain tropes of Nazi propaganda films, like Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will), the showpiece directed by Leni Riefenstahl and shown in German theaters throughout World War II.12 The opening scenes of Mary Koszmary, discussed above, invoke but also reverse some of the primary conventions of Triumph: the focus on a charismatic leader, emphasis on the movement’s popularity through images of audiences and crowds, and the propagandistic possibilities of political speech multiplied and augmented through film. For example, in Mary Koszmary Sierakowski delivers his speech in a vast arena similar to those in which Hitler and Nazi officials offer their speeches in Triumph. However, the Nazi propaganda film is heavily focused on the immense size of the crowds, lingering for minutes over the audiences and making use of overhead shots to indicate the vast congregation of people. In contrast, the stadium in Mary Koszmary is nearly empty, and Bartana’s camera actually lingers on the utterly empty and overgrown seats. Sierakowski makes his speech to only a small group of young people. While these images of the empty stadium work against the trope of the adoring, cult-like audience, other visual allusions in And Europe Will Be Stunned are more ambiguous. For example, the young people in Mary Koszmary (and later, at the rally in the third film) are dressed in uniforms that recall the short pants, button-down shirts, and ties of the Hitler youth depicted in Triumph. Even the use of children as a symbol of the forward-thinking, utopian nature of the movement uncannily doubles the Nazi emphasis on youth movements as the future of the party. Similarly, the symbol of the JRMiP, a Polish eagle topped by a star of David, can either appear to be a utopian melding of two national symbols or a strange echo of the Nazi eagle over a swastika. And the singular focus on a charismatic individual leader, in this case Sierakowski, on whom the camera is largely focused during Mary Koszmary, hints not just at the Hitlerian cult of personality but at the dangers of fascism and authoritarianism more generally.

Complicating Memory The complicated signaling of these visual tropes, in which the Jewish settlement project in Poland is compared to both the utopia of early Zionist settlement and to European fascism and Nazism, is mirrored in the content of the political program at the center of the project. Mary Koszmary is essentially an extended political advertisement for the JRMiP, in which Sierakowski expounds on the platform of the new party in terms both political

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and poetic. The practical element of the political program, which itself is somewhat impractical, even impracticable—the return of three million Jews to Poland—is, in some ways, only an instrumental element of Sierakowski’s speech and the platform of the JRMiP as developed throughout the video series and book, articles, and manifestos circulated along with it. The ideological purposes behind this return are, like the visual cues of the films, intertwined with the legacy of the Holocaust in Poland as well as the history of the state of Israel. According to Sierakowski’s speech, the repatriation of a Jewish p ­ opulation equivalent to Poland’s before the Holocaust would have not just p ­ olitical repercussions but effects that are described in semi-spiritual terms. Sierakowski declaims near the beginning of the speech, “Heal our wounds, and we will heal yours.” This is followed by emotional appeals that echo the language of mutual beneficiality, such as “Return, and both you and us will finally cease to be the chosen people. Chosen for suffering, chosen for ­taking wounds, and chosen for inflicting wounds,” and “We need the other, and there’s no closer other for us than you.”13 These quasi-mythical ideas about the imbrication of Polish identity with the presence of Jews point to the way in which, as Karen Underhill puts it, “the profound absence or void opened up in the wake of the Holocaust – a void magnified by the silence surrounding Jewish matters and Jewish history in post-WWII Communist-controlled Poland – has become also a kind of pregnant space of possibility, and mythic/ imaginative potentiality, into which can be projected a new conception of Polishness.”14 The reconception of Polish identity through a projected image of its Jewish history represents a variety of what Marianne Hirsch calls “postmemory.” According to Hirsch, “‘Postmemory’ describes the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before – to experiences they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up…. Postmemory’s connection to the past is thus actually mediated not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation.”15 In this case, ­however, Sierakowski’s speech is offered not from an uncomplicated position of victimhood but from a troubled national perspective colored by its association with both the victimization of the colonized and complicity with the perpetrators. Thus the plea for mutual healing contains a veiled acknowledgment of the equally complex position of Israeli Jews: while many Israelis’ ancestors fled their home countries, including Poland, as victims of antisemitic violence, as Israeli citizens they are now figured as complicit in their government’s oppression of Palestinians. Thus, And Europe Will Be Stunned makes use of the history of the Holocaust in Poland to refer to the complex postwar history of Israel. At the same time, it plays with the old antisemitic notion that Jews should “go back where they came from,” pointing to the impossibility of that task. This impossibility, in stark contrast to the utopian mood of the beginning of

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Mur I Wieza, is highlighted after the completion of the kibbutz. Immediately after the JRMiP flag is hung from the kibbutz tower to the applause of the watching Israeli settlers, the scene shifts to a shot of those settlers hanging barbed wire from the top of the kibbutz fence. This process, as well as shots of the finished fence topped with barbed wire, is interspersed with shots of the settlers planting crops and learning Polish. As the sounds of the settlers at their language lessons fade into silence, we are left with shots of the finished settlement: a fortress, surrounded by a high fence and barbed wire, in the middle of the square, isolated and alone. This isolation is not incidental; it is tied to the very history of the “wall and tower” settlement referenced in the title of the film. Homa u’migdal (wall and tower) was a style of construction of Jewish settlements in Palestine during the period of the Arab Revolt (1936–1939). These wall and tower settlements were designed to take control of land that had been purchased by the Jewish National Fund but could not be settled because of existing Bedouin encampments or concerns about security. Much like the kibbutz in Mur I Wieza, which is built in exactly this style, with a hastily constructed prefabricated outer wall and wooden observation tower, the homa u’migdal settlements were intended to stake out territory for colonial expansion. But as Sharon Rotbard points out, “In total contrast to its ambitions of expansion, the tactical and strategic solution offered by Homa Umigdal served in fact to perpetuate the ghetto mentality and the impulse of enclosure.”16 Likewise, in the film, the isolation of the kibbutz is at odds with the JRMiP project of Jewish repatriation and inclusion. In fact, the visual cues of the isolated settlement point backward, toward Holocaust memory, rather than toward a utopian future. The barbed wire and segregation behind walls recall both the memory of the ghetto—an effect doubled by the fact that the kibbutz stands on the site of the Warsaw ghetto—as well as the concentration camp. The camera pans out in consecutive shots to reveal the contained isolation of the kibbutz on the square, and as the sun sets, a spotlight in the kibbutz tower shines directly on the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes before fading to black. When the film re-opens on a new day, confused Varsovians wander around the walls of the kibbutz uncertainly; one woman approaches the entrance, adorned with a “Welcome” sign in Hebrew, peeks in, and turns away. Finally, an overhead shot emphasizes the way that the self-contained settlement stands alone, quiet and still, on the square before the film ends. This separation from the community and self-contained isolation belies any utopian vision of healing or mutuality. And the image from the darkness of the memorial facing the kibbutz is a reminder of both the origin of this separation—that the Jews of Poland were murdered and driven out—as well as the consequences of it— that isolation and difference beget fear that can end in violence. And, indeed, the story does end in violence: the third and last video in the series, Zamach (Assassination), opens after the assassination of Sierakowski, the JRMiP’s leader.17 The film focuses on Sierakowski’s wake and funeral,

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which is staged as a kind of rally in which eulogists offer competing visions of the JRMiP platform and ideology. The wake is held in the Palac Kultury i Nauki (Palace of Culture and Science). Built in 1955 and once dedicated to Stalin, it is the tallest building in Poland and a symbol of Poland’s history of Soviet domination. Again, the locale for the scene, much like the opening scene of the series in the Tenth Anniversary Stadium, points to the historical malleability of space and the way that public spaces and monuments may simultaneously refer to multiple narratives of history. Like the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, which proposes a particular narrative of Jewish history and the place of the Holocaust, the palace refers to a particular narrative of Polish oppression and victimhood, now redeemed through the repurposing of the space into modern arts and community center. A huge group of mourners, numbering in the hundreds, files through the palace for the wake, establishing Sierakowski’s association with and importance to the image of a modern, independent Poland. After the wake, we see a close-up shot of a hand drawing a picture in the guest book. The line drawing that emerges is a picture of a stick figure holding a sign, which reads “Never Again,” in one hand and a gun in the other. The clear reference is to the Holocaust, and the picture suggests a simple equation between Jewish power (and violence) and the prevention of Jewish persecution. The picture offers a simplistic, unitary interpretation of history much like that depicted on the monument: that an event like the Holocaust, which symbolizes Jewish victimhood, can only be prevented, or perhaps redeemed, through violent Jewish resistance, or even domination. The next visitor to the guest book, however, suggests an alternate interpretation, writing, “We shall be strong in our weakness,” one of the slogans of the JRMiP. This slogan adopts the reverse position: that “weakness” or a refusal to participate in violence and domination is precisely what confers strength. Again, these two juxtaposed images reflect different narratives of the legacy of the Holocaust in Poland, particularly as this Holocaust history reflects on the Jewish present. These narratives are presented without comment and in tandem, forcing the viewer to do the interpretive and analytical work of both puzzling out their messages and placing value on them. Unlike the monument in the second film, which represents a literally monolithic view of Jewish history, the film itself deconstructs that narrative, leaving its interpretation of Holocaust and post-Holocaust Jewish history as ambivalent. The very last visitor at the wake is a woman who does not speak, but whose words we hear, rather, as a voice-over. She is Rivka, a ghost, a victim of the Holocaust who intones that she was, “murdered and buried anew, who was disinherited, who was moved, breathless, from the mass graves of Auschwitz, Babi-Yar, Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibor, to the shrine of memory, to the mausoleum of architecture of the sublime in Jerusalem.” Rivka is an amalgam, the figural survivor. While she speaks, the camera ranges over the scene of an odd hybrid event, one which recalls both a funeral and a political rally but does not conform to the norms of either. First, we see a line of

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police in riot gear, as well as young pioneers and other civilians with signs and armbands as if at a protest or rally. As Rivka connects Polish Holocaust history to the same narrative that reads the state of Israel as the natural outcome and redemption of victimization, we see the menacing image of state power, this time in a peaceful capacity as protectors of the funeral. In fact, as the scene progresses it is not clear if the police are there to protect the crowd or to participate in the rally. As she blends into the crowd, Rivka continues, “I can be found everywhere. I am the ghost of return. Return returning to herself.” This return is visualized in her turn into and movement toward the group, and with this image, the narrative of her movement from Europe to Israel, from victim to victor, is reversed, complicating the unidirectional historical narrative she references.

The Multidirectionality of History The rally-funeral itself also presents a number of complicating perspectives of Rivka’s story of victimization, return, and repatriation. Five speakers eulogize Sierakowski, himself now a victim of political violence: his widow, an Israeli woman who speaks in Hebrew; the Polish art historian and curator Anda Rottenberg, the daughter of a mixed marriage, speaking in Polish; the Israeli writer and Holocaust survivor Alona Frankel, also speaking in Polish; the Israeli journalist and television personality Yaron London, speaking Hebrew; and young representatives of the JRMiP, speaking English. The self-identification of the speakers, the languages they speak in, and the content of their speeches represent a broad spectrum of possibilities for conceptualizing Polish Holocaust history in relationship to Zionism and the state of Israel. In fact, the entire rally-funeral recalls Michael Rothberg’s conception of “multidirectional memory” as encouraging us “to think of the public sphere as a malleable discursive space in which groups do not simply articulate established positions but actually come into being through their ­dialogical interactions with others; both the subjects and spaces of the public are open to continual reconstruction.”18 It is the very multidirectionality of memory that challenges the monolithic historical narrative of victimization and triumph that forms the subtext of the video series. Dana Sierakowski, the widow, represents a personal example of the repatriation of Jews to Poland; she notes that she “exchanged one homeland for another.” However, she delivers her eulogy in Hebrew rather than Polish, indicating that the exchange has been less than total, and suggesting that national identity is not necessarily simple and unitary. This idea is echoed in her narration of Sierakowski’s last moments, which also draw connections between Jewish history, Holocaust memory in Poland, and national identity. In her telling, she and her husband were attending the opening of an exhibit called “Chosen” at the Zachęta National Gallery. They were looking at a Bruno Schultz painting when she heard three shots ring out and Sierakowski fell. Before he died, he pressed a piece of paper into her hands with his last

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message, which she reads aloud. Sierakowski’s message is in English and ends with the admonition, “There are no chosen people.” A correlation is established here between chosenness and Schultz, an emblematic Polish-Jewish victim of the Holocaust. At the same time, Sierakowski’s rejection of the very concept of chosenness suggests the imbrication of this idea, central to Jewish nationalism and national self-conception, with the history of Polish-Jewish victimization during the Holocaust. In rejecting chosenness, Sierakowski rejects a unidirectional nationalism and implicates that nationalism in Polish Holocaust history. That his Israeli-Polish wife delivers this message, mostly in Hebrew, both makes her a representative of the type of national self-conception hinted at in Sierakowski’s speech in Mary Koszmary and at the same time reflects a certain ambivalence about the utopian notion of Jewish return. Her speech also points to the somewhat problematic nature of the JRMiP platform of Jewish return to Poland as a mode of healing. Right before her remark about having exchanged homelands, which seems to imply an equal trade, without regret, she notes, “For you I left everything: my country, my homeland, my parents’ house.” This repetition of her loss—of home, of family—is a reminder that there is also a cost involved in return, and although it is a voluntary forfeiture, it is nonetheless a counterpoint to the redemptive power attributed to Polish-Jewish repatriation by Sierakowski. The emotional or spiritual healing that Sierakowski refers to in Mary Koszmary, a central aspect of the JRMiP platform, also necessitates a material loss of the space or place demarcated by the concept of “home,” as in Dana Sierakowski’s formulation. It is here that the image of the Jew as trope rather than reality, the figure of the Jew as a healing presence, runs up against actual Jews, who have parents and houses and other homelands. In a sense, the memory of the Jew—Rivka, the ghost of the Jewish Holocaust victim—is demonstrably incompatible with real Jews.19 The following speeches offer a variety of representations of P ­ olish-Jewish history and the Jewish present that both echo and counter the p ­ ossibility of healing the wounds of the Holocaust through Jewish return. Anda Rottenberg, a Polish art historian and curator whose father was a Polish Holocaust survivor, centers her eulogy on the multicultural history of Poland, suggesting that Sierakowski’s message and the JRMiP platform are actually an attempt to restore Poland to the ideal of its founders as a multicultural nation. Immediately after her, the Israeli writer and illustrator Alona Frankel, a Holocaust survivor herself, speaking in Polish as if to establish her own legitimate claim to a Polish identity despite her Israeliness and Jewishness, offers a very different portrait of Poland and the purpose of the JRMiP. Rather than a healing process or a return to an ostensibly more authentic Polish history, Frankel characterizes the notion of return as reparations for the Holocaust. She says, “I will not live among you…Israel is my country but restoration of citizenship rights a historical injustice.” Rottenberg and Frankel essentially offer mirroring perspectives. Each suggests that Polish history has been perverted by the Holocaust, but in different ways: Rottenberg claims that the

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Holocaust was a diversion in the historical narrative of Poland as a tolerant, multicultural space; Frankel claims that the perversion of the Holocaust, while not inconsistent with Poland’s antisemitic history, was the unjust stripping of citizenship from Polish Jews. Their positions bookend the question of return: One need not return to Poland, because she never left; the other refuses to return, but wants Poland to acknowledge her right to do so. The fourth speaker, Yaron London, an Israeli journalist and television personality, delivers his speech in Hebrew and offers an anti-JRMiP perspective. He represents the teleological interpretation monumentalized in Rapoport’s Memorial to the Ghetto Heroes, the notion that a degraded Jewish diasporic existence was redeemed after the Holocaust by the emergence of the state of Israel. “Only utter fools (t’mimim, which can also be translated as “innocents”) can long for a utopian world in which centuries of riots (pogroms) and hatred are erased,” he says. And while he claims that Rivka, as a representative of Polish Jewry and Holocaust victimhood, has departed, never to return to Poland, we know that she is, in fact, in the crowd listening. The shot shifts as he speaks, so that we can see as Rivka moves forward through the crowd, carrying a suitcase, to stop right in front of the stage where London stands, facing him. He does not notice her. As he intones his final remarks, “The Jewish Diaspora, ladies and gentlemen, ended in Auschwitz,” the camera moves to focus on Rivka, who looks into it plaintively. Her presence actively counters London’s insistence on the teleological view in which Jewish history ends in the establishment of the state of Israel, precluding any further developments. It is into this ambivalent, contradictory juxtaposition of utopian ideas that the JRMiP enters. While the teleological ending suggested in London’s speech is visually countered by Rivka’s presence, the final remarks, delivered by two young representatives of the party, offer an ideological counterpoint. After a eulogizing preface, the JRMiP representatives recite some of the principles of the JRMiP Manifesto, a jumble of universalism, anti-capitalism, transnationalism, pacifism, and multiculturalism that ends with the poetic exhortation: With one religion, we cannot listen. With one color, we cannot see. With one culture, we cannot feel. Without you, we cannot even remember. Join us, and Europe will be stunned!

This particular proclamation of the JRMiP bookends Bartana’s trilogy: initially voiced by Sierakowski from the very site of Jewish suffering and finally declaimed by his followers from the stage in the wake of his death. Its use of emotional appeal and mythologization of the Jew as trope, which is also evident in the figure of Rivka, both raise questions about the use of historical memory and the pitfalls of memorialization of the Holocaust.

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As Sara Ahmed has pointed out with regard to the use of emotion and emotional appeals as a tool for healing national wounds, “the question of who is doing the healing and who is being healed is a troubling one.” When the healing of the nation is made dependent on the victimized other, “the national body takes the place of the indigenous bodies; it claims their pain as its own….to hear the other’s pain as my pain, and to empathise with the other in order to heal the body (in this case, the body of the nation), involves violence.”20 The choice of senses in the JRMiP slogan as the apposite terms for racial and religious categories seems consistent with the emotional appeal for Jewish return as healing Poland, repairing its Holocaust history. But it also raises the specter of responsibility (what Ahmed might call “violence” in this context): Rather than acknowledging Polish complicity in or responsibility for the absence of Jews, this political platform transfers responsibility to those Jews to help Poland listen, see, feel, and remember—in short, to be human. This responsibility for the reconstruction of Polish humanity points to the other troubling (in the dual sense of that word) aspect of the JRMiP slogan, the essentializing of Jewishness as a trope for an ethics of universal humanism. Sarah Hammerschlag has traced a similar type of “revalorization of the rootless Jew” in postwar French philosophy.21 As she has noted, “The position of outsider allocated to the Jew represented an alternative to the structures of allegiance put in place by both the universalist and the particularist models of French identity. As a product of the racialized ideology of German and French fascism, the Jews came to represent ‘destabilization itself’.”22 In this case, we see the figure of the Jew employed in the service of a universalist notion of a post-colonial ethical nationalism. This sentiment is reinforced in the JRMiP speech, which is part of its published manifesto: “We direct our appeal not only to Jews. We accept into our ranks all those for whom there is no place in their homeland - the expelled and persecuted.”23 Thus, the appeal for a Jewish return to Poland is not precisely dependent on the immigration of actual Jews, from Israel or elsewhere. This distillation of the deracinated Jew into a figure or trope, as Hammerschlag notes, allows for “the use of Judaism as an emblem for victim and outsider, an emblem whose content is easily transferable.”24 But paradoxically, while this makes the Jew into a trope for a deracinated universal humanism, it also suggests that Jews as flesh-and-blood humans are irrelevant, the same problem raised earlier in Dana Sierakowski’s speech. Rather, Jews simply become conduits of memory (“Without you, we cannot remember”), ciphers for the past.

Art as Countermonument This somewhat circular movement of memory again complicates the linear construction of a historical narrative of Polish-Jewish history or Holocaust history in Poland. This is underscored by the fact that the end of the final

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film of the trilogy is also not the “end” of the story of the JRMiP. Rather, the JRMiP emerges from the film as a real-life political movement, an extension of the artistic project into both the political and literary spheres. The multivalent and multimedia nature of the project blurs the boundaries between art and politics and between the imagined and the real. This blurring extends the countermonumental challenge of the work to established teleological narratives of Holocaust history that posit, in Yaron London’s formulation, the end of Jewish history in Europe. Rather, the extension of the JRMiP to the public sphere attempts to pick up Polish-Jewish history and re-center it within the context of current political issues in Europe and the Middle East. In May 2012, Bartana convened a meeting of the JRMiP Congress in Berlin as part of the 7th Berlin Biennale of Contemporary Art. Over the course of three days, the congress debated one question per day, including “How should the EU change in order to welcome the Other?”; “How should Poland change within a re-imagined EU?”; and “How should Israel change to become part of the Middle East?”25 During each of the sessions, delegates made policy proposals in answer to these overarching questions, which were then debated by the delegates and the audience and voted upon. The questions and proposals, which touch on nationalism, post-colonialism, contemporary European politics, the Holocaust, and many other topics, functioned as an interactive corollary to the video installation itself. In its format, the congress echoes James Young’s description of what might be considered the “best” sort of Holocaust memorial: “the never-to-be-resolved debate over which kind of memory to preserve, how to do it, in whose name, and to what end.”26 Not only does the format resist monolithic narratives and challenge teleological interpretations of history but it also connects memory to the present and history to current events. Likewise, the companion publication to the video series, A Cookbook for Political Imagination, does not function as a traditional exhibition catalog but extends the interactive elements of the installation and the congress to the textual sphere. The Cookbook, named thus because it contains a variety of “recipes” intended as a guidebook for the JRMiP movement, was influenced by the events of the Arab Spring, which began just before its publication. The book is a collection of short essays, stories, graphics, and art that all reflect, in some way, on the JRMiP and the themes it addresses: nationalism, Holocaust memory in Europe, utopian politics, and Israel, among others. The format of the book, with over 40 contributors from around the world, insists on a multivalent approach, representing a variety of interpretive, imaginative, and associative possibilities that both reflect the content of the films and go beyond it. Again, the number and variety of “recipes” in the Cookbook resist a monolithic or facile interpretation. For example, the Cookbook extends the videos’ critique of the teleological historical narrative of Zionist redemption of Holocaust suffering. It does this both by making the films’ implied connections between Holocaust memory

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and Zionism explicit but also by pushing the boundaries of that challenge. Avi Pitchon brings together the loose association between Holocaust history, Zionism, and the JRMiP’s proposed return: “The return to Europe is not the abandonment of the Zionist ethos; it is in fact the next step in its history, a step that goes beyond it, and heals it. The new Israeli Jewish Europeans are pioneers, and the erection of the Wall & Tower before the Warsaw ghetto is the founding act of a utopia reborn.”27 In another essay, Gish Amit pushes further, suggesting that Sierakowski’s address in Mary Koszmary raises a series of unasked questions as well: “Should the Israelis ask the Palestinians: will you be willing to forgive us for our crimes? Will you be willing to live with us? Will you be willing, you, who are capable of changing our lives?”28 This mode of interpretation suggests that the value of the video series lies in the very instability of its meaning, its ability to raise corollary questions and force an engagement of the past with the present similar to that modeled by the congress meeting. It is precisely this ability to engage historical memory in our understanding of the present that gives a project like And Europe Will Be Stunned its power as countermonument. Rather than reifying a particular version of Holocaust memory, casting it in stone as Rapoport’s Monument to the Ghetto Heroes literally does, Bartana’s trilogy and its associated print, visual, and interactive elements place history in conversation with the present, producing new readings and alternate interpretations. Through specific reference to the images and visual cues of the monumentalized memory of the Holocaust in Poland, as well as both Nazi and Zionist propaganda, Bartana consciously differentiates And Europe Will Be Stunned from these types of monolithic narratives. Through its complicating, and at times problematic, dismantling of teleological historical narratives that suggest the redemption of victimization through national triumph, And Europe Will Be Stunned encourages a more complicated reading of Polish Holocaust history and the history of Zionism than has been offered by traditional monuments and historiographies. Its integration of old media (print and film) with new (the Web site) in the larger project itself represents a movement away from unifying narratives of Holocaust memory and toward a more multivalent conception of past and present.

Notes

1. Thanks to Yael Bartana and Petzel Gallery for allowing me access to the video trilogy. 2.  Yael Bartana, Sebastian Cichocki, and Galit Eilat, “Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (JRMiP),” in A Cookbook for Political Imagination, eds. Galit Eilat and Sebastian Cichocki (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011), n.p. 3. “About,” http://www.jrmip.org/?page_id=2, accessed 21 August 2017. 4.  Mary Koszmary (Nightmares), directed by Yael Bartana (2007), One-Channel Video and Sound Installation, 11 min.

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5. Mur I Wieza (Wall and Tower), directed by Yael Bartana (2009), One-Channel Video and Sound Installation, 15 min. 6. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 174. 7. This historical narrative, along with the explicitly nationalist intentions of the sculptor, accounts at least partially for the decision, in 1975, to install a reproduction of the monument at Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust museum. 8. In the historical and political context in which the film was made, it also evokes the separation barrier that had begun to be built by the state of Israel roughly (but not precisely) along the Green Line. 9. James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 95. 10.  At Memory’s Edge, 96. 11.  Avodah (Labor), directed by Helmar Lerski (1935; Waltham, MA: National Center for Jewish Film, 2008), DVD. 12. Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will), directed by Leni Riefenstahl (1935; Synapse Films, 2006), DVD. 13. Mary Koszmary. A full discussion of the implications of this emotional appeal appears in the next section. 14. Karen Underhill, “Next Year in Drohobych: On the Uses of Jewish Absence,” East European Politics and Societies 25, no. 3 (August 2011): 582. 15. Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 5. 16. Sharon Rotbard, “Wall and Tower,” in A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture (New York: Verso, 2003), 48. 17.  Zamach (Assassination), directed by Yael Bartana (2011), One-Channel Video and Sound Installation, 35 min. Unless otherwise indicated, all subsequent quotes from the video series are from this film. 18. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 5. 19. This incompatibility and its consequences are also suggested by the end of the JRMiP’s platform as elaborated during the funeral, discussed below. 20. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 35. 21. Sarah Hammerschlag, The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 30. 22. Hammerschlag, 8. 23. Bartana et al., 121. 24. Hammerschlag, 5. 25. “Congress in Berlin: And Europe Will Be Stunned,” http://www.jrmip.org, accessed 6 December 2017. 26.  At Memory’s Edge, 119. 27. Avi Pitchon, “Save Europe Now Ask Me How,” in A Cookbook for Political Imagination, 365. 28.  Gish Amit, “When Suffering Becomes an Identity: On the Moments of Catastrophe and the Contours of Hope,” in A Cookbook for Political Imagination, 210.

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Bibliography “About.” JRMiP (Website). http://www.jrmip.org/?page_id=2. Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Amit, Gish. “When Suffering Becomes an Identity: On the Moments of Catastrophe and the Contours of Hope.” In A Cookbook for Political Imagination, edited by Galit Eilat and Sebastian Cichocki, 209–212. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011. Bartana, Yael, dir. Mary Koszmary (Nightmares). 2007. One-Channel Video and Sound Installation, 11 min. ———. Mur I Wieza (Wall and Tower). 2009. One-Channel Video and Sound Installation, 15 min. ———. Zamach (Assassination). 2011. One-Channel Video and Sound Installation, 35 min. Bartana, Yael, Sebastian Cichocki, and Galit Eilat. “Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (JRMiP).” In A Cookbook for Political Imagination, edited by Galit Eilat and Sebastian Cichocki, 4–5. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011. “Congress in Berlin: And Europe Will Be Stunned.” JRMiP (Website). http://www. jrmip.org. Hammerschlag, Sarah. The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. “The Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland: A Manifesto.” In A Cookbook for Political Imagination, edited by Galit Eilat and Sebastian Cichocki, 120–121. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011. Lerski, Helmar, dir. Avodah (Labor). 1935; Waltham, MA: National Center for Jewish Film, 2008. DVD. Pitchon, Avi. “Save Europe Now Ask Me How.” In A Cookbook for Political Imagination, edited by Galit Eilat and Sebastian Cichocki, 363–369. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011. Riefenstahl, Leni, dir. Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will). 1935; Synapse Films, 2006. DVD. Rotbard, Sharon. “Wall and Tower.” In A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture, edited by Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman, 39–58. New York: Verso, 2003. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Underhill, Karen. “Next Year in Drohobych: On the Uses of Jewish Absence.” East European Politics and Societies 25, no. 3 (August 2011): 581–596. Young, James E. At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. ———. The Texture of Memory. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

PART V

Graphic Culture

CHAPTER 27

“Master Race”: Graphic Storytelling in the Aftermath of the Holocaust Victoria Aarons

In 1955, comics artist Bernie Krigstein and scriptwriter Al Feldstein ­published “Master Race,” an eight-page graphic story that appeared in the debut issue of EC Comics’ Impact magazine.1 Set in America ten years after the war, “Master Race,” with stunning economy, returns to “those bloody war years” in a dramatic encounter between a Holocaust survivor and a Nazi perpetrator, two men whose portentous meeting on a subway car descends into the depths of traumatic memory.2 Published a decade after the end of the war and the liberation of the concentration camps, “Master Race,” ­considered “one of the finest stories ever to appear in the comics form,”3 anticipated the emergence of the evolving and expanding genre of Holocaust graphic narratives, book-length works, as defined by pioneering graphic artist Will Eisner, of “sequential art.”4 When Eisner coined the term “sequential art” in 1985 for long-form ­comics narratives, what we now think of as the established genre of graphic novels was just emerging into the mainstream of popular and critical ­culture.5 Thus, to be sure, in the mid-1950s, at the time of its publication, “Master Race” was “a comic book rarity,” as cartoonist and graphic novelist Art Spiegelman puts it (Benson et al., 288), one of only a very few artifacts “dealing with and acknowledging the Holocaust in popular culture.”6 “Master Race” appeared at a time when, according to Martin Jukovsky, “there was little in the mass media about the murder by the Nazis of millions of Jews, Gypsies, political oppositionists and homosexuals. The images of crowded gas chambers, mountains of corpses piled like cordwood, and smoke from the V. Aarons (*)  Trinity University, San Antonio, TX, USA © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_27

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burning bodies continuously spewing out of tall chimneys had not yet established themselves in the public consciousness.”7 “Master Race” was, then, “an exceptional undertaking,” produced at a moment in which an awareness of the extent of the atrocities and the unfurling impact of the genocidal events were just beginning to take shape in public discourse (Jukovsky, “‘Master Race’ and the Holocaust”). Not only was “Master Race,” as Jukovsky suggests, one of the first comics narratives to show “death camps (as distinct from concentration camps) and the unique atrocities such as medical experimentation on living people,” but the design of the graphic story artistically transposes the defining events of a specific time and place onto a distant and seemingly unassailable terrain (“‘Master Race’ and the Holocaust”). “Master Race” thus took the comics medium in a new direction, a graphic story of a deeply serious and weighty subject unconventionally told through a comics structure, as Greg Sadowski explains, “with enough intellectual and emotional power to thrust comics into the rarefied stratosphere of high art” (177). Here I would like to suggest the ways in which Krigstein and Feldstein’s nascent undertaking in “Master Race” influenced the genre of Holocaust graphic narratives. In chasing the retreating afterimage of Holocaust memory, “Master Race” establishes the discursive and artistic language for “the black chasms” of Holocaust memory as they resurface and transcend time, distance, and place, the past replanted onto a postwar American landscape, a layering of histories and memories (Krigstein, “Master Race,” 219). As a popular cultural product of its time, “Master Race,” set in the fraught aftermath of war, widened the lens through which the Holocaust was viewed and absorbed by an increasingly broad audience. The largely experimental and unconventional subject matter of “Master Race” contributed to the developing latitude with which comics narratives were conceived and received in America in the 1950s. As John Benson, David Kasakove, and Art Spiegelman suggest, the interplay of rhetorical situation, literary tropes, and graphic images enacted the conditions of Holocaust rupture and psychic displacement that reconfigured the relation of its subject and forms. That is, by “using the most dramatic events of [the] century as a backdrop” for the text of “Master Race” and the artist’s avant-garde “style which is the ­antithesis of standard comics storytelling,” one that substantively breaks from conventional cartooning techniques, “Master Race” ushered in a new direction for comics narratives and new possibilities for approaching the genre (Benson et al., 288). Indeed, as Sadowski points out, Krigstein considered “Master Race” to be his greatest achievement, by his own admission, “something very, very special, something which has never been done before” and whose effects have resonated ever since (Krigstein quoted in Sadowski, 177). In creating a comics story that took on the subject of the Holocaust as its primary landscape as well as its felt imprint and aftereffects, Feldstein and Krigstein’s groundbreaking work might well be considered a landmark predecessor to the generational range of Holocaust graphic narratives that have proliferated in the early decades of the twenty-first century.8

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It was not really until the publication of Art Spiegelman’s long-form graphic narrative Maus, the first graphic novel to receive, in 1992, a Pulitzer Prize, that the genre became marked as a literary and cultural production. Since Maus, the production of and interest in comics narratives and graphic novels, in general, have escalated, becoming ever more elaborately and experimentally conceived and enthusiastically received. The long-form graphic narrative, as we understand it now, has become an increasingly sophisticated, complex genre, a hybrid form of text and image that has expanded its reach, moving into not only deeply personal autobiographical and biographical familial narratives but also extended political storylines and natural as well as human-made catastrophes.9 Indeed, Maus is credited, more than any single comics narrative, with having changed the course, not only of the developing genre of comics, but the field of graphic storytelling itself. As Hillary Chute, in Disaster Drawn, a study of “verbal-visual” forms of witnessing in documentary graphic narratives, rightly proposes, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, the first volume of Spiegelman’s account of his father’s experiences in Auschwitz, is “arguably the world’s most famous work of comics […] forever altering the terrain of comics in America and worldwide.”10 Maus is considered by scholars and graphic artists alike to have contributed significantly to the freedom comics writers and illustrators have taken in tackling substantial nonfictional political and personal subjects. As Leonard Rifas argues, Maus “did more than any other single work to establish comics as a legitimate medium for communicating serious stories.”11 Thus, Maus helped reshape and redefine the genre of comics storytelling and, in doing so, explored and expanded, in particular, further modes of Holocaust testimony and witnessing through the long-form graphic narrative. Maus thus changed the way we look at comics, extending the possibilities for this hybrid form that crosses generic conventions, structures, and conceits in the expression of complex realities and histories. As comics artist Miriam Katin, child survivor of the Nazi occupation of Hungary, depicted in her graphic memoir We Are on Our Own, puts it, Spiegelman’s Maus gave her “permission” to tell her family’s Holocaust story, license to recount the events of her traumatic history in graphic form.12 Katin’s memoir, published in 2006, is one of an array of personalized Holocaust stories that have appeared in the genre of graphic narratives in the opening decades of the twenty-first century. But if Spiegelman’s Maus, now a classic, established the precedent for subsequent graphic narratives of the Holocaust, then Krigstein and Feldstein’s “Master Race” provided a prototype for Spiegelman’s iconic work. In discussing the precedents for the creation of Maus, Spiegelman points to “Master Race” as contributing to his own work, “graphically […] and definitely in terms of its subject matter,” extending and pushing against the boundaries of what was considered possible given the constraints of the genre (Roman). Published at a time when comics artists were reconfiguring the parameters of the genre, “Master Race” was, as Spiegelman acclaims, “an accomplishment of the highest order […] a tour de force,” a graphic narrative that set

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in motion new directions for Holocaust literary representation, witnessing, and testimony.13 We find in Spiegelman’s work an expansion of some of the formal structures and markers that Krigstein introduced in “Master Race,” a conflation of temporalities and a collapsing of narrative and spatial boundaries that create its haunting landscape of representation. Both volumes of Spiegelman’s Maus show the imprint of Krigstein and Feldstein’s work: the dramatic shifts and layering of time, the acceleration of tempo and pace as the juxtaposed moments of image and text collide, the configurations of traumatic recall, and the visual constructions of memory’s destabilizing effects as we enter the landscape of the Holocaust past. “Master Race,” as Krigstein’s “most celebrated experiment in the comics form,” creates conditions of representation that transcend time and space, presenting both a reenactment of the enveloping events of the Shoah and an extension of the traumatic rupture that defies temporal and spatial constraints (Sadowski, 178). Here, in what has become a characteristic conceit of Holocaust literary representation, past becomes contiguous with present, forming a kind of eternally present reality that shapes the fabric of postwar life. Characterized by recurring tropes of ellipses and of analepses, in which chronology is elided or layered, interrupted by the intrusion of past events, the past materializes and takes over both narrative and visual movement. The present surrenders to the past. As Eli Wiesel has written in a different but related context, in creating the shifting, unstable ground of the Holocaust, time itself “changes pace, country,” the present “in the grip of all the years black and [un]buried,”14 as proximate recognizable markers retreat, unbidden, into “the universe of the damned.”15 There is no turning away from the direct gaze of the stark images that confront us on the dense, thick pages of Krigstein’s comics story. The highly charged and unsparing interaction of text and image that unspools throughout “Master Race” has an uncanny, destabilizing effect, a uniquely framed “visual witnessing,” characteristic, as Chute suggests, of “the way that comics can offer an absorptive intimacy with their narratives while defamiliarizing received images of history” (Disaster Drawn, 141–142). “Master Race,” in its understated economy, evoking all too familiar markers of atrocity and at the same time defamiliarizing the shape of the shadowy past, creates the fraught conditions for a moral reckoning in the aftermath of the Holocaust in the dramatic encounter between victim and perpetrator. “Master Race,” as a precursor to Maus, published some 30-plus years—a generation—earlier, is a sophisticated and provocative artistic work. Together both graphic narratives—the one a brief and dramatic encounter; the other a two-volume long-form elaborate exposé—establish the groundwork for the rich and elastic diversity of styles that carries Holocaust graphic narratives into the future. In “Master Race,” the deceptively simple storyline, the presumably chance encounter between two men—a Nazi perpetrator, a commander of Belsen Concentration Camp, and one of his victims, who has vowed to enact revenge on his tormentor—dramatically and cinematically opens

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itself up to characteristic representational patterns that shape contemporary Holocaust graphic narratives. The central recurring patterns draw upon the following: the instability and fracturing of memory; the psychic projection of trauma; the unconscious and perilous descent into the past; the destabilizing rupture produced by familiar images of the Holocaust unmitigated by time or place; and the pressing extension of ongoing generational testimony and vigilance. Such tropes take on significant dramatic effect in “Master Race” by the artistic landscape of the narrative, the stark, violent images and grotesque figures couched within the dark, blackened panels that both introduce and conclude the comics narrative. The sequential mode of comics, in both text and image, juxtaposed with the images constructed within individual panels upsets the balance of readerly perception. In other words, the reader is forced to navigate two conflicting positions from which to view the unfolding narrative tension in an attempt to reconcile the two seemingly antithetical configurations, narrative sequence and individual, paneled image. The image, that is, isolated in the panel and thus separate, becomes a representational icon, as cartoonist Scott McCloud defines it, images that “represent a person, place, thing, or idea.”16 The image thus exists within the borders of the panel as a distinct representational icon. The individual panels in a work of sequential art, however, do not function as distinct moments or symbolic representations. Instead, the reader does the work of what McCloud refers to as “closure,” the “phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole,” by connecting the panels and images and thus completing the narrative arc (McCloud, 63). We thus visually “take in” the image and “transform it into […] ‘reality,’ the reader “a willing and conscious collaborator” in making sense of and experiencing the fleeting representational images (McCloud, 65). Such a process of discovery and recovery contributes to the representational complexity of the subject of the Holocaust, by calling upon familiar markers, all the while making emphatic—making visual—the limits of representation. Thus, the comics form, drawing upon the recognizable conventions of the genre—panels, gutters, caricature, economy, and so forth—destabilizes received narratives all the while amplifying the exposed trauma of the Shoah and its prolonged aftermath. Here the real is created and ironically underscored by the unreality of the form. As Joshua Lambert has suggested, in the stylized juxtaposition of hyperbole and understatement, embellishment and simplification, Comics can disarm […] precisely because they are so profoundly wrong for the job. Whether it’s humans drawn as animals [Maus] or a young boy’s survival of Auschwitz as a cartoon mutant’s origin story [X-Men: Magneto Testament], there’s something off about these works. And that’s true even of graphic works of simple, straightforward testimony, because rendering speech and historical experience into strips of cartoons involves so much distortion that a reader cannot forget […] that this is a highly unnatural, profoundly deliberate way of

498  V. AARONS communicating. Comics keep it weird, which gives them the power to stop us from feeling like we’ve already seen it all.17

Thus, in “Master Race,” Krigstein and Feldstein create the conditions for discomfort and readerly unease—the felt sense of ominous foreshadowing— and thus the continuing moral assessment of Holocaust history and memory. Opening on a darkened, sinister landscape that will rapidly descend into the depths of fear and reawakened repressed memory, that treacherous place of the unconscious, “Master Race” thus sets the stage for the destabilizing shape of trauma re-evoked and reanimated. Unsurprisingly, given its focus on memory, “Master Race” is driven by modes of concealment. The brief story, in outline, is one of ambiguously haunting disguise and exposure. The story opens with ambiguous unease. A hunched, hooded man, his face partially concealed by the brim of his hat, his eyes cast in shadows, descends the stairs from the glare of daylight into the darkness of the subway. We are introduced to this shadowy, somewhat sinister figure by an undisclosed narrative voice that seems to exist somewhere offstage. But this voiced presence recognizes the masked figure and identifies him by name, calling to him directly: “You can never forget, can you Carl Reissman? Even here…in America…Ten years and thousands of miles away from your native Germany…You can never forget those bloody war years. Those memories will haunt you forever…as even now they haunt you while you descend the subway stairs into the quiet semi-darkness…” (Krigstein, 218, ellipsis in original). This voiced-over narration follows Reissman as he descends from the light of day and the open expanse of the streets down to the cavernous enclosure of the subway station. It is an ominous voice, one that knows Reissman’s history but also his psychic state, his internal condition and disposition. This voice will follow Reissman throughout the narrative, spatially hovering above him, increasingly exposing Reissman’s character and motives as the story unfolds, as, in fact, Reissman unintentionally discloses them. The claims of the backstage, unidentified voice comprise a complex narrative directive, but one that the reader must rely on entirely, since we are not given any solid internal contextual indicators from Reissman himself. The speech bubbles that accompany Reissman are sparingly minimal, stingily so. His silence cloaks his character and his intentions. Thus, we come to see him almost entirely through the filter of this ambiguous absent narrator, one who knows a great deal about Reissman but who intentionally withholds crucial information about his identity. Nonetheless, this is a voice that seems to direct and orchestrate Reissman’s movements. As Reissman enters the subway, it is as if he is propelled there by a puppeteer, one who both follows him and guides him: “You move to the busy clicking turnstiles…slip the shiny token into the thin slot…and push through” (Krigstein, 218). On the one hand, this is a second person narrative voice, one that describes the character’s actions to that same character as he moves through the arc of the story: “You move,” “You stare,” “You

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blink,” “You try to read,” “You look around” (Krigstein, 218–219). The unidentified narrator describes Reissman’s actions to him as he enacts them. On the other hand, the narrative point of view appraises and judges the motives underlying Reissman’s movements. Initially, at least, the reader suspects that the narrative voice is internal to Reissman, that the character is holding an internal monologue, a meditation on his own comportment. This effect is heightened by the juxtaposition of text and image, since the figure is drawn in such a way as to mirror the narrative description. Early on, for example, Reissman, seated in the subway car, is huddled against the window of the train, his posture defensive, eyes apprehensive. The text that introduces this panel, words framed directly above his hunched, wary figure, names the disposition of his bearing: “But you are afraid, aren’t you, Carl? You’ll always be afraid. You’ll keep remembering…remembering the horror…the hate…the suffering…and you’ll stay afraid” (Krigstein, 219, ellipses in original). There is a kind of eerie intimacy to the voice that calls to Reissman by his first name, “Carl.” This is a narrator who knows this character all too well, a voice from which the character cannot escape, making emphatic, once again, the internalized nature of the narrative voice. The reader, however, remains outside the drama being played out in Reissman’s psyche. All we seem to know at this point is that he is an immigrant who has fled Germany after the war. We suspect that he is a victim of the atrocities of war, one subjected to “the horror…the hate…the suffering” and who continues to live in fear (Krigstein, 219, ellipses in original). His experiences have left him stunned, arrested, and dissociated, since, as his condition is dispassionately described to him by the undisclosed narrator, “Nothing has meaning any more…nothing but the sickening sensation that has plagued you for over ten long years. The concentration camp has left its mark upon you, hasn’t it, Carl Reissman?” (Krigstein, 219, ellipsis in the original). The narrator’s question, in all its unwelcome intimacy, requires no answer. His fear, disquiet, and discomfort are palpably felt, both in his outward, garrisoned projection of unease and in the words that seem to surround him. He would seem to be the victim of the atrocities that follow him still. But the question is framed in an uncomfortably aggressive manner. The appended “hasn’t it, Carl Reissman?” to the catalogue of descriptors of his fraught condition turns the seemingly detached portrait of an eviscerated, traumatized man into an accusation. “Hasn’t it” points a finger at Reissman, demanding that Reissman answer for his demeanor and conduct. Thus, it is no surprise that this shift in tone and emotional disposition presage the introduction of another, intervening character onto the scene, a mysterious character who appears unbidden, materializing seemingly out of nowhere in the doorway of the subway car. The reader is thus momentarily arrested in the process of closure, foiled, as is Reissman, by the unanticipated presence of this apparition, an antagonist who will implicitly join the narrator in exposing Reissman’s real character and the motives of his secrecy. The ambiguity surrounding this new character positions him in direct

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opposition to Reissman, who has been called out by name from the ­beginning of the story, and sets the stage for the stark and chilling clarity that arises from the initial ambiguity of Reissman’s identity. Thus, with a punctuation in the narrative, a figure appears unbidden, menacing, taking up not only the entire space of the panel but the implied, airless container of Reissman’s interior space. It is not clear if this new passenger exists outside of Reissman’s phobic terror at being exposed, unmasked, uncovered by “the one you knew someday you’d see again…the face you’ve been afraid to see for ten long years” (Krigstein, 220, ellipsis in the original). The train’s movement, that “onrushing steel monster,” as it “lurches and rolls ahead, thundering out of the station and back into the black chasms tunneling beneath the city,” is arrested only long enough to stage the appearance of this man clad in black, his face a rigid death-mask of angled, sharp lines, before the train once again takes up steam and “screams around a curve in its subterranean route […] the scream […] shrill and sharp…setting your teeth on edge…reaching back into the past” (Krigstein, 219–220, unbracketed ellipses in original). In the claustrophobic caverns of the subway, Reissman’s fear materializes with the arrival of this other man, who suddenly enters the subway car and, a single-minded Charon, ferries Reissman back to a past from which, for a decade, he has attempted to run—“running pell-mell across Europe, hiding your clothes, losing yourself in among the streams of refugees that choked the roads and highways before the advancing allied armies” (Krigstein, 223). Significantly, the two panels that show the black-clad man’s unbidden and ­sudden appearance and Reissman’s response to this moment are situated side by side. In the first of the two panels, the black-clad man is pictured looking down and off to his left where, below, in the next panel, Reissman is shown looking up at the man, whose skull-like, sunken face pierces Reissman’s self-secluding guise. While Reissman is only partially depicted in this panel that focuses on his terrified eyes as he takes in his fellow passenger, the newly and abruptly introduced man in black is drawn in a frontal elongated stance, “framed in a Mondrian-like abstraction of Perfect Order, the certitude of ­retribution that is soon to fall upon Reissman” (Benson et al., 292). This is for Reissman the moment of exposure, for the unnamed man in black is revealed to be a survivor of the Holocaust, the victim of Reissman’s crimes, who, like an apparition, has materialized to fulfill his pledge of vengeance upon his persecutor. The man in black witnessed “the killing and maiming and torturing” with which Reissman was complicit, and his words pursue the Nazi perpetrator in his flight: “Someday I’ll get you, Reissman! I’ll get you if it’s the last thing I do!” (Krigstein, 223). Thus, in a swift and ironic move, the train will turn cattle car, deporting Reissman to his death. For, as the subway car continues its unrelenting descent, time and space mutate, metastasizing and holding Reissman captive and culpable. There is no longer any ambiguity in the interaction of these two characters, as the panels explicitly give way to graphic images of the murderous impulses of crimes against humanity in which Reissman is unambiguously and heinously unveiled as a complicit, indeed fanatical, participant.

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The episode—one of criminality and its corresponding punishment—draws to a close as Reissman, who has run from the train as it comes to a stop, is chased by the survivor in the direction of an oncoming train and slips off the rails to his death. It is in these final moments that we come to identify the narrative voice that has been driving the action all along. This is the collective voice of the displaced, the dispossessed, and the sufferer, and the nameless man in black the “personification of the millions […] who were caught […] who were persecuted and jailed and burned in ovens and gassed and buried alive in mass graves,” who will exact retribution for all the victims (Krigstein, 224). The final panel moves from the light of the barreling train once again into the darkness from which it came, the darkness of memory reawakened for the extended moment of moral judgment. In this brief graphic narrative, the Nazi perpetrator is put on trial, held accountable for his actions, and punished accordingly. The victim of the concentration camp commander’s unconscionable actions is now the agent of adjudication and retribution. The survivor’s agency is momentarily reinstated, and he is shown at the story’s end retreating into the darkness. While the perpetrator has met his inglorious end and the victim is given the final word, the traumatic impact of their history, we are meant to understand, is not resolved. Nor can it ever be. There is never sufficient retribution for the wide-scale crimes of the Shoah that changed both the shape of history and our present worlds. For, in the final panel, the survivor walks into the blackness of memory, into the ­darkness of the genocidal past. We only see his black-clad back as he enters the constricted but bottomless space of the ever present past. The survivor sees the events of the recent past all too acutely, but he also enters the enshrouded darkness represented by the black panel; he doesn’t know what denials or ambushes await him. In this terse eight-page graphic story, Krigstein and Feldstein capture, not only the systematized, legislated sequence of Nazi antisemitism—images and text depicting the rise of the Third Reich and Hitler’s glorification, the barbed enclosure of concentration camps, the sadistic medical experimentation conducted on inmates, the killing and deposing of bodies in mass graves—but also the mounting hysteria and frenzy that characterized the times—the zealousness of complicit crowds all too willing to participate in barbarity, “the flow of hate that poured through the streets with clubs and guns and the echoes of the little man’s screams urging it on” (Krigstein, 220). “Master Race” manages to represent in its specificity, not only the tenor of the times to great dramatic effect, but also the disposition and temperament of the years mounting in its wake, the extended aftershocks of war. Its brevity, both as a matter of the structural, formal conventions of the comics form (contained panels, compressed spaces, spatially constrained, cartooned images, etc.) and the economies of text, punctuates what is not seen: the progressive events that took place in the interstices of the panels, in the white spaces separating the panels’ borders. It is in the gutters, those readerly moments of empty space, of absence, what Chute refers

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to as “a space of stillness—a stoppage in the action, a gap and a space of movement,” that much of the interpretive, midrashic work of the reader/ ­ viewer takes place (Disaster Drawn, 35). Such spaces, then, are openings, as Chute suggests, for “the figuration of a psychic order outside of the realm of symbolization, a space that refuses to resolve the interplay of elements of absence and presence” (Disaster Drawn, 35). While the breaks in the visual narrative speak to the limits of representation, they also create moments of closure, the opportunity for the active engagement of the reader participating in a kind of narrative intervention that creates the opportunity for moral judgment. Here, minimalism leads to intensification and magnification, creating, as McCloud suggests, the effect of “amplification through simplification […] stripping down an image to its essential meaning,” a meaning that extends beyond spatial and temporal constraints (McCloud, 30). The effect is also one of expansion through compression. The compressed spaces of the panels that frame the dramatic moments open themselves up to context and thus to memory, to the prolonged haunting of the past as it confronts the present, “assaulted by the image,” assaulted, that is, by the dismantling and fracturing of stable time and space.18 The arrangement of the spaces separating panels thus creates intervals for us to navigate the space of memory as we pause before entering the threshold of visual memory. That is, the gutters, the white spaces both separating and connecting panels, create momentary interruptions that invite us into the image. The past, as novelist Ehud Havazelet once wrote, is “no longer something to be recalled from a distance—it was there in front of him, to walk into if he dared.”19 The understated economy of the composition of “Master Race,” then, the startling contrast between the abbreviated configuration of the graphic story and the amplified animation of its intensity—in terms of both what is shown (revealed) and what is ­elliptically omitted (concealed)—not only makes emphatic the enormity of the subject, but also opens the text to an active engagement with that history. At the story’s end, the survivor is still chasing memory just as, correspondingly, he is chased by memory, that most tenebrous, and, to borrow a phrase from Spiegelman, “very fugitive thing.”20 Krigstein and Feldstein thus introduce what are now long-standing, ­stable features of Holocaust literary representation, familiar patterns and markers that contribute to the evolving disposition of the genre. Holocaust literary representation is characterized by tropes of rupture and disequilibrium. These tropes enact the dislocation and traumatic memory that they attempt to evoke.21 In drawing on persistent tropes of Holocaust literary representation, “Master Race” thus, as I have argued, prefigures both Maus and the developing genre of Holocaust graphic narratives, a genre that has expanded its breadth and generational reach into the twenty-first century. The resonance and significance of both these pioneering works are felt all the more acutely as we enter a time that will witness the end of direct survivor testimony, a time that calls upon new, reinvigorated forms of Holocaust expression as another generation engages with that history, forms that mesh with

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a contemporary generation’s aesthetic and cultural sensibilities. The descent into memory continues to be the central trope that shapes Holocaust graphic narratives ever since “Master Race” and Maus. Drawing upon and responding to these foundational pieces, contemporary generations of writers and graphic illustrators who return to the subject of the Shoah from an expanding temporal and geographical distance, reflect on and imaginatively evoke the catastrophic events of that time. Contemporary graphic artists continue to chase the “fugitive” shape of memory as it retreats into the ever-increasing distance. These are fluid and mutating narratives that engage the hybrid characteristics of the form as they struggle with memories of the Holocaust, memories that are both concealed and exposed at moments of imagined recreation. The connecting thread among these graphic narratives of divergent and overlapping generations is, indeed, memory. Through a mosaic of experimental forms, contemporary graphic artists attempt to isolate and arouse memory in a generational layering of voices and a blurring of traditional structures, conventions, and dispositions, a melding and layering, not only of narrating voices but also of genres, shape-shifting amalgams of fiction, memoir, biography, and history, all in an attempt to memorialize the past, those who ­succumbed to history and those who survived.

Conclusion As part of a developing genre, Holocaust graphic narratives, stories of individual and collective loss, reflect both an intergenerational and a multigenerational dialogue among post-Holocaust graphic artists and writers. Such a dynamic intergenerational response to extended memories of the Holocaust, as Lisa Appignanesi puts it, “cascades through the generations.”22 There are now, at this point in history, as Geoffrey Hartman has posited, “three generations […] preoccupied with Holocaust memory. They are the eyewitnesses; their children, the second generation, who have subdued some of their ambivalence and are eager to know their parents better; and the third generation, grand-children who treasure the personal stories of relatives now slipping away.”23 Such a chorus of interconnecting voices finds expression in an array of literary structures and forms: novels, short stories, poetry, memoirs, as well as the developing genre of graphic novels. The expression of Holocaust memory in the comics medium is not a new form of representation.24 But, as a genre, it has erupted in the early decades of the twenty-first century; subsequent generations of comics artists, cartoonists, and illustrators navigate the subject of the Holocaust in what Samantha Baskind and Ranen Omer-Sherman characterize as “an explosive cultural phenomenon.”25 Since Maus, the daunting range of historical, social, and moral issues generated by the Holocaust has been taken up by second- and third-generation comics writers and illustrators—the children and grandchildren of survivors—who attempt to mediate, through their adoption of intertwining modes of representation, the memories of those who experienced the

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catastrophic events of the Shoah and to find their place and their own voices in that continuing narrative. These multigenerational works implicitly speak to one another in their attempts to return to the past, to stories of fortuitous survival and devastating loss.26 Looked at as a piece, these works represent a multigenerational illocutionary braiding, a multi-voiced response to the Holocaust as it extends into recollected and imagined memory. These narratives go back in time as a conceit for the enactment of memory and as a means of laying the groundwork for self-reckoning, self-identification, and the measuring of the continuing legacy of the Holocaust. As such, they ­figure forth our mediated and mediating responses to it. Through temporal and locational shifts and the dialogic arrangement and intersections of text and image, these graphic narratives create the conditions for the expression and expansion of Holocaust memory, posing overlapping generational perspectives through which memory is shaped and re-evoked. In continuing the extension of Holocaust remembrance and testimony, such works significantly contribute to the larger effort of both Holocaust literary representation and Holocaust understanding. To be sure, as we move farther and farther from the events of the Holocaust and the immediate aftermath of the Nazi genocide, memory takes on a different shape. New forms of witnessing and testimony emerge, and increasingly “mediated forms of remembering that carry the responsibility of firmly embedding the Holocaust in the cultural memory of later generations,” as Gerd Bayer argues, present themselves.27 But the fabric of memory always has a complicated texture. Memory is never static. Its shape changes over time, given the vicissitudes of experience, the contingencies of the quotidian, the layering of intervening memories, the mustering of defenses, and the imperatives of psychic rearrangement, especially in response to the anxieties and exigencies of the present age. Thus, in contemporary Holocaust literature, including graphic narratives, as we enter another generation separating us from the actual events, the constructions of mediated, second- and thirdhand accounts of memory mutate, blur around the edges, and are remade to include a layering of narrating voices, partially and imperfectly remembering. As Chute fittingly argues, the nonfictional graphic narrative that reimagines historical moments of traumatic rupture is “a form of witnessing,” providing an architecture and a landscape for the verbal-visual expression of individual and collective trauma (Disaster Drawn, 1). Thus, as memory takes on newly framed articulations of witnessing and testimony, memory, as Spiegelman suggests, “gets replaced by language,” but also by the image, the material extension of trauma and memory (MetaMaus, 28). In other words, here memory is not only articulated through texts, but it is drawn through the imagination, visually unleashed as temporalities and spatial boundaries are collapsed in an attempt to make the past present. Therefore, in the graphic narrative, ever since the transformative, c­reative moment of “Master Race,” multigenerational perspectives that perform together in the Holocaust graphic narrative speak to the extending trauma of

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the Holocaust and to the reach of memory. We see this interchange of stories and voices in comics narratives as diverse as Joe Kubert’s fictionalized ­historical account of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Yossel: April 19, 1943, Miriam Katin’s child-survivor memoir, We Are on Our Own, Martin Lemelman’s second-­ generation graphic vocalization of his mother’s past, Mendel’s Daughter, Canadian artist Bernice Eisenstein’s I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors, that tells the story of her own developing identity set against her family’s experiences, and Amy Kurzweil’s Flying Couch, a third-generation perspec­ tive that joins the lives and the voices of three generations of women affected by the events of the past as they intersect in distinguishing and defining ways. These and an array of other graphic narratives carry the memory of the Holocaust into the future. Thus, the developing genre of contemporary Holocaust graphic narratives helps us reconceive what it means to live in a post-Holocaust world and thus responds to a perceived need for continuing testimony, one that comments on our present age as it reimagines the past.

Notes



1. “Master Race” appeared in the April 1955 issue of Impact, published by EC (Entertaining Comics). While it is not entirely clear who actually wrote the original script of “Master Race,” as John Benson, David Kasakove, and Art Spiegelman, in “An Examination of ‘Master Race’,” point out, editor “Feldstein did enough rewriting for his style to be apparent” and thus the text of “Master Race” is generally attributed to him ([Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009], 288). 2. Bernard Krigstein, “Master Race,” in B. Krigstein, ed. Greg Sadowski (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2002), 218. 3.  John Benson, David Kasakove, and Art Spiegelman, “An Examination of ‘Master Race,” in A Comics Studies Reader, 288. 4. Will Eisner, Comics and Sequential Art (Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press, 1985). 5. Since Eisner’s pioneering work, Comics and Sequential Art (Poorhouse Press, 1985), which has been expanded and reissued in subsequent editions, other comics illustrators have gone on to develop the definitional character of the genre of graphic novels, most notably Scott McCloud in his influential and oft-cited work, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (originally published by Tundra Books in 1993). While the term graphic novel is the recognized name for the genre of long-form sequential art, I refer here and elsewhere to the designation graphic narrative, which strikes me as a more appropriate definition of the works I discuss. Referring to his most well-known work, Art Spiegelman has said that he prefers the term “comics” to “graphic novel,” because while the latter “sounds more respectable […] I prefer ‘comics’ because it credits the medium” (Marjorie Kehe, “Art Spiegelman: Don’t Call Comics ‘Graphic Novels’,” The Christian Science Monitor, March 17, 2009, https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/chapter-and-verse/2009/0317/artspiegelman-dont-call-comics-graphic-novels, accessed 31 December 2018). Maus is a mixture of genres: historical fiction, memoir, lamentation, documentary, and biography, an “intertwined narrative of a genetic double-helix”

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(Michael Cavna, “MetaMaus: Maus’ Creator Art Spiegelman Reveals Emotional Journey to Today’s 25th Anniversary Book,” The Washington Post, October 4, 2011, https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/comic-riffs/ post/metamaus-maus-creator-art-spiegelman-reveals-emotional-journey-to-todays-25th-anniversary-book/2011/10/03/gIQARhyIKL_blog.html?utm_ term=.564689bee31b). As Hillary Chute explains, “graphic novel is often a misnomer. Many fascinating works grouped under this umbrella… aren’t novels at all: they are rich works of nonfiction; hence […] the broader term narrative. […] In graphic narrative, the substantial length implied by novel remains intact but the term shifts to accommodate modes other than fiction. A graphic narrative is a book-length work in the medium of comics” (Hillary Chute, “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative,” PMLA 123, no. 2 [March 2008]), 453. 6. Rafael Pi Roman, “New York Voices—Interview with Art Spiegelman,” NY Voices, November 25, 2012, https://www.thirteen.org/nyvoices/transcripts/ spiegelman.html, accessed 2 December 2018. 7. Martin Jukovsky, “‘Master Race’ and the Holocaust,” written to accompany the reprint of Bernard Krigstein’s eight-page graphic story “Master Race” in Impact (Russ Cochran, publisher, West Plains, Missouri, 1988). http://www. jukovsky.com/masterrace.html, accessed 9 November 2018. 8.  While it is not entirely clear who actually wrote the original script of “Master Race,” as John Benson, David Kasakove, and Art Spiegelman, in “An Examination of ‘Master Race’,” point out, editor “Feldstein did enough rewriting for his style to be apparent” (288). 9. I’m thinking here, for example, of a range of graphic narratives that take up a range of historical and personal accounts, such as Ari Folman and David Polonsky’s graphic depiction of the Lebanon War in Waltz with Bashir (Metropolitan, 2009), Marjane Satrapi’s personalized account of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (L’Association, 2003; originally published in France in 2000), Josh Neufeld’s comics narrative of Hurricane Katrina, A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge (Pantheon, 2009), and many others that have at their center devastating historical and personal experiences and conditions. 10. Hillary L. Chute, Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press and Harvard University Press, 2016), 152. 11. Leonard Rifas, “War Comics,” in The Routledge Companion to Comics, eds. Frank Bramlett, Roy T. Cook, and Aaron Meskin (New York: Routledge, 2017), 190. 12.  Paul Cravett, “Miriam Katin: Coming to Terms” (December 17, 2015; originally appeared in Art Review Magazine, October 2015). www.paulgravell. com/articles/article/miriam_katin, accessed 14 August 2017. 13. Art Spiegelman, “Ballbuster: Bernard Krigstein’s Life Between the Panels,” The New Yorker 27, no. 20 (July 22, 2002), https://www.questia.com/magazine/1P3-141318761/ballbuster, accessed 30 August 2018. 14. Elie Wiesel, “An Old Acquaintance,” in Legends of Our Time (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968), 40–41. 15. Elie Wiesel, “Why I Write: Making No Become Yes,” The New York Times Book Review (April 14, 1985), 13.

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16. Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: William Morrow and HarperCollins, 1993), 63. 17.  Joshua Lambert, “How Comics Help Us Combat Holocaust Fatigue” (February 9, 2017), https://forward.com/culture/361784/how-comics-helpus-combat-holocaust-fitigue/, accessed 1 October 2018. 18. Rocco Versaci, This Book Contains Graphic Language: Comics as Literature (New York: Continuum, 2007), 98. 19. Ehud Havazelet, “To Live in Tiflis in the Springtime,” in Like Never Before (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 239. 20. Art Spiegelman, MetaMaus (New York: Pantheon, 2011), 28. 21. Elsewhere I have argued that Holocaust literature might be defined as a genre of rupture, one that produces the effects of discursive disequilibrium, narrative disjunction and estrangement in an attempt to represent the enormity of the trauma of the Holocaust, inviting the reader to participate in an ethical act of reading and bearing witness. See “A Genre of Rupture: The Literary language of the Holocaust,” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Holocaust Literature, ed. Jenni Adams (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 27–45. 22. Lisa Appignanesi, Losing the Dead: A Family Memoir (London: Vintage, 2000), 8. 23.  Geoffrey Hartman, “Shoah and Intellectual Witness,” Partisan Review 1, no. 1 (1998): 1, http://readingon.library.emory.edu/issue1/articles/Hartman/ RO%20-%202006%20-%20Hartman.pdf. 24. There is, as I have suggested, a long history of political cartooning and comic strips that respond to the events of the Holocaust, both during the time of the Nazi assault and in its aftermath. For an anthology of early comics depictions, see the stunning collection We Spoke Out: Comic Books and the Holocaust, edited by Neal Adams, Rafael Medoff, and Craig Yoe, with an introduction by iconic cartoonist Stan Lee (San Diego, CA: Yoe Books and IDW Publishing, 2018). 25. Samantha Baskind and Ranen Omer-Sherman, “Introduction,” in The Jewish Graphic Novel: Critical Approaches (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010), xv. 26.  Some of the comics works that comprise the overarching genre (fiction and nonfiction) include, but are by no means limited to, the following: Joe Kubert’s Yossel: April 19, 1943 (2003); Pascal Croci’s Auschwitz (2004); Miriam Katin’s child-survivor memoir We Are on Our Own (2006), and its sequel Letting It Go (2013); Martin Lemelman’s second-generation graphic narrative, Mendel’s Daughter (2006); David Sim’s Judenhauss (2008); Jason Lutes’ Berlin saga (2018); Greg Pak and Carmine Di Giandomenico’s X-Men: Magneto Testament (2008); Polish writer and illustrator Michael Galek and Marcin Nowakowski’s Episodes from Auschwitz (2009); Carla Jablonski and Leland Purvis’s Resistance trilogy (2010, 2011, 2012); Trina Robbins’ Lily Renée, Escape Artist (2011); Belgium born Israeli cartoonist, Michel Kichka’s Second Generation: The Things I Didn’t Tell My Father (2012); French novelist Jérémie Dres’ We Won’t See Auschwitz (2013); Israeli commix novelist Rutu Modan’s The Property (2013); Reinhard Kleist’s The Boxer: The True Story of Holocaust Survivor Harry Haft (2014); German graphic novelist Barbara Yelin’s Irmina (2014); and Emil Farris’ My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (2017); and Amy Kurzweil’s third-generation polyphonic layered story, Flying Couch

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(2016). As an example of another third-generation graphic narrative, I would also like to call attention to Leela Corman’s forthcoming “Victory Parade.” Excerpts of Corman’s work in progress have appeared in Tablet Magazine. See, for example, the chapter “Bearing Witness at Buchenwald” (April 20, 2017), https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/230037/bearing-witness-at-buchenwald, accessed 8 July 2018. See also Corman’s brief comics sketches “The Book of the Dead” (Tablet Magazine [May 4, 2016], http:// www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-relition/201031/the-bood-of-the-dead), accessed 1 August 2018, and “Drawing Strength from My Grandfather, Who Carried His Losses from the Holocaust” (Tablet Magazine [December 30, 2013], http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-relligion/156602/grandfather-carried-losses/?print=1), accessed 1 August 2018. This list of titles is, by no means, exhaustive, and here I am including only those that were either originally written in or translated into English. 27. Gerd Bayer, “After Postmemory: Holocaust Cinema and the Third Generation,” Shofar 28, no. 4 (Summer 2010): 116.

Bibliography Aarons, Victoria. “A Genre of Rupture: The Literary language of the Holocaust.” In The Bloomsbury Companion to Holocaust Literature, edited by Jenni Adams, 27–45. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Adams, Neal, Rafael Medoff, and Craig Yoe, eds. We Spoke Out: Comic Books and the Holocaust. San Diego, CA: Yoe Books and IDW Publishing, 2018. Appignanesi, Lisa. Losing the Dead: A Family Memoir. London: Vintage, 2000. Baskind, Samantha, and Ranen Omer-Sherman, eds. “Introduction.” In The Jewish Graphic Novel: Critical Approaches, xv–xxvii. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010. Bayer, Gerd. “After Postmemory: Holocaust Cinema and the Third Generation.” Shofar 28, no. 4 (Summer 2010): 116–132. Benson, John, David Kasakove, and Art Spiegelman. “An Examination of ‘Master Race.” In A Comics Studies Reader, edited by Jeet Heer and Kent Worchester, 288–305. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. Cavna, Michael. “MetaMaus: Maus’ Creator Art Spiegelman Reveals Emotional Journey to Today’s 25th Anniversary Book.” The Washington Post, October 4, 2011. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/comic-riffs/post/metamaus-mauscreator-art-spiegelman-reveals-emotional-journey-to-todays-25th-anniversary-book/2011/10/03/gIQARhyIKL_blog.html?utm_term=.564689bee31b. Chute, Hillary. “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative.” PMLA 123, no. 2 (March 2008): 452–465. ———. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press and Harvard University Press, 2016. Corman, Leela. “Bearing Witness at Buchenwald.” Tablet Magazine, Online, April 20, 2017. https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/230037/bearing-witnessat-buchenwald. ———. “Drawing Strength from My Grandfather, Who Carried His Losses from the Holocaust.” Tablet Magazine, December 30, 2013. http://www.tabletmag.com/ jewish-life-and-relligion/156602/grandfather-carried-losses/?print=1.

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———. “The Book of the Dead.” Tablet Magazine, May 4, 2016. http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-relition/201031/the-bood-of-the-dead. Cravett, Paul. “Miriam Katin: Coming to Terms,” December 17, 2015. www.paulgravell.com/articles/article/miriam_katin. Croci, Pascal. Auschwitz. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004. Dres, Jérémie. We Won’t See Auschwitz. Translated by Edward Gauvin. London: SelfMadeHero, 2012. Eisenstein, Bernice. I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors. New York: Riverhead Books, 2006. Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art. Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press, 1985. Farris, Emil. My Favorite Thing Is Monsters. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2017. Galek, Michael, and Marcin Nowakowski. Episodes from Auschwitz. St. Joseph, Missouri: K&L Press, 2009. Hartman, Geoffrey. “Shoah and Intellectual Witness.” Partisan Review 1, no. 1 (1998): 1–8. http://readingon.library.emory.edu/issue1/articles/Hartman/RO%20-%20 2006%20-%20Hartman.pdf. Havazelet, Ehud. “To Live in Tiflis in the Springtime.” In Like Never Before, 231–250. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. Jablonski, Carla, and Leland Purvis. Resistance. New York: First Second, 2010. Jukovsky, Martin. “‘Master Race’ and the Holocaust.” Impact. http://www.jukovsky. com/masterrace.html. Katin, Miriam. Letting It Go. Montreal, Quebec: Drawn & Quarterly, 2013. ———. We Are on Our Own: A Memoir. Montreal, Quebec: Drawn & Quarterly, 2006. Kehe, Marjorie. “Art Spiegelman: Don’t Call Comics ‘Graphic Novels’.” The Christian Science Monitor, March 17, 2009. https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/ chapter-and-verse/2009/0317/art-spiegelman-dont-call-comics-graphic-novels. Kichka, Michel. Second Generation: The Things I Didn’t Tell My Father. France: Dargaud, 2012. English translation, Amazon Digital Services LLC, January 27, 2016. Kleist, Reinhard. The Boxer: The True Story of Holocaust Survivor Harry Haft. London: SelfMadeHero, 2014. Krigstein, Bernard. “Master Race.” In B. Krigstein. Volume One (1919–1955), edited by Greg Sadowski, 218–225. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2002. Kubert, Joe. Yossel: April 19, 1943. A Story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. New York: ibooks, Graphic Novel, 2003. Kurzweil, Amy. Flying Couch. New York: Black Balloon Publishing and Catapult, 2016. Lambert, Joshua. “How Comics Help Us Combat Holocaust Fatigue,” February 9, 2017. https://forward.com/culture/361784/how-comics-help-us-combatholocaust-fitigue/. Lemelman, Martin. Mendel’s Daughter: A Memoir. New York: Free Press, 2006. Lutes, Jason. Berlin. Montreal, Quebec: Drawn & Quarterly, 2018. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: William Morrow and HarperCollins, 1993. Mendelsohn, Daniel. The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. New York: HarperCollins, 2006. Modan, Rutu. The Property. Translated by Jessica Cohen. Montreal, Quebec: Drawn & Quarterly, 2013.

510  V. AARONS Pak, Greg, and Carmine Di Giandomenico. X-Men: Magneto Testament. New York: Marvel, 2008. Rifas, Leonard. “War Comics.” In The Routledge Companion to Comics, edited by Frank Bramlett, Roy T. Cook, and Aaron Meskin, 183–191. New York: Routledge, 2017. Robbins, Trina. Lily Renée, Escape Artist. Minneapolis: Graphic Universe, 2011. Roman, Rafael Pi. “New York Voices—Interview with Art Spiegelman.” NY Voices, November 25, 2012. https://www.thirteen.org/nyvoices/transcripts/spiegelman. html. Sim, David. Judenhauss. Kitchener, ON: Aardvark-Vanaheim, 2008. Spiegelman, Art. “Ballbuster: Bernard Krigstein’s Life Between the Panels.” The New Yorker 27, no. 20 (July 22, 2002). https://www.questia.com/ magazine/1P3-141318761/ballbuster. ———. MetaMaus. New York: Pantheon, 2011. Versaci, Rocco. This Book Contains Graphic Language: Comics as Literature. New York: Continuum, 2007. Wiesel, Elie. “An Old Acquaintance.” In Legends of Our Time, 39–53. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968. ———. “Why I Write: Making No Become Yes.” The New York Times Book Review, April 14, 1985, pp. 13–14. Yelin, Barbara. Irmina. London: SelfMadeHero, 2014.

CHAPTER 28

The Challenges of Translating Art Spiegelman’s Maus Martín Urdiales-Shaw

Introduction In an essay originally published in 1995, Alan Rosen considered the status of the English language in Art Spiegelman’s Maus volumes, perceptively arguing how it functions in a variety of ways in this graphic novel.1 In formal terms, the most visible contrast here is between Vladek’s “foreignized” immigrant English—colored by the cadences and structures of Polish and Yiddish—and the “good” Englishes (i.e., grammatically perfect) in the novel, which may correspond to American characters speaking their native tongue or, interestingly, to the Poles and Jews of the 1930s and 1940s including Vladek, also speaking their native tongues. Within Maus, this second “good” English, free of American idiom, operates as an intratranslation of the source languages spoken by native speakers (usually Yiddish and Polish) and identifies Vladek’s unmediated story as presented directly to readers in the dialogue balloons. Thus, chatting with his Polish Jewish family in Lublin in the 1930s, Vladek

An earlier version of this manuscript, chiefly grounded on case-study discussions of linguistic aspects, appeared in the special issue of Word and Text “The Place of Translation,” guest-edited by M. Teresa Caneda-Cabrera and Rui Carvalho Homem (Vol. II, Issue 2, December 2012) and was later reprinted, without changes, in the volume Translation Transnationalism World Literature, edited by Francesca Benocci and Marco Sonzogni (Joker Edizioni, 2015). M. Urdiales-Shaw (*)  University of Vigo, Pontevedra, Spain © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_28

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utters perfect sentences like “One moment, girls – I have a gift for each of you” (65),2 but in his own English, when he tells Art his survival story retrospectively, he voices sentences like this: “I didn’t want they should see me much” (60). Therefore, whenever Maus engages the present context of the interviews with Art, either in captions or in dialogue balloons, Vladek’s English, now as the source language, becomes foreignized through its Polish and Yiddish features. This particular rationale in the use of English(es) needn’t seem particularly strange to readers who are always aware of the duplex narrative unfolding in Maus, Vladek’s European story (his memories of the war and his experience of the Holocaust) and Art’s American story (the construction of Maus itself through interviews with his father and the cartoonist’s own creative process). In fact, the linguistic marking/non-marking of Vladek’s speech is a useful reminder of the narrative time frame. Yet, as Rosen has pointed out, there is an added dimension to Vladek’s foreignized English: he is not the only survivor of the death camps living in 1970s New York, “but Spiegelman presents [these other émigrés] as fluent in English, speaking like natives, virtually without accent” (129), thus erasing for them the linguistic singularity he preserves for Vladek. The graphic artist himself has underlined the centrality of Vladek’s “broken language” to Maus (MetaMaus, 155), and his emphasizing of Eastern European inflection in his father’s speech was noted by Nancy K. Miller in relation to how the original Vladek tapescripts3 evidenced a fluency in English which hardly corresponds to the “fractured,” “broken” textual rendering of the character’s English in the Maus balloons.4 Taking up on Miller’s point, Michael Rothberg confirms Vladek’s English in Maus as “the artist’s reconstruction of a marked dialect.”5 Thus, this alteration of Vladek’s English into an exaggeratedly “broken” or “fractured” discourse has been interpreted not just in relation to his identity or background, but, also, in an intriguing way, to a defamiliarization of English as the (only?) adequate way to convey Holocaust testimony. Rosen notes that “this quality of foreignness is the means by which English can become a language of testimony…Spiegelman uses it to convey the foreignness of the Holocaust itself” (129).6 His argument is informed by two notions: on the one hand, the historical remoteness of English to the concentration camp world, as set out by commentator Sidra Ezrahi7 and, on the other, the perceived association, for camp inmates, of this language to the freedom, decency, and humanity of the Allied forces, specifically embodied by the two countries which did not endure German occupation, Britain and the United States. Establishing a taxonomy of languages based on their degree of relevance to the Holocaust inevitably generates a complex arena for translation practices of Maus, all the more fascinating given the variety of languages into which Maus has been translated. Immediate questions arise: is the target

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language more or less “foreign” than standard English to the Holocaust experience? If the target language is as foreign as English, or more, must Vladek’s English speech also be foreignized in translation? Taking up on Miller’s, Rothberg’s, and Rosen’s arguments above, together with Spiegelman’s own admission that he emphasized the foreignness of his father’s speech, it becomes evident that rendering this particular feature is central to Vladek’s characterization in Maus as a Polish Jew and a Holocaust survivor. Therefore, it should be contemplated in translation, but the question that immediately arises is how. Which strategies, features, or conventions can translators employ to make the target language reflect this sense of ­foreignization, while making Vladek’s speech both acceptable and intelligible to target readers? It must be stressed that Vladek’s speech in Maus is a perfectly understandable English, which at most takes the form of a “marked dialect” in Rothberg’s terms (145). Vladek does not speak a primitive, beginner, or pidgin-like English, and his voice actually extends a convention employed by many twentieth-century Jewish American writers, to depict first-generation Jewish émigrés from Central and Eastern Europe. The register may vary from standard American English in intensity or in the number of non-normative features used, but it is qualitatively recognizable as the English of Ashkenazi Jews who emigrated to America—mainly New York—as adults and whose “old country” languages were Polish or Russian, and Yiddish at home or in the shtetl. Readerships in the United States don’t need to be advised about this type of English, essentially because American fiction has a long-standing tradition of the vernacular, dating back to Mark Twain, and thus, characters are expected, in dialogue, to speak the particular kind of English which identifies their sociocultural, regional, or ethnic background. In linguistic terms, and turning now specifically to Vladek’s case, these features include changes in word order such as the fronting of adverbs or other complements (“Only she talks about money,” 69; “I have for you a warmer [coat],” 71), confusion of modal verbs, misconstrued impersonal clauses (It was for there was/were), misuse of what for that in relative clauses, confusions of determiners with countable and uncountable nouns (much for many/a lot of), and misuse of prepositions. There are no semantic errors and no mistakes in the use of verbal tenses themselves and many of Vladek’s utterances only diverge from the norm in no more than one or two of the six features mentioned, while a significant number of his utterances occur in perfect English. As critics have noted, the general effect of Vladek’s English is to remind readers of the significance of his identity as a Polish Jew and concentration camp survivor, but when he is not relaying his “survivor’s tale,” Vladek’s language actually shows a marked assimilation to American culture: “It looks on you like a million dollars!” (71); “You know…the bigshot cartoonist” (135).

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Translating Vladek: The Survivor in Spanish and Other Romance Languages In the following, I will be examining some of the major approaches to the translations of Vladek’s discourse in Maus into Spanish and several other Romance languages, principally focusing on (a) the translators’ response to Vladek’s “foreignized” discourse as a relevant feature of Maus; (b) where applicable, the overall effect of transforming Vladek’s discourse in the target language; and (c) other ways through which translators might alert readers to the implications of the various linguistic registers in the original Maus. The very first Spanish translation of Maus was published only three years after Spiegelman’s Maus I (1986) and thus only covers this first volume, in an equivalent paperback format (henceforth8 Sp Maus A). It was produced by Norma Editorial, a well-known Barcelona-based press specializing in the publication of comics and graphic novels in Spain since the political transition into democracy in the 1970s. The text was produced in agreement with Argentinian Muchnik Editores, and its translator was Eduardo Goligorsky, an Argentinian émigré who fled the military dictatorship in 1976 and settled in Barcelona. In relation to Vladek’s language, Goligorsky’s translation into Spanish illustrates one of the twelve “deforming tendencies” that Antoine Berman listed in relation to translation practices, that of the “effacement of the superimposition of languages” in novels where there is a “relation between dialect and a common language.”9 Thus, Vladek in the first volume of Maus is given the same neutral Spanish register as his son Art or any other character. At age 88, Eduardo Goligorsky is still active as a political commentator for the online journal Libertad Digital, and I was able to interview10 him regarding the possible significance of his Jewish background to his involvement with Maus and his translation strategies. Goligorsky’s feedback revealed him as a fully assimilated Jew, from Argentinian-born parents, and a Spanish citizen for many years now. He declared himself an atheist whose involvement with Jewish culture was limited to translation jobs. The Maus translation, he explained, was a personal request from general editor Mario Muchnik, but he noted that he wouldn’t have approached Nazism through this kind of genre, not giving reasons. Goligorsky was adamant in asserting that he was firmly set against notions of cultural and political identity, and in fact, he has written frequently in condemnation of Catalan separatism. He provided no feedback on the challenge of rendering Vladek’s voice, so it seems his translational aim was purely functional. The next edition of Maus in Spanish was produced by Emecé Editores of Argentina (henceforth Sp Maus B): both volumes of Maus were published, as separate paperbacks, in 1994, three years after Spiegelman’s Maus II was published. The translation for the two volumes was commissioned to another Argentinian, the fiction writer César Aira, who used Argentinian Spanish, but made the same choice as Goligorsky in not giving Vladek a distinct linguistic register, again “effacing” his super-imposed idiom.

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Crucial problems emerge in the adaptation of Vladek’s English to a r­egister in Spanish that might somehow represent Vladek’s identity as Polish Jew/Holocaust survivor in this target language. These problems relate to the tension between marketplace demands and the geographical dispersion of readerships. The production of literary translations seeks the largest prospective markets within a linguistic community. Potential readers of Maus in Spanish are both in Spain and in Latin America, and although any Spaniard can communicate and be understood by a Mexican or Argentinian and vice versa, this is far from saying they are speaking languages with shared sociocultural and historical backgrounds.11 Endowing Vladek with a differentiating linguistic register in a Spanish translation would not have the same implications or effects for readers on both sides of the Atlantic. How can Vladek’s immigrant identity be appropriately conveyed to Spanish readers, when Spain, throughout most of the twentieth century, was an isolated nation (producing exiles, if anything) where no large incoming ethnic group “foreignized” Spanish in any specific way? Conversely, Argentina, like the United States, has largely been a country of immigrants, with large numbers of Italian, Spanish, or Jewish arrivals throughout the twentieth century. Vladek’s ­discourse might be made to reflect the “foreignized” identity of the émigré for Argentinian readers aware of their country’s cultural diversity, but would this discourse work well with other readerships in this continent? The Emecé edition is originally Argentinian, but subsequent reprints were produced in Mexico by Editorial Planeta Mexicana, which indicates that this edition’s potential marketplace is all Hispanophone America. Mexican, Uruguayan, or Chilean readers of Maus might recognize translator Cesar Aira’s language as Argentinian Spanish, but they would not necessarily identify a linguistic register construed as foreign/migrant-like vis-à-vis a specific Argentinian sociocultural context. It is illuminating to compare these earlier softcover editions of the Maus volumes with the translation strategies employed after 1997, when The Complete Maus was released by Pantheon Books as a hardback compilation of both volumes. Under the simplified title Maus, two Spanish versions of The Complete Maus were issued, both by large publishing conglomerates: Planeta-DeAgostini, in 2001, translated by Roberto Rodríguez and Reservoir Books,12 in 2007, translated by Cruz Rodríguez (henceforth Sp Maus C and Sp Maus D, respectively). Unlike Aira and Goligorsky, both these translators chose to explicitly display Vladek’s particular register in rendering him in Spanish. Now, in view of the above discussion, and taking into account that these are global publishing houses with extensive worldwide distribution, it seems reasonable to surmise that these translators could not endow Vladek with a linguistic register that would be culturally bound or relevant to a specific geographic community in the Hispanophone world. Instead, they followed what might seem a more neutral, linguistically related strategy: to transfer the ungrammaticality of Vladek’s English into Spanish usage, a strategy which is explained, although in different ways, in these editions’ Notes.

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The 2007 translator, Cruz Rodríguez, footnotes the character’s first words to his son Art with “Vladek still makes mistakes when speaking English, particularly in verbal tenses and the use of prepositions” (my translation, Sp Maus D, 13), a translator’s note which is equivocal, as there are no mistakes in Vladek’s tenses, only in his use of modal verbs, while it directs attention to the source text rather than to the strategies she will employ in translation. The note for the 2001 edition (Sp Maus C) is inserted in a front matter page saturated with texts: acknowledgments, people involved in the volume production, copyright information, the publisher’s legal information, and a disclaimer. Using a wording which further masks its authorship, with plurals, verbs in passive form, and an impersonal heading (“we didn’t want to”; “have been used”; “our version”; and “Note on the Translation” rather than “Translator’s Note”), the note clarifies the strategy used in the Spanish recreation of Vladek’s “defective English which exposes his Polish origins” (my translations, Sp Maus C, front matter). This strategy implies using the Spanish language’s “own resources,” including “the character’s confusion of verbal modes, gender [markers], uses of ser and estar, or of prepositions” (my translation, Sp Maus C, front matter). The note thus openly admits to locating the actual divergence from the grammatical norm in the Spanish language rather than in Vladek’s utterances, a strategy that parallels Cruz Rodríguez’s in the 2007 version. Thus, in both translations, it is the normative employment of certain structures or constructions in Spanish which actually determine Vladek’s misuse of language, regardless of his actual linguistic competence in the English original. For example, the correct clause “He was a communist!” (28) becomes the ungrammatical “Estaba un comunista!” (Sp Maus C, 28) and, similarly, “Here is the door…” (136) is transformed into the incorrect usage “Ahí es la puerta” (Sp Maus D, 136). The problem with such a strategy is two-fold: (a) the translation no longer “matches” the particular instances of Vladek’s foreignized register, but starts following the discursive rules of Spanish; (b) the actual types of error chosen to represent this register are too bound to basic lack of competence in Spanish. As one distinctive feature, both translators chose the ser/estar confusion to characterize Vladek’s register. In Spanish, the ser/estar mix-up is an error symptomatic of an entirely different condition of linguistic competence, that of a typically Anglophone speaker learning the Spanish language. The correct use of ser and estar is usually achieved in a short time through immersion in a Spanish-speaking community, so it is inadequate for a character who is not learning the language, but a longestablished émigré. Both Spanish and Hispanic readerships would interpret this feature as identifying a visiting foreigner rather than a largely assimilated immigrant, like Vladek. Moreover, because constructions with verbs ser and estar are so frequent in the Spanish language, the translations may incur in an overflow of tiring, defective speech which bears no correspondence to the rhythms of the original. This is particularly patent in Chapter 6, volume 1, of Sp Maus D, with over twenty ungrammatical utterances but less so in Sp Maus C, where the translator chose only a few occurrences to locate the errors.

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Greater success is achieved through the other foreignizing strategy, related to verb formation. As noted earlier, in this area Vladek’s English is only defective in the use of modal verbs like should, confusion of –ing with to + [infinitive] clauses (“You don’t know counting pills,” 32), or in omitting the do auxiliary in questions. In terms of strict equivalence, transferring these types of verbal errors into Spanish is impossible, since two of these linguistic features (do auxiliary, modal verbs) are inexistent or irrelevant in Spanish, while impersonal clauses function differently. Thus, both translators of the Maus editions relocate Vladek’s verbal errors to the field of conjugation, but restrict these to specific types of clauses in Spanish, those introduced with the relative que, either introducing a subordinate clause or in the structure tener que (have to) + [inf]. In such clauses, Roberto Rodríguez (Sp Maus C) has Vladek habitually use present indicative mode instead of the correct subjunctive (“no quiero que lo escribes en tu libro,” 25; correct form: escribas) and also has him malform tener que +[inf] clauses, by erroneously conjugating the second verb (“tengo que lucho para salvarme,” 28; correct usage is infinitive: luchar; original is fully grammatical: “I must fight to save myself,” 28). For her part, Cruz Rodríguez (Sp Maus D) generally has Vladek use conditional tenses, instead of the correct subjunctive, in these contexts (“no quiero que lo pondrías en el libro,” 25; correct form: pongas), and occasionally has him confuse indicative and subjunctive verbal modes. Although they inevitably involve different features of the verbal system in relation to English, both strategies are appropriate in that, by being circumscribed to que clausal environments and the complex use of the subjunctive, they reproduce the intensity and scale of Vladek’s verbal errors in English. More importantly, this type of error is indicative of an advanced level of competence, as evidence shows that foreigners long-established in Spain, who speak Spanish well, have enduring problems with subjunctive usage. Moreover, natives of some regions in Spain—Basque speakers, typically—actually misuse conditional for subjunctive tenses in real conversation in Spanish, thus providing a preexisting cultural model for Cruz Rodríguez’s version of Vladek (Sp Maus D). A sentence meaning “If it were up to me” would often be phrased by these speakers as “Si por mi sería” (sería is conditional) instead of the grammatically correct subjunctive form: “Si por mi fuera” (subjunctive). In other Romance languages, such as Portuguese and French, the adaptation of Vladek’s register in translation, when implemented, never tends to such radical transformations. I will examine these more cursorily, and without the above attention to detail, given that these are languages I can read and understand to a large degree, but can never presume to assess as a native speaker.13 Of the three Portuguese editions, two produced in Brazil, one in Portugal, and all featuring different translators, the early Editora Brasiliense version (Maus I, 1986; Maus II, 1995), by Ana Maria de Souza Bierrenbach, and the peninsular DIFEL volumes (Maus I, 1999; Maus II, 2001), by Jose Vieira de Lima, resemble the early Spanish editions by Goligorsky and Aira,

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in not attempting to adapt Vladek’s register or marking his speech as foreignized in any way. An analogy with the history of translations into Spanish seems clear, since the later Portuguese version of The Complete Maus, the Brazilian Maus: História Completa (henceforth Pt Maus) by the publisher Companhia das Letras (São Paulo, 2005) does, like the two omnibus Spanish versions, attempt an adaptation of Vladek’s foreignized register into the Portuguese language, again by means of a linguistically bound standardized notion of the “foreigner,” rather than a cultural model. This translation also locates some of Vladek’s errors in verbal usage—and others in gender concordance—but these are generally limited to a misuse of infinitives for the imperfect past tense (“Eu morar,” Pt Maus 14 for Eu morava…) the survivor employs to tell his story, whereas use of other tenses seems correct throughout. In essence, although Vladek embodies a somewhat stereotyped vision of foreignness, and, again, his performance no longer matches the specific “foreignized” utterances in the English original, the scope and typology of his ungrammatical Portuguese are well measured and avoid the excesses and incoherences of linguistic competence that affect Vladek’s translations into Spanish. For the French language, there is only one translated version, that of publishers Flammarion, who first published the Maus I and Maus II volumes as individual paperbacks (1987, 1992) and a few years later issued The Complete Maus under the very literal title Maus: L’Intégrale (1998; henceforth Fr Maus). The translator into French, Judith Ertel, adapts Vladek’s foreignized register into French by using a rather elegant and simple solution. Ertel entirely avoids the pitfalls of verbal conjugation as a site for Vladek’s ungrammatical usage and focuses instead on echoing the syntactic structure, transferring into French Vladek’s emphatic Yiddish-English utterances with complement preceding subject or with anteposed adverbs. Ertel’s adaptation is careful to antepose the whole complement (or the adverb) to a position which does not violate the French language’s basic syntax, while paralleling, on an individual basis, Vladek’s word order: “It’s a shame Françoise also didn’t come” (13) becomes Dommage Françoise aussi n’est pas venue (Fr Maus, 11) the relocated adverb aussi occupying the same position as “also” in the English original (instead of clause-final). Similarly, “A wire hanger you give him!” (13) becomes Un cintre en fer, tu lui donnes! (Fr Maus, 11) reflecting exactly the whole anteposed verbal complement, but not interfering with the internal word order of the noun phrase (cintre en fer: wire hanger). The strategy is efficient in that it never compromises the readability of the French text, but at the same time develops a French with a certain quaintness, certainly not that of a native or standard speaker. On the other hand, by focusing solely on one strategy, and disregarding other aspects of Vladek’s usage (i.e., modal verbs, prepositions, relatives) while not including “new” errors relevant to the target language only (like gender concordance), the translator ensures both a coherence of the register within the target language and a qualitative equivalence with the source language.

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I would like to draw this section on translating Vladek to a close, by focusing now on the significant exception of Cristina Previtali, a translator of Maus who shows an unprecedented awareness of the significance of Vladek’s foreignized register and the importance of rendering it in translation. Previtali was responsible for the canonical Italian translation14 of The Complete Maus, published by Einaudi under the simplified title Maus in 2000 (henceforth It Maus). Among the several translations into Romance languages examined, this is the only translation of Maus which (a) explicitly visibilizes the translator’s concern with the survivor’s discourse as an indicator of cultural identity and geographical background and (b) transcends other attempts at target language adaptation through solely linguistic or grammatical means, to construct, instead, a culturally bound model of foreignization that can be specifically relevant to an Italian readership. Previtali was so sensitive to this issue that the Italian Maus includes a page-long Translator’s Note (Nota del Traduttore, It Maus 4) in which she not only alerts readers of the significance of Polish and Yiddish idiom in Vladek’s speech, which she leaves deliberately untranslated. More importantly, she also emphasizes her concern with conveying to an Italian readership, “the wide range of feelings evoked in the reader by the original … in the absence of the consolidation, in Italy, of a ­language parallel to New York Jewish speech” (It Maus 4, this and the following are my translations). Previtali’s wording on how she tackled this translational challenge is worth quoting in the original: Pertanto, al fine di ottenere un effeto simile a quello provocato nel lettore americano, si è affrontato il lavoro analizzando conversazioni di persone linguisticamente affini a Vladek ma residenti in Italia ed esaminando strutture grammaticali e sintattiche di alcune lingue slave. (It Maus, 4)

Previtali seeks to “obtain a similar effect to that produced on the American reader” (ottenere … americano), in a translation strategy that becomes the most challenging and intuitive among all the options taken by Romance languages’ translators. Instead of trying to reproduce Vladek’s foreignized English within Italian linguistic structures, her model is culturally bound to Italy and adopts a sociolinguistic approach, namely “the analysis of dialogues by people linguistically akin to Vladek but residing in Italy” (analizzando… Italia). Concurrently, this strategy also looks for equivalence at the implied source language level (Vladek’s Polish) by “examining grammatical and syntactic structures of certain Slavic languages” (esaminando…slave).

Untranslatable Vladek: Auschwitz and Beyond In his seminal essay “The Translator’s Task,” Walter Benjamin spoke of translation as a site or “region” in which the original “develops into a linguistic sphere that is both higher and purer” and “points … toward the inaccessible domain where languages are reconciled and fulfilled.”15 In these pages,

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Benjamin’s very philosophical approach actually deals with the ontological status of the translated text vis-à-vis the original, in terms of the former providing a concrete “realization” of the latter, so that “the element toward which the genuine translator’s efforts are directed remains out of reach. It is not translatable, like the literary language of the original, because the relation between content and language [there] is entirely different from that in the translation” (Benjamin, 79). I want to propose that this notion of untranslatability, based on the immobility of the content/language relation in the translated (target) text, can be aptly reappropriated to discuss the preservation of German terms in Vladek’s account in Maus. While most of Vladek’s English speech in Maus is defined by a foreignized register, variously reckoned with, or not, by several translators, there comes a point in his account where certain German words are used in the original— paralleling the translingual, but also German, title word “Maus”—and are to be preserved as such and not translated. These are words which speak not so much of the survivor, but of the site he has survived: Auschwitz. As Vladek is a perfectly competent speaker in semantic terms, Art’s preservation of Vladek’s German never originates in the survivor’s lack of competence. Neither can these words draw attention to the German language itself, used, as they are, only at a very specific point of the account, the Auschwitz chapter (199–234). Rather, these words draw attention to what was originally defined by David Rousset as “the concentrationary universe”16 or, in Sidra Ezrahi’s words, a “self-contained world which both generated its own vocabulary and invested common language with new, sinister meanings” (Ezrahi, 10). This particular idiom within a language, simultaneously German and not German, often academically labeled “Nazi-Deutsch” (more informally, “German of the Camps”) thus becomes a “perverse rhetoric that signified the collective actions of the National Socialists [characterized by] the incompatible goals of maintaining precise written records of Nazi deeds while camouflaging them in euphemism for the outside world” (Ezrahi, 11) and has been the object of inquiry of a number of survivors, critics, and commentators of the Holocaust since the 1950s.17 In Maus, the list of terms includes: Appel (210 ff.), Selektion/s (218, 219, 227), Blocksperre (219, 227), and Bettnachzieher (227). In Benjaminian terms, they would all illustrate, in several ways, a relationship between content and language which is absolute and inextricable and, as a consequence, where the “realization” into another language becomes null. Transference into the ideal/inaccessible “domain where languages are reconciled and fulfilled” (79) is impossible, because these words defy rational reinscription beyond the natural sites of Nazi-Deutsch, namely the concentration camps.18 Because these words signify horror euphemistically or convey an absurd systematization, their translation into another language would drain them of their core meaning. Terms available to illustrate the functional, surface meanings, of Appel and Selektion abound in English19 and Romance languages, but no translation can fully convey the macabre implications of the concentrationary Appel, which, Vladek tells Art, was the routine procedure of “count[ing] the

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live ones and the dead ones to see [there weren’t] any missing” (210). Similarly, no translation of Selektion can signify the process by which “each day … the ­doctors chose out the weaker ones to go and die” (218). It is only within NaziDeutsch that words like Selektion and Appel can maintain their full, unspeakable implications of ruling over human life and death. In yet another way, the term Blocksperre becomes untranslatable because of its inherent and exclusive relevance to Birkenau, site of the gas chambers and crematoria. The term functionally translates as “close barracks!”, but its meaning centrally includes the agonic moment when all prisoners return to these cabins prior to an apparently random choice of the barracks to be emptied of inmates and then collectively transported to a Selektion. In Maus, during a Blocksperre, Vladek avoids a Selektion by hiding in the toilets (227). Without knowledge of the two Nazi-Deutsch terms, this very sentence would require extensive paraphrasing in any language, including postwar or contemporary German. Italian survivor Primo Levi was particularly sensitive to the issue of an un-German German, when he accounts for the fourth term cited, Bettnachzieher, in his autobiographical The Drowned and the Saved. Levi offers a fuller explanation than Vladek’s quasi-comical version in Maus, which actually fails to convey the absurdity of this task (“a ‘bedafter-puller’ … after everybody fixed their bed we came to fix better so the straw looked square,” 227). This is Levi’s didactic and analytic clarification of the term: [I]n every barracks there existed a pair of functionaries, the Bettnachzieher (“bed-after-pullers,” a term I believe does not exist in normal German, and that Goethe certainly would not have understood) whose task it was to check every single bed and then take care of its transversal alignment. […] [T]hey were equipped with a string the length of the hut: they stretched it over the made-up beds, and rectified to the centimeter any possible deviations. Rather than a cause of torment, this maniacal order seemed absurd and grotesque: in fact, the mattress leveled out with so much care had no consistency whatever, and … under the body’s weight, it immediately flattened down to the slats that supported it.20 (italics mine)

Although total untranslatability in Maus is closely linked to these terms as essential markers of Nazi-Deutsch within the concentrationary universe, there are also a few other instances of Vladek’s account which evidence the perception that a concept cannot be easily rendered in translation beyond its home territories. In 1943, before Auschwitz, when hiding from forced evacuations by German soldiers and negotiating security among the Poles in the Srodula ghettoes, Vladek tells Art: Vladek: “Always Haskel was such a guy: a kombinator.” Art: “A what?” Vladek: “A guy what [sic] makes kombinacja, a schemer…a crook.” (118, italics in original)

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Shortly, Vladek’s account continues through captions, “Haskel had two brothers, Pesach and Miloch. Pesach was also a kombinator, but Miloch, he was a fine fellow” (119). Clearly, Vladek struggles to find a precise English equivalent, but the term eludes a straightforward transference into his English and entails clarification or periphrasis. To answer his son, Vladek first deviates to the noun form kombinacja, which clarifies nothing, and then tentatively adds “schemer” or “crook.” But still these English terms seem only to convey partial meanings of kombinator, and, unsatisfied, Vladek recovers the Polish term subsequently (119). That the term is expressive and highly significant to Polish culture, as a nation of survivors, is suggested by the variety of dictionary entries with the same root in a Polish dictionary.21 Its very polysemy is played out in the diverse approaches to translating Vladek’s explanatory reply: in Spanish, “un maquinador” (Sp Maus A); “hacía kombinacja en su provecho” (Sp Maus B, underlined Polish in original); “un intrigante … un pillo” (Sp Maus D); in Portuguese, “um trapaceiro” (Pt Maus); in French “un magouilleur … un escroc” (Fr Maus). Ultimately, kombinator translates more comfortably into languages bound to countries that have endured a history of military or cultural subjugation, institutional corruption and poverty, or patent social inequalities, where a picaresque instinct becomes necessary to prosper or survive. By contrast, in Vladek’s personal experience of the United States, the term has no equivalence within the “place” of American English. Vladek’s use of the verb organize in the past tense, throughout the last chapters of Maus I and first chapters of Maus II, functions in a similar way. Here, the issue is interestingly complicated by the fact that the verb exists in English but is actually foreignized by Vladek to convey a particular Polish meaning. This is evidenced by the actual complements it takes, always involving food or gear: “we organized ourselves good clothes and i.d. papers” (127), “I just organized some eggs” (222), “We left behind…the civilian clothes we organized” (241), and “I still have a little coffee I organized” (267). These sentences are intermingled in Vladek’s account with others in which he uses the term arranged in the very same contexts, so readers gradually recognize the two verbs as synonyms within Vladek’s speech. The issue at stake here is not so much untranslatability itself, but the fact that, for Vladek, organize deeply reverberates (z)organizować, an idiosyncratic Polish verb expressing the deeply rooted notion of availing oneself of things in the face of institutional restrictions and rules, relevant not only to the concentration camps and the ghettoes of war-time Poland but also to the ensuing socialist era.22 It must be noted, however, that this particular sense of organize occurs across a range of several survivors’ accounts in different languages, but it is my contention that it originated in the speech of Polish prisoners and then became a translingual term used in shared understanding within concentration camp jargon. In Vladek’s discourse, organize always implies foresight, cunning, enterprise, and watchfulness. Interestingly, in a subversive way, Spiegelman never lets this word appear with its standard English meaning in

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Maus (i.e., as a positive trait, often attributed to Germans), a strategy that reinforces readers’ mental association of organize to Vladek’s story of survival. Some translators of Maus, like Judith Ertel, transpose this foreignized meaning, in this case through the French verb organiser between quotation marks (Fr Maus, 125, 148), but, generally, the term is simply translated using the most precise verb, for each context, within the target language (Sp Maus A, B, D and Pt Maus). Untranslatability acquires one last dimension in Maus: that of the deliberate preservation of an original language. I will not be commenting here on the Yiddish words (oy!, ach!, meshugga, bagel, etc.) which occasionally mark Vladek’s discourse. Any sensitive reader or translator understands their relevance to Vladek’s Jewish identity, and these terms have permeated American English—specially New Yorkers’ speech—for years. Rather, I’d like to pay particular attention to the striking hitchhiker’s scene in Maus II, a brief episode that is spatially and temporally removed from the survivor’s story, and yet somehow brings it to bear in modern America through the power structures of language. Driving back from a shopping mall with Art and Vladek, the artist’s wife Françoise decides to stop the car for a black hitchhiker. Instantly incensed, Vladek cries, “it’s a colored guy, a shvartser! Push quick on the gas!” (258), and for the first time in Maus, the following two panels show a scowling Vladek speaking whole Polish sentences, which are translated into the captions: “*(POLISH:) Oh my God! What’s happened to his wife? She’s lost her head!!”; “*(POLISH:) @!★!! I just can’t believe it! There’s a SHVARTSER sitting in here!” (259, top left and following panel). Pragmatically, Vladek speaks Polish now to avoid being understood, but in the very fertile context of language and power intersections in Maus, the implications of Vladek’s sudden emotional language shift are worth noting. As Alan Rosen observes, “the episode witnesses a shift of roles and voices … In reverting to his native Polish, he finally regains a fluency … [that] comes at the expense of, and suspends, the authority [of] his tortured English” (131). Although Rosen’s argument proceeds differently, what is also fascinating here is that in adopting his native Polish, Vladek seems to enact a discourse of power and victimization uncomfortably reminiscent to that of the Third Reich’s “native German,” an effect intensified by the fact that in these panels, the hitchhiker is shown speaking a non-normative Black English. When Françoise later reproaches Vladek for his being, “of all people,” “a racist” the survivor replies, “It’s not even to compare the shvarsters and the Jews!” (259). Vladek then recalls “coloreds” or “shvartsers,” shifting between the Jim Crow era term, today often offensive, and derogatory Yiddish,23 as thieves he had to watch out for in his early immigrant days, when he worked at the New York garment district (260).24 Early in this chapter, questions are raised on the taxonomy of languages in relation to the Holocaust and the ways in which languages can be made (or not) to reproduce the linguistic register that forges Vladek’s identity as a survivor. I did not consider German at that point, but I will now, as a way

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of drawing toward a conclusion. Primo Levi has famously noted that understanding German was key to survival during the first days in Auschwitz, in front of primitive and brutal SS men who did not discern if a prisoner’s paralyzed reaction to an order derived from non-comprehension of the language (Levi, 70–71). As has been noted here, Nazi-Deutsch became a perverse semantic code, but its underpinnings were inevitably within the German language. Both German and Yiddish, within different communication contexts (other Jewish prisoners or Nazi guards), would rank first and second in the taxonomy of languages at a site like Auschwitz (Levi, 78). And yet, for all the immediacy and pertinence of both languages to this concentrationary universe, Art Spiegelman’s account in MetaMaus of the initial failed attempt at a German version of Maus illuminates the challenges and paradoxes involved: As soon as [publishers Zweitausendeins] heard I was starting on the long Maus book they optioned the rights – way before there was an American publisher. […] it was essential to keep Vladek’s broken language intact […] it’s at the heart of the work. My publisher said, “Well, we’ll just have to do some kind of Germanized version of Yiddish.” But when getting ready for publication years later, Zweitausendeins got a very well-respected translator who came back with Vladek talking like some kind of hip Berliner. My publisher then insisted that if they did Vladek’s language in a kind of Yiddishized German, no German would understand it and it would also be seen as anti-Semitic. I found that difficult to wrap around, figuring either it was anti-Semitic, or nobody would understand it – but if they didn’t understand it why would it come off anti-Semitic? (MetaMaus, 155)

Ultimately, because for a German-speaking readership, Yiddish cannot easily be released of its peculiar idiolectal status as a vulgarized form of German itself,25 some of the very traits that work so well in the foreignizing of Vladek’s English actually worked dangerously or counterproductively in this attempt at rendering a Yiddishized German. After further trials, Spiegelman bought the rights back and eventually published Maus with Rowohlt (1989), whose translators were a married couple, “[a] professional translator, and … [a] German journalist whose parents were Eastern European Jews. They did a good job … of catching the specifics of the linguistic oddities rather than ignoring the issue or resorting to some kind of Borscht Belt Yiddish shtick” (MetaMaus, 155). At one point in his survivor’s tale, Vladek somewhat naively tells his son, “Auschwitz was in a town called Oświęcim” (185), as if not considering that Auschwitz is the German translation of the Polish place-name Oświęcim. Indeed, why should he? Place-names might be translated across languages, but the naming of these places rightfully belongs to the collective memory of European Jews and all other victims of the Nazi Lagers.

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In its Latin etymology, translatio means “to move across,” a term that established itself in English with the sense of “rendering anew” in another language. The exploration of the challenges in translating the voice of the survivor in Maus, an account which is itself a translatio, a rendering anew, of Vladek’s personal experience from the perspective of his son Art Spiegelman, illustrates the multiple complexities and nuances of how a Holocaust testimony may reach readerships across the world. The Holocaust was a transnational event. It was unique not only in the extent of its horror, but also in its having been recorded by survivors, victims, witnesses, and their descendants, in a variety of languages. Yet, often, Holocaust accounts have only reached global audiences through versions in English or other majority languages, Elie Wiesel’s Night being a case in point. And, because translation can never be a completely transparent process where an exact equivalence between original and target texts is to be found, a fascinating field of enquiry stretches now before us, one that lies at the crossroads between Holocaust representation and Translation Studies.

Notes





1.  Alan Rosen, “The Language of Survival: English as Metaphor in Art Spiegelman’s Maus,” in Geis, Considering Maus, 122–134. 2. All ensuing citations from the American version of Maus with a page number only will refer to The Complete Maus, Pantheon Books, 1997. 3. On Art Spiegelman’s refashioning of Vladek’s actual speech in the tape-recorded interviews, see also my article “Between Transmission and Translation: The Rearticulation of Vladek Spiegelman’s Languages in Maus,” Translation and Literature 24, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 23–41. 4.  Nancy Miller, “Cartoons of the Self: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Murderer—Art Spiegelman’s Maus,” in Geis, Considering Maus, 55. 5.  Michael Rothberg, “‘We Were Talking Jewish’: Art Spiegelman’s Maus as ‘Holocaust’ Production,” in Geis, Considering Maus, 145. 6.  Rosen’s argument applies to the mediated narrative, which in Maus II, Chapters 1–4, is usually presented through captions, and occasionally interposed present-time panels showing Vladek telling Art. 7. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 11–12. 8. For the sake of clarity, all translations of Maus discussed will use this citation form that indicates both language and edition. The four Spanish translations will be identified as Sp Maus A, B, C, and D. For Portuguese, French, and Italian, the citations will be Pt Maus, Fr Maus, and It Maus, respectively. 9. Among others, Berman cites the translation into French of Valle Inclán’s novel Tirano Banderas, in which Iberian (i.e., Castilian) Spanish interacts and coexists productively with various forms of Latin American Spanishes in ways relevant to the source text, while “the French text is completely homogenous, the French translator [not having] confronted the problem” (251). See Antoine Berman’s “Translation and the Trials of the Foreign,” in Venuti, Reader, 240–253.

526  M. URDIALES-SHAW 10. Eduardo Goligorsky, email reply to author’s questions, September 20, 2018. 11. On the interrelations between translation, power, ideology, and cultural contexts of reception, see Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere, eds. Translation, History and Culture (London: Pinter, 1990); Sherry Simon, Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission (London: Routledge, 1996); and Lawrence Venuti, ed. Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology (London: Routledge, 1992). 12.  Reservoir Books is one of the many imprints of Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, now a publishing giant in the Spanish language. 13.  I am very grateful to Professor Rui Carvalho Homem and Dr. Burghard Baltrusch for their very helpful comments on Portuguese usage. 14. An earlier, rare, Italian edition exists of Maus I and II as separate volumes by translator Carano Ranieri (Milano Libri Edizioni, 1989, 1992). 15. Benjamin, “The Translator’s Task,” in Venuti, Reader, 79. 16. David Rousset, L’univers concentrationnaire (Paris: Les Éditions de minuit, 1994). 17. Early essays: Nachman Blumenthal, “On the Nazi vocabulary” (Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 1, 1957); Shaul Esh, “Words and Their Meanings: 25 Examples of Nazi Idiom” (Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 5, 1963); Book chapters: George Steiner’s Language and Silence, 136–151; Berel Lang’s “Language and Genocide,” in Act & Idea in the Nazi Genocide, 81–102; Primo Levi’s “Communication,” in The Drowned and the Saved, 76–78. Books: Victor Klemperer’s LTI: The Language of the Third Reich. 18.  Enacting this very notion, Italian survivor Primo Levi usually referred to Auschwitz as the Lager in early memoirs like Se questo è un uomo (1958). On Levi’s outlook on the unrepresentability and (hence) untranslatability of Lagerjargon, see Alana Fletcher’s “Transforming Subjectivity: Se questo è un uomo in Translation and Adaptation,” 37. 19. Consider the benign connotations of the words choice and selection in contemporary first-world contexts: “the choice is yours”; “a selection of the best wines.” 20. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (London: Abacus, 1989), 94. 21. N.pl.: kombinacja; ADJ(m/f): kombinator/-ka; N.sing. kombinatorstwo; V. kombinować. In Oskar Perlin, Gran diccionario polaco-español. Tomo I (A-R) (Warsaw: Wiedza Powszechna, 2002), 352. 22. I am indebted to Dr. Andrzej Antoszek for his valuable feedback on this issue. 23. See Milly Heyd’s discussion of the term “schvartser,” in Mutual Reflections: Jews and Blacks in American Art (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 194–196. 24. Vladek seldom voices criticism of American society at large. His sweeping statement on blacks should be qualified in the context of New York’s garment industry undergoing, at that time, a process of severe wage cuts due to outsourcing, competition, and an excess of unskilled cheap labour, supplied by incoming immigrant groups. See Carmen T. Whalen, “Sweatshops Here and There: The Garment Industry, Latinas, and Labor Migrations,” International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 61 (Spring 2002): 54–55. 25. See Benjamin Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 29–30.

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Bibliography Bassnett, Susan, and André Lefevere, eds. Translation, History and Culture. London: Pinter, 1990. Benjamin, Walter. “The Translator’s Task.” Translated by Steven Rendall. In Venuti, Reader, 75–83. Berman, Antoine. “Translation and the Trials of the Foreign.” Translated by Lawrence Venuti. In Venuti, Reader, 240–253. Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven. By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Fletcher, Alana. “Transforming Subjectivity: Se questo è un uomo in Translation and Adaptation.” In Translating Holocaust Literature, edited by Peter Arnds, 33–44. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2016. Geis, Deborah R. ed. Considering Maus: Approaches to Art Spiegelman’s ‘Survivor’s Tale’ of the Holocaust. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003. Harshav, Benjamin. The Meaning of Yiddish. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Heyd, Milly. Mutual Reflections: Jews and Blacks in American Art. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999. Klemperer, Victor. The Language of the Third Reich: LTI, Lingua Tertii Imperii, A Philologist’s Notebook. Translated by Martin Brady. London: The Athlone Press, 2000. Lang, Berel. Act & Idea in the Nazi Genocide. Syracuse: University of Syracuse Press, 2003. Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. London: Abacus, 1989. Miller, Nancy. “Cartoons of the Self: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Murderer—Art Spiegelman’s Maus.” In Geis, Considering Maus, 44–59. Perlin, Oskar. Gran diccionario polaco-español. Tomo I (A-R). Warsaw: Wiedza Powszechna, 2002. Rosen, Alan. “The Language of Survival: English as Metaphor in Art Spiegelman’s Maus.” In Geis, Considering Maus, 122–134. Rothberg, Michael. “‘We Were Talking Jewish’: Art Spiegelman’s Maus as ‘Holocaust’ Production.” In Geis, Considering Maus, 137–158. Rousset, David. L’univers concentrationnaire. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1994. Simon, Sherry. Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission. London: Routledge, 1996. Spiegelman, Art. The Complete Maus. New York: Pantheon Books, 1997. ———, Art. Maus. Translated by Cristina Previtali. Torino: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 2000. ———, Art. Maus. Translated by Roberto Rodríguez. Barcelona: Planeta DeAgostini, 2001. ———, Art. Maus. Translated by Cruz Rodríguez. Barcelona: Reservoir Books, 2007. ———, Art. Maus: História Completa. Translated by Antonio de Macedo Soares. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2005. ———, Art. Maus: L’intégrale. Translated by Judith Ertel. Paris: Flammarion, 1998. ———, Art. Maus I: El relato de un superviviente. Translated by Eduardo Goligorsky. Barcelona: Muchnik Editores/Norma Editorial, 1989.

528  M. URDIALES-SHAW ———, Art. Maus I: Historia de un sobreviviente. Mi padre sangra historia. Translated by César Aira. Buenos Aires: Emecé editores, 1994. ———, Art. Maus II: Historia de un sobreviviente. Y aquí comenzaron mis probemas. Translated by César Aira. Buenos Aires: Emecé editores, 1994. ———, Art. Maus: A história de un sobrevivente. Translated by Ana Maria de Souza Bierrenbach. São Paulo: Brasilense, 1987. ———, Art. Maus II: A história de un sobrevivente. E Assim começaram os meus problemas. Translated by Jose Vieira da Lima. Algés, Portugal: DIFEL, 2001. ———, Art. Maus I: Un survivant raconte. Mon père saigne l’histoire. Translated by Judith Ertel. Paris: Flammarion, 1987. ———, Art. MetaMaus. New York: Pantheon Books, 2011. Steiner, George. Language and Silence: Essays, 1958–1966. London: Faber & Faber, 1985. Urdiales-Shaw, Martín. “Between Transmission and Translation: The Rearticulation of Vladek Spiegelman’s Languages in Maus.” Translation and Literature 24, no. 1 (2015): 23–41. Venuti, Lawrence, ed. Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology. London: Routledge, 1992. ———. The Translations Studies Reader, 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 2012. Whalen, Carmen T. “Sweatshops Here and There: The Garment Industry, Latinas, and Labor Migrations.” International Labor and Working-Class History 61 (Spring, 2002): 45–68. Wiesel, Elie. The Night Trilogy. New York: Hill and Wang, 1987.

CHAPTER 29

We Are a Long Ways Past Maus: Responsible and Irresponsible Holocaust Representations in Graphic Comics and Sitcom Cartoons Jeffrey Scott Demsky

Introduction In 1986, cartoonist Art Spiegelman published the first volume of Maus, his graphic novel about inter-generational Holocaust trauma.1 The work’s creative method, anthropomorphizing cartoon animals to convey the victimperpetrator-collaborator-bystander model, was cutting edge. It was also risky. Ultimately, while Spiegelman’s innovation sparked criticism—namely claims that he trivialized survivors’ suffering2—his unique approach inspired decades of scholarly and artistic contemplation.3 Understandably, some onlookers might still reject Holocaust graphic novels and cartoons as lacking the moral seriousness and tonal restraint demanded of Holocaust art.4 By its very nature, the mediums traditionally conjure up associations of the madcap, the childish, and the insignificant.5 Such disapprovals, however, ignore Maus’ many nuanced contributions. Spiegelman stuffs his panels with seemingly endless thought and speech balloons, captions, photographs, charts, tables, diagrams, and timelines.6 He frames his stories starkly, but faithfully, demonstrating both visual and textual mastery of his unlikely muse.7 Looking backward from present times, Spiegelman’s approach remains revolutionary, inexorably changing the ways that cultural producers evoke, recall, and represent Holocaust memories.8

J. S. Demsky (*)  San Bernardino Valley College, San Bernardino, CA, USA © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_29

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However, despite its title, Maus is not solely a “survivor’s tale.” Nor is it exclusively a Hitler and Holocaust history. While the work confronts vital aspects of this past, Spiegelman’s focus is also self-directed. It was only set against the catastrophic backdrop of Jewish losses that he could explore his own victimization and survivorhood, the result of having grown up with European Jewish parents irreparably damaged by World War II (Fig. 29.1).9 “I have entered myself into their story,” Spiegelman acknowledged. “The way this [secondary] story got told, and who the story was told to, is as important if not a more important part of the story then solely my father’s narrative” (Smith, 30). This disclosure is significant. Artie is not an objective observer. He did not write Maus to fashion intimacy with received Holocaust trauma. Instead, he is a central character in the stories: It is his life and experiences that frame and frequently disrupt his father’s tale, and to that degree, Maus is somewhat autobiographical.10 As Dominick LaCapra explains, Spiegelman’s intervention is compelling not because it faithfully recreated aspects of this past, but rather because it devised new remembrance, demonstrating, “how this history not only interacts with, but also erupts into, the present, pointing out how the present seems, at times, only to be a transparent screen for these unresolved pasts.”11 Indeed, Spiegelman’s intersections were so groundbreaking they stirred a new representational form. Shortly after reading Maus, Marianne Hirsch fashioned her influential postmemory construct.12 Unlike inviolable firsthand memories, formed from lived intimacy with pain, secondary witnessing is a more belated form of knowing. That people acquire it, however, does not necessarily diminish its power. Learned memory connotes intentionality, reflecting later generations entering a history literally not their own.13 Lillian Kremer terms this process witnessing “through imagination”14;

Fig. 29.1  Maus as Holocaust postmemory (Note This frame reveals Vladek’s surprise at learning Artie’s authorial interventions)

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Geoffrey Hartman characterizes it “witnesses by adoption”15; Jackie Feldman explains it as “witnessing the witness,”16 and Alison Landsberg categorizes it “prosthetic”17 memory. In all cases, however, the commonality is non-survivors’ agency to fashion meaningful connections to this past. This is certainly the case with Maus. Take for example the set of panels in which Spiegelman shares a childhood postmemory involving his imagined arrest by SS troops while at public school, or his fears that Zyklon B might stream from his house’s showers.18 Spiegelman’s triumph in these imaginings was not that he recovered a forgotten story, one already existing and waiting to be told.19 Rather, he constructed a new trope, one that pushed beyond existing conventions by pulling away from the sanctity of survivor testimony, while still abiding what Hasia Diner terms the “reverence and love” tradition.20 Maus never seriously offended the sensibilities of Holocaust scholars and survivors because it dealt compassionately with the history of the event and the strain its memory puts on those who inherited it. Since its publication, additional fictive Holocaust stories, from varying genres, pushed out further this now-opened door. I perceive in these cultural products unique learning opportunities. Something like Maus, for example, strikes me as emblematic of a so-called responsible fiction. These imaginings veer from historical orthodoxy, but spur, not spurn, respectful remembrances. Holocaust humor movies like Train of Life and Last Laugh fit this construct. Seinfeld’s “Soup Nazi” episode is another well-known example. The skit’s juxtaposition of Nazi-era lineups with current-era lineups, only now set before an authoritarian chef rather than prison guards, was obviously mischievous. Nevertheless, the show’s writers ultimately conjured memory of this anxiety in a responsible way. Airing a few years later, the Curb Your Enthusiasm “Survivor” episode also achieved this end. For those whose tastes allowed, the dinner table backand-forth between rival “survivors” was only entertaining because the joke [work] validated both the enduring Holocaust legacy and the contemporary importance of being a reality television star, which since 2016 carries with it the potential for presidential trappings. Such cheekiness, however, also can beget a secondary remembrance category, one that I term irresponsible fictions. Just a few years after Art Spiegelman accepted his Pulitzer Prize for Maus, a derivative form of Holocaust animation cropped up. Still flourishing in current times, American cartoon sitcoms like South Park, Robot Chicken, and Family Guy notably carve out distance from, and sometimes mock, the European Jewish genocide. These shows appeal to audiences because of writers’ fearless provocations, spanning a wide range of topics, including ridiculing the Catholic Church for its pedophilia scandal, deriding Mormonism, as well as cartooning the Muslim prophet Muhammad as a fire-conjurer.21 With regard to snubbing Holocaust piety, South Park joking does not always intend to damage its victims. Instead, the humor skewers the sometimes-maudlin victimization narrative that has developed around this history.22 I am not determining whether such reconstructions are amusing or appropriate. My aim is not to elevate one

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representation—responsible or irresponsible—over the other. Although they exist on different ends, the two styles represent the same memory continuum. Both can play a role in shaping the ways that people continue to remember who did what to whom. Never has this challenge been more pressing. As seven and a half decades of post-Holocaust chronology move inexorably toward ten, and bold representations continue to emerge, the challenge for those stewarding this memory is not determining whether comic/cartoon palimpsests are accurate representations. Rather, the more pressing goal is recognizing how best to integrate these amalgams into the existing canon, ensuring that successive generations remember at all.23

Responsible Holocaust Comic and Cartoon Representations Even before Maus, Art Spiegelman’s cartooning was sensationalist. His Garbage Pail Kids trading cards, drawn to parody the mid-1980s Cabbage Patch Kids craze, were a sardonic hit. Admittedly, tongue-in-cheek characters named “Adam Bomb” or “Fryin’ Brian,” drawn to parody things like nuclear war and capital punishment, are very different figures from those that he later drew in Maus. However, his unconventional method of cartooning serious issues presaged his Holocaust vision. Of course, Spiegelman is not the first writer/illustrator who recognized that cartoons provide artists a unique license for social memorialization.24 Mad Magazine’s satirical portrayals of 1950s American life gave rise to Robert Crumb’s 1960s “comix”25 movement, which in turn gained additional momentum during the seventies, embodied by Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor series.26 One commonality linking these artifacts is their presentation of sometimes-unsympathetic characters, frequently negotiating morally ambiguous situations, producing scenarios that deviated from the era’s prevailing “superhero” archetype.27 Will Eisner’s A Contract with God is another example of this unvarnished approach.28 Its gritty portrayals of early twentieth-century urban Jewish American life included two subsequent volumes, particularly A Life Force, that addressed the community’s reactions to the Holocaust.29 Maus complemented this trend toward realism in comic storytelling. Spiegelman’s approach also revised another dominant tradition, namely the custom by which art and literature shaped from the Holocaust aimed primarily to stir readers’ emotional responses. “I’ve always been put off a bit,” he explained, “by [Holocaust] material that is very high pitched, very histrionic […] so horribly strong” (Smith, 29). This approach, visible in works such as Elie Wiesel’s Night and Viktor Frankl’s Man Search for Meaning, reflects what one contemporary expert terms the “perils of empathy” when representing this past.30 In contrast, Maus modeled “a more subdued approach […] one that makes readers enter into the stories […] rather than aggressively coming out and grabbing your eyeballs” (Smith, 29). This is an important distinction. Spiegelman is trying to stoke his audiences’ cognitive, rather than their empathetic, connections to this history. His method steers ordinary people

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to contemplate what they might have done when facing such dangers and to take part in active (if mediated) self-exploration. Throughout Maus’ two volumes, Spiegelman’s tangles of enmeshed temporalities, recurring character (un)masking,31 and revealing of pasts in ways that are constitutive of the present reflect his aim to provoke readers’ mental acuity, instead of simply tugging at their emotions.32 Take for example his panels depicting prisoners’ use of human fat and gasoline to stoke carcass fires. Such goings-on were routine at AuschwitzBirkenau and Spiegelman is audacious to illustrate these truths. Significantly, even though he cartooned the violence, the technique does not confuse readers’ understandings. Although they encounter suffering mice, and not people, they can easily infer the historical facts. However, as Lawrence Langer noted more than twenty years ago, these sorts of frames also expose the “unavoidable limitations” of working with the Holocaust as a creative muse.33 Blackand-white-sketched mice did not burn at Auschwitz; innocent human Jews did. Indeed, following this intersection with Holocaust reality, Spiegelman’s comic/cartoon method reached its representational limits. Having arrived at the gritty truth about what the European Jewish destruction denoted, little more remained for him to show. A few pages later, he segues into his story’s final chapter. Notably, rather than using his closing frames to reinforce audiences’ connection to the traumas that his work unpacked, his ending is conspicuous for its effort to carve out space. Maus concludes with Artie’s character sitting on a cottage patio alongside his Christian-raised, French wife. Commenting on the night’s stillness, her character remarks, “It’s almost impossible to believe that Auschwitz ever happened.”34 As someone peripherally connected to this history, she is the one figure capable of voicing such quixotic sentiments. Her words convey unambiguous detachment, forecasting closure for the novel, but perhaps also closure for her husband’s inherited pain. Art’s emergence from Holocaust trauma, however, coincided with his broader metamorphosis from his parents’ unwitting victim, into their unintended oppressor (Schuldiner, 170). By Maus’ end, his homicidal reaction to mosquitos pestering his tranquility signified this transformation from powerlessness to potency. Via deadly blasts of repellent from an aerosol can, as the attacking insects succumbed to the poison, Artie affirmed the authenticity of his non-Holocaust-defined identity. Having eradicated the unwanted pests from his life, just as Nazis once did with Jews, Spiegelman and his wife depart the porch for the security of the cottage. Such movement signals readers that the time has similarly arrived for them to move on, from wistful Holocaust contemplations to those of petty contemporary annoyances, from gas chambers to spray cans, from piles of human bodies to piles of dead flies (Orvell, 125). Following Maus’ success, publishers released additional Holocaust graphic comic novels. However, these post-Maus works did not always equal their muse (Gonshak, 57). Take for example Joe Kubert’s Yossel: April 19, 1943 and Pascal Croci’s Auschwitz. Yossel is a self-referential counter-narrative,

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reimagining Kubert’s alter ego as a sixteen-year-old Warsaw Ghetto resistance fighter.35 Yossel was not Kubert’s first graphic comic about genocide. In 1996, he penned Fax from Sarajevo, recounting Bosnian ethnic cleansing during the 1990s Balkans War.36 Unwittingly, at times Yossel exposes the limitations of post-memorialization, revealing how secondary witnessing can also prematurely sanitize still-bitter pain (Gonshak, 70). Croci’s Auschwitz similarly struggled. As a non-Jew living in France, someone born fifteen years after World War II ended, Croci’s narrative relied exclusively on strangers’ testimony, secondary studies, and fictional works. The result was postmemory masquerading as lived memory, eliciting critics’ skepticism.37 However, while less effective than Maus, Kubert and Croci’s works are still responsible because their representations affirmed accurate truth. Yossel’s narrative appropriated Mordechai Anielewicz, the real-life Polish Jewish resistance leader (Gonshak, 69). Croci’s Auschwitz portrayed Sonderkommandos burning Jewish corpses, just as Spiegelman had, bolstering memory of this grim reality.38 Indeed, it is probably more the context, rather than the content, that ultimately determines if these interventions are harmless or hurtful. Artists possess creative authority to reposition facts and meaning, even those pertaining to the Holocaust. Terrence Des Pres argued over thirty years ago that such whimsy does not belittle the history’s seriousness, but rather demonstrates that laughter is the most humane part of suffering than history.39 This is where comics and cartoons possess a potentially palliative effect. Consider work from the Italian graphic artist AleXsandro Palombo’s 2015 series, The Simpsons-NEVER AGAIN. His various prints display Homer, Marge, and the kids arriving at Auschwitz’s gates; behind barbed wire with Stars of David sewn to their garb; emaciated, naked, as Homer lay dying (Fig. 29.2). The relics embody Palombo’s “humor chic” method, an approach in which he associates Western cartoon characters to unfunny things.40 The technique is something akin to a conversation starter, useful for broaching taboo but eternal topics. To promote breast cancer awareness, he made colorful prints of Betty Boop, Snow White, and the Little Princess with double mastectomy scars. In a similar vein, hoping to draw attention to the scourge of domestic violence, Palombo released a splashy series in which Olive Oil, Wilma Flintstone, and Wonder Woman have blackened eyes. The Simpsons-NEVER AGAIN aimed to modernize, not denigrate Holocaust representations. Palombo’s notion that images of beloved cartoon characters’ persecution would evoke greater contemporary sympathy then black-and-white photos of unknown victims may be less a matter of fault than it is fact. Of course, such license can also complicate. His 2010 No Racism, No Antisemitism series typifies this potential. Its prints imagine Anne Frank as fulsome, giddy, and sexualized. She also presents as potentially homicidal, pointing a rifle at a Louis Vuitton-clad Adolf Hitler. Audiences must individually decide what to make of this unusual menagerie.

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Fig. 29.2  The Simpsons-NEVER AGAIN (permission granted by artist, AleXsandro Palombo) (Note This depiction demonstrates how cartoon postmemory can modernize familiar Holocaust images)

Such avant-garde treatments, however, are not entirely capricious. Rather, they index long-standing scholarly discussions about representing Anne— more than seventy-five years past her death—exclusively through a constructed girlish persona (Fig. 29.3).41 Ultimately, the artist’s intention, gleaned through a study of their wider oeuvre, their online postings, and public statements about their work, best determines whether their interventions are responsible or irresponsible. Sticking with Anne Frank-themed artifacts, Philip Roth’s novella The Ghost Writer encapsulates this impulse. Published in 1979, coterminous with the emergence of Western Holocaust consciousness, The Ghost Writer is a blueprint for achieving cheeky but reverent remembrance. Roth’s absurdist contrivance—that Anne Frank survived the Holocaust and lived in the Berkshire Mountains—blazed paths to more probative questions about postwar Jews’ relationship to this memory.42 If provocative, such repackaging is not intrinsically distasteful. Instead, just as with The Simpsons-NEVER AGAIN, Roth’s device arguably enriched Anne’s memory for contemporary audiences. Especially, this flexibility may be necessary to attract and sustain fourth- and fifth-generation post-witnesses, those cohorts lacking any obvious connection to this past.43 Tweaking traditional depictions can also appeal to mature audiences, onlookers knowledgeable about the European Jewish destruction, but now preferring some distance.44

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Fig. 29.3  Anne Frank, No Racism, No Antisemitism (permission granted by artist, AleXsandro Palombo) (Note Empowering Anne: Cartoon postmemory reconfiguring Holocaust icons)

Irresponsible Holocaust Comic and Cartoon Representations In the closing scene to Inglourious Basterds (2009), director Quentin Tarantino cast his Adolf Hitler character in a French cinema, seated alongside a bevy of high-ranking Nazi officials. The inviting setting, however, was actually a trap. As Hitler and his henchmen unsuspectingly watched a new Reich Ministry of Propaganda film, their lurking assassins stealthily locked the exit doors. An Orwellian figure in the form of a woman’s outsized face soon appeared on the movie screen. She matter-of-factly informed the audience that their deaths were imminent. Moreover, she stated that their murders were Jewish retribution for Third Reich crimes against humanity. Via the spark of a cigarette butt to film reel, a pyre quickly engulfs the sealed building killing its occupants. Cinematically, the experience is remarkable. However, Tarantino’s fantastic ending also typifies what I term irresponsible Nazi/ Holocaust representation.45 For filmgoers possessing accurate knowledge of this past, his faux imagining was possibly droll or empowering.46 However, it also has the potential to offend, namely via its historical inversions rendering Jews as sadists and Nazis as victims.47 Indeed, for uninitiated audience members, the film’s sleek fictions present as subversive. Unlike the catalog of motion pictures that facilitate viewers’ intimacy to this past,48 Tarantino’s film is conspicuous because it offered audiences an escape from the era’s difficult realities, what Thomas Doherty terms the absence of any “real images of Nazism that crash the party and wrench

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the spectator back into the history.”49 That the film achieved financial success, amassing similar box office earnings as Schindler’s List, indicates that contemporary consumers welcome off-kilter Holocaust representations. This irresponsible style, in which cultural producers intersect with Nazi/Holocaust history more to exploit its perceived panache50 than to explore its ethical lessons to humankind, is particularly visible in contemporary American cartoon sitcoms. Since the late 1990s, writers for series like South Park, Family Guy, and Robot Chicken have plied a range of whimsical Nazi/Holocaust humor. Some skits lampoon Adolf Hitler and Nazism as buffoonish, akin to the Hogan’s Heroes “Sergeant Shultz” character and Charlie Chaplin’s iconic rendering in The Great Dictator. Others tweak dominant forms of Holocaust commemoration, with several skits deconstructing Anne Frank’s legacy.51 However, there are also instances where sitcom cartoons use their platforms to directly mock victims and peddle antisemitism. Especially when compared to the tumult that accompanied Maus’ publication, this far nastier style has conspicuously provoked little public outrage.52 Indeed, many of the writers contributing to the “Ha-Ha Holocaust”53 are of Jewish heritage. Israeli television stations broadcast this genre54 as do stations in the United States and across Europe.55 One thing is clear. We are now a long way past Maus. Ours is a post, postmemory age where truth is whatever persons individually decide it to be. This is an obviously toxic environment for Holocaust remembrance and some need exists to analyze how irresponsible cartooning can sanction growing public ambivalence toward this once solemn remembrance. A requisite for successful parodying is the injection of original commentary or representation to previously known accounts or images. Take for example, the film Austin Powers, which parodies Ian Fleming’s James Bond spy character. Revealing a bumbling and awkward secret agent, who nevertheless displays the same legendary sangfroid as his muse, pokes comic fun the so-called alpha male figure. Notably, Austin Powers spoofs its inspiration rather than savaging it. However, parodying does not require that fresh iterations that demonstrate reverence toward their fonts.56 Indeed, this diminishing process occurs in many Nazi/Holocaust skits aired on American cartoon sitcoms. South Park, produced since the late 1990s, is a high-value amplifier for such pertness. The show depicts the lives of fourth-grade schoolers living in a quiet Colorado town. One of the boys, Kyle Broflovski, is Jewish. Kyle struggles to negotiate his identity,57 a process irritated by the cascade of harassment he receives from his bigoted classmate, Eric Cartman. Although just a fourth-grader, Cartman is a hardened antisemite. Throughout the show’s run, writers have used his character to provoke conversations about ethno-racial intolerance, including Nazism and the Holocaust (Samuels, 100, 105). Indeed, the “Pinkeye” episode (1997) that aired during the show’s inaugural season directly parodied this history (Fig. 29.4). Its plot featured the Cartman character wearing an Adolf Hitler Halloween costume to school.58 Predictably, upon seeing the getup, school officials

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Fig. 29.4  Eric Cartman as Adolf Hitler (Note This character demonstrates how ­cartoon postmemory can complicate Holocaust remembrance)

recoiled. The principal ordered Cartman to detention, to watch an anti-Nazi documentary. Taking these steps were notably responsible. What destabilized this tradition, however, was Cartman’s flippant response to the educational film. Throughout the screening, still outfitted as Adolf Hitler, he expressed glee while watching columns of marching Nazis. At one point, South Park animators depicted Cartman drifting into a dream sequence where he became the Nazi Führer, standing atop a rostrum and screaming German-sounding gibberish. Following Sigmund Freud’s observations that comedy releases repressed hostility toward social norms (Samuels, 103), the Cartman-Hitler figure directly attacked 1990s post-Schindler’s List expectations for Holocaust piety.59 The imagining of an eight-year-old boy dressed as Hitler also complemented “carnivalesque” impulses, in line with Mikhail Bakhtin’s writings about anti-social humor and rebelliousness.60 None of this cartooning indexed denialism; rather, it signals purposeful spacing away from this inherited memory common among some third-generation Jewish Americans.61 South Park writers again used Cartman’s character to tweak responsible Holocaust remembrance in their Anne Frank parody. Ostensibly, the “Major Boobage” episode involved children huffing cat urine.62 To discourage these behaviors, the town’s authorities decided to deport all cats. Nothing overt about this trope suggested a looming Holocaust joke. However, when officials arrived at Cartman’s home, searching for cats, a doorway to genocide humor opened. The antisemitic youngster acted like a contemporary

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Miep Gies, frustrating the officers’ search. After it was safe, accompanied by the crescendo of plangent, minor-mode background music, Cartman climbed a staircase to his attic. He is hiding a cat. Before closing the attic’s latch, he slips the animal a book and says, “Here, write a diary.” The reallife Anne often began her diary entries by writing “Dear Kitty.” The show’s creative team may have selected this quip as a way to establish some factual relationship to her memory. Moreover, as Edward Portnoy notes, owing to Cartman’s inherent insensitivity, rendering him a rescuer appears to subvert his identity more than it does Anne’s legacy.63 To the degree that the episode deconstructs her persona, the barbs target her commemorative ubiquity more than her commemorative value, an insight that connects South Park’s bit to earlier fabrications like Philip Roth’s “Amy Bellette.”64 Additional cartoon sitcoms followed with their own irresponsible Anne Frank representations. Robot Chicken’s “Toy Meets Girl” (2005) finds Anne happy to live in an annex behind her father’s business. As she confides to her diary, “Everything I want is right here,” the camera pans across a bourgeois-appearing room to reveal her companion Peter van Daan reading from torah (Portnoy, 315). When the Nazis arrive, Anne is ferocious. Equipped with a full complement of Home Alone (1990) traps—paint can on rope and slippery ice puddles—she stymies the Storm Troopers. Robot Chicken writers close their fantasy with Anne and Peter, clad in modern couture, embracing atop an Amsterdam river crossing. Peter assures her, “You’re really something, Anne Frank.” “I’m just me,” she replies, tossing back her hair and curving her leg (Portnoy, 316). What renders this trope irresponsible is not its reimagining of Anne fighting back, or even her triumphing, as similar contemplations animate other Holocaust-themed postmemory fictions.65 Rather, the complete sanitization of her pain, not to mention the erasing of all others that suffered in the annex, is insubordinate. Robot Chicken viewers watching this skit, mostly all of whom are youthful and non-Jewish, can easily conclude from the portrayal that Nazism posed Jews more of an inconvenience than a mortal threat. The long-running animated cartoon series Family Guy also drew up a dissident Anne Frank skit.66 “If I’m Dyin’, I’m Lyin’” (2000) presents a blackand-white scene depicting the show’s patriarch, Peter Griffin, seated in an attic. He sits off to the side, looking at a group of people drawn as observant Jews. In the center is a girl with braided hair clutching a book-marked “Diary.” After setting up the joke’s premise, its punch line arrives via three interlocking images. First, viewers witness cartoon Nazis storming into the house. Next, the camera slowly pans upward to reveal those hiding in the attic. It is at the dramatic zenith that Family Guy writers unveil their final frame: Peter munching on a large bag of potato chips (Portnoy, 314). It is obvious the noise will alert the lurking soldiers. However, while the soonto-be victims stare at him in horror, Peter’s countenance is entirely blank. He continues to snack. The inanity of this scene, from Peter being in wartime

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Amsterdam, to the availability of potato chips, renders the clip so clearly at odds with reality that the show’s creative team might have concluded their rendition was too eccentric for serious analysis. However, if not purposeful, the writers’ sub-textual messaging indexes the precarious state of current-day American Holocaust remembrance. Selecting the lethargic, ignorant Peter Griffin character as the joke’s vehicle hints at Americans’ intellectual fatigue with this past. Clearly, Peter and those audience members that identify with him are incapable of responsible remembrance. They and their ilk are not going to accept this duty to memory.67 Such rejections, however, do not explain the show’s subsequent eagerness to lambaste the very memory they are intent on ignoring. Such brashness renders their cartooning distinctive, as Family Guy’s interventions often achieve Holocaust denigration, rather than satire. It is true that the show’s writers have devised a handful of Holocaust-themed parodies, notably their re-purposing of Peter as Amon Göth in “Family Goy” (2009).68 More frequently than not, however, their memorialization aims at ridiculing, rather than remembering, the murdered. In “Amish Guy” (2011), Peter learns about the opening of a new roller coaster, named Holocaust. “Wow!” he exclaimed to his friends, “I had heard about the Holocaust, but never believed it until right now.”69 In “Fighting Irish” (2015), an episode featuring Liam Neeson, the script closes with Peter declaring, “Oskar Schindler wasn’t real and neither was anything in that movie.”70 “Candy, Quahog, Marshmallow” (2016) perhaps best represents the shows’ searing of this once-hallowed past. One scene, set in a postwar German movie studio, has a film director ebulliently declaring, “Now that World War II is over, we can get back to writing comedies!” He hands his assistant a list. “Get me these comedy writers!” Looking over the sheet, the staffer shakes his head no. “They won’t be available.” “What?!” “This is so crazy,” the director exclaimed, “Get me my agent!” “Sorry,” the assistant replied, “He isn’t available either.” Dumbfounded, the director asks, “What happened?” Met by his assistant’s difficult stare, the executive eventually acknowledges, “Oh, yeah. I remember.”71 That Family Guy’s writers ultimately affirm Holocaust truth does not render their representations responsible. Acknowledging the genocide’s truth merely as a predicate for unpacking punch lines sustains the approach’s seditiousness. Notably, the show also consistently peddles antisemitic stereotypes. This was one reason that Fox Television executives initially declined to air “When You Wish upon a Weinstein” (2003), an episode in which Peter sings to the stars in want of a Jewish financial planner.72 Once the studio’s chiefs relented, however, Family Guy writers have regularly returned to this theme. “Brian Sings and Swings” (2006) draws a skit in which Peter is a Hasidic Jew, arriving at synagogue (Fig. 29.5). After loudly reminding congregants to cut coupons from their newspapers, he segued into an anecdote about how he recently “us-d” down a salesperson while shopping for a television. “Believe It or Not, Joe’s Walking on Air”

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Fig. 29.5  Peter Griffin as Hassidic Jew (Note This character demonstrates how cartoon postmemory humor can spurn Holocaust remembrance)

(2007) employs both Holocaust derision and generic antisemitism, namely writers’ use of Anne Frank as a descriptive adjective for describing a cheap and socially awkward Jewish woman. “Family Gay” (2009) returns to this theme, jabbing the Jewish Mort Goldman character. Over a series of scenes, viewers follow Mort in order to witness the explosion of a surreptitiously placed “wallet bomb.” Set to detonate once he reaches for his money, the joke [work] derives from the stereotype of Jewish thriftiness, as viewers witness Mort unharmed for several weeks thereafter. These sorts of representations may delight some audiences, but they also cause obvious damage. Especially problematic is when this American-created humor diffuses into societies with more troubled connections to antisemitism and the Holocaust. In current times, Internet platforms provide an unlikely nexus where Jewish American comedy writers in Hollywood unwittingly produce skits that satisfy bigots’ tastes globally. As was the case with Maus thirty years ago, the overriding question remains one of accountability, since artists cannot control how others will receive and reshape their work. Over time, as Walter Reich has observed, even “welcome” Holocaust narratives may present as too ritualized, hackneyed, and particularistic to sustain broad-based remembrance.73 Conversely, irresponsible tropes may attract outsized amounts of attention, supplanting reverential frameworks with their fictions.74 For the producers and consumers of Holocaust-themed comics and cartoons, the question of how best to represent or reconfigure this history remains an unsettled business, but a flourishing one nonetheless.

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Conclusion Adolf Hitler did not like comics/cartoons. Along with jazz music and various other forms of artistic modernity, he characterized the genre as “Jewish.”75 For their part, Jewish American wartime cartoonists did not like Adolf Hitler. In March 1941, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, the duo that created Captain America, published their debut issue with a front cover that displayed Cap punching the Nazi Führer in his face. In the series’ second issue, Cap’s trusty sidekick, Bucky Barnes, strikes both Hitler and his chief lieutenant, Hermann Göring.76 Such politicization was remarkable, especially since during spring 1941 the US government maintained full diplomatic ties with Germany. Unlike the contemporary Superman and Batman series, that cast their protagonists in opposition to generic warmongers, Captain America was explicit in its Nazi enemy.77 This was a risky approach. Reflecting on the decision after the war, Simon revealed that their pillorying—one story featured Cap stuffing Adolf Hitler into a trashcan—incensed segments of the domestic audience. Individuals sent the writers threatening letters. German American Bund members picketed their publisher’s offices.78 Despite the opposition, Captain America persisted with its anti-Nazi bent. During wartime, Cap’s most consistent opponent was “Red Skull,” a swastika-adorned-Nazi ghoul (Stevens, 36). The series also messaged various pro-Jewish sentiments that implicitly contradicted Hitler’s claim that Jews were a friendless people.79 The name of the scientist who developed the serum enabling Captain America’s powers is “Reinstein,” a wink to the famous German Jewish émigré.80 Cap’s symbols and costume also connected Jewish and American cultures. His red-white-blue round shield, adorned with a five-point star, recalled the “Shield of David” (Arnaudo, 32, 34). Similarly, the “A” on his head may have connoted both “America” and the Hebrew letter “aleph,” which activates the superhero/defender in the Jewish golem tradition.81 The “Steve Rogers” character, who eventually becomes Captain America, also exhibited “Jewishness,” something to which writers alluded in his pre-transformational fragility, vulnerability, and lower east side of Manhattan roots.82 That Dr. Reinstein’s elixir “melted” such qualities, enabling Steve Rogers to “become” Captain America, indexed cultural assimilation arguments that readers during the early 1940s would have recognized. However, if the Rogers character were indeed Jewish, not everyone from that era would have found his secularism plausible. Horace Kallen wrote extensively at the time about Jewish efforts to enter the non-Jewish American mainstream. Referencing his own alienation as a Princeton University faculty member, he disputed the idea that Jews could ever authentically shed their difference.83 Rather, Cap’s transformation fits Gunnar Myrdal’s creedal vision better, an imagining in which citizens fashioned secular identities by demonstrating reverence for democratic values.84 As a storytelling device, the decision not to explicitly reveal Cap’s precise heritage is clever. It is ultimately less important for readers to know Cap’s authentic ethnicity, then for them to

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surmise what that inheritance may be.85 Such ambiguity invited disparate nonProtestant audiences, e.g., Jews, Italians, Poles, Irishmen, and Slavs to read themselves into the stories. Many did just that, gladly relinquishing their heritage, in part or in full, for assimilation into the American melting pot.86 Captain America’s first issue sold out in less than a week. After its second issue approached the million-copy mark, the serial rivaled the sway of established heavyweights like Superman and Batman (Stevens, 35). This popularity represented more than just a fad. Captain America’s creative team could not have known it at the time, but their insistence that Nazism posed a collective threat to humankind, not just European Jews, presaged what later emerged as the Western liberator narrative.87 Of course, neither Captain America, nor the United States of America, actually ended the genocide. Nevertheless, honoring genocide victims’ trauma gradually became a central part of the postwar American experience.88 Speaking in 1979 at the nation’s first Holocaust Remembrance Day, President Jimmy Carter acknowledged this legacy. “Although the Holocaust took place in Europe,” he declared, “the event is of fundamental significance to Americans.”89 “We feel compelled to study the systematic destruction of the Jews so that we may prevent such enormities from occurring in the future” (Young, “America’s,” 73). This commitment to commemorate, whether expressed via presidential statement or cultural imagining, draws its inspiration from the same source. Underlying both expressions is the idea that opposing bigotry and minority persecutions—rejecting Nazi beliefs rather than receiving them—is part-and-parcel of the nation’s core values (Jewett and Lawrence, 2–3). First visible during wartime, the drive to represent this message through comics/cartoons received additional momentum during the late 1980s, embodied by graphic novels such as Maus, and the subsequent movement that emerged ultimately outstripped all efforts that preceded it.

Notes





1. Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History, vol. 1 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986). 2. When asked about this criticism, Spiegelman replied, “Well, Graham, if it was somebody else asking I’d tell them to go fuck themselves-frankly. Obviously, I wouldn’t put the kind of effort into this project if it was to trivialize anything.” As quoted in Graham Smith, “From Mickey to Maus: Recalling the Genocide Through Cartoon,” Oral History 15, no. 1 (1987): 30. 3.  During 2006–2008, the Modern Language Association indexed a dozen and a half texts published about Maus. As quoted in Andrew Loman, “That Mouse’s Shadow: The Canonization of Spiegelman’s Maus,” in The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts, eds. Paul Williams and James Lyons (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), 217. 4. “Spiegelman’s Maus is […] neither edifying nor heroic but mostly childish.” See Robert Faggen, “Loose Cannons: The Holocaust for Beginners,” Harvard Review 5 (1993): 26.

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5. Thomas Doherty, “Art Spiegelman’s Maus: Graphic Art and the Holocaust,” American Literature 68, no. 1 (1996): 71. 6.  Hillary Chute, “The Shadow of a Past Time: History and Graphic Representation in Maus,” Twentieth Century Literature 52, no. 2 (2006): 202, 205. 7. Walter Metz, “‘Show Me the Shoah!’: Generic Experience and Spectatorship in Popular Representations of the Holocaust,” Shofar 27, no. 1 (2008): 13. 8.  Marianne Hirsch, “Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Postmemory,” Discourse 15, no. 2 (1992–1993): 11. 9.  Michael Schuldiner, “The Second-Generation Holocaust Nonsurvivor: Third-Degree Metalepsis and Creative Block in Art Spiegelman’s Maus,” in Unfinalized Moments: Essays in the Development of Contemporary Jewish American Narrative, ed. Derek Parker Royal (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2011), 72. 10.  Rosemary Hathaway, “Reading Art Spiegelman’s Maus as Postmodern Ethnography,” Journal of Folklore Research 48, no. 3 (2011): 250. 11. As quoted in Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory After Auschwitz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 155. 12. Alan Rosen, “The Language of Survival: English as Metaphor in Spiegelman’s Maus,” Prooftexts 15, no. 3 (1995): 258. 13. Wendy Stallard Flory’s analysis of Dutch students encountering this history via graphic novel is instructive. See “The Search: A Graphic Narrative for Beginning to Teach About the Holocaust,” Shofar 29, no. 2 (2011): 34–49. 14. Lillian Kremer, Witness Through the Imagination: Jewish American Holocaust Literature (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989). 15. Geoffrey Hartman, The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), 8. 16.  Jackie Feldman, “Nationalizing Personal Trauma, Personalizing National Redemption: Performing Testimony at Auschwitz-Birkenau,” in Remembering Violence: Anthropological Perspectives on Intergenerational Transmission, eds. Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm (New York: Berghahn Book, 2009), 104. 17. Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 130. 18. Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began, vol. 2 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991), 16. 19. James Young, “The Holocaust as Vicarious Past: Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the Afterimages of History,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 3 (1998): 676–678. 20. Hasia Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence After the Holocaust, 1945–1962 (New York: New York University Press, 2009). 21. David Koepsell, “They Satirized My Prophet…Those Bastards!,” in South Park and Philosophy, ed. Robert Arp (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 132. 22. Jeffrey Scott Demsky and Liat Steir-Livny, “Holocaust Jokes on American and Israeli Situational Comedies: Signaling Positions of Memory Intimacy and Distance,” in The Languages of Humor: Verbal, Visual and Physical Humor, ed. Arie Sover (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 70.

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23. Sarah Pinnock, “Atrocity and Ambiguity: Recent Developments in Christian Holocaust Responses,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 75, no. 3 (2007): 516. 24. Jean-Paul Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books, trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), 63. 25. Some debate surrounds the term’s spelling. Miles Orvell broadly notes that the “x” connotes the relic’s differences from the period’s conventional comics. However, Roger Sabin narrows this interpretation, arguing the letter denotes the different types of adult themes unpacked in these series. See Miles Orvell, “Writing Posthistorically: Krazy Kat, Maus, and the Contemporary Fiction Cartoon,” American Literary History 4, no. 1 (1992): 122; Roger Sabin, Going Underground: Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art (London: Phaidon Press, 2001), 92–95. 26. Joseph Witek, Comics Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1989), 154. 27. Daniel Stein, Christina Meyer, and Micha Edlich, “American Comic Books and Graphic Novels,” Amerikastudien/American Studies 56, no. 4 (2011): 514. 28. Will Eisner, A Contract with God: And Other Tenement Stories (New York: Baronet, 1978). 29. Henry Gonshak, “Beyond Maus: Other Holocaust Graphic Novels,” Shofar 28, no. 1 (2009): 57. 30.  N. Ann Rider, “The Perils of Empathy: Holocaust Narratives, Cognitive Studies and the Politics of Sentiment,” Holocaust Studies 19, no. 3 (2013): 45. 31.  See Michael Chaney, “Animal Subjects of the Graphic Novel,” College Literature 38, no. 3 (2011): 132. 32.  Erin Heather McGlothlin, Second-Generation Holocaust Literature: Legacies of Survival and Perpetration (Rochester, NY: Camden House Publishing, 2006), 178. 33. Lawrence Langer, Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 75–76. 34. Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began, vol. 2 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991), 16. 35. Victoria Aarons, Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma, and Memory (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2020), 157. 36. Joe Kubert, Fax from Sarajevo (Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Comics, 1996). 37. Lazar Jovanović, “Representations of the Holocaust in Comics and Graphic Novels,” in Representation of the Holocaust in the Balkans in Arts and Media, ed. Nevena Daković (Belgrade: Diskurs, 2014), 107. 38. Pascal Croci, Auschwitz (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004), 84. 39.  Maurizio Viano, “Life Is Beautiful”: Reception, Allegory, and Holocaust Laughter,” Film Quarterly 53, no. 1 (1999): 34. 40. J. Post Staff, “Artists Draws The Simpsons as Jews in Auschwitz for Anniversary of Camp’s Liberation,” Jerusalem Post, January 27, 2015, www.jpost.com/ Diaspora/Artist-draws-The-Simpsons-as-Jews-in-Auschwitz-for-anniversaryof-camps-liberation-389169.

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41. Ilana Abramovitch, “Teaching Anne Frank in the United States,” in Anne Frank, Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory, eds. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jeffrey Shandler (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2012), 174. 42.  Shalom Auslander built out this premise, imagining Anne as an elderly and embittered shut-it, cloistered in a rural western New York cottage. See Hope: A Tragedy (New York: Riverhead Books, 2012), 72–73. 43.  Nina Siegal, “Anne Frank Who? Museums Combat Ignorance About the Holocaust,” New York Times, March 21, 2017, https://www.nytimes. com/2017/03/21/arts/design/anne-frank-house-anti-semitism.html?smid= tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0. 44. Peter Novick, “The American National Narrative of the Holocaust: There Isn’t Any,” New German Critique 90 (2003): 33. 45.  For fuller discussion of the film’s intention and impact, see Stella Setka, “Bastardized History: How Inglourious Basterds Breaks Through American Screen Memory,” Jewish Film and New Media 3, no. 2 (2015): 141–169. 46.  Ben Walters, “Debating Inglourious Basterds,” Film Quarterly 63, no. 2 (2009): 21. 47. Stefan Grissmann, “The Good Bad Nazi,” Film Comment 45, no. 4 (2009): 34–35. 48. James Jordan, From Nuremberg to Hollywood: The Holocaust and the Courtroom in American Fictive Film (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2016), 8–10; Lawrence Baron, Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 6. 49. Thomas Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–39 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 373. 50.  Angela Neustatter, “The Enduring Appeal of Nazi Chic,” New Statesman, July 24, 2008, https://www.newstatesman.com/society/2008/07/naziuniforms-black-fashion. 51. For related discussions, see Otto Baruch Stier, Holocaust Icons: Symbolizing the Shoah in History and Memory (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 102–119. 52.  Rob Eshman, “Seth MacFarlane: Not an Anti-Semite,” Jewish Journal, February 25, 2013, http://www.jewishjournal.com/rob_eshman/article/ seth_macfarlane_not_an_anti_semite/. 53.  Aviva Atlani, “The Ha-Ha Holocaust: Exploring Levity Amidst the Ruins and Beyond in Testimony, Literature and Film” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Western Ontario, 2014). 54. Liat Steir-Livny, “Holocaust Humor, Satire, and Parody on Israeli Television,” Jewish Film and New Media 3, no. 2 (2015): 195–221. 55.  Jeffrey Demsky, “Searching for Humor in Dehumanization: American Situational Comedies, the Internet, and the Globalization of Holocaust Parodies,” in Analysing Language & Humor in Online Discourse, ed. Rotimi Taiwo (Hershey, PA: IGI Publishing, 2016), 12. 56. Jeffrey Weinstock, “Simpsons Did It: South Park as Differential Signifier,” in Taking South Park Seriously, ed. Jeffrey Weinstock (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 93.

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57. For fuller analysis, see Robert Samuels, “Freud Goes to South Park: Teaching Against Postmodern Prejudices and Equal Opportunity Hatred,” in ed. Weinstock, Taking, 103. 58.  Pinkeye, Animation, Comedy, directed by Matt Stone and Trey Parker (1997; Los Angeles: Braniff/Viacom), Television. 59. Matthew Boswell, Holocaust Impiety: In Literature, Popular Music and Film (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 7–9. 60.  Nehama Aschkenasy, “Reading Ruth Through a Bakhtinian Lens: The Carnivalesque in a Biblical Tale,” Journal of Biblical Literature 126, no. 3 (2007): 440. 61. This distancing is not universal. Victoria Aarons and Alan Berger find that the passage of time has encouraged other third-generation post-witnesses to sustain more diligently Holocaust memory. See Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, and Memory (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017). 62.  Major Boobage, Animation, Comedy, directed by Trey Parker (2008; Los Angeles: South Park Digital Studios/Viacom), Television. 63.  Edward Portnoy, “Anne Frank on Crank: Comic Anxieties,” in eds. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Shandler, Anne, 314. 64. For Anne as a protean Holocaust icon, see Jon Stratton, Jewish Identity in Western Pop Culture: The Holocaust and Trauma Through Modernity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 123. 65. See, for example, Leon Uris, Mila 18 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961); Ian MacMillan, Village of a Million Spirits: A Novel of the Treblinka Uprising (New York: Penguin Books, 2000); Uri Orlev, The Man from the Other Side (New York: Penguin, 1989); and Daniel Torday, The Last Flight of Poxl West (New York: Picador and St. Martin’s Press, 2016). 66.  If I’m Dyin’ I’m Lyin’, Animation, Comedy, directed by Swinton Scott III (2000; Los Angeles: Fuzzy Door Productions/20th Century Fox Television), Television. 67. For related discussions, see Jon Stratton, “Jews, Punk, and the Holocaust: From the Velvet Underground to the Ramones: The Jewish American Story,” Popular Music 24, no. 1 (2005): 84. 68. Family Goy, Animation, Comedy, directed by James Purdum (2008; Los Angeles: Fuzzy Door Productions/20th Century Fox Television), Television. 69.  Amish Guy, Animation, Comedy, directed by John Holmquist and Peter Shin (2011; Los Angeles: Fuzzy Door Productions/20th Century Fox Television), Television. 70.  Fighting Irish, Animation, Comedy, directed by Brian Iles and Dominic Bianchi (2015; Los Angeles: Fuzzy Door Productions/20th Century Fox Television), Television. 71. Candy, Quahog Marshmallow, Animation, Comedy, directed by Joseph Lee and Dominic Bianchi (2016; Los Angeles: Fuzzy Door Productions/20th Century Fox Television), Television. 72. Cydney Tune and Jenna Leavitt, “Family Guy Creators’ Fair Use Wish Comes True,” Entertainment and Sports Lawyer 27, no. 2 (2009): 16. 73.  Walter Reich, “Unwelcome Narratives: Listening to Suppressed Themes in American Holocaust Testimonies,” Poetics Today 27, no. 2 (2006): 463–472.

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74. Gavriel Rosenfeld, Hi Hitler!: How the Nazi Past Is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 6. 75. Amy Hungerford, The Holocaust of Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 206. 76.  J. Richard Stevens, Captain America, Masculinity, and Violence (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2015), 36. 77.  Christopher Murray, “Propaganda: The Pleasures of Persuasion in Captain America,” in Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods, eds. Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith (New York: Routledge, 2012), 137. 78. Joe Simon and Jim Simon, The Comic Book Makers (Lebanon, NJ: Vanguard Productions, 2003), 45. 79. Marco Arnaudo, The Myth of the Superhero, trans. Jamie Richards (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 34; Murray, “Propaganda,” 137. 80. Jason Dittmer, Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero: Metaphors, Narratives, and Geopolitics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press 2013), 66. 81. Simcha Weinstein, Up, Up, and Oy Vey!: How Jewish History, Culture and Values Shaped the Comic Book Superhero (Baltimore: Leviathan Press, 2006), 50–51. 82. Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence, Captain America and the Crusade Against Evil (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), 32. 83.  Noam Pianko, “The True Liberalism of Zionism: Horace Kallen, Jewish Nationalism, and the Limits of American Pluralism,” American Jewish History 9, no. 4 (2008): 306. 84. Charles P. Kindleberger, “Gunnar Myrdal, 1898–1987,” Scandinavian Journal of Economics 89, no. 4 (1987): 397. 85. Similar mystery likewise surrounds the Superman origin story, with some arguing that the character is “legitimately understood” as Jewish. See Arnaudo, Myth, 30–31. 86. For fuller analysis, see Lawrence Baron, “X-Men as J-Men: The Jewish Subtext of a Comic Book Movie,” Shofar 22, no. 1 (2003): 45–48. 87. Shaul Magid, “The Holocaust and Jewish Identity in America: Memory, the Unique, and the Universal,” Jewish Social Studies 18, no. 2 (2012): 107. 88. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 85. 89. As quoted in James Young, “America’s Holocaust: Memory and the Politics of Identity,” in The Americanization of the Holocaust, ed. Hilene Flanzbaum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 72.

Bibliography Aarons, Victoria, and Alan Berger. Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, and Memory. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017. Arnaudo, Marco. The Myth of the Superhero. Translated by Jamie Richards. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Arp, Robert. South Park and Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007.

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Atlani, Aviva. “The Ha-Ha Holocaust: Exploring Levity Amidst the Ruins and Beyond in Testimony, Literature and Film.” Ph.D. thesis, University of Western Ontario, 2014. Baron, Lawrence. Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. ———. “X-Men as J-Men: The Jewish Subtext of a Comic Book Movie.” Shofar 22, no. 1 (2003): 44–52. Boswell, Matthew. Holocaust Impiety: In Literature, Popular Music and Film. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Brenner, Rachel. “Holocaust Culture in Perspective: Evading the Holocaust Story and Its Legacy of Responsibility.” Dapim 26, no. 1 (2012): 125–150. Chaney, Michael. “Animal Subjects of the Graphic Novel.” College Literature 38, no. 3 (2011): 129–149. Chute, Hillary. “The Shadow of a Past Time”: History and Graphic Representation in Maus.” Twentieth Century Literature 52, no. 2 (2006): 199–230. Daković, Nevena. Representation of the Holocaust in the Balkans in Arts and Media. Belgrade: Diskurs, 2014. Diner, Hasia. We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence After the Holocaust, 1945–1962. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Dittmer, Jason. Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero: Metaphors, Narratives, and Geopolitics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press 2013. Doherty, Thomas. Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–39. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Duncan, Randy, and Matthew J. Smith. Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods. New York: Routledge, 2012. Flanzbaum, Hilene. The Americanization of the Holocaust. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Flory, Wendy. “The Search: A Graphic Narrative for Beginning to Teach About the Holocaust.” Shofar 29, no. 2 (2011): 34–49. Gabilliet, Jean-Paul. Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2010. Gonshak, Henry. “Beyond Maus: Other Holocaust Graphic Novels.” Shofar 28, no. 1 (2009): 55–79. Hirsch, Marianne. “Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Postmemory.” Discourse 15, no. 2 (1992–1993): 3–30. Hungerford, Amy. The Holocaust of Texts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Jewett, Robert, and John Shelton Lawrence. Captain America and the Crusade Against Evil. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002. Jordan, James. From Nuremberg to Hollywood: The Holocaust and the Courtroom in American Fictive Film. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2016. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, and Jeffrey Shandler. Anne Frank, Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2012. LaCapra, Dominick. History and Memory After Auschwitz. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.

550  J. S. DEMSKY Langer, Lawrence. Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Levine, Michael. “Necessary Stains: Spiegelman’s MAUS and the Bleeding of History.” American Imago 59, no. 3 (2002): 317–342. Magid, Shaul. “The Holocaust and Jewish Identity in America: Memory, the Unique, and the Universal.” Jewish Social Studies 18, no. 2 (2012): 100–135. McGlothlin, Erin. Second-Generation Holocaust Literature: Legacies of Survival and Perpetration. Rochester, NY: Camden House Publishing, 2006. Metz, Walter. “‘Show Me the Shoah!’: Generic Experience and Spectatorship in Popular Representations of the Holocaust.” Shofar 27, no. 1 (2008): 16–35. Novick, Peter. “The American National Narrative of the Holocaust: There Isn’t Any.” New German Critique 90 (2003): 27–35. ———. The Holocaust in American Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. Orvell, Miles. “Writing Posthistorically: Krazy Kat, Maus, and the Contemporary Fiction Cartoon.” American Literary History 4, no. 1 (1992): 110–128. Pinnock, Sarah. “Atrocity and Ambiguity: Recent Developments in Christian Holocaust Responses.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 75, no. 3 (2007): 499–523. Rider, Ann. “The Perils of Empathy: Holocaust Narratives, Cognitive Studies and the Politics of Sentiment.” Holocaust Studies 19, no. 3 (2013): 43–72. Rosen, Alan. “The Language of Survival: English as Metaphor in Spiegelman’s Maus.” Prooftexts 15, no. 3 (1995): 249–262. Rosenfeld, Gavriel. Hi Hitler!: How the Nazi Past Is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Royal, Derek. Unfinalized Moments: Essays in the Development of Contemporary Jewish American Narrative. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2011. Sabin, Roger. Going Underground: Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art. London: Phaidon Press, 2001. Setka, Stella. “Bastardized History: How Inglourious Basterds Breaks Through American Screen Memory.” Jewish Film and New Media 3, no. 2 (2015): 141–169. Smith, Graham. “From Mickey to Maus: Recalling the Genocide Through Cartoon.” Oral History 15, no. 1 (1987): 26–34. Sover, Arie. The Languages of Humor: Verbal, Visual and Physical Humor. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History, vol. 1. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986. ———. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began, vol. 2. New York: Pantheon Books, 1991. Stein, Daniel, Christina Meyer, and Micha Edlich. “American Comic Books and Graphic Novels.” Amerikastudien/American Studies 56, no. 4 (2011): 511–529. Steir-Livny, Liat. “Holocaust Humor, Satire, and Parody on Israeli Television.” Jewish Film and New Media 3, no. 2 (2015): 195–221. Stevens, Richard. Captain America, Masculinity, and Violence. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2015. Stier, Otto Baruch. Holocaust Icons: Symbolizing the Shoah in History and Memory. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015. Stratton, Jon. Jewish Identity in Western Pop Culture: The Holocaust and Trauma Through Modernity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

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Taiwo, Rotimi. Analysing Language & Humor in Online Discourse. Hershey, PA: IGI Publishing, 2016. Weinstein, Simcha. Up, Up, and Oy Vey!: How Jewish History, Culture and Values Shaped the Comic Book Superhero. Baltimore: Leviathan Press, 2006. Weinstock, Jeffrey. Taking South Park Seriously. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008. Williams, Paul, and James Lyons. The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010. Witek, Joseph. Comics Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989. Young, James. “America’s Holocaust: Memory and the Politics of Identity.” In The Americanization of the Holocaust, ed. Hilene Flanzbaum, 68–82. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. ———. “The Holocaust as Vicarious Past: Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the Afterimages of History.” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 3 (1998): 666–699.

CHAPTER 30

Claustrophobic in the Gaps of Others: Affective Investments from the Queer Margins Golan Moskowitz

With World War II over seventy years behind us, to what extent will Holocaust memory be relegated to the removal of the history book, risking complacency or forgetting? Survivors’ immanent disappearance does not necessitate the total loss of affectively salient, dedicated commitments to their memories. Focusing mainly on grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, whom I first position in the context of second-generation studies, the following essay examines creative responses to tropes of (e)strange(d) affect by marginal individuals within post-Holocaust families. By this, I mean experiences of emotional displacement, strain, and isolation in relation to family ties and historical trauma, as well as reverberating feelings regarding one’s place in wider social contexts. I situate these responses in relation to sociological discourse about the increasingly individual and familial character of non-Orthodox Judaism in the twenty-first century, arguing that these perspectives offer routes for maintaining the salience of Jewish identity in secular individualist contexts. In addition to analyses of visual art and popular culture, including Jill Soloway’s Transparent (2014–2019), my own notyet-published graphic narrative “Part Hole” (2009), and a performance by drag artist Mini Horrorwitz (2017), I draw on oral histories I collected from grandchildren of survivors in 2011–2012 for a study of grandsons’ gendered relationships with Holocaust heritage.1 As I will argue, contemporary queer perspectives, through their estranged and creative relationships with normative time and social bonds, help maintain embodied, affective investments in family Holocaust memories and legacies. G. Moskowitz (*)  University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_30

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554  G. MOSKOWITZ

Positioning Survivors’ Descendants At the present historical moment in which non-Orthodox American Jewishness is increasingly a function of individual narratives negotiated privately and often beyond the traditional institutions of synagogues, ­ federations, or even endogamous marriages, communal anxieties build ­ about Jewish continuity. Though the Holocaust has become a malleable symbol across Jewish identities, studies suggest that most contemporary Jewish American emerging adults lack embodied connections to Holocaust memory. Cohen and Eisen (2001) noted that almost all of their thirdgeneration interviewees “have been touched by the Holocaust directly or indirectly, but many […] see no specifically Jewish meaning in the event, no significance to their lives as Jews, and no lessons for Jewish history.”2 Twothirds of their interviewees agreed with the statement “my being Jewish doesn’t make me any different from other Americans.” Young Jewish Americans still formulate and draw from the Holocaust in ways that coalesce with American historical stances as liberators and harbingers of social equality, but they do not generally view it as a defining aspect of their Jewishness. Forty percent of Debra Kaufman’s seventy Jewish emerging adult interviews (2010) did not even mention the Holocaust when relaying their Jewish identity narratives (until prompted to do so at the interview’s conclusion), and the other sixty percent treated the Holocaust as a kind of tangential springboard to discuss universalism, interest in Israel, or family genealogy.3 Characterizations of the “third generation”—survivors’ grandchildren— are disparate and inconclusive. Some clinical accounts focus on the grandchildren’s susceptibility to post-traumatic effects. Numerous journalistic accounts tout the occupational and personal successes of this generation as a culminating triumph over grandparents’ traumas and parents’ residual hardships. Recent epigenetic studies strengthen the premise that trauma alters genetic expression across generations, supporting the idea of intergenerational transmission. For some grandchildren of survivors, the Holocaust occupies the central, defining component of their (Jewish) identity. Other grandchildren are not interested in thinking about the Holocaust and do not identify with the experiences of their surviving grandparents; this may derive from the fact that connecting with a horrific recent past and its subsequent effects on the family may complicate rather than strengthen one’s ability to feel comfortable in the wider society. Moreover, many grandchildren of survivors enjoy social privilege and cannot easily relate to their grandparents’ experiences. Supporting this trend, from among the third-generation oral histories I collected, a twenty-four-year-old whom I’ll call Gabe stated, I could never really empathize with anything close to what [my grandparents] went through. I didn’t even think about that as a question. […] I didn’t dwell on it […] the only time [my brother and I have] had this kind of conversation

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was in terms of our generation marrying Jewish girls, and in terms of getting at Hitler for—for clearing the Jewish population. It’s—it’s as simple as that […] they wouldn’t disown me if I didn’t, but it’s something that […] I take very seriously.

Gabe’s survivor grandparents grew up comfortably within a large community of other survivors after the war. Though Gabe knew about the Holocaust for as long as he could remember, he expressed little to no internal conflict about its effects on his own life. In fact, when discussing potential values of third-generation identity, he generalized about the American value of equality: “[Post-Holocaust identity] is not something I kind of go out and say [about myself], but that being said, […] looking at America, and looking at our country that accepted my family, and kind of treated everybody equally when they came, that’s kind of something that I felt very strong about.” Being a grandson of survivors reinforced Gabe’s American pride and influenced him toward endogamy, but throughout our conversation he was averse to envisioning or thinking about the actual events of the Holocaust. A sports fan employed by a defense contractor in a large city, Gabe followed performative norms of middle-class American masculinity, avoiding the vulnerability that would be provoked by thinking deeply about a heritage of Holocaust survival. What, then, characterizes those contemporary young Jews who do emotionally experience the Holocaust legacy as central to their identity? It is not uncommon that only one child per generation in a post-Holocaust family takes on the weighty task of internalizing and investing in the traumatic family history. Studying the second generation, William B. Helmreich (1992) noted that “In a few families the reactions varied from one sibling to the next, with one child very curious, almost obsessively so, and another not interested in the least.”4 Second-generation writer Helen Epstein (1979) recounted how, while she felt entranced by and almost addicted to her parents’ traumatic stories, her brother virtually shut his ears to them.5 Differing family structures, self-conceptions, and degrees of social enfranchisement affect the circumstances of one’s coming of age, coloring the ways in which young adults relate to their family heritage. Causation aside, characteristics generally correlated with internalizing an embodied relationship to Holocaust memory include: nightmares about being captured, separation anxieties, general anxieties, aggression and interpersonal difficulties, alienation and identity conflicts, dispositional intensity and seriousness, deep levels of gratitude, heightened sensitivity and empathy, purposefulness and awareness of political inequalities, strong but overwhelming family relationships (i.e. overprotectiveness), parent-child role reversals and problems individuating, a heightened sense of ethnic self-consciousness, preoccupations with food and other resources, and motivation to reach high levels of success.6 Studying the third generation, journalist Allison Nazarian found that many “reported feeling traumatized or powerless about the Holocaust, especially before adulthood. Other [grandchildren of survivors] connected the

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Holocaust with recurring nightmares, relationship difficulties and body-­ related disorders — for themselves and their families.”7 For third-generation writer Erika Dreifus, the Holocaust, as received through private family rhythms, took center stage in her self-formation. Dreifus’ Holocaust- and family-inspired short story collection, Quiet Americans (2011), attracted critical attention and praise. In a paper delivered at a 2003 conference at the Imperial War Museum in London, she explained that her writing, based on history and family narrative recollection, helped her work through a lifelong fixation on her grandparents’ losses. She recounted “the recurring nightmare I hadn’t shared, of the SS soldiers storming into my suburban classroom, tearing me from my desk and isolating me – the only Jewish student – to be taken away in a big, black truck.”8 For Dreifus, as for others whose families’ physical and emotional worlds were altered by the Holocaust, Jewishness, even in a contemporary American context that paints most Jews as “White” and successful, is a dangerous marking of “other” and something that continues to be “worked through” privately or within the family. Jewishness as an embodied legacy of targeted difference, endurance, survival, and family triumph characterizes a certain perception of “chosenness” to which some contemporary Jews relate. Individual experiences of alienation, internal conflict, or subordination may offer some of the most salient affective pathways for the endurance of survivors’ histories and memories. Jewish experiences of “otherness” and creative responses to those experiences help maintain physical and emotional ties to memories sometimes perceived as slipping away. Those descendants of survivors who maintain affective connections to their grandparents’ wartime experiences resist sanitized notions that paint survivors as saintly martyrs and uncritically forget the actual weight and specific textures of the difficulties they faced. Instead, such descendants remember survivors’ physical and emotional hardships as displaced people rebuilding their lives amidst trauma, loss, and xenophobia. Before survivors became globally revered public speakers, they often experienced profound alienation and loneliness in their postwar contexts. Helmreich and others have written poignantly about the ways in which survivors struggled to adjust to American and Jewish American society, which emphasized values of social normalcy, working to solidify Jewish acceptance and eliminate antisemitism in the 1940s. Survivor refugees, who had been selected to die by virtue of their Jewishness, regardless of the levels to which they previously practiced Judaism or assimilated in Europe, stood out yet again in mid-century America as foreign reminders of loss and need. According to Mark Anderson, “Camp survivors and European Jews who had found refuge in the United States were largely unwelcome reminders of the past in a society focused on Cold War issues of nuclear proliferation and the spread of communism.”9 Jonathan Sarna writes that in the immediate postwar years “refugees stood almost alone in this determination to memorialize what they had lost,” and the Jewish Publication Society published no more than a single book about the Holocaust between 1950 and 1965.10 Henry Greenspan describes the

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stigmatization and suppression of survivor identity that existed until 1970: “Before survivors became ‘the survivors’ they were known by other names. For many years in this country they were ‘the refugees,’ ‘the greeners’ (greenhorns), or simply ‘the ones who were there.’ […T]hey evoked a shifting combination of pity, fear, revulsion, and guilt. In general, they were isolated and avoided.” He refers to Elie Wiesel’s characterization, in which “People welcomed them with tears and sobs, then turned away,” treating them as “sick and needy relatives. Or else as specimens to be observed and to be kept apart from the rest of society by invisible barbed wire. They were disturbing misfits who deserved charity, but nothing else.”11 The fact that eighty percent of survivors in the U.S. married other survivors reflects, in addition to shared languages and encounters in DP camps, their sense of internalized difference within the American Jewish community (Helmreich, Against All Odds, 121). Greenspan draws on survivor interviews that express the social pressure to silence their nightmarish memories in order to fit in and gain acceptance in an individualistic U.S. that favored pleasant normalcy and a philosophy of “everyone-for-himself.” Once employed and assimilated, Greenspan writes, “most discovered that they were still isolated.” One survivor explains, “I was, as they say, ‘part of the mainstream.’ But I was not in the mainstream. Because I was very much alone. Very much” (“Imagining Survivors,” 53–55). Helen Epstein, a journalist and child of survivors, grew up perceiving the American Jewish community as being at odds with the seriousness of her family’s experience of a harder “real life.” She paints her family as a socially inassimilable “island,” without emotional outlets, too severe for the bland, affected synagogue, where she interacted with socially privileged, ignorant children and where polite people suffered her father’s challenging, but heartfelt stories (Children of the Holocaust, 155–157). Mirroring previous waves of Jewish immigration in which disenfranchised immigrant parents raised children toward socioeconomic privilege but expressed subsequent ambivalence about their children’s success, survivor families’ perceptions of American Jews are striking in their disdain for a “toocomfortable” lifestyle. Like those Americans born to immigrants in the early twentieth century, survivors’ children also often felt ashamed of their refugee parents, whose unpleasant memories and foreign mannerisms set them apart in a postwar culture that prized optimism, decorum, and social conformity. Yet they also often felt protective of their parents, attuned to their immense pain and deep wounds. Shmotkin et al. (2011) characterize some children of survivors as conflicted by the mixed messages of their parents, who, on the one hand, upheld their children as treasured extensions of endangered life, and on the other hand, due to the parents’ own traumas, withheld from these children the independence or emotional modeling necessary for their children to feel consistently secure. Internal representations and the ways in which they conflict with lived experience become sources of vulnerability, especially during stressful events, but they also become sources of connection and emotional solidarity with (grand)parents who share them. Survivors’ offspring may

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inherit internalized contradictions between normative self-presentation and hypersensitive inner worlds, the latter characterized by fragile self-perceptions, rigid world assumptions, and emotional preoccupations. Many children of survivors narrate an inner conflict between the desire to understand their parents and the inability to know how to survive the erosion of boundaries and the emotional overwhelm conjured by parents’ memories. Internalizing parents’ unfinished mourning could impede individuation, because achieving independence sometimes felt like abandoning the fragile parent, especially for a child designated by a parent as a “memorial candle,” the parent’s replacement for murdered relatives.12 As children, the second generation often struggled to separate their own subjectivities from their parents’. One child of survivors describes a continuous inability to know “how and where to establish the appropriate boundaries that keep me from feeling like I’m being swallowed up by [my parents’] incredible emotional neediness.”13 Narratives of coming into Holocaust knowledge intersect meaningfully with coming-of-age stories and memories, merging the revelations of difficult family history with one’s initiation into adulthood, including the trappings of gender and sexuality. Grandchildren of survivors vary in terms of the affective traces they exhibit of grandparents’ social otherness, endangerment, hypersensitivity, or numbness. Individual narratives of post-Holocaust identity are differently influenced by the endurance of trauma in family relationships and by varying experiences of social belonging or isolation in one’s contemporary environments. In a study of third-generation Israelis whose parents had not successfully worked through their Holocaust heritage, Dan Bar-On (1995) noted the grandchildren’s “concern about finding a place in society, their feeling of being an outsider, their difficulty in experiencing reality.”14 These trends mirror those found in Russell’s (1974) clinical study of survivors’ children, which highlighted identity struggles, family atmospheres of “depression, of apathy, gloom and emptiness,” and a lack of “real commitment to, or deep involvement in, the real world” (cited in Tauber, “Second-Generation Effects of the Nazi Holocaust”). The sociological concept of reference group theory holds that “contact and participation with members of the out-group, the larger community, cannot be successfully and satisfactorily made until contact and identification are made with the in-group.” Using this theory, Tauber (1980) discussed how the personal conflict, insecurity, and alienation of those descendants who did not feel grounded or represented in their own reference group (whether the family, a community of Holocaust descendants, or a larger Jewish community) translated to anxiety about being accepted in the dominant society. As Tauber writes, “Stress, tension and strain are the result. To make an adjustment, the individual has to belong fully to his own in-group. Otherwise, the individual is never able to develop a clear sense of who he is, who his family is, or what is happening in his life” (cited in Tauber, “Second-Generation Effects of the Nazi Holocaust,” 20–22).

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Affect-rooted investments in Holocaust heritage, strengthened by feelings of not belonging or coherently existing in the present, coalesce with contemporary American notions of religion as rooted in personal feeling, as well as with traditional Jewish notions of particularity, chosenness, and diaspora. Cohen and Eisen (2001) describe twenty-first-century Jewish American identity as increasingly “bound up in key family relationships and rites of passage, nourished by a stock of memories which are marked by passion and ambivalence.” The authors declare, “Personal journeys and experiences, especially if shared with other family members, are the stuff out of which their Judaism is now imagined and enacted, a Judaism constructed and performed one individual at a time.” This is the legacy, suggest Cohen and Eisen, of the children of Jewish immigrants, who reinterpreted the Jewish theological “doctrine of chosenness” between 1925 and 1950: Jews who were at home in America, or wished to be, could not affirm either to themselves or to others that they were essentially ‘strangers in a strange land,’ exiles awaiting a return to Palestine, or God’s one true chosen people. America was, after all, a society embarked on a providential mission involving all humanity. […] Shorn of its theological base, chosenness seemed ethnic chauvinism. Jews were not comfortable with that (“The Sovereign Self”).

Thus, at least in the U.S., notions of a collective Jewish particularity were often reconfigured as individual and familial particularities—the “strangeness” or “uniqueness” of the self and of one’s family. However, in highly acculturated, socially enfranchised families that have worked through the traumatic past, the self and the family are less likely to feel strange, unlike families fractured by silence, social stigma, or unprocessed trauma. Notions of self and family take the foreground and feel strange, for example, in the work of Pulitzer Prize-winning, second-generation comics artist Art Spiegelman, who emphasizes the intergenerational transmission of an affectively jarring Holocaust heritage. In a 2008 comic strip, Spiegelman depicts himself passing down a treasure chest to his young son, Dash. The chest opens to reveal a fire-breathing dragon wearing a concentration camp uniform cap and charging after Dash, as Spiegelman proclaims, “It’s magical! It makes you feel guilty all the time, like you have no right to be alive! And – just think! – someday you’ll be able to pass it on to your son!”15 Spiegelman’s family history, as conveyed in Maus, foregrounds his own unprocessed pain brought on by his survivor mother’s suicide, which took place during Spiegelman’s twenties, as well as his survivor father Vladek’s decision to burn all of his late wife’s papers—a decision that leads Spiegelman to call Vladek “murderer,” perpetuating the irresolution of familial silence and denial that stands in ­ the way of the artist’s relational closure with his parents and their traumatic memories.16

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Feeling Strange David Grossman has claimed that a writer is someone who feels claustrophobic in the words of others.17 In the following analysis, I explore ways in which some descendants of survivors, and artistic representations of such figures, respond to having grown within the secrets and unspoken suffering of others. Twenty-first-century representations in literature, performance art, and popular culture have drawn public attention to Holocaust legacies of emotional removal, stigma, and alienation. Post-traumatic afterlives and secret or obstructed family pasts may interact meaningfully and generatively with contemporary experiences of social otherness. Individuals make sense of their identities in narrative contexts. Embodied experiences of alienation or endangerment, as feature prominently in queer narratives, may take on significant meaning for individuals situated within family histories dominated by trauma, loss, resistance, and survival. Creative connections between family history and contemporary experiences may run the risk of trivializing or skewing the former, but they may also work to preserve salient investments in Holocaust memory and to diffuse emotional ­constraints in the present. As Dan Bar-On writes, The working-through process means the chance to create a dialogue, to achieve a kind of balance, between memories of life and death, between remembering the past and creating a life in the present. Its aim is not to abolish memory but to weaken its control, enabling the experience of pleasure in the present. The way to reduce fear and resume hope is to accept both of them as legitimate ­feelings. (Fear and Hope, 349)

Narrative “working through” aims to validate the effects of a painful family history as well as to understand them as non-threatening to a vital and cohesive self in the present. The impact of this work both stabilizes subjectivity, fostering a functional subject, and reinforces an embodied meaning derived from its legacy of endangerment. This phenomenon resounds in Amy Hungerford’s analysis of a particular scene in Maus. When Art, the survivor’s emotionally destabilized son, seeks to organize his feelings in therapy, “the narrative connection is, in turn, imagined as a bodily one.”18 Suffering writers’ block and depression, he appears as a human wearing a mouse mask. Only by reconstructing his identity through narrative in therapy is his head restored to a coherent mouse head. Significantly, the “coherence” to which he is restored is mouse, not human. Therapeutic self-situating, as impacted by the past but rooted in the present, has restored an identity coherence that is more endangered Jew than it is universal or American. Similarly, the creative examples discussed below spotlight the compulsion to reveal oneself as “other,” whether through drag, dress-up, gender transition, or persistent intertwinement with a haunting family past.

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“Alan” One interviewee I’ll call Alan, a maternal grandson of a Holocaust survivor, helps illustrate the potential correlations I ponder between queerness and investment in family Holocaust legacies. Alan defined his connection to Jewish identity as solely based on his grandfather’s survival of the Holocaust and the subsequent impact this had on Alan’s mother and step-grandmother. A twenty-one-year-old visual art major and a physically slight, soft-spoken gay man who claimed to be “very sensitive to gender-and-sexuality social inequalities,” Alan lacked much of the social validation and empowerment enjoyed by others of his generation, like Gabe, discussed above, who described himself as a typical American guy and as someone who did not think about gender issues. Alan, by contrast, identified himself as “two steps down on the privilege ladder” and described his alienation among Jews, his aversion to organized religion, and the shame he experienced within his own family, which urged him to remain discreet about his sexual orientation. When describing himself, Alan used such adjectives as submissive, weak, feminine, and fearful. Unlike Gabe, whose family history showed a great deal of American belonging, community engagement, and cross-generational bonding, Alan recounted a post-Holocaust family experience of unresolved anxieties, relational disconnects, and enduring shame. His emotionally distant and erratically behaving survivor grandfather, Jake, did not function as a typical “family man.” Explaining how even Jake’s own children and grandchildren addressed him by his first name, Alan shared, “He was – he was my grandpa, and he obviously loved me, but he wasn’t my grandpa. Nobody – like, my mom didn’t even call him ‘Dad.’” After losing all relatives in the war, save for a cousin or two, Jake was silent about his experiences. As Alan painted it, “He came so close to death…experienced so much death, that he lived his life here, like, very haphazardly. He gambled a lot. He actually developed a serious gambling problem….” Alan’s mother was “embarrassed of her upbringing […] where they lived. […] and I think she was embarrassed by her parents, because…he was such [an] ‘out-there,’ outrageous guy that she said she would always [...] go over to other peoples’ houses. She said that she wouldn’t really ever bring people over to her house.” Alan linked his mother’s unresolved relationship with her survivor father to her anxious style of parenting and homemaking during Alan’s childhood: what my mom tried to do was make it so that…my brother and I did not experience what she experienced. She would go out of her way to really make it so that…we were not embarrassed…She said she’d always, always try to have it look nice, buy things, keep it…I think she’s trying to do what she didn’t get to have as a child and…shelter and protect us […] she can’t watch Holocaust movies…So I think she probably – because she can’t do it, she doesn’t want us to do it. When we were younger, that was, like…we were her children.

562  G. MOSKOWITZ Her feelings become…that’s what our feelings will be, because she makes the decisions for us.

Alan’s mother, like her father, Jake, perpetuated evasions of difficult ­realities. Actively obstructing important family truths, however, may have actually strengthened Alan’s curiosity and investment in the hidden stories of his grandfather’s past. As literary theorist Marianne Hirsch argues, denial does not weaken, but rather solidifies bonds.19 In this respect, we might better understand why Alan, unlike Gabe, tended to directly put himself in his grandfather’s shoes—into the scene of the denied, but crucial knowledge. As Alan shared, I always wondered: which way would I have been sent? Would I have been viewed as weak? And sent straight to the gas chambers, or would I have been sent to work until I died? […] I would just be… terrified. And I guess in those levels of terror, I don’t know… like, would I – I – I fight or flight. I could never see myself fighting. I would see myself fleeing […] I guess my submissive nature can arguably be my – a feminine quality.

Alan empathized with survival experiences in strikingly physical terms that revealed his own embodied identification with the vulnerable aspects of his grandfather’s experiences. Though Alan felt detached from the wider Jewish community, his sense of difference and marginalization as a gay man with a troubled maternal family history imbued him with a special commitment to remembering the Holocaust, whose effects on his relatives were the very basis of his Jewish identity. Moreover, as an “other” in mainstream society, he could “relate to the idea of persecution and not being seen as equal” and understood himself as “more sensitive to […] survivors of the Holocaust, or to the whole Holocaust experience, because I don’t live a life where I’ve experienced full privilege.” Thus, despite his mother’s normalizing efforts, Jewish identity took shape for Alan as an outsider status of embodied difference and one that impelled empathetic bridging with the imagined scenes of traumatic origins—an affective task for which Alan perceived himself suited by way of his “femininity” and relative social disadvantage as a gay man. “Transparent” Contemporary social estrangement and embodied investments in Holocaust memory intertwine also in Jill Soloway’s Amazon series Transparent (2014– 2019), which asks viewers to move through a family’s story in chronologically complex ways, learning about the secrets of the Pfeffermans’ past as it coincides with the pain and loss that surround their experiences in the present. As becomes clear through the series, retired professor Maura Pfefferman, who has come out as transgender in her senior years, grew up in a family that denied her access to her own queer genealogy, the knowledge that the

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Uncle Gershon and Aunt Gittel whom she never met were in fact the same person—a transgender disciple of Magnus Hirschfeld’s, killed by the Nazis. Gittel’s pearl ring, salvaged by her sister Rose, Maura’s mother, becomes a focal point in Maura’s secret and transgressive childhood dress-up in the underground bunker used by her family during her Cold War-era childhood, further linking Maura’s gender to a history of politicized threat. Of Maura’s three children, Ali, the youngest, most directly connects with this legacy of queer Jewish expression and its endangerment. In the pilot episode, after Maura has announced to her three children that she will be selling her house, Ali is the first child to emerge from the ensuing bickering to ask Maura, with concerned tenderness, where Maura will live—a question that points poetically to Maura’s emotional homelessness as an older, closeted transgender person from a family that narrowly escaped the Holocaust. “You know, out of all my kids, you’re the one…you can see me most clearly,” Maura tells Ali in a following scene, “Probably because we share the depressive gene.” Throughout the course of the series, Ali’s spiritual alienation leads her to innovate Jewish rituals, to conduct research on trauma and gender, and to restlessly explore femme, genderqueer, and nonbinary modes of expression. Emily Robinson and Gaby Hoffmann, the actors who respectively perform Ali’s character as a youth and as an adult, also respectively portray the teenage and adult Rose, further linking Ali to the traumatic intergenerational narrative of targeted Jewish and gendered difference. In “Cherry Blossoms” (Season 2, Episode 4), when Ali travels to visit her aged Grandma Rose in a nursing home, the latter mistakes Ali for her own murdered sibling, “Gershon.” In “Man on the Land” (Season 2, Episode 9), while Maura is effectively banished from a women’s festival in the woods that excludes transgender women, Ali has a vision of Rose’s mother, Yetta, scurrying anxiously through a dark forest, presumably on her way out of Germany in the 1930s. Ali also visualizes a young Grandma Rose at the Hirschfeld Institute in Weimar-era Berlin as the Nazis seize Gittel and destroy the institute. An extended shot of Ali’s paralyzed eyes, entranced by the imagined fire in which the Nazis burned Hirschfeld’s books, solidifies her position as a figure haunted by the unprocessed, traumatic family past. More than standing as a link to a heritage of embodied difference, Ali is a frustrated witness to the mechanisms by which intergenerational trauma sustains itself. In “Cherry Blossoms,” it is Ali who brings the concept of epigenetics to the viewer’s attention, reading in a library about a study in which the offspring of lab animals traumatized alongside the scent of cherry blossoms remained severely averse to that scent for generations. During an argument with Maura in “Why Do We Cover the Mirrors?” (Season 1, Episode 10), Maura asks Ali to lower her voice, and Ali retorts, “That’s our family religion! Secrecy!” Ali is angry, because she has linked her current lack of direction and boundaries with Maura’s willingness to let Ali cancel her own bat mitzvah years ago. This decision, we learn, related to Maura’s secret exploration of her own gender—her participation that weekend, years before coming

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out as trans, in a cross-dressing camp. Maura’s exploration of her own transgender identity is, like Ali’s tenuous connections to both Jewishness and gender, connected to a family past of endangerment on both personal and wider societal levels that continue to reverberate in the present moment. As a family, the Pfeffermans grasp in the figurative dark, and sometimes directly at each other, for the roots of and off-switches to their post-traumatic affective styles, which waver between hypersensitivity and numbness, narcissism and martyred self-evacuation. Queer displacement of body and social identity, as well as the accompanied feelings of spiritual homelessness in the present, launch Maura and Ali into liminal time and space, pressing them to further an ongoing need to understand and derive meaning from unresolved narrative threads of the family’s traumatic past. “Part Hole” Five years before Transparent premiered, I sought to untangle the content of my own gender-frustrated suburban American childhood in a post-Holocaust family. I began a project tentatively titled “Part Hole,” using a graphic narrative form to situate that period of my life in relation to the family mythology that colored it. It paints a portrait of the author in the late 1980s–1990s as a closeted and gender-frustrated queer son of an Israeli-raised immigrant whose own Polish mother, Esther, had survived the war. As a young child, Esther (then “Eta”) had lost her father and brother, escaped the Lublin ghetto, sustained a back injury from a Nazi air raid while living in underground bunkers with Minsk partisans in the forest, and spent much of the war in hiding before reconnecting with her mother, Dora, and immigrating to Israel with her in 1950. By that point, Dora had survived Majdanek, Stutthof, and a death march, the effects of which left her emotionally erratic and unwell for the rest of her life. Esther would depend on my mother, her eldest child, to keep her company as Esther lapsed from willful, didactic optimism to grappling with dark voids of pain. My mother developed childhood capacities for hypersensitivity, self-evacuating forms of empathy, and analytical seriousness—qualities she would recognize most in me—her “artistic” (gay) son who broke the rules of gender where I felt safe to do so. An immigrant who came to the U.S. alone at nineteen, my mother insisted on her own “specialness” and social queerness—a bittersweet stance we would both share as sensitive, but strong-minded “outsiders.” Throughout my childhood, she insisted that I was a reincarnation of Dora, her maternal grandmother—that I had both her serious disposition and her wild laugh. Of her three children, she claimed me as her “twin soul.” As her queerest child, an emotionally intense boy who liked to wear dresses, draw princesses, and direct my sisters in melodramatic home-movie creations, I learned to read subtle emotional cues, evacuate myself abruptly as necessary, and “pass” in order to survive the demands of powerful others.

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Even as a child it was difficult not to link the dichotomy of my emotional hyperactivity inside the home and my timid, chameleon social tendencies outside of it with the mystifying family narrative of Esther’s survival, a narrative about private resilience and social danger, hiding, and migration that was defined by stark, unthinkable imagery and riddled with holes and gaps, more fairytale than biography. Until a 2013 investigation I conducted with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Esther never knew about Dora’s experiences in the camps during their years apart. Likewise, until Esther reached her eighties, my mother never knew about Esther’s early memories of the ghetto and of hiding in a Polish farmer’s cellar. “I suppose many look back on their childhood feelings toward their

mothers and remember an enormity of unarticulated emotion,” I wrote in one panel of “Part Hole” in which my own mother appears kissing my cheek, “There really are no words to describe how safe I felt under her watch, or how fiercely loved and shielded, even from myself.” Using motifs of a spider web and fountain, I explored my emotional entanglement in the incomplete Holocaust narrative and its air of mystery in ways that spoke to my own social alienation as “other”—a serious boy with Israeli immigrant roots, unusual gender expression, and a developing queer identity. Describing our family in a separate sequence, I wrote, “manhood could not have been more blatantly ignored. And beside my powerful mother, it couldn’t have been less relevant to my own person, I felt.” In another panel, I sit at the kitchen counter across

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from my mother, whose stream of consciousness overwhelms the page, the text obstructing my child’s head as my legs dangle off the counter stool. The text describes how I inherited her sense of aesthetics and felt compelled to be the same as her—“even things I’d never contemplated became my favorites if they were hers too…Sharing favorites with her let me tap into her energy current, pouring it into my dry, searching veins, the source of life.” My second-generation mother saw herself in me in ways akin to how Maura Pfefferman sees herself in Ali; I, in turn, needing her, came to see myself as anything she needed me to be as she searched for herself, emerging from a youth of being what her own captivating, but tormented survivor mother had needed her to be.

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To be “claimed” in this way by powerful, even mystifying parents in search of themselves is to learn to conceive of oneself as a sort of satellite, orbiting a larger body, charting its rhythms, and mediating the external impact of its energies elsewhere. The late feminist poet Adrienne Rich articulated this experience with her own father, Arnold Rice Rich, chairman of pathology at Johns Hopkins Medical School. Arnold had suppressed his Jewish identity and took a particular interest in cultivating his daughter’s intellect. “I never in my whole life knew what my father was really feeling,” she writes, Yet he spoke – monologued – with driving intensity. You could grow up in such a house mesmerized by the local electricity, the crucial meanings assumed by the merest things. This used to seem to me a sign that we were all living on some high emotional plane. It was a difficult force field for a favored daughter to disengage from.20

Rich credited the root of her own interest in her assimilated paternal family’s Jewish heritage to viewing footage of Jewish corpses in concentration camp liberation films in 1946 at age sixteen and feeling unable to decide, as a daughter of a Jew living in a pervasively antisemitic environment, if those corpses were “us” or “them.” Also akin to Ali Pfefferman’s character, who feels her identity weighted with a compulsion to secrecy by the needs of an endangered parent, Rich admits, “I had never been taught about resistance, only about passing” (“Split at the Root,” 139). Lurking beneath Rich’s passing, however, is a burning investment in exploring the secrecies embedded in her family’s history, as well as in her own queerness. In “Part Hole,” I similarly strive to convey that, across the generations of my family, positions beyond the bounds of social normalcy—those of hypersensitive immigrant and queer perspectives—helped sustain greater investments in the key relational ties and feelings connected with an unresolved family Holocaust narrative as its details continued to emerge over time. “The Diary of Mini Horrorwitz” Psychoanalytic theory sheds light on the ambivalence all children are subject to feel toward parents, especially when the parent–child bond is queered— made somehow at odds with the wider culture. Jacqueline Rose’s Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty (2018) argues that maternal symbols elicit both longing and rage because they dissolve barriers between conscious social identities and unconscious intersubjective affect, “undoing” the social individual, but fulfilling a yearning for pre-social pleasures. Mothers have traditionally represented a cherished but liminal state of being “before social identity” and thus “before gender,” a state that artists repeatedly idealize, bemoan, and fetishize. The symbolic maternal has long operated as aesthetic portal into an affective, pre-social existence of organic connection, but also as the final site from which one is painfully banished into the structure of

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impersonal social law. When mother and/or child is estranged from the wider society and the maternal bond exists in tension with the social sphere, this may intensify the symbolic split in a forming subject’s diverging relationships to social coherence and emotional expression. This is often true for children of immigrants, subjugated minorities, and those enduring the effects of trauma. Art-making by such offspring conveys the creative struggle to mediate or adjoin the realms of the affect-laden, lost maternal and the language of contemporary society. Nowhere, perhaps, is this creative struggle so striking and provocative as it is in the art of drag performance, through which self-transformations enable access to elements of expression and relationship forbidden by the cultural laws inscribed within one’s particular anatomical sex, race, class, religion, or sexuality. Subverting social and bodily norms and creatively exploring relational possibilities, drag is an art form highly suited to addressing queer intergenerational feelings of restriction, survival, and boundlessness. As I explore in the following example, many drag artists venerate and perform complex relationships with mothers and the symbolic maternal. Drag lends itself to explorations of affect, passing, family endangerment, and transcendent relations to the wider culture. Contemporary Brooklyn drag artist Mini Horrorwitz, a grandchild of two Holocaust survivors on her mother’s side, describes her performance of “The Diary of Mini Horrorwitz” as a “Jewper Hero routine” inspired by a connection she made between Britney Spears’s song “Dear Diary” and the diary of Anne Frank. Horrorwitz refers to her act as “the story of how a young Jewish girl could only trust in her diary to tell her truths, but then realizes she has to be her own hero in this world and breaks out of her shell of fear to fight Hitler […] It’s about how love and being who you are will always destroy fear and hate.”21 She performed the act in September 2017 at Bushwig, an annual Brooklyn drag festival founded in 2012 by drag artists Horrorchata and Babes Trust and attended by thousands. Another Jewish drag artist called Amber Alert participated in the act, standing in for maternal authority and hegemonic force at various moments in the performance. The act opens with Mini clutching a red diary marked with a large Star of David. She scurries onto the stage, crouched low to the ground, taking tentative steps, and frantically projecting her gaze around the room, conveying a state of terror and helplessness as “Tomorrow Belongs To Me,” a Hitler Youth anthem featured in Cabaret (1972), blares on the speakers. An archetypal schoolgirl, Mini wears a white buttoned shirt tucked into a short plaid skirt. Also an archetypal “other,” her shirt is marked on one side of her upper chest with a Star of David, on the other side with the word “Fag.” Mini rises as the music transitions into the instrumental opening of Britney Spears’s “Dear Diary,” shifting connotations of Anne Frank to those of culturally enfranchised American girlhood innocence. “Dear Diary” appeared on Spears’s hugely successful first album, …Baby One More Time (1999), which ushered in an era of sugary pop music that colored the adolescence of many survivors’ grandchildren, appearing six years after Schindler’s List (1993) and the opening of the United States

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Holocaust Memorial Museum. Like the iconic schoolgirl Cher Horowitz, the blonde, entitled protagonist of Clueless (1995), a film about teenage popularity, Horrorwitz begins to exude manufactured innocence and affected femininity. “Dear Diary, today I saw a boy,” Mini lip-syncs, “And I wondered if he noticed me. He took my breath away.” Like much of the content of Anne Frank’s diary, Spears’s fictional diary in the track focuses on the concerns of early adolescence—crushes and hopes for the future. As she performs, however, Mini opens her diary, showing the audience the Star of David on the cover, along with the label “Diary of Mini Horrorwitz.” She thereby maintains the audience’s awareness of the “horror” and marked Jewish endangerment that either competes with or parallels Spears’s and Horowitz’s girlish vulnerability. Femininity offers Mini, like Alan, an affective pathway for connecting with difficult elements of family history. It is interesting to note that Mini’s performance, like Spears’s and Frank’s diaries, is a male-produced expression of femininity—Spears’s “diary” is managed by her lyricist and producer, Frank’s by her surviving father, Otto, who censored Anne’s words to preserve an image of her innocence. Both invite destabilization to unleash obstructed truths. Mini’s shift from a world of queer and Jewish endangerment to one of uncomplicated girlish sweetness—a performance of ultimate “passing”—is quickly interrupted by a subsequent gesture of feminine power and rebellion, as the disorienting, digitally stylized introduction to Spears’s “Overprotected” (from her album Britney, 2001) fractures the scene with an aggressive beat. Lip-syncing, “Say hello to the girl that I am,” Mini rips off her outfit to expose a metallic blue leotard with a large white Star of David on the center of her chest, reminiscent of a superhero outfit. She struts forward with confidence along the catwalk to the lyrics “You’re gonna have to see through my perspective.” Interrupting Mini, Amber Alert then enters with a series of domineering gestures. Wearing glasses, an up-do, and a skirt suit, Amber forcefully points her fingers and dominates the stage. Mini then responds in a fit of rebellion with the following verses of Spears’s song: “I don’t need nobody telling me just what I wanna / What I, what, what, what I’m going to / Do about my destiny / I say no, no, nobody’s telling me just / What, what, what I wanna do, do / I’m so fed up with people telling me to be / Someone else but me (Action!).” The interjection of the director’s call to “action,” which originally implies the policing Spears seems to resent as a heavily managed pop star, takes new meaning in light of post-Holocaust and queer relations to survival strategies that interfere with spiritual freedom and authentic self-expression. Following Spears’s lyrics “I’m so fed up with people telling me to be someone else but me,” Mini inserts a recording of actor Brad Pitt’s voice from the film Inglorious Basterds (2009): “We’re going to be doing one thing, one thing only: killing Nazis.” As the aggressive beat resumes, Mini pantomimes the killing of her fellow performer, Amber, who kneels before her. Mini then works the catwalk for a cheering crowd. In this symbolic gesture, has Mini killed a Nazi, overcome a coercive director, or

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reclaimed her individuality from an overprotective parent? “Overprotected” takes on new meaning in the context of post-traumatic families that continue to employ hiding and passing, like Alan’s mother, discussed above, who strives to protect her children from painful histories and to perform an uncomplicated American normalcy. Using popular cultural references to the Holocaust helps Horrorwitz to make her own feelings as a queer grandchild of survivors legible to her audience in the present, and it also destabilizes the stylized veneer of popular culture that surrounds American post-traumatic afterlives; teenage popularity contests, diaries, action films, and overbearing music producers flicker with connotations of horror and post-traumatic isolation on Mini’s stage.

Conclusion For grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, cultural perceptions and personal/ familial relationships to Jewish identity are sometimes fraught with posttraumatic meanings. For queer and otherwise marginal grandchildren situated within unprocessed or secret family narratives, the challenges of personally existing and socially belonging may strangely align with perceptions of survivor grandparents’ embodied difference and endangerment in ways that generate continued affective investments in processing and deriving meaning from those narratives. Such persistent forms of affective legacy converge with the self-oriented trend in contemporary Jewish life among adults in their twenties and thirties who define their Jewish identities by what is personally meaningful. This essay has sought to illuminate creative pathways by which some queer grandchildren of Holocaust survivors identify with and express Jewish legacies of survival from the margins of social belonging—positions of alienation and stigma that help sustain meaningful investments in survivors’ painful histories. Such unusual forms of creative production push against the confinement post-Holocaust artists experience both in relation to traumatic legacies and, sometimes, as atypical subjects whose affective experiences lack concrete reflections and outlets in the wider social sphere. For some postHolocaust Jews who continue to experience themselves as stigmatized or queer, tropes of passing, hiding, shape-shifting, embodied difference, and socially transcendent cultural perceptions and relational styles remain potent links to a history of endangered particularities and to aspects of family memory that risk neutralization in the wider culture.

Notes

1. These interviews were part of my 2012 MA thesis and were pre-approved by Brandeis University’s IRB. 2. Steven M. Cohen and Arnold M. Eisen, “The Sovereign Self: Jewish Identity in Post-modern America,” JCPA.org (2001), http://jcpa.org/jl/vp453.htm.

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3. Debra Kaufman, “The Circularity of Secularity: The Sacred and the Secular in Some Contemporary Post-Holocaust Identity Narratives,” Contemporary Jewry 30 (2010): 119. 4. William B. Helmreich, Against All Odds: Holocaust Survivors and the Successful Lives They Made in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 134. 5. Helen Epstein, Children of the Holocaust (New York: Penguin Books, 1979). 6.  Ingrid Diane Tauber, “Second-Generation Effects of the Nazi Holocaust: A Psychosocial Study of a Nonclinical Sample in North America,” PhD diss., California School of Professional Psychology, 1980; Ilany Kogan, The Cry of Mute Children: A Psychoanalytic Perspective of the Second Generation of the Holocaust (London: Free Association Books, 1995); H. Wiseman, J. P. Barber, A. Raz, I. Yam, C. Foltz, and S. Livne-Snir, “Parental Communication of Holocaust Experiences and Interpersonal Patterns in Offspring of Holocaust Survivors,” International Journal of Behavioral Development 26, no. 4 (2002): 371–381; D. Shmotkin, A. Shrira, S. C. Goldberg, and Y. Palgi, “Resilience and Vulnerability Among Aging Holocaust Survivors and Their Families: An Intergenerational Overview,” Journal of Intergenerational Relationships 9 (2011): 7–21. 7. Matt Lebovic, “Author Examines Holocaust Trauma in a New Generation,” The Times of Israel, February 27, 2013, http://www.timesofisrael.com/ author-examines-holocaust-trauma-in-a-new-generation/. 8. Erika Dreifus, “Ever After? History, Healing, and ‘Holocaust Fiction’ in the Third Generation,” Paper presented at “Beyond Camps and Forced Labour” conference at the Imperial War Museum, London, January 29–31, 2003, www.erikadreifus.com/wp/wp-content/…/08/DreifusEverAfter.pdf, accessed 1 December 2012. 9.  Mark M. Anderson, “The Child Victim as Witness to the Holocaust: An American Story?” Jewish Social Studies 14, no. 1 (2007): 2. 10. Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 295–296. 11. Henry Greenspan, “Imagining Survivors: Testimony and the Rise of Holocaust Consciousness,” in Americanization of the Holocaust, ed. Hilene Flanzbaum (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 50. 12. Dina Wardi, Memorial Candles: Children of the Holocaust (London and New York: Tavistock/Routledge, 1992). 13.  Arlene Stein, “Feminism, Therapeutic Culture, and the Holocaust in the United States: The Second-Generation Phenomenon,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society 16, no. 1 (2009): 43. 14. Dan Bar-On, Fear and Hope: Three Generations of the Holocaust (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1995), 346–347. 15. Art Spiegelman, Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@?*! (New York: Pantheon, 2008). 16. Art Spiegelman, Maus (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 159. 17. David Grossman, Writing in the Dark, trans. Jessica Cohen (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2008), 19. 18. Amy Hungerford, “Surviving Rego Park: Holocaust Theory from Art Spiegelman to Berel Lang,” in The Americanization of the Holocaust, ed. Hilene Flanzbaum (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1999), 119.



572  G. MOSKOWITZ 19. Ayşe Gül Altınay and Andrea Pető, “Gender, Memory and Connective Genocide Scholarship: A Conversation with Marianne Hirsch,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 22, no. 4 (2015): 392. 20. Adrienne Rich, “Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity” (1982), in The Beacon Book of Essays by Contemporary American Women, ed. Wendy Martin (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 144. 21. Alexandra Pucciarelli, “4 Jewish Drag Queens You Need to Know,” Alma, https://www.heyalma.com/4-jewish-drag-queens-need-know/.

Bibliography Altınay, Ayşe Gül, and Andrea Pető. “Gender, Memory and Connective Genocide Scholarship: A Conversation with Marianne Hirsch.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 22, no. 4 (2015): 386–396. Anderson, Mark M. “The Child Victim as Witness to the Holocaust: An American Story?” Jewish Social Studies 14, no. 1 (2007): 1–22. Bar-On, Dan. Fear and Hope: Three Generations of the Holocaust. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1995. Cohen, Steven M., and Arnold M. Eisen. “The Sovereign Self: Jewish Identity in Post-modern America.” JCPA.org., 2001. http://jcpa.org/jl/vp453.htm. “Dear Diary.” Performed by Britney Spears. Written by Jason Blume and Eugene Wilde. …Baby One More Time. Jive Records, 1999. Dreifus, Erika. “Ever After? History, Healing, and ‘Holocaust Fiction’ in the Third Generation.” Paper presented at “Beyond Camps and Forced Labour” conference at the Imperial War Museum, London, January 29–31, 2003. www.erikadreifus. com/wp/wp-content/…/08/DreifusEverAfter.pdf. Accessed 1 December 2012. Epstein, Helen. Children of the Holocaust. New York: Penguin Books, 1979. Greenspan, Henry. “Imagining Survivors: Testimony and the Rise of Holocaust Consciousness.” In The Americanization of the Holocaust, edited by Hilene Flanzbaum, 45–67. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1999. Grossman, David. Writing in the Dark. Translated by Jessica Cohen. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. Helmreich, William B. Against All Odds: Holocaust Survivors and the Successful Lives They Made in America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. Hungerford, Amy. “Surviving Rego Park: Holocaust Theory from Art Spiegelman to Berel Lang.” In The Americanization of the Holocaust, edited by Hilene Flanzbaum, 102–124. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1999. Inglorious Basterds. Directed by Quentin Tarantino. Perf. Brad Pitt. The Weinstein Co. and Universal Pictures, 2009. Kaufman, Debra. “The Circularity of Secularity: The Sacred and the Secular in Some Contemporary Post-Holocaust Identity Narratives.” Contemporary Jewry 30 (2010): 119–139. Kogan, Ilany. The Cry of Mute Children: A Psychoanalytic Perspective of the Second Generation of the Holocaust. London: Free Association Books, 1995. Lebovic, Matt. “Author Examines Holocaust Trauma in a New Generation.” The Times of Israel, February 27, 2013. http://www.timesofisrael.com/author-examinesholocaust-trauma-in-a-new-generation/.

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Moskowitz, Golan. “Grandsons Who Remember: Intersections of Holocaust Heritage and Contemporary Male Positioning.” MA thesis, Brandeis University, 2012. “Overprotected.” Performed by Britney Spears. Written by Rami Yacoub and Max Martin. Britney. Jive Records, 2001. Pucciarelli, Alexandra. “4 Jewish Drag Queens You Need to Know.” Alma. https:// www.heyalma.com/4-jewish-drag-queens-need-know/. Rich, Adrienne. “Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity” (1982). In The Beacon Book of Essays by Contemporary American Women, edited by Wendy Martin, 134–151. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996. Rose, Jacqueline. Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018. Russell, A. “Late Psychosocial Consequences in Concentration Camp Survivor Families.” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 44, no. 4 (1974): 611–619. Sarna, Jonathan D. American Judaism: A History. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004. Shmotkin, D., A. Shrira, S. C. Goldberg, and Y. Palgi. “Resilience and Vulnerability Among Aging Holocaust Survivors and Their Families: An Intergenerational Overview.” Journal of Intergenerational Relationships 9 (2011): 7–21. Spiegelman, Art. Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@?*! New York: Pantheon, 2008. ———. Maus. New York: Pantheon, 1986. Stein, Arlene. “Feminism, Therapeutic Culture, and the Holocaust in the United States: The Second-Generation Phenomenon.” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society 16, no. 1 (2009): 27–53. Tauber, Ingrid Diane. “Second-Generation Effects of the Nazi Holocaust: A Psychosocial Study of a Nonclinical Sample in North America.” PhD diss., California School of Professional Psychology, 1980. Transparent. Created and produced by Jill Soloway. Perf. Jeffrey Tambor, Gaby Hoffmann, et al. Topple, Picrow, and Amazon Studios. Distributed by Sony Pictures Television, 2014–2019. Wardi, Dina. Memorial Candles: Children of the Holocaust. London: Routledge, 1992. Wiseman, H., J. P. Barber, A. Raz, I. Yam, C. Foltz, and S. Livne-Snir. “Parental Communication of Holocaust Experiences and Interpersonal Patterns in Offspring of Holocaust Survivors.” International Journal of Behavioral Development 26, no. 4 (2002): 371–381. Youtube. “Bushwig 2017 (SAT)—Mini Horrorwitz.” Filmed September 23, 2017 at Bushwig, Brooklyn, NY. Video, 4:47. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZBT_K-6GtE&feature=youtu.be.

CHAPTER 31

Recrafting the Past: Graphic Novels, the Third Generation, and Twenty-First Century Representations of the Holocaust Claire Gorrara

As we approach the end of the 2010s, we move closer to the point where there will be no witnesses remaining who lived through the Holocaust. What does this mean for future generations whose connection to the wartime past will soon be mediated exclusively through historical scholarship and other forms of cultural memory? This transition could be construed as a “crisis of memory,” with personal experience in all its color and vibrancy consigned to the archive. Alternately, as cultural historian Aleida Assmann argues, such a transformation could be viewed as the moment when memories of the Holocaust are “reclaimed by society.”1 Into the twenty-first century, contemporary writers and artists born after the war years are producing memory texts that speak to—but are distinct from—the work of previous generations who acted as the custodians of Holocaust memory. These new memory texts address audiences beyond the conventional literary forms of the novel and memoir and respond to the profound challenges facing historical narratives as authoritative accounts of the past. In an age of mass communication and information flow, comic books and graphic novels have emerged as vehicles of memory that privilege the individual, deeply personal and haptic task of recrafting the past in pictures and words.

C. Gorrara (*)  Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_31

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This chapter will begin by analyzing representations of war and conflict in the medium of the graphic novel. It will assess the reasons for the upsurge in the production of Holocaust comic books and graphic novels since the turn of the century. Are there genre-specific negotiations with history and memory in the graphic novel that make it particularly well-adapted to represent the Holocaust today? The chapter will then consider the positionality of the third generation as the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and exiles. It will identify common characteristics and preoccupations in their creative work and speculate as to why some third-generation artists choose the graphic novel as their preferred genre for Holocaust representation. Finally, the chapter will examine three graphic novels that tell the story of the third generation’s relationship to the Holocaust.2 This is a relationship that is channeled through bitter-sweet relations with the survivor generation; new knowledge acquired on return journeys to sites of Holocaust remembrance; and the appropriation of memory texts and objects as a means to retain a connection to a family heritage that is fast disappearing. As this chapter will argue, these ­third-generation narratives offer insights not only into the innovative potential of the graphic novel as a memory text.3 They also attest to the continuous rewritings of the Holocaust taking place in contemporary culture as new generations “reclaim” Holocaust memories.

Drawing the Past in Words and Images Comics and graphic novels have proved central to the cultural reimagining of the Holocaust in the same way that the Holocaust generated perhaps the most influential autobiographical comic book of all time: Art Spiegelman’s Maus. First published in installments in the 1980s, Maus inspired comics artists to make use of the graphic medium as a site for reflecting on the relationship between autobiography, history, and traumatic memory.4 Since Spiegelman’s iconic work, a growing number of comic artists and graphic novelists have produced work representing the Holocaust, from the United States and Europe to South East Asia.5 Through their work, as Joanne Pettitt suggests, the Holocaust has entered the cultural lexicon of the graphic novel as a paradigm of evil through which other global conflicts and atrocities are interpreted and imagined.6 The choice to represent the Holocaust in the pages of the comic book and graphic novel has accelerated since the turn of the century.7 In an age when the objectivity of historical writing is under pressure, the documentary comic book and graphic novel have offered new ways of representing the past that speak to our fascination at the blurred lines between fact and fiction. As Hillary Chute has argued persuasively, since the Second World War, the graphic novel has been mobilized by writers to undertake “urgent acts of witnessing” when faced with the horror of the atomic bomb, the Holocaust, and the humanitarian crises of the Middle East.8 It has been used to testify

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to the impact of war on individuals and communities and to highlight the multi-sensory experience of war via the art of drawing. Crafting the past in a verbal/visual format, the graphic novel has offered comic artists and graphic novelists a medium that can function both as reportage and historical evidence and as a political statement, encouraging the reader to engage with the memory politics of the present and questions of global justice.9 The popularity of the graphic novel as a narrative form for representing the Holocaust can be attributed to the genre-specific negotiations of history and memory that it enables. First, the formal properties of the graphic novel accentuate the act of re-telling the past as a multifaceted endeavor. The combination of word and image and the complementary nature of the two modes of expression demonstrate how meaningful stories of the past are always a composite affair. They require a combination of elements (written and visual) to represent the densely layered nature of lived experience. As graphic novelists have proven, this effect of retelling the past on multiple planes allows the narrative to accommodate a range of visual materials and styles, from maps, tables, and charts, to redrawn photographs and film stills.10 This disparate array of materials enables the graphic novelist to bring together historical information and subjective evaluation, constructing an engagement with the past that differs from the evidentiary perspective of the historian. This creative engagement with past impacts on the second specificity of the graphic format: the genre’s attention to the constructedness of any representation of the past. With its ability to mix different drawing styles, for example, realism, fantasy, expressionism, and to play with narrative point of view, the graphic novel disrupts any expectation of historical representation as a seamless record of the past by a neutral and omniscient observer. As Kent Worcester notes, “the cartoonist creates work that by its very nature eschews any claim to objectivity and lays its methodological cards on the table.”11 In so doing, the reader is obliged to reflect on how history is constructed. Which sources are being used and why? Whose perspective is being presented and to what ends? By framing history literally as a series of boxes, graphic novels highlight the subjectivity inherent in any representation of the past and the events they depict. The third specificity of the graphic novel is its capacity to visualize how we remember the past. Personal or autobiographical graphic novels weave these memory processes into the very fabric of the narrative. This can be through a given color palette, black and white denoting documentary accuracy and “pastness,” while stark colors denote vibrant memories and sometimes the shock of recall. Memory can also be represented in changing panel sizes and shapes, influencing the pace of reading, with bigger single-page panels often identifying memory milestones and high points. The graphic novelist can also choose to represent memory recall through closed or open borders for panel frames, demonstrating constraint or the release of emotional intensity. Such sequential reading also draws upon repeated images that work as

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visual cues to guide readers on their narrative journey. These images build a matrix of personal meanings that shape plot and theme, such as Maus’s use of animal characters to represent the dehumanization and racial segregation of the Holocaust within an imaginary animal kingdom. In all instances, the rich complementarity of image and text highlights the graphic format’s potential to accommodate the processing of personal memories and their impact on present-day lives. For the third generation, these are personal memories that intersect with broader debates on the cultural legacies of the Holocaust.

Generational Transmission The notion of a specific generational identity for grandchildren of the Holocaust has been consciously claimed by a small group of writers and artists. Erika Dreifus, for example, has written of a “special kind of kinship” among writers born in the 1960s and 1970s who work at a ­third-generational remove from family experiences of the Holocaust.12 For Dreifus and others, there are common characteristics and preoccupations at work among this grouping of writers, artists, and filmmakers. First, these are writers who operate at a temporal and emotional distance from the Holocaust compared to the second generation who are so impacted by the aftereffects of the Holocaust on their survivor-parents. As Gerd Bayer argues in his article on Holocaust cinema and the third generation, the work of selected third-generation filmmakers suggests that they have moved beyond “postmemory,” Marianne Hirsch’s widely used term for the belated trauma of living with family memories of cataclysmic loss and destruction.13 Not having experienced the family tragedy imparted to the second generation by their survivor-parents, the third generation’s work tends to be more curiosity-driven and to draw upon a repertoire of cultural references that enrich and exceed the family story. For Bayer, this open approach translates into filmic narratives that have greater freedom to reimagine the Holocaust, accentuating the dialogic and social act of remembrance rather than the solitary peril of traumatic re-enactment (Bayer, “After Postmemory,” 130). In the graphic novels under consideration in this chapter, this broader canvas for imagining the Holocaust is often represented in journeys of discovery to visit places and people that have been suppressed or excised from family history. These “return journeys” take artists and authors toward Holocaust stories that have been “orphaned” as older family members pass away, their past lives existing only as memory traces in photography albums or remembered personal anecdotes. Third-generation writers and artists grapple with the urgency of recovering these memories of the Holocaust on the point of extinction. As Victoria Aarons notes, such authors acknowledge their responsibility to become “an ethical listener, one who recognises and acts upon […] the duty to listen.”14 Indeed, it is this willingness to reflect on the legacies of

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the Holocaust for their family networks that motivates third-generation writers and artists to embark on journeys of remembrance. On these literal and imagined journeys, often to sites of Holocaust atrocity in Central and Eastern Europe, authors document their interactions with wartime interlocutors and cultural commentators who give a different perspective on the past to that of the family. To represent this complex endeavor, such authors and artists look to cultural forms that can bridge the gap between the past and the present, such as the graphic novel. Since the turn of the century, increasing numbers of third-generation ­artists have adopted the graphic medium as a vehicle for family stories of the Second World War and the Holocaust.15 This choice may be related to the fact that, as Kent Worcester notes, “the low status, low budget, under the radar quality of the medium works to the advantage of highly ­motivated individuals who have interesting stories to tell” (Worcester, “Graphic Novels and the War on Terror,” 43). These family stories, at a double generational remove from the Holocaust, are arguably on the periphery of mass cultural production. They are under “the cultural radar,” but they are nonetheless deeply felt stories for their authors. The artisanal, hand-drawn quality of such work indicates these authors’ felt connection to the past rather than the collective injunction to remember promoted by the commemorative culture of state institutions, such as schools and museums. Yet, it may also be that, for the grandchildren of those who lived through the Holocaust, the graphic novel is better suited to their relationship to the wartime past than other cultural forms. Into the twenty-first century, visual media, such as film, photography, and video, are increasingly influencing memory cultures, understood as the cultural practices that constitute our connection to a shared past and their impact on our sense of identity in the present. As the work of Jérémie Dres, Rutu Modan, and Amy Kurzweil demonstrates, the appeal of the graphic novel lies in its vibrancy as a hybrid form allowing for the creative synergy of the visual and the verbal.

Recrafting the Past Jérémie Dres’s Nous n’irons pas voir Auschwitz (We Won’t See Auschwitz) was first published in French in 2011 and was Dres’s first book-length graphic novel.16 Born in 1982, Dres uses the graphic novel format to represent his personal quest to understand more of his family history and cultural identity as a non-observant Jewish Frenchman.17 The graphic project developed following the death of Dres’s paternal grandmother Téma Barab in 2009 in Paris, aged 97. Born and brought up in Warsaw into an assimilated Jewish family, Téma and three of her four siblings emigrated to France and America in the interwar years. Only one sister, Sonia, appears to have remained in Poland to perish in the Holocaust. The same fate appears to have awaited Dres’s paternal great grandfather, Tankiel Dress as noted in captions

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that accompany family photographs reproduced at the end of the book. Téma’s remembered stories of life in pre-war Poland set the scene for Jérémie and his brother Martin to visit Poland in July 2010 on a quest to understand the family’s Polish past. They go specifically in search of Téma’s parents, Moszek Barab and Chana Glicka Barab who died in 1918 and 1932, respectively, and their paternal grandfather’s Polish ancestors, the Dress family, who came from the small town of Zelechów. The brothers end their journey at the annual Jewish festival in Krakow, 50 miles from Auschwitz, but decide not to visit the camp complex and the museum.18 In a similar vein, Rutu Modan’s fictional The Property (2013) is framed in a seven-day visit to Poland from Israel as Regina Segal and her granddaughter Mica fly to Poland to lay claim to an apartment in Warsaw. This is the ostensible property of Regina, who fled from Poland to Palestine in 1940 as a young unmarried mother, exiled with her Jewish family. The family quest for property in the “old country” masks a personal quest on the part of Regina who harbors a secret about the paternity of the son she conceived in Poland, Reuben, Mica’s father. He is the son of Regina’s then ­non-Jewish Polish lover, Roman Gorski, from whom she was separated by her family but who still lives in the apartment in Warsaw that her family once owned. Roman knows nothing of the existence of his Israeli son. The narrative follows the genre conventions of “lost love,” with the 1940s romance of Regina and Roman mirrored in the romance that blossoms between Mica and a Polish graphic artist turned tourist guide, Tomasz Novak. Tomasz helps Mica and Regina negotiate Polish society in their quest for answers about Regina’s past, supporting their “root tourism” and rediscovery of Polish life. As Modan has made clear in interview, The Property draws on her family history as an Israeli Jew born in 1966. Both Modan’s sets of grandparents were originally from Poland and fled the Nazi Occupation. Modan undertook research visits to Poland to prepare for writing The Property which was published simultaneously in Hebrew and English. She modeled the character of Regina on her maternal grandmother, originally from Warsaw. In interview, she notes her own sense of estrangement from Poland as a country discussed as “one giant graveyard” by family members because of the memories it evoked.19 Amy Kurzweil’s Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir (2016) started life as an undergraduate dissertation during her degree in Feminist Studies at Stanford University. It was completed as a published graphic novel seven years later. Born in 1987, Kurzweil wrote the graphic novel to explore her relationship with her mother Sonja Rosenwald Kurzweil, an academic and psychotherapist, and her grandmother, Lily Fenster, a Holocaust survivor originally from Poland. Lily’s mother, father, and four sisters all died in the Holocaust and Lily’s wartime experiences are a central component of the narrative. Lily spent the early postwar years in a Displaced Persons camp in Heidelberg, Germany, giving birth to her daughter Sonja and a son there, before emigrating to

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America with her husband. The narrative sequences that represent Lily’s wartime experiences are drawn using text taken verbatim from Lily’s oral testimony recorded for the Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral Testimony Archive at the University of Michigan-Dearborn in 1994. As such, Flying Couch meshes the publicly available Holocaust testimony of Kurzweil’s grandmother with the autobiographical narrator’s own reflections on what it means to be the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor. As their lifelines intertwine, Kurzweil draws her own life from childhood through university to her “birth right” visit to Israel and her present-day profession as a graphic novelist, illustrator, and dance teacher. In their exploration of personal and collective memories of the Holocaust, Kurzweil, Modan, and Dres privilege family stories, return journeys (real and imagined), and memory texts and objects that bring together historical evidence and family artifacts for a personalized retelling of the past.

Family Stories First, all three graphic novelists draw their relationship with the Holocaust through the stories passed on from grandmother to grandchild. In these encounters, the grandmother embodies both a positive narrative of survival and the damaging effects of living with the aftermath of exile and loss. For Dres, his grandmother Téma Barab triggers his interest in his Polish family through her qualities as a storyteller. At the beginning of the narrative, Jérémie draws Téma recounting stories of her Polish childhood as he sifts through old family photography albums. The grandmother’s voice is all that remains of his Polish ancestors and is deliberately textured as “other” in accent and intonation in the French-language original to reflect her foreign origins, still audible after seventy years of living in France. However, this voice also carries the baggage of the past, including mistrustful views of other European nations associated with the Holocaust: “Marry whoever you want but not a Polack or a Kraut” (Dres, We Won’t See Auschwitz, 12). This apprehension and anxiety about wartime others also colors Modan’s The Property as Mica manages her family’s avaricious belief that they have been swindled out of rightful property ownership by Polish associates from the war years. Unlike Téma the storyteller in We Won’t See Auschwitz, Regina is a keeper of secrets about her Polish past, above all her romance with Roman Gorski and their failed elopement to Sweden in May 1939 as an unmarried couple. This secret symbolizes a lost connection with Polish origins and a refusal to confront the war years. In the graphic narrative, this grief takes somatic form as Regina retires to her hotel bed in delayed mourning as she confronts the life and love she left behind in Poland. In Kurzweil’s Flying Couch, the grandmother Lily embodies the complexities of coming to terms with the past as a “celebrity” Holocaust survivor who

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donates her life story to the Holocaust testimony archive at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. In the narrative, Lily is a multifaceted figure portrayed over time as a child Holocaust victim, an overbearing Jewish mother, a celebrity survivor, and an aging grandparent facing ill health and institutionalization. Lily’s autobiographical stories overwhelm any historical narrative of the Holocaust. This is a “her-story” of the Holocaust whose legacies haunt the narrator and take form as anxieties centered on fears of disease and darkness. Of all three graphic narratives, the damaging effects of channeling memories of the Holocaust through the survivor generation to their grandchildren are evoked most intensely in Flying Couch. As Dana Mihailescu notes, Kurzweil’s novel “maintains an ethical position of deference to the grandmother’s recollections of the Holocaust by not altering in any way the wording of the latter’s war memories.”20 This is signaled graphically in the use of standard type-written print for the grandmother’s testimony—as if a period document from the 1940s—rather than the hand-drawn script used routinely in the graphic novel. Yet Kurzweil also depicts the stories that cannot be captured in her grandmother’s publicly recorded memories for the University of Michigan-Dearborn archive. These unspoken stories are figured in images of obscured or darkened vision as intimations of things that cannot be retold for the posterity of the archive and which impact on the narrator herself. The graphic novel begins with the child-narrator looking in the mirror at her own eyes and inspecting her dilated pupils as “this pulsing, oozing blackness at the source of all sight, it terrified me” (Kurzweil, Flying Couch, 9). This is the first sign of the narrator’s anxiety about self-reflection and confronting the pain of others. Such a sequence is drawn in dual circular panels like the frames of spectacles as if the narrator needs to interpose a screen between herself and the family stories she receives. As the narrative progresses, darkened eyes become signifiers of the horror that engulfed Lily’s lost family members and which the narrator fears she might witness herself. In one scene, she is presented as locked in a gaze with her grandmother who is wearing dark sunglasses. Lily states: “did I ever tell you dat you have my sister’s eyes? My baby sister one – mit BLECK eyes. She vas zo hungry she ask me: Lily, please, a piece of bread” (Kurzweil, Flying Couch, 45). This graphic illustration of the grandmother’s thickly accented English emphases the foreignness of her experiences for the narrator and the historical and cultural distance between generations. Yet sharing the same dark eye color as her grandmother’s baby sister who died from malnutrition in the Warsaw Ghetto petrifies the child-narrator. She imagines seeing the lost Polish family reflected in her grandmother’s sunglasses as if they have traveled over time and space to confront her. Via these visual cues, the graphic narrative casts the narrator as a secondary witness to her grandmother’s trauma. At its heart, Flying Couch is, therefore, a cathartic attempt to seek alternative means of engaging with Holocaust memories so that other figurations of Jewish identity can emerge from the stories of the past.

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Mapping Memory While all three graphic novels create a connection with the Holocaust through a grandparent, this embodied knowledge of the past is enriched by journeys of discovery. These journeys form part of a broader appreciation of contemporary Jewish identity. In Kurzweil’s Flying Couch, mapping journeys is an integral element of the memoir as the narrator charts her life in maps of various shapes, sizes, and types. These maps are woven into the graphic narrative through the drawing of floor plans for her family homes, district maps for the urban and suburban areas in which she has lived, and the transport routes for work and pleasure that plot the narrator’s life in planes, trains, and automobiles. This cartographic impulse is paralleled in maps of the Warsaw districts in which Lily lived as a young teenager and larger-scale maps of wartime Poland onto which Lily’s teenage self is superimposed as she wanders the countryside living as an orphan worker to avoid capture. As spatial and psychological markers of home and exile, twinned maps in Flying Couch reference the entwined life journeys of grandmother and granddaughter and the influence of past trauma on present-day Jewish identity. If Flying Couch maps matrilineal trajectories, the narrators of the graphic novels by Modan and Dres undertake more literal journeys of discovery to sites of Holocaust remembrance in Poland. These return journeys involve contesting commonly held narratives of the Holocaust and opening the graphic narrative to multiple voices from and about the past. In Modan’s The Property, the pre-packaged experience of the Holocaust as “dark tourism” is satirizing in the opening pages as Mica and Regina board the plane from Tel Aviv to Warsaw along with a party of Israeli schoolchildren visiting the extermination camps. As the teacher in charge bites into his airline meal, he muses: “okay Monday Treblinka, Tuesday Majdanek and the gas chambers. I prefer Majdanek, it’s more frightening than Auschwitz” (Modan, The Property, 6). This touristic consumption of the Holocaust is taken to extremes when Mica is inadvertently caught up in a historical re-enactment of the wartime round-up of Jews in Warsaw’s city center and loaded into a covered lorry to be “deported” from the city. In Dres’s We Won’t See Auschwitz, this questioning of received histories of the Holocaust allows the family narrative of exile to be reshaped by Polish interlocutors who gradually displace Téma as the sole point of reference for the third generation. As the narrator and his brother Martin travel around Poland in July 2010, they interview Polish people who help them recover and understand their family history. These interlocutors connect the brothers’ family history to a network of other Jewish stories that change their perceptions of what it means be Jewish in Polish society. These identities and viewpoints range from Orthodox and reform rabbis to fashionable Jewish new media journalists to middle-aged Jewish political militants who were once active under state socialism and lived abroad to escape imprisonment.21 By drawing attention to a plethora of stories centered on the Jewish community

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in Poland, the graphic novel refutes depictions of Poland as hostile territory for Jewish travelers. It emphasizes instead the ties that bind and the numerous Polish friends and experts who help Jérémie and Martin to reassemble their Franco-Polish family history. In We Won’t See Auschwitz, these combined efforts to piece together the family’s wartime past highlight the difficulties inherent in telling transnational histories many years later. Above all, the work of translation is made explicit in all three texts as narrators struggle to express themselves in European languages which are no longer family languages and confront different national cultures of remembrance. In The Property, English functions as the lingua franca as Mica navigates present-day Warsaw with its hotels, tourist sites, and cosmopolitan elites. Her relationship with Tomasz, the aspiring comic book artist, is conducted entirely in English, as indicated in lower case typescript, but her conversations with Regina are undertaken in Hebrew, indicated in capitalized typescript. In addition, conversations in Polish are represented in italics, while the moment of the most dramatic conversation remains but a squiggle. As Roman Gorski comes to meet Mica, the granddaughter he has never known, he and Mica remain in communicative limbo. Roman speaks Polish and Russian, and Mica speaks Hebrew and English. There is no common ground between them. This is represented in their speech bubbles by squiggly lines, and it is only via the translation of Tomasz that the estranged grandfather and granddaughter can finally communicate. The graphic novel implies that languages can build bridges, but they can also erect walls. Similarly, in We Won’t See Auschwitz, a language deficit dogs the attempts of Jérémie and Martin to access local archives in Zelechów as they search for traces of their paternal grandfather Simchy Dress. Starting their conversation in halting English, the brothers are confronted with the incomprehension of the local archivists who respond firstly in Polish and then in fragmented English to their request for documents on their family. The brothers cannot overcome the linguistic and bureaucratic barriers that block entry to the past and, in a panic, Jérémie disowns their family history: “No, no, this is not us, this is not our family. We do it for a friend in France, we are French and…” (Dres, We Won’t See Auschwitz, 137). Anxiety is represented radiating from Jérémie in circular lines suggesting flapping hands or vigorous head movements. Attempting to create a family history without the aid of a local interpreter, the narrator and his brother cannot complete the complex linguistic transactions required to communicate about the Holocaust. Gatekeepers stand in their way as culture and language determine who has access to the past. If official archives and repositories prove difficult to penetrate, places of grief and mourning offer alternative emotive sites of memory for the third generation on their journeys. While all three graphic novels refute the notion of European Jewry as a “cemetery culture” of doomed people,22 cemeteries play a central part in the authors’ remapping of their family past. In The Property, Regina and Roman finally confront the past and are reconciled in

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a Warsaw cemetery on All Saint’s Day (Zaduszki in Polish) when, in Poland, cemeteries are lit up with candles to honor the dead. However, it is in We Won’t See Auschwitz, that cemeteries symbolize most poignantly the cultural presence of the Jewish community in wartime Poland. When they arrive in Warsaw, Jérémie and Martin seek out the Jewish cemetery that they know to be the final resting place of their paternal great grandparents. With the expert aid of Isroel Szpilman, the Jewish cemetery director, Jérémie and Martin locate the gravestones of Moszek and Chana Glicka Barab and pay their respects to these long-lost ancestors. Even if damaged and difficult to decipher, the family tombstones in the Warsaw cemetery offer an image of the stewardship of Jewish memory and a commitment to repair a broken chain of memory transmission. In contrast, in the small town of Zelechów, the birthplace of the brothers’ paternal grandfather Simchy Dress, all that remains of the local Jewish cemetery is an abandoned field with tombstones peeking through the vegetation like broken teeth. Represented as crossing a no-man’s land of desolation in a single large panel, the two brothers survey a landscape of loss that is representative of a localized memory of denial of Poland’s Jewish heritage. Neither brother feels comfortable as they contemplate the neglected graves and both sense distrust and suspicion among the local population. The twin cemeteries of Warsaw and Zelechów stand, therefore, as stark reminders of a schism in national responses to the Holocaust in Poland: dutiful remembrance but also denial.

Memory Texts, Memory Objects The narrators in all three graphic novels choose not to visit Auschwitz. They elect instead to encounter the past in memory texts and memory objects that complement the direct personal testimony of grandparents. In Amy Kurzweil’s Flying Couch, the materiality of the graphic book provides the building blocks through which to imagine the Holocaust past of her grandmother. Books are drawn piled on desks as permanent features of domestic interiors and as surrogate personal friends. They are celebrated as fonts of knowledge from which the narrator and her mother, as a psychotherapist, draw their inspiration. They are also drawn piled up and bent into shape to look like houses with book cover rooves and book walls and doorways (Fig. 31.1). These are the “book houses” from which Lily’s Holocaust story emanates as letters going up in smoke, a poignant reminder of the extermination camps in which her Polish family perished. It is not only books that are recrafted to connect the narrator to her grandmother and her Holocaust past. Period photographs are also redrawn in a realist style that contrasts with the cartoonist aesthetic of the main graphic narrative. These photographs of family members, deceased and alive, demonstrate the documentary imperative that subtends the narrative. Above all, the narrator seeks to understand what lies hidden behind a treasured studio photograph of her grandmother as a young woman. In this photograph, Lily is dressed to impress in her finest

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Fig. 31.1  Amy Kurzweil, Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir (New York: Catapult/ Black Balloon, 2016), p. 1 (Reproduced with kind permission of the author)

clothes and with a smile on her face. This photograph is evidence of Lily’s transformation from a Polish Holocaust survivor to an assured American citizen. It accompanies the narrator on her journeys and ends as one of the few objects that adorn the narrator’s sparsely furnished apartment in Brooklyn as she settles down to sleep in the closing pages of the novel. Its presence is a marker of closure and family reconciliation.23

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Modan’s The Property also makes use of photographs as memory objects and connectors to the wartime past. While the graphic novel is published in vibrant colors, making use of the “clear line” style associated with Hergé’s Tintin albums, wartime photographic images are integral to the narrative. As Regina and Roman reminisce about their wartime romance and remember Regina’s enforced exile, sepia-toned panels denoting old photographs sketch out the “missing” scenes of Roman’s wartime history without Regina. Indeed, Regina and Roman re-establish their bond with photographs as they visit the Warsaw Fotoplastikon, the oldest stereoscopic theater of images in the world, and the location of their pre-war romantic assignations. Tomasz, as Mica’s love interest and the Polish translator and interpreter, is a graphic novelist and continues these references to photography and film as media of memory. His stylized imagining of the romance between Regina and Roman is story-boarded within a sequence of panels in a classic black and white 1930s cinematographic style. These give a different iteration of the past and recast a story of Holocaust separation and exile as a tale of star-crossed lovers. Through employing photographic and filmic objects and visual styles, The Property signals the complex layering of perspective and the subjectivity inherent in any vision of the past. However, the defining memory text for all three third-generation artists is Art Spiegelman’s Maus, the paradigmatic example of postmemory and the second generation. Connections between these three graphic memoirs and Spiegelman’s work are evident at the level of characterization, narrative structure, and aesthetics. Vladek, Artie’s father from the survivor generation, finds his counterpart in the overbearing Jewish grandmothers who exasperate and fascinate the third-generation narrators. Journeys, real and imagined, create narrative momentum and stimulate the imagination, while photographs are redrawn to act as memento mori of lost family members. Yet there are also significant departures in the use of the graphic novel as a vehicle of memory for different generations. None of the third-generation graphic novels make use of the animal fable approach of Maus and, in the cases of Modan and Dres, they avoid the camp symbolism so evident in Spiegelman’s text, such as the stripped pajamas and the emaciated bodies of prisoners. Importantly, the claustrophobic thick panel frames of Maus, that Spiegelman himself has likened to “coffins of memory” (Chute, Disaster Drawn, 194), are jettisoned in Flying Couch and We Won’t See Auschwitz in favor of borderless panels and pages that stretch outward and connect places, people, and events across multiple time lines. Varied in size and shape, the borderless panels in the graphic novels by Dres and Kurzweil gesture at the openness of their encounters with the past and their willingness to follow a flow of memory that circumvents Auschwitz as the Holocaust lieu de mémoire par excellence.

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Conclusion To conclude, what does this growing body of graphic novels produced by the third generation tell us about memories of the Holocaust at a time when the last witnesses and survivors are fast disappearing? First, these graphic novels are testament to the continuous rewriting of the Holocaust as society “reclaims” such memories. Within the pages of the graphic novel, such cultural appropriation acknowledges the privileged status of family members who lived through the war years. However, none of the graphic narratives analyzed in this chapter remains anchored to the Holocaust memories of the survivor generation and all seek to think such experiences afresh. These new memory texts underscore how the act of visualizing the past depends on the viewer’s vantage point and their location in time and history. This positionality determines how we understand the Holocaust and our response to the perspective of other people and nations whose stories may be foreign to us and require translation. Second, these three graphic novels help us to appreciate the specific contribution of the graphic novel as a multi-modal text that reflects readers’ multiple engagements with the wartime past. As Joanne Pettitt notes: “graphic novels are ideally placed to articulate the complexities of global memory because, in their combination of text and image, they are able to sidestep the hegemonic use of language, adopting instead a dialogic form that reflects the compounded nature of global memory studies” (Pettitt, “Memory and Genocide in Graphic Novels,” 183). All three of the graphic novelists in this chapter exploit the artisanal aesthetic of the graphic medium to grasp the texture of memory and the need to incorporate words and images to capture memory’s richness. They create works that shape an iteration of the past that is faithful to the slow and painstaking process of assembling complex personal and collective histories of the Holocaust. These are drawn visions that have their roots in a documentary comics tradition that can be traced back to the work of eminent Jewish comics artists, such as Art Spiegelman, Will Eisner, and Harvey Pekar, explicitly referenced as the founding fathers of a Holocaust comics tradition in Flying Couch (Kurzweil, Flying Couch, 115). Yet, even with this intellectual pedigree, Kurzweil, Dres, and Modan remain attached to retellings of the past that do not reply on the vision of others but that emerge from personal story worlds. Finally, none of graphic novelists chooses to concentrate on images of Auschwitz and the extermination camps, recognizing perhaps that the time has come to resist the siren pull of Auschwitz as the dark site of Holocaust remembrance. Instead, these graphic novelists invest in reclaiming memories of the Holocaust that allow for renewal and reconciliation and that map out a different future for memory for those who come after.

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Notes













1. Aleida Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 5. 2. Jérémie Dres, Nous n’irons pas voir Auschwitz (Paris: Editions Cambourakis, 2011), translated as We Won’t See Auschwitz, trans. Edward Gauvin (London: SelfMade Hero, 2012); Rutu Modan, The Property (London: Jonathan Cape, 2013); and Amy Kurzweil, Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir (New York: Black Balloon, 2016). 3. By the term “memory text,” I am referring to cultural scripts of the Second World War and the Holocaust that circulate widely in contemporary culture. Joan Tumblety, in her work on memory and history, defines these texts as “known, discrete stories in general circulation, whether created or consumed amongst those who experienced the past in question or not.” Joan Tumblety, Memory and History: Understanding Memory as Source and Subject (London: Routledge, 2013), 13. 4. See Art Spiegelman, The Complete Maus (London: Penguin Books, 2003). 5. See the special issue of the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 17, no. 1 (2018), “Beyond Maus: Comic Books, Graphic Novels and the Holocaust,” edited by Ewa Stańczyk, that analyses the Holocaust in comics and graphic novels from the Netherlands, America, France, Italy, Poland, East Germany, and the Czech Republic. 6. Joanne Pettitt, “Memory and Genocide in Graphic Novels: The Holocaust as Paradigm,” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 9, no. 2 (2018): 173–186. 7. An example of public interest in the comic book as a carrier of cultural memories of the Holocaust was the exhibition organized by the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris, January 2017–January 2018, entitled “Shoah et bande dessinée.” See the accompanying catalogue: Shoah et bande dessinée: l’image au service de la mémoire, sous la direction de Didier Pasamonik and Joël Kotek (Paris: Editions Denoël et Mémorial de la Shoah, 2017). 8. Hillary Chute, Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics and Documentary Form (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 2016), 38. 9. This chapter will use the term graphic novel to refer to long-form comics narratives that have weighty personal or historical subjects and preoccupations at their core. The term is one that is gaining currency in academic circles. It is contested by some comics artists and scholars on the grounds that it represents an attempt to confer cultural legitimacy on long-form comic books and is not a distinctive iteration of the historic comics form. See Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey, The Graphic Novel: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 10. See, for example, Belgian Michel Kichka, Deuxième génération: ce que je n’ai pas dit à mon père (Paris: Dargaud, 2012) who draws his family history and personal experiences as the son of a Holocaust survivor, very much in the mode of Spiegelman’s Maus. 11. Kent Worcester, “Graphic Narrative and the War on Terror,” in Cultures of War in Graphic Novels: Violence, Trauma and Memory, eds. Tatiana Prorokova and Nimrod Tal (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2018), 41–57 (44).

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12. Erika Dreifus, “A Special Kind of Kinship: On Being a ‘3G’ Writer,” in ThirdGeneration Holocaust Narratives: Memory in Memoir and Fiction, ed. Victoria Aarons (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016), 1–16 (1). 13.  Gerd Bayer, “After Postmemory: Holocaust Cinema and the Third Generation,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 28, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 116–132. See also Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 14. Victoria Aarons, “Introduction: Approaching the Third Generation,” in ThirdGeneration Holocaust Narratives: Memory in Memoir and Fiction, ed. Victoria Aarons (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016), i–xxii (xv). 15. This choice of the graphic novel as a memory text for family legacies of the Second World War also pertains to narratives written from the perspective of those implicated in the enactment of collective violence. See, for example, Nora Krug’s Heimat: A German Family Album (London: Penguin Books/ Particular Books, 2018). Krug approaches the fate of the Jews in Germany through an investigation of her German family living under the Nazi regime. The experiences of her grandparents, and above all her paternal uncle who died in SS uniform aged eighteen, are unclear. She seeks to uncover these family stories that have not been passed down to her as the third generation. 16. Dres’s graphic memoir has also been translated into Italian as Noi non andremo a vedere Auschwitz (2012) and Polish as Nie pojedziemy zobaczyć Auschwitz (2013). All citations will be from the English-language version. 17. In 2018, Dres followed up on his family quest for roots in Poland with a parallel volume, Si je t’oublie Alexandrie (Paris: Steinkis, 2018), in which he embarks on a journey to Egypt with his mother to seek out stories about his maternal grandparents. They emigrated from Egypt to France in 1948, along with other Egyptian Jews, following the creation of the state of Israel and the attendant regional tensions. 18. For a fuller reading of this graphic novel within a French national context, see my “Not Seeing Auschwitz: Memory, Generation and Representations of the Holocaust in Twenty-First Century French Comics,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 17, no. 1 (2018): 111–126. 19. See Modan’s interview for The Jewish Daily Forward in which she discusses her Polish family roots and history, https://forward.com/culture/180177/israeli-graphic-novelist-rutu-modan-draws-on-her-f/?p=all&p=all, accessed 12 January 2019. 20. Dana Mihailescu, “Mapping Transgenerational Memory of the Shoah in Third Generation Graphic Narratives: On Amy Kurzweil’s Flying Couch (2016),” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 17, no. 1 (2018): 93–110 (102). 21. See Alan L. Berger, “Life After Death: A Third-Generation Journey in Jérémie Dres’s We Won’t See Auschwitz,” in Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives: Memory in Memoir and Fiction, ed. Victoria Aarons (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016), 73–88, for a thoughtful analysis of Dres’s graphic novel as both a personal journey of discovery and an investigation of his Jewish roots as he pursues “the Deuteronomic call to choose life over death, seeking to uncover more fully the way of life of a vanished world” (75).

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22.  Michael André Bernstein, “Victims-in-Waiting: Backshadowing and the Representation of European Jewry,” New Literary History 29, no. 4 (1998): 625–651 (645). 23. The photograph is reproduced at regular intervals in the text, identifiable by its stylistic difference to the cartoonish drawing of the main narrative. This photograph is increasingly referenced as the narrator’s graphic journey draws to a close. It is an indicator of the distance covered in understanding between grandmother and granddaughter and the special relationship they share. See Flying Couch and pages 33, 57, 151, 285, 288 and 290.

Bibliography Aarons, Victoria. “Introduction: Approaching the Third Generation.” In ThirdGeneration Holocaust Narratives: Memory in Memoir and Fiction, ed. Victoria Aarons, i–xxii. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016. Assmann, Aleida. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Baetens, Jan, and Hugo Frey. The Graphic Novel: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Bayer, Gerd. “After Postmemory: Holocaust Cinema and the Third Generation.” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 28, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 116–132. Berger, Alan L. “Life After Death: A Third-Generation Journey in Jérémie Dres’s We Won’t See Auschwitz.” In Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives: Memory in Memoir and Fiction, ed. Victoria Aarons, 73–88. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016. Bernstein, Michael André. “Victims-in-Waiting: Backshadowing and the Representation of European Jewry.” New Literary History 29, no. 4 (1998): 625–651. Chute, Hillary. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics and Documentary Form. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 2016. Dreifus, Erika. “A Special Kind of Kinship: On Being a ‘3G’ Writer.” In ThirdGeneration Holocaust Narratives: Memory in Memoir and Fiction, ed. Victoria Aarons, 1–16. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016. Dres, Jérémie. We Won’t See Auschwitz. London: SelfMade Hero, 2010. ———. Si je t’oublie Alexandrie. Paris: Steinkis, 2018. Gorrara, Claire. “Not Seeing Auschwitz: Memory, Generation and Representations of the Holocaust in Twenty-First Century French Comics.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 17, no. 1 (2018): 111–126. Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Kichka, Michel. Deuxième génération: ce que je n’ai pas dit à mon père. Paris: Dargaud, 2012. Krug, Nora. Heimat: A German Family Album. London: Penguin Books/Particular Books, 2018. Kurzweil, Amy. Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir. New York: Black Balloon, 2016. Mihailescu, Dana. “Mapping Transgenerational Memory of the Shoah in Third Generation Graphic Narratives: On Amy Kurzweil’s Flying Couch (2016).” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 17, no. 1 (2018): 93–110.

592  C. GORRARA Modan, Rutu. Interview. The Jewish Daily Forward. https://forward.com/culture/ 180177/israeli-graphic-novelist-rutu-modan-draws-on-her-f/?p=all&p=all. Accessed 12 January 2019. ———. The Property. London: Jonathan Cape, 2013. Pasamonik, Didier, and Joël Kotek, eds. Shoah et bande dessinée: l’image au service de la mémoire. Paris: Editions Denoël et Mémorial de la Shoah, 2017. Pettitt, Joanne. “Memory and Genocide in Graphic Novels: The Holocaust as Paradigm.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 9, no. 2 (2018): 173–186. Spiegelman, Art. The Complete Maus. London: Penguin, 2003. Stańczyk, Ewa, ed. “Beyond Maus: Comic Books, Graphic Novels and the Holocaust.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 17, no. 1 (2018). Tumblety, Joan, ed. Memory and History: Understanding Memory as Source and Subject. London: Routledge, 2013. Worcester, Kent. “Graphic Narrative and the War on Terror.” In Cultures of War in Graphic Novels: Violence, Trauma and Memory, eds. Tatiana Prorokova and Nimrod Tal, 41–57. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2018.

CHAPTER 32

X-Men at Auschwitz? Superheroes, Nazis, and the Holocaust Edward B. Westermann

The juxtaposition of comic book superheroes and the Third Reich’s most notorious killing center may strike some readers as highly inappropriate, if not irreverent and even demeaning to the survivors of the Holocaust. However, the emergence of the Holocaust as a theme in the pages of “low-brow” literature provides one method for bringing the awareness of the Shoah to a much broader audience. Likewise, comic books and graphic novels constitute a viable medium for reaching a public less and less inclined to engage in long-form reading, especially in a world in which communication has become dominated by fleeting images on Snapchat and the 140 (now 280) characters of a twitter post.1 Furthermore, the significant influence of comics among youth is an important point in terms of readership, but, perhaps more importantly since the genre’s themes and concepts emerge years later in mainstream art and literature.2 In such a context, it therefore should not be surprising that the view of the Holocaust as perhaps the paradigmatic event of the twentieth century and “a key episode in American historical consciousness” should find expression in the pages of comics not only for its historical importance, but also for its power as a moral fable highlighting fundamental issues of good versus evil and right versus wrong, a major theme of the genre.3 In contemporary US society, the Holocaust continues to exert a forceful presence within popular culture, and the events involving the destruction of the European Jews have found expression in historical studies, literature, and

E. B. Westermann (*)  Texas A&M University-San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_32

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film as well as in the pages of graphic novels and comic books. Hollywood has used the events of the Holocaust to highlight Jewish experience under National Socialism in a number of highly acclaimed feature films, including Steven Spielberg’s landmark Schindler’s List (1993), a film that won seven Oscars, as well as Life Is Beautiful (1997) and The Pianist (2002) both of which received three Oscars. These films combined with the popularity of Holocaust related fiction such as Sarah’s Keys, The Book Thief, and The Boy in Striped Pajamas demonstrate the way in which the Holocaust has transcended the historical narrative and has emerged as an iconic symbol within contemporary popular culture.4 Despite their popularity, some of these works, especially The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, have been criticized “as simpleminded and emotionally shameless … definitively prov[ing] that fiction is not a suitable vehicle for the consideration of crimes as vast as the Holocaust.”5 Still, as Robert Eaglestone argues, “Fiction can initiate or disclose new categories or concepts through which the Holocaust can be seen and understood, or can refine and elucidate what we already know or take for granted, and, in so doing, go further than the licence given to the discipline of history.”6 In one respect, comic books have the advantage of being able to bridge the traditional divide between film, scholarship, and literature since these sources exist in “visual-verbal narrative documentary form.”7 In fact, it is the very format of the medium, with its telegraphic phrasing, sequential paneling, and artwork that creates new interpretive space for merging historical narrative with artistic expression. The graphic visual images and the paucity of dialogue create a broad interpretive space that elicits new connections and relationships. Marc DiPaolo argues, “comic books inspire us to meditate on the tense and controversial issues of our day and inspire us to think in unconventional terms.”8 DiPaolo also contends that far from being “a supposedly dispensable form of entertainment,” contemporary comics reveal “the politics underlying the spectacle to make us directly wrestle with difficult issues, and inspire us to react with similar thoughtfulness and sensitivity to the pressing questions of our time” (DiPaolo, 10). In this sense, the inclusion of themes related to Nazism and the Holocaust within popular comics act as historical subjects in their own right, but also can be viewed as moral fables that apply to issues of racism, antisemitism, and genocide in the contemporary world.

World War II and the Emergence of the Superhero The initial US battle against National Socialism found its expression not by airplanes dropping bombs on Hitler’s Germany or by troops storming ashore in a Europe under Nazi thralldom, but rather in the pages of comic books in which nationalist US superheroes battled against the Axis Powers. In fact, prior to US entry into World War II, Captain America struck the “first blow” in this contest with a punch to Adolf Hitler’s jaw illustrated on the cover of

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Captain America Comics number 1 in March 1941.9 Similarly, the pictorial Look Magazine in its February 27, 1940 edition included a comic spread featuring the nascent Superman kidnapping both Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin before depositing the two dictators in front of a meeting of the League of Nations where they subsequently were found guilty of “modern history’s greatest crime-unprovoked aggression against defenseless countries.”10 In these cases, the comic book emerged as an artifact of popular culture with a propagandistic purpose to stimulate opposition to Fascism by promoting American (or British) nationalism and democratic values in which red, white, and blue clad “super-patriots” battled against the dark forces of Nazism (DiPaolo, 5 and Eaglestone, 147). In its earliest manifestation, the superhero assault on Nazism focused on investigations of Nazi fifth columnists operating within the USA, battles directed at the Wehrmacht, or in individualized contests involving a superhero pitted against Adolf Hitler. In short, these early rhetorical and pictorial assaults against Nazism were aimed at winning the war against Hitler’s Germany (and Imperial Japan) by generating popular support within a Manichean framework of good battling against evil. Despite the Allied Powers’ public declaration in December 10, 1942 condemning the “increasingly brutal acts of violence and terror” in Poland and Nazi plans for “the complete extermination of the Jews,” the issue of genocide and what would become known as the Holocaust was subsumed into the larger issue of Nazi crimes writ large.11 Ironically, these efforts were in large part spearheaded by Jewish writers, artists, and publishers who were themselves victims of social prejudice and professional exclusion within the US publishing world.12 Still, others including Theodor Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss), a Lutheran grandson of German immigrant grandparents, used political cartooning to launch his own campaign against US isolationism, racism, and antisemitism in the pages of the left leaning New York daily PM between 1941 and 1943.13

X-Men and the Holocaust If the US battle against Hitler began in the pages of comics in the 1940s, the genre also fed a growing public interest and attention to the Holocaust in the 1980s. In one respect, the focus on the Holocaust reflected the Central European Jewish origins of the writers including Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Chris Claremont and their personal interest in the subject.14 In the case of comics, especially The X-Men (later The Uncanny X-Men), Lee, Kirby, and subsequently Claremont had found a readymade platform for integrating the persecution of the Jews under National Socialism and the issue of antisemitism in general into the work’s narrative. In a series with an underlying premise devoted to exploring society’s acceptance of those considered different, events involving the destruction of the European Jews formed a logical story line, especially for describing the origins of the series’ key antagonist,

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Magneto. Indeed, The X-Men was uniquely situated to explore the themes of acceptance and exclusion within contemporary society based on its exploration of the discriminatory treatment of humans with mutant powers by the government and by ordinary citizens. Not surprisingly, the experience of mutants attempting to gain acceptance and equal rights evoked comparisons with the civil rights movement within US society by minority racial and religious groups. The literary scholar Adam Roberts contends, “X-Men is actually about race—the mutants stand in for those racial groups that have suffered marginalization and persecution at the hands of larger society.”15 For example, Katherine Anne “Kitty” Pryde, the first expressly Jewish character to join the X-Men and the granddaughter of a concentration camp prisoner, was introduced in the January 1980 issue of The Uncanny X-Men #129, “God Spare the Child.”16 With her ability to phase through any object, she is impervious to physical harm representing a new generation of Jewish identity defined by strength rather than past victimization. Another scholar argues that the evolution of the series allowed the writers to use the theme of “discrimination as an opportunity to connect the characters’ persecution with antisemitism in general and the tragedy of the Holocaust more specifically,” while another argued that the X-Men as a whole could be seen as a “ciphers for the Jewish experience, or the black experience.”17 In any event, the persecution of the Jews emerged as a prevailing theme in a number of X-Men stories, a trend that in part reflected the use of comic books as “socially relevant” literature (Dittmer, 51).

Mutants, Trauma, and Genocide The 1991 release of X-Men by the artist and writer team of Chris Claremont and Jim Lee not only achieved a wide and enthusiastic audience with eight million issues sold, but the X-Men franchise quickly reached iconic status within US popular culture (Johnson, 154). While Claremont is largely credited with the popular resurrection of the comic in the late 1970s by turning it from a “second-tier bimonthly series to the best-selling title in the industry,” the general storyline and narrative of the comic has remained relatively consistent.18 From the initial issue of The X-Men in 1963 to its later manifestations, the mutant community remains divided on the issue of seeking accommodation and integration within “normal” society or attempting to establish their preeminence over this society through the use of their superior powers. This philosophical and political conflict is dramatized in the actions and beliefs of the comic’s two most powerful protagonists, the paraplegic Charles Xavier (aka the Professor or Professor X) and Erik Lehnsherr (aka Eisenhardt or Magneto).

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Professor Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters endeavors “to teach frightened teenage mutants how to accept, adapt to, and use their newfound power” (DiPaolo, 223). Not only does Xavier attempt to help mutants deal with the physical and psychological effects of their powers and to integrate them into human society, he also forms the X-Men as a group of mutant/ superheroes who are dedicated to protecting human society, especially from acts of violence committed by other mutants. In contrast, Magneto, the leader of the “rogue” mutant faction, focuses on the existing fear and prejudice among humans against mutants to create a zero sum view of the world in which the survival of each group is based on the subjugation or destruction of the other. His goal is “to dominate humanity, not help it.”19 Magneto’s apocalyptic view of the conflict between mutants and humans is in turn shaped by his experience as a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, a plot line introduced by Chris Claremont in the issue “X-Men vs. Magneto” of October 1981 (DiPaolo, 221). In this comic, Magneto accuses the leaders of the Free and Communist worlds of preparing for a nuclear “Holocaust,” a genocide that threatens man and mutant alike. He therefore demands that all governments relinquish control of their nuclear and conventional arsenals or face the absolute destruction of their societies.20 When challenged by Cyclops, a member of the X-Men, about his threat to annihilate humanity, Magneto refers to his own grief and loss at the hands of the Nazis who killed his entire family and who “slaughtered—without mercy, without remorse” as a justification for his own actions (Claremont [October 1981], 150). Ultimately, Magneto is defeated by a team of X-Men, his lab is captured, and his plan for the extermination of humanity is averted. In the issue’s deciding battle, Magneto confronts the X-Men, including Kitty Pryde. Believing that he has killed the girl mutant and a fellow Jew, Magneto is suddenly reminded of his experience at Auschwitz. He cries, “I remember my own childhood— the gas chambers as [sic] Auschwitz. The guards joking as they herded my family to their death.” He continued, “As our lives were nothing to them, so human lives became nothing to me” (Claremont [October 1981], 150). In the wake of the battle, a confused and seemingly remorseful Magneto makes good his escape leaving the X-Men and their leader Professor Xavier in control of his island lab. Claremont’s evocation of Magneto’s experience in Auschwitz in “X-Men vs. Magneto” raises a number of issues related to representation of the Holocaust in the comic genre in general. The selection of Auschwitz as the site of Magneto’s trauma revealed Claremont’s attempt to use the most widely recognized site of the Holocaust and frame it within a contemporary discourse on genocide. In this way, Claremont employs the historical reality of Auschwitz as a site of extermination, but also uses Auschwitz as a metaphor for the loss and suffering of all Holocaust victims. Likewise, Magneto’s reflections on the gas chambers and the effects of this trauma on his psyche provide an explanation for the seemingly paradoxical situation in

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which a survivor of the Shoah becomes himself a willing proponent of genocide, in this case a genocide that is intended to consume all of humanity. Paradoxically, Magneto’s utopian vision can only be achieved through the destruction of humankind; a solution that itself reflects the insolvable tensions between retribution and justice that he faces from his own Holocaust experience. Similarly, the Nazi exclusion and persecution of the Jewish people finds its expression in the contemporary prejudice that Magneto associates with humanity’s treatment of mutants, and it is only with his presumed murder of a fellow Jewish mutant that he faces his complicity in a process that he ostensibly seeks to prevent. Claremont incorporates the Holocaust as a historical artifact for the reader, but also as a method for evaluating the effects of the Shoah on survivors; however, he uses Magneto to reverse the traditional post-Holocaust message of forgiveness, reconciliation, and prevention to one of anger, retribution, and looming genocide. Interestingly, the appearance of this X-Men issue occurred just after the serialization of Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale in RAW magazine in 1980 (Chute, 152). In this sense, Claremont’s (re)creation of Magneto’s “origin story” linked to the events of the Holocaust reflected both the writer’s interest in the subject and a growing interest within popular culture related to the Nazi genocide of the European Jews. While both Magneto and Spiegelman’s character, Vladek, experienced physical and psychological trauma during the Holocaust, Magneto’s powers provide him with capabilites lacked by other survivors. Less than a year later, in the September 1982 issue of The Uncanny X-Men, entitled “Gold Rush,” Claremont once again raised the issue of the Holocaust and its psychological effects on survivors. This issue begins with the X-Men gathered around an unresponsive Professor Xavier who is locked in a psychic battle with an “alien consciousness” intent on “stripping him of his humanity” and taking his life.21 The psychic contest consuming Professor Xavier has in fact transported him twenty years into the past to Haifa, Israel and a time before he was paralyzed. Xavier is visiting Dr. Daniel Shomron, an Israeli psychiatrist responsible for treating Holocaust survivors, who has requested his friend’s assistance in dealing with a particularly severe case. Upon his arrival at the clinic, Xavier meets a medical orderly, “Magnus,” but is surprised by the seeming loss of his own mutant power to penetrate the orderly’s thoughts. He then notes the tattooed number “214782” on Magnus’ forearm. In response to Xavier’s question about the tattoo, Magnus states, “Auschwitz. I grew up there,” and he adds, “I have no family Dr. Xavier. Anymore” (Claremont [September 1982], 161). The tattoo and Magnus’ comment clearly identify him as a survivor while Xavier’s inability to read his thoughts hints at the orderly’s own special powers. Importantly, Magnus’ remarks not only reflect the loss of his family and his youthful innocence, but also frame Auschwitz as the site that defined his view of life, a location which established his view of humanity.

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Subsequently, Xavier is introduced to Gabrielle “Gaby” Haller, a patient and a survivor of Dachau, who is in a catatonic state. Xavier uses his telepathic powers to enter Gaby’s mind where he encounters a wall of psychic defenses in the form of an array of various monsters and demons. After successfully vanquishing these ephemeral threats, he crosses into Gabrielle’s consciousness and witnesses her memories as a ten-year old of being “packed so tightly in a cattle car that the dead cannot fall, but remain on their feet, supported by those around them ‘til the cars are unloaded” (Claremont [September 1982], 161). In fact, the Professor “witnesses” her deportation, including Gaby’s grandmother’s death, standing next to her in the cattle car, and the killing of her fellow Jews who are led to the gas chamber upon arrival at Dachau and then cremated. Gaby’s physical beauty motivates the guards to spare her life until the final days of the war when she is taken before the camp’s commandant and transformed by magic into a statue of solid gold, at once a symbol of her radiance and a reminder of the Nazi’s appropriation of Jewish wealth. At this point, Xavier having broken the “psychic dam,” brings her back to consciousness. In the wake of the session, Shomron invites Xavier and Magnus for a celebratory drink and remarks on her “remarkable verbal images,” including “S.S. guards as demons and ogres, and the crematorium as the gates of hell,” images that serve to underline the evil nature of the Nazi regime (Claremont [September 1982], 161). As Gaby starts her recovery, Xavier and Magnus assist her in dealing with the traumatic memories that continue to plague her. Gaby’s recovery involves an implicit competition between the two men to save her and appears to contrast the belief by Xavier that she can be healed with that of Magnus that such experiences prevent one’s ever being cured. In a related subplot, the two men become involved in a debate concerning the willingness of humanity to accept those with mutant powers. At one point, Magnus exclaims, “There is only one way to guarantee the survival of homo superior [i.e., mutants], and that is for them to hold the reins of power;” a view that Xavier rejects. The philosophical debate between Xavier and Magnus is interrupted by the kidnapping of Gaby, who is taken prisoner by a neo-Nazi unit, Hydra, under the command of a former SS (Schutzstaffel) officer. During the kidnapping, Magnus (now revealed as Magneto) demonstrates his mutant powers in battle against the Nazi soldiers. Subsequently, Magnus and Xavier join together and embark on a rescue mission to find Gaby and bring her back to Israel. Two days later, the two mutants locate Gaby at Hydra’s camp in Kenya where the “Nazi war criminal” Baron Strucker exults in the location of a hidden trove of Nazi gold. Strucker exclaims, “Where better to hide the gold than Black Africa, among savages. And who better to turn into a living map to this vault than a Jewess child” (Claremont [September 1982], 161). Strucker’s character in this case serves as an archetype for all unrepentant Nazi war criminals and his utterances provide proof of his continued adherence to ­

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Nazi racial and antisemitic beliefs in the postwar period. As Xavier tends to Gaby, Magneto buries Strucker and the soldiers of Hydra under tons of rock. He then collects the Nazi gold horde, and, before departing, warns Xavier, “I care nothing for you or them. And when homo sapiens are no more, homo superior will claim their rightful place … as Lords of the Earth!” (Claremont [September 1982], 161) Magneto’s literal crushing of Strucker and his Stormtroopers and his acquisition of confiscated gold originally taken from the Jewish people seem to constitute a defining victory; however his triumphal exhortation of homo superior as Lords of the Earth evokes disquieting parallels to the Nazi’s rhetoric of a master race (Herrenvolk).

History as Fiction or Fable as Fact? In “Gold Rush,” Claremont intertwines a number of wartime themes including deportation to the camps, the process of annihilation, and the battle for survival within the camps along with postwar issues related to the trauma of survivors, the existence of the state of Israel, the activities of Nazi war criminals, and hidden Nazi gold. The use of Auschwitz and Dachau as exemplars for the concentration camp system draws upon the widespread historical knowledge of these sites and plays upon the popular perception of the camps as symbols of the Third Reich and the regime’s crimes.22 From a historical perspective, the choice of Dachau as a site for the mass gassing of Jews is problematic, however. The camp did have a gas chamber and a crematorium, but there is no clear evidence that the former was ever used for this purpose (Wachsmann, 258, 266). Likewise, the majority of Dachau’s victims were political prisoners and not Jews, although Jews within the camp became special objects of SS abuse. With respect to historical representation, “Gold Rush” does accurately depict the SS uniform cap with its notorious skull and cross bones and Baron Strucker intermixes German language words, such as “Ja,” “Leutnant,” “Kamraden” [sic], and “Führer” [i.e., Adolf Hitler], with English. The depiction of SS uniforms and regalia as well as the use of German language terms constitute one method by which comic artists and writers attempt to establish a degree of historical authenticity. In truth, it appears that less importance is placed on the strict historical or linguistic accuracy of such symbols, but instead on their function as symbols of “Germanness” or “Nazism” rather than genuine historical or linguistic artifacts. Similarly, in the depiction of the Holocaust, historical details prove less important than the broader philosophical issues related to agency and meaning. The overarching theme dominating “Gold Rush” centers on the revelation of Magnus’ (i.e., Magneto’s) experience in Auschwitz and the continuing debate between Magneto and Xavier regarding the former’s ideas on the impossibility of the coexistence between humans and mutants. This debate injects a philosophical dimension into the realm of pulp fiction by

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confronting the horror of Nazi genocide while addressing survivor trauma and the specter of future genocide. This discussion also implicitly demands one to face her/his own beliefs and complicity in the treatment of racial and religious minorities. In a deeper reading, one might also suggest that the reader’s lack of mutant powers makes her/him by implication the theoretical objects of Magneto’s genocidal impulse. In this way, Claremont’s evocation of the Shoah not only historicizes, but also contemporizes the issue of genocide.

Magneto at Auschwitz The issue of the Holocaust remains a veiled, but important subplot within the X-Men series. And its key role is exemplified in the origin story of the series’ primary antagonist. Likewise, the Shoah continues to provide an important reference point for subsequent issues. The writer Mike Carey, influenced in part by Claremont’s work in the early 1980s, put Auschwitz and the mass murder of the European Jews at the center of an issue of X-Men Legacy published in July 2011.23 The issue, entitled “Aftermath, Part Two,” situates the story within the landscape of Auschwitz and shows Magneto being consoled by a fellow mutant, Rogue, while standing underneath the iconic gate of Auschwitz I (the main camp) with its cynical slogan “Arbeit macht Frei” (Work will set you Free).24 It opens with Magneto and Rogue breaking into a Holocaust Museum in Los Angeles after hours. Magneto’s purpose for the break-in is to show Rogue a photo from one of the museum’s exhibits. He explains that the photograph is of an SS doctor, August Hirt, an actual SS doctor who evokes the well-known image of Josef Mengele, the notorious “Angel of Death.” While the drawing of Hirt does not correspond to his real life appearance, but rather appears more like a caricature of Hitler, Carey was drawing upon the real Professor August Hirt and depicting actual historical events.25 During the war, Hirt sent Reich Leader of the SS Heinrich Himmler a proposal for collecting the skulls of Jewish concentration camp prisoners in order to have the “opportunity of obtaining tangible, scientific evidence” on these members of “subhumanity.”26 Likewise, Hirt, as a faculty member at the Anatomical Institute of the Reich University in Strasbourg did collect skeletal remains of Jewish “specimens,” a project he shared with his students by announcing, “that he went to concentration camps and picked out [the skulls] of the Jews that he wanted to measure.” Furthermore, during a class lecture, he boasted, “When he found skulls that interested him, the Jews were killed.”27 The incorporation of an actual perpetrator and specific details of his crimes not only increases the narrative’s authenticity, but also allows for the comic to serve as a historical source. In a series of flashback panels within the comic depicting Hirt’s story, Magneto details the meteoric rise of the “dull and plodding” Hirt to the directorship of the biology department in Strasbourg at a German university

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in the 1930s, a career made possible primarily as a result of the removal of the school’s Jewish faculty. Magneto then describes Hirt’s meeting with Himmler in which Hirt reveals a plan to take “100 [Jewish] human specimens” from Auschwitz who will be “killed and their skeletons and organs preserved” in order to create a historical record documenting the inferiority of the Jewish race after the completion of the Final Solution and the annihilation of the European Jews (Carey, Sandoval, and Wilson, 249). Hirt arrives in Auschwitz-Birkenau (Auschwitz II) in April 1942 and begins his selection of Jewish men, women, and children whose remains are to be preserved as part of his racial catalogue. During his trip to Birkenau, Hirt attempts to select a young boy serving with the Sonderkommando [special detachment], the unit responsible for assisting in the gassing, cremation, and disposal of the murdered Jews. In this case, however, a senior SS officer intervenes, telling the doctor that members of the Sonderkommando are exempt from his selection. Narrating this flashback, Magneto remarks to Rogue, “In the end, Hirt selected not 100, but 115 subjects. He didn’t want to leave Asians, Romanies [i.e., “Gypsies”] or Poles from his catalogue of inferior people” (Carey, Sandoval, and Wilson, 249). All of these prisoners are taken to the Natzweiler-Struth of concentration camp where they are “measured” and killed, after which, the bodies are sent to the biology department at the university in Strasbourg for the preservation of their skeletons and organs. The narrative then flashes forward to April 1945 and the Allied advance into Germany. Hirt’s fear of being captured and having to explain the pile of corpses still awaiting processing in the basement of the university leads to his attempted escaped to France under a false identity. He is stopped at the border by a French army patrol and detained, not for his activities with the SS, but for breaking curfew. Despite Hirt’s temporary detention, his seeming escape from Germany and his evasion of responsibility for his crimes raises the issues of justice and retribution for Nazi perpetrators. While sitting in his cell waiting to be released, the steel door is suddenly ripped from its frame and a young man stands before Hirt. In response to Hirt’s question about his identity, the young man responds, “My name is Eisenhardt Herr Doktor.” Hirt then responds in German, “Ah! Also sind Sie ein Jude?” (Ah! Are you a Jew then?) to which Eisenhardt answers, “We met in Poland outside the town of Oświȩcim. At the camp called Auschwitz” (Carey, Sandoval, and Wilson, 249). At this point, Hirt remembers the young boy that he had tried to select as a specimen for his study and exclaims, “I am a scientist you understand? I serve scientific truth” (Carey, Sandoval, and Wilson, 249). The young Magneto hands Hirt a length of rope and declares that he also serves the truth and he has passed the sentence of death by hanging on the SS doctor. He then offers Hirt the choice to either hang himself before the morning or he, Magneto, will murder Hirt’s father, his sister, and his two children. Faced with this choice, Hirt chooses to hang himself in his cell that evening and his body is found by his French guards the next

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morning. Magneto’s ultimatum is important in two respects. First, Hirt’s death at his own hands prevents Magneto from becoming a direct perpetrator in the story. Second, his ultimatum to Hirt accurately reflects the “choiceless choice” faced by many Jews during the Shoah, a situation demonstrated with great effect in William Styron’s novel Sophie’s Choice.28 Carey uses the description of Hirt’s death to transition the story back to the Holocaust museum in Los Angeles. At this point, Magneto responds to Rogue’s question about Hirt’s death by remarking that it was not an act of absolution, but rather a lesson gleaned from his oppressors: “I learned from my oppressors. Took the darkness and the nightmare into myself, and became adept at using them” (Carey, Sandoval, and Wilson, 249). The story closes with Magneto and Rogue locked together in each other’s arms thus graphically illustrating the coexistence of good and evil. In this case, Rogue, the heroic X-(Wo)Man recognizes the loss and grief experienced by her erstwhile nemesis and the influence of such traumatic events in shaping Magneto’s view of humanity and seeks to comfort him. In this final image, the moral fable illustrating the coexistence and battle between good and evil finds depiction in the embrace of the heroic Rogue and the anti-hero, Magneto.

Decoding “Aftermath, Part Two” “Aftermath, Part Two” primarily focuses on the effects of the Holocaust on Magneto’s character and his own struggle with this past and his desire for punishment of the killers and justice for the victims. From a linguistic perspective, the story incorporates German terms and titles, including “Teufel” (devil) and “Herr Doktor” as well as the Polish term for Auschwitz, Oświȩcim. This attention to technical detail includes the depiction of black SS uniforms, albeit without the distinctive death’s head emblem, as well as prisoners in striped uniforms with shaven heads. Regarding the effects of Nazi racial science, the expulsion of German Jews from the medical profession is historically accurate as is the “active, even leading role” of German medical professionals “in the initiation, administration, and execution of Nazi racial programs” and the attempts of these men to legitimize the “science” of “racial biology” in Nazi Germany.29 Similarly, Nazi medical personnel at Auschwitz and other concentration camps conducted a wide variety of horrific experiments on Jewish prisoners including vivisections as well as injections with lethal substances. The assimilation of Hirt’s real life and horrific activities reflects Carey’s integration of historical evidence that deepens the complexity of the story.30 While Carey accurately describes Nazi racial experiments and the role of SS doctors in this process, this information, the description of life in Auschwitz, and the detail of Eisenhardt’s experience in the Sonderkommando serve primarily to explain Magneto’s hatred of humanity. It also provides a reasonable explanation for his obsessive search for security for his fellow mutants.

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The story fails, however, to elaborate on Magneto’s life in Auschwitz or explain his transformation from a Jewish prisoner into a mutant with superpowers. In this sense, the story avoids a counterfactual narrative since Magneto apparently gained his powers after his escape from Auschwitz. Likewise, Magneto does not seek redemption, but rather Hirt’s forced suicide represents an act on behalf of those demanding punishment and retribution for Nazi crimes committed against Jews and other victim groups.

The Wolverine at Sobibor Magneto is not the only character from the X-Men series whose personal history is tied to the killing centers. The Wolverine, perhaps the X-Men’s most recognizable and popular character, especially with respect to the X-Men film franchise, first appeared in an issue of The Incredible Hulk in 1974 and then gained increasing popularity within the X-Men; a title comic of his own followed a highly successful four part series written by Chris Claremont and illustrated by Frank Miller in 1982. In this series, “Wolverine slaughters an extraordinary number of his enemies and the mutant displays that his primary superpower is killing” (Johnson, 132). With his obscure past, Wolverine represents an “anti-hero” distinguished by his strength, agility, and ferocity and his noted “propensity for killing,” using a set of unbreakable “adamantium” claws that can be extended or retracted (Johnson, 132). In addition to his lethal claws, Wolverine has the ability to heal rapidly from wounds, superficial or lethal, making him essentially immortal (Johnson, 132 and Wright, 265). The close connection between Wolverine’s origin story and his remarkable powers of recovery made his character an intriguing choice as the major protagonist in a Nazi killing center. As a product of a eugenic experiment, Wolverine is in narrative terms a logical candidate to place within the Nazi camp system, especially based on public knowledge of Josef Mengele’s experiments at Auschwitz (Lifton, 337–383). In the November 2005 issue, entitled “Prisoner Number Zero,” the writer Mark Millar placed Wolverine at Sobibor in occupied Poland in 1942. The paradoxical placement of a mutant who literally can’t be killed in a site of extermination creates a framework for exploring the limits of Nazi power within the camp and the existence of individual agency among the prisoners. In this sense, Wolverine’s designation as “Prisoner Number Zero” is significant and incorporates the numbering system used in the camps in place of names. The number zero reinforces the ambiguity of Wolverine’s role as a prisoner. He assumes the role of the “first” prisoner of the camp, but since numbering systems begin with one, his status as a prisoner is immediately put into question.31 The choice of Sobibor as the site of Wolverine’s incarceration also is interesting since it was one of three “Operation Reinhard” killing centers in German occupied Poland, established in 1942 specifically for the mass murder of the European Jews (Wachsmann, 293–294). Unlike Auschwitz and Majdanek, camps with dual roles as killing

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centers and labor camps, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Belzec were specifically designed for the purpose of mass extermination with a limited number of Jewish prisoners serving as Arbeitshäftlinge (forced workers) selected to assist with the processing and mass murder of the Jews arriving by train.32 The choice of Wolverine as a prisoner of Sobibor is thought provoking in several respects. Wolverine’s persona and conduct, much like that of Magneto, is often ambiguous and violent. Like his animal namesake, he is known for his ferocity and aggression. Accordingly, the setting of Sobibor symbolically reinforces connections between imprisonment or caging of a human and an animal. The connection is represented graphically on the opening page with Wolverine’s framing against the camp’s barbed wire fence. In this representation, Sobibor is a place where Wolverine is forced to revert to his “animal self,” and where all prisoners are forced to forfeit their humanity. Unlike Magneto, Wolverine has no identifiable Jewish origins and Millar’s narrative fails to address how he came to Sobibor or the reason for his incarceration. The issue opens at Sobibor with the arrival of a new SS commandant, Bauman, reportedly in the wake of the “suicide” of the previous commandant. The plotline indicates that Bauman received orders directly from the head of the Security Police, SS General Reinhard Heydrich, to enforce discipline within a camp described as a “disgrace compared with Auschwitz and Treblinka” and to improve “the camp’s extermination rates which were embarrassingly low” (Millar, 32) The comparison between Auschwitz’s, Treblinka’s, and Sobibor’s “extermination rates” frames the story as concerned with the Nazis’ desire to escalate mass murder and genocide. As Bauman enters the camp, he notes a prisoner (Wolverine) staring at him through the wire. This panel shows the back of Wolverine’s head in with his distinctive dual horned hairstyle. In contrast, the frontal views of Wolverine throughout the issue show his face drawn in black without recognizable facial features and dominated by completely white eyes, a clear indication of the dominance of Wolverine’s “animal self” within the camp. This representation effaces Wolverine’s normal complexion and human identity and replaces it with a demonic other, a technique that emphasizes the hellish nature of Sobibor itself. Interestingly, the cover art for this issue does provide a frontal shot of Wolverine with normal skin tone and recognizable facial features including eyes with a defined pupil and iris. The allusion to hell can also be found in the initial sequence dedicated to the unpacking of Bauman’s extensive collection of literary works as well as his crated collection of old and valuable wines, a family heirloom. In the case of the last, one frame shows Bauman holding a bottle of wine while remarking, “Some of these bottles have been in my family for over three hundred years” (Millar, 32). The subsequent panel then highlights the bottle’s label with a horned demon’s skull encased by fire and the French words “La Fin du Monde” (lit. the end of the world) (Millar, 32).

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During Bauman’s initial tour of the camp, Wolverine stands in the ­ ackground staring at the new commandant and refuses to respond to an b SS guard’s command to work. Bauman, smoking a cigarette, recognizes Wolverine as the prisoner who stared at him upon his arrival and orders that he be made an example to the other prisoners. Wolverine is then dragged to the side of a shed, where Bauman directs that he be shot in the back of each knee before being executed. The new SS commandant then turns to a group of prisoners and warns, “You see what happens when you stand around gawking? You see what happens when you fail to do your work?” (Millar, 32). His point made, Bauman orders that Wolverine’s body be incinerated in the crematorium. This initial execution raises the paradox of Wolverine’s immortality and initiates the conflict between the superhero protagonist and his Nazi antagonist. Later that evening, Bauman relaxes in his room surrounded by bookcases filled with literary classics while reflecting on the Nazi campaign against the Jews. In a panel exposing his thoughts, Bauman notes that he “took no pleasure in our camps,” and recalls, “As I wrote in the Volkischer Beobachter33 [sic], the Jews might have started this war when they brought down one of our finest buildings [the Reichstag], but it’s the duty of all patriots to finish it.”34 Bauman’s reverie is cut short by the sound of whistling outside his window and the distinctive silhouette of Wolverine standing in the distance. A clearly agitated and incredulous Bauman and a group of SS guards storm outside and find the recently executed prisoner, alive and uninjured. Bauman’s subsequent questions to Wolverine elicit no response and the SS guards proceed to beat Wolverine, stab him with their bayonets, and shoot him before he is once more carried to the incinerator and “burned like coal” (Millar, 32) After this second execution, a nighttime panorama of the camp, reflecting Bauman’s dark mood, serves as the backdrop for an internal monologue in which he remarks, “But I could still hear whistling in the dead of night, no matter how many times I turned or how many bottles [of wine] I opened” (Millar, 32). At this point, he ruefully comments on his failure to question why the previous commandant had committed suicide by cutting his wrists, revealing that the last two camp commandants at Sobibor had killed themselves. The revelation of these two deaths combined with Bauman’s increasing anxiety foreshadows his own imminent demise and raises the question of who is the real prisoner in the camp. The following week as Bauman escorts SS General Reinhard Heydrich to inspect the camp, a scene framed in an oversized panel with a depiction of a massive crematorium chimney belching black smoke, Bauman notices Wolverine among the prisoners and rushes from the inspection party to kill him, a process he repeats again and again. By this point in the story, Bauman is experiencing symptoms of psychological trauma, reinforced by the unexpected news of Heydrich’s assassination in Prague on May 27, 1942.35 The loss of his friend and mentor combined with sounds of a familiar, persistent

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whistling outside his office have led him to break a promise to his father by opening the wine he was saving as an inheritance and investment for his children. Bauman’s increasing bouts of drunkenness and his growing psychological disorientation frame the story’s denouement. An SS guard enters Bauman’s office to inform him of an extraordinary situation in which one prisoner inside the gas chamber has remained alive despite the presence of poison gas and the deaths of the other prisoners. The lone survivor of the gassing, Wolverine, pictured from behind in a hunting crouch within the gas chamber, is subsequently brought to Bauman’s office and bound to a chair for questioning. At the start of the interrogation, Bauman pours himself a glass of rare wine and exclaims, “I know what you are … You’re one of those special people, one of those freaks who can do things people shouldn’t be able to do” (Millar, 32). In a veiled reference to Magneto, the writer, Millar, depicts Bauman recalling a similar case involving the story of a young boy who had reported seeing a person “pick apart an armored car just by looking at it” (Millar, 32). Wolverine’s refusal to answer Bauman’s questions drives the latter into a fury during which he breaks several wine bottles on Wolverine’s head and exclaims, “We can’t kill you, but you can still feel pain” (Millar, 32). Bauman, in a frenzy, continues to beat Wolverine and knocks over a lamp, starting a conflagration that spreads throughout the book filled room. The final panel of the page displays the label of a bottle of La fin du Monde with its picture of a horned demon’s skull encased in fire. In this sense, the horned demon’s skull evokes Wolverine’s distinctive dual horned hairstyle and decisively inverts the narrative between prisoner and jailer. The story ends with the arrival of a new SS commandant who is being observed by Wolverine, once again with his body framed against the wire fence. The final page consists of a single panel that projects the arrival of the new commandant with an oversized silhouette of Wolverine’s distinctive hair line and two completely white eyes framed by flames and with the prophetic remark that “the honest truth was, we [the SS camp personnel] were locked up with him” (Millar, 32). In contrast to Claremont’s depiction of the suffering and murder of the Jews in Auschwitz, Millar’s treatment of Sobibor concentrates on the impact of Wolverine’s survival on the behavior and psyche of the Nazi perpetrator, Bauman. Although Sobibor was conceived and constructed as a killing site for Jews, “Prisoner Number Zero” recasts the camp from a site of Jewish suffering to a hell of the Nazi’s own making in which the perpetrators, symbolized by the German SS commandants, become the victims. The absent presence of Jewish victims is underlined by indeterminate and shadowy drawings of the camp’s prisoners who, like Wolverine, remain voiceless throughout the story. Like Magneto in “Aftermath, Part Two,” Wolverine’s presence in Sobibor does not serve a redemptive purpose. He does not attempt to save his fellow prisoners from annihilation, explicitly shown in the panel depicting the inside

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of the gas chamber with corpses scattered around him. In this sense, he is a demon or the angel of death and not a supernatural agent of salvation. With respect to the technical details of representation, in contrast to “Aftermath, Part Two,” the drawing of SS uniforms is much less precise and the only German word used in the issue is “Herr” or “Mister.” Furthermore, the placing of a crematorium building in Sobibor is historically incorrect since the bodies of the victims were burned there in open pits. Perhaps most interestingly, Millar’s depiction of Bauman avoids the traditional Hollywood stereotype of SS commandants as either psychotic killers or social misfits, but instead gives him the persona of a self-described “academic” and a man of culture who is well-read and a connoisseur of fine wine. Despite this cultural façade, Millar assigns agency and responsibility to Bauman as a man driven by the twin impulses of antisemitism and overweening ambition. He is a man who has freely accepted his role in mass murder and looks upon his job as a means to achieving his career goals. In contrast to Bauman, Wolverine represents a character of “dark goodness” who is “utterly noble and completely savage,” a mutant who represents “us at our absolute best and worst and the best there is at being the absolute worst.”36 In this sense, Wolverine’s character challenges Manichean oppositions by recalling the mythical Golem who acts as a mute agent to defend the Jewish people and to avenge SS crimes against them.37 Wolverine’s refusal to speak even under torture further highlights his isolation. He does not interact with his fellow prisoners, but instead haunts the waking moments and nightmares of his SS antagonist in a hell of the Nazi’s creation.

Conclusion The association of superheroes with the events of the Holocaust and with narrative conventions commonly associated with science fiction and fantasy may raise concerns about trivializing the murder of six million European Jews. Similarly, the fictional realm of superheroes questions the genre’s ability to capture the reality of the Shoah. Lawrence Langer described this tension: “When the Holocaust is the theme, history imposes limitations on the supposed flexibility of artistic license.” He also remarked, “The Holocaust in fact resists displacement by the Holocaust in fiction, as if the artist were guilty of some unprincipled violation of a sacred shrine.”38 These are valid concerns; however, the use of comics as moral fables and their focus on the broader questions of right versus wrong and good versus evil makes the Holocaust a fitting topic for examination. Similarly, it is the importance of the message rather than the medium that should take first place. Indeed, some survivors chose comic depiction as their own means for portraying the horror of the camps. Paladij Osynka, a survivor, used “sketches” of life in Auschwitz “in the form of cartoons” to convey the “humorous” and the “tragic” aspects of the prisoners’ camp experience.39 Artistic depiction in comics also has the

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advantage of exploiting the capacity of comic books or graphic novels to ­create new visual-verbal spaces for conceptualizing and interpreting the reality of genocide. From a purely utilitarian perspective, popular comics whose readership reaches in the millions have the ability to reach a much broader and diverse population than most historical or literary texts. They provide a forum, even if imperfect, for representing the horrors of Sobibor and Auschwitz to millions of readers, many of whom may not have taken such a trip without the X-Men. The Holocaust was not a fantasy and there were certainly no superheroes in Auschwitz, but that does not mean that comics and graphic novels cannot serve as one of many sources for attempting to grasp the incomprehensibility of genocide. Acknowledgements   I would like to thank my colleague, Dr. Jackson Ayres, and the editors for their insightful and substantive contributions in the review of this manuscript.

Notes

1.  For an astute discussion of the depiction in contemporary media of Adolf Hitler, National Socialism, and the Holocaust see Gavriel Rosenfeld, Hi Hitler! How the Nazi Past Is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 2. Christina Dokou, “Seen City: Frank Miller’s Reimaging as a Cinematic ‘New Real,’” in Comics as History, Comics as Literature: Roles of Comic Book in Scholarship, Society, and Entertainment, ed. Annessa Ann Babic (Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014), 174. 3. Jeremy Black, The Holocaust: History and Memory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), 198. 4. Tatiana de Rosnay, Sarah’s Key (New York: St. Martins, 2008); Markus Zusak, The Book Thief (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007); and John Boyne, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (New York: Random House, 2006). 5. Robert Schickel, “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas: A Failed Holocaust Fable,” Time, November 7, 2008. 6. Robert Eaglestone, The Broken Voice: Reading Post-Holocaust Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 3. 7. Hillary L. Chute, Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 14. 8. Marc DiPaolo, War, Politics and Superheroes: Ethics and Propaganda in Comics and Film (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2011), 10. 9. Jason Dittmer, Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero: Metaphors, Narratives, and Geopolitics (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2012), 9; Jeffrey K. Johnson, Super-History: Comic Book Superheroes and American Society, 1938 to the Present (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2012), 34–35. 10. Roy Thomas, Superman: The War Years, 1938–1945 (New York: Chartwell Books, 2015), 70–73.

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11. Republic of Poland, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland (London: Hutchinson & Company, 1942), 3. 12. Dina Kraft, “How Jewish Comic Book Artists Led the Fight to Break the Silence on the Holocaust,” Haaretz, September 23, 2018, https://www.haaretz.com/ israel-news/.premium-how-jewish-comic-book-artists-led-the-fight-to-show-theholocaust-1.6462797; Dittmer, Captain America, 9. 13. Richard H. Minear, Dr. Seuss Goes to War: The World War II Editorial Cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geisel (New York: The New Press, 1999). 14. Marie-Catherine Caillava, “Magneto the Jew,” in The Unauthorized X-Men: SF and Comic Writers on Mutants, Prejudice and Adamantium, ed. Len Wein (Dallas, TX: Benbella Books, 2006), 103. 15.  Adam Roberts, “Lee, Kirby and Ovid’s X-Metamorpheses,” in The Unauthorized X-Men: SF and Comic Writers on Mutants, Prejudice and Adamantium, ed. Len Wein (Dallas, TX: Benbella Books, 2006), 140. 16. For a discussion of Kitty Pryde’s character see Keith R. A. DeCandido, “Pryde and Joy,” in The Unauthorized X-Men, ed. Len Wein (Dallas, TX: Benbella Books, 2005), 79–88, https://www.marvel.com/characters/kitty-pryde; Chris Claremont and John Byrne, “God Spare the Child,” in The Uncanny X-Men, vol. 1, no. 129 (January 1980). 17. Marco Arnaudo, The Myth of the Superhero, trans. Jamie Richards (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 35; Adam Roberts, “Lee, Kirby and Ovid’s X-Metamorpheses,” in The Unauthorized X-Men, ed. Len Wein (Dallas, TX: Benbella Books, 2005), 140. 18. Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 263. 19. Christopher Allen, “Magneto Attracts,” in The Unauthorized X-Men: SF and Comic Writers on Mutants, Prejudice and Adamantium, ed. Len Wein (Dallas, TX: Benbella Books, 2006), 92. 20.  Chris Claremont, “X-Men vs. Magneto,” in The Uncanny X-Men, vol. 1, no. 150 (October 1981). 21.  Chris Claremont, “Gold Rush,” in The Uncanny X-Men, vol. 1, no. 161 (September 1982). 22. Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (New York: Farrar, Straus and Grioux, 2015), 22. 23.  Shaun Manning interview with Mike Carey, “X-Position: Mike Carey Builds His Legacy” (June 10, 2008), http://www.cbr. com/x-position-mike-carey-builds-his-legacy/. 24. Mike Carey, Rafa Sandoval, and Matthew Wilson, “Aftermath, Part Two,” in X-Men Legacy, no. 249 (July 2011). 25.  For a photograph of Hirt see Lindsey Bever, “Remains of Holocaust Experiment Victims found at French Forensic Institute,” The Washington Post, July 22, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/ wp/2015/07/22/remains-of-holocaust-victims-used-as-guinea-pigs-foundat-french-forensic-institute/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.1fc2c3393ea9. 26. Simon Harrison, Dark Trophies: Hunting and the Enemy Body in Modern War (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), 125–126. 27. Quoted in Eric A. Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband, eds., What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany, an Oral History (Cambridge, MA: Basic Books, 2005), 189.

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28.  For a discussion of “choiceless choice” see Lawrence Langer, Versions of Survival: The Holocaust and the Human Spirit (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1982), 72. For a literary depiction see William Styron, Sophie’s Choice (New York: Random House, 1979). 29. Robert Proctor, Nazi Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 6, 80, 89–90. 30.  Robert J. Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 287–296. For example, Hirt’s actual suicide shortly after the war corresponds with the fictional narrative. 31. Mark Millar, “Prisoner Number Zero,” in Wolverine, no. 32 (November 2005). 32. Jules Schelvis, Sobibor: A History of a Nazi Death Camp (Oxford, UK: Berg, 2007), 83. 33. The Völkischer Beobachter (People’s Observer) was the main newspaper of the Nazi Party. 34.  Mark Millar, “Prisoner Number Zero,” in Wolverine, no. 32 (November 2005). Interestingly, Millar dedicated this issue to Will Eisner, the author of the graphic novel A Life Force (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983). 35. Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 568. 36. Charlie W. Starr, “The Best There Is … Isn’t Very Nice,” in The Unauthorized X-Men: SF and Comic Writers on Mutants, Prejudice and Adamantium, ed. Len Wein (Dallas, TX: Benbella Books, 2006), 70. 37. Moshe Idel, Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989). 38.  Lawrence L. Langer, Admitting the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 75–76. 39. Paladij Osynka, Auschwitz: Album of a Political Prisoner (n.p., 1946), 8.

Bibliography Allen, Christopher. “Magneto Attracts.” In The Unauthorized X-Men: SF and Comic Writers on Mutants, Prejudice and Adamantium, edited by Len Wein, 89–97. Dallas, TX: Benbella Books, 2006. Arnaudo, Marco. The Myth of the Superhero. Translated by Jamie Richards. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Babic, Annessa Ann, ed. Comics as History, Comics as Literature: Roles of Comic Book in Scholarship, Society, and Entertainment. Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014. Bever, Lindsay. “Remains of Holocaust Experiment Victims Found at French Forensic Institute.” The Washington Post, July 22, 2015. Black, Jeremy. The Holocaust: History and Memory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016. Boyne, John. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. New York: Random House, 2006. Caillava, Marie-Catherine. “Magneto the Jew.” In The Unauthorized X-Men: SF and Comic Writers on Mutants, Prejudice and Adamantium, edited by Len Wein, 99–109. Dallas, TX: Benbella Books, 2006. Carey, Mike, Rafa Sandoval, and Matthew Wilson. “Aftermath, Part Two.” In X-Men Legacy, no. 249, July 2011.

612  E. B. WESTERMANN Chute, Hillary L. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Claremont, Chris. “Gold Rush.” In The Uncanny X-Men, vol. 1, no. 161, September 1982. ———. “X-Men vs. Magneto.” In The Uncanny X-Men, vol. 1, no. 150, October 1981. Claremont, Chris, and John Byrne. “God Spare the Child.” In The Uncanny X-Men, vol. 1, no. 129, January 1980. DeCandido, Keith R. A. “Pryde and Joy.” In The Unauthorized X-Men, edited by Len Wein, 79–88. Dallas, TX: Benbella Books, 2006. De Rosnay, Tatiana. Sarah’s Key. New York: St. Martins, 2008. DiPaolo, Marc. War, Politics and Superheroes: Ethics and Propaganda in Comics and Film. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2011. Dittmer, Jason. Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero: Metaphors, Narratives, and Geopolitics. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2012. Dokou, Christina. “Seen City: Frank Miller’s Reimaging as a Cinematic ‘New Real.’” In Comics as History, Comics as Literature: Roles of Comic Book in Scholarship, Society, and Entertainment, edited by Annessa Ann Babic, 171–193. Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014. Eaglestone, Robert. The Broken Voice: Reading Post-Holocaust Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Eisner, Will. A Life Force. New York: W. W. Norton, 1983. Harrison, Simon. Dark Trophies: Hunting and the Enemy Body in Modern War. New York: Berghahn Books, 2012. Idel, Moshe. Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989. Johnson, Eric A., and Karl-Heinz Reuband, eds. What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany, an Oral History. Cambridge, MA: Basic Books, 2005. Johnson, Jeffrey K. Super-History: Comic Book Superheroes and American Society, 1938 to the Present. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2012. Kraft, Dina. “How Jewish Comic Book Artists Led the Fight to Break the Silence on the Holocaust.” Haaretz, September 23, 2018. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-how-jewish-comic-book-artists-led-the-fight-to-show-the-holocaust-1.6462797. Langer, Lawrence L. Admitting the Holocaust. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Lifton, Robert J. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York: Basic Books, 1986. Longerich, Peter. Heinrich Himmler. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Millar, Mark. “Prisoner Number Zero.” In Wolverine, no. 32, November 2005. Minear, Richard H. Dr. Seuss Goes to War: The World War II Editorial Cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geisel. New York: The New Press, 1999. Osynka, Paladij. Auschwitz: Album of a Political Prisoner. Privately Printed, 1946. Proctor, Robert. Nazi Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Republic of Poland, Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland. London: Hutchinson & Company, 1942.

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Roberts, Adam. “Lee, Kirby and Ovid’s X-Metamorpheses.” In The Unauthorized X-Men: SF and Comic Writers on Mutants, Prejudice and Adamantium, edited by Len Wein, 139–151. Dallas, TX: Benbella Books, 2006. Rosenfeld, Gavriel. Hi Hitler! How the Nazi Past Is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Schelvis, Jules. Sobibor: A History of a Nazi Death Camp. Oxford, UK: Berg, 2007. Schickel, Robert. “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas: A Failed Holocaust Fable.” Time, November 7, 2008. Starr, Charlie W. “The Best There Is … Isn’t Very Nice.” In The Unauthorized X-Men: SF and Comic Writers on Mutants, Prejudice and Adamantium, edited by Len Wein, 65–78. Dallas, TX: Benbella Books, 2006. Thomas, Roy. Superman: The War Years, 1938–1945. New York: Chartwell Books, 2015. Wachsmann, Nikolaus. KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps. New York: Farrar, Straus and Grioux, 2015. Wright, Bradford W. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. X-Men, DVD. Directed by Bryan Singer. Burbank, CA: Twentieth Century Fox, 2000. X-Men: Apocalypse, DVD. Directed by Bryan Singer. Burbank, CA: Twentieth Century Fox, 2016. X-Men: First Class, DVD. Directed by Matthew Vaughn. Burbank, CA: Twentieth Century Fox, 2011. Zusak, Markus. The Book Thief. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.

CHAPTER 33

An Iconic Image Through the Lens of Ka-tzetnik: The Murder of the Mother and the Essence of Auschwitz David Patterson

When Gideon Hausner was preparing his list of Holocaust survivors to testify at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, he went to Yehiel De-Nur, the Holocaust survivor and author known as Ka-tzetnik 135633, and pleaded with him to take the witness stand. As De-Nur related it to me years later, he in turn pleaded with Hausner not to call him to the stand. “Yes,” he said to Hausner, “I spent two years in Auschwitz. I saw the starvation, the beatings, the humiliation, the smoke bellowing from the chimneys, but that is not Auschwitz. What Auschwitz is I cannot say. Please do not ask me to testify!” In the end, however, Hausner got De-Nur to agree to testify. When the time came for him to take the stand on 7 June 1961 in Session 68 of the Jerusalem trial of Adolf Eichmann, he attempted to say what Auschwitz is: Witness Dinur: I do not regard myself as a writer and a composer of literary material. This is a chronicle of the planet of Auschwitz. I was there for about two years. Time there was not like it is here on earth. Every fraction of a minute there passed on a different scale of time. And the inhabitants of this planet had no names, they had no parents nor did they have children. There they did not dress in the way we dress here; they were not born there and they did not give birth; they breathed according to different laws of nature; they did not live—nor did they die—according to the laws of this world. […] They were clad there, how would you call it…

D. Patterson (*)  University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX, USA © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_33

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616  D. PATTERSON Q. Yes. Is this what you wore there? [Shows the witness the prison garb of Auschwitz.] A. This is the garb of the planet called Auschwitz. And I believe with perfect faith that I have to continue to bear this name [Ka-tzetnik] so long as the world has not been aroused after this crucifixion of a nation, to wipe out this evil, in the same way as humanity was aroused after the crucifixion of one man. I believe with perfect faith that, just as in astrology the stars influence our destiny, so does this planet of the ashes, Auschwitz, stand in opposition to our planet earth, and influences it. If I am able to stand before you today and relate the events within that planet, if I, a fall-out of that planet, am able to be here at this time, then I believe with perfect faith that this is due to the oath I swore to them there. They gave me this strength. This oath was the armor with which I acquired the supernatural power, so that I should be able, after time—the time of Auschwitz—the two years when I was a Muselmann, to overcome it. For they left me, they always left me, they were parted from me, and this oath always appeared in the look of their eyes. For close on two years they kept on taking leave of me and they always left me behind. I see them, they are staring at me, I see them, I saw them standing in the queue… Q. Perhaps you will allow me, Mr. Dinur, to put a number of questions to you, if you will agree? A. [Tries to continue] I remember… Presiding Judge: Mr. Dinur, kindly listen to what the Attorney General has to say. [Witness Dinur rises from his place descends from the witness stand, and collapses on the platform. The witness fainted.]1

Something unspeakable weighed on the witness, something he could not speak, the weight of the entire “concentrationary universe.”2 As De-Nur tried to speak it, even as he tried to think it in “a shuddering of the human quite different from cognition,” to borrow a phrase from Emmanuel Levinas,3 that universe swept over him and sent him into a swoon in his attempt to narrate a time outside of time, a time that cannot be thought. “Time there,” De-Nur testified, “was not like it is here on earth. Every fraction of a minute there passed on a different scale of time.” That different scale of time belongs to none of the circles of heaven or hell, where a principle of justice rules; as Primo Levi has said, “for us the Lager is not a punishment.”4 In Auschwitz, the Jews served no sentence: they were not “doing time.” Outside of time, Auschwitz cannot be located within the landscape of being or nothingness: In that anti-space-time more was real than was possible, the unreal all too real. Thus the witness testifies before humanity to an anti-time in an anti-world void of humanity. This rupture of time, which is a rupture of the real, is a breakdown of language. For De-Nur, who tried to put Auschwitz into words, there was a literal breakdown of language, a breakdown that was itself part of his testimony: He fell mute. De-Nur’s repeated refrain of “I believe with perfect faith” is also worth noting: it is the Hebrew phrase ani maamin b’emunah shlemah, from the

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Thirteen Principles of Faith found in Maimonides’ commentary on the Mishnah (Sanhedrin, 10).5 The Thirteen Principles are recited in the prayer known as the Yigdal. If one is to say what Auschwitz is, perhaps it can only be said in a prayer. As Maurice Blanchot states, “the question concerning the disaster is part of the disaster; it is not an interrogation, but a prayer, an entreaty, a call for help.”6 Or is the entreaty to be uttered in a swoon, realizing that the call for help comes both from the human and from the beyond? And it is a call that goes unanswered, like a million candles burning for the help that never came. Is that when De-Nur finally “said” what Auschwitz is— when he fainted? Is that how the essence of Auschwitz is to be represented— in a swoon? Is that how it is to be spoken—in a collapse into silence? And what becomes of language and all that we thought we knew about language in the attempt to speak it?

Ka-tzetnik 135633: A Memory and a Name In the summer of 1989, I was in Jerusalem doing research at the National Library for a book I was writing on Holocaust novels. I had arranged to meet with one of the authors I was studying: Haim Gouri. As we sat in his apartment one evening, Gouri asked me if there were other authors whom I would like to meet. Among the few I mentioned was Yehiel De-Nur. He picked up the phone, dialed a number, and the meeting was arranged. The next day, early in the afternoon, I arrived at the De-Nurs’ apartment on Pineles Street in Tel Aviv. I knocked on the door, and there stood the lovely Eliyah, Yehiel’s wife. “David!” she cried, as if she had known me for years. “You’re here at last! Please come in! Come in!” Near a desk in the corner of their modest living room sat Yehiel silently eyeing me, sizing me up, as Eliyah and I spoke for almost an hour. Ka-tzetnik 135633 is not precisely a pen name for Yehiel De-Nur.7 It is the name that was tattooed into De-Nur’s flesh upon his passage through the gates marked Arbeit Macht Frei. De-Nur was born in Sosnowiec in 1909; Ka-tzetnik 135633 was born in Auschwitz in 1943. In the late spring of 1945, the escaped prisoner of Planet Auschwitz lay dying in a British army hospital in Italy. But before succumbing to death, he resolved to fulfill a promise made to the ashes that had been cast to the winds, the ashes that now cover the earth. So he asked for a pen and paper. Some two weeks later, the patient produced a manuscript. He also made a miraculous recovery, as though his testimony to the dead and for the dead had released him from the grip of the Angel of Death. The former inmate of the anti-world entrusted his book to Eliyahu Goldenberg, a soldier in the Jewish Brigade from Palestine. Noticing that the manuscript had no author’s name on it, Goldenberg asked, “Who shall I say wrote this?” “Who wrote it, you ask?” the man replied. “They wrote it! Go on, put their name on it: Ka-tzetnik!”8 It was the name given to all the inhabitants of the

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concentrationary universe, the name of those whose voices went into this voice. Thus appeared Ka-tzetnik’s first novel, perhaps the first novel to bear witness to the Shoah, Salamandra (the English edition is titled Sunrise Over Hell, 1977), after the mythical creature that emerged from fire. After the book was published in Israel in 1946, Eliyah (then named Nina Asherman) was so taken by the book that she spent more than a year tracking down its author. The novel could be found in every Israeli home, but no one, not even the publisher, knew the identity of its author. Eliyah located him at last, however, and they were married in 1947. “I was living on one park bench during the day, and another at night,” Yehiel told me. “She saved my life.” He would disappear for months at a time, whereupon his Eliyah would get a phone call: “Your husband has collapsed in the orange grove. Come get him.” She would go to pick him up, only to find another novel. It was she who brought his literary testimony to the light of day. Yehiel gave no public lectures and, with the exception of an appearance on 60 Minutes on 6 February 1983, never appeared on a talk show. When his children were in high school they read his works, but they did not know that their father was the author. He never participated in the ceremonies for the Ka-tzetnik Prize, a literary award established in 1981. Nor was he ever involved in special seminars held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem or at Yad Vashem for the future teachers of Israel, despite frequent requests. “My wife tells me I should,” he explained to me. “And I know she is right. But for some reason I cannot. It isn’t me. It’s the others. I have always tried to keep Yehiel De-Nur separate from Ka-tzetnik.” On the day of our initial meeting, once Yehiel had decided I was okay, he asked me about my work on the Holocaust. What was I studying? What was I looking for? Why had I taken up such a task? With his characteristic intensity, he listened to my faltering replies. Suddenly he went to his desk, pulled out a manuscript, and all but shouted, “Here: this is the key! You will take it. You will read it. This is the key! The other books are about Auschwitz. This is Auschwitz!” It was the manuscript of the English translation of his first work of nonfiction Shivitti. I asked if it was his only copy. “Yes. You will take it. You will bring it back.” Deeply daunted by having such a treasure entrusted to my care, I told him, no, I cannot do that. What if something should happen to it? But he insisted, repeating, “You will bring it back.” I spent that night in Jerusalem poring over the harrowing tale of the therapy Yehiel endured in an effort to overcome thirty years of sleepless nights. With the onset of darkness, the nightmares would descend upon him, so that he had to catch what sleep he could in afternoon catnaps. Finally, Eliyah took him to a clinic that specialized in such cases, operated by Dr. Jan Bastiaans in the Netherlands. Shivitti is an account of his therapeutic encounters with Dr. Bastiaans. And yet he could not write it until ten years after the experience, when the first line of the book came to him: “LSD treatment of Mr. De-Nur, Session One….” “For two weeks,” he related to me, “from the first

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word to the last, I wrote continuously. I have no memory of anything else, until I noticed other things on the desk, the picture of Eliyah. And somehow I knew I was finished. Oh, yes, there was one other thing: the cry of a child outside my window. It was a cry of life.” At the core of Shivitti are the visions that came to him while under the influence of the drug, visions from Planet Auschwitz. They rival those of Ezekiel. And yet Ka-tzetnik is not Ezekiel, for whom the dry bones came to life. Ka-tzetnik is Ka-tzetnik, before whose eyes the very bones of the dead were consumed in the gullet of Auschwitz. The next time I saw Yehiel was the last time I saw Eliyah. It was in June 1991. I had traveled to Israel by way of the murder campsites at Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. When he greeted me at the door, Yehiel hesitated for a moment: He did not recognize me at first. “David, you are so different,” he said. He could not put his finger on it, but he insisted that I had changed dramatically. I could not imagine what he was talking about. But then I realized: The ashes of the anti-world had left their mark on me, and my eyes had been transformed by what they had seen. Eliyah insisted that I had not changed a bit. Eliyah had a way of seeing through the ashes. But she had changed. It was only two years since I had last seen her, yet she looked ten years older. Her face was marked with the pain and the sickness of her third struggle with cancer. She apologized for not hugging me; she said it hurt too much. As she excused herself to go rest, she paused and looked back at me, singing the refrain, “We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when… .” Her eyes had the look of a last look. She knew. And so did I. Yehiel immediately asked me about my visits to the sites of the murder camps in Poland. There was a strange desperation in his voice. He wanted to know whether any of the wooden blocks are still standing in Birkenau, whether they were as he has described them in his books. It was as if he were not quite sure that they had ever existed, as if he were trying to convince himself that he had not gone insane and invented it all. Yes, Yehiel, the plank beds are there in the blocks, just as you said. Yes, the cold stone oven runs down the middle of each block. You have not gone mad. (Or have you? How have you kept from going mad?) Yehiel De-Nur died on July 17, 2001. But I wonder whether Ka-tzetnik 135633 does not live in all of us. With the Nazis’ burning of the body of Israel, the earth has been covered with the ashes of Israel. Those ashes inhabit the ground from which we harvest our bread. They curl up in the crumbs we put into our mouths. In those ashes lies the key to the horror that now haunts humanity from within.

The Key: The Murder of the Mother Ka-tzetnik’s Shivitti unlocks a trace of what was consumed at Auschwitz. The English title is taken from Psalms 16:8, where it is written: “Shivitti Y-H-V-H lenegedi tamid—I have placed the Lord before me always.” Part of an image

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found in many synagogues, the verse is inscribed over the two lions of Judah, accompanied by kabbalistic texts. I do not know if Ka-tzetnik was a prophet. But when I think of Ka-tzetnik, what Martin Buber once said of the prophets comes to mind: “They always aimed to shatter all security and to proclaim in the opened abyss of the final insecurity the unwished for God who […] confounds all who imagine that they can take refuge in the certainty that the temple of God is in their midst.”9 Indeed, one of the terms used to name the Holocaust is Churban, a word that refers to the destruction of the Temple. It is no accident. Given his Chasidic upbringing—he was a descendant of Nachman of Breslov—Ka-tzetnik was quite familiar with the religious ramifications and understood that each Churban entailed the obliteration of the flow of God’s light into the world, as it is written in the Midrash (see, e.g., Tanchuma Tetsaveh 6). By the light and in the darkness of the flames that consumed the Temple of Israel—the body of the Jewish people—the visions in Shivitti unfold. How far De-Nur may have strayed from the religion of his childhood, I am not sure. But his work is replete with the kabbalistic and Chasidic imagery that shaped his childhood. “Darkness in my mouth,” Ka-tzetnik records in the first of his visions. “I can taste it.”10 The darkness in the mouth is the darkness of silence: The Kingdom of Night is the Kingdom of Silence. It is the silence that ensues upon the tearing of word from meaning, so that the cry of those marked for death “split the heavens,” as it is written in Sunrise Over Hell, “but Heaven remained lofty and silent as though God had deserted its temples.”11 Through the rift in the heavens the darkness rains down and reduces the maternal word of loving kindness to a cold and empty silence. “No screams here,” writes Ka-tzetnik, “no speech. The Site of Silence. […] Night here had an essence all its own. Night here was at the beck and call of an omnipotent sovereign, a sovereign supreme over the Planet. Night muffled, stealing inaudibly on tip toes to envelop you, inaudibly, so as to keep from trespassing upon the terrifying silence reigning supreme.”12 No screams. No speech. And since the soul or essence of the human being lies in a capacity for speech, as Maimonides has said,13 the Site of Silence is the site of the assault on the soul. This breath of God breathed into the human being is the image of God, and the image of God is associated with the Divine Presence or the Shekhinah. Because the word vibrates on the breath, the mystical tradition teaches that the Shekhinah is the origin of speech.14 Recalling that the Shekhinah is a maternal presence, we realize that this imposition of an irreducible silence is a defining feature of the Nazi assault on God and on the word, and it finds a concrete manifestation in the murder of the mother. Ka-tzetnik articulates the cosmic nature of this silence in Star of Ashes, where he writes, “Silent are the heavens, silent the yellowed fields; silent the readied rifles, silent the ghetto hovels.”15 In the ghetto, the little ones “push again their mother’s belly, as if seeking to get inside once more. Their scream, embryonic, unuttered, howls out of the mother’s eyes.”16 In Atrocity,

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Ka-tzetnik reveals the horror that permeates this mute condition. When the boy Moni, the novel’s hero based on De-Nur’s brother, first entered the Auschwitz barracks, the prisoners “received him the way the pile behind the block receives a skeleton just dumped by the block orderlies. Here no one utters a word. Here speech is extinct.”17 Hence, the Shekhinah is no more; speech is no more. Which means: the mother is no more. This wordlessness, then, underscores a radical bereavement that the witness struggles to convey with words. Thus in Shivitti, Ka-tzetnik manages somehow to pray, God Give me this day the silent word, like the one Their eyes gave on Their way to The crematorium18

The word that curls up in the eyes of the dead is the word forming the prolonged prayer that is Shivitti. Reading this text, we peer into the eyes of the Muselmänner on their way to the ovens, the eyes that haunt Ka-tzetnik’s visions. Responding to this text, their eyes penetrate into us, until we behold a single word: it is, as we shall see, the word Mama. In Shivitti, an imposed nothingness descends upon the man like an unholy spirit, a shav, to use the Hebrew word, which is a cognate of Shoah. It is a nothingness that cleaves the witness in half. “The I of Then and the I of Now,” Ka-tzetnik states, “are a single identity divided by two.”19 Between the two looms an absence: Ka-tzetnik is not the author as an I who undertakes his task but the author as other, who has lost his I in the loss of his mother. “All I’ve ever written is in essence a personal journal,” Ka-tzetnik writes in Shivitti, “a testimonial on paper of I, I, I: I who witnessed… I who experienced… I who lived through… I, I, I, till half through a piece, I suddenly had to transform I to he. I felt the split, the ordeal, the alienation of it.”20 Throughout his novels Ka-tzetnik was unable to return to himself; overwhelmed by his responsibility for the others, he lost himself. In Shivitti, however, he speaks as I, not as he; in Shivitti he unlocks the vision that in the novels he had kept hidden from himself. For De-Nur, the transition from the novels to Shivitti brought on a seismic rupture in his psyche. Perhaps that is why it took him ten years from the time he had completed his therapy with Dr. Bastiaans until he could pen the book’s opening line. Perhaps that is why he wrote the book in a trance-like state, as he told me, and had no memory of having written it. In his novels Atrocity and House of Dolls, Ka-tzetnik bore witness to what befell his brother Moni and his sister Danielle. In Shivitti, shifting from he to I, he sounded the depths of his own soul and collided with a vision that his novels could not contain:

622  D. PATTERSON My mother. I see her naked and marching in line, one among Them, her face turned towards the gas chambers. “Mama! Mama! Mama!” A voice comes rolling down to me out of the Auschwitz sky. The echo of each separate word is a hammer crashing on my eardrums. It’s my mother, naked. She’s going to be gassed. I run after her. I cry out, “Mama! Mama!” I, outside that line, run after her: “Mama Listen to me! Mama!” My mother naked. Going to be gassed. I behold my mother’s skull and in my mother’s skull I see me. And I chase after me inside my mother’s skull. And my mother is naked. Going to be gassed. I’m choking!21

This is the key. This is Auschwitz. The mother in me is the soul in me, and the soul—the substance and sanctity of all that is meaningful—was consumed in the ovens of Auschwitz. This assault on the mother and on all that she signifies was systematic and calculated: It is the essence of the singularity we call the Shoah, and De-Nur has captured it in all its metaphysical depths. His vision here is truly visionary in a way that borders on the prophetic; it is not a memory from his own life dredged up by the LSD. For in his own life, his mother passed away before the war broke out.

A Photographic Icon of the Essence of Auschwitz “Suddenly, the stillness was broken by the screaming of children,” Sara Nomberg-Przytyk remembers the arrival of a transport of children in Birkenau (yes, children!), “a scream repeated a thousand times in a single word, ‘Mama,’ a scream that increased in intensity every second, enveloping the whole camp. Our lips parted without our being conscious of what we were doing, and a scream of despair tore out of our throats. […] At the end everything was enveloped in death and silence.”22 There is no mother without a child, no child without a mother: The two are as inextricably bound as earth and sky, humanity and holiness, word and meaning. Among the more than two million Holocaust photographs in public archives,23 some have assumed an iconic status. Why? Because some, more than others, convey the essential, invisible aspect of Auschwitz, of the Holocaust, of the depth dimension of the horror that we fear to gaze upon because it lies within the soul of each of us. Recall one of the meanings of the Greek word eikon: More than an image, it is an “image in the mirror,” a mirror held up to the soul, reminding us yet again of the transcendent truth of Elie Wiesel’s insight: “The ultimate mystery of the Holocaust is that whatever happened took place in the soul.”24 That is where we must seek out the essence of Auschwitz: in the soul. So let us look if we dare, for we look at the risk of gazing upon the Gorgon.

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0HPEHURI(LQVDW]JUXSSH'VKRRWLQJPRWKHU DQG FKLOG 3KRWRWDNHQLQWKH8NUDLQHLQ SXEOLFGRPDLQ

In the mystical tradition, we have a teaching that says the letter shin on the head tefillin signifies the Upper Mother, who gives birth to creation through her mother’s love and through that love imparts meaning to life (Tikkunei HaZohar 26a). And so we step before this photograph. Whoever has seen this image taken in the Ukraine in 1942 has been transformed by it. It is an icon of a Jewish mother holding her child in her arms, with the Nazi’s rifle aimed at the back of her head,25 an icon because this single image captures the evil of the Third Reich’s systematic assault on the mothers of Israel. In this Jewish mother are gathered all the Jewish mothers who could not save their children but who nevertheless held them close in their arms. Just so, the photograph captures the infinite extent to which a mother is prepared to be with her little one. De-Nur’s realization that the key to Auschwitz, the essence of Auschwitz, lies in the murder of the mother is underscored. Let us examine the image before our eyes. No faces meet the camera’s eye, nothing to forbid murder, the prohibition that, says Levinas, issues from the face.26 The murderer’s face, like his humanity, is obscured by his weapon: The weapon renders him faceless. The Jewish mother’s face is turned downward, perhaps looking to regain her footing on this ashen piece of earth; it is obscured by the child whose life—whose death—she is desperately trying to save. And the child’s face is turned away, seeking a place to hide in his or her (we cannot tell which) mother’s arms. Recall the image of the children in Ka-tzetnik’s novel Star of Ashes, as they struggle to climb back into their mother’s womb to escape the horror of this world. This Jewish child, too, filled with terror, struggles to climb back inside somewhere, his face hidden from view, his howl no less embryonic, encompassing the universe. Gazing at this image, we feel the scream rising in our own throats, choking us.

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Like the screams that flooded the women’s camp in Auschwitz, this photograph shatters any stillness we or the world might experience from the horrific moment that we lay eyes on it. The child shatters that stillness. The child is screaming, “Mama!” You can hear it even now, rising up from the depths of the black and white. It haunts us. Or is it the screams of the mother? The two merge into a cosmic scream. The Jewish mother’s arms are wrapped around the Jewish child, like the wings of the Shekhinah in the prayer El molei rachamim: El molei rachamim—God filled with compassion—who dwells in the heights, bring proper rest to the soul of [this one] beneath the wings of the Shekhinah, amid the heights of the holy and the pure, illuminating like the brilliance of the firmament the souls of our beloved and our holy ones, who went to their eternity. May You who are the source of compassion shelter them in the shade of your wings eternally, and bind their souls in the bonds of the living. The Lord is his/her heritage. May he/she find rest and peace. And let us say: Amen. (my translation)

But there is no saying amen to this image. Unlike the Shekhinah, this Jewish mother is unable to protect her Jewish child. And the El molei rachamim was never said for this mother and child. Never has there been such a transcendent image of the embrace. It gives new, devastating meaning to Levinas’s insight: “Proximity is not a state, a repose, but, a restlessness, null site, outside of the place of rest. […] No site then, is ever sufficiently a proximity, like an embrace. Never close enough, proximity does not congeal into a structure. […] Proximity, as the ‘closer and closer,’ becomes the subject. It attains its superlative as my incessant restlessness.”27 The restlessness ignited by this photograph is the restlessness of an ethical demand that can never be met; it is as incessant as it is unrelenting. It allows no sleep. This proximity that can never be close enough is the infinite closeness, the unbridgeable closeness of what is very nigh unto thee, the closeness of the transcendent ethical demand, which insists that the death which concerns me is the death of the other—the death of the mother and child. Oblivious to the photographer and the photograph, this Jewish mother about to be cast into oblivion can think only of her Jewish child. She is a mother. She struggles to keep her footing on the shifting ground of a homeland transformed into a wasteland, the ground of a creation now reeling under the trauma of an anti-creation. Is she trying to run? She wants to run. But run where? You want to reach out to her and say, “Here, give me the child. I will save her!” The lines from Wiesel’s Ani Maamin return to us: I run… And while I run, I am thinking:

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This is insane, This Jewish child Will not be spared…. I perceive a whisper…: I believe in you.28

She and the child are about to be shot before she can take a step. The two possibilities normally allowed a victim are denied to these two: Neither submission nor flight is an option for them. Or for the Jewish people. Only a death that is not death, as the image of this mother and child brings to mind these lines dated 20 October 1941 from the diary of Sarra Gleikh, who survived a similar action in the Ukraine, near her town of Mariupol: “Somewhere above the corpses children were crying. Most of them, especially the babies whose mothers held them in their arms to protect them (they shot us in the back), had fallen, now buried under the bodies of their mothers; buried alive under the corpses, they were smothering.”29 Those who are smothering beneath this iconic image of the Shoah are the invisible aspect of the photograph, the transcendence that opens our eyes and steals our breath. Who is this man taking aim at the grim image of a horrifying Madonna? What is his rifle for? Self-defense? Defense against the Jewish contagion that threatens the soul of all humanity? What is he trying to kill? He is killing the soul of the mother. It is one thing to shoot a woman, but quite another to shoot a woman trying to protect her child from being shot. This is the categorical, metaphysical, transcendent distinction conveyed by this photograph. Does the Nazi murderer know that as soon as he fires he has lost his own soul? What does his one open eye focus on, as it stares down the sights of his rifle? Does he have a mother? Did his mother ever offer him the embrace with which this Jewish mother embraces her child? No, never. Never did his mother embrace him to protect him from a murderer who would nonetheless murder him. There are other questions: Who is the photographer? What is he trying to document? For whose eyes has he taken the photograph? Not for our eyes. And yet the image stubbornly demands our gaze: we collide with the question put to the first human being, the question that decides our humanity and the dearness of the other human being: Where are you? If the essence of Auschwitz lies in the murder of the mother, it lies, too, in this first question put to the first human being.

A Closing Reflection In November 1941, historian Emmanuel Ringelblum, who organized a group of chroniclers known as the Oneg Shabbat, wrote in his ghetto diary, “Jews have been prohibited from marrying and having children,” adding that Jewish women “have to have an abortion.”30 On 5 February 1942, Vilna Ghetto diarist Herman Kruk reported, “Today the Gestapo summoned two members of the Judenrat and notified them: No more Jewish children are to

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be born.”31 Six months later, in his diary from the Kovno Ghetto, Avraham Tory noted, “From September on, giving birth is strictly forbidden. Pregnant women will be put to death.”32 In the concentration camp at Ravensbrück, Germaine Tillion recalls, “the medical services of the Revier were required to perform abortions on all pregnant women. If a child happened to be born alive, it would be smothered or drowned in a bucket in the presence of the mother.”33 In the concentrationary anti-world pregnancy was neither a medical condition nor a blessing from God—it was a sin most severe. Having determined that the crime of the Jew was being alive, the Nazis concluded that the most culpable of criminals is the one who gives birth to the Jew: the Jewish mother. The very one who, from a Jewish standpoint, is among the most honored and most sacred of beings, is from the Nazi standpoint, among the most odious. Here we glimpse a singular horror, an ethical and metaphysical horror, that belongs to the essence of Auschwitz. The horror lies not only in the assault on the Jewish mother but in the assault on the very meaning of the Jewish mother. Ka-tzetnik 135633 is one of the surviving witnesses who sounded most profoundly the depths of that horror. The mother signifies a difference that is non-indifference, the quintessential caring for another that forms the ground of meaning in human life. To have a mother is to be already summoned to an infinitely meaningful mission by the one who first utters our name with an infinite love: Origin implies destiny, when that origin is understood as a mother and not as some primeval ooze. To have a mother is to have a future and thus to set out toward the horizon of the yet-to-be, without which there is no meaning: To have a mother is to have meaning. For it is the loving word, the caring caress, of the mother that first announces to us that we are somebody. The Nazi assault on the mother is an assault on that expression of kindness, on the kindness that tells us we matter. If, as Primo Levi conveyed the essence of Auschwitz, “Hier ist kein Warum”—Here there is no Why34—we may read this to mean: Here there is no mother. When the Shekhinah accompanies Israel into exile, she does so as a mother looking after her children. What is the sign of this accompaniment? It is the Torah, which the Jews bear with them in their wanderings. When the Jews were gathered at Mount Sinai, it is written, the Torah had to be accepted first by the women before it could be received by the men. For the House of Jacob mentioned in Exodus 19:3 precedes the reference to the Children of Israel, and the House of Jacob refers to the women, the mothers of Israel (see, e.g., Rashi’s commentary on Exodus 19:3). If the Torah is the foundation of creation, the mother, through her tie to the beit, the first letter of the Torah, is the foundation of the Torah itself. For the beit is the womb from which creation is born. Significantly, the beit also designates a “house,” the shelter that a mother transforms into a dwelling place. And what is a dwelling place? It is a space into which we invite another—the space opened up by the mother. Both physically and metaphysically, a mother embodies the radical

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opposite of the ontological interest in occupying space, which was the Nazis’ murderous interest in Lebensraum or “living space,” which invariably became a killing space. As the one who harbors a womb, a space that is forever hidden, the mother is the one who, quite literally, does not usurp the place of another but rather makes room for another to dwell in the world by conceiving and giving birth. Associated with the “womb,” or rechem, the mother personifies the “compassion,” the rachamim, that lies are the core of our humanity. Levinas sheds light on these connections when he says, “Rachamim (Mercy) […] goes back to the word Rechem, which means uterus. Rachamim is the revelation of the uterus to the other, whose gestation takes place within it. Rachamim is maternity itself. God as merciful is God defined by maternity.”35 Hence, the Nazis’ assault on the mother was central to their assault on God. Recall the words of the Zohar: “First came Ehyeh (I shall be), the dark womb of all. Then Asher Ehyeh (That I Am), indicating the readiness of the Mother to beget all” (Zohar III, 65b). Begetting all, the Zohar says further, the Supernal Mother begets all of humanity (Zohar I, 22b). From the depths of the mother’s compassion—from the rechem within the rachamim—human life and the meaning of human life, to which the presence of the Jews bears witness, begin to stir. That is why the Nazis set out to systematically annihilate the Jewish mother. With the obliteration of the Jewish mother from their midst, the Jews were left with no one to be with them as a mother; they were turned over to the anti-world where, in the words of Primo Levi, “everyone is desperately and ferociously alone.”36 Yes, ferociously alone. It is a combination of words that springs from the all-too-real unreality of the Holocaust. What can it mean? Is it that no one hears you scream? That you hear nothing but screams and silence? That you are bereft of everything, from your hair to your name? That, infinitely removed from the Infinite One, you are infinitely homeless, orphaned, bereft of the mother? Indeed, living in a camp, in a ghetto, or in hiding, every Jew in Nazi Europe was homeless, precisely because the mothers of Israel were being systematically murdered—something Ka-tzetnik understood all too well. The Hebrew edition of Shivitti is titled Tzofen: E.D.M.A., which means Code: E.D.M.A. “E.D.M.A.” is an acronym for Elohei De Meir Anani, “God of Meir, answer me” (see Avodah Zarah 18a). It is a phrase used by the followers of the great Talmudic sage Rabbi Meir whenever they fell into danger under the Roman oppression. This code appears on the title page of every book that Ka-tzetnik published. The E.D.M.A., however, could not save him from the horrific vision of his mother, a vision of the mother, going naked to be gassed and burned. As horrifically traumatizing as it is for a Chasidic Jew to behold his murder naked on her way to be murdered, this vision of the meaning of Auschwitz is even more traumatizing. Indeed, it is devastating: “Coiled in my mother’s skull, I am tossed into the maw of the crematorium,” he writes.37

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If “the murder camp was not an accidental by-product of the Nazi empire” but “was its pure essence,” as Emil Fackenheim has argued,38 the murder defining that essence is the murder of the mother. It is the murder of the primal mother of all the children of the earth, the murder of the Supernal Mother, who is buried in the ashes of her children, with her children. De-Nur’s vision is a vision of the Shekhinah herself going to be gassed. The world has known orphans before, many times over. But the world itself has never been so orphaned. It is not merely due to the fact that almost all of the survivors whose testimony is entrusted to us were orphans. More than that, it is because these are not orphans whose mothers have passed away—they are orphans whose mothers were systematically murdered in a realm where it was a cosmic crime to be a Jewish mother. In the Holocaust Kingdom, not a single Jewish mother died. No, they were all murdered. At Auschwitz humanity incinerated its own soul. Much more profoundly than most, Yehiel De-Nur realized the metaphysical implications of this horrific truth. “This is Auschwitz!” he declared to me as he handed me the manuscript of Shivitti.

Notes



1.  “The Trial of Adolf Eichmann, Session 68,” June 7, 1961, State of Israel Ministry of Justice, The Nizkor Project, available at http://www.nizkor.org/ hweb/people/e/eichmann-adolf/transcripts/Sessions/Session-068-01.html. 2. From David Rousset, L’Univers concentrationnaire (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1965). 3. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), 87. 4. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 82–83. 5.  Briefly stated, the Thirteen Principles are: (1) God exists, (2) God is one and unique, (3) God is incorporeal, (4) God is eternal, (5) prayer is to be directed to God alone and to no other, (6) the words of the prophets are true, (7) Moses’ prophecies are true, and Moses was the greatest of the prophets, (8) the Written Torah (first 5 books of the Bible) and Oral Torah (teachings now contained in the Talmud and other writings) were given to Moses, (9) there will be no other Torah, (10) God knows the thoughts and deeds of men, (11) God will reward the good and punish the wicked, (12) the Messiah will come, and (13) the dead will be resurrected. The Mishnah is the oral tradition put into writing in the form of commentary on the Torah, Jewish law, and tales; it forms the core text of the Talmud. 6. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 13. 7. Born Yehiel Feiner, he changed his name to De-Nur after the Shoah. According to the thirteenth-century mystic Nachmanides, the River De-Nur is a river of fire where the angels immerse themselves, as in a ritual bath, before serving God; see Nachmanides, Writings and Discourses, trans. Charles B. Chavel (New York: Shilo, 1978), 366. Cf. Ka-tzetnik 135633, Shivitti: A Vision, trans. Eliyah De-Nur and Lisa Herman (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 15–16.

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8. Ibid. 9. Martin Buber, The Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation of Religion to Philosophy, trans. Maurice Friedman, et al. (New York: Harper, 1957), 73. 10. Ka-tzetnik 135633, Shivitti, 4. 11. Ka-tzetnik 135633, Sunrise Over Hell, trans. Nina De-Nur (London: W. H. Allen, 1977), 78. 12. Ibid., 158. 13. Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, trans. M. Friedlaender (New York: Dover, 1956), 68. 14.  See, for example, Joseph Gikatilla, Sha’are Orah: Gates of Light, trans. Avi Weinstein (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1994), 337. 15. Ka-tzetnik 135633, Star of Ashes, trans. Nina De-Nur (Tel Aviv: Hamenora, 1971), 53. 16. Ibid., 55. 17. Ka-tzetnik 135633, Atrocity, trans. Nina De-Nur (New York: Kensington, 1977), 92. 18. Ka-tzetnik 135633, Shivitti, 108. 19. Ibid., 100. 20. Ibid., 71. 21. Ibid., 100–101. 22. Nomberg-Przytyk, Auschwitz, 81. 23. Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 107. 24. Elie Wiesel, Against Silence: The Voice and Vision of Elie Wiesel, vol. 1, ed. Irving Abrahamson (New York: Holocaust Library, 1985), 239. 25.  Photo taken in the Ukraine in 1942, available at http://ohdelaholocaustproject.pbworks.com/w/page/4260207/Einsatzgruppen; see Yitzhak Arad, The Pictorial History of the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1990), 200; the photo belongs to the public domain. 26. Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 86. 27. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 82. 28. Elie Wiesel, Ani Maamin: A Song Lost and Found Again, trans. Marion Wiesel (New York: Random House, 1973), 89, 91. 29.  Sarra Gleikh, “The Diary of Sarra Gleikh,” in The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry, eds. Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, trans. and ed. David Patterson (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002), 54. 30. Emmanuel Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, trans. and ed. Jacob Sloan (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), 230. 31.  Herman Kruk, “Diary of the Vilna Ghetto,” trans. Shlomo Noble, YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 13 (1965): 20. 32. Avraham Tory, Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary, trans. Jerzy Michalowicz (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 114. 33. Germaine Tillion, Ravensbrück, trans. Gerald Satterwhite (New York: Doubleday, 1975), 77. 34. Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 29. 35. Emmanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. Annette Aronowicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 183.

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36. Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 88. 37. Ka-tzetnik 135633, Shivitti, 103. 38. Emil L. Fackenheim, The Jewish Return into History (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 246.

Bibliography Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster. Translated by Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. Buber, Martin. The Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation of Religion to Philosophy. Translated by Maurice Friedman, et al. New York: Harper, 1957. Fackenheim, Emil L. The Jewish Return into History. New York: Schocken Books, 1978. Gikatilla, Joseph. Sha’are Orah: Gates of Light. Translated by Avi Weinstein. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1994. Gleikh, Sarra. “The Diary of Sarra Gleikh.” In The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry, edited by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, translated and edited by David Patterson, 50–54. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002. Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Jackson, Livia E. Bitton. Elli: Coming of Age in the Holocaust. New York: Times Books, 1980. Ka-tzetnik 135633. Atrocity. Translated by Nina De-Nur. New York: Kensington, 1977. ———. Kaddish. Translated by Nina De-Nur. New York: Algemeiner Associates, 1998. ———. Shivitti: A Vision. Translated by Eliyah De-Nur and Lisa Herman. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. ———. Star of Ashes. Translated by Nina De-Nur. Tel Aviv: Hamenora, 1971. ———. Sunrise Over Hell. Translated by Nina De-Nur. London: W. H. Allen, 1977. Katz, Josef. One Who Came Back: The Diary of a Jewish Survivor. Translated by Herzl Reach. New York: Herzl Press and Bergen-Belsen Memorial Press, 1973. Kruk, Herman. “Diary of the Vilna Ghetto,” translated by Shlomo Noble, YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Sciences 13 (1965): 9–78. Langfus, Anna. The Whole Land Brimstone. Translated by Peter Wiles. New York: Pantheon, 1962. Leitner, Isabella. Fragments of Isabella. Edited by Irving Leitner. New York: Thomas Crowell, 1978. Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz. Translated by Stuart Woolf. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Levinas, Emmanuel. Nine Talmudic Readings. Translated by Annette Aronowicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. ———. Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981. Maimonides. Guide for the Perplexed. Translated by M. Friedlaender. New York: Dover, 1956. Nachmanides. Writings and Discourses. Translated by Charles B. Chavel. New York: Shilo, 1978.

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Nomberg-Przytyk, Sara. Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land. Translated by Roslyn Hirsch. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1985. Opoczynski, Peretz. “Warsaw Ghetto Chronicle—September 1942,” translated by M. Z. Prives. In To Live with Honor and Die with Honor: Selected Documents from the Warsaw Ghetto Underground Archives “O.S.”, edited by Joseph Kermish, 104–105. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1986. Rousset, David. L’Univers concentrationnaire. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1965. Rubinstein, Donna. I Am the Only Survivor of Krasnostav. New York: Shengold, 1982. Tillion, Germaine. Ravensbrück. Translated by Gerald Satterwhite. New York: Doubleday, 1975. Tory, Avrahem. Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary. Translated by Jerzy Michalowicz. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. “The Trial of Adolf Eichmann, Session 68,” June 7, 1961, State of Israel Ministry of Justice. The Nizkor Project, available at http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/e/ eichmann-adolf/transcripts/Sessions/Session-068-01.html. Wiesel, Elie. Against Silence: The Voice and Vision of Elie Wiesel, 3 vols, edited by Irving Abrahamson. New York: Holocaust Library, 1985. ———. Ani Maamin: A Song Lost and Found Again. Translated by Marion Wiesel. New York: Random House, 1973.

CHAPTER 34

Photographing Survival: Survivor Photographs of, and at, Auschwitz Tim Cole

In June 2014, American teenager Breanna Mitchell found herself at the center of a storm of hostile commentary after posting a “Selfie in the Auschwitz concentration camp.”1 Although Mitchell was neither the first, nor the last, to turn her phone’s camera on herself and snap a selfie at Auschwitz, she had the misfortune that it was her photograph—posted online—that went viral. The criticism leveled at Mitchell and her “Selfie in the Auschwitz concentration camp” drew together longer running critiques of the selfie as supreme act of millennial narcissism with ongoing concerns about breaches of so-called “Holocaust etiquette.”2 But taking—and then posting—a selfie at Auschwitz was also widely seen as a particularly egregious breach of one of the unwritten rules of contemporary photographic practice at the former Auschwitz concentration camps. While thousands of photographs have been taken at, and of, Auschwitz, few tend to be carefully posed portraits let alone self-portraits.3 Most tourist photographs taken of Auschwitz seek to eschew people and stand within the tradition of landscape photography. A number of architectural elements dominate the frame: the “Arbeit Macht Frei” gateway where visitors begin their tour of the museum in the former main camp Auschwitz I, the rail tracks leading into—and out of—the main camp at Birkenau, the lines of watchtowers and barbed wire fences and the rows of barracks.4 These photographs that as Judith Keilbach has suggested are, in part, modeled on the post-war photograph taken by Stansilav Mucha of the deserted camp, look

T. Cole (*)  University of Bristol, Bristol, UK © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_34

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along the rails toward the entrance gate into Birkenau and are self-consciously devoid of people.5 These depictions of empty landscapes are attempts by tourists to “illustrate the tracelessness of extinction” (Keilbach, 62). By choosing to photograph these iconic—people-less—elements of the former camps, the resulting images operate in an indexical manner. The act of simply taking a photograph of the gateway at Auschwitz I and then posting it online is an act that says I am at Auschwitz/I was at Auschwitz, given that the image itself acts as what Roland Barthes termed “a certificate of presence” and proof of being there: an image that is “locatable.”6 There is no need to shift position from photographer to subject appearing in front of the camera—whether through carefully staged portrait, or selfie—and when posting the image online, the hashtag “Auschwitz” is in many ways redundant given the visual ubiquity of the material remains that are photographed. The majority of photographs taken at, and of, Auschwitz feature what Baer describes as “the oversaturated referents of ruins,”7 and so reproduce an image that, as Imogen Dalziel notes, the photographers “have been exposed to many times on television and other media” (Dalziel, 203, c.f. Reynolds, 84, 107–108). In short, photographic choices are both reflective of, and reinforce, the “place myths” of Auschwitz and require neither caption, nor the presence of the photographer within the frame.8 Although the hashtag “Auschwitz” is largely redundant, thousands of images have been taken at, and of, Auschwitz in the last decade and uploaded and distributed through social media platforms. By January 2015, 80,000 images had been posted to Instagram with the hashtag Auschwitz. Eighteen months later in August 2016, this number had almost doubled to over 151,000.9 With digital images, there is an ease of exchange through social media that marks the increasing use of the photograph as a device for communicating through and with. Photographs circulating on and through social media are images intended for display that say something about the person taking and posting the image. At its most basic level, the image states “I am at Auschwitz”/“I was at Auschwitz.” But, given the sense of moral imperative that frames visiting Auschwitz, posting an image of the gateway at Auschwitz does not simply say “I am here”/“I was here” but also says that I am a good/better person by dint of choosing to go here.10 This use of photographs of Auschwitz to communicate something about the self is not simply reducible to the millions of tourists who visit the former camps. In this chapter, I want to focus on survivors’ return visits to Auschwitz, some of whom took a camera with them.11 Examining survivor photographs, I seek to add something new to the literature on Holocaust photography that has tended to focus on wartime photographs taken by those dubbed perpetrators, victims, bystanders, and liberators,12 the re-use and re-display of these images in post-war memory and representation,13 and the photographic practices of contemporary Holocaust tourists (Dalziel;

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Reynolds; Cole, “Holocaust Tourism”) and artists.14 In this essay, I argue that survivor photographs form a small but significant and unstudied subset of images of the former sites of wartime incarceration and murder that operate in complex ways as tools of navigating the past, present, and future. In particular, I am interested in the ways that survivors, like Breanna Mitchell, place themselves into the frame to say something about their identity vis-à-vis this difficult place. I draw on a number of images taken by—and of—survivors who returned to Auschwitz contained within the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive. When collecting a large number of interviews with survivors in the 1990s, this institution not only directed interviewers to ask whether survivors had made post-war visits to their former homes or sites of incarceration, but also offered survivors the opportunity to show a selection of photographs relating to their lives at the end of the interview.15 Most of the photographs that survivors brought out for the camera were images of family members from both pre-war and post-war life. However, in a small number of cases, they also included photographs taken on return visits to former sites of incarceration. Given that these were displayed within the context of the interview, survivors offered their own oral “captioning” of these images, which I draw on in my discussion below.16 The small sample size—a handful of survivors from one institutional archive—means that I do not seek to make any claims for representativeness here. Rather, I am interested in drawing attention to these unstudied images and offering some initial thoughts on what they suggest about how the act of photographing or being photographed at Auschwitz functions for survivors of the camp. It would be wrong to reduce all survivor photographs—and photographers—to a single, uniform category. Chronology and personality are important here. For example, there are important differences between the photographs taken by Karel Beran on his return visit in 1946 that I turn to below and some of the photographs taken by the larger number of survivors who returned—often accompanied by their children—in the 1990s. However, a number of shared concerns unite these photographs that variously navigate the continuities and changes at this revisited site. Most importantly, the photographs taken by, and of, survivors at Auschwitz contain a sense of “presence”—that Barthes saw as characteristic of all photographs— framed around the survivor’s body in this place, documented in and by the image (Barthes, 87). The photographs that survivors take and display to the camera at the end of their Shoah Foundation interview are records of their return to the former site of their incarceration. But more importantly, they are images that say something about their own identity vis-à-vis this place and others. These are photographs of survivors and survival.

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Karel Beran’s Documentary Photographs of Traces of His Forced Labor In September 1946, Karel Beran drove with his friend Armin Glanz—who was also a former prisoner of Auschwitz—across the Czech-Polish border in his “little sports car” in order to revisit the complex of former camps for the day.17 They started at the main camp, where they looked at documents in the embryonic “sort of local museum.” They finished up at Birkenau, at the “partly demolished crematorium.” Here, Beran explained to his interviewer, “we collected some of the ashes which we set out to collect in the first place.” As becomes clear, this was the main motivation for their quick one-day visit back to Auschwitz. As with other survivors, the former gas chamber and crematoria buildings formed a focus for mourning dead relatives.18 But in between their visit to look at documents at the former main camp and collect ashes from the former death camp, Beran and Glanz drove out to the former sub-camp at Budy. Here, the fences were gone and they found that the local population had moved into the “various small houses” that had once been occupied by German guards. However, alongside these changes, Beran discovered a set of striking continuities. As he explained to his interviewer, the stork’s nest was still there on top of the chimney of the former commander’s house, “some of these buildings which we put up … was still existing,” and he discovered the blacksmith’s shop “where I worked.” It was while back in Budy that Beran took out his camera and photographed parts of his former camp. In his Shoah Foundation interview in the 1990s, he showed a sequence of photographs to his interviewer taken during this return visit. The first was taken at the start of this road trip to Auschwitz, featuring his “very dear friend Dr Armin Glanz” at the wheel of Beran’s twoseater sports car. The next three photographs were taken at, and of, Budy. The first of these showed Glanz standing among the “local population” who “turned up when we returned” drawn by the “novelty” of the sports car. The second and third were rather different and received fuller explanation. Both were of single buildings, centrally framed, with no-one—not even Glanz, let alone Beran himself—intruding into the image. They are documentary-style photographs of vernacular architecture. One showed “a silo building” intended for wheat but used for storing sugar beet to feed the horses in the winter. As he explained, “we built this with practically no equipment.” The other was of “a building very near to the silo building” that was used as a blacksmith’s shop “where we worked” repairing plows and agricultural tools and “where I put the commander Mengele’s horseshoe into the fire to re-shoe his horse.” That Beran himself never strays into the image, but rather stayed firmly placed behind the viewfinder, could be read as an attempt to assert control over this site. For Susan Sontag, the act of photography is in part an act of seeking to make sense of—and gain control over—the world.19 It is clear from Beran’s retelling of his visit to Auschwitz in September 1946 more

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than half a century later that it was emotionally extremely difficult. He broke down as he retold the story of collecting and keeping ashes from the crematoria and recalled a sleepless night immediately after leaving the former camp. However, the place which Beran found the most difficult to return to— Birkenau—was a place that he chose not to photograph, a theme that I return to at the close of this essay. Rather than photography being an act of control, Beran’s photographs can be seen as documents of the traces of his labor in other parts of the former complex of camps. The significance of these photographs of a couple of very ordinary-looking buildings is their intimate connection with Beran’s wartime laboring body. Beran was only interested in recording those buildings that he either built with his own hands or worked in. This can be seen in the photograph of the building “we built” where the silo is centrally framed. A small part of a neighboring building trespasses onto the right-hand edge of the image. While this building “next to it” was “also built by prisoners,” Beran explains, it was not constructed by him and so does demand the recording in the way that Beran’s grain silo does. Although Beran is absent from all these images, his oral captioning places himself into the frame as more than simply the photographer. Back in Budy, Beran carefully recorded the extant structures that contain the traces of his laboring self. Animated by his narrative, these images become not only a documentary record of camp vernacular architecture, but a kind of metaphorical self-portrait in Auschwitz that can be seen in more explicit ways in photographs taken by a number of survivors who returned with family members in the 1990s and inserted their bodies into the frame.

Morris Pfeffer’s Portrait Photographs of Survivor Authority Karel Beran’s surprise at finding parts of the camp still standing was shared by Morris Pfeffer, who returned to Auschwitz with his wife in 1991 and then a second time with his son in 1996.20 Showing a series of photographs of these return visits to his interviewer, Pfeffer pointed out material objects that he remembered from his time in the camp still there. As he explained, the barracks in Auschwitz where he had been housed—Block 17a—had “the same doors what you see now.” When he showed another photograph, this time not of the doors to Barracks 17a but two garbage bins, Pfeffer explained that he was sure this was “the same barrel as 1942” that he used to crawl into at night to try to find scraps of food. Unlike Beran’s photographs, these are not simply documentary images of architectural details with a direct connection to himself. Rather, Pfeffer himself appears in both images. Pfeffer’s presence within the frame extends not only to those sites like Block 17a—“my block”—intimately linked to his own wartime experience, as well as those places like the death block in Block 11 where he never spent any time. Regardless of whether it was his former barracks or

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not, the image is the same. It shows Pfeffer, alone, standing by the entrance. With his video camera slung around his neck, he could easily be mistaken for a tourist. However, as he made clear through his oral captioning, he staked a much greater claim on this place in and through these staged portraits. This claim to authority is most clearly articulated through a number of striking portraits that contrast Pfeffer as survivor with others who are not survivors and so are shown as having a very different relationship with this place. On his first visit in 1991, he explained that he found the garbage cans in part of the camp that was out of bounds for visitors at a time when “they start to renovate.” Showing a photograph of the garbage cans, himself, and a museum employee, Pfeffer casts the image as a clash of authority: the survivor versus the museum, as well as Jew versus Pole, which features in many narratives of those who returned in the 1990s (Cole, “Crematoria, Barracks, Gateway,” 113–114). According to his retelling, the museum employee challenged him and told him “you cannot come in here and make pictures.” The photograph itself is evidence of who won this battle. Pfeffer recalls telling the hapless official: “I was here before you was born,” rolling up the sleeves of his shirt to show his prisoner number and pointing to the garbage cans announcing that “this was my hotel, this was my grocery” and informing him, “you better get out of my way before I get mad.” The photograph is evidence of Pfeffer’s authority in and over this space—regardless of the regulatory attempts of the museum—as well as a dramatic restaging of this encounter. It is clearly not simply an image of two old garbage cans, but rather a photograph that says something about who those garbage cans—and the former camp where they are found—really belong to. Here the act of photographing not simply the contemporary camp, but the survivor in the contemporary camp asserts control over this contested site. This sense of battle between the survivor and the museum surfaces again in another image that Pfeffer showed his interviewer. It is a copy of a name list from the Auschwitz archives, showing the names of Pfeffer and his father, with the dates of their entry into the camp, and crucially also their exit from the camp in early 1945. This list is evidence of both their having been there and their survival, but as Pfeffer explains, this document is more than simply an archival trace. The fact that he has it in his hands—as with the supposedly prohibited photograph he has just shown—is further proof of his successful battling with the museum authorities. Retelling a similar showdown to that staged by the garbage cans, Pfeffer explained that he was barred entry to the archive, but after once more deploying the line “I was here before he was here,” he successfully gained entry and managed to get hold of the paperwork—“we settled on the copy” rather than the original he ruefully admits— that he showed his interviewer. Photographs as evidence of his authority as survivor in and over this place are not only deployed by Pfeffer as he restages a series of conflicts with the museum authorities. Pfeffer also uses portrait photographs taken in Auschwitz

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to stake a claim to his own authority vis-à-vis the non-survivor members of his family and in particular his son who is a member of the so-called second generation. In doing this, he is again not alone but shares a wider set of survivor practices (Cole, “Crematoria, Barracks, Gateway,” 116–117). Two of the photographs that Pfeffer showed his interviewer are portraits of his son in Auschwitz on their visit there in 1996. In the first, his son sits, alone, in the punishment block. In the second, he stands with his father, on the path running between the rows of brick barracks in the former main camp in Auschwitz. “You can see his face,” Pfeffer explained of the first portrait, that “he was just shattered,” words he re-echoed when he shows the second photograph, this time of the two of them together, explaining how his son “was just shattered” by his experience of being in a place that he could not comprehend. As he showed these portraits of his “shattered” son in Auschwitz, Pfeffer animated the image by invoking his son’s words of disbelief at what happened here: “What I see here I cannot believe. I cannot…I cannot visualize. How did you people survive over here?” As he talked through the second photograph of his son, he explained to his interviewer how his son “could never visualize such a cruelty could exist.” Showing a photograph taken with his wife during their first visit, Pfeffer used the same language to explain that “she couldn’t visualize” what happened at the camp. While Pfeffer returned to the camp with both his wife and his son and saw the same things, there is a gap in comprehension between them that he uses these photographs to evidence. There are some things that only survivors understand and are beyond the reach of the second generation “young American boy” who stands beside his father in the portrait of the two of them taken on the path that Pfeffer once walked on. However, while Pfeffer is clear about the impossibility of those who were not there comprehending what happened in this place, this does not prevent him from a desire to pass the baton of this unbelievable knowledge to the next generation. Talking through the portrait of his son and himself in Auschwitz, he recalled imploring him: “You should remember for generation to come. You should tell them the same story what you saw over there. I told my part and now be obligation to you to tell to the future generations.” This call to witness and retell is one where it seems that photographic images as evidence play their part. While on his first visit Pfeffer kept the video camera firmly around his own neck, on his second visit, he passed this over to his son who now “sees” through the viewfinder, records what he sees and tells others of what he—and the camera—witnessed.

Michael Zylberberg, Judith Perlaki, and Elizabeth Kent’s Portrait Photographs of Survivor Liberation Like Pfeffer, Michael Zylberberg, Judith Perlaki, and Elizabeth Kent all returned to Auschwitz in the 1990s with family members who they instructed in taking carefully staged portrait photographs of themselves in the former

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camps. However, while the survivor is centrally framed, these photographs are taken for and operate in rather different ways from those taken by and of Pfeffer. Instead of being a way of performing the authority of the survivor in, and over, this place, Zylberberg, Perlaki, and Kent use photographs as a way of staging their freedom from this place. In so doing, their photographs—and the accompanying narrative—are less focused on the material continuities that dominate the frame in Beran’s images of buildings he built, and worked in, at the Budy sub-camp, or Pfeffer’s photographs of the door of his barracks or the garbage cans by the kitchen. Instead, their photographs—and narratives—work with and because of the material and existential discontinuities that mark Auschwitz then and Auschwitz now. In particular, the photographs stand as evidence of—and themselves produce—the rupture between past and present (and future) and the identities of prisoner and free man or woman. The diptych that Michael Zylberberg showed to his interviewer at the end of his Shoah Foundation interview is a good example of this oral and photographic narrative of discontinuity. Zylberberg returned to Auschwitz— like many other survivors—to say Kaddish for his parents at the ruins of crematorium three, blown up by the Germans before they evacuated the camp in January 1945 (Cole, “Crematoria, Barracks, Gateway,” 107–111). The ruined crematorium was not the only evidence of the dramatic physical change wrought to the camp. Whereas Beran and Pfeffer drew attention to material continuities through their choice of what to photograph, Zylberberg was struck that the camp “is not what it was when I was a prisoner.”21 Not only had hundreds of wooden barracks disappeared from Birkenau, but the very ground where they once stood had changed. Picking up on something commented on by other survivors, Zylberberg recalled that “When we were there the earth was always black and dark,” but, “today when you walk in there the whole area is covered with grass, this is because there’s nobody walking there anymore the grass has a chance to grow.” Instead of turning the camera on the buildings in the camp as evidence of its continued material existence, Zylberberg had it turned on himself. He was very intentional about where this portrait was to be taken. As he explained to his interviewer, his return visit was driven by a concern, “before I die to return to those horrible places where I was dragged in as a prisoner.” In an act of symbolically rewriting that past lack of agency in places where he had been “dragged in as a prisoner,” Zylberberg “wanted to walk in there as a free man and walk out as a free man.” For Zylberberg, this momentous act was one that demanded photographing. Describing the moment when, “we walked out from Auschwitz,” he explained that his daughter took photographs of this act “because this was very important for me.” One of these photographs makes up the left-hand image of the diptych that Zylberberg showed his interviewer. It shows him walking into the main entrance to Birkenau, beneath the iconic guard tower that tourists queue up to photograph from the end of the rail track by the former crematoria.

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However, unlike those tourist photographs, this is very much first and foremost a portrait within the landscape. It is a close-up portrait, with most of the guard tower cropped from the frame. It is an image that could be of Zylberberg walking through any gate, but as he knows and explains, this is one freighted with particular significance. It shows him alone rather than part of a column of prisoners, five abreast. He is portrayed as an independent agent who chooses to cross the threshold of this place. As he explained to his interviewer, “the picture show how I was walking out as a free man of the concentration camp. This was a pilgrimage I always wanted to do and I did it this year.” The photograph as act of, and evidence of, liberation extends to the second image that forms the right-hand pair of this diptych. It shows Zylberberg echoing the same pose that he adopts under the gateway in Birkenau, but this time in the courtyard of Mauthausen. As he explained to his interviewer, on his return visit with family members in 1997, he went straight from Auschwitz to Mauthausen, mirroring his own wartime journey from one camp to the other. Mauthausen was another place, like Birkenau, where Zylberberg “wanted to walk out free.” But it was also a place where he “wanted to be on the same spot” that he “was standing at liberation.” His oral captioning transforms this image from simply being a photograph showing Zylberberg in Mauthausen, into a staged recreation of a particular time— May 1945—and place—“the spot” where he stood when the camp—when and where he was liberated. As both photographs suggest, and Zylberberg is not alone here, liberation by the Americans in 1945 was in some ways not sufficient in enacting the shift from prisoner to free man (Cole, “Crematoria, Barracks, Gateway,” 117–120). Rather, Zylberberg wanted to return to re-enact the event of liberation at the same spot on the earth’s surface and to perform the consequences of liberation by walking in and out of Birkenau when and how he wanted. The photographs are more than simply a record of this re-enactment and performance, although they clearly function in this way. In some ways, they are constitutive of these acts intentionally performed for the camera that then assume a persistence and ongoing record that evidences freedom. This sense of carefully staged portraits weighted with considerable symbolic value can be seen in the photographs taken, kept, and shown by two Hungarian Jewish sisters when they were interviewed—individually—by the Shoah Foundation. Judith Perlaki and Elizabeth Kent, who had both been deported to Auschwitz Birkenau in 1944, both returned there in 1991 along with another of their sisters and Perlaki’s son. Explaining this visit, Kent adopted a very similar tone to that of Zylberberg: “I wanted to walk in there and walk out as a free person. I never was able to do it because every time I walked in and out there were German soldiers with me … I wanted to do it on my own. I wanted to experience that I am free.”22 Her sister also expressed a shared concern: “I don’t want to ever die before I go back as a free man [sic.] to Auschwitz.”23

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Rather than being photographed walking into or out of the camp, Kent and Perlaki staged a photograph of the sisters holding the formerly electrified fence that made up the boundary of the main camp. Explaining the photograph to her interviewer, Perlaki pointed out “as you can see we are touching the wire.” A little earlier in the interview when she retold this return visit, she mentioned this photograph that she planned to show: “you will see a picture of my sister and me holding electric wire – no electricity.” Touching and holding the fence that had once been deadly are evidence that things had changed. Echoing Zylberberg, Kent was struck by the marked material discontinuities of the camp when she returned. “Fifty years has changed an awful lot of things,” she reflected. But this photograph acts as more than simply evidence of material change in the camp. It was also evidence—like Zylberberg’s photographs—of a changed identity in this place. Standing by the border fence, Kent, Perlaki, and their sister not only touched what was formerly deadly, but also trespassed into a formerly forbidden—Verboten— space. It was this transgressive—and redemptive—act that was performed and photographed. Perlaki and her sister both have copies of the photographs recording this transgressive act, which they showed to their respective interviewers at the conclusion of their Shoah Foundation interviews. It is not exactly the same photograph, but two photographs taken in the same place, moments after each other. You can imagine Perlaki’s son standing there with two cameras, and taking first one shot with his mother’s camera of her standing at the front grasping the wire, with her sisters behind her also holding the fence at Auschwitz I, and then another shot with his aunt’s camera that mirrors the first shot almost perfectly with the identical pose, but with his aunt’s head in the center turned slightly to now look directly at the camera. It was an image too important to be taken just once with one camera. Both women wanted to make sure they had their own copy of this photograph. While both sisters have, and show, copies of this central image to their interviewers, they also separately show other photographs of this return visit. Perlaki showed a photograph of her sisters standing by a symbolic family gravestone that they had erected in the former Jewish cemetery in their hometown in Hungary. She clearly has a particular connection to this gravestone, explaining that she pays a man to maintain this “grave” of her mother, brother, and sister. Kent also has a photograph of this symbolic gravestone, but a close-up without her sisters in the frame. The two other photographs she showed of all three sisters—that mirror the image of them standing together holding the formerly electrified fence at Auschwitz—are of the three of them by the roadside to their former hometown and the three of them in one of the former barracks in Auschwitz. As with the photographs taken of the sisters by the fence, in the photograph inside the barracks all three sisters adopt an identical pose. However, this time they each hold up a hand drawn sign, written in bold on sheets

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of paper that announce “Never Again”—the oft-repeated refrain central to Holocaust memory practices and institutions. It is not a photograph that Perlaki shows, nor perhaps has. It seems that whereas Perlaki was the instigator and leader of the photograph that shows the three sisters holding the fence in Auschwitz, it was her sister who coordinated this performance inside the barracks that her nephew photographed, with her camera—the camera bag hanging empty around her neck as she and her sisters posed together with their handwritten signs. This image of Kent’s is clearly intended for a future audience, proclaiming what has been seen as the central lesson of the Holocaust. However, the more significant photograph for both sisters— showing them holding the fence—is one where they are both producers and consumers of the image. As with Zylberberg, these are photographs taken not only of survivors in Auschwitz, but also for survivors of Auschwitz as a way of re-negotiating their relationship with this difficult place.

Conclusions: Survivor “Selfies” at Auschwitz? With their emphasis on photographing change—both of the camp itself and of their relationship with the camp—the “liberation” photographs taken of, and by, Zylberberg, Perlaki, and Kent are markedly different from those taken of, and by, Beran and Pfeffer that emphasize continuity through their selective photography of certain structures within the camp. As they place themselves carefully within the frame, Zylberberg, Perlaki, and Kent do so with a self-conscious sense that the backdrop of the camp has changed dramatically since they were last here—and so has their own identity. For Kent and Perlaki, the fact that electricity no longer courses through the barbed wire fence that surrounds the camp is central to the symbolism of the staged group portrait. They are free to touch this wire that no longer poses a deadly peril. That they do, and choose to be photographed doing so, is an act both of defiant transgression of a space that was once out of bounds and of redemption which asserts their own life—rather than death—and their collective survival. Similarly, for Zylberberg, there are no longer guards at the camp who drag prisoners in and out of the main gateways, and so he can choose to enter and leave when he wants and how he wants. It is that sense of freedom and reassertion of a new identity framed around agency that he celebrates in and through the photograph. But while the images of Zylberberg, Perlaki, and Kent are different in these important ways from those of Beran and Pfeffer, what they all share is a concern with portrait, and not simply landscape photographs, at and of Auschwitz. In contrast to the tourist gaze at a people-less landscape, survivors people their photographs of, and at, this place with their own bodies. These are staged and posed (self-)portraits with the survivor either individually in the case of Pfeffer and Zylberberg, or collectively in the case of Perlaki and Kent in the center of the frame. In Beran’s images, the presence of the

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survivor is less obvious, but as I have argued, the traces of his laboring body dominate the frame. In a sense, all these images are something akin to survivor “selfies” at Auschwitz. In many ways, the presence of the survivor’s body in survivor photographs and the absence of people in tourist photographs make sense given the very different investments with this site. Daniel Reynolds asks, rhetorically, “who is the Other in Holocaust tourism?” and answers that the “Other that tourists seek are the dead and their defeated captors, all absent, save for their representations in the traces of the past crimes on display. The destinations are marked by the absence of the people who would fill the typical role of ‘natives,’ whether we speak of victims, perpetrators, or bystanders.”24 Contemporary tourist photography tends to seek to convey and construct those absences—in particular, the absence of the more than one million killed at this camp—through the selection of images that are characterized by their lack of people. The material objects that still stand in the camp—gateway, railroad tracks, fence posts, and barbed wire—as well as the very landscape itself stand in for the absent victims. In contrast, survivors place themselves within the frame as they re-people the site with their own bodies in complex ways. But Auschwitz as site of absence also characterizes survivor experiences and photographic practices. This signals another striking difference between photographs taken by survivors and tourists. Contra the dominant images taken across the range of landscapes in the two former camps, survivor photographs differ in terms of where is—and is not—photographed. As I have suggested elsewhere, survivors visit a number of different spaces within Auschwitz where they undertake a number of different practices (Cole, “Crematoria, Barracks, Gateway,” 102–131). From Beran onwards, they have visited the site of the former gas chambers and crematoria in Birkenau to mourn the dead. In the 1990s and 2000s, they returned to the extant structures of the camp—and in particular their barracks—to retell their own story of imprisonment to their children and grandchildren, as you see in the case of Pfeffer’s return visit. During the 1990s some survivors—and here Zylberberg, Perlaki and Kent are part of a broader phenomenon—returned to the camp to performed their survival as act of liberation and revenge at the liminal boundary spaces of gateway, barbed wire fence and guard tower. While the survivors that I have examined here photographed (themselves and their family members inside or in front of) their barracks and (themselves at) the boundaries of the camp, they have not photographed the ruins of the gas chambers and crematoria. As they returned to Auschwitz, it is clear that the survivors, who were interviewed by the Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, chose not to photograph certain places (or not to show those photographs to their interviewers). In short, it seems that there are also a (different) set of unwritten rules of survivor photography at the site of the former camps which means that certain places are—and are not—photographed.

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The nature of the absences at the ruins of the gas chambers and crematoria in Birkenau is too personal. Retelling their visits to these places proves overwhelming to many—Beran and Zylberberg included. Zylberberg did arrange for a photograph to be taken of himself at Birkenau, but it was snapped at the very edge of the camp. Beran decided that Birkenau was not somewhere to be photographed. He did not turn his camera—as contemporary tourists do—on the architectural remains of Birkenau, but on a little-known sub-camp that was connected with his wartime labor and survival. While tourist photographic practices at Auschwitz seek to capture the absent “Other” of those murdered here through photographs that focus on architectural landscapes devoid of people, survivors adopt different practices vis-à-vis those who are absent, but decidedly not “Other.” From Beran onwards, survivors have returned to Auschwitz to mourn the absent dead from among their own family. Although they do not take photographs of these acts of mourning and sites of mourning, survivors have taken cameras with them to Auschwitz. And some of these images are deemed important enough to be shown alongside historic photographs of dead family members as part of their post-war testimony. However, in contrast to the dominant tourist images of empty landscapes, survivor photographs tend to be portraits: self-portraits akin to survivor “selfies.” The sample of photographs taken by survivors on their return visits to Auschwitz and shown to their Shoah Foundation interviewers that I consider here suggests that survivors have used photography in sophisticated ways to negotiate their identity as “Auschwitz survivors” as well as their complex relationship with this place and its past, present, and future. They are certainly a subset of Holocaust cultural production that are worthy of further consideration. Survivor snapshots are texts that can fruitfully be added to the more established genres of memoir and testimony, as we explore the ways that survivors have engaged in acts of meaning-making.

Notes

1.  Breanna Mitchell [Princess Breanna] twitter post “Selfie in the Auschwitz Concentration Camp” (20 June 2014). 2. Samantha Mitschke, “The Sacred, the Profane, and the Space in Between: SiteSpecific Performance at Auschwitz,” Holocaust Studies 22, nos. 2–3 (2016): 228–243, especially 230–231. 3.  Imogen Dalziel, “‘Romantic Auschwitz’: Examples and Perceptions of Contemporary Visitor Photography at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum,” Holocaust Studies 22, nos. 2–3 (2016): 185–207; Ewa Stachura and Marta Mantyka, “Guidelines for the Rearrangement of Auschwitz Museum Based on Web Picture Analysis,” Inter Conference_2016_Interferncias/ Interferences, 218–219; and Daniel Reynolds, “Consumers or Witnesses? Holocaust Tourists and the Problem of Authenticity,” Journal of Consumer Culture 16, no. 2 (2016): 334–353, see 339.

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4. Daniel P. Reynolds, Postcards from Auschwitz: Holocaust Tourism and the Meaning of Remembrance (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 77. The book cover images or “Postcards from Auschwitz” are telling in this regard. 5.  Judith Keilbach, “Photographs, Symbolic Images, and the Holocaust: On the (Im)possibility of Depicting Historical Truth,” History and Theory 47 (2009): 54–76, see especially 73–74. See also Tim Cole, “Holocaust Tourism: The Strange Yet Familiar/the Familiar Yet Strange,” in Revisiting Holocaust Representation in the Post-witness Era, eds. Diana I. Popescu and Tanja Schult (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 93–106. 6. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (London: Vintage, 2000), 87. 7.  Ulrich Baer, “To Give Memory a Place: Holocaust Photography and the Landscape Tradition,” Representations 69 (2000): 42. 8.  The phrase “place myths” comes from Rob Shields, Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity (London: Routledge, 1991), 61. 9.  Ewa Stachura and Marta Mantyka, “Guidelines for the Rearrangement of Auschwitz Museum Based on Web Picture Analysis,” Inter Conference_2016_ Interferncias/Interferences, 213. 10.  Tim Cole, “(Re)visiting Auschwitz: (Re)encountering the Holocaust in Its Landscapes,” Cultural History 2, no. 2 (2013): 232–246. 11. I deal very briefly with two images taken by survivors—that I examine in more detail at the end of this essay—in Cole, “Holocaust Tourism” and Tim Cole, “Touching Landscapes? Embodied Experiences of Holocaust Tourism and Memory,” in Remembering the Second World War, ed. Patrick Finney (London: Routledge, 2017), 234–248. 12. From a large literature see in particular the pioneering work of Sybil Milton: “The Camera as Weapon: Documentary Photography and the Holocaust,” Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual 1 (1984): 45–68; Sybil Milton, “Images of the Holocaust—Part I,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1, no. 1 (1986): 27–61; and Sybil Milton, “Images of the Holocaust—Part II,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1, no. 2 (1986): 193–216. See also the important booklength studies by Janina Struk, Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004); Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); and Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Although his thesis is highly problematic, it is striking that perpetrator photographs form part of the evidentiary base drawn on by Daniel J. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996). For my own study of “bystander” photographs, see Tim Cole, Traces of the Holocaust: Journeying in and Out of the Ghettos (London: Continuum Books, 2011), Chapter 6. 13. See, for example, Struk, Photographing the Holocaust; Zelizer, Remembering to Forget; Barbie Zelizer, ed., Visual Culture and the Holocaust (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001); Richard Raskin, A Child at Gunpoint: A Case Study in the Life of a Photo (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2004); and Susan A. Crane, “Choosing Not to Look: Representation, Repatriation, and Holocaust Atrocity Photography,” History and Theory 47, no. 3 (2008): 309–330.

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14. See, for example, Brett Ashley Kaplan, Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory (New York: Routledge, 2011), especially Part II. 15.  On the institutional politics and culture of the Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, see Noah Shenker, Reframing Holocaust Testimony (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). 16. Cf. the importance of written captioning in the literature. See especially Walter Benjamin’s essay “A Small History of Photography,” in One Way Street and Other Writings (London: Verso, 1979). 17. USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, 38473, Interview with Karel Beran (10 December 1997). Other quotes are from the same source unless otherwise indicated. 18. Tim Cole, “Crematoria, Barracks, Gateway: Survivors’ Return Visits to the Memory Landscapes of Auschwitz,” History and Memory 25, no. 2 (2013): 102–131, see especially 106–110. 19. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 9. 20. USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, 18648, Interview with Morris Pfeffer (10 December 1997). Other quotes are from the same source unless otherwise indicated. 21.  USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, 32519, Interview with Michael Zylberberg (19 August 1997). Other quotes are from the same source unless otherwise indicated. 22.  USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, 9161, Interview with Elizabeth Kent (22 February 1996). Other quotes are from the same source unless otherwise indicated. 23. USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, 11807, Interview with Judith Perlaki (7 February 1996). Other quotes are from the same source unless otherwise indicated. 24.  Daniel Reynolds, “Consumers of Witnesses? Holocaust Tourists and the Problem of Authenticity,” Journal of Consumer Culture 16, no. 2 (2016): 340.

Bibliography Baer, Ulrich. “To Give Memory a Place: Holocaust Photography and the Landscape Tradition.” Representations 69 (2000): 38–62. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. London: Vintage, 2000. Benjamin, Walter. One Way Street and Other Writings. London: Verso, 1979. Cole, Tim. “Crematoria, Barracks, Gateway: Survivors’ Return Visits to the Memory Landscapes of Auschwitz.” History and Memory 25, no. 2 (2013): 102–131. ———. “Holocaust Tourism: The Strange Yet Familiar/the Familiar Yet Strange.” In Revisiting Holocaust Representation in the Post-Witness Era, edited by Diana I. Popescu and Tanja Schult, 93–106. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. ———. “(Re)visiting Auschwitz: (Re)encountering the Holocaust in Its Landscapes.” Cultural History 2, no. 2 (2013): 232–246. ———. “Touching Landscapes? Embodied Experiences of Holocaust Tourism and Memory.” In Remembering the Second World War, edited by Patrick Finney, 234–248. London: Routledge, 2017. ———. Traces of the Holocaust: Journeying in and Out of the Ghettos. London: Continuum Books, 2011.

648  T. COLE Crane, Susan A. “Choosing Not to Look: Representation, Repatriation, and Holocaust Atrocity Photography.” History and Theory 47, no. 3 (2008): 309–330. Dalziel, Imogen. “‘Romantic Auschwitz’: Examples and Perceptions of Contemporary Visitor Photography at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.” Holocaust Studies 22, nos. 2–3 (2016): 185–207. Didi-Huberman, Georges. Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Goldhagen, Daniel J. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. Kaplan, Brett Ashley. Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory. New York: Routledge, 2011. Keilbach, Judith. “Photographs, Symbolic Images, and the Holocaust: On the (Im) possibility of Depicting Historical Truth.” History and Theory 47 (2009): 54–76. Milton, Sybil. “The Camera as Weapon: Documentary Photography and the Holocaust.” Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual 1 (1984): 45–68. ———. “Images of the Holocaust—Part I.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1, no. 1 (1986): 27–61. ———. “Images of the Holocaust—Part II.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1, no. 2 (1986): 193–216. Mitschke, Samantha. “The Sacred, the Profane, and the Space in Between: Site-Specific Performance at Auschwitz.” Holocaust Studies 22, nos. 2–3 (2016): 228–243. Raskin, Richard. A Child at Gunpoint: A Case Study in the Life of a Photo. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2004. Reynolds, Daniel P. “Consumers of Witnesses? Holocaust Tourists and the Problem of Authenticity.” Journal of Consumer Culture 16, no. 2 (2016): 334–353. ———. Postcards from Auschwitz: Holocaust Tourism and the Meaning of Remembrance. New York: New York University Press, 2018. Shenker, Noah. Reframing Holocaust Testimony. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. Shields, Rob. Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity. London: Routledge, 1991. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973. Stachura, Ewa, and Marta Mantyka. “Guidelines for the Rearrangement of Auschwitz Museum Based on Web Picture Analysis.” InterConference_2016_Interferncias/ Interferences. Struk, Janina. Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence. London: I.B. Tauris, 2004. Zelizer, Barbie. Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera’s Eye. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Zelizer, Barbie, ed. Visual Culture and the Holocaust. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001.

PART VI

Historical and Cultural Narratives

CHAPTER 35

A Reconsideration of Sexual Violence in German Colonial and Nazi Ideology and Its Representation in Holocaust Texts Elizabeth R. Baer

One of the new directions in Holocaust studies, and still somewhat ­controversial, is close examination of the genocide the Germans committed in their colony in southern Africa between 1904 and 1907, and of the ways in which this genocide functioned as a precursor to the Holocaust.1 Such studies, in what has been termed the “continuity thesis,” demonstrate Nazi appropriation of colonial ideology regarding race and gender and of colonial methodology for annihilation of ethnic groups. Colonial exploits and discourse were made familiar to citizens of the Fatherland through newspaper accounts, fiction, debates in the Reichstag, and self-congratulatory books published by the Schutztruppe, the colonial military, thus preparing the populace for the violence and racial hierarchies of the Third Reich.2 This essay opens with an overview of this little-recognized genocide of the Herero and Nama in German Southwest Africa, the first genocide of the twentieth century. Even less is known about the discourse regarding gender in Germany’s colony and its subsequent impact on aspects of Nazi rule, including the Nuremberg Laws, regulations regarding prostitution, and the prevalence of sexual violence in the Third Reich, which is the focus of this essay.3 To illustrate these links, texts by two Holocaust survivors, providing significant details about sexual violence, will be examined: Nanda Herbermann’s memoir The Blessed Abyss (1946) and Liana Millu’s autofiction

E. R. Baer (*)  Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, USA © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_35

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Smoke Over Birkenau (1947). Rape, brothels located in lagers, and other forms of sexual violence are represented in differing ways in these texts, which, in turn, echo colonial practice and perspectives. Such comparisons prompt queries: What about gender in these genocidal situations? What happened to indigenous women in southern Africa when large numbers of German military men arrived, beginning in the late 1880s? How common was sexual violence in the colony? Were bordellos established? What beliefs about race, women, and sexuality informed the behavior of the Schutztruppe in Africa? How did these beliefs and the behavior of the Schutztruppe subsequently inform Nazi ideology around issues of sexuality? Germany came late to colonizing. Just before the infamous Treaty of Berlin in 1885, during which European powers carved up the continent by drawing boundaries on a map in Berlin, and assigned chunks to various European countries, an adventurous businessman, one Adolf Lüderitz, staked a claim to coastal land north of South Africa. In 1885, this land was taken under the wing of the German government and became the colony of German Southwest Africa (hereafter GSWA). Germany subsequently claimed colonies in other parts of Africa as well as in China and the South Pacific. But GSWA remained the target for creating a New Germany, lebensraum for resettling German immigrants on land grabbed from the indigenous people. Germany used threats to get local people to sign deceptive treaties; the German military built railroads through existing indigenous farms, stole cattle, killed men with impunity, and treated local women to large doses of sexual violence. By 1904, the Herero people rose in revolt against this mistreatment and the Germans responded with the Battle of Waterberg, during which thousands of Herero men, women, and children were killed or were forced into the Omaheke desert to die of starvation and thirst. In 1905, another ethnic group, the Nama, rose against the Germans and were similarly vanquished. German General Lothar von Trotha issued an extermination order in late 1904 which makes his genocidal intent palpably clear: “I will annihilate the rebelling tribes with rivers of blood and rivers of gold. Only after a complete uprooting will something new emerge.”4 Following the war, concentration camps and a death camp, Shark Island, were established, where thousands more died from exposure, forced labor, disease, starvation, medical experimentation, and sexual violence; these camps were the prototypes for the concentration camps and killing centers of the Nazis. The overall death toll was approximately 80% of the 80,000 Herero and 50% of the 20,000 Nama, for an estimated 80,000 people exterminated. My monograph, The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich, examined texts which both justified and condemned this genocide. The term genocidal gaze describes the attitude of German imperialists toward the indigenous people in Africa, an attitude that is then perpetuated by the Nazis.5 This term serves as a metaphor for the repellant

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imperial ideology that Germans developed: They gazed upon the Herero and Nama as barbaric, lacking civilization, history, or meaningful religion; they were seen as expendable. The Germans brought the same ideology to the Holocaust. Both the indigenous people in Africa and the Jews and other Nazi victims in Europe were represented in German ideology as subhuman, undeserving of citizenship, of owning land, ultimately undeserving of life itself. Concepts such as Lebensraum (living space), Rassenschande (racial shame), and Endlösung (final solution) were deployed by German authorities in 1904 and again in the 1930s–1940s.6 The Germans denied the existence of this genocide for a century. Though they have acknowledged the Holocaust with gestures of vergangenheitsbewältigung (“coming to terms with the past”) for over fifty years, they have yet to formally apologize for the genocide of 1904–1907 and have refused to pay long-overdue reparations. After the genocide, the archives of colonial documents were sealed. They remained closed during the Nazi era and then were taken to Moscow by the Soviets at the end of World War II. Returned to the German Democratic Republic in the 1960s, the files were opened by a young Marxist historian, Horst Drechsler, whose 1966 book, “Let Us Die Fighting”: The Struggle of the Herero and Nama Against German Imperialism (1884–1915) was the first valid account of what had actually happened in the African colony. The following critical questions expand our understanding of gender and genocide and the links between these two German genocidal moments. How did the ideology of racial hierarchy inform attitudes toward women in the colony? What impact did the long-time denial of this genocide and its accompanying sexual violence have on the behavior of German men during the Holocaust? And what impact did it have on female victims of the Third Reich? I use “sexual violence” as an umbrella term similar to the way the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia declared rape “a crime against humanity.” “Rape in this definition was not limited to forced penetration but […] cover[ed] sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, and […] include[ed] the forced undressing of women and parading them in public, humiliation, harassment […] the intention to cause psychological harm […] forced impregnation and sterilization.”7

Colonial Sexual Violence and Impunity in GSWA We know relatively little about the plight of indigenous women during German imperialism in southern Africa (today’s Namibia). We have no witness testimony by a Herero or Nama woman survivor, no oral interviews or written documents about their suffering at the hands of the Germans.8 In 1918, the British published a “Blue Book” about German atrocities in their colony but failed to interview any women.9 For sources, we must turn to

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court records, photographs, eyewitness accounts by men, reports of missionaries, and those by German military and settlers (Hillebrecht email 9-28-18). Colonial fiction also yields some clues. Small bits of information from these sources show the same crimes found in the Third Reich: forced prostitution in concentration camps, rape of indigenous women by German soldiers, sexualized whippings, and photographs of women which reveal they were forced to undress.10 Ann Laura Stoler traces the progression that often occurred in colonies regarding sexual relationships between white male colonizers and indigenous women.11 Though Stoler’s book concerns the Dutch Indies (current Indonesia), much of what she asserts is applicable to other imperial sites, including German attitudes toward race, gender, and sexuality in GSWA. She traces the early use of concubinage which, as mores regarding race and racial purity change, results in a later prohibition against interracial relationships. Stoler’s interest “in the task of realigning metropolitan and colonial histories in a conjoined analytical frame” (Stoler, xii) informs the effort of this chapter to look at the shared methodology and ideology in GSWA and in the Third Reich, with a particular focus on sexual violence. We see a very similar situation in GSWA, beginning in the 1880s. One of the few scholars who have written at length on sexual arrangements and sexual violence in GSWA is Wolfram Hartmann. A note of caution is warranted prior to my use of Hartmann’s scholarship. His take on sexual relations between German military and indigenous women might be summed up by the title of one of his articles: “Sexual Urges in the Colony.” In other words, he analyzes such sexual relations primarily in terms of male needs, rather than in terms of racial hierarchies, assertion of power, or exoticism. Nonetheless, the data he provides is very useful. “Colonialism,” Wolfram Hartmann notes, “is often understood as a violent and rapacious penetration of territories and populations. In GSWA this sexual metaphor had a very real side to it, and colonial conquest and military conflict were indeed accompanied by highly predatory sexual behavior of German troops […] Though largely undocumented, this predacious behavior can be traced to having occurred nocturnally in living spaces referred to as Werften or locations, and around the clock in the encampments of prisoners of war and other labour compounds.”12 Just as in the case of the Dutch Indies, German soldiers turned to concubinage for practical reasons: Because very few white women came to the colony, these monogamous and stable relationships with local women were the best way to avoid the increasing rates of venereal disease in the colony, and they were understood to be temporary. Most soldiers signed a three-year contract to go out to the colonies as Schutztruppe. While concubinage was frowned upon from a moral perspective and understood to be a kind of “emergency measure” (Hartmann, “Urges,” 55), it was nonetheless the norm, especially in rural areas. Commissioner Rohrbach, traveling in GSWA, noted that “Each and every non-married

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farmer, as well as white itinerant traders and soldiers […] had an Ovaherero woman as companion for bed and table […] this was considered as normal as eating and drinking” (Hartmann, “Urges,” 55). A naval man, G. Auer, wrote commentary in his diary about photos of German men with local women: “Since navy troops arrived in Swakopmund it has become quite lively; all fellow-soldiers had teamed up with black sweethearts, with whom we walked the town arms linked, having a good time” (Hartmann, “Urges,” 61). Without testimony from the women, we can know little of their expectations and experiences in these relationships and to what extent coercion was a factor. But the production of many mixed-race children worried the Kaiser; initially awarded German citizenship by virtue of their patrilineal heritage (although this was controversial), these children became a financial burden to the German colony when abandoned. Eventually, as the relationship between racial hierarchies and permitted sexual partners tightened, interracial marriages were banned in 1905, by order of the Kaiser.13 Thus was introduced the concept of Rassenschande in the colonies: an increasing emphasis on racial purity and eugenics led to the view that mixed-race offspring were degenerate by virtue of their African blood. The new law increased the demand for prostitution, and formal brothels were now established near the concentration camps being set up as the war with the Herero came to a close. To be sure, brothels had existed since the arrival of the Germans in the 1880s. Hartmann notes: “Bordellos as institutions where sex was offered in its commoditized form, were operated informally and formally. Women could be visited— informally—in their places of abode, the so-called Werften. Every settlement in the beginning of colonial urbanization had several of these” (Hartmann, “Urges,” 47). The clientele for these informal houses came from the military bases, hotels, breweries, and police stations nearby. Hartmann continues: “The Werften were considered one huge whorehouse, ransacked nocturnally by drunken men, soldiers, and settlers […] ever growing over the years as German colonial soldiers and settlers increased in number […] the first medical report to be put together for Windhoek as early as 1893 [reports] the regular sanitary examination of women working as prostitutes” (Hartmann, “Urges,” 47–48). The Blue Book carries the transcript of an interview done with Herero men in 1920: “At Windhoek, a house of prostitution was opened for the German military. Our daughters were placed in it and when they returned from there and got married to Herero men, they were sterile.” Another witness reported: “The [Herero] girls are interfered with by Germans when they are quite young […] There is a great deal of sexual disease among the people and it spreads as a result of this immorality” (Jeremy Silvester and Jan-Bart Gewald, 177 n. 165). Sources on sexual violence describe rape in GSWA as commonplace throughout the colonial era from 1885 to 1915, before, during, and after the genocide. Elisa von Joeden-Forgey: “In German South West Africa,

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sexualized violence was widespread. Settlers even had special terms for it such as Verkafferung (going native) and Schmutzwirtschaft (dirty trade) […] no distinction was made in colonial discourse between consensual and forced sex. Indeed, sexual relations between European men and African women were described with reference to the race hierarchy that governed the German social order […] During the war, women and girls were subjected to rape in what appears to be very high numbers” (von Joeden-Forgey, 40, 47). Scholars assert that this incessant sexual violence was one of the causes of the Herero rebellion in January 1904, which led to the destructive Battle of Waterberg. Hartmann also cites the prevalence of rape in GSWA, recounting as evidence three court cases of one Paul Pierstorf who came to the colony as a soldier and, after 1893, settled in Windhoek. Pierstorf was twice brought up on charges of attempted rape of Nama women in their prisoner of war huts and a third time on a charge of raping a white woman. His punishments, ordered by the court, were minimal. Hartmann notes that these cases “make evident the conditions under which such violence was possible and why such behavior was, more often than not, swept under the carpet of male complicity” (Hartmann, “Urges,” 40). He cites other cases—that of a high German official who raped a young woman in a mission parish in the late 1890s, leaving her pregnant; she worked for him as a laundress which is where he raped her and then paid her ten Marks for the forced intercourse (Hartmann, “Urges,” 42). Hartmann, too, writes about sexual violence as a cause of the war. That indigenous women were perceived as widely available, as a “convenience” for the Schutztruppe, is confirmed by a passage from a colonial novel, published by Gustav Frenssen in 1906.14 Frenssen was a Lutheran pastor who never traveled to Africa but engaged returning military in conversation and based his novel, Peter Moor’s Journey to the Southwest, on these interviews. The novel valorizes the German effort to eradicate the indigenous people, putting speeches into the mouths of German clergy and military commanders that justify the extermination. The indigenous people are termed “slaves” and “savage by nature” (Frenssen, 78, 221). Peter Moor’s lieutenant pronounces that “These blacks have deserved death before God and man […] Because they have built no houses and dug no wells […] God let us conquer here because we are the nobler and more advanced people” (Frenssen, 233). The main character, Peter Moor, has been in-country for several months when he and his fellow troops are sent to the German fort in Windhoek for some R & R. This fort, called the Alte Fest, still stands in central Windhoek. It was outside this fort that one of the initial concentration camps was built, a series of huts covered with skins and other materials. Moor reports: “When I took my leave after supper and went up to the fort, I saw some soldiers laughing with Hottentot women15 and one fellow said to me as he passed that these women were at our disposal at any time” (Frenssen, italics mine, 130). Indeed, colonial-era photographs show the Alte Fest partially surrounded by the crude dwellings, in tidy rows. At the edge of the concentration camp sit two considerably

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larger such huts which historians have conjectured may have been the brothels. If so, this sets a precedent for the spatial arrangement of brothels in some Nazi camps; they, too, were often located on the periphery of the camp. Another source recently come to light, Mama Penee Transcending the Genocide, is a family oral history recorded by the grandson of a woman who experienced the threat of German sexual violence.16 Mama Penee, née Jahohora, was born to a Herero clan in 1893 in Omaruru; she lost her parents at age 11, in August 1904, when they were shot dead by German soldiers near the cave in which they had been hiding from the fighting of the Herero War. Jahohora survived on her own in the desert for nine months, during which she learned to avoid soldiers: “She had heard that in some places Ovaherero were being forced to do hard labor, and that women were being raped by German soldiers. She was determined never to be captured let alone to be raped” (n.p.). Jahohora eventually found her way back to the Herero people and was then forced to work on a German farm. The manuscript offers valuable information about the threat under which Herero women lived. Jahohora, now fourteen, is forced by the German farmer’s wife to remove her traditional leather clothing and take a warm bath, after which she must stand naked in the sun until dry, and then is garbed in a typical Victorian dress. She “noticed that some young women even of her age were made to have children by German men” (n.p.). Jahohora takes a drastic measure to assure that she is not raped: I made an oath that no German man would touch my body. I walked into the veld until I found a lot of nettles which I repeatedly rubbed on my arms and legs. The pain was excruciating but I repeatedly burned my body until the swellings started to show […] I never revealed my secret. That was how I got the nickname Inaavinuise (larva mother, after the dead skin from which the larva would emerge). Not too surprisingly, the German men stayed away from me. (n.p.)

Jahorora told her story of survival to her grandsons, one of whom wrote this manuscript. Many people living in Namibia today are the grandchildren or great grandchildren of an indigenous woman who was raped. Their stories reveal their anguish and the discrimination they face. Often, they know nothing of their paternal heritage.17 Other forms of sexual abuse, such as extreme whipping, deserve mention. The men, women, and children who survived the genocide worked in the confines of concentration camps; others built railroads, worked as miners, and as farm laborers, like Jahohora, for the German settlers. They were frequently subjected to brutal floggings with a sjambok, a kind of whip made of heavy rhinoceros hide. Photographs of these beatings in progress were taken by the military and sent home as postcards. Farm laborers were particularly vulnerable to unwarranted punishment; the law required that such floggings be limited to no more than 25 lashes at any one time and that women be spared; both of these regulations were routinely flouted. The custom of such

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floggings came to be called “paternal chastisement,” a shocking euphemism when one learns about the damage inflicted on the victims (Silvester and Gewald, 204). “Flogging […] came to our people more regularly than their meals,” stated a Herero headman (Silvester and Gewald, 135). Ludwig Cramer, a farmer with a large number of forced laborers, offers a particularly gruesome example of cruelty and murder under the auspices of such “paternal chastisement.”18 He almost always selected women as his targets. In 1912, he flogged two pregnant women with impunity, both of whom miscarried. Using as an excuse his desire to learn more about supposed poisons hidden by his laborers, Cramer beat a woman named Maria all evening until she fell unconscious; the beating was resumed the following day. Brought to the hospital a week later, she had wounds on her back infested with maggots, on her face, and on her breasts. A photograph of her back in the 1918 Blue Book reveals the horrifying extent of these wounds. She never recovered and died six months later. Because the floggings were made known when the women were brought to hospital, Cramer was accused in court of assault and battery of eight victims, seven of them female. Such a trial was an anomaly; Germans could usually punish their laborers without fear of reprisal. The judicial system, such as it was, was rigged against indigenous people: The corroborated evidence of seven indigenous people was required to outweigh that of one white man (Silvester and Gewald, 93). Imperial Commissioner Theodor Leutwein declared, “Beating to death was not regarded as murder; but the natives were unable to understand such legal subtleties,” yet another comment which demonstrates the crushing weight of the genocidal gaze upon the Herero and Nama (Silvester and Gewald, 204). Photography from this era reveals that German soldiers often used their cameras as another weapon of sexual violence. Evident in several photos is the fact that the woman on prominent display has been forced to bare her breasts for the titillation of the photographer and the future viewers of the photograph; indeed, in some shots taken inside the death camp Shark Island, the soldier has inserted himself into the picture as evidence that he has the power to humiliate the woman and to subsequently enjoy both that power and her nakedness.19 Lora Wildenthal asks the crucial question: “Germans, far from bringing civilized mores to primitive Africa, were themselves exhibiting brutality. Would they bring that brutality back to Germany?” (Wildenthal, 74). A cartoon, entitled “The Power of Habit,” which appeared in the German magazine Simplicissimus in 1904, suggests that the answer is a resounding YES. It reveals the violence against women during the colonial era and the ways in which this attitude was carried back to Germany. In image one, we see the German soldier, bidding farewell to the African woman who has been his concubine or forced sexual object. Note the presence of the whip. The second image, just below, depicts his return home to the Fatherland. Next, in his apparently joyless state, his wife bootblacks their stove and an idea is born to

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Fig. 35.1  “The Power of Habit” (Simplicissimus 1904; out of copyright)

him. If he could bootblack her, his lust or sadism, predicated on violence in Africa, will return. In image five, note that he has donned his military clothing. And in the final image, he is treating his spouse to the same kind of sexual violence in which he indulged in the colony (Fig. 35.1).

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Sexual Violence During the Third Reich The Simpliccissimus cartoon is an invaluable signifier of sexual violence in GSWA, the transmission of that violence to Germany, the replication of such violence, and its subsequent representation. To detail such violence in the Holocaust and in Holocaust texts, I turn to two writers and their texts, each quite different. Yet, both instances reveal the threads of shared ideology and methodology from the colonial era to the Third Reich. In short, both texts demonstrate the genocidal gaze and its aftereffects.

Nanda Herbermann Nanda Herbermann was born into a middle-class Catholic family in Münster in 1903. Her family were devout Catholics; she had a sister who became a nun and a brother who became a priest, serving as a missionary in New Guinea. Herbermann attended a high school for girls in Münster and then did an apprenticeship at a well-regarded bookstore, where she was introduced to the intellectual and artistic circles of Münster, as well as to many prominent Catholics. Herbermann’s contacts in the bookstore led her to a new position in 1928, as editorial assistant to Father Friedrich Muckermann, an activist priest who was considered something of an enfant terrible in Catholic circles. Though he was an outspoken opponent of Bolshevism, a topic on which he published widely, Muckermann was known to live a Bohemian lifestyle, participating in activities seen as questionable for a priest, such as an international dance congress. Muckermann, strongly committed to “political Catholicism,” served as publisher and editor of the Catholic journal The Grail, with articles by prominent German Catholics on subjects such as philosophy, theology, the plastic arts, social issues, and book reviews. In June 1934, Muckermann published an editorial which was a thinly veiled critique of Hitler and Nazi politics. The issue was confiscated by the Nazis. Muckermann was forced to flee to Holland during the summer of 1934 to escape arrest. With the September 1934 issue of The Grail, the masthead of the journal changed to reflect Herbermann’s new role as leader of the editorial staff. Clearly, Herbermann was something of a New Woman during the 1920s: an actress and chain smoker, she did not marry, worked in various white-collar jobs, and ultimately became a respected writer and editor in her own right. In the 1930s, despite constant surveillance by the Gestapo and periodic raids, she operated and edited an important journal almost single-handedly. On February 4, 1941, Herbermann was arrested by the Gestapo in Münster. Most likely because of her work with Father Muckermann as well as her friendship with Bishop Clemens August von Galen, an outspoken opponent of euthanasia, Herbermann was accused of collaboration with the Catholic resistance. She was deported in July 1941 to Ravensbrück, the

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largest camp for women. On March 19, 1943, Herbermann was released from Ravensbrück upon direct orders by the Reichsführer of the SS, Heinrich Himmler. Heinz Herbermann, one of the five brothers who served in the German army during World War II, had petitioned Himmler directly for her release. Privileged to return home to Münster in the midst of the war, but under strict orders from the Gestapo not to reveal any information about Ravensbrück, Herbermann soon began to record her memories of her experiences. As the war ended, she set about preparing her manuscript for publication. One of the first concentration camp memoirs to appear in print, The Blessed Abyss, was originally published as Der Gesegnete Abgrund under the imprint of the Allied occupying forces by the Catholic press Glock und Lutz in 1946.20 The first English edition did not appear until 2000. Herbermann provides historical details on daily life in the women’s camp. More importantly, she documents the particular brutality to which female inmates were subjected on the basis of their sexuality and reproductive capacity. In her chapter “The Sick Among Us,” Herbermann reports: Newly-born children of young mothers, who had been taken into custody during their pregnancy, were killed or aborted before birth. In the sick-bay I myself heard such a small being crying, who was murdered fifteen minutes later. I knew German and foreign inmates who confessed to me after their delivery to the concentration camp that they were pregnant and hoped that they would be released in time. But they were not released, nor did they bear a child.21

She also attests to the “medical experiments” to which Ravensbrück inmates were subjected. Nazi doctors routinely sterilized women in the camp, particularly the Roma and Sinti inmates. One especially instructive aspect of Herbermann’s memoir is the fact that she confirms important details about forced prostitution and the bordellos that were established by the SS in a number of concentration camps. As an “Aryan,” Herbermann was appointed to be a barracks elder in the camp. Thus, she had access to information about Nazi activities and attitudes. One of her assignments was to preside over a barrack of women arrested for prostitution. Herbermann outlines the histories of these women to illustrate how the horrible social conditions in which they grew up led them to prostitution. Discussing the SS bordellos at Mauthausen and other concentration camps for men to which women from her block were sent, Herbermann asserts: “It is a horrible fact that people who had been imprisoned for their depravity, and for ‘endangering human society,’ were now commanded by the State, which held them for this precise reason, to be depraved again” (Herbermann, 132). She notes that these women would generally be sent back to Ravensbrück approximately every three months to be “exchanged” for new forced labor sex workers. While the SS wooed women into “volunteering” to work in bordellos with promises of an early release and better living conditions,

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Herbermann reports that at least one woman she knew, “Frieda,” did not survive the violence she was subjected to there and never returned from Mauthausen (Herbermann, 131). The SS began to establish bordellos for the use of “Aryan” male inmates of concentration camps in summer 1942, about a year after Heinrich Himmler initially gave the order; by the end of 1944, at least eleven such bordellos had been built: in Buchenwald, Dachau, Gusen, Auschwitz, Monowitz, Birkenau, Flossenbürg, Neuengamme, Sachsenhausen, and Dora-Mittelbau.22 Christa Paul was one of the first scholars to write about these sonderbau, or special buildings as they were called, publishing her initial study in 1994.23 Camp bordellos were established for a number of reasons. Among these were the Nazi effort to prevent homosexual relationships among male inmates and the effort to divert inmates from attempts at resistance or political organization. According to both Paul and more recent work by Robert Sommer, however, the primary purpose of the bordellos was to encourage inmates to work harder.24 Himmler ordered the establishment of the bordellos as part of a new incentive system which paid inmates small amounts of “camp money” when they produced at higher rates or fulfilled certain quotas; with this money, they could purchase hard to obtain items such as cigarettes or food products—or they could visit the bordello for a price of 2 RM (Schulz, 135–146). Ironically and sadly, scholars now frequently note that additional food would have been a much more alluring reward for most male inmates.

Liana Millu Smoke Over Birkenau, by Italian survivor Liana Millu, is a collection of six narratives Primo Levi has called “one of the most powerful European testimonies to come from the women’s lager at Auschwitz-Birkenau and by far the most affecting among Italian accounts.”25 The text takes up gendered aspects of women’s experiences in the lager: pregnancy, childbirth, sexual violence, maternal love, forced prostitution, and the bartering of sexual favors for food. Liana Millu was born into a Jewish family in Pisa; the year of her birth is listed variously as 1913, 1914, and 1920. In her teens, she had already conceived the desire to be a writer and, against expectations for young women at the time, she approached a newspaper in Milan; having written and published a successful article for them, Millu was invited to join the staff. Wishing to cut ties with her family and her religion, she changed her Sephardic birth name from Millul to Millu. After Mussolini’s racial laws were established, she lost her position as a journalist and as a teacher in an elementary school. She worked variously as a seamstress, a clerk and a nurse, using false identification papers; she also allied herself with a group of freethinking and free-loving Marxists. In 1942 or 1943, she joined the Italian resistance as

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a member of the “Organizzazione Otto” which operated as a rescue team, and in 1944, she was arrested with a group of partisans in Venice. She was thirty years old or perhaps 24. Sent initially to the Italian concentration camp of Fossoli, she then was deported to Auschwitz, arriving on May 23, 1944. Millu was selected for labor and tattooed with the number A-5384; she was given a blood-stained jacket from a murdered prisoner which she still owned well after the war. After four months in Birkenau, Millu was transferred to Ravensbrück and then to labor in an arms factory in Malkow. Liberated in 1945 and returning almost immediately to Italy, Millu began drafting the stories that became Smoke Over Birkenau, finishing them that same year. Millu published the first edition in Italy in 1947. It was sadly neglected by the press and reviewers and promptly went out of print until 1957. The first English edition did not appear until 1991. Some have called the book Holocaust fiction, but “autofiction” more accurately describes the six interconnected accounts of women’s experiences in the lager.26 Millu situates herself as the first person narrator/ observer in each text, sometimes using her own name and sometimes assuming a pseudonym that begins with “L”—Lianka, Lianechka—as does her own given name. Taking such an observer stance is the most important lesson she learned in Birkenau, according to Millu: “Never to put oneself in sight, to always try to not attract attention, this was the wisdom that one learned almost immediately. Because it was always dangerous to attract attention from the Kapos.”27 Also, like Herbermann, Millu was trained as a journalist and brought a journalist’s eye for detail and a tone of objectivity to recounting women’s lives in Birkenau. Significantly, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, the translator of Smoke Over Birkenau, also considers the book a mixed genre: “Moreover, the book wasn’t really fiction, or only fiction in the loosest sense; it was a memoir, no doubt adorned and enhanced, but the events really happened.”28 Evidence of the correlation between Millu’s own experiences and those of the characters in Smoke Over Birkenau can be garnered by comparing Millu’s account of her four months in Auschwitz in her interview with Susan Branciforte to the book itself. Millu also declares that the book she wrote next, The Bridges of Schwerin, is autobiographical; such a non-fiction approach would seem to stem from her training as a journalist. “Scheiss Egal” is the story of a woman who, when confronted with a “choiceless choice” of starvation or the brothel, “volunteers” for the Auschwitz brothel in order to survive. This story and the other five graphically depict the sexual violence experienced by women in Auschwitz, thus corroborating the accounts of Nanda Herbermann. “Scheiss Egal” (“I don’t give a shit”) recounts the suffering of Dutch sisters, Lotti and Gustine, in Birkenau. When Gustine falls ill, Lotti determines to save her own life by “volunteering” for the Puffkommando, the brothel. Lotti justifies her decision to the narrator:

664  E. R. BAER I’m eighteen years old—I don’t want to die […] I’m supposed to refuse life because it’s offered on a dirty plate? I told Gustine all this but she didn’t understand […] It had reached a point where we could hardly talk to each other anymore […] Gustine and I are of the same blood […] but now there is nothing left between us, because I was afraid to die and she believed God would save her. (Millu, 171–173)

Though Lotti survives, her sister Gustine has declared her “dead,” so disgusted is she with Lotti’s new role. Gustine refuses to speak with her and, worse, to accept the life-giving food and medicines Lotti obtains for her. Smoke Over Birkenau portrays women who faced a dilemma: Would they trade sex for food or accept starvation and inevitable death? While we might object to terming this “rape” on the grounds that the women “volunteered,” Millu’s stories make clear the ways in which such an exchange is indeed a profound violation of these women, both physically and emotionally. An air raid over Auschwitz sends a commando of women into the Puff for shelter, and there, the narrator of “Scheiss Egal” encounters Lotti. She recounts the day she “volunteered,” earning this sneer from the blockowa: “Aha, so you want to go to the Puff? You want to have some fun and stuff your face, huh?” Lotti begs the blockowa to keep her decision a secret, but instead, the blockowa tells Lotti’s sister, Gustine: “She’s going to become a whore” (Millu, 174). As Lotti describes this profound humiliation, she begins to sob convulsively. Suddenly, a “customer,” a middle-aged soldier, “with a coarse, menacing face” arrives at the door. Demanding to know what all the “whimpering” is about, he is told that Lotti’s sister is sick. “Her sister is sick? Scheiss egal! Who gives a shit? the soldier thundered, unbuckling his belt” (Millu, 175). What will come next for Lotti is clear to the narrator who obeys the soldier’s command to “beat it.” As the narrator exits the brothel, she gazes up at the smoke in the sky: “It was all nothing but smoke. Smoke drifting over the lagers, the town, and the brothel; smoke drifting over evil and innocence, wisdom and folly, death and life. All of it ‘Scheiss egal’” (Millu, 175). The smoke, which gives the book its title and is a pervasive symbol in all the chapters, blurs reality for the narrator, preventing her from making the distinctions that are the groundwork of ordinary life. Lotti’s identity, too, has been blurred and erased by the blockowa’s curses, by her sister’s refusal to recognize her, and by the soldier’s treatment of her as nothing more than a sexual convenience. So, what can we conclude from this close examination of sexual violence in two German genocidal moments: the genocide of the Herero and Nama, 1904–1907, and the Nazi Holocaust, 1933–1945? First, clearly, the kinds of sexual violence in which the Schutztruppe indulged in their African colony— forced prostitution in concentration camps, unbridled rape, forced undressing, sexualized whipping, and the use of a camera to humiliate women—were all repeated during the Holocaust. Though Germans did not invent the concentration camp, they may have been the first to establish bordellos within

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the camp boundaries and keep official records of the “earnings” of the women therein. Impunity was an engendering factor in both instances, the expectation that this was their right as Schutztruppe/Nazis to use women as a convenience and that no punishment would be forthcoming. The Nuremberg Laws, with their formulas about racial purity and allowable sexual partners, echo the laws in the latter years of GSWA, as do the racial/racist hierarchies established in the Third Reich, and the resulting genocidal gaze. And a second conclusion: Though we have no witness accounts from the women in GSWA about their suffering, these two early Holocaust texts about sexual violence made the continuity, from the colony to the Third Reich, public and obvious. Yet these texts were themselves neglected, ignored, and/or misread so that these German crimes against women were hidden for almost a century and were, for a while, taboo in Holocaust studies itself. Thus, we can trace the results of a double denial: initially, denial of the genocide in GSWA and colonial amnesia regarding the widespread and brutal sexual violence against women there between 1885 and 1915; subsequent re-enactment of this violence during the Third Reich; and then neglect by Holocaust scholars until the 1990s which took the form of misbegotten claims that Jewish women were not raped and that sexual violence was unworthy of study. If denial leads to impunity and repetition of criminal acts, then the study not only of those criminal acts but also of the consequences of denial is crucial to the future of Holocaust studies.

Notes



1.  See, for example, Jürgen Zimmerer and Joachim Zeller, eds., Genocide in German South-West Africa: The Colonial War of 1904–1908 and Its Aftermath (Monmouth Wales: Merlin Press, 2008); Volker Langbehn and Mohammed Salama, eds., German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust and Postwar Germany (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); David Olusoga and Casper E. Erichsen, The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism (London: Faber and Faber, 2010); and Shelley Baranowski, Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 2. Schutztruppe, which is literally translated as “protective forces,” is certainly a misnomer as the German military did anything but protect the indigenous people of this southern Africa land. 3. See Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, “Women and the Herero Genocide,” in Women and Genocide: Survivors, Victims, Perpetrators, eds. Elissa Bemporad and Joyce W. Warren (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), 36–57; to my knowledge, this is the first article published by an American academic on the issue of gender in GSWA. See also Gesine Krüger, Kriegsbewältigung und Geschichtsbewusstsein: Realität, Deutung und Verarbeitung des deutschen Kolonialkriegs in Namibia 1904 bis 1907 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999).

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4.  For von Trotha’s extermination order, see George Steinmetz, “The First Genocide of the 20th Century and Its Postcolonial Afterlives: Germany and the Namibian Ovaherero,” hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.4750978.0012.201. 5.  Scholars have used the concept of the gaze in various contexts, often to describe a negative gesture occurring in and defining an oppressive relationship. Laura Mulvey introduced the notion of the “male gaze” to analyze how women are objectified by the male gaze in cinema, and E. Ann Kaplan’s “colonial, or imperial, gaze” describes the dominating look of the imperialist upon the “inferior” colonized. See Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”; E. Ann Kaplan, Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze. 6.  See Benjamin Madley, “From Africa to Auschwitz: How German South West Africa Incubated Ideas and Methods Adopted by the Nazis in Eastern Europe,” European History Quarterly 35, no. 3 (2005): 429–464. 7. Zoë Waxman, “An Exceptional Genocide? Sexual Violence in the Holocaust,” in Genocide and Gender in the Twentieth Century: A Comparative Survey, ed. Amy E. Randall (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 107. 8.  Private email from Werner Hillebrecht, former Director of the National Archives, Windhoek, Namibia, September 28, 2018. 9.  Jeremy Silvester and Jan-Bart Gewald, eds., Words Cannot Be Found: An Annotated Reprint of the 1918 Blue Book (Leiden: Brill, 2003). 10. Such photographs may be found in Wolfram Hartmann, ed., Hues Between Black and White: Historical Photography from Colonial Namibia, 1860s to 1915 (Windhoek: Out of Africa Publishers, 1904). 11.  Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 12.  Wolfram Hartmann, “Urges in the Colony: Men and Women in Colonial Windhoek, 1890–1905,” Journal of Namibian Studies 1 (2007): 39. 13. See Lora Wildenthal, German Women for Empire, 1884–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 79–107. 14. Gustav Frenssen, Peter Moor’s Journey to Southwest Africa, trans. Margaret May Ward (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908). 15. “Hottentot” was a derogatory term used for the Nama ethnic group. 16.  Mama Penne Transcending the Genocide, forthcoming, University of Namibia Press, 2020. 17.  For the personal story of one such descendant, see the film by Halfdan Muurholm, producer and director, and Casper W. Erichsen, co-director, One Hundred Years of Silence (New York, NY: Filmmakers Library, 2006). 18. The details regarding Cramer which follow are taken from Horst Drechsler, “Let Us Die Fighting”: The Struggle of the Herero and Nama Against German Imperialism (1884–1915) (London: Zed Press, 1980), 234–237, and Silvester and Gewald, Part II, Chapter 2. 19. See Hartmann, Hues, passim. 20. The book went through three German editions. See Nanda Herbermann, Der Gesegnete Abgrund. Schutzhäftling Nr. 6582 im Frauenkonzentrationslager Ravensbrück, ed. Elisabeth Prégardier (Plöger Verlag, 2000).

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21. Nanda Herbermann, The Blessed Abyss: Inmate #6582 in Ravensbrück Concentration Camp for Women, eds. Hester Baer and Elizabeth Baer, trans. Hester Baer (Wayne State University Press, 2000), 170. 22. See Christa Schulz, “Weibliche Häftlinge aus Ravensbrück in Bordellen der Männerkonzentrationslager,” in Frauen in Konzentrationslagern BergenBelsen, Ravensbrück, ed. Claus Füllberg-Stolberg (Bremen: Edition Temmen, 1994), 135–146. 23. Christa Paul, Zwangsprostitution: Staatlich errichtete Bordelle im Nationalsocialismus (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1994), 135. 24. Robert Sommer, “Camp Brothels: Forced Sex Labor in Nazi Concentration Camps,” in Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 168–196. 25. Liana Millu, Smoke Over Birkenau, trans. Lynne Sharon Schwartz (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 7. 26. “Autofiction is a term used in literary critic ism to refer to a form of fictionalized autobiography.” Serge Doubrovsky coined the term in 1977 with reference to his novel Fils, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autofiction. 27. Branciforte, “Intervista con la storia: Una conversazione con Liana Millu,” Italianist 18 (1998): 289–304, 292. 28. L ynne Sharon Schwartz, Face to Face: A Reader in the World (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 65.

Bibliography Baranowski, Shelley. Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Branciforte, Suzanne. “Intervista con la storia: Una conversazione con Liana Millu.” Italianist 18 (1998): 289–304. Drechsler, Horst. “Let Us Die Fighting”: The Struggle of the Herero and Nama Against German Imperialism (1884–1915). London: Zed Press, 1980. Frenssen, Gustav. Peter Moor’s Journey to Southwest Africa. Translated by Margaret May Ward. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908. Hartmann, Wolfram, ed. Hues Between Black and White: Historical Photography from Colonial Namibia, 1860s to 1915. Windhoek: Out of Africa Publishers, 2004. Hartmann, Wolfram. “Urges in the Colony. Men and Women in Colonial Windhoek, 1890–1905.” Journal of Namibian Studies 1 (2007): 39. Herbermann, Nanda. The Blessed Abyss: Inmate #6582 in Ravensbrück Concentration Camp for Women. Edited by Hester Baer and Elizabeth Baer, translated by Hester Baer. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000. Kaplan, E. Ann. Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze. New York: Routledge, 1997. Ka-Tzetnik. House of Dolls. Translated by Moshe M. Kohn. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955. Krüger, Gesine. Kriegsbewältigung und Geschichtsbewusstsein: Realität, Deutung und Verarbeitung des deutschen Kolonialkriegs in Namibia 1904 bis 1907. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999. Langbehn, Volker, and Mohammed Salama, eds. German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust and Postwar Germany. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.

668  E. R. BAER Madley, Benjamin. “From Africa to Auschwitz: How German South West Africa Incubated Ideas and Methods Adopted by the Nazis in Eastern Europe.” European History Quarterly 35, no. 3 (2005): 429–464. Millu, Liana. Smoke Over Birkenau. Translated by Lynne Sharon Schwartz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1997. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) reprinted in her Visual and Other Pleasures. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Muurholm, Halfdan, Producer and Director, and Casper W. Erichsen, Co-director. One Hundred Years of Silence. New York, NY: Filmmakers Library, 2006. Olusoga, David, and Casper E. Erichsen. The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism. London: Faber and Faber, 2010. Paul, Christa. Zwangsprostitution: Staatlich errichtete Bordelle im Nationalsocialismus. Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1994. Schaller, Dominik J. “From Conquest to Genocide: Colonial Rule in German Southwest Africa and German East Africa.” In Empire, Colony, Genocide, edited by Dirk Moses, 296–324. New York: Berghahn Books, 2008. Schulz, Christa. “Weibliche Häftlinge aus Ravensbrück in Bordellen Männerkonzentrationslager.” In Frauen in Konzentrationslagern Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbrück, edited by Claus Füllberg-Stolberg, 135–146. Bremen: Edition Temmen, 1994. Schwartz, Lynne Sharon. Face to Face: A Reader in the World. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000. Silvester, Jeremy, and Jan-Bart Gewald, eds. Words Cannot Be Found: An Annotated Reprint of the 1918 Blue Book. Leiden: Brill, 2003. Sommer, Robert. “Camp Brothels: Forced Sex Labor in Nazi Concentration Camps.” In Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century, edited by Dagmar Herzog. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Steinmetz, George. “The First Genocide of the 20th Century and Its Postcolonial Afterlives: Germany and the Namibian Ovaherero.” hdl.handle.net/2027/ spo.4750978.0012.201. Stoler, Ann Laura. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Timm, Annette F., ed. Holocaust History and the Readings of Ka-Tzetnik. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. von Joeden-Forgey, Elisa. “Women and the Herero Genocide.” In Women and Genocide: Survivors, Victims, Perpetrators, edited by Elissa Bemporad and Joyce W. Warren, 36–57. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018. Wildenthal, Lora. German Women for Empire, 1884–1945. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Zimmerer, Jürgen, and Joachim Zeller, eds. Genocide in German South-West Africa: The Colonial War of 1904–1908 and Its Aftermath. Monmouth Wales: Merlin Press, 2008.

CHAPTER 36

The Place of Holocaust Survivor Videotestimony: Navigating the Landmarks of First-Person Audio-Visual Representation Oren Baruch Stier

Videotestimony is a unique genre of Holocaust representation: not quite memoir, not really film, certainly not literature—although many survivor videotestimonies include highly poetic and dramatic passages— videotestimonies are situated somewhere in the spaces between literary, memorial, and cinematic narratives. Increasingly, survivor videotestimonies mediate for many viewers their knowledge and awareness of the events of the Shoah, but in ways distinct from other genres of Holocaust representation. How and where do we place them? This chapter investigates the place of survivor videotestimonies in the scholarly literature (as sources) and as primary documents in and of themselves, but it also explores their place in the landscape of Holocaust representation, particularly the archival spaces that house and contain them, and the Internet and virtual spaces that extend and exceed those archival containers, bringing these audio-visual narratives into the viewer’s home, office, or classroom. The place of testimony here also includes the spaces in which testimony is given—from DP camps immediately after the war to tastefully decorated living rooms long after—and the spaces indexed in the course of giving testimony—transports and camps, forests and other hiding places, and, most especially, homes lost and never regained. Indeed, videotestimony often becomes the space in which narrated memories of home in the past clash with images of home in the present, even as the

O. B. Stier (*)  Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_36

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present tense of testimony endlessly slips away: our sense of place shifts with the passage of time, as the “survivors” we watch and listen to pass away and become ghostly presences, leaving their accounts in their wake, and transmitting them into the future. What remain are literal and figurative landmarks of memory—spaces and places that mark the landscape of the testimonial narrative. Inquiring after the place of Holocaust survivor testimony, finally, raises ethical issues concerning voyeurism and instrumentalization. Are videotestimonies merely sources of information? Are they complete narratives that may not be mined for data? These multiple layers of place anchor, to varying degrees, the act of giving testimony, grounding these narratives in their historical, memorial, and domestic landscapes. How do we define the distinctive nature of survivor videotestimonies? In many respects, videotestimonies are simply visually augmented oral histories. But testimony can be distinguished from oral history in a number of ways: an oral history is a recording of information about the past collected via interview (it is also the field of study based on such interviews); a testimony, by contrast, is a statement, oral or written, attesting to the truth of something, as in a court of law or in a religious context; it serves as evidence and is often framed as the production of such evidence. In instances of the latter, a person testifies to something, and the resulting testimony does not need to be the product of an interview. One might note that we “take” oral histories, but we “give” testimonies. When it comes to first-person accounts of the Holocaust, it is more common to call the results testimonies because of their evidentiary function, though they typically adhere to the interview-based oral history convention. Referring to them as testimonies highlights, therefore, their close relationship to proof of and knowledge about an historical event. The word “testimony” is derived from the Latin testis, “a witness,” and there is often a presumed identification of testimony with witness. Indeed, a witness in a courtroom provides testimony regarding what she saw. But witness and testimony are not the same thing, because there is always a temporal gap between the event experienced by the witness and the recounting of it through testimony. This gap can be more pronounced in the case of the Holocaust, where much of the testimony frequently follows the historical events to which it refers by years and even decades, relying more heavily on a witness’s recollections and accentuating the memorial quality and structure of Holocaust testimony (see below for a discussion of some exceptions to this). Moreover, the often traumatic nature of Holocaust experiences complicates the presumed direct, referential quality of Holocaust testimony because, to put it simply, trauma disrupts the processes of recollection and recounting. In Between Witness and Testimony, Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer “argue that the disaster of the Shoah—in which the victim and the survivor find it impossible to know, or put words to, the experience in which they find themselves—is located at the junction of the compulsion to speak and failure of speech, where the witness manages to redeem the moment (to finally see

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what lies beyond or behind what can be told by history), to ‘fall victim’ to it, and leave a trace of it in language.”1 This junction, this “point that divides them is the movement into discourse” (Bernard-Donals and Glejzer, xv). Bernard-Donals and Glejzer define the “stark difference” between the terms, “witness” and “testimony”: Witness is the moment of seeing, in which the witness’s confrontation with the (sublime) event renders him speechless and terrified; testimony is the witness’s obedience to the compulsion to speak, though what the witness says is neither a reflection of the event (which is irretrievably lost to memory) nor unaffected by it. But this also means that the relation between the event that forms the core of traumatic memory and the testimony that provides the only access that we have to the event itself is a vexed one, all the more so because of the nature of sublimity and the possibility of redemption implied by it. (Bernard-Donals and Glejzer, xii)

Witnessing to traumatic experience is private, intransitive; testimony is the attempt to make what was witnessed public—to represent the act of witnessing—but it often testifies to its own failure to communicate, to its incommensurability, to language’s inability to contain traumatic experience or its recollection, to the impossibility of making the recipient or addressee of testimony into a witness to the witness’s trauma. Lawrence Langer, whose 1991 volume, Holocaust Testimonies, the result of a years-long study of survivor accounts housed at the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University—one of the key collections of videotestimonies—was the first monograph devoted to analyzing and understanding the genre, posits: Testimony is a form of remembering. The faculty of memory functions in the present to recall a personal history vexed by traumas that thwart smooth-flowing chronicles. Simultaneously, however, straining against what we might call disruptive memory is an effort to reconstruct a semblance of continuity in a life that began as, and now resumes what we would consider, a normal existence. “Cotemporality” becomes the controlling principle of these testimonies, as witnesses struggle with the impossible task of making their recollections of the camp experience coalesce with the rest of their lives. If one theme links their narratives more than any other, it is the unintended, unexpected, but invariably unavoidable failure of such efforts.2

Bernard-Donals and Glejzer speak of the “epistemology of witness”; I focus rather on the epistemology of testimony (what is the nature of testimonial knowledge and how do we come to know it?), because we cannot know anything outside of the way it is communicated. This is true particularly because the testimonial process, I would argue, has three successive stages: witnessing the original event, recalling the event in the process of giving testimony,

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and, finally, recounting the event in testimony, a narration often interrupted by breaks and hesitations that highlight the incommensurability of testimony. Testimony, like memoir, is based on first-person recollection. But unlike memoir, testimony is produced typically without much pause for reflection, analysis, self-critique, or, especially, revision (multiple testimonies given by one person over time may, taken together, undo much of this distinction). Many would describe testimony as more immediate than memoir, though it is important to note that, while the production of testimony does not typically allow for the laborious process of writing and rewriting that results in the written memoir, this does not mean that testimony is produced without any mediation. As Hank Greenspan has observed, “The primary contrast between spoken and written retelling is not, as some have suggested, that spoken recounting is less ‘mediated’ or more ‘spontaneous.’[…] The difference is rather that speech, including rehearsed speech, entails dimensions—changes of cadence, eruptions and interruptions, exclamation and pause—that are virtually impossible to recreate in texts”3 (I will return to this below). Indeed, Greenspan has rejected the whole range of terminology most commonly used in association with what he prefers to call “survivors’ accounts”: terms like “testimony,” “oral history,” and even “memory” are all problematic, or worse. While I appreciate his observations and accept many of them, I find the term “testimony” remains apt in this particular case due to the evidentiary aim of the major archiving projects, which, in addition to the Fortunoff Archive, include the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (VHA) and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive. In most respects, videotestimony can be understood as an enrichment and intensification of testimony in general. Whether testimony is taken in written or oral form, for example, the recording medium may not capture certain nuances of speech, gestures, body movements and, especially, hesitations, pauses, and other meaningful gaps in the presentation of testimony; testimony recorded through audio-visual techniques seeks to represent and retain more of these elements of narration and recall, which are difficult to transcribe or otherwise render for a reader’s or auditor’s comprehension. It is not only the fullness of the testimonial process that videotestimonies seek to capture; attending to the full picture of a testimony’s production allows its viewer-listeners to perceive a range of elements that participate in the mediation and production of videotestimonial knowledge that are associated with both the individual giving testimony, the individual(s) watching the testimony, and the wide variety of formal, technical, generic, and human components located in between the two. Elsewhere I have outlined a method of distinguishing these modes of mediation and production by attending to the various “frames of remembrance” circumscribing videotestimony4; these include at least five distinct categories. The first encompasses the various ways the speaker frames her own

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testimony—frames “arising from the testimonial act: narrative self-framing, linguistic self-framing, and spatial-temporal distortions or disruptions created in the embodying of the memory of trauma” (Stier 2003, 74); choices a survivor makes to include objects or even family members in the course of testimony may also impact the testimonial frame. The second includes technical frames, such as the formal manner in which the survivor giving testimony is visually framed by a camera operator as well as other aspects relating to the technical-technological limitations of recording—the length of videotape used, fixed camera angles, production quality, beginning and ending points, etc. The third category covers frames determined by the interviewers, including questions asked or not, interruptions, redirections, and such, as well as the broader role of the interviewer in setting agendas and even the interviewer’s presence or absence on screen. The fourth frame of reference arises from the subject position of the auditor-voyeur of the testimony, who comes later but participates in the creation of testimony by virtue of his role as viewer and recipient of the testimony, and which includes the respectful and perhaps even reverential attitude expressed toward survivors. Finally, the fifth category deals with the institutional context of the testimony—where it was recorded and where it is housed, how it is organized and categorized, and how it is produced and accessed.5 In short, one might summarize this approach as a concern not so much with the content of videotestimony, which remains important, but with its context—its containers—and not only the bodily containment of testimony but also its institutional and cultural containment. In what ways are Holocaust testimonies contained within the medium of videotestimony and all of its attendant frames of remembrance, and how do those modes of containment impact the testimonies themselves and the ways we view and understand them? In what ways do these testimonies exceed their containers, overflow in the process of reception, spill out into culture at large, become disembodied, and break out of the frames of remembrance? Because traumatic memory and indeed the Shoah itself elude containment—and, moreover, because so many were murdered without giving any testimony—this issue of excess and overflow is also important. These issues have become only more urgent in recent years. The era of the recording and collection of Holocaust testimonies has all but passed, but we are very much in the heart of the era of their containment and dissemination. I want to tie these issues of framing and of context and containment to the term “place” and ask, What is the place of survivor videotestimonies in the landscape of Holocaust representation? How do we understand the importance and influence of the particular place of testimony—its locus, its location—on the testimonial process? Where is testimony literally situated? These are complex questions that refer to at least four distinct spatial frameworks: archival space, virtual space, the recording space, and the spaces indexed in the course of the testimony. Although these categories coexist and may even

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overlap, it is instructive to view each one as a separate but related zone of engagement whose analysis ultimately informs and enriches our understanding of the nature of Holocaust survivor videotestimony as a unique genre. The place of the archive, for example, is a critical one, not only because the archive has been the primary repository and access point for survivor testimonies, but also because archival collection, cataloguing, and indexing policies have impacted the who, what, when, where, why, and how of videotestimony projects. It is frequently through the archive that scholars identify specific testimonies as sources for historical research, and it is due to archival practices that those sources are made accessible. While the earlier phases of survivor testimony collecting were met with a good deal of hesitation and skepticism from historians, the past decade or so has seen increased use of first-person testimony in scholarly writing about the Holocaust, most notably in Christopher Browning’s history of the Starachowice slave-labor camp, Remembering Survival, which is “based almost entirely on postwar eyewitness testimony.”6 As search technology becomes more sophisticated and precise—owing to increased availability of transcriptions, better and more thorough indexing and cataloguing, and the like—the place of testimonies in Holocaust research is increasingly pronounced. For some, however, this heightened role comes at a cost: the fragmentation of individual testimonies into bits of evidence stripped of narrative context and useful only for others’ research priorities, which detracts from the integrity of the testimony as a whole, i.e., not in the service of an ulterior motive. As Noah Shenker cautions, the ability to search within testimonies for specific testimonial fragments might detract from, as he puts it, “the careful viewing and listening that is often not only an analytical but also an ethical demand of working with such interviews.” He asks, “Does the segmentation and instrumentalization of VHA witness interviews potentially position them as sources of historical illustration rather than as complex and textured sources in their own right?” (Shenker, 17). In truth, archival space is the place where one can identify testimonial fragments, linked by a common research objective, and whole testimonies, selected according to a series of criteria. This dual function of the archive contributes to the ways in which it authorizes the testimonies it houses. Annette Wieviorka has written about the massive accumulation of Holocaust testimonies, noting, “No other historical event, not even World War I—when the practice of recording testimonies first became common— has given rise to such a movement, which is so vast and long-lasting that no researcher can pretend to master it in its entirety.”7 Delineating three phases, beginning with the testimonies “left by those who did not survive the events,” and continuing with the witness’s emergence as a public figure in the context of the Eichmann trial, she ultimately analyzes the development of that figure in what she calls in her study “the era of the witness” (Wieviorka, xv), first published in 1998 as L’ère du témoin. I want to propose that we have

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now entered a fourth phase in the development of Holocaust testimony, the era of the archive, largely as a result of the imminent passing of the surviving witness generation. Archival authority and authorization, I should note, stem in part from the institutional nature and conservative role of the archive. We are well aware that, in English, we “bear witness” while we “give testimony”: the act of witnessing is something borne and embodied by an individual, most likely in a profoundly private way; it is, initially at least, contained within the individual body and does not yet exist as testimony. Wieviorka illustrates this personal nature of witnessing, although in this case she is comparing Claude Lanzmann’s interview style and technique to what was employed at the Eichmann trial: “The witness is the bearer of an experience that, albeit unique, does not exist on its own, but only in the testimonial situation in which it takes place” (Wieviorka, 82). In this way, the account the witness is literally carrying inside herself comes to light and life—and indeed, existence—through the giving of testimony. Testimony, then, is the record left behind by a witness who can literally give it to an archive, allowing the archive to assume the role of a collective body that stands in for a group of individual witnesses. It is the archive that is increasingly defining the place and role of testimony in public discourse, and it is in thinking about the space and place of the archive that we can gain a deeper understanding of the evolving nature and function of Holocaust testimony and the new opportunities its archival housing and preservation afford us. One of the earliest Holocaust testimony archival projects is David Boder’s wire recorded interviews with so-called displaced persons in the DP camps and “shelter houses” of early postwar Europe. Over nine weeks in Europe in the summer and fall of 1946, Boder, a psychologist, conducted around 130 interviews in nine languages; later, approximately eighty of those were transcribed into English, most of which comprised a sixteen volume, self-published “library of catastrophe.”8 While Boder did not call these interviews testimonies—referring to them as “narratives, reports, personal histories and documents, stories, and even ‘tales’” (Rosen, 12)—and while they were neither the earliest nor most comprehensive set of postwar personal narratives (thousands of DP interviews were collected by historical commissions whose work began prior to Boder’s, for example, though it does not appear any of those were audio-recorded), they are important not least because of Boder’s aim in soliciting such reports for the benefit of Americans back home. As Alan Rosen notes in his meticulous study, “Boder hoped that the DPs’ tales of what they had gone through, coupled with vignettes of the oppressive conditions they faced in the German DP camps, in postwar Poland, or in communist Russia, would convince Americans to lobby in favor of a liberal immigration policy” (Rosen, 16–17). Thus, they are among the earliest accounts of wartime experiences elicited for the express purpose of communicating to a group of intended recipients—embodying the notion of literally

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giving testimony: Boder would introduce the interview subjects to his project with, “We know very little in America about the things that happened to you people who were in concentration camps. If you want to help us out, by contributing information about the fate of the displaced person, tell us your personal story. Tell us what is your name, how old you are, and where you were and what happened to you when the war started” (Rosen, 61). Rosen asserts that “Boder’s are the earliest audio recordings of Holocaust survivor testimony” (Rosen, 22). These personal histories were largely told— at Boder’s urging—in the DPs’ own tongues, which Rosen sees as “a vision of survivors still at home in their native language and milieu” (Rosen, 20), although I would add, despite their physical displacement. Thus, “home” for many of these interviewees was reduced to the internal landscape of their own narrations. The interviews themselves were conducted in an external landscape stripped for the interviewees of recognizable landmarks and marked by a negative sense of place—these are “displaced persons,” unable to return “home” because “home” has become devoid of family, of domicile, of safety or security. In terms of the testimonial frame, starting the narrative at the beginning of the war further delimited the landscape of survivor memory, further isolating the speaker from the safe space of home by way of a temporal boundary marker that excluded life before the war and, as Rosen suggests, possibly forestalling acts of mourning. Rosen’s case study of Boder’s project “carves out a distinctive territory for early postwar testimony: neither immediate nor belated, neither of a piece with the wartime writings nor divorced from them. Not the work of a historian, Boder’s interviews are nonetheless tied to a cluster of historical issues: the DP saga, immigration, and the ambiguous place (if there was to be a place) of Jews in postwar Europe” (Rosen, 227). I wish to highlight here the importance of place in Boder’s project. The spaces in which he recorded his interviews are distinguished by what they are not: neither institutionally controlled nor domestically determined, they are liminal spaces in which neither the interviewer nor the interviewees are fully at home; reflecting the instability of place for Jews in postwar Europe, the Boder testimonies capture narratives that are themselves interstitial. While later testimony archiving projects, especially audio-visual ones, would reflect specific spatial strategies—Yale’s Fortunoff Archive typically recorded interviews in neutral studio spaces and the VHA consists of recordings usually made in survivors’ living rooms—Boder’s lack of such clearly delineated recording environments highlights the profoundly unsettled milieu of his DP subjects. Annette Wieviorka argues forcefully for the importance of location in framing both witness and audience and in determining the significance of the transmission of testimony. She suggests, for example, that Beit Ha-am in Jerusalem, the location of the Eichmann trial, not only reinforced the potency of the survivor testimonies given there (famously, the focus of the trial), but also contributed positively to the reception of those accounts:

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The extraordinary force their words acquired can also be attributed [to] the place where they were pronounced, which gave them a political and social significance no book could confer. Their political dimension lay in the fact that the state, represented by the prosecutor, underwrote their testimony and thus lent it all the weight of the state’s legitimacy and institutional and symbolic power. The witnesses’ words attained a social dimension because they were uttered before judges whose responsibility it was to acknowledge the truth they contained and because they were relayed to the world media as a whole. For the first time since the end of the war, the witnesses had the feeling that they were being heard. (Wieviorka 2006, 84)

I would like to point out that this power has lingered in this space, for some at least, long after the historical trial itself, even into the next generation: Richard Hecht tells of an encounter years later, with a woman—a child of a survivor—at the same hall that had been converted into the famous courtroom, where the woman’s mother had testified as a witness. “I come here to hear my mother’s voice again tell her story, tell what she had seen, the very same story she told me over and over again.”9 This testimonial residue, clinging to a particular place, makes of such spaces charged and potent environments of memory. Perhaps an awareness of the potential potency of place in shaping videotestimonial narratives was behind the very different decisions made by the Fortunoff Archive and the Shoah Foundation concerning recording locations. As mentioned already, the Fortunoff Archive recorded its testimonies in essentially neutral, stark, studio locations, in order to discourage distraction and encourage the free flow of recollection from its witnesses, framed and viewed in isolation. Beginning roughly fifteen years later, the Shoah Foundation employed a different setting, aimed at more deliberately framing the testimonial narratives of “people who have returned to ‘normal,’ who have survived the shipwreck of war,” as Wieviorka suggests (Wieviorka, 111). If we were to review the many examples afforded by the VHA, one thing that is immediately noticeable is its domestication of testimony: the vast majority of Holocaust survivor videotestimonies recorded by the Shoah Foundation are set in the interviewees’ diverse (and possibly staged) living rooms. “They like to show off their homes, which they prepare specially for the interview,” Wieviorka notes (125). Jeffrey Shandler observes that here they are: at home, so that they appear framed by a wide variety of quotidian environments.[…] The VHA’s choice of setting for its interviews […] configures the Archive as a memory palace that contains tens of thousands of living rooms. Recording interviews in the familiar intimacy of their homes may have proved reassuring to survivors, as they embarked on the daunting task of recounting their past. This setting might also affect viewers, who encounter survivors of extreme experience within a domestic setting, as if paying them a virtual social call.[…] These staged backgrounds configure the spectacle of survivor videos as something more akin to painted or photographed portraits than

678  O. B. STIER to documentary records of, say, witnesses testifying in courtrooms or subjects filmed for psychological studies. As with formal portraiture, the composition of the shot situates the interviewees in environments that they dominate, surrounded by attributes that exemplify their character.10

Clearly, these domestic settings work to ease the discomfort of witness and viewer alike, offering an environment familiar to the interviewee, smoothing over her interior journey to hell and back in the course of her testimony, even as it also provides the person watching it some degree of visual respite from the difficult narrative. This domestication of the testimonial experience frames and contains it within the familiar (and familial) setting of the home, couching the narration of horrors “over there” within a safe space that visually counters the tales of dislocation and deprivation unfolding on screen. Actually, it is not surprising that space is an organizing framework for the Shoah Foundation interviews: Shenker points out that its protocol “asks interviewers to press witnesses to anchor their memories with meteorological, temporal, or spatial markers” (Shenker, 138). The domestic setting, even more than the typically stark recording studio in the Fortunoff tapes, highlights the role played by the embodied survivor in her own home in bringing the past into the “present” and reanimating a mental image held by many viewers derived from skeletal newsreel footage of survivors, thereby altering the “canon” of Holocaust representation. Greenspan would go even further; for decades, he has pioneered an interviewing methodology based in ongoing, repeated conversations with survivors “understood as collaborative partnerships” with individuals approached in the context of their full life histories rather than as sources for testimony to be given and taken in turn: “Here it is enough simply to imagine retelling grounded in what is already a communal conversation versus entering a community to ‘gather testimonies’ and move on. It may be the difference between retelling that is always at home and testimony that is wonderfully ‘housed’—collected, archived, and coded—but with no place to go” (Greenspan, xv). No matter what the methodology, survivors’ homes here function as landmarks, anchoring and grounding testimony for both the witnesses and their listener-voyeurs. They serve as reassuring beacons that signal the transmissibility of memory, the stability of the survivors, and the sense of narrative closure that accompanies the end of a story that, by design, brackets the suffering of the Shoah with life at home before and after the war. There are two meanings to the word “landmark,” and both are instructive in this context. One has to do with navigation and spatial orientation: a physical landmark is a recognizable element of the landscape, easily seen from a distance, and thus useful in helping people determine their location and sense of place. Historically, the concept of the landmark is related to the determination and indication of property boundaries—what does or does not belong within a delimited area. The second meaning of landmark is less about place than about events and signifies a turning point, watershed, or milestone (the term remains wedded to its spatial origins); as an adjective, it indicates

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something consequential. With respect to testimony, landmarks of memory would be critical points in a survivor narrative as well as spatial marks of survivor experience; in videotestimony specifically, they could also refer to visual markers related to the testimonial narrative and to its setting. In shifting my attention now to the spaces indexed in the course of testimony, I would like to focus on two examples of two types of internal landmarks: one, the idea of “home,” is more general and conceptual; the second, the “Arbeit macht frei” gateway at Auschwitz (and elsewhere), is more specific and material. I will explore each one in turn in order to further sharpen our understanding of the place of videotestimony and the places that mark the landscape of the testimonial narrative. For the latter, I begin with the premise that “Arbeit macht frei,” as an iconic sign and phrase, has been increasingly employed in the post-Holocaust era to represent the Shoah in its entirety.11 One question raised by the iconic role played by the gateway is whether and in what ways this infamous proverb appears in survivor testimonies as a marker of personal experience. How does “Arbeit macht frei” itself turn up as a landmark in these narratives? The research question itself is instructive, because “Arbeit macht frei” was not a phrase originally catalogued by either the VHA or Fortunoff Archive. This fact itself is deserving of exploration and analysis, but it certainly points to the likelihood that, as much as one might think the phrase is a key one employed in the public representation and commemoration of the Holocaust, it was not conceived as a crucial component of the testimonial narratives collected and then indexed by either organization. I should note that, as transcription and indexing progress at both sites, it is likely that using the phrase as a search term will yield more results in the near future than it has until now. Using internal tools, largely searching through sparse interviewer notes on narrative segments, Shoah Foundation catalogers did come up with about twelve testimonies that mention the phrase. Allow me to cite four of them. Godel Silber, for example, interviewed in Toronto in 1995 at the age of 73, reports that he arrived in Birkenau in December 1942 and worked building the crematoria there. He was then assigned to a work detail as a mechanic; the detail was marched to Auschwitz: We come before, we stayed, they don’t let us in right away, and I see a sign [looks up] on the top the gate, Arbeit macht frei, you know on the top the gate, Arbeit macht frei. So I mean ok, I gonna work here three months, six months, then I gonna be released, yes. So they got us inside, aber everybody was scared, because Auschwitz was very clean; if you had a louse, they kill you. In Birkenau was billions and billions. Judy Schwartz, interviewer: Could you translate what was written on the gate of Auschwitz [GS, under JS: Yeah] into English? GS: Yes, Arbeit you know, the work, release you, arbeit macht frei [JS: Thank you. I’m sorry]— the working, Arbeit is working; if you work you gonna be released. It’s still there I think it’s in the book too. On every camp they put it up that sign.12

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In a similar manner, Alexander Frohlinger, interviewed in Boca Raton in 1995 at the age of 71, also speaks of marching through the infamous gate as part of a work detail: And immediately we formed, I don’t know how many of us and they took us, we marched into a place, I don’t know marched, or take us with a b— mostly marched, [looks up] to a famous word in a gate, [looks up] it says Arbeit macht frei, as we marched in, and they told us so many in this barracks, so many in that barracks, and we separated us, as we went in there, we, they… Lisa Timoner, interviewer: What does the sign mean? AF: Arbeit macht frei, uh, Work makes you free LT: So you were going there to work? AF: This was actually a working, uh, working camp, we was about I would say between 18 or 22,000 people, I don’t know exactly— LT: And this was Auschwitz AF: Right, it was three story buildings, brick buildings…13

Other recollections associate the gateway with arrival at the camp; Samuel Eltman, interviewed at the age of 80 by Rhoda Fischler in 1997, speaks of his transfer from a camp in Germany to Auschwitz, a place he had never heard of, in railway cars: When we arrived to Auschwitz, when we let, they let us out from the, the, uh, the wagons, I looked, I saw [looks up] a big sign [draws arc in the air], Arbeit macht free, frei, Arbeit macht frei, it means in English, uh, labor makes you free. I still didn’t know. And when they let us out and we were standing on the side, and music, and they were playing music [….] They told us to put the packages if anybody had them […] on the side, and we had to stand up [….] But I saw already that this is different than a labor camp.14

Finally, Dorothy Berliner’s testimony, recorded in 1995 at the age of 80, includes this exchange with interviewer Miriam Rutiz right at the start of the second videotape in her testimony: MR: Ok, please continue DB: Yes MR: You wanted to mention— DB: Where do I start, I don’t know MR: First of all why don’t you start with, uh, when you came into Auschwitz, what was the date? DB: Oh that gate, oh my god [MR tries to interrupt to correct]—Work [her left hand comes up to her neck protectively] makes you, Arbeit makes you, frei, that work makes you free. MR: And when [DB lowers her hand] did you come into Auschwitz, what was the date?

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DB: When I came in, three days later, when, eh, it w-, it, it w-, it was the month of May, end of May, the 19th of May. MR: In which year? DB: 44 [MR under DB: 1944] 44.15

These testimonies clearly need to be analyzed and sorted out: some, like Berliner’s present chronological challenges—if she arrived in 1944, she would not have seen the infamous gate at Auschwitz I upon arrival at the camp complex, though she may have seen it afterward: her comment, “When I came in, three days later,” might actually refer to her arrival at or transfer to Auschwitz I, where she could have seen the gateway, three days after arriving at Birkenau. Nonetheless, these brief references support the notion that “Arbeit macht frei” is a powerful spatial landmark in survivor experiences, though perhaps not as powerful as it has become in post-Holocaust culture. What all this points to is the potential for specific places, and the category of place in general, to serve as orienting landmarks and as terms for the comparative analysis of testimonies. The second example of space indexed in the course of the testimonial narrative I wish to briefly discuss is the notion of “home.” “Home” is indexed in two primary ways in Holocaust survivor videotestimonies: in references to prewar homes no longer accessible in space but recalled in memory, particularly, in the VHA recordings, in the first twenty percent or so of the witness’s account; and in references to postwar homes indicated more frequently not in the course of testimony itself but rather in the visual setting, referred to already, of the survivor recounting her life in her own home in the present. The former are most often nostalgic reflections on a time and place long gone, though they also, sometimes at the encouragement of the interviewer, reflect on early memories of antisemitism, foreshadowing the stories of wartime persecution to follow. The indexing of postwar “home” is more pronounced, because it is more visually delineated: whether or not survivors speak of their present-day homes, it is obvious from the setting of most of their videotestimonies that they are in their homes while they are recounting and, hopefully, more at home in their narratives as a result. It is clear that the spaces in which they tell their tales are their own spaces, projecting a picture of control. This image of control counterbalances the lack of agency often suggested by their narratives (in which things frequently happen to them), the framework of recording (the interviewers and technicians frequently set the agenda and control the timing), and the tendency for traumatic memories to interrupt and otherwise hijack survivors’ narrative authority over their own stories. This projection of reasserted agency is reinforced by the appearance of family members, in an echo of the book of Job’s unsettling conclusion, at the end of many of the Shoah Foundation interviews, further anchoring them in the time and space of the present. Wieviorka, critiquing its work, likens its interviews’ endings to the final scene of Schindler’s List: “The message is

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optimistic: the family, reconstituted thanks to their descendants, is the l­iving proof of the Nazis’ failure to exterminate a people. This message reveals the true nature of these interviews. The project is not ultimately concerned with constructing an oral history of the Holocaust but rather with creating an archive of survival” (Wieviorka, 115). In this view, the family’s appearance conveys a salvationist, redemptive, and perhaps even triumphal sense of closure to the videotestimony. This spatial and familial anchoring of testimony has been extended further in occasionally staged returns to European spaces, thereby also extending testimony’s narrative arc and sense of closure in the process. This is something that happens socially and ritually in pilgrimage tours like the March of the Living, in which survivors accompany teens to Holocaust memorial landmarks, at times enacting their own public return to sites in their personal and private wartime landscape. But the Shoah Foundation archive has linked this commemorative return in space to testimonial transmission: in The Last Days, a film produced by the Foundation, incorporating and building upon five survivor videotestimonies in the VHA, the domesticated narrations of peaceful, youthful lives before the war are supplemented with images of the same survivors in the cinematic present re-visiting the places of their childhood.16 In the last half hour of the film, the survivors are again taken out of the comforting containment of their own homes and testimonial accounts in order to bear witness in the film’s present to their own survival, as it were. For example, Alice Lok Cahana goes to Bergen-Belsen’s archive to find the record of her sister, who had used her mother’s maiden name for registration and thus had escaped Alice’s detection previously. Alice brings her whole family with her to hear her husband say kaddish at a mass grave where the authorities think she was buried, in order to symbolically bury her sister. Alice brings her mother’s prayer book, and we watch a moving scene of mourning and closure. This is despite Alice’s words that “there are a lot of people like me out there, still looking, because for us, liberation was not the last day” (The Last Days 1998). (Later we learn that Alice is an artist who deals with the subject of the Holocaust in her work.) Here, the image of home and its accompanying sense of agency, enhanced by the presence of family members, is transposed, as it were, to a landmark site in the European Holocaust landscape, bringing the testimonial narrative back toward its spatial origins and literally re-placing memory through filmed testimony. What can we make of this extension of the testimonial-memorial frame into the European landscape of suffering and death? I think it is important to note that scenes like this purport to manage the potential overflow of and traumatic breaks within testimony by enlarging its container, and that this enlargement includes us as viewers as well, symbolically connecting us, not only as mere facilitators of the testimonial process, but also as virtual participants in acts of mourning. While these may appear as artificially contrived acts of narrative closure, they may also offer, as in the example just cited, a final

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return in space as well as a symbolic burial plot for a narrative that otherwise would have concluded, dislocated, in a place—the survivor’s new home—far removed from her wartime experience. But there is more: recent technological innovations have worked to reduce or even elide structural barriers in the time and space of video-recorded testimony: testimonies were recorded “there” and “then” while we view them “here” and “now,” but developments in access to and applications of survivor accounts have impacted this sharp distinction. On the most basic level, digitization, electronic searchability, and online distribution have made many videotestimonies instantaneously accessible in the classroom, library, and even an individual’s own home, at times making it as easy to watch a desired survivor account as it is to watch a Netflix movie. In addition, the Shoah Foundation has created two new applications utilizing videotestimonial material that have even more profound implications with respect to the place of testimony, creating virtual spaces for witness-viewer engagement: “Dimensions in Testimony” and The Last Goodbye. “Dimensions in Testimony” is a holographic museum exhibit of “interactive biographies” based on interviews with selected survivors—as of the end of 2018, fifteen Holocaust survivors and one survivor of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, all of whom had previously recorded testimonies for the VHA—who were re-recorded in a studio setting with multiple cameras answering hours of questions covering a wide range of topics.17 The feeder questions are meant to anticipate real queries visitors to the exhibit would have and actually do pose on site to the eerie image of one of the sixteen survivors; the survivors “answer” them in turn through adaptive natural-language technology that matches actual questions with recorded answers and that “learns” over time, improving “the relevancy rate and speed of the survivor’s responses.”18 Needless to say, the illusion of reallife and real-time interactions that appear to bring the viewers and the survivor closer together is remarkable. But I am left wondering about the impact of the inevitable moment when all of these survivors have died even as their pre-recorded, AI alter egos live on. The Last Goodbye merges videotestimony with the survivor’s return to European Holocaust landmarks in a 17-minute film.19 Combining photogrammetry, 360 degree, and “walk-around” imagery, viewers “accompany” Pinchas Gutter (also the first survivor to have recorded answers for “Dimensions in Testimony”) on his 2016 visit to the former Majdanek concentration and death camp in a room-scale virtual reality experience: we only enter the spaces that Gutter himself enters, however, so we see the gas chamber only from the outside, for example; at times we “stand” or “sit” next to him while he narrates, while at other times—notably, at the crematorium—we only hear his voice but do not see his body. Majdanek is well known as a camp memorial that appears chillingly frozen in time: because Soviet forces advanced on it so quickly, Nazi staff and their collaborators fled with no time to destroy material evidence, as they did, for example, at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

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The result is a physical space that appears nearly operational, as if the site could be running again with the flip of a switch. The film does not feature a reconstruction of the camp, but the filmmakers did temporarily remove existing informational signage to help reduce visual distractions in its memorial environment. The overall result is an immersive experience of being “there” (though not quite “then”) while listening to survivor testimony as if it were coming from a person next to you. Thus, The Last Goodbye, in bringing and applying the techniques of first-person audio-visual representation to a site of Holocaust atrocities and merging them virtually with the viewer’s experience, dramatizes a significant stage in the evolution of the genre of Holocaust survivor videotestimony. Here, archival and virtual space, the space where testimony is given (and taken) and the spaces indexed in the course of a witness’s recounting, all merge. The film highlights the distinctiveness of videotestimony as a genre of Holocaust representation, grounds it in history and memory, and offers a model for new applications of videotestimony that may live on far beyond the deaths of those who gave so generously of their own traumatic experiences. As survivors pass from the stage of the present, leaving their testimonies behind in various archives, we must necessarily reflect on the place and the places of those archives. While many may limit their understanding of testimonies to the temporal frame, seeing them as some sort of time travel, I argue that they transform space as well, transporting us in the process. Giving testimony is a fundamentally transitive act; in order to avoid becoming intransitive, however, in the wake of the witnesses’ imminent disappearance, these connections to space and place anchor and ground these narratives in a variety of landscapes. In this way, they become landmarks of memory. Acknowledgements   The author gratefully acknowledges the support of a grant from Targum Shlishi: A Raquel and Aryeh Rubin Foundation, which supported research for this chapter.

Notes

1. Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer, Between Witness and Testimony: The Holocaust and the Limits of Representation (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001), xi. 2. Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991), 2–3. 3. Henry Greenspan, On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Beyond Testimony, 2nd ed. (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2010), xii–xiii. 4.  See Oren Baruch Stier, Committed to Memory: Cultural Mediations of the Holocaust (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 2003), 67–109. 5. Noah Shenker has also examined issues related to institutional framing in his analysis of the three major archives of videotestimony, attending to the labor of the interviewing process, the interplay of common and deep memory in testimony, aspects of survivor testimony not captured in the official recording, and

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the sense of moral obligation conveyed in the testimonies, as these emerge from an examination of institutional cultures and media practices intimately involved in the production of testimony. See Noah Shenker, Reframing Holocaust Testimony (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2015). 6. Christopher Browning, Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp (New York: Norton, 2010), 3. 7. Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, trans. Jared Stark (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006), xi. 8. Alan Rosen, The Wonder of Their Voices: The 1946 Holocaust Interviews of David Boder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), viii. 9. Roger Friedland and Richard D. Hecht, “The Powers of Place,” in Religion, Violence, Memory, and Place, eds. Oren Baruch Stier and J. Shawn Landres (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006), 21. 10. Jeffrey Shandler, Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors’ Stories and New Media Practices (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017), 130–131. 11. In this regard, see Chapter 2 of Oren Baruch Stier, Holocaust Icons: Symbolizing the Shoah in History and Memory (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 68–99. 12.  Godel Silber, Interview 2226, Tape 2, 9:48-10:50, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, 1995. 13.  Alexander Frohlinger, Interview 5071, Tape 3, 6:38-7:45, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, 1995. 14. Samuel Eltman, Interview 33794, Tape 3, 12:50-14:15, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, 1997. 15.  Dorothy Berliner, Interview 5075, Tape 2, 0-1:05, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, 1995. 16.  The Last Days, DVD, directed by James Moll (Los Angeles: Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, 1998). 17. “Dimensions in Testimony,” USC Shoah Foundation: The Institute for Visual History and Education, accessed 27 December 2018, https://sfi.usc.edu/ collections/holocaust/ndt. 18. “dit_one_sheet_holocaust_20181019_opt.pdf” (“Dimensions in Testimony One-Sheet”), USC Shoah Foundation: The Institute for Visual History and Education, 10/2018, available for download at https://sfi.usc.edu/ collections/holocaust/ndt. 19. The Last Goodbye, VR film, created by Gabo Arora and Ari Palitz (Los Angeles: USC Shoah Foundation, 2017).

Bibliography Berliner, Dorothy. Interview 5075, Tape 2, 0-1:05. Visual History Archive. USC Shoah Foundation, 1995. Bernard-Donals, Michael, and Richard Glejzer. Between Witness and Testimony: The Holocaust and the Limits of Representation. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001. Browning, Christopher. Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp. New York, NY: Norton, 2010. Eltman, Samuel. Interview 33794, Tape 3, 12:50-14:15. Visual History Archive. USC Shoah Foundation, 1997.

686  O. B. STIER Friedland, Roger, and Richard D. Hecht. “The Powers of Place.” In Religion, Violence, Memory, and Place, edited by Oren Baruch Stier and J. Shawn Landres, 17–36. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006. Frohlinger, Alexander. Interview 5071, Tape 3, 6:38-7:45. Visual History Archive. USC Shoah Foundation, 1995. Greenspan, Henry. On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Beyond Testimony, 2nd ed. St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2010. Langer, Lawrence L. Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991. Rosen, Alan. The Wonder of Their Voices: The 1946 Holocaust Interviews of David Boder. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Shandler, Jeffrey. Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors’ Stories and New Media Practices. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017. Shenker, Noah. Reframing Holocaust Testimony. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2015. Silber, Godel. Interview 2226, Tape 2, 9:48-10:50. Visual History Archive. USC Shoah Foundation, 1995. Stier, Oren Baruch. Committed to Memory: Cultural Mediations of the Holocaust. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 2003. ———. Holocaust Icons: Symbolizing the Shoah in History and Memory. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 2015. The Last Days. DVD. Directed by James Moll. Los Angeles: Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, 1998. The Last Goodbye. VR film. Created by Gabo Arora and Ari Palitz. Los Angeles: USC Shoah Foundation, 2017. USC Shoah Foundation: The Institute for Visual History and Education. “Dimensions in Testimony.” https://sfi.usc.edu/collections/holocaust/ndt. Accessed 27 December 2018. USC Shoah Foundation: The Institute for Visual History and Education. “dit_ one_sheet_holocaust_20181019_opt.pdf” (“Dimensions in Testimony OneSheet”). Last modified 10/2018. Available for download at https://sfi.usc.edu/ collections/holocaust/ndt. Wieviorka, Annette. The Era of the Witness. Translated by Jared Stark. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006.

CHAPTER 37

Beckett’s Holocaust Ira Nadel

The Czech historian and novelist H. G. Adler challenges those seeking a ­positive assessment of Beckett and the Jews. Without suffering, Adler believes no one can write authentically about the Holocaust, demanding facts to determine the truth. He displayed this himself in his authoritative account of Theresienstadt where he spent 32 months before being sent on to Auschwitz (and surviving). Beckett viewed the Holocaust only from a distance and could not, and did not, understand the plight of the Jews according to Adler. Adorno opposed this view, arguing in a 1961 essay on Endgame that Beckett understood only too well the plight of the Jews and the significance of antisemitism and the Holocaust. Noting that the catastrophe in the play cannot be named, Adorno writes that it corresponds “more or less to the way people in Germany in 1960 talk about the murder of the Jews in attenuating allusions,” adding that The violence of the unspeakable is mimicked by the timidity to mention it. Beckett keeps it nebulous. One and only speak euphemistically about what is incommensurate with all experience, just as one speaks in Germany of the murder of the Jews.1

For Adorno, Beckett’s minimalist prose and deracinated characters confirmed the dramatist’s perception of the horror of the Holocaust. In contrast to Adler, Adorno took Beckett as the exemplary post-Auschwitz artist for understanding the task of art after Auschwitz, which may be, in the words of the painter Avigdor Arikha’s daughter Alba (Beckett’s goddaughter and

I. Nadel (*)  University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_37

687

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named after his poem “Alba”), “no surplus, all essentials.”2 With life so arbitrary, there is only time for the “essentials.” After the Shoah, there was only a cultural wilderness which Beckett, almost alone, understood. These contending views of Beckett’s Holocaust form the basis of this discussion, beginning with his [Beckett’s] response to the loss of a series of close Jewish friends during the war and how he, in his work, responded. Was it accident that the original name of Estragon was Lévi? Records show that 1528 Jewish deportees from France had the name of Levi or Levy and perished in the camps.3 Was it accident that his early work Eleutheria (Greek for “freedom”) contained numerous references to German threats to the Jews, alluding to deportation and disappearance? Could his late work Catastrophe summarize the suffering of the Jews throughout the Holocaust? Such questions provide the starting point. i

I know my eyes are open, because of the tears that pour from them unceasingly. Beckett, The Unnamable.

The topic of Beckett and the Holocaust is not new. Critics began to identify the link when Adorno began to analyze Endgame. Kenner in Samuel Beckett, A Critical Study (1961), noted it; Raymond Federman, a contemporary and friend of Beckett’s, suggested connections while working on the early fiction in 1963 and 1965; in 1970, Kenner’s A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett also registered connections which Deirdre Bair’s biography of 1978 developed. Rosette Lamont in 1990 reported on Beckett’s response to a set of direct questions about the Holocaust posed to him in 1984, while by 1996 in The World of Samuel Beckett, 1906–1946 Lois Gordon considered the impact of the Jews in his life and work during the war—as did James Knowlson in his biography of Beckett published the same year. In 2004, Gary Adelman’s Naming Beckett’s Unnamable broadened a Judaic reading of the writer noting that when Beckett lived in Roussillon from 1942–45 in the Unoccupied Zone, he lived among Jews from all over Europe.4 Jackie Blackman in 2007 and later showed the biographical connections between Beckett’s Irish and French circle of Jews, while Alysia Garrison in “Trauma and the Unnamable” (2007) pursued critical links with Jewish sources. Subsequent studies elaborated both critical and biographical connections, including Daniel Katz, “What Remains of Beckett: Evasion and History” (2009), David Houston Jones, Samuel Beckett and Testimony (2011) and Joseph Anderton, Beckett’s Creatures, 2016. All address Beckett’s response to the fate of the Jews in World War II Most recently, Emilie Morin’s Beckett’s Political Imagination (2017) reviews the complex situation of Beckett and the aftermath of World War II and trauma, indicating the difficulty between “referentiality and abstraction” when referring to the historical events he witnessed.5 But as she and

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others have suggested, the political and moral legacies of the war and his activities in the Resistance never left him; he never forgot the war. One quasi-comic example of this are the notebooks of Watt, filled with wartime jottings, both clear and coded. They worried at the London War Office to such an extent that they withheld the notebooks for analysis when Beckett returned to Dublin via London in April 1945 (Morin, 132).6 Nevertheless, as Morin convincingly argues, Beckett repeatedly “perceived his own political identity through the lens of the French Resistance” and, we might add, the Jews (Morin, 139). One of the first to specifically confront Beckett about his response to the Holocaust was the French-born Rosette C. Lamont, Professor of French at CUNY and later Sarah Lawrence. Not long after she visited Auschwitz, she visited Beckett on May 20, 1984, sensing that he was “one of the great Holocaust writers of our time,” possibly on a par with Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi.7 In her 1990 essay, based on their conversation, she outlines links between Godot, the Holocaust and Beckett (Lamont, 37). Describing the piles of luggage, damaged limbs, eyeglasses and other human objects which recalled for her aspects of Godot, plus the crippled heroes of his trilogy, she pointedly sought [to know] what he knew about the camps. He answered obliquely, focusing on his sorrow over the death of Alfred Péron in the camps, the amateurish actions of the Resistance fighters, and how receipt of a telegram from Péron’s wife allowed Beckett and his wife Suzanne to escape, hiding several days in Paris while false papers were being prepared (Lamont, 37). First the Occupation, then the roundup of Jews, followed by the Resistance and hiding: Beckett knew directly the suffering and danger faced by the Jews of France. Elements of Godot are rife with Holocaust allusions, from the nightly beatings of Estragon/Gogo, who learns to accept pain as a constant, to the telling question of Vladimir—“where are all these corpses from?” and the whippings of Lucky which evoke the capos of the concentration camps, as well as the dialogue about dead voices and their need to speak.8 Godot becomes a testamentary drama, parallel to the way the witnesses at the Nuremberg or Eichmann trials presented their evidence. Beckett wrote the play from October 9, 1948, to January 29, 1949, having just completed Watt, written while in hiding in the “Unoccupied Zone” of France.9 He was himself waiting, embodying Lamartine’s remark that “Vivre, c’est attendre [to live is to await]” (in Lamont, 43). Vladimir summarizes this but with a tinge of fatalism possibly alluding to the Holocaust: “we are waiting for Godot to come — [ …. ] or for night to fall” (Godot 51A). Beckett would write that “memories are killing,” the impact of the Jewish experience of France and the Holocaust infiltrating his writing to create a shadow that pervades his work.10 Some critics, in fact, see Beckett almost exclusively as a Jewish writer, Gary Adelman, for example, stating that Beckett’s world is that of “the concentration camp” and that the “metaphor

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of the writer as a condemned Jew is powerfully evoked in The Unnamable and implicit everywhere” (Adelman, 16). He also suggests that the unnamed narrator of Becket’s Unnamable merges with the idea of the Jews as survivors of the Holocaust. The narrator’s torments and fate, his lamentations mixed with the imagery of furnaces and ashes, underscore the striking correspondences (Adelman, 79). Marjorie Perloff is slightly more circumspect, noting that the word “war” does not appear in Godot or in the fictions of 1945–46, although “allusions to it are […] everywhere in the texts of the postwar decade.” Beckett’s technique was to discover “ways of not-saying and yet saying.”11 To name is to destroy in the sense of Mallarmé: Using words like “war, Vichy, Resistance, Auschwitz” would be unjust to the complexity of the experiences for Beckett. His responsibility is only for showing (Perloff, 99). But the presence of Judaic allusions in Beckett’s postwar writing draws attention to the inescapable Jewish elements of his work. The impact of Beckett’s Jewish friends harmed or killed by the Holocaust, whether Paul Léon, Joyce’s Jewish secretary, interned and subsequently killed at Auschwitz, or Alfred Péron, a Trinity College classmate, who sought to translate Murphy into French and who introduced Beckett to the Resistance cell “Gloria SMH,” was profound.12 Indeed, the impact of their deaths and the plight of the Jews of France became the paradoxical vocation of all Holocaust authors fighting against silence: “there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.” These lines from “Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit” (1949) identify both the despair and hope of confronting the Holocaust which Beckett expressed in a series of texts.13 According to Beckett’s biographer James Knowlson, the writer had likely seen film footage in 1947 of the liberation of Belsen, Dachau and Auschwitz; the same year, he also read two memoirs describing life in the Mauthausen concentration camp partly reporting on the fate of Alfred Péron.14 The survivor/ author was Georges Loustaunau-Lacau, the title of one work, Chiens maudits [Bad Dogs]. Beckett captured the European cultural wasteland during and after the Shoah in characters like Nell and Nagg in Endgame who struggle to escape the ashcans of the post-Holocaust world, seeking to kiss in opposition to the first word of Endgame, “finished.” Triumphantly, the last is “remain.”15 But as Adorno realized, the play takes place “in a no man’s land, zone of indifference between inner and outer.” Nell and Nagg exist in a state of “complete alienation. Concentration camp, intermediate domain between life and death [….] Living is dying because it is a not-being-able-to die” condition (Adorno, Dossier, 168, 174). But before that was Beckett’s poetry, an early and important form of expressing his despair. But before the texts, the context.

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ii

Five Jews came over the sea with gifts to Tairdelbach [King of Munster] and then were sent back again over the sea. Annals of Innisfallen, ca. 1079

Jewish Beckett is not an oxymoron but an identity. In Ireland, his association with Jews began when his beloved Aunt Cissie married William “Boss” Sinclair, the son of a Jewish antiques dealer.16 Beckett, in fact, grew up Jewish—or at least in an Irish Jewish circle. Aunt Cissie, who attended art school and was a contemporary of Estella Solomons and who, like her, would go to Paris in 1904 to further her art education, went against family wishes to marry Sinclair who had the reputation of a “natural bohemian.”17 The Sinclairs moved to Kassel, Germany in 1922, a choice partly dictated by their friendship with the Jewish painter Cecil Salkeld who was studying there and partly for business reasons. Sinclair thought he might offer German modernist paintings in Dublin; he ended up mostly shipping antiques. Salkeld returned to Dublin in 1925 and shortly after began a radical magazine with Beckett’s future university friend Con Leventhal. The title was To-Morrow. Estelle Solomons, Cissie’s friend, was also involved in these Irish avant-garde movements, as well as Rosamond Jacob. Beckett spent a month in Kassel in 1932, staying with his Jewish relatives who remained in Germany until they returned to Ireland in 1933 because of Hitler’s rise to power. The reason for Beckett’s visit was Peggy Sinclair, his cousin and early love. In the summer of 1928, on one of her trips to Dublin, he was smitten by the green-eyed seventeen-year old. And while the Becketts may have been “dismayed” by Aunt Cissie’s marriage to the Jewish Sinclair, that did not prevent Beckett’s involvement with his cousin with whom he spent a great deal of the summer. He also visited her in October 1928 when she attended art school near Vienna, becoming the original of SmeraldinaRima in Dream of Fair to Middling Women written in Paris immediately after his 1932 visit but not published until 1992 (Knowlson, 89–95, 144). Beckett actually transposed one of her love letters into “The Smeraldina’s Billet Doux” for the novel but published earlier in his short story collection, More Pricks than Kicks (1934). During his Kassel visits, the Sinclairs put Beckett in touch with several Jewish intellectuals, including a number of art historians he visited on subsequent trips to Germany in the late 1930s. By November 1937, Beckett’s Jewish-centered conscience caused him to take a public stand in support of his Jewish relatives summarized by Benjamin Ivry: Following Boss’s death, his brother Harry Sinclair sued a Dublin writer, Oliver St. John Gogarty, for libel after passages in a book [limericks in his memoir] referred to him and Boss as ‘Two Jews in Sackville Street’ and to their grandfather as an ‘old usurer.’ Beckett […] made a special trip to Dublin from Paris

692  I. NADEL […] to testify on behalf of the plaintiffs [….] in a letter to a friend, condemning St. John Gogarty and idle bystanders alike, [Beckett added that] ‘There are limits to scurrility, & to cynical laissez-faire.18

For Beckett, testifying was an act of moral courage triggered by his first exposure to Nazi Germany in 1936. His diaries from that visit, the year after the implementation of the Nuremberg racial laws (1935), constantly refer to his discomfort over the populations’ unthinking support of Hitler. One entry reads “The expressions ‘historical necessity’ & ‘Germanic destiny’ start the vomit moving upwards.”19 Beckett sought to aid, the eminent Polish-Jewish art historian Rosa Schapire whom he visited twice in Hamburg in 1936 and who escaped to England in 1939.20 He knew her Jewishness prevented her from publishing or lecturing. And in the same letter where he mentions Schapire, he offers this aesthetic: “beauty is a blank wall with Paste No Bills. I am tired dashing my skull against it” (Lett. 1: 383). In May 1938, Beckett wrote to a friend and fellow philosemite, Arland Ussher, whose book The Magic People: An Irishman Appraises the Jews would appear in 1951. He told Ussher that he had a London lunch with an Irish doctor, Edward Morrison, whose antisemitism was so virulent that he had to leave (Lett. I: 621). That same year, 1938, Beckett purchased a painting by the Polish-Jewish artist Jankel Adler whose work he praised for its offering a “delectatio morose” or morose delight. Beckett’s identity with, and even as, a Jew grew. After escaping with his wife Suzanne to Vaucluse because his Resistance cell was exposed, he complained to a member of the Irish Legation in Vichy that local officials could not “believe that I can be called Samuel and am not a Jew.”21 In his German Diaries 1936–37, Beckett records his strenuous reaction to the abuse of the Jews in contrast to Leonard and Virginia Woolf who in the spring of 1935 anxiously traveled by car through Germany on their way to Italy. At one point in Bonn, they likely offered the Nazi salute to crowds lining the streets in preparation for a parade and visit by Herman Goering.22 By contrast, Beckett continued to maintain Jewish friendships in Paris, while witnessing the continued mistreatment of Jews, well aware, for example, of the Rafle du Velodrome d’Hiver, the Nazi directed roundup of 13,152 Parisian Jews on July 16–17, 1942. Underscoring this was the rumor that in sympathy with the Jews, Beckett wore a yellow Star of David around Paris. This and other actions document his awareness and empathy with the Jews of not only Paris but Europe.23 Most importantly, Beckett’s Holocaust was not abstract but real, his awareness of Jewish life and oppression finding early expression in his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1932).24 The novel is partially set in Kassel, Germany where Peggy Sinclair had lived with her parents. The novel tells of Belacqua, a writer and teacher, smitten with Smeraldina (Peggy Sinclair) whom he visits at her school in 1928, as Beckett had done.

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Eleutheria (1947), Beckett’s first completed dramatic work and written in French prior to Godot, also contains allusions to the Jewish situation during the war where Beckett participated in the Resistance. The war complicated Beckett’s Parisian existence and he had to leave twice, the first time two days before the Germans marched into the capital on June 12, 1940. His papers were not in order because of bureaucratic delays and he had to escape; with the assistance of friends, he and Suzanne reached Arcachon. By mid-September, they returned just before the program of anti-Jewish legislation was enacted. By May 1941, the first of three mass roundups of Jews occurred. Paul Léon was arrested in the second roundup in August. On 1 September, Beckett joined Jeannine Picabia’s Resistance cell, an information collecting network, part of British Special Operations. Beckett translated and typed reports dealing with German military movements. In August 1942, however, a French Catholic priest and double agent (Robert Alesch) betrayed the cell; more than fifty were arrested and sent to the camps.25 Forewarned by Péron’s wife, Beckett and Suzanne escaped, hidden for a few days in Paris by Suzanne’s Communist friends and then by Nathalie Sarraute. With forged documents, they were able to be smuggled into the free zone where they remained in the village of Roussillon d’Apt in the Vaucluse until the war ended. Marjorie Perloff provides a vivid summary of their difficult situation in her article “In Love with Hiding.” But while working as a farm laborer, Beckett returned to writing Watt started in Paris. In May 1944, he rejoined the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur the month Paris was liberated (Birkett, 36). To his biographer James Knowlson, Beckett criticized the roundups of the Jews in Paris and, according to the Irish scholar Jackie Blackman, he joined the Resistance because of “the ill treatment of the Jews in Paris.”26 W. J. McCormack believes that Beckett’s involvement with “the public events of his lifetime has been repeatedly prompted by his loyalty to Jewish friends.”27 Beckett, an outsider in Paris, easily identified with the Jew as an outsider, something he was previously aware of in Dublin. Indeed, when the war began, he was in Ireland and it was almost impossible for him to return to Paris, telling Israel Shenker that he absolutely “preferred France in war to Ireland at peace” (Beckett in Perloff, 80). After the war, he was again an outsider, having to go to Ireland to gain re-entry to France, this time—August 1945—succeeding only when he joined the Irish Red Cross as quartermaster/interpreter sent to the devastated town of St.-Lô to help in rebuilding the hospital. Only after time spent there was he legally able to return to Paris in October 1945, joining Suzanne who had returned earlier to their flat on the rue des Favorites because of her French citizenship. By February 1946, Beckett began to write intensely in French composing the unsettling, destabilizing texts that appeared as Texts for Nothing (1955).

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“In this most Christian of worlds/ All poets are Jews” – Marina Tsvetaeva “The Poem of the End”.

Anticipating many of Beckett’s postwar writings was his poems of 1938–39 which display a Jewish poetics carried on after the war. These early and late poems exhibit a secular Jewish consciousness, a repeated sense of exile and threat. Several anticipate the deracinated condition of post-Holocaust survivors, the syntax defused and deconstructed. Exile, thought once to be the foundation of Jewishness, attached Beckett (and indeed Joyce) to the Jews and showed the parallels between their threated existence in France and his. The otherness of the Jews and of Beckett united the two. “Echo’s Bones— The Vulture” opens with “dragging his hunger through the sky/of my skull shell of sky and earth,” foreshadowing the deracinated condition of survivors witnessed by Beckett.28 Spinoza is one of the connections between Beckett and a Jewish poetics. Read by Beckett in 1936, Spinoza’s Ethics was particularly challenging for him according to Knowlson (Knowlson, 206). He, in fact, read a French translation with facing Latin, the text offering in his words “a solution and a salvation impossible in an English translation” (Knowlson, 206). The epigraph of Chapter 6 of Murphy (1938) is, in fact, a quotation from the fifth part of Spinoza’s Ethics, substituting Murphy for God: It reads “Amor intellectualis quo Murphy se ipsum amat” (“The intellectual love with which Murphy loves himself”).29 Murphy, despite the closed system of his mind, feels split in two and cannot understand how the two can communicate. Metaphorically, this might represent the division between the Irish Beckett and France creating the outsider feeling, or that between the Jews of France and their constant conflict between belonging and rejection, partly originating in the Dreyfus affair. Murphy’s tri-parte division of his mind into the light, half-light and dark zone may actually represent the dilemma of French Jews with Judaism the light, France the half-light and antisemitism the dark zone.30 The generalized problem faced by the Jews of France and Beckett was “how to affirm one’s Jewishness [or foreignness] in a world dominated by alienation.” What Beckett and others achieved is not the poetry of exile but an “affirmative experimentation of radical poetics.”31 In short, Beckett’s poems anticipate the “Jewishness” found in his plays, while textually expressing his biographical connections to Jews, notably his attachment to Peggy Sinclair and public defense of her father. A number of the poems and prose works from the pre- and postwar period highlight Beckett’s Jewish consciousness. They begin with a preposition or adverb, the poem constructed only via a few phrases, two or three words to a line with a deregulated and decentered syntax. “Ainsi a-t-on beau” (Poèmes 1937–39) is a sonnet comprised of two sentences, eleven and

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three lines where time devours the subject. “Arènes de Lutèce,” also from Poèmes 1937–39, records the splitting of the self as a couple sit in a ruined Roman arena in the heart of Paris, as the narrator perceives, remembers and creates a past and a future. The shattered lives of the subjects in “Arènes de Lutèce” proleptically measure the state and fate of France and its French Jews during and after the war. Self-displacement balanced by self-recognition is the disturbing result in a setting that anticipates the bicycle arena in the 15th arrondissement where 13, 152 French Jews, including 4115 children, were rounded up by the French police between July 16–17, 1942 on the orders of the Nazis and taken to the Velodrom d’Hiver (also known as La Grande Rafle du Vel’ d’Hix). They remained there for five days with little or no water, facilities or food before deportation to internment camps and then transport to Auschwitz. Postwar orders insisted on the destruction of all records of the roundup; only a single photo of the incident remains, that of a series of empty buses lined up outside the Velodrom. Beckett was in Paris at the time and active in the Resistance cell “Gloria SMH” but had to flee a month after the roundup because of the betrayal of the cell. The division between the acceptance and betrayal of French Jews, ­experienced even by Holocaust survivors—joy at being alive, guilt at the loss of others—finds expression in Beckett’s own divided languages and texts. A number of the pre- and postwar poems appear in French and English, often within the same text. “Dieppe” from 1937, for example, is written in both French and English each version four lines long: Dieppe encore le dernier reflux le galet mort le demi-tour puis les pars vers les vièilles lumières Dieppe again the last ebb the dead shingle the turning then the steps towards the lights of old

(CP 50, 51)

Nature does not provide the future but returns to the past. The dead present is dark; only the past is bright. Three poems published in transition in the summer of 1948 but written earlier continued the practice of separate texts, having French and English versions of the same work on facing pages. What these works suggest is the divided nature of both the language and thought and the persistent sense of displacement, much like the situation of the Jews and Beckett in France (his identity card and passport indicated, of course, his Irish citizenship)

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as the war continued. Another important poem of the period is the brief “Saint-Lô,” the destroyed town in Normandy where Beckett worked with the Irish Red Cross to rebuild the hospital, an experience leading to his report written for Radio Éireann, “The Capital of the Ruins,” intended to highlight French and Irish efforts at renewal, although it became an important statement of Beckett’s vision of survival amid devastation. He emphasizes the clear and present danger in the area—children play with detonators, while de-mining continues—but over-riding this is the shared sense of an inextinguishable human condition of recovery which triumphs over bombs—but also the emotional impact of such experiences.32 “Humanity in ruins”—a phrase from his radio broadcast—inspired Beckett to revisit his artistic themes during the so-called siege of the room in 1946–48 when he wrote “La Fin,” Mercier et Camier, “L’Expulse,” Premier amour and “Le Calmant.” He began Eleutheria in 1947, then Molloy. In late 1947, he began Malone meurt and in 1948, En attendant Godot. What many of them shared was concern with devastation, deprivation, displacement and return. Beckett was forty when he wrote “The Capital of the Ruins” in 1945.33 Acknowledging the destruction, Beckett also saw hope. The first word in his poem “Saint –Lô” refers to the river that flows through the devastated town: Vire will wind in other shadows unborn through the bright ways tremble and the old mind ghost-forsaken sink into its havoc.

(CP 32)

The absence of punctuation marks the absence of civility and order. The poem first appeared as five lines in the Irish Times of June 24, 1946. The original format had “ghost-abandoned,” later modified to “ghost-forsaken” and moved up to line three. It was originally a separate line four. It was Beckett’s first creative postwar work. The indeterminacy of Beckett’s prose texts at this period emphasizes the dislocation of the frequently unidentified narrators left with the nightmare of history in the postwar period. Written in French, they mark his attempt to reinsert himself into French life, even if the stories are about alienation and loss with titles such as “The Expelled,” “The Calmative” and “The End.” Marjorie Perloff understands them as Beckett’s “most searing examination of wartime conditions in Vichy France,” especially the life of hiding, terror and suspicion where the difference between “dens and ruins” evaporates.34 She also notes that each story begins with an expulsion and that collectively they project defeat and disillusionment, separation and loss. “The Calmative” opens with “I don’t know when I died” followed by a passage evocative of the camps:

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For I’m too frightened this evening to listen to myself rot, waiting for the great red lapses of the heart, the tearings at the caecal walls, and for the slow killings to finish in my skull, the assaults on unshakable pillars, the fornications with corpses. (“Calmative,” 61)

Even the vocabulary evokes the Holocaust, at one point the narrator referring to “this bed of terror” (“Calmative,” 62). As he wrote earlier in “A Wet Night,” “when with indifference I remember my past sorrow […] my memory has sorrow.”35 The decentered method of telling may be the only way Beckett could convey his personal dislocation and that of the citizens and Jews of Paris. Beckett’s “The End” (1946) might be understood as an allegory of Jewish consciousness. Set in a strange Dublin, the narrator finds himself exiled after his return from a sort of asylum. Childhood memories plague him until he begins to wander, being rejected in his search for shelter. He becomes a figurative Wandering Jew with displacement the repeated theme. At the end, he locates a boat and seals himself in it and drifts into Dublin harbor where he chooses to scuttle the boat and drown, as the Jews found themselves decimated during the Holocaust, having been refused refuge by European and other countries such as the USA and Canada. Preceding “The End” was “The Expelled,” similarly allegorical: It deals with rejection and abandonment with injustice the theme, anticipating Aharon Appelfeld’s For Every Sin (1989), the story of a man who returns home after his liberation from a concentration camp to try and understand what happened; he discovers only loss. For Appelfeld, the memory of the Holocaust was his abiding project. For Beckett and Appelfeld characters ironically try to become fugitives from their own past, whether Murphy or Molloy or Theo, the hero of For Every Sin. This is a fundamental Jewish condition in the post-Holocaust world, although Appelfeld, himself, went to Israel to escape his past but found he had to write about it. The themes of failing memory and an erased identity are similarly pervasive in both writers. Stylistically, Appelfeld shared with Beckett the belief that “the sentence and the paragraph should always remain autonomous.” Plot is a constant distraction. And like Beckett, Appelfeld bound himself to a new language, Hebrew, adding that “I’m writing fiction because I understood immediately that my memory is weak and I must fill it with imagination.”36 For Beckett, his memory was clear but only through imagination could he deal with what he witnessed and experienced. iii

“Because of the alarming nature of darkness, screaming always occurs when the doors [of the vans] are closed.” “Reich Business,” Berlin, June 5, 1942.37

698  I. NADEL

In his address on Endgame, Adorno underscored the way the play c­onfronts a crisis of meaning and representation precipitated by the Holocaust and the collapse of human perfectibility. He also emphasized the partial, rather than complete, despair in the work. Ironically, Frankfurt, where Adorno was then teaching, would soon take moral center stage in that the so-called Auschwitz trials would take place there from December 1963 to August 1965, shortly after the Eichmann trial of 1961 and his hanging in 1962. The trials, with the repeated testimony of life in the camps, may have contributed to Adorno’s 1966 revision of his statement about the impossibility of writing poetry after Auschwitz (“to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” [1949]). During the trials, Adorno published The Jargon of Authenticity (1964), followed by Negative Dialectics in 1966. Endgame is a moment in history where silent images and meaningless words become “the currency of catastrophe.”38 Beckett’s hesitancy in directly representing the Holocaust, partly because he sensed the exhaustion of speech after the atrocities, turns the play into an oblique, elliptical but ultimately penetrating representation of the un-representable. Withholding specificity in the persecution of Clov, in particular, makes the play all the more chilling because of the anonymity of the supposed crimes. Declarations like “suffer better” resonate with Holocaust memories, while Hamm’s remark, “put me in my coffin,” is a macabre expression of the dark will that overtook so many in the camps (Endgame, 80, 77). In 1966, when Adorno revisited his declaration that to write poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric, he wrote that perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living.39

He further linked Endgame with the Holocaust writing that The most far out dictum from Beckett’s Endgame, that there really is not so much to be feared any more, reacts to a practice whose first sample was given in the concentration camps. (Meditations, 362)

“The indifference of each individual life that is the direction of history” is what appalled Adorno and what he witnessed in the Holocaust and Endgame (Meditations, 362). Beckett, Adorno then writes, has given us the only fitting reaction to the situation of the concentration camps – a situation he never calls by name, as if it were subject to an image ban. What is, he says, is like a concentration camp [….] the image world of nothingness as something emerges to stabilize his poetry – and his plays. (Meditations, 380–381)

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699

But importantly, the negation of a radically evil world “is the chance of another world that is not yet” (Meditations, 381). This applies to Adorno, as well as Beckett, bringing both back from the abyss of nihilism. There are, as Beckett titled an interior monologue from 1986–89, “Stirrings Still,” a kind of qualified hope that might hold a measure of redemption. But in Beckett’s “The Lost Ones,” completed in 1970 and published in 1972, there is, unlike Endgame, no sense of a redemptive event.40 It embodies his sense of impoverishment. The post-Holocaust world offers no future. “The Lost Ones” is a work of lamentation or mourning for those who were vanquished or died, implicitly in the Holocaust, although the event is never singularly named. The work paradoxically suppresses Holocaust references in order to preserve them via not-naming. The site of the story is a cylinder 50 meters round and 16 meters high where bodies, in a Dantean landscape, wander and struggle in a dim “yellowness” to reach half-broken ladders to escape. It is largely silent except for the sound of ladders moving about and “the thud of bodies striking against one another or one against itself as when in sudden fury it beats its breast.”41 A storyteller bears witness to a horror he tries to imagine, although in this story nothingness, the negative of all being, reigns, the unsaid intensifying the overall unease. But Beckett doesn’t judge: He tells. He shows us the “soul-landscape” of a “dark white” world.42 Beckett is a survivor and knows that the Holocaust cannot be forgotten but neither can it be fully told. Or as Adorno wrote in his “Notes on Beckett,” “it is as if consciousness wished to endure the end of its own physical presence, while looking it in the face [….] Consciousness begins to look its own demise in the eye, as if it wanted to survive the demise” (Adorno, “Dossier Notes,” 163). There is an obligation to express but little left to express: “all has not been told and never shall be [….] the effect of this climate on the soul is not to be underestimated” (Beckett, Lost, 219). The story “suppresses the death camps, gas chambers and crematoria precisely to preserve its citation in other forms” according to one critic.43 In the final few pages, the narrator explicitly references Primo Levi’s If This is a Man which recounts his time in Auschwitz. And the phrase “if a man” appears three times on the final page as Beckett’s narrator recognizes a survivor.44 Beckett here cites Levi as a survivor who found in language a means to tell his story. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno wrote that “the created world is radically evil, and its negation is the chance of another world that is not yet. As long as the world is as it is, all images of reconciliation, peace and quiet resemble the image of death.” This Beckett understands; hence, his obliqueness in writing of the Holocaust. It is both there and not there but it never disappears.45 He, furthermore, never renounces observation, writing in Molloy that “I was in the dark, most of the time, and all the more completely as a lifetime of observations had left me doubting the possibility of systematic decorum [….].”46 If one shifts decorum to discourse, one has Beckett’s own annotation on his treatment of the Holocaust: unsystematic but persistent, intermediate but powerful.

700  I. NADEL

Beckett has, himself, been optioned, as well as absorbed, by Holocaust writers, one of the clearest and most important being Art Spiegelman. In Maus II, when the character Art visits his psychiatrist Pavel, anxious that he will be unable to tell his father’s story, Pavel says to him that no one can make sense of the genocide and that “maybe it’s better not to have any more stories.” Art replies: “Uh-huh. Samuel Beckett once said: ‘every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.’” A frame then follows without dialogue or narrative. Art and his therapist face each other silently, the image embodying Beckett’s maxim. Silence passes between two until in the final frame Art says “On the other hand he SAID it.” Pavel then answers “He was right. Maybe you can include it in your book.”47 Language as testimony takes precedence over silence. More recently Yann Martel’s Beatrice & Virgil (2010), his allegorical novel of the Holocaust, draws on Beckett and Beckettian situations. Early in the novel the narrator Henry tries to explain what his book is about, telling a historian it is about representations of the Holocaust. The event is gone; we are left with stories about it. My book is about a new choice of stories [….] We not only have to bear witness, that is tell what happened, [but] address the needs of ghosts.48

Unsettled by the rejection of his book by his publisher, he realizes, as he wanders through Hyde Park, that his Holocaust novel and essay were about aphasia and his project about “losing his voice” (Martel, beatrice, 20). Henry now realizes that writing had abandoned him, a Beckettian condition. But while others accuse Henry of seeing the Holocaust in everything, he replies that that is wrong. “It was,” he says, that “he saw everything in the Holocaust […]” (Martel, beatrice, 116). Displacement comes to epitomize the Jewishness with which Beckett identified, while a single word of protest best expresses Beckett’s persistent and genuine reaction to the Holocaust which he tries to de-historicize but cannot. In a letter to the French art critic and historian Georges Duthuit in August 1948, Beckett wrote that “one must shout, murmur, exult, madly, until one can find the no doubt calm language of the no, unqualified, or as little qualified as possible” (Lett. II: 98). Beckett’s protest against the Holocaust is not rejection or silence, but a refusal to tolerate its denial. In his response to the Shoah, Beckett seeks “a better kind of seriousness” (Lett. II: 98) demonstrated by those who attempt to climb the ladders in the cylinder of “The Lost Ones.” As Beckett acknowledges, “it takes courage to climb,” adding “don’t lose heart: plug yourself into despair and sing it for us” (Lost 203; Lett. II: lxxv). This is a Jewish heroism that Beckett names.

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Notes









1. Theodor Adorno, “Dossier: Adorno’s Notes on Beckett,” 165, https://www. euppublishing.com/doi/pdfplus/10.3366/jobs.2010.0002. Web. 1 May 2018. 2. Theodor Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” New German Critique 26 (1982): 119–150. The essay originally appeared in 1961 in Noten zur Literatur II (Frankfurt, 1961). Alba Arikha in “Samuel Beckett and Avigdor Arikha: The Long Friendship of an Irish writer and a Jewish Painter,” 5 March 2014, https://eamonncmckee.com/2014/03/05/samuel-beckett-and-avigdor-arikha-the-long-friendship-of-an-irish-writer-and-a-jewish-painter/. Web. 21 May 2018. 3. Before the catastrophe, Lévi was, in fact, the most common Jewish name in France (Blackman, “Beckett Judaizing,” 331). 4. Gary Adelman, Naming Beckett’s Unnamable (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2004), 79. 5. Emilie Morin, Beckett’s Political Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 131. 6.  Laura Salisbury intriguingly explores these codings in “Gloria SMH and Beckett’s Linguistic Encryptions,” in Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts, ed. S. E. Gontarski (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 153–169. 7. Rosette C. Lamont, “Samuel Beckett’s Wandering Jew,” in Reflections of the Holocaust in Art and Literature, ed. Randolph L. Braham (Boulder: Social Science Monographs, 1990), 36. 8. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove Press, 1982), 41B, 40B. 9. For Beckett’s account of this time in his own words, see Lamont, “Samuel Beckett’s Wandering Jew,” 43. 10. Beckett, “Expelled,” in The Complete Short Prose, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove Press 1995), 46. 11. Marjorie Perloff, “In Love with Hiding: Samuel Beckett’s War,” Iowa Review 35, no. 1 (2005): 77, 100. 12. A French chemist, Jacques Legrand, and the daughter of the cubist painter Francis Picabia Jeannine (code name “Gloria”) set up the cell. For additional and new information on “Gloria SMH” see James Knowlson, “Samuel Beckett’s Biographer reveals secrets of the writer’s time as a French Resistance Spy,” The Independent, July 23, 2014, https://www.independent.co.uk/ arts-entertainment/books/features/samuel-becketts-biographer-revealssecrets-of-the-writers-time-as-a-french-resistance-spy-9638893.html. Web. 17 May 2018. 13. Samuel Beckett, “Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit,” in Disjecta, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1984), 139. 14. James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 344. 15. Beckett, Endgame and Act Without Words (New York: Grove Press, 1958): 1, 84. 16.  For a description of their relationship and Beckett’s visits to the Sinclairs in Kassel, see Beckett Remembering, Remembering Beckett, eds. James and Elizabeth Knowlson (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 35–37.

702  I. NADEL









17. Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 74. Estella Solomons would marry James Starkey who would found and edit the Dublin Review and who would publish Beckett’s poem “Alba” in September 1931. 18.  Benjamin Ivry, “Samuel Beckett’s Letters Reveal Roots of Resistance,” Forward, October 27, 2011, http://forward.com/culture/144905/samuel-becketts-letters-reveal-roots-of-resistance/. Web. 3 May 2018. 19. Beckett, Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries, 1936–1937, ed. Mark Nixon (New York: Continuum, 2011), 87; German Diaries, 15 January 1937. 20. Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929–1940, Volume I, eds. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 383–385. 21. Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1941–1956, vol. II, ed. George Craig, et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), xvii. 22. Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Chatto and Windus, 1996), 678–679. 23. Steven Connor, “Scribbledehobbles: Writing Jewish—Irish feet,” http://www. stevenconnor.com/scribble/. Web 7 May 2017. 24.  Jackie Blackman, “Beckett Judaizing Beckett: ‘A Jew from Greenland,’ in Paris,” Samuel Beckett Today 18 (2007): 328. 25. Jennifer Birkett, Undoing Time, The Life and Work of Samuel Beckett (Kildare, IR: Irish Academic Press, 2016), 35. 26. Jackie Blackman, “Samuel Beckett: Not Quite: ‘Jew from Greenland’: Jewish Identity and Its Influence on His Early Post-War ‘Resistant Aesthetic,” Thesis, Trinity College, Dublin (2010): 2. The author is grateful to Dr. Blackman for sharing her remarkable research which draws on personal meetings with a number of the key figures, as well as extensive archival sleuthing. 27.  W. J. McCormack, “Seeing Darkly: Notes on T. W. Adorno and Samuel Beckett,” Hermathena 141 (1986): 31. In his notes on Beckett, Adorno wrote that “hearing oneself talking is like watching a Beckett play …. One is alienated from one’s own language by B[eckett].” Note 8, Adorno, “Dossier: Notes on Beckett,” tr. Dirk Van Hulle and Shane Weller, Journal of Beckett Studies (2010): 162. 28. Samuel Beckett, Collected Poems 1930–1978 (London: John Calder, 1984), 9. 29. Samuel Beckett, Murphy (New York: Grove Press, 1957), 107. 30.  Deleuze read Beckett’s work as “relentless Spinozism” in his essay “The Exhausted” (1992), rpt. Parallax 2 (1996): 113–135. 31.  Joshua Shuster, “Looking at Louis Zukofky’s Poetics,” in Radical Poets and Secular Jewish Culture, eds. Stephen Paul Miller and Daniel Morris (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2010), 131. 32. Samuel Beckett, “Capital of the Ruins [Saint-Lô],” in The Beckett Country, Samuel Beckett’s Ireland, ed. Eoin O’Brien (Dublin: Black Cat Press, 1986), 335–337. 33. For a discussion of the radio speech (dated 10 June 1946) and his Saint-Lô experience, see Lois Gordon, The World of Samuel Beckett 1906–1946 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 186–203. 34. Perloff, 88; Beckett, “The Calmative,” in The Complete Short Prose, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove Press, 1995), 62.

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703

35. Samuel Beckett, “A Wet Night,” in More Pricks Than Kicks (New York: Grove Press, 1972), 81. 36.  Alain Elkann, “Aharon Appelfeld” Interview, 28 December 2015, http:// www.alainelkanninterviews.com/appelfeld-aharon/. Web. 13 May 2018. Philip Gourevitch, “Aharon Appelfeld and the Truth of Fiction in Remembering the Holocaust,” New Yorker, 5 January 2018, https://www. newyorker.com/culture/postscript/aharon-appelfeld-and-the-truth-of-fictionin-remembering-the-holocaust. Web. 12 May 2018. 37. “Reich Business, Berlin, June 5, 1942” in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Routledge, 1991), 240. 38.  Jackie Blackman, “Beckett’s Theatre After Auschwitz,” in Samuel Beckett: History, Memory, Archive, eds. S. Kennedy and Katherine Weiss (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 71–88. 39. Theodor Adorno, “Meditations on Metaphysics,” in Negative Dialectics. 1966, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 362–363. 40. The French title is Le dépeupleur or “The Depopulator,” which may imply ­genocide because Pleureur refers to a mourner. 41.  Samuel Beckett, “The Lost Ones,” in The Complete Short Prose, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove Press, 1995), 203. 42. Samuel Beckett, Watt (London: John Calder, 1998), 249. 43. David Kleinberg-Levin, “Nihilism in Samuel Beckett’s The Lost Ones: A Tale for Holocaust Remembrance,” Philosophy and Literature 39 (1A) (2015): A224. 44. A passage on surviving reads “So on infinitely until towards the unthinkable end if this notion is maintained a lost body of all by feeble fits and starts is searching still. There is nothing at first sight to distinguish him from the others dead still where they stand or sit in abandonment beyond recall” (Lost Ones, 222). 45. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics. 1966, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 381. 46. Samul Beckett, “Molloy,” in Three Novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 26. 47. Art Spiegelman, Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale (New York: Pantheon, 1991), 45. 48. Yann Martel, Beatrice & Virgil (Toronto: Knopf, 2010), 15.

Bibliography Adelman, Gary. Naming Beckett’s Unnamable. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2004. Adorno, Theodor. “Dossier: Notes on Beckett,” translated by Dirk Van Hulle and Shane Weller. Journal of Beckett Studies 19.2 (2010): 157–178. ———. “Meditations on Metaphysics.” In Negative Dialectics. 1966. Translated by E. B. Ashton, 361–408. New York: Continuum, 1973. ———. Negative Dialectics. 1966. Translated by E. B. Ashton. New York: Continuum, 1973. Beckett, Samuel. “The Calmative.” In The Complete Short Prose, edited by S. E. Gontarski, 61–77. New York: Grove Press 1995.

704  I. NADEL ———. “Capital of the Ruins [Saint-Lô].” In The Beckett Country, Samuel Beckett’s Ireland, edited by Eoin O’Brien, 333–337. Dublin: Black Cat Press, 1986. ———. Collected Poems 1930–1978. London: John Calder, 1984. ———. Endgame and Act Without Words. New York: Grove Press, 1958. ———. “Expelled.” In The Complete Short Prose, edited by S. E. Gontarski, 46–60. New York Grove Press 1995. ———. The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929–1940, Volume I, edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. ———. The Letters of Samuel Beckett Vol. II: 1941–1956. Edited by George Craig, et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. ———.“The Lost Ones.” In The Complete Short Prose, edited by S. E. Gontarski, 202–223. New York: Grove Press, 1995. ———. “Malone Dies.” In Three Novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, the Unnamable, 179–288. New York: Grove Press, 1965. ———. “Molloy.” In Three Novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, the Unnamable, 7–176. New York: Grove Press, 1965. ———. “Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit.” In Disjecta, edited by Ruby Cohn, 138–145. New York: Grove Press, 1984. ———. “The Unnamable.” In Three Novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, the Unnamable, 291–414. New York: Grove Press, 1958. ———. Waiting for Godot. New York: Grove Press, 1982. ———. Watt. London: John Calder, 1998. ———. “A Wet Night.” In More Pricks Than Kicks, 47–84. New York: Grove Press, 1972. Birkett, Jennifer. Undoing Time, the Life and Work of Samuel Beckett. Kildare, IR: Irish Academic Press, 2016. Blackman, Jackie. “Beckett Judaizing Beckett: ‘A Jew from Greenland,’ in Paris.” Samuel Beckett Today 18 (2007): 325–340. ———. “Beckett’s Theatre After Auschwitz.” In Samuel Beckett: History, Memory, Archive, edited by S. Kennedy and Katherine Weiss, 71–88. New York: Palgrave, 2009. ———. “Samuel Beckett: Not Quite ‘Jew from Greenland’: Jewish Identity and Its Influence on His Early Post-War ‘Resistant Aesthetic’.” Thesis, Trinity College, Dublin (2010). Cronin, Anthony. Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist. New York: HarperCollins, 1997. Elkann, Alain, “Aharon Appelfeld” Interview, 28 December 2015. http://www. alainelkanninterviews.com/appelfeld-aharon/. Web. 13 May 2018. Gourevitch, Philip. “Aharon Appelfeld and the Truth of Fiction in Remembering the Holocaust.” New Yorker, January 5, 2018. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/ postscript/aharon-appelfeld-and-the-truth-of-fiction-in-remembering-the-holocaust. Web. 12 May 2018. Ivry, Benjamin. “Samuel Beckett’s Letters Reveal Roots of Resistance.” Forward, 27 October 2011. http://forward.com/culture/144905/samuel-becketts-letters-reveal-roots-of-resistance/. Web. 3 May 2018. Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. 1939. New York: Viking, 1982.

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Kleinberg-Levin, David. “Nihilism in Samuel Beckett’s the Lost Ones: A Tale for Holocaust Remembrance.” Philosophy and Literature 39 (1A) (2015): A212–233. Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006. Lamont, Rosette C. “Samuel Beckett’s Wandering Jew.” In Reflections of the Holocaust in Art and Literature, edited by Randolph L. Braham, 35–53. Boulder: Social Science Monographs, 1990. Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. London: Chatto and Windus, 1996. Martel, Yann. Beatrice & Virgil. Toronto: Knopf, 2010. McCormack, W. J. “Seeing Darkly: Notes on T.W. Adorno and Samuel Beckett.” Hermathena 141 (1986): 22–44. Morin, Emilie. Beckett’s Political Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Perloff, Marjorie. “In Love with Hiding: Samuel Beckett’s War.” Iowa Review 35, no. 1 (2005): 76–103. Rabinbach, Anson. In the Shadow of Catastrophe. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Schuster, Joshua. “Looking at Louis Zukofky’s Poetics.” In Radical Poets and Secular Jewish Culture, edited by Stephen Paul Miller and Daniel Morris, 127–150. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2010. Spiegelman, Art. Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale. New York: Pantheon, 1991.

CHAPTER 38

The Auschwitz Women’s Camp: An Overview and Reconsideration Sarah Cushman

The name Auschwitz evokes industrialized mass murder and symbolizes the Nazi genocide of European Jews during World War II. Recently, scholars have mined the archives, witnesses, and landscapes of Eastern Europe to show that at least as many Jews were murdered at close range by mobile killing squads as were murdered in Nazi annihilation camps. Still, Auschwitz remains iconographic. As World War II progressed, Auschwitz-Birkenau’s centrality to genocide intensified and it became the murder site of over 15 percent of Holocaust victims. While many have heard of Auschwitz and its genocidal sub-camp Birkenau, few know about the women’s section, a key component of the Auschwitz complex. The women’s camp was atypical: significant numbers of women held positions of absolute power over other women; and it was a predominantly female space embedded in an imminently genocidal locale. It was a dynamic setting in which women undertook to shape their lives in what few ways they could during the camp’s existence, from March 1942 to January 1945. While scholars have explored interpersonal dynamics, coping skills, and survival strategies among women prisoners, this article offers an overview of the whole: a place, its denizens—personnel and prisoners—and its social structures.1 It offers a first articulation of a timeline for the women’s section and an approach that integrates analyses of women prisoners, prisoner functionaries, and guards. It adds to the work of others that challenge the notion of Auschwitz as a fixed site.2 It also challenges previous scholarship

S. Cushman (*)  Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_38

707

708  S. CUSHMAN

that categorizes the responses of women and men prisoners as highly differentiated. It also counters two notions about prisoner functionaries: that they were primarily gentile and that they were complicit in genocide.3 The history of the Auschwitz women’s camp intertwines with that of the camp complex, but it is its own thread—it has its own timeline, structure, personnel and personalities, and its own intricacy. The women’s camp was a place—a community and society of sorts—in which interactions between and among various groups of women were central. This essay begins with an outline of important periods of the women’s camp, followed by a discussion of the several groups of women who populated it, including how each group approached its existence in Auschwitz-Birkenau and interacted with the other groups. The essay ends with a brief discussion of what an analysis of Auschwitz-Birkenau women’s camp adds to Holocaust history. The history of the women’s camp falls into five stages based primarily on where most women prisoners lived and worked.4 Others dwelled in different parts of the Auschwitz complex, including the staff building (Stabsgebaüde) near the main camp, and several agricultural sub-camps— Budy, Harmense, Plawy, and Rajsko—within the Auschwitz Zone. Original plans for the women’s section placed it in the sub-camp of Birkenau, which was to house thousands of laborers to construct the area around Auschwitz, and which eventually comprised several sections divided by electrified barbed wire, lodging different groups of prisoners. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and supervisor of racial and population policies in occupied Europe, saw Auschwitz as a prototypical “German” town and agricultural estate—a project requiring massive labor (Dwork and van Pelt, 188–190). When construction of Birkenau ran behind schedule, the SS built a wall separating blocks one to ten from the rest of the Auschwitz main camp to contain the women’s section. Initially, the only women prisoners sent to Auschwitz were laborers. Transports comprised of Jewish children, elderly, and others, began to arrive soon thereafter. Those the Nazis deemed unsuited for labor were murdered in improvised gas chambers, located in the former morgue of the main camp (Crematoria I), and later in two farmhouses (Bunkers I and II) near Birkenau. All were converted into gas chambers using the deadly efficient Zyklon B insecticide. During this period, the SS began construction of four large crematoria in Birkenau (Crematoria II–V). Still, the numbers of women admitted to the camp quickly led to overcrowded, filthy, and disease-ridden conditions that characterized the women’s section for its duration. The women guards and gentile prisoner functionaries brought to oversee the women’s section became overwhelmed; other prisoners, including Jews, were conscripted to help manage the camp. Women prisoners resided in the main camp until mid-August 1942, when one section of Birkenau became ready. Thus, the founding of the women’s camp on 26 March and its transfer to Birkenau on 10 August mark the beginning and end of the first phase.

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The second phase is framed by relocation of the women’s camp from Auschwitz to Birkenau section BIa and its expansion to all of section BI in July 1943. Conditions for prisoners, already deadly, deteriorated. Massive selections characterized not only the initial relocation, but also the several months following. The SS used such actions to cull infirm and debilitated prisoners in response to a typhus outbreak. Selections took place on 10 August, 1–2 October, 5 December, and 6 February 1943. During each, thousands of prisoners, Jewish and gentile, were murdered in the farmhouse gas chamber bunkers. These events terrorized prisoners. Most who had survived the first period died during the second. Following the February selection, gentile prisoners were no longer subject to gas chamber selections.5 Birkenau continued as a vast labor camp and transformed into a murder factory. The four Birkenau crematoria became operational and transports of Jews from across Europe continued to arrive, most of which underwent immediate selections resulting in the murder of approximately 90 percent of arrivals.6 The camp SS also stole the property that arrived with the Jews they murdered and sent it to needy Germans. July 1943 saw the expansion of the women’s camp from BIa into the entirety of section BI (BIa and BIb) in Birkenau and remained its location for the next year. This third period occurred at the same time that Nazi “Operation Reinhard” death camps began to close down. Named for Reinhard Heydrich, the coordinator of the “Final Solution,” the Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka death camps, intended for the annihilation of Polish Jewry, had begun operations at various times in 1942. By summer 1943, over 90 percent of Jews in Poland had been killed. Small teams of prisoners were forced to destroy the camps and evidence of what the Nazis had done there. Auschwitz became the sole Nazi murder camp.7 Transports of Jews continued to arrive from across Europe, and most Jews were killed without ever being registered in the camp. Conditions remained deplorable and claimed the lives of most prisoners within several months.8 While there was rapid turnover of the prisoner population, except for those in “privileged” positions, the size of the prisoner population remained steady. In early 1944, it became clear that Germany would lose the war. Its allies sought ways to ameliorate their losses. Hungary pursued a separate peace with the Allied Powers, which angered Hitler and prompted German occupation. While still a German ally, Hungary had persecuted its Jewish citizens but had not deported them. With German occupation, and despite international attention and massive effort, hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz. This became the busiest period in Birkenau’s history of mass murder. Not all were sent immediately to death. Labor remained a priority and some Jews were kept alive to serve the Nazis. The start of this massive influx of Hungarian Jews marks the transition from third phase to the fourth.

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The fourth period ran from spring 1944 through the evacuation of the entire Auschwitz complex on January 18–19, 1945, and liberation by the Red Army on January 27, 1945. Although huge numbers of Hungarian Jews were murdered, this stage saw a quick and dramatic increase in the population of the women’s camp. Inmates spread into sections BIIc and BIII of Birkenau, and into a newly built section of the Auschwitz main camp. As summer ended, the women’s section contracted quickly. Many women prisoners were transferred to camps inside Germany and others were annihilated. The remaining population was moved from sections BI and BIII in Birkenau into BIIc. With fall and winter of 1944, more prisoners were transferred out of Auschwitz as the Red Army achieved great success against the Germans and approached the camp. Many prisoners feared they would be killed before the Soviets arrived. A small group of women, along with many members of the Sonderkommando, planned an uprising, which took place on October 7, 1944. While successful in rendering one crematorium inoperable, it resulted in the deaths of most conspirators. As the Red Army drew near, the camp SS began to destroy evidence: They dismantled the remaining crematoria and burned administrative records. Most prisoners were forced to evacuate the camp on foot early on January 19, 1945. They marched for three days to Gleiwitz, where open train cars transported them to camps in Germany. The Soviets reached Auschwitz on 27 January to find 7000 debilitated prisoners, remnants of the crematoria, thousands of surviving documents, and warehouses full of items stolen from murdered Jews. The history of the women’s camp did not end with the liberation of Auschwitz. The final period of the women’s section began with liberation on January 27, 1945, and continues today. The lives of most who arrived in Auschwitz ended then and there. For survivors, however, their experiences continued with death marches, internment in other camps, and liberation. Freedom from Nazi persecution and oppression meant enduring the next phase of difficulty. Survivors faced the horror of learning how many family members had perished, sought to reassemble lives in destroyed homes or displaced persons camps, watched or took part in postwar war crimes trials, relocated to new countries, and finally began to learn to live in foreign lands. All this while building new families and communities and battling lifelong trauma among a host of other issues and challenges. Included in this final postwar period of Holocaust history is how scholars and subsequent generations have come to understand and analyze Auschwitz. Part of the story is that the women’s section of Auschwitz was either subsumed into a general history of the camp or ignored altogether. To enter Auschwitz-Birkenau as an inmate was to enter another world. It meant an end to living in the normal sense. What women underwent upon arrival and how they experienced it changed little over time. Nothing in their prior experience had prepared them for that shock. Alica Rothovà was among

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the first to arrive. “On March 26, 1942 THE DOORS ARE OPENING. And the SS-MEN ARE WAITING. Where are we?” Nobody answered. Instead, “We were rushed out with screaming LOS-LOS-HINAUS! We were very silent, and were rushing from the cattle wagons.”9 Irmgard Müller recalled a similar experience of violence, shock, and bewilderment in April 1943. “Any hope was crushed forever when the train reached its destination. The arrival at the ramp was the most shocking experience of my life. There were guns pointed at us all around, and a pandemonium of warning shots, of shouted orders, barking dogs and the screams of terrorized families being torn apart.”10 Approximately a year later, in early summer 1944, Agi Rubin reached Auschwitz in one of the final waves of Hungarian deportations. “It was, the impression was unbelievable. There were these striped-clothes people, dogs, German soldiers, and it was very, very chaotic[….T]hings just happened so quickly, you didn’t have a chance to think or to know what’s happening to you or what’s awaiting you.”11 Jews disembarking from trains found an incomprehensible environment in which the vast majority would be killed and the “lucky” few transformed into prisoners. Those selected for admittance, both men and women, were forced to march to Birkenau from the arrival ramp, which had several locations over the course of the camp’s history.12 Guards beat and abused them along the way. Initiation followed. Helen Stern, on one of the first transports from Slovakia, recalled that, [T]hey led us into a common bathroom, stripped us of all our clothing, made us stand naked, and put us into large tubs….They shaved all our hair (everywhere). They gave us uncleaned [sic] Russian uniforms [….] My uniform became my only clothing for the next 10 months. As I looked around, I could not believe what the loss of hair could do to one’s looks, even the prettiest of us. They then registered us, and from that moment on until after the war I became nothing but number 2282.13

While the procedure was similar and degrading for men and women, camp initiates experienced these violations in gender-specific ways. For many young women, this was their first experience being naked near men; the SS men often were sexually suggestive or verbally abusive; and the body parts exposed and probed in the presence of these men were sexual. These violations paired with loss of hair and the cessation of menstruation shortly after arrival marked a profound loss of femininity. In short, women experienced the admission process as sexualized violence and violation. Inside Auschwitz, labor and horrific conditions cooperated to dehumanize and destroy. Indeed, the entire Auschwitz camp complex was a location of mass death. The situation for women was even worse than for men. Rudolf Höss, the first commandant of Auschwitz, acknowledged after the war, “Everything was much more difficult, harsher and more depressing for the women, since general living conditions in the women’s camp were

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incomparably worse. They were far more tightly packed and the sanitary and hygienic conditions were notably inferior.”14 Ilse Michel, an assimilated, middle-class Jewish women from a small town in Germany claimed, “There are no words in any vocabulary to describe Birkenau, The stench, the dirt, the lice, the diarrhea [sic], the hunger, the despair, the agony, the hatred, the beatings and death.”15 This well-documented litany was exacerbated by hard labor, which included demolition of Polish homes and shops compulsorily vacated by the Nazis, draining swampland to make it agriculturally productive, farming and animal husbandry, and road construction. Deadly conditions and overwhelming terror created by German camp authorities conspired against prisoners’ individual lives and solidarity. Each prisoner narrowed her focus to survival, all the while starving, exhausted, and isolated. Relations among human beings degenerate even in less extreme contexts. Liana Millu observed, “Everyone got mean – what else can people do when they feel totally crushed and helpless?”16 Violence between common prisoners seems to have been limited to protecting sources of ­security—scrabbling over food and living space, protecting group members. Prisoners who survived beyond the first several months developed tactics to combat annihilation. They utilized practical, psychological, and social strategies to assert individuality and to claim solidarity. Some scholars have seen significant differences in coping mechanisms employed by men and women. Women saved food, sewed clothing, provided mutual aid, and bonded socially, particularly with the creation of family-like groups.17 My research indicates that women and men employed similar strategies based primarily on an attempt to retain dignity and a sense of humanity. Men and women alike shared stories, recipes, and religious observances. They tried to wash themselves. They slowed down work, when possible, and struggled to protect themselves and loved ones from violence. They stole needed items from the SS, they undertook to help each other, and they forged social bonds. Most of the specific strategies looked remarkably similar. Relationships between prisoners, however, varied by gender. While women tended to form groups based on family structures (i.e., camp mothers, sisters, and—rarely— brothers), men tended to bond in pairs or trios. Men and women alike saw going it alone as a virtual death sentence.18 Still, prisoner responses did not yield a primarily positive effect. Survival remained elusive and what served to comfort or help one person could trouble or endanger another. While prisoners sought ways to assert individuality and solidarity, Primo Levi has cautioned that “it is naïve, absurd, and historically false to believe that an infernal system such as National Socialism sanctifies its victims: on the contrary, it degrades them, it makes them resemble itself [….].”19 He saw this particularly among prisoners ensconced in the camp hierarchy. “No two prisoners are equal,” recalled Inka Wajsbort, a young Jewish woman deported from a ghetto in Silesia not far from Auschwitz. “There was an ironclad hierarchy here depending on your function, the Kommando

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[work detail] to which you belonged and your national, ethnic and religious background.” She described this hierarchy: “A Jewess in quarantine was on the lowest rung of this ladder, the bottom of degradation. Above her was the Aussenkommando [outside work detail].” If some women stood at the bottom, others ranked above. “The higher echelon prisoners [were] employed in various Kommando groups…[and] still higher stood the prisoners who had an official function: the Blockälteste responsible for the barracks, the Stubenälteste in charge of order and cleanliness, the ‘runners’ who delivered instructions, the secretaries, the Kapos responsible for the Kommandos and a plethora of other office holders.”20 Jewish prisoners comprised the largest, but not the only population group in the women’s section of Birkenau. The distinction between Jewish and non-Jewish prisoners proved the most important.21 While a high death rate prevailed, non-Jews possessed privileges that most Jews did not. Permitted contact with the outside world, they received packages and sent messages. Letters were censored and packages pilfered by guards, but news, food, and clothing from outside served as physical, spiritual, and emotional sustenance. Most Jews, denied similar privileges, also no longer had family outside the camp. Even more important, however, was that by early 1943, non-Jews were no longer subject to selections. They were not sent to the gas chambers.22 This did not diminish the overwhelming daily horror for gentile women prisoners. Wajsbort identified the two possibilities for bettering one’s position in the camp: a better work commando or an official function. These positions offered the only, for Jews, or improved, for gentiles, possibility for survival. A “good” job typically meant work inside—in a building or within the camp. Indoor work protected a prisoner from exposure to the elements—cold, heat, rain, and snow. A job inside the camp meant avoiding forced marches to and from work sites that drained prisoners’ already depleted energy. A work assignment might give a prisoner greater access to food or entail work that was less physically demanding. In some cases, work assignments were more consistent. Sometimes “better” labor details included all or several of these advantages. Prisoners coveted such assignments, even though some of these jobs entailed difficult and disgusting tasks, such as heavy and repetitive factory work or removing excrement from the latrines.23 Favored work assignments included kitchen duty, sorting goods stolen from arriving transports, factory forced labor, scientific experimentation, office tasks, work in infirmaries, and processing new arrivals. The other path to privilege was through official functions, which fell into three categories: work supervision, internal oversight of the camp and living quarters, and camp administration.24 The first two entailed oversight of other prisoners; the latter did so only rarely and for few. Kapos oversaw work assignments. Typically, cordons of male guards surrounded work details to prevent escape, a single camp guard led each work detail, and kapos

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supervised smaller groups of prisoners.25 Some larger commandos had a head kapo to whom other kapos reported. Kapos ensured that the prisoners labored continuously, maintained pace and discipline during marches to and from work sites, and when work slowed or discipline faltered, they meted out punishment.26 Kapos supervised commandos inside and outside the camp. Other prisoner functionaries were responsible for the women’s camp and the barracks. The Lagerälteste (Camp Senior, the highest prisoner position) oversaw the entire women’s camp: readying inmates for Appell (roll call), “cleaning” the camp, food distribution, and the division of prisoners into work units. The Camp Senior enlisted the assistance of others, including kapos. Other women oversaw individual barracks (Blokovas or Blockälteste). They supervised and disciplined women prisoners while they were there—through the night and during Blocksperre (lockdown), when new transports arrived. They inspected barracks, bunks, prisoner uniforms, distribution of food within a barrack, as well as other duties. These women had assistants—Stubenälteste or Stubowe (bunk seniors)—who supervised bunks. Some of these women had assistants as well. An SS-woman (matron) oversaw each block. She chose the block senior, who in turn chose the bunk seniors.27 “Better” work assignments led to envy and resentment, unintentionally resulting in interpersonal friction. Official functions, in which some prisoners supervised others, were part of SS efforts to divide and control the prisoner population. Other distinctions—stemming from nationality, educational level, and other characteristics external to Auschwitz and that predated the Nazi camp system—exacerbated hostility. This served the interests of SS. Some prisoners, however, were able to exploit the system to their own and others’ benefit. The first women prisoner functionaries arrived on the day the women’s camp was established in March 1942. All gentile and mostly German, these women were recruited or conscripted primarily from among the “criminal” and “anti-social” prisoner categories, but included some political prisoners and Jehovah’s Witnesses.28 Inheriting generalizations from male prisoner functionaries, the categories “criminal” and “anti-social” became synonymous with these roles (Strzelecka, 397). All were marked as brutal and violent. In the Auschwitz women’s camp, however, Jewish prisoners entered the prisoner hierarchy shortly after the camp was established: There were too few gentile prisoner functionaries to oversee internal camp operation; the SS-matrons were unable to manage. This proved an opportunity for prisoners, including Jewish prisoners, who filled the organizational vacuum and landed work that offered better conditions.29 Some claimed later that anyone there at that time could have gotten a similar job.30 Thus, within months if not weeks of the establishment of the women’s section, Jewish women found their way into “privileged” and functionary positions. While this did not guarantee survival, it was a prerequisite for it. In my research to date (January 2019), I have found no Jewish woman prisoner, sent to Auschwitz before spring 1944, who survived unless she held a privileged position or transferred to another camp.

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All prisoner functionaries had to appear to advance the goals of the camp administration. The SS men and women who ran the camp encouraged violence from prisoner functionaries and threatened punishment if they were not sufficiently vicious.31 Not all prisoner functionaries behaved with the same degree of brutality, however, and not all became violent. Rather, some attempted to minimize the violence they thought inevitable.32 Some sought their positions for their own benefit, others desired to assist their loved ones, and a few wanted to help the larger mass of prisoners. Orli Reichert, a German political prisoner incarcerated in concentration camps since 1933, achieved a position of power as the Lagerälteste of one section of the women’s camp. Sara Nomberg-Przytyk recalled Reichert’s behavior in her memoir Auschwitz: True Tales from A Grotesque Land. Her analysis lays bare the spectrum of conduct exhibited by functionaries: I always saw [Reichert] in a variety of situations, and in each situation she was a different person. On one occasion she would be defiant to the authorities; on another she would be cruel to the prisoners. At one moment she was filled with compassion for human suffering; at another, without blinking an eye, she made sure that not even one of the victims to the gas chamber would escape. On some days she was comradely with anyone who was fighting for freedom, no matter what the person’s nationality. Yet there were times when she would isolate herself from the rest of us because she was German and it was her duty to support the German cause.33

Reichert’s behavior seemed erratic and inexplicable to a prisoner who did not share her position. But her actions reflect the efforts of a woman trying to survive and perhaps to help a few others in what seemed like an insane environment. It was not an enviable position, particularly for the many who entered it reluctantly. Magda Blau had been relatively content with her secretarial work in Auschwitz. “I was working in the office at one stage. I was so happy to work in the office, not to have…to see all the cruelty.” The camp commander assigned her to the position of Lagerälteste for a new section of the women’s camp. Magda protested, but to no avail. In her new position, she sought to help some prisoners. She went to her new section (presumably BIII, opened in 1944) and found absolutely nothing there: no beds, no blankets. She insisted the camp commander provide those items and that one prisoner supervises each barrack so that at least thirty women would have better jobs. She paid a price for taking the position even though she had no choice. “The news traveled – that I am a protégé of [the camp commander]. But that’s nothing. Never mind. I couldn’t just save everybody.” Instead, she tried to help others. She made the women in charge directly responsible to her. “[W]here I could, I was running up and down from morning to evening […] I begged […] I watched the girls in charge. I said, ‘You try your best. If not, I personally punish you.’ And I did.” She punished her own friends,

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ironically using tactics associated with the SS to compel them to treat those they supervised more humanely.34 With no positive result, section BIII of Auschwitz became known as one of the worst due to incomplete construction, severe overcrowding, starvation, and all of the other conditions that plagued Auschwitz generally. The horrible conditions and her occasional use of punishment associated Blau, in the eyes of other prisoners, as a lackey of camp authorities.35 Some scholars and survivors have understood behavior such as that displayed by Reichert and Blau, or even simple engagement in “privileged” work, as evidence of psychological regression and that “privileged” prisoners identified and cooperated with the values and goals of the SS.36 This view is mistaken. Prisoners—“privileged,” functionary, or otherwise—sought to survive. “Privileges” helped them to achieve that end. Most certainly, some were attracted to personal power, which frequently led to violence and brutality. Functionaries’ goals, however, were not always assisted by serving the SS diligently. Because they had better food and clothing and less debilitating labor, they gained a perspective beyond immediate survival. Some turned their attention to men and sex, to leisure, and to doing as little work as possible, none of which coincided with the priorities of camp authorities. In fact, there were times when the goals of “privileged” prisoners countered those of the SS. Some “privileged” prisoners were involved in resistance. This phenomenon clearly illustrates that their aims diverged from those of the SS camp staff and undermines the notion that they existed exclusively as extensions of the camp administration. Furthermore, some functionaries who did not resist the Nazi goals of annihilation and massive labor exploitation still did not actively support a Nazi agenda. The Zimmerspitz sisters were among the first Jewish women prisoners in Auschwitz, where they secured supervisory roles in a barrack. They violently enforced barrack rules and sacrificed others for their own survival. But they also hoped for the end of the war and the Nazis’ demise, as illustrated by a poem predicting Nazi defeat that one of them wrote and which was discovered by an SS man who had all four women taken for interrogation and shot.37 If prisoner functionary positions were important to camp authorities, which individual prisoners held them was not. “Privileged” prisoners were as expendable as any other. While prisoner functionaries ran the camp from day to day, Nazi authorities oversaw the entire operation. The SS brought four groups of non-prisoner women to the camp specifically to support the camp administration: female camp guards (Aufseherinnen; matrons); telecommunications experts (Helferinnen; auxiliaries); nurses (Schwestern); and SS wives.38 Of these women, only guards had regular and ongoing contact with prisoners. Literally, overseers or supervisors, the matrons guarded women prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau and other camps in areas controlled by the Third Reich. Initially, recruitment compared to that of any other job. As the war

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progressed and the prisoner population ballooned, recruitment lagged and the SS turned to conscription. Training, which took place primarily at Ravensbrück, but sometimes at other camps, was of inconsistent duration and varied content. It lasted from several days to several weeks and included little overt indoctrination, but rather extensive on-the-job training that inculcated in the Aufseherinnen a sense of their own superiority and the worthlessness of prisoners. Fraternization was prohibited and violence encouraged. Maria Mandel stood at the top of the hierarchy of the Auschwitz-Birkenau women’s camp, where she presided over internal operations. As the senior woman guard, she became a part of the male command structure, her rank the rough equivalent of a male officer.39 The leadership of the female guard corps had changed shortly after the relocation of the women’s section from Auschwitz to Birkenau in late 1942. Johanna Langefeld and Maria Mandel, the head matrons in Auschwitz and Ravensbrück respectively, switched places. Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the entire Auschwitz complex, doubted the competence of the women guards, but unlike in his contentious relationship with Langefeld, there were few issues between him and Mandel with regard to administration of the women’s section. Directly below Mandel sat the Report Leaders (Rapportführerinnen; liaison officers) of which there were several, including Elisabeth Ruppert, Therese Brandl, Elisabeth Hasse, and Margot Drechsler. The latter oversaw the entire labor force in the women’s camp. Block Leaders (Blockführerinnen) functioned as links to individual barracks within each camp section and chose the prisoner functionaries who oversaw each barrack. Other women guards assisted the Block and Report Leaders. Women guards supervised general cleanup, organization, and order within the women’s camp and carried out daily roll calls to count prisoners. They also enforced regulations and oversaw prisoners who worked inside and outside the camp. They were responsible for the prisoner kitchens and laundry, the potato peeling and bread rooms, and the package sorting room, all tasks that required a large number of prisoners. For example, Elisabeth Volkenrath, in charge of the parcels store, had twenty-five to thirty prisoners working with her to open packages received from the Red Cross for distribution to non-Jewish prisoners in order to control for contraband.40 Few proper ranks existed among the Aufseherinnen. Distinctions of power obtained through the tasks they fulfilled and when they were required to be on duty. Maria Mandel, the Head Matron, derived much of her power vis-àvis the other Aufseherinnen from her responsibility for making these determinations (Brown, 240). Work assignments decided an Aufseherin’s quality of life. Guards, like the prisoners, coveted inside work and avoided outside tasks when they could. If work assignments meant the difference between life and death for prisoners, for matrons they merely proffered more or less discomfort. Other factors that influenced an Aufseherin’s relative rank included the permanence of her post, whether she worked a day or night shift, how

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many shifts she worked, and the amount of free time she received. Position tenure could range from a single day to several years. Indications of higher ranks included relative permanence of a job, working only one shift, working during the day, and longer and more frequent free time. Violence permeated most interactions between guards and prisoners, including prisoner functionaries. Paula Synger, a Jewish survivor from Poland, experienced such violence immediately. “At my arrival at Auschwitz I was beaten so terribly that from that time on I tried to avoid beating, and at the very sight of aufseherins [sic] I ran far away, because I wanted to live.”41 Violence by guards was an everyday occurrence. Dora Szafran, a Polish Jewish woman, testified after the war that, “I have seen Kramer [an SS officer] beat a person; I have seen how Borman [sic; a woman guard] set a dog on a person, and I have seen how Grese [a woman guard] beat a person.” Recalling the frequency of violence, she declared, “I have seen that sort of thing so often that I cannot say how many times I have seen [an individual] do it.” The beatings were not only painful and humiliating, they were life threatening. Noting the severity of the beatings, Szafran said: “[They were] very severe. If they were not the cause of death they were not called severe in the camp.”42 Beatings, however, were only one form of abuse visited upon the prisoners. Inmates understood that the Aufseherinnen deliberately prolonged roll call to increase suffering from exposure to the heat or cold, the effort to maintain stillness and attention, or even just to stand while exhausted and starving. Inability to endure these tortures resulted in additional abuse. One of the most frequent was called “making sport” (Sport machen). Helene Klein, a Polish Jewish woman, described what that entailed. “It was falling down and getting up and crawling and the speed was increased all the time.”43 Isabella Leitner, a Hungarian Jewish woman imprisoned in Auschwitz with her three sisters, recalled that her sister Chicha, was singled out during roll call for a minor infraction. “[The matron] made her kneel, lifted Chicha’s arms high in the air, and placed two heavy rocks in her hands. She then ordered Chicha to hold her arms straight up for the duration of the Zeil Appell [sic]. ‘And no wavering of the arms! If you do, you’ll die! I’ll return to check on you.’”44 In addition to their regular duties, Aufseherinnen also participated in selections of those deemed “unfit” for labor for dispatch to the gas chambers. The majority of women guards provided a cordon; they prevented escape and kept order among the ranks of women prisoners. Survivors do not recall the presence of Aufseherinnen on the ramp during arrival, although Mandel and some of her close associates may have been involved. Aufseherinnen became responsible for women prisoners as soon as they left the selection area and they oversaw the camp admission process. They also may have escorted some of the large groups of people to the gas chambers.45 In short, while not all matrons may have engaged directly in selections, a number of them certainly did. Nor would lack of active participation in selections relieve any of them of

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responsibility for participation in the project of genocide. Their role in keeping order was essential to the efficiency of selections. Mistreatment of prisoners was daily fare. The Aufseherinnen invented ways of inflicting humiliation, degradation, and pain, and of increasing the daily misery of the women confined in the camp. While it is difficult to determine the extent of outright sexual assault and rape within the Auschwitz complex, it is clear that the humiliation and degradation of women prisoners included sex-based violence. A short section of an article is inadequate to address the topic in a significant way, but any overview of the women’s camp would be incomplete without its mention. Women prisoners feared sexual assault during their arrival and induction to the camp, which most recall as fraught with sexual threat. While confined for the most part to the psychological realm, it seems clear that the majority of physical sexual assaults by SS men of Jewish women occurred during these processes. Sex-based violence remained a part of women’s experiences even after admission. Medical experiments limiting reproductive capacity took place in Auschwitz, and many women believed that the cessation of menses resulted from similar efforts. Some gentile women were forced into sexual slavery in separate brothels for SS men and “privileged” male prisoners. Several “privileged” women prisoners entered sexual/romantic relationships with SS men. While these women may have taken initiative, the vast power differential in these cases means that sexual exploitation may be inferred. Others engaged in sexual barter—the exchange of sex for food and other necessities—with other (usually male) prisoners. Varying degrees of agency and coercion characterized such exchanges. In addition, some women prisoners suffered sexual assault or rape at the hands of male prisoners. Finally, any discussion of sexbased violence in the Auschwitz women’s camp would be incomplete without the mention of women perpetrators. There is evidence that some women guards sexually humiliated women prisoners through violence related to menstruation and mutilation of sexualized body parts.46 In addition, some lesbian relationships, about which there is scant testimony, may have been characterized by varying degrees of intimidation and coercion. Finally, the long history of the Nazi camp system began in 1933, but women did not enter the camp system in significant numbers until 1939, and in large numbers until 1942—at about the time the women’s camp in Auschwitz was established and simultaneous with a huge influx of Jews (men and women alike). While many of the practices established in men’s camp were imported into women’s camps, they were not necessarily replicated. The position of Jewish women in the prisoner hierarchy in Auschwitz is a case in point. Jewish women had the opportunity (and took it) to acquire better jobs and camp functions within weeks of the women’s camp founding. This was an opportunity less available to Jewish men. And while prisoners who occupied “privileged” and functionary positions found themselves at odds with other prisoners, what becomes clear upon close analysis

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is that most did not share the goals or perspectives of camp authorities. Instead, their positions offered better opportunity to survive. The women’s camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau is a Holocaust site that has been at the margins of study for too long. Analyses of the three groups of women—prisoners, “privileged” prisoners, and women affiliated with the SS—together and discretely, bring to the fore new ideas and challenge several long-standing conceptions about Auschwitz and women’s places in it. The women’s camp had a related, but separate timeline from the complex as a whole, which was influenced by its location(s) and the personnel and prisoners who lived and worked there. Women prisoners’ experiences were remarkably similar to those of men, including ways of coping with the deadly environment. Using gender as a tool of analysis brings nuance to our understanding. While the ways that men and women responded to the genocidal environment of the camp were generally similar, there were significant differences. Women and men alike developed strategies to deal with hunger, isolation, depressed morale, hard labor, and the threat of violence. They hoarded food or ate it straight away, they bartered bread for other needed items, they slowed the pace of labor when they could, and they shared spiritual and cultural practices. They also sought better positions in the camp, though Jewish women had greater opportunity than Jewish men to secure such positions. Women and men sought to bond with other prisoners. For men, they typically joined with one or two others. Women created larger groupings and associated group members with familial roles, most frequently mother, daughter, and sister roles. Women also felt an overarching threat of sexualized violence, as well as a range of actual sexualized violence. They also could and did engage in sexual barter, a practice typically available to only a small number of male prisoners. In short, gender influenced how prisoners experienced and responded to existence in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Notes





1. Irena Strzelecka, “Women,” in Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, eds. Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 393–411; Na’ama Shik, “Sexual Abuse of Jewish Women in Auschwitz-Birkenau,” in Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century, ed. Dagmar Herzog (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 221–246; and Zoë Waxman, Women in the Holocaust: A Feminist History, in particular chapter three, “Concentration Camps” (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017). 2. Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996); Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano, ed., Geographies of the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. 3. I am currently writing a book based on my doctoral dissertation, The Women of Birkenau (Clark University, 2010).

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4. No adequate map of the women’s camp has been drawn to date. For that ­reason, I do not include a map here. 5. Franciszek Piper, Auschwitz 1940–1945: Central Issues in the History of the Camps, Vol. III, Mass Murder, 104; Pawełczyńska, Values and Violence, 103. 6. Walter Lacquer, “Forward,” in Auschwitz Chronicle, ed. Danuta Czech (New York: Henry Holt, 1989), xvi. Franciszek Piper puts the number at 20 percent, “The Number of Victims,” Ch. 3, Mass Murder, vol. 2 of Auschwitz, 1940–1945: Central Issues in the History of the Camp, eds. Aleksander Lasik, Franciszek Piper, Piotr Setkiewicz, et al. (Oswiecim, Poland: Auschwitz Birkenau State Museum, 2000), 220. 7. Majdanek functioned as a death camp for a short period only, so I do not include it here. 8. Yehoshua R. Büchler, “First in the Vale of Affliction: Slovakian Jewish Women in Auschwitz, 1943,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 10, no. 3 (Winter 1996): 309. His research asserts that 92 percent of Slovakian women arriving in 1942 died by the end of the year. Surely, high mortality rates continued as conditions worsened. 9. Auschwitz Birkenau State Museum, Collection of Reminiscences of Former Prisoners, Volumes 200 and 201, Alica Rothovà-Jokubowic/1103, 175897, 182. 10.  Mueller, “Administration,” in Auschwitz, the Nazi Civilization, ed. Lore Shelley (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1992), 40. 11.  USHMM, RG-50, Oral Histories of the University of Michigan-Dearborn Holocaust Survivor Oral History Project, Interview with Agi Rubin, Call Number: RG-50.155*06. 12. At first, prisoners disembarked near the main camp. Soon, Jewish transports arrived at the “Jewish ramp” located approximately halfway between the main camp and Birkenau. Later, the SS built a rail spur into Birkenau. 13. Kuban (Stern), “Born Twice,” in Nazi Civilization, 76. 14. Rudolf Höss, “Autobiography of Rudolf Höss,” in KL Auschwitz Seen by the SS, eds. Kazimierz Smolen, et al. (Warsaw: Interpress Publishers, 1991), 58–59. 15. Ilse Michel, “Working in the Gun Powder Room—Unaware of the Ongoing Smuggling,” in The Union Kommando in Auschwitz: The Auschwitz Munitions Factory Through the Eyes of Its Former Slave Laborers, ed. Lore Shelley (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996), 135. 16. Liana Millu, Smoke Over Birkenau (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1986), 112. 17. See: Myrna Goldenberg, “Memoirs of Auschwitz Survivors: The Burden of Gender,” and Ruth Bondy, “Women in Theresienstadt and the Family Camp in Birkenau,” both in Women in the Holocaust, eds. Dalia Ofer and Lenore Weitzman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 18. Elie Cohen, Human Behavior in the Concentration Camps (New York: W.W. Norton, 1953), 182. 19. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vintage Books, 1989; reprint, New York: Summit Books, 1988), 40. 20. Wajsbort, “A Model Hell,” in The Union Kommando in Auschwitz, 44–45 (italics in original).

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21. Anna Pawełczyńska, Values and Violence in Auschwitz: A Sociological Analysis (Berkley: University of California Press, 1973; originally published as Zarys socjologicaneg problematyki Oświeçiemia. Warsaw: państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1973), 54. 22.  Franciszek Piper, Mass Murder, Vol. 3 of Auschwitz 1940–1945, 104; Pawełczyńska, Values and Violence, 103. 23. Irena Strzelecka, “The Women in the Auschwitz Concentration Camp,” in The Prisoners—Their Life and Work, Vol. 2 of Auschwitz 1940–1945, 195. 24. Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL, A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2015), 123–124. 25. Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, eds., Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp (Bloomington: Indiana University Press in association with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1994), 363. 26. Hermann Langbein, People in Auschwitz (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 145; Gutman and Berenbaum, Anatomy, 366. 27.  Czernyak-Spatz and Shatzky, “Record-Keeping for the Nazis and Saving Lives,” Jewish Currents Online, May 1, 2011. 28. Danuta Czech, “The Auschwitz Prisoner Administration,” in Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, 363. Many scholars translate the German Asozial as “asocial,” I use what I think is the more accurate English translation, “anti-social.” 29.  See my chapter titled, “How Deep the Gray—‘Privileged’ Jewish Women Prisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau,” in conference proceedings from National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education Ethel LeFrak Holocaust Education Conference, Seton Hill University, October 2018, forthcoming (2020). 30. Czernyak-Spatz and Shatzky, “Record-Keeping,” Jewish Currents Online, May 1, 2011. 31.  USHMM, RG-59.016M, Belsen Trial, Reel 1, Hilde Lobauer, 188; Reel 2, Helena Kopper, 136; Danuta Czech, “The Auschwitz Prisoner Administration,” in Anatomy of Auschwitz, 363–364; Hermann Langbein, People in Auschwitz, 143–145. 32. USHMM, RG-50.155*06, Agi Rubin, 37. 33. Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Lang (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 41–42. 34. USHMM, RG-50, USHMM Oral History Collection, Interview with Magda Blau, Call Number: RG-50.030*0030, 24–25. 35. See also Langbein, People in Auschwitz, 165–166. 36. See: Bruno Bettelheim, Surviving and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1979); Elie Cohen, Human Behavior. They view prisoner “collaboration” as identification with the values and goals of the SS or as psychological regression. 37. Frtiz Bauer Instite, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, 4 Js 444/59, Magda Blau, Bd. 87, 17057. 38.  For a study of SS wives, see Gudrun Schwarz, Eine Frau an Seiner Seite: Ehefrauen in der SS-Sippengemeinschaft (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1997). 39.  Daniel Patrick Brown, The Camp Women (Atglen, PA: Schiffer Military History, 2002), 19. 40. USHMM, RG-59.016M, Belsen Trial, Reel 1, Elizabeth Volkenrath, 24. 41. USHMM, RG 59, Belsen Trial, Reel 1, Paula Synger, 14. 42. USHMM, RG 59, Belsen Trial, Reel 1, Dora Dzafran, 189.

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723

43. USHMM, RG 59, Belsen Trial, Reel 1, Helen Klein, 26. 44. Leitner, Fragments of Isabella (New York: Crowell, 1978), 43. 45. USHMM, RG-59.016M, Belsen Trial, Reel 1, Affidavit of Etyl Eisenburg, 117, noted that Aufseherin Hasse oversaw trucks from (presumably) Block 25 in the women’s camp to the gas chambers, which supports this idea indirectly. 46. Gisella Perl, I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz (New York: International University Press, 1948; London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019), 45–47. Citations refer to Rowman and Littlefield reprint.

Bibliography Archives Fritz Bauer Institut, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, 4 Js 444/59. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), Washington, DC, RG-50, USHMM Oral History Collection. USHMM, RG-59.016M, Belsen Trial.

Books Bettelheim, Bruno. Surviving and Other Essays. New York: Knopf, 1979. Brown, Daniel Patrick. The Camp Women. Atglen, PA: Schiffer Military History, 2002. Cohen, Elie. Human Behavior in the Concentration Camps. New York: W.W. Norton, 1953. Czech, Danuta. Auschwitz Chronicle. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1989. Dwork, Debórah, and Robert Jan van Pelt. Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996. Frankl, Viktor. Man’s Search for Meaning. New York: Beacon Press, 1959. Goldenberg, Myrna, ed. Different Horrors, Same Hell: Gender and the Holocaust. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013. Gutman, Yisrael, and Michael Berenbaum, eds. Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press in association with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1994. Höss, Rudolf. Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz. New York: Da Capo Press, 1996. Knowles, Anne Kelly, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano, ed. Geographies of the Holocaust. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. Langbein, Hermann. People in Auschwitz. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Lasik, Aleksander, Franciszek Piper, Piotr Setkiewicz, et al., eds. Auschwitz, 1940– 1945: Central Issues in the History of the Camp. Oswiecim, Poland: Auschwitz Birkenau State Museum, 2000. Leitner, Isabella. Fragments of Isabella. New York: Crowell, 1978. Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. New York: Vintage Books, 1989; reprint, New York: Summit Books, 1988. Millu, Liana. Smoke Over Birkenau. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1986. Nomberg-Przytyk, Sara. Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985.

724  S. CUSHMAN Pawełczyńska, Anna. Values and Violence in Auschwitz: A Sociological Analysis. Berkley: University of California Press, 1973; originally published as Zarys socjologicaneg problematyki Oświeçiemia. Warsaw: państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1973. Perl, Gisella. I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz. New York: International University Press, 1948; Reprinted with introduction and notes by Danny M. Cohen and Phyllis Lassner. London: Littlefield and Rowman, 2019. Schwarz, Gudrun. Eine Frau an Seiner Seite: Ehefrauen in der SS-Sippengemeinschaft. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1997. Shelley, Lore, ed. Auschwitz, the Nazi Civilization. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1992. ———. The Union Kommando in Auschwitz: The Auschwitz Munitions Factory Through the Eyes of Its Former Slave Laborers. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996. Wachsmann, Nikolaus. KL, A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2015. Waxman, Zoe. Women in the Holocaust, a Feminist History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Periodicals Büchler, Yehoshua R. “First in the Vale of Affliction: Slovakian Jewish Women in Auschwitz, 1943.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 10, no. 3 (Winter 1996): 299–325. Czernyak-Spatz, Susan, and Joel Shatzky. “Record-Keeping for the Nazis and Saving Lives.” Jewish Currents Online, May 1, 2011.

CHAPTER 39

Aryan Feminity: Identity in the Third Reich Wendy Adele-Marie

A model of Aryan feminity emerges when studying women and Nazism ­during the Holocaust. Competition for who best fit the idea of a perfect female archetype was seen among women married into the upper echelon of the Nazi party. Looking at how femininity was characterized via fertility is critical, as it reveals what this perfect archetype would be like. Whether a single woman having sex with several different men, or a wife of a top official, fertility shaped how Aryan femininity was constructed. Further, the wives used their agency to shape not only their own identities, but those of their husbands as well, postwar and in the case of Magda Goebbels, via a letter to her eldest son, eulogized herself by saying: My beloved son! By now we have been in the Führerbunker for six days already - daddy, your six little siblings and I, for the sake of giving our national socialistic lives the only possible honorable end… You shall know that I stayed here against daddy’s will, and that even on last Sunday the Führer wanted to help me to get out. You know your mother - we have the same blood, for me there was no wavering. Our glorious idea is ruined and with it everything beautiful and marvelous that I have known in my life. The world that comes after the Führer and national socialism is not any longer worth living in and therefore I took the children with me, for they are too good for the life that would follow, and a merciful God will understand me when I will give them the salvation… The children are wonderful… there never is a word of complaint nor crying. The impacts are shaking the bunker. The elder kids cover the younger ones, their presence is a blessing and they are making the Führer smile once in a while. May God help that I have the strength to perform the last and hardest. We only have one goal left: loyalty to the Führer even in

W. Adele-Marie (*)  Oakton Community College, Skokie, IL, USA © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_39

725

726  W. ADELE-MARIE death. Harald, my dear son - I want to give you what I learned in life: be loyal! Loyal to yourself, loyal to the people and loyal to your country … Be proud of us and try to keep us in dear memory.1

In this final letter to her son Harald, Magda portrayed herself as a strong, valiant woman, to whom even Hitler sought to award with his own party pin. This was a final recognition of her sacrifice for him: suicide rather than live in a world devoid of Nazi authority. Magda portrayed herself in this letter as a woman who lived up to the party ideal of Aryan feminity even by murdering her own children. Although historical research has revealed the substantial role of German women in the camps, so far, this significant strand of Aryan feminity has been neglected. Instead, consistent with neglected narratives of women in other polities who wielded power “behind the scenes,” some self-representations of the wives of top Nazi officers who competed for the informal representational status of “First Lady of the Reich” offer a more comprehensive history of women’s critical influences. Fertility was an ultimate Hitlerian goal, and women were mandated to provide it. Marriage to the primary architects of the Final Solution elevated the social status of most women, which in turn positioned them to maintain postwar romantic myths of the Third Reich as a new world order based on racial supremacy via domesticity and fertility. Adolf Hitler, in his most intimate role, was the overseer of marriage and pregnancy, and the protector for these women against the Jews to ensure that the master race would continue indefinitely. With Hitler as an overarching guardian, women sought involvement with Nazism as well as an identity for themselves as the ultimate maternal role model, since fertility was a way that women could fight against Germany’s enemies. Moreover, fertility intertwined with fervent adoration of Nazism made many women more desirable, especially among those who aspired for an agency of power via marriage to an SS officer, for example. Women involved with the Nazi party sought a contemporary identity in the “quest for Nazi female perfection” to stand as “the First Lady of the Reich.” Their standing among themselves saw an ongoing struggle to present the perfect Aryan feminine role model. These women sought to escape connection and culpability as well as reconcile their husband’s legacy in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Wives of Nazi officials at every social, political, and professional level benefited in some way from their involvement with the Reich’s killing machine, typically by status. In tracing their activities, how can we ascertain their motives? Marriage to a Nazi did not always mean that a woman would become more sophisticated since becoming involved or identified with as a Nazi was important, but clearly, grabbing a top spot in German society as the wife of a Nazi official did not always translate into a step-up in style or refinement. But then, the National Socialists were not always known for their sophisticated taste. In an effort to

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broaden the appeal of the Party symbol, the swastika surfaced as a decorative motif on virtually every consumer product available – on dog collars, bed sheets, matchbooks, and the water glasses of Nazi dignitaries. It even appeared as head ornament in the form of a woman’s hat, on fruit drop candies, and embroidered onto sexy silk camisoles.2

If involvement with the party did not refinement, it did represent power, even cloaked in overt antisemitism. Further, Nazism, an ideology that did not allow women to rise to positions of actual authority and also looked down upon women working outside of the home, still appealed to millions of women. Women were warned of constant dangers from the Jews who were considered enemies of women, family, and the state. Latent and manifest antisemitism emerges when studying women’s roles in Nazi Germany, as for some antisemitic expression allowed by connections as well as personal ambitions for social and economic mobility, and the yearning for lives unconstrained by the social conservatism of their local cultures and families. Connectivity with the Nazis allowed some women to create agency, whether by giving speeches to the general public reminding German women what their ultimate role should be in the new Nazi order, or serving as the perfect wife and mother, upholding an ideal domesticity for their husbands and the government, as Lina Heydrich and Veronika (Vera) Eichmann did. Marriage also offered an elusive power connection for women, as Magda Goebbels, considered an epitome of Nazi constructed beauty and womanhood, saw. For a time, Goebbels successfully combined her public role as an important Aryan woman with marriage and motherhood. Typically for women, whether married to a top Nazi or a lower level functionary (or indeed for any German woman) their fertility was promoted by government propaganda and sanctioned by law. Domesticity was encouraged by government economic incentives, and having a fertile womb became an ideal achievement as well as a way to take part in nationalistic pride. This pride manifested itself in a fevered attempt by some women to become “pregnant for Hitler.” This was not literal, but figurative, as becoming pregnant allowed an imagined intimacy and so enabled the woman to feel a deep connection to him. Hitler even publicly stated that he provided the men for women so that they could become pregnant. In a speech, where he addressed a group of German women, Hitler stated, “In my new army I have given you the finest fathers of the world.”3 Historian George Bruce correctly identified that “sinister motives lay behind this sentimental wording: the harsh fact of woman’s total subordination to Adolf Hitler’s militaristic and expansionist foreign policies” (Bruce, 99). Hitler took over an intimate role of matchmaker for German women. It was implied in his speech that he gave women the men, now it was up to the women to make the relationship happen. This was because in order to ensure that Germany would continue as a viable state, and, at least in the eyes of the Nazis, an emergent world power, it was necessary for the population to increase. Hence, Hitler saw himself as the father

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of the nation, and as a surrogate husband of sorts for the German women, their ultimate and omnipresent protector. Women were to be wedded to the state by devoting their bodies for reproductive purposes of Nazi Germany. Controlling how women were depicted, Hitler advocated not only domestic femininity, and warned of the latent and overt dangers of the Jews as the ultimate corrupter of German women. Hitler portrayed as the protector of German womanhood against the “incursions of the vampire master,” the Jew. Hitler saw the Jew as responsible for the degradation of German society, and sought to “eliminate the snake of primal eroticism, the Jew who is trying to possess her [the German woman].”4 Hitler also saw the male Jew as someone who “fed on femininity,” a monster who sought to destroy, both morally and racially, the German woman (Dijkstra, 438). Nazi ideology emphasized domesticity as a way to protect women from corrupting elements as the Jews, who were surmised as potentially seeking to suck the virtue from the souls of German women. Thus, one of the only ways a woman could protect herself, the same woman who “was the conduit to degeneration, the weak link in the evolutionary process,” was to become a mother. Impregnation by a pure Aryan man was the only way a woman could “break the teeth of the vagina” (Dijkstra, 438). Therefore, Hitler would protect all German women from any enemy in exchange for domestic and reproductive devotion to his nationalistic cause. Thus, with the needed and expected rise in the German birthrate, Hitler cried for the need for Lebensraum (living space) for the German people. He argued that Germans suffered horribly in the aftermath of World War I, and he blamed the Jews for the economic and social hardships many Germans faced, including the loss of nationalism. Many Germans lost their homes, businesses, and farms, and combined with hyperinflation, then as conditions worsened with the advent of the Great Depression, Hitler’s promises resonated. Hitler became one for whom women held a “deep seated reverence” since he served as a “father figure for a generation that had lost its own fathers in WWI” thus as far as the Jews were concerned, many later “reveal a belated awareness of the effects of Nazi antisemitism.”5 Hitler also promised that Germany would soon recover and once again enjoy economic prosperity. Consequently, while Hitler’s ideology promised a return to morality and economic prosperity, much of Germany’s success would have to come from women who would “rescue the German family.”6 The Aryan race had to increase and multiply in order to ensure that Hitler’s ideal state would rise and continue. Therefore, National Socialism sought to establish a subservient role for women, where the woman would act, in most cases, as a reproductive mechanism for the Nazi war machine.7 Yet, to achieve maximum fertility to further the nation, women were subjected to propaganda enforcing the ideal role for them as mothers, and this is where the images of the wives of the Nazi echelon resonate.

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Although Nazi ideology and policy pressured women to activate the government promoted fertility that was sweeping Germany, a study of these women demonstrates that Nazi women were instrumental in designing and executing their state-constructed subservient role. Magda Goebbels, Lina Heydrich, and Veronika (Vera) Eichmann, three wives of critical, powerful Nazi officials, provide key examples of women’s influential roles within Adolf Hitler’s innermost circle as well as their influence on Nazi ideology and practice. This contribution will then argue that in the postwar period, their influence extended to constructing a memory that shaped their husbands as innocent bystanders and their own images as exemplary German patriots. Critical examination of these women’s self-representations shows that many Nazi wives knew much more about their husband’s roles in the Holocaust than they would admit to.8 These women also were entrenched in antisemitism, whether they took part in expressions or actions of it themselves. One had to be antisemitic in order to belong, and for some, presenting themselves as radical antisemites perhaps was attractive to men. Some historians have suggested that women may have been more pre-disposed to antisemitism, which possibly facilitated everything from supporting their Nazi spouses to taking on jobs in the camp system. Whether any predisposition to antisemitism made it easier for women to support actions against the Jews, there was a possibility that “females were slightly more likely than males to be antisemites in the early Nazi party…the accumulated and corroborated evidence indicates the females were indeed more antisemitic than males.”9 Certainly, the top echelon of women married to the men who made the Final Solution possible were associated with antisemitism. Focusing on their disavowal of their own and their spouse’s culpability reveals significant new insights into a different kind of resistance: against the exposure of Nazi atrocities and attempts to de-Nazify the nation. A key example of how this resistance to de-Nazification prevailed decades later is a 1979 interview in which Lina Heydrich (nee von Osten) asserted that her husband Reinhard, SS-Obergruppenführer, General der Polizei as well as chief of the Reich Main Security Office, whom she had married December 26, 1931, “had nothing to do with [the Final Solution].”10 Lina was blonde, stoic, and maternal and saw herself as an ideal representative of the Nazi government, quite possibly because of her feverish support of Nazism (yet she sought little public attention until much after the war had ended and then only in the context of “righting the wrongs” against what she considered false attacks on her husband’s memory). Lina was the one who had encouraged Heydrich to apply to the SS for employment. An avowed Nazi, she had initial deeper ties to the party than Heydrich. She had this status via her family connections with Karl von Eberstein, SS-Sturmführer to whom Lina had recommended Heydrich for employment.11 After her marriage to Heydrich— who had rather quickly rose in power first in the SD (Sicherheitsdienst) Secret Service, then in the SS (Schutzstaffel)—Lina was even further empowered.

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She was not afraid to state her opinion about her contemporaries, perhaps because she had an aggrandized construct of self-importance and status. She was said to have belittled Margarete Himmler, the wife of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, her husband’s superior officer, calling her “bourgeous, humourless, and stingy” with “facial twitches” (Guenther, 136). Perhaps marriage and status to the man that Hitler called the “man with the iron heart” provided Lina with agency to belittle her peers.12 Nazi women competed among themselves as to who looked the part of the ideal Aryan woman, and ostensibly for Hitler; status and marriage did not stop women from engaging critical commentary of one another because someone had to be the ideal woman by Hitler’s public side as a status symbol of Aryan feminine representation. These criticisms of fellow Nazi wives showed that women verbally gossiped over who best represented the ultimate model of Aryan femininity. Aryan feminity was important because women could not be officially involved except as party members, so they had to construct any measure of agency that they could. Restrictions against women were outlined by an early decree by Nazi officials. In 1921, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the NSDAP voted that “a woman can never be admitted into the leadership of the party and into the executive committee.”13 After her husband’s death in 1942, she continued to memorialize him until her own death. In 1976, she wrote a book Leben mit einem Kriegsverbrecher (Life with a war criminal; later reissued as My Life with Reinhard). Because Reinhard Heydrich died a general, after the war she successfully petitioned the West German government for a pension, which she received.14 In 1979, Lina, at the time of an interview, was depicted by the photographer with a brass funeral mask of her husband Reinhard over her head. She was also filmed lovingly polishing it, denying the entire time that her first husband had any culpability for the Holocaust. Instead, she argued, he was a wonderful husband who simply got caught up in Nazi politics. Along with other Nazi wives, Lina (she later argued she remarried the Finnish theater director Mauro Manninen only to be able to change her name) remained committed to the myth of Nazi triumphalism and her husband’s identity. Lina constructed herself as an innocent widow, a mother of four children, whose father was not in any way responsible for the crimes of the Third Reich. The Heydrich’s eldest daughter, Silke, also sought a postwar memorialization of her father. In a December 28, 1971, interview, Silke, a former model, argued, “Was my father an evil man? If he really was, I should be able to feel this within myself. I have watched myself for a long time and didn’t feel anything of the sort.”15 So where did this legacy of defense and denial by women connected to the Nazi regime come from? What had been instilled in the women of Nazi Germany? Hitler’s theory was this: When he came to power in 1933, women would soon be encouraged to return to their homes to fight the new Germany. The preferred role for women in the Third Reich was to have babies, and to be the prolific mother of the new German state. While National Socialism

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espoused romanticized domesticity and female subservience, the incongruous Adolf Hitler critically “relied on the devotion and support of women, even though he banished them to periphery of political life and often treated them with indifference in private. His narrow, cramped views on women’s role determined the destiny of millions.”16 National Socialism did not allow for an equal role for women in German society, and fired women from “civil service and teaching positions, although oftentimes for political reasons” whereas “in some professions, the percentage of women actually increased. For example, women doctors increased from 5.6 percent in 1930 to 7.6 percent.”17 Despite some marginal gains in a few professions, women were discouraged from taking on formal careers.18 With the rise of Nazism in the early 1930s, women were discouraged from attaching themselves to social organizations that favored emancipation and instead were encouraged to join groups coordinated by the government. The Nazis saw this as necessary to rebuild Germany from the destruction they believed was wrought upon the German people by the government that came before them. The Nazis saw the preceding Weimar Republic as a period of not only decadence, but a time in German history where “the Jew, as the ‘peoples’ vampire’, leeched the gold of masculinity from his ‘host’ by infecting all with his erotic effeminacy” (Dijkstra, 407). The Jew was to blame for the downward spiral, in the view of Adolf Hitler and members of his Nazi party, that German society endured after World War I. Moreover, Nazi ideology blamed the Jew for the rise of feminism, female promiscuity, prostitution, and the lack of morality in Germany. The Jew was depicted as a parasite that sought to corrupt good German women. In addition, the Jew was often portrayed as someone who wanted German women to have promiscuous sex outside of their racial sphere and live a life full of depravity and decadence. Thus, the extermination of the Jew coincided with the desire to protect women and idealize, on terms outlined by the Nazis, femininity: “In seeking to eradicate the Jew, Hitler also sought to eradicate the sexual woman. The Führer’s conception of a good woman was simple…the goal of female education has to invariably be the future mother” (Dijkstra, 406–407). Feminists and opposers to the Nazis did not necessarily support such a regime whose basic tenets of Nazism, elitism, and racism would in no way allow women to attain or maintain even a minor semblance of equality. Women who supported the Nazis felt by “mid-1932, that the social trend was ‘away from liberalism, towards obligations; away from the career woman, toward the housewife and mother’.”19 Thus, this found millions of women “shared the point of view advocated by the Nazis, as to a naturally determined sexual division of labour, and that it was important to reconstruct a community of the people in which they would be involved primarily as wives and mothers, and not be forced to compete with men” (Gellately, 10).

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Out of “of the estimated forty million German women in the Reich,” it has been estimated that some thirteen million women were active in Nazi party groups from 1933 to 1945 “that furthered the regime’s goals of racial purity, imperial conquest and global war.”20 These women supported, many to the very end, a regime that at heart had an abiding contempt for the female gender. National Socialists sought to return women to subordinate positions in German society, which meant from the 1933 onset of power that women were to disregard any prior economic, political, or societal quest for emancipation. Women could proudly serve their country. How? They could have babies for the Fatherland (Hitler had emphasized this in a 1935 speech where he argued women could fight for Germany via their fertility), with fertilization used as a racial weapon, a fertility armament overseen by women (although answerable to men, and, ultimately, Hitler himself). Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, a widow and mother of four children, was the head of the Nazi’s Women’s League (NS-Frauenschaft).21 The League recruited thousands of women to help construct the proper imaging of a Nazi woman in the Volksgemeinschaft. This woman was subservient to men, understood her role in the private sphere, and placed emphasis on profound fertility.22 The Nazi family was presented as one of the most important parts of the Nazi state because it had a “specific duty to fulfill. It was seen as the germ cell of the nation and as the source of völkisch renewal, through reproduction. As such, it became the most important eugenic tool.”23 National Socialism wanted to eliminate, “within a hundred years, the dark German type by mating them with blonde women” in order to create a super race of “racially” pure, blonde-haired, blue-eyed people.24 Hitler said of German women that they were “our most loyal, fanatical fellow-combatants” that were lauded for “both their activism in the Nazi movement and their biological power as generators of the race” (Toland, 764). To succeed in this goal, which the Nazis believed was necessary so that pure Germanic blood would survive, the regime established a hundred-year plan, conceived in part by Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s Reichsführer, SS. Himmler established “Lebensborn (Fountain of Life), an SS maternity organization whose main function was to enforce that ‘every SS member should father four children, in or out of wedlock’ (Toland, 764). Another was to adopt racially suitable children for childless SS families and to assist racially sound unwed mothers and their children” (Toland, 764). Children who matched racial Aryan tenets, with the hopes of creating the blonde super race, were stolen and given to SS families to raise; over 12,000 children were kidnapped and given to SS families.25 Lebensborn was also described as “stud farms where SS men and suitable young women were mated to breed a master race” (Toland, 764). A government that encouraged fertility in such a way and used women to achieve racial goals certainly did not view women in an egalitarian fashion. While many women were marginalized during the regime in order to assert Hitler’s political ideology, they could find agency within their private spheres should they wish it or have the ability to do so, typically via

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marriage but also through work, especially to memorialize their own sense of importance.26 Moreover, the societal marginalization espoused by Nazism helped to authenticate the hyper-aggressive Nazi masculine ideal. If women returned to the domestic sphere, and if the enemy of the German man was destroyed, the Nazi ideal of masculinity would reign supreme; the enemy of the German man was defined as the Jew. (Enemies that were non-Jews were defined as, but not limited to: Communists, the disabled, mentally ill, political dissenters, gypsies, and people belonging to various religious sects such as the Seventh-Day Adventists.) However, despite the masculine-oriented ideology of the Nazi party, during the 1930s and 1940s, many women in Germany proudly paid allegiance to the Third Reich. This was in spite of Nazi beliefs that mandated women not interfere with the principles of the party. Although women could not join the elite sectors of the Nazi party, they could marry a Nazi official to gain authority. Perhaps women who became involved with the SS decided that whatever role was afforded to them was the best possible under the circumstances, and for most, that avenue meant marriage. Magda Goebbels, wife of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, was one of a select group of women specifically used to define the Nazi construction of a feminine mother ideal and the ideal Aryan German woman. Although she and her second husband had six children, they had a very troubled marriage. Perhaps in way to escape her misery, Magda constructed a role for herself as the leading lady of Nazi Germany. In an interview with the Vossische Zeitung, a German newspaper, Magda, referred to as the “First Lady of the Reich,” strongly asserted that “when the German woman is confronted with the choice between marriage and career then she always will be encouraged to choose marriage since that is undoubtedly best for a woman. I am attempting to make the German woman more beautiful.”27 Following in her example and within the framework of this new role, women were to be the perfect wife and also, with the Nazi hyper-emphasis on fertility, have as many babies as possible to ensure the continuation of the German Volk (nation, people). Based on fertility, this ultimate construction of femininity by the Nazis became a way for women to take part in the construction of the new state. The government reminded women of their duties. Hundreds of warnings went out to women reminding them of their duty to the state as well as warning them of the consequences of marrying outside of the race, or, indeed, the country: “We must always attempt to persuade each German-blooded woman who is considering a relationship with a foreigner that her behavior is improper, inconsistent with the racial expectations of society. It must be clear that such behavior is a crime against the future of our people. Appropriate education will often prevent an undesirable marriage. As we have seen, current law does not prohibit the marriage of a German girl to a racially-unrelated foreigner. A marriage with a racially-related foreigner means the girl is lost to German ethnicity. In both cases, the marriage is more dangerous and less desirable that the marriage of a German man to

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a foreigner. Educating German women about this is urgently necessary. As a last resort, of course, there is the possibility of legal measures to combat racial threats to the German people. It is much better, however, to avoid letting it come to that, but rather lead each German girl to be aware of and proud of her German ethnicity.”28 Indeed, at a very early age, girls were “encouraged to prepare for motherhood and given practice in tasks befitting the woman’s role in the Volksgemeinschaft” a role that Magda Goebbels perfectly emulated (Wall, 105). However, this imaging was by Nazi standards faulty in many respects: Magda had a Jewish stepfather, drank, smoked and was divorced. Furthermore, she possessed “steely determination and inordinate ambition, characteristics that Nazi male officials preened themselves on, but would have strongly discouraged the female sex from developing” (Guenther, 132). She also wore makeup, “while the general female public was being bombarded with placards and announcements that the German woman does not use makeup” (Guenther, 131).29 Magda later committed suicide after killing her six youngest children. In death, she sought to establish a personal memory, as devoted Nazi who sacrificed herself and her children because of her immortal love for Hitler. This is seen in her final letter to her eldest son, Harald Quandt: “Last night, the Führer took off his golden party pin and pinned it to me. I am proud and happy. May God help that I have the strength to perform the last and hardest task (killing herself and her children). We only have one goal left: loyalty to the Führer even in death and to be able to end our lives with him is an honor. Harald, my dear son — I want to give you what I learned in life: Be loyal! Loyal to yourself, loyal to the German people and loyal to your fatherland […] Be proud of us and try to keep us in dear memory …”.30 Magda left it to her surviving child to create for posterity an image of her in a world she was not brave enough to face. Other women were not so publicly prominent in the regime. Vera Eichmann remains one such wife memorialized primarily as the devoted spouse of Adolf Eichmann, the man responsible for the Final Solution. It is she who remains a quasi-elusive figure, surprisingly, given the depth of historical analysis of her husband. Contemporary glimpses of her are found. Vera has been largely absent from the larger historical filmic narratives (she was most recently depicted in the Netflix 2018 film Operation Finale) concerning her husband, the architect of the Final Solution. If portrayed at all, as in Operation Finale, she was depicted as a maternalistic, devoted, romantic mother. This “stout woman” (as characterized by West German officials) appears to not have comprehended, or quite possibly even cared about, the dangers of identifying who she was even when her family was in hiding in Argentina. She did not even change her or her children’s names when applying for passports: “[she] walked into the German Embassy in the Argentine capital and applied for passports for her two older sons. She wrote in the applications that the young men ‘might want to travel to Germany during vacations to visit relatives.’ The woman’s name was Vera

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Eichmann. She presented the sons’ birth certificates and her marriage certificate. The passports were issued.”31 After Eichmann was sentenced to be executed, Vera, in perhaps a last-ditch effort to appeal to the unspoken universal respect for maternity, did ask that her husband’s life be spared, stating that “After rejection of the appeal, my husband’s fate is in your hands. As a wife and mother of four children, I ask your honor for my husband’s life.”32 Did Vera discuss or acknowledge her husband’s crimes? Pictures of her at his trial show her holding Eichmann’s memoirs. Was this absent memory of her husband’s culpability for the Holocaust real or simply too horrible for her to comprehend given their loving relationship? Did it matter if it did? To her, Eichmann was her husband, her lover, and the father of her children. Perhaps for Vera the shock of his criminality was something she could not cope with externally. We shall never know. However, tantalizing excerpts can be found of what she said or did not say about her husband. For one glimpse, we can look to her youngest son (born in 1955 while the Eichmanns were in hiding) Ricardo, a historian. Ricardo said this about his mother: “My mother kept all the newspaper cuttings about him [Eichmann] under the sofa. I would creep under there and peek at them. I understood bits and pieces but not the whole picture. When I asked my mother, she would say, ‘Lass das’ — ‘leave it.’ It was a taboo subject and stayed that way till my mother died two years ago. […] And it would have been better if [my mother] had talked to me. I wanted to challenge her, but I saw her inner turmoil. I loved her, and she loved my father. What was I supposed to do?”33 Ricardo’s own words explain the tumult that he witnessed his mother going through with the loss of her husband and his father. Yet, this very same spouse and dad was responsible for the murder of millions of innocents. Later, when Eichmann was captured and sentenced to death, Vera moved back to Germany with her family, living on assistance from relatives as Nazi widows were not entitled to any monies from the government (Lina Heydrich was an exception). Vera remains an elusive figure. In Munich, awaiting Eichmann’s sentencing, she was photographed reading Eichmann’s memoirs. This incredulous image portrays her as resolute, and somewhat forced. Did she really need to read a book about her husband in order to understand one of history’s most notorious mass murderers? One way to approach this picture is to consider whether or not Vera was making an attempt to construct a memory of herself as an unwitting spouse of a man she had to read about to comprehend what he had done. Her youngest son Ricardo asserted that his mother never explained what his father did. He also said that after his father’s capture and execution, that “the family returned to Germany shortly after the trial began, and Eichmann said his mother, Veronika, never told him what his father did or how his father died.”34 Thus, she removed accountability and attempted to escape familial culpability by creating an amnesiac, or absent memory.35 Vera remains one of the Nazi wives whose biography is still not fully flushed out. Is she deserving of future

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scholarly examination in order to better understand, how, if at all, she imaged herself as the wife of one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany? Unlike Magda Goebbels and Lina Heydrich, little suggests that Vera Eichmann attempted to establish herself as another “bride of Hitler” as a self-designated “First Lady of the Reich,” significant because this asserts that Vera sought little public recognition for herself during her marriage and made no public attempt after her husband’s death to defend his honor. Instead, she said little to her children about their father, and kept her own memories of him to herself. In general, images of women in Nazi Germany typified an unrealistic quest for women to achieve a look that reflected “a Nordic priestess preaching the cult of womanhood” (Guenther, 131). If women did not meet this standard, they were subjected to disparaging remarks or verbal bullying by their peers. Wives could bring down their husbands because of their own indiscretions or hint of Jewish identity. Reinhard Heydrich attempted to destroy some generals and other Nazis that he had issues with. In order to do this, Heydrich would investigate their wives. Thus, via marriage, men could be gotten rid of. All Heydrich had to do was distort their wives’ image and reputation. This was done typically by implying a past, such as prior moral misconduct such as an abortion, sexual indiscretions, Judaic connections or ancestral Jewish identity. Therefore, even a mother of the Volk proved useful to discredit their husbands.36 If a woman’s character was defamed, she was also disposable if such charges were decreed should stand. Marriage could be a dangerous game in the Third Reich. Women were essential in Nazism not just for fertility, but also used as a tool to get rid of men deemed a threat, perhaps explaining the rationale as to why so many women went along with the domestic Nazi fantasy of a fertile, devoted wife. If they did not, their actions could fall on their husbands. Perhaps they were scared of what could happen with a stained marital legacy. How did these women reconcile having husbands who bore responsibility for the Holocaust? Most portrayed themselves as upholders of a valiant and courageous idea of domesticity, with husbands deserving of mercy, as Vera Eichmann argued. Lina Heydrich said of Reinhard that he was an innocent victim of Nazi policies even though he was “the main architect of the Final Solution. He was chief of the Reich Security Main Office, the SS and police agencies most directly concerned with implementing the Nazi plan to murder the Jews.”37 Others absented themselves like Vera Eichmann. Magda Goebbels committed suicide because she could not conceive of a world without Hitler. During the Third Reich, these individuals competed as to who best represented a “refashion of female citizenry” (Guenther, 130). Self- and government-designated constructions of women as fertile archetypes represented the “First Lady of the Reich Myth.” Postwar, wives perpetrated falsehoods by mythologizing their own innocence, as well as that of their husbands. This was done either via their arguments for their spouses’

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innocence or their absence of acknowledgment for their husbands’ crimes. Consequently, this rendered the Nazi male perpetrators, at least in the eyes of their wives, less historically culpable for the Holocaust. Theoretically, then, in analyzing fertility and marital constructs of Aryan feminity, this chapter offers critical intervention in studies that privilege women’s moral and political righteousness rendering it important to understanding women’s roles in Nazi Germany.

Notes







1.  Spartacus Educational, “Magda Goebbels,” https://spartacus-educational. com/Magda_Goebbels.htm. 18 February 2019. 2. Irene Guenther, Nazi Chic: Fashioning Women in the Third Reich (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 136–138. 3. George Bruce, The Nazis (London: The Hamlyn Publishing Group, 1974), 99. Bruce asserted further “speaking generally, however, Hitler wanted more children for the Hitler Youth and young men for the expanded Reichswehr” an assertion that challenges his theory that “no obstacles” existed for women even if they were of “exceptional” ability. See ibid. 4. Bram Dijkstra, Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 438. 5. Elizabeth Baer and Myrna Goldenberg, Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), 9–10. 6.  Jack G. Morrison, Ravensbrück: Everyday Life in a Women’s Concentration Camp, 1939–1945 (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2000), 4–5. 7. Leila J. Rupp, Mobilizing Women for War: German and American Propaganda, 1939–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), see pp. 11–16. For Rupp’s interpretation on the status of literature on women and Nazi ideology, reference n. 6, pp. 13–14. 8. Baer further stated that “In the face of antisemitism, German Christian women’s groups were silent and passive, unsupportive of Jewish women’s groups with whom they worked for before the Nazi rise to power. This apparent inconsistency between moral and political responsibility is also evident in the interviews of the wives of the leaders of the July 20, 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler. Most of the eleven widows reveal a belated awareness of the effects of Nazi antisemitism.” See Baer, p. xxii. 9. Why were females supposed to have been more antisemitic than the men? Sarah Gordon argued that there is valid evidence to validate this claim. In part, Gordon took her information from Peter Merkl’s Political Violence Under the Swastika: 581 Early Nazis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975). Merkl’s research suggested, “Females were not great aiders of Jews.” Gordon also reminded the reader “accumulated and corroborative evidence indicates that females were indeed more antisemitic than were males.” See Gordon, p. 303. However, Gordon also noted that Merck’s tables, which used numbers from 1933, showed women were slightly over characterized than men as antisemites, thus, the data may have been skewed to represent German women as more antisemitic than German men. See Sarah Gordon, Hitler, Germans, and the ‘Jewish Question’ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 58–60.

738  W. ADELE-MARIE 10. “Widow of Heydrich Says ‘Holocaust’ Ignores Facts,” The New York Times, February 7, 1979, p. 2. Lina also wrote to many periodicals “correcting” them for what she alleged were falsehoods against Reinhard Heydrich’s memory. 11. Adrian Weale, The SS: A New History (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 2010), 78. 12. Mario Dederichs, Heydrich: The Face of Evil (Drexel Hill, PA: Casemate, 2009), 92. 13.  Karl Dietrich Bracher, The German Dictatorship: The Origins, Structure, and Effects of National Socialism (New York and Washington, DC: Praeger Publishers, 1970), 87. 14. Note Robert Gerwarth’s Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), passim. 15.  See Joachim Moskau, “Nazi Children Reflect on Dad,” Boca Raton News, December 28, 1971. Heydrich’s only surviving son also supported the idea of his father’s lack of provable culpability for the Holocaust. In 2012, on the 70th anniversary of the Wannsee Conference, the British newspaper The Mirror tracked down “Despite the unspeakable sins of his father, when the Mirror this week tracked down Heydrich’s only surviving son Heider, now 77, he told us he would not be attending any of the memorial services – and even seemed to try to excuse his family history ‘If you examine the files of the German foreign office and the files of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, you will not see a mention of a secret programme,’ he stated.” See: “Seventy Years on from the Most Murderous Meeting in History—The Nazi’s Wannsee Conference,” The Mirror, https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/70years-on-from-the-most-murderous-meeting-159754. 27 January 2019. 16. Cate Haste, Nazi Women: Hitler’s Seduction of a Nation (London: Channel 4 Books, 2001), 7–8. 17. Jackson Spielvogel and David Redles, Hitler and Nazi Germany: A History, 6th ed. (Boston: Prentice Hall, 2010), 171. 18.  Spielvogel pointed out the war changed everything since female labor was absolutely necessary to win the war. He further argued that “The Nazis would almost certainly have insisted on returning women to their ‘natural’ occupations if they had won the war.” See ibid., 171. 19. Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 10. 20. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Women in the Third Reich,” Collections Highlights, www.ushmm.org/research/research-in-collections/ collections-highlights/women-in-the-third-reich. 28 July 2017. 21. See Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, Die Frau in Dritten Reich (Tübingen: Grabert, 1978), and Haste, p. 93. For a short biography of Scholtz-Klink, see Shaaron Cosner, Women Under the Third Reich (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1998), 140. Besides Magda Goebbels and Scholtz-Klink, other women emulated the ultimate construction of the Nazi “Frau,” such as Winifred Wagner, Viktoria von Dirksen, Helen Bechstein, and Baroness Karin von Kantzow, Hermann Göring’s first wife. See Ian Sayer and Douglas Botting, The Women Who Knew Hitler: The Private Life of Adolf Hitler (New York: Carroll and Graft, 2004), passim. 22. Donald D. Wall, Nazi Germany and World War II, 2nd ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2003), 106–107.



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23. Lisa Pine, Nazi Family Policy: 1939–1945 (Oxford: Berg, 1997), 10. Völkisch in this context meant nationalistic. 24. John Toland, Adolf Hitler (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1976), 764. 25. Andrew Malone, “Stolen by the Nazis: The Tragic Tale of 12,000 Blue-Eyed Blond Children Taken by the SS to Create an Aryan Super-Race,” The Daily Mail Online, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1111170/Stolen-Nazis-Thetragic-tale-12-000-blue-eyed-blond-children-taken-SS-create-Aryan-superrace.html. 23 April 2010. 26. See Claudia Koonz, “A Tributary and a Mainstream: Gender, Public Memory, and Historiography of Nazi Germany,” in Gendering Modern Germany History: Rewriting Historiography, eds. Karen Hagemann and Jean H. Quataert (New York: Bergbahn Books, 2007), especially pp. 151–152, where Koonz states that it was true of oppression regimes where when private spheres are mandated as the norm for women, where it can then be seen how these actors “simultaneously allowed the women who operated within those spheres to exert agency, in fact, that is precisely how oppression functions. Ordinary women could be the victims of misogyny as well as beneficiaries (and sometimes facilitators) of racial persecution.” 27. Clifford Kirkpatrick, Nazi Germany: Its Women and Family Life (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1938), 117, 319. Many women who were involved with the Nazi party did not commit crimes against humanity. Further, Clifford provided a contemporary overview of German women in the 1930s. See also Baer, 278. 28. See: Nachrichtendienst der Reichsfrauenführung Sonderdienst 10, # 16 (September 1941), https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/ rff-sonderdienst.htm. 11 January 2018. 29. Also, The National Socialist Women’s Yearbook of 1934 “reveals women without makeup, without jewelry, and with large hips were considered the ideal Aryan woman in Nazi Germany. The Chairwoman of the Association for German Women’s Culture, Agnes Gerlach claimed the ideal woman had become the ‘big Germanic type of woman’ instead of the France’s ‘small, romantic type.’ Nazi propaganda highlighted larger women with large, child bearing hips. Gerlach’s article stated it was un-German to use products to change hair color or to change one’s looks with cosmetics. The image of the thin French woman was emotionally damaging to German women in Gerlach’s opinion. Similarly, the Jewish influence was thought to include too much focus on accessorizing and overly made up women. According to Nazi propaganda, Jewish and French woman were not strong or able to bear as many children because they were petite. The German woman was superior and did not need to use these enhancing products to be beautiful. The ideal German woman did not need to blend in with other women of the world. They were supposed to be the superior race; therefore, their women did not need doctoring to be beautiful and perfect.” See Agnes Gerlach, The National Socialist Women’s Yearbook of 1934 (Germany: National Socialist Women’s Organization, 1934), https://alphahistory.com/nazigermany/women-in-nazi-germany/. 15 December 2018. 30.  Philip Richter, “The Dark Side of a Great Company: BMW’s Ties to the Third Reich,” Turtle Garage: The Past, Present, and Future of the Automobile, http://www.turtlegarage.com/2017/06/15/the-dark-side-of-a-great-company-bmw-and-the-third-reich/. 1 December 2018.

740  W. ADELE-MARIE 31.  Spiegel, “The Long Road to Eichmann’s Arrest: A Nazi War Criminal’s Life in Argentina,” http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/the-long-roadto-eichmann-s-arrest-a-nazi-war-criminal-s-life-in-argentina-a-754486.html. 15 December 2018. 32.  Ofer Aderet, “Eichmann Refused to Admit Guilt in Last-Ditch Bid for Clemency,” Haaretz, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-eichmann-refused-to-admit-guilt-in-last-ditch-bid-for-clemency-1.5396373. 31 January 2019. 33. See Palash Ghosh, “Legacy of the Third Reich: Eichmann’s Remorseful Son,” International Business Times, https://www.ibtimes.com/legacy-third-reich-eichmanns-remorseful-son-1048816. 5 December 2018. 34.  “Eichmann’s Son: There Is No Way I Can Explain Deeds,” The Jewish News of Northern California, June 9, 1995, https://www.jweekly. com/1995/06/09/eichmann-s-son-there-is-no-way-i-can-explain-deeds/. 29 November 2018. 35. I refer the reader to Steven Ramirez, et al., “Creating a False Memory in the Hippocampus,” Science, July 26, 2013, http://science.sciencemag.org/content/341/6144/387.full. 11 January 2019. 36. Edmund L. Blandford, SS Intelligence: The Nazi Secret Service (Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 2001), 41–42, 127–128 and 129–133. 37.  United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Reinhard Heydrich,” Collections Highlights, www.ushmm.org/research/research-in-collections/ collections-highlights/women-in-the-third-reich. 20 May 2018. This also later lent to how German women were hypersexually portrayed postwar.

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DeGrazia, Victoria. How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922–1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Dijkstra, Bram. Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. Dornemann, Louise. German Women Under Hitler Fascism: A Brief Survey of the Position of the German Women Up to the Present Day. London: Allies Inside Germany, 1943. Eichmann’s Son: There Is No Way I Can Explain Deeds. The Jewish News of Northern California. June 9, 1995. https://www.jweekly.com/1995/06/09/eichmann-sson-there-is-no-way-i-can-explain-deeds/. 29 November 2018. Gellately, Robert. Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Gerlach, Agnes. The National Socialist Women’s Yearbook of 1934. Germany: National Socialist Women’s Organization, 1934. https://alphahistory.com/nazigermany/ women-in-nazi-germany/. 15 December 2018. Gerwarth, Robert. Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011. Ghosh, Palash. “Legacy of the Third Reich: Eichmann’s Remorseful Son.” International Business Times. https://www.ibtimes.com/legacy-third-reich-eichmanns-remorseful-son-1048816. 5 December 2018. Gordon, Sarah. Hitler, Germans, and the ‘Jewish Question’. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Guenther, Irene. Nazi Chic: Fashioning Women in the Third Reich. Oxford: Berg, 2004. Haste, Cate. Nazi Women: Hitler’s Seduction of a Nation. London: Channel 4 Books, 2001. Heydrich, Lina. Lebem mit einem Kriegsverbrecher. Ludwig: 1976. Kirkpatrick, Clifford. Nazi Germany: Its Women and Family Life. New York: BobbsMerrill, 1938. Koonz, Claudia. Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987. ———. “A Tributary and a Mainstream: Gender, Public Memory, and Historiography of Nazi Germany.” In Gendering Modern Germany History: Rewriting Historiography, edited by Karen Hagemann and Jean H. Quataert. New York: Bergbahn Books, 2007. Malone, Andrew. “Stolen by the Nazis: The Tragic Tale of 12,000 Blue-Eyed Blond Children Taken by the SS to Create an Aryan Super-Race.” The Daily Mail Online. www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1111170/Stolen-Nazis-The-tragic-tale-12-000blue-eyed-blond-children-taken-SS-create-Aryan-super-race.html. 23 April 2010. Mason, Timothy. “Women in Germany, 1925–1940: Family, Welfare, and Work. Part II.” History Workshop (January 1976): 5–32. Merkl, Peter. Political Violence Under the Swastika: 581 Early Nazis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975. Morrison, Jack G. Ravensbrück: Everyday Life in a Women’s Concentration Camp, 1939–1945. Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2000. Moskau, Joachim. “Nazi Children Reflect on Dad.” Boca Raton News, December 28, 1971.

742  W. ADELE-MARIE Nachrichtendienst der Reichsfrauenführung Sonderdienst 10, # 16 (September 1941). https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/rff-sonderdienst.htm. 11 January 2018. Pine, Lisa. Nazi Family Policy: 1939–1945. Oxford: Berg, 1997. Potter, Jane. “Women in War and Peace.” In The Routledge History of Women in Europe Since 1700, edited by Deborah Simonton. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Ramirez, Steven. “Creating a False Memory in the Hippocampus.” Science, July 26, 2013. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/341/6144/387.full. 11 January 2019. Richter, Philip. “The Dark Side of a Great Company: BMW’s Ties to the Third Reich.” Turtle Garage: The Past, Present, and Future of the Automobile. http:// www.turtlegarage.com/2017/06/15/the-dark-side-of-a-great-company-bmwand-the-third-reich/. 1 December 2018. Rupp, Leila J. “Mother of the Volk: The Image of Women in Nazi Ideology.” Journal of Military History 3, no. 3 (Winter 1977): 362–379. Scholtz-Klink, Gertrud. Die Frau im Dritten Reich. Tübingen: Grabert, 1978. Seventy Years on from the Most Murderous Meeting in History—The Nazi’s Wannsee Conference. The Mirror. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/70-years-onfrom-the-most-murderous-meeting-159754. 27 January 2019. Spartacus Educational. “Magda Goebbels.” https://spartacuseducational.com/ Magda_Goebbels.htm. 18 February 2019. Spielvogel, Jackson, and David Redles. Hitler and Nazi Germany: A History, 6th ed. Boston: Prentice Hall, 2010. Stephenson, Jill. Women in Nazi Society. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1975. The Long Road to Eichmann’s Arrest: A Nazi War Criminal’s Life in Argentina. Spiegel. http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/the-long-road-to-eichmann-s-arresta-nazi-war-criminal-s-life-in-argentina-a-754486.html. 15 December 2018. Toland, John. Adolf Hitler. New York: Doubleday & Co., 1976. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Women in the Third Reich.” Collections Highlights. www.ushmm.org/research/research-in-collections/collections-highlights/women-in-the-third-reich. 28 July 2017. Vronsky, Peter. Female Serial Killers: How and Why Women Become Monsters. New York: Berkley Books, 2007. Wall, Donald D. Nazi Germany and World War II, 2nd ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2003. Weale, Adrian. The SS: A New History. Boston: Little Brown and Company, 2010. Widow of Heydrich Says ‘Holocaust’ Ignores Facts. The New York Times, February 7, 1979. Wiggerhaus, Renate. “Women in the Third Reich.” Connexions 36 (1991): 10–11.

CHAPTER 40

Reconsidering Jewish Rage After the Holocaust Margarete Myers Feinstein

In the waning days of the Second World War, Germans were convinced that Jews would take revenge on them. Particularly in the East, Germans fled from the advancing Soviet army and liberated concentration camp inmates. The anticipated wholesale slaughter at the hands of Jews, and the Allied forces allegedly doing their bidding, failed to materialize. Along with a myth of silence, there developed a myth that Jews had not sought vengeance. In the 1990s, a flurry of books and articles challenged the idea that Jews had forgone revenge. According to journalists and scholars, members of the Jewish Brigade of the British Army and the former partisans organized as the Avengers carried out extrajudicial executions and, in the case of the Avengers, attempted mass killings of SS men, while ordinary survivors displaced their vengeful impulses into symbolic forms of revenge. It was at this time that Naomi Seidman published her article exposing differences between Elie Wiesel’s La nuit/Night and its Yiddish-language precursor Un di velt hot geshvign. Seidman identified evidence of survivor revenge acts and fantasies in the Yiddish volume that Wiesel omitted when he revised the work for a non-Jewish audience. According to Seidman, this difference can be explained by Wiesel’s realization that Jewish rage would be unacceptable to a Christian audience, and thus he censored himself in the search for a wider readership. Responses to Seidman’s article have focused on the texts of the two works. An examination of survivor memoirs and oral interviews and Wiesel’s later writings, however, demonstrates that the differences can be explained by a change in Wiesel’s attitude.

M. M. Feinstein (*)  Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA, USA © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_40

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Survivor narratives demonstrate that Jewish rage was a real force in the immediate postwar period. Yet, over time, some of those who had engaged in revenge, who had believed that all Germans should suffer, came to revise their opinions. This change suggests an explanation for the differences between Wiesel’s two works. Seidman has argued that in Un di velt hot geshvign “the Yiddish survivor is alive with a vengeance and eager to break the wall of indifference he feels surrounds him,” but finding the non-Jewish audience he wanted was only accomplished, … by foregrounding the reticent and mournful Jew who will speak only when at the urging of the older Catholic writer. Wiesel began by preaching to the Jewish converted, but soon enough, one might say, the preacher himself underwent a kind of conversion. By the time Wiesel was negotiating with his French publishers, the survivor who pointed an accusatory finger at Ilsa Koch, then raising her children in the new postwar Germany, had been supplanted by the survivor haunted by metaphysics and silence.1

The negotiations between Wiesel, his French mentor, and his publishers, it would seem, led to the universalization of the Holocaust and a muting of Jewishness in the French text. “This sublimation [of Jewish vengeance], after all, was Wiesel’s ticket into the literature of non-Jewish Europe (“Scandal,” 15).” According to this interpretation, Wiesel had removed expressions of vengeance from Un di velt hot geshvign in order to find a non-Jewish audience for La nuit. The evidence from survivor narratives, however, demonstrates a plausible alternative explanation, namely that Wiesel had experienced a change of heart. From this perspective, the differences reflected in La nuit embodied the sentiments Wiesel had at the time that he was reworking the text from Yiddish into French. Two later works also point to Wiesel’s evolving sentiment. After his first trip to Germany since his liberation, Wiesel wrote, in the 1962 essay “An Appointment With Hate,” of the dissipation of his hatred for Germans. Here he announces that hatred could not continue in changed circumstances. At the same time, he proclaims that Jews did not seek revenge after liberation. In 1983s Le cinquième fils/The Fifth Son, Wiesel acknowledges the post-liberation (unfulfilled) desire for revenge but argues that worldly justice is best achieved through the use of words while vengeance should be left to God. Using Holocaust survivor personal narratives as a comparison reveals that the differences in the expression of Jewish rage between Un di velt hot geshvign and Night can be explained by Wiesel’s evolving attitudes rather than an attempt to moderate his message for a Christian audience. At the same time, they also demonstrate that Wiesel, by using a definition of revenge that only applied to mass killings, helped to construct a myth about the lack of Jewish vengeance.

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Defining Revenge Complicating the discussion of revenge is this problem of definition. When in Un di velt hot geshvign, Wiesel states that the “historic commandment [mitzvah] of vengeance was not fulfilled” by theft and rape, he refers to the Biblical commandment to blot out the memory of Amalek.2 Rabbis understood the commandment to be a call for the annihilation of the Amalekites and even in ancient times wrestled with the morally troublesome commandment. Some rabbis have suggested that Amalek refers to an evil inclination and that Jews are to engage in an inner spiritual battle to eradicate Amalek, while others defer the final battle with the Amalekites until the dawn of the Messianic Age.3 Wiesel’s observation that theft and rape fell short of fulfilling the commandment suggests that, like many survivors, he viewed the Germans as descendants of Amalek and that only their annihilation would satisfy the commandment. With such a definition of vengeance, Jewish responses after the Shoah clearly fell short. Some scholars define revenge as a “destructive response” that is disproportionate to the severity of the injury.4 With this definition, it also would be seemingly impossible for Holocaust survivors to imagine or engage in revenge. Indeed, many survivors mention the impossibility of exacting revenge on the Germans, because it would be impossible for them to inflict comparable (let alone greater) damage to what they had suffered. As one survivor notes, “There’s a great temptation to think about killing and one does think of it, but if one kills one German or kills ten Germans, it’s not much of an exchange.”5 The magnitude of German crimes made revenge virtually unthinkable. The Avengers, a group of former partisans under the leadership of Abba Kovner, was an organization that sought to inflict losses on the Germans similar to those suffered by the Jews. Determined to kill 6 million Germans in order to demonstrate to the world that it could not murder Jews with impunity, the Avengers planned to poison urban water supplies in Germany. The plan failed when the team ran into logistical problems.6 The Avengers did succeed in gaining access to a bakery that supplied a prison camp for SS men, poisoning the bread and causing illness but few, if any, deaths.7 There would be, could be, no revenge taken equal to, let alone greater than, the injury inflicted on the Jews. Revenge is often used interchangeably with vengeance, yet some scholars differentiate between the two based on the emotions behind them. Revenge is thus characterized by resentment, while vengeance is associated with moral outrage and anger. Retribution is applied to thoughts and acts that are deemed equal and appropriate to the original offense, motivated by a desire to restore justice. Retaliation is used for instances based on the talion principle of proportionate response (“Revenge After Trauma,” 47). Like revenge, even retaliation was hard for survivors to achieve. One woman survivor recalled, “Look, we didn’t do to them what they did to us really.

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We tried to beat them and shave off the hair like they did to us, but this is nothing. They’re still alive. We didn’t burn them like they burned us.”8 The enormity of German crimes overwhelms the fine distinctions of these categories. When survivors spoke of revenge, they meant a variety of things. For some, revenge was impossible, because to them it meant inflicting comparable pain onto the Germans, which was beyond their capabilities. For others, revenge meant holding former SS guards accountable, by denouncing them to Allied authorities or physically assaulting them. For some survivors, revenge was destroying German property, raping German women. Others found revenge in humbling the once haughty Germans, hiring them to do manual labor or pimping German women. And for many survivors, revenge was demonstrating that Germans had failed to destroy the Jewish people. Having babies and working to create a Jewish state were symbolic forms of revenge, a sign of Jewish victory over German plans for them. What all of these thoughts and behaviors have in common is a desire to assert agency over Germans, to take back power and to use it in some way to hurt, humiliate, punish, or defeat the perpetrators. It is in this sense, that I will use the term revenge and interchange it with vengeance and retribution.

Personal Narratives In the debates that followed the publication of Seidman’s article, scholars have either accepted Seidman’s explanation for Wiesel’s edits or have sought to defend Wiesel by emphasizing the similarities between the two works. Some have even explained that what appears to be rage in Yiddish is in fact a misreading, that in the context of postwar Germany fargvaltikn really should be translated as “coucher avec” [to sleep with] rather than rape.9 While there is merit to the general point of the expressiveness of the Yiddish language, it is hard to imagine that German women would willingly sleep with recently released concentration camp inmates, who were emaciated, smelly, and probably lice-ridden and whom the women assumed to be criminals because of their prisoner uniforms and haircuts. Another way to gauge the level of hyperbole in Un di velt hot geshvign is to compare it to other survivor personal narratives. As we shall see through an examination of survivor oral history interviews and memoirs, Jewish rage did indeed exist. For information about revenge thoughts and actions, we must rely on survivor memoirs and oral history interviews. There are few other records available. Most acts of vengeance did not result in legal proceedings against the survivors, given the sympathy of the occupying powers that retained jurisdiction over them. Those few cases that did enter court records are nearly impossible to locate, since archives do not have a search mechanism for locating them. As with any document, memoirs and oral histories require careful

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reading. The subject of revenge is sensitive, and as a consequence, survivors may censure themselves when discussing it. Social norms, gender, and fear of prosecution can each play a role.

Psychology of Revenge Until the 1990s psychology tended to classify revenge as pathology, an illness. An Australian nurse working in the Belsen DP camp wrote home about a German Jew who became mentally ill “and after causing a good deal of disturbance in the village in his endeavor to destroy the last SS man, the British Army Authorities placed him in a German mental asylum and we do not know his fate.”10 The major indication of this survivor’s instability was his revenge acts. Survivors understandably would be reluctant to speak of revenge thoughts or acts under such conditions. Recently, psychologists have affirmed vengefulness as a normal stage of post-trauma recovery. Judith Herman defines revenge fantasies as resistance to mourning, mourning being an important aspect of the second stage of recovery (retelling the story and integrating it into one’s life story).11 Although revenge fantasies are a normal response, she argues that they are harmful over time, since they bind victim to perpetrator. Thus, therapy needs to help survivors of trauma to replace revenge with a quest for justice. Revenge fantasies, she asserts, “exacerbate the victim’s feelings of horror and degrade her image of herself. They make her feel like a monster” (Trauma and Recovery, 89). The recognition that vengeful thoughts are normal, at least in the short-term, was an advance. More recent research suggests that revenge thoughts can be beneficial. Ira Gäbler and Andreas Maercker point out that, In the context of coping and restoration of self-concept and self-worth, it seems that revenge emotions and cognitions can be regarded as useful reactions to trauma that positively impact the mental processes triggered by injury and suffering. Indeed, feelings or fantasies of revenge have benefits for the individual, by providing satisfaction, reassurance, and experience of power and control. (“Revenge After Trauma,” 45–46)

Thus, revenge thoughts alone are not harmful to survivors of trauma. Miriam Berger affirms the changes in psychologists’ understanding of revenge, noting that psychoanalysis has categorized vengefulness as an illness or primitive aggression, whereas it is actually a normal reaction, “a response to disruptions in mutual recognition.”12 The shift in psychology toward viewing revenge fantasies as a normal, even beneficial, reaction to trauma may help to explain the increase in survivors discussing the subject. At the same time, other factors may influence the willingness of survivors to discuss revenge. Notions of gender can also determine what men and women choose to reveal.

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Gendered Narrative Construction According to his videotaped interview, two days after his liberation at Dachau, Sidney Glucksman borrowed a rifle from an American soldier and went to confront a German who lived outside of the camp. Entering the man’s home, he extracted a confession from the German that he had served in the army and had known about the camp but had been helpless to do anything about it. Sidney Glucksman killed him. Asked whether the German had been home alone, Glucksman recalled that the man’s wife and daughter were both present, and that the daughter was “a somebody” because she was wearing a uniform. When the interviewer asked why he had not also shot them, his smooth narration became disjointed, “I didn’t think I had the heart. I was so full of hatred. I never thought of—a woman or daughter would be—that I could do something like this.” He concluded that he left the house without saying anything more and went looking for more Germans. He found very few men in the houses and most of them were too old to have been involved, but he was certain that the town of Dachau was full of Nazis.13 Sidney Glucksman’s interview is interesting for a number of reasons. Despite Seidman’s 1996 article, historians have continued either to deny or to minimize the existence of Jewish physical revenge, and Glucksman’s testimony prompts us to reexamine those assumptions. Indeed, survivors frequently had thoughts of revenge in response to the trauma that they had experienced, and some exacted physical revenge through beating, head shaving, and even killing. Glucksman’s response to the interviewer also shows that gender influenced revenge as men and women had different experiences and attitudes that shaped their revenge behavior. Glucksman, for example, had not imagined shooting a woman, not even one wearing a uniform. The wife and daughter’s identities as women were more important to him than their identities as Germans. Another survivor who was part of a group that burned down a German farm and beat the farmer recalled, “But we couldn’t kill. It was hard to—especially a woman. We couldn’t hit a woman.”14 In another example, Abba Kovner, the former partisan and leader of the Avengers, asserted both that “there is no such thing as an innocent German” and that “neither my comrades nor I ever preached hatred of the German people but rather its responsibility, and we never wanted to harm women and children” (Fall of a Sparrow, 235–236). This last statement is somewhat surprising given the Avengers’ unrealized plot to poison urban German water supplies. It is likely, however, that both statements were true despite their incongruity. Male survivors, socialized to protect women, were less likely to beat or kill German women than they would German men. Like Sidney Glucksman, other male survivors participated in assaults on German men but did not beat or kill the German women who were present. This was also true for Herschel Balter, who was part of a group that tracked down and beat a concentration camp guard and turned him over

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to US authorities while leaving the guard’s wife unharmed.15 Jewish men tended not to include German women in the category of perpetrators. Not everyone viewed German women as innocent. Jewish women were more likely than Jewish men to have experienced German women as guards and kapos, making it easier for Jewish women to include German women in their definition of perpetrators. When Jewish women attacked Germans, their blows most often landed on German women. Thus, gendered experiences as well as gender norms may have influenced acts of revenge and their retelling. Men might be more likely to discuss revenge in order to appear more powerful and masculine. Certainly, there were male survivors who worried that their failure to take revenge reflected poorly on them as men. Robert Mendler refused to shoot a German kapo when an American soldier gave him the opportunity. The American killed the German himself. Mendler reflects, “I should have killed him. I couldn’t. I just couldn’t do it. I should have done, maybe, but I couldn’t do it.”16 The belief that he should have been able to kill the German most likely stemmed from a definition of masculinity that emphasized physical reprisals. Raised in a traditional yet Zionist home, Jacob Biber wrestled with the conflicting messages he had received. As a child, he was taught to forgive. “I have asked myself, ‘Did this teaching make me a weakling? Was I a weakling for not trying to avenge the spilled blood of my family?’ […] There was no forgiveness in my heart […] But after the war I could not find it in my heart to seek revenge.”17 Zionist masculinity expected the new Jewish man to be strong, physical, and to take up arms in defense of the community. It was this masculine ideal that caused Biber to question whether he was weak for not taking revenge. In contrast to men who felt that their masculinity required them to take revenge, women might minimize their revenge thoughts and behavior in order to conform to norms of femininity. Psychologists have found that men are more likely to report homicidal revenge thoughts than women.18 Women survivors who speak of feeling vengeful often follow those thoughts with their efforts to obey moral precepts. Esther Brunstein, observing the German soldiers forced to clear away corpses at Bergen-Belsen, noted, “There was murder in all of us and it scared me. I remember praying silently. I did not really know to whom to pray but I never prayed so fervently in all my life. I prayed not to be consumed by hatred and destroyed for the rest of my days.”19 Pearl Benisch watched the same scene and found it bittersweet. “We saw them being degraded and humiliated. […] There is, in fact, no form of retribution we can exercise on them. We shall never be able to exact revenge; nor have we tried to. The Eternal Judge Himself must avenge our millions.”20 While acknowledging the desire for revenge, these women emphasized their moral strength, turning to prayer and leaving vengeance to God, a fitting feminine response. Like their male counterparts, when female survivors report attempts to beat their former guards, they tend to emphasize the weakened condition of

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the women survivors during the days immediately following liberation, inhibiting their ability to take violent revenge. In Bergen-Belsen when German men and women were forced to bury the dead, Amelia Berko watched a Greek Jewish woman beat a German woman. No one stopped her, she commented, because “what harm could she do?”21 Flora Altman recalls seeing a woman attack a German soldier after the SS had fled, screaming, “What did you do to our parents?” but observes that the woman was too weak to inflict much damage.22 In a rare admission of male weakness, Henry Stone mentions an inability of some male survivors in Dachau to inflict much damage through beatings.23 While both men and women experienced weakness, the emphasis on it in women’s accounts of vengeance could be an attempt to maintain their femininity even as they admit to the unfeminine act of physically assaulting others. The difference in the levels of violence reported in revenge attacks may then be attributable to a difference in what men and women choose to recount, rather than a real difference in thoughts and actions. At the same time, it is likely that female survivors were indeed less inclined to kill because of their socialization as women.

Gender and Revenge Acts Physical revenge attacks on guards and kapos were most likely to occur in the immediate aftermath of liberation when the perpetrators had not yet been imprisoned or made their escapes. This was also the time when Allied soldiers were most inclined to look the other way or even to encourage and facilitate revenge acts, such as the soldier who gave Glucksman his gun. At Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp, survivors searched the officers’ quarters and threw the hiding Germans out of the windows. One male survivor estimated that his group killed 200 Germans in the first two weeks after liberation until the American forces intervened.24 In Dachau survivors beat guards until American soldiers put a stop to it, but other soldiers gave their weapons to survivors so that they could execute their former guards.25 One Dachau survivor described feeling happy after hanging a kapo. “As soon as I caught my breath I had one thing on my mind: vengeance. I can taste it right now. We wanted to kill.”26 In Ebensee, Austria, guards escaped during the night, so survivors had to make due with executing German kapos.27 Male survivors reported taking part in hangings, shootings, and fatal beatings of perpetrators.28 German civilians in areas surrounding liberated camps were also frequent targets, as in Glucksman’s case. Most survivors also tended to agree with Glucksman’s assessment that elderly men were not as responsible as military-aged men. Women’s vengeance could also take gendered forms. Some women sought retribution by cutting German women’s hair or forcing them to wash the survivors’ clothing.29 In the concentration camps, the shaving of hair had traumatized Jewish women more so than Jewish men.30 The women had felt

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their femininity stripped away by the process, so they chose this method of retaliation against German women. For example, Americans liberated Baba Igla and other prisoners at Waldenburg, Germany. The GIs told them that they could do whatever they wanted to their former guards. Igla quickly assured the interviewer that they did not kill the guards, “but the girls take off their hair, take off the clothes, and they parade them, because it was women soldiers too, and that was the nakuma [revenge]. […] We had enjoyment of revenge, what we did with the Germans.”31 The description of the shearing and parading suggests the intention to replicate the humiliations that the Germans had inflicted on the survivors. Jewish women were less likely to kill (or, at least, to confess to it) than Jewish men, but they did take revenge in their own way.32 Within weeks of liberation Allied authorities restored order, and wild revenge was no longer a viable option. At this time, some survivors offered their services to the Allied militaries in their efforts to locate war criminals. Under the cover of Allied authority, some of these survivors were still able to exact vengeance. Men accompanying soldiers in searches could occasionally ask permission to be left alone with prisoners to inflict physical revenge.33 One group of Dachau survivors served as Nazi hunters for the US Army in Salzburg, Austria. Dennis Urstein estimated that they murdered eleven SS men before being told that they must bring their prisoners in alive.34 Other male survivors hunted war criminals on their own and after beating their prisoners turned them over to Allied authorities.35 This practice enabled the survivors to combine the desire for physical vengeance with the quest for retributive justice. Women working for the Allies often provided translation during interrogations and trials. These activities also provided opportunities for revenge. For example, a British war crime investigator offered Lucille Eichengreen his pistol so that she could execute the German they had just interrogated. To her own surprise, she refused the offer.36 We do not know how many other such incidents occurred and whether those offers were accepted. Another woman acted as interpreter for two Poles accused of killing a German. She attempted to use her position to influence the outcome. She wanted them to be acquitted, since she believed that no one should be punished for killing a German.37 Although women working with war crimes investigators and Allied military courts do not report physically attacking the Germans with whom they came into contact, they saw their work as a form of retribution. With German SS and military men, the ones whom survivors most readily deemed guilty and deserving of punishment, imprisoned in POW camps, many survivors realized that their revenge lust needed to be satisfied in ways other than direct attacks on German men. It is in this context that one can interpret rapes and pimping of German women as revenge by proxy. The symbolic meaning of rape is one of dominance, and as feminist philosopher Claudia Card writes, it is “dominance not simply over women but in war even

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more importantly over other men who are presumed to take pride in being protectors of women.”38 Jewish men did not see themselves as capable of harming German women as women. It was different when the women served as stand-ins for German men. Women had their own sex-specific form of revenge, the symbolic revenge of childbirth. In the months and years following liberation, with their strength regained, many female survivors gave birth to a new generation. Frequently survivors viewed the arrival of babies as a form of symbolic revenge. As survivor Samuel Bak observes, “Giving birth to a Jewish child was a form of retaliation against the brutal cruelty of the recent past.”39 Jewish women with baby carriages figured prominently in DP political and memorial demonstrations as they sought to make visible the resurgence of the Jewish people on vanquished German territory.40 Perhaps this feeling of renewed strength emboldened Mania Feldman in 1948, when a German woman refused to let her pass with her baby carriage. Feldman viewed this as her chance for revenge. She grabbed the woman’s hair, forced her to the ground, and punched her with all her might. Taken to the Military Police for the assault, Feldman had the opportunity to explain the reason for her violence. In the end, it was the German woman who was charged for provocation and sentenced to house arrest and probation. Feldman recalled, “I took my revenge.”41 Around the same time, Sara Hauptman was also provoked. In 1948, Hauptman’s family was living in requisitioned rooms. One day the homeowner began spouting pro-Nazi sentiments. Hauptman, a diminutive former resistance fighter, leapt on the table and violently attacked the woman, knocking out some of her teeth. The woman’s friend who was present called out the window for help. When the German police arrived, Hauptman acknowledged what had occurred. She was not charged.42 Both Feldman and Hauptman emphasized the towering size of the German women in contrast to their own small stature. It is unknown if the size difference was real or one of perception. Perhaps the memories of German power magnified the women’s sizes, thereby increasing the magnitude of the survivors’ victories over them. Also in both cases, the survivors emphasized that the German women had provoked them and that Germans continued to display antisemitic sentiment years after the end of the war. These Jewish women used the opportunity to take revenge and to demonstrate their renewed strength. Unlike women survivors’ reportedly feeble revenge attacks at the moment of liberation, these women described being able to inflict bodily harm. Just as claims of weakness had maintained the feminine image of those survivors who took revenge in the immediate post-liberation period, the provocative actions of the German women gave a legitimate explanation for the Jewish women’s unfeminine behavior. Historical evidence demonstrates that the Jewish rage expressed in Wiesel’s Un di velt hot geshvign was real and that it was not isolated. We also find a

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hint in oral histories as to why Wiesel might have chosen not to respond directly to Seidman’s charge that, in order to appeal to a broader non-Jewish audience, he had erased Jewish rage when he reworked the text into Night. Dennis Urstein, who participated in the executions of SS men in Salzburg, at first had wanted all Germans and Austrians dead. In 1949, he had a sudden realization that he was engaging in the same kind of thinking as the Nazis. He recalled the non-Jewish Austrian and German prisoners in the camps and acknowledged that they did not share the guilt of the perpetrators. “It changed something, but it didn’t change me trying to find all the ones who were guilty of crimes, but my attitude changed” (Urstein, Seg., 213). Another survivor who shortly after liberation had killed a German in what he described as an automobile accident also experienced a change in attitude: “At that time, five and a half months after the liberation, that a German was killed just by accident didn’t bother me. Now it does bother me.”43 We can find a similar change of heart in Wiesel’s works.

The Evolution of Elie Wiesel’s Thought In the summer of 1962, Wiesel returned to Germany for the first time since his liberation from Buchenwald. He was on a tour to promote Night. His encounter with the prosperous and confident Germany of the Economic Miracle left him shaken. In an essay for Commentary, he recounted his reactions.44 What bothered him above all was the complacency he saw in Germans, a complacency that he attributed to the limited nature of the Nuremberg Trials and to the lack of Jewish revenge to impress upon the Germans their guilt for the Holocaust. At first, Germans had anticipated widespread Jewish vengeance, “but finally the Germans understood that they had nothing to fear, and so their fear turned into contempt. ‘Look at those Jews: they are not even capable of revenge!’ – and a new phase began, the phase of self-justification. If we are not judged, it is because we have done nothing, we are innocent” (“An Appointment,” 471). Even though he condemned Germans for evading responsibility for the Holocaust, Wiesel acknowledged that there are some German authors who are tormented by guilt and others who are searching for justice. He was unable to paint all Germans as bad. Despite his dismay, or perhaps outrage, at the ease with which Germans ignored the recent past, Wiesel found that he was ashamed of his lack of hate, which he viewed as a betrayal of the dead (“An Appointment,” 475). “It was, indeed, not until I re-entered Germany that I understood about hate, a hate that was more than desirable: justified. It escapes us, disappears as the events that engendered it have disappeared” (“An Appointment,” 476). Although Wiesel said that it was only upon returning to Germany that he had this realization, he also wrote that a few months before his trip he had blushed when a German woman said that she assumed that he hated Germans. He at first

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excused his blush as a response to the accusation but then recognized that it was in fact because he no longer hated. The woman, he later learned, had been imprisoned for her opposition to the Nazi regime, a reminder that some gentile Germans had also been victims of Nazism. It seems plausible then that sometime before 1962, Wiesel had begun letting go of his hatred for Germans, even though he still would speak out “against forgiveness, against forgetting, against silence” (“An Appointment,” 476). Like other survivors, in the decade following the Holocaust, Wiesel’s attitude toward Germans was changing, becoming more nuanced. As part of his discussion of hatred, or the lack thereof, Wiesel turned his attention to the absence of Jewish vengeance after the Holocaust. Mentioning that Russians liberated from Buchenwald had commandeered American jeeps to drive into Weimar “where for hours on end they machinegunned the inhabitants for having lived a normal—if not peaceful—life on the other side of the barbed wire” (“An Appointment,” 475), Wiesel wondered why liberated Jews did not do the same. He answered his question by acknowledging that the Jewish community in Palestine had debated the issue but had rejected vengeance in favor of justice, wanting to prove Jewish moral superiority. Wiesel added to this argument by referring to a midrash in which God rebukes the angels for celebrating the drowning of Pharaoh’s soldiers in the Red Sea, for they were also God’s creation (“An Appointment,” 476). Wiesel also reminds us that Saul had initially refused to kill Agag, King of Amalek, and invokes the Torah as evidence that Jews do not hate foreigners although they may distrust them. He even said that, “the Torah bids us remember Amalek, not hate it” (“An Appointment,” 476). While Wiesel is correct that there were no examples of indiscriminate mass revenge acts against German civilians committed by Jews, he obfuscated when he suggested that debates about revenge only took place in Palestine and not among the survivors themselves. Also, by focusing attention on mass revenge killings, he ignored the individual acts of revenge taken in the initial days and weeks following liberation that resulted in the beatings and killings of SS guards and kapos (and the occasional civilian), the head shaving of German women, and other revenge acts. Seemingly in response to Seidman, in the preface to the new translation of Night, Wiesel mentioned the need to shorten his original manuscript and reproduced some of the omitted passages, but not the ones referring to revenge. One reproduced passage states that “Today there are a­nti-Semites in Germany, France, and even the United States who tell the world that ‘the story’ of six million assassinated Jews is nothing but a hoax … Those who kept silent yesterday will remain silent tomorrow.”45 This is an accurate translation of the Yiddish text with the exception that the Yiddish version asserts that it is “Germans and antisemites” who tell the world that the story is a hoax. His anger against postwar Germans, omitted from earlier

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translations, is still being downplayed. No longer are all Germans cast as antisemties. Instead, antisemites can be found in the democratic countries of which Germany is only one. Why did he soften the charge? Why did he not address Seidman’s comments on Jewish rage? Like Dennis Urstein, his attitude had changed. Wiesel no longer saw all Germans as antisemites and now viewed Germany as a democracy on par with France and the United States. In his novel The Fifth Son, published in French in 1983 and in English in 1985, Wiesel dealt directly with the issue of revenge. The protagonist is the unnamed son of Holocaust survivors, who learns that his father’s obsession with vengeance and its justification stems from the father’s participation in the postwar execution of a ghetto commandant. The father had identified the commandant to Jewish Brigade soldiers, who carried out the attack. The postwar son is not disturbed by this discovery. “In those days,” he thinks, “that was undoubtedly the thing to do.”46 This sentiment is in keeping with Wiesel’s desire in Un di velt hot geshvign that the mitzvah of vengeance should be fulfilled. It suggests that, in the context of the immediate postwar situation, Jewish revenge acts made sense and were even justifiable. When the postwar son learns that the commandant had survived the attack, he becomes obsessed with completing the assassination. Seeking a blessing from a Hasidic rebbe, he is confronted with the disapproval of traditional Judaism that demands leaving vengeance to God. The rebbe warns, “To punish a guilty man, to punish him with death, means linking yourself to him forever: is that what you wish?” (Fifth Son, 190). Undeterred, the son confronts the former commandant in his luxurious, West German office. There the blood lust leaves him. Instead, he realizes that he will speak and tell the tale to unmask the commandant. He tells the German war criminal, “Wherever you are you shall feel like an intruder, pursued by the dead … Men will think of you with revulsion; they will curse you like the plague and war; they will curse you when they curse death” (Fifth Son, 214f.). In this story, Wiesel explained that what had seemed desirable in the immediate aftermath of the Shoah was no longer acceptable. The rebbe’s warning had been born out by the father’s obsessive dwelling on revenge. Telling the story, robbing the murderers of their comfortable lives, Wiesel asserted, is the path to justice in this world. “Justice must be human, it passes through language which must be justified by memory. Only in life are just words translated into acts of justice; never in death” (Fifth Son, 214). Vengeance is God’s domain. The victims will be avenged when the murderers face divine punishment. The Fifth Son traced Wiesel’s journey from his desire in the postwar period for Jewish revenge against the Germans through a period of moral struggle to the realization that survivors can use words to serve justice in this world, while leaving vengeance to God.

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Conclusion In the three works by Wiesel that I have discussed, revenge is the realm of men. In Un di velt hot geshvigen and in Night, it is the boys of liberated Buchenwald who run into town to steal (or bring back) potatoes and to rape German shikses (or sleep with girls). In The Fifth Son, the mother suffers a mental breakdown and is institutionalized. The son’s girlfriend assists him in locating the commandant, but once the son embarks on his journey to Germany, she appears only in his thoughts. By the end of the book, she has left him. In reality, however, revenge was the purview of both Jewish men and women. Both women and men reported having revenge fantasies in response to the trauma they had experienced at the hands of Germans and their collaborators. In the days immediately following liberation, some survivors had the opportunity to fulfill those fantasies. While men and women both fantasized about revenge killings, the majority did not act out those fantasies and those who did tend to be male. While Jewish men viewed German men of military age as the primary perpetrators and professed shock at the idea of harming German women, some did rape German women or engage in sexual relationships with German women as a form of revenge. Jewish women were more likely to vent their anger against German women than against German men. When they physically assaulted German women, they shaved their hair and beat them. A few, such as the women in the former partisan group the Avengers, also killed. Gender played a role in how Jews defined the perpetrators and in how they sought to take revenge. Putting Night and its predecessor in the context of other survivor personal narratives and in the context of Wiesel’s later writings allows us to better understand Wiesel’s changing expressions of Jewish vengeance. Holocaust survivor personal narratives demonstrate that Jewish rage was a real force in the immediate postwar period. The vengeance expressed in Un di velt hot geshvign was not a matter of hyperbole. It was real. The historical record also shows that with the passage of time some of those who initially believed that all Germans should suffer came to revise their opinions, sometimes overnight. They recognized that some Germans had been imprisoned alongside them in the concentration camps and that some Germans after the war felt guilty and took responsibility for German crimes. This change of attitude is reflected in the works of Elie Wiesel, who first lamented that the mitzvah of vengeance went unfulfilled but who later endorsed the use of words to create worldly justice. The differences between Un di velt hot geshvign and La nuit/Night may be attributed to the evolution of Wiesel’s thought. Jewish rage no longer demanded revenge. It demanded justice.

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Notes







1. Naomi Seidman, “Elie Wiesel and the Scandal of Jewish Rage,” Jewish Social Studies (Ser. 2) 3 (1996): 8, JSTOR. 2. Especially, Deuteronomy 25: 17–19. 3.  Louis H. Feldman, ‘Remember Amalek!’ Vengeance, Zealotry, and Group Destruction in the Bible According to Philo, Pseudo-Philo, and Josephus (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2004), 49, 53; Eliott Horowitz, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 133–137. 4.  Ira Gäbler and Andreas Maercker, “Revenge After Trauma: Theoretical Outline,” in Embitterment: Societal, Psychological, and Clinical Perspectives, eds. Michael Linden and Andreas Maercker (New York: Springer, 2011), 47. 5.  Abraham Marber, USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (VHA), Interview Code (IC) 46992, Segments (Segs.) 318–319. 6. Dina Porat, The Fall of a Sparrow: The Life and Times of Abba Kovner, ed. and trans. Elizabeth Yuval (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 210–237. 7. Joseph Harmatz, From the Wings: A Long Journey, 1940–1960 (Sussex, UK: The Book Guild, 1998), 116–117. 8. Tola Belik, VHA, IC 46507, Seg. 52. 9.  Alan Astro, “Revisiting Wiesel’s Night in Yiddish, French, and English,” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 12, no. 1 (January 2014): 139. 10. Muriel Knox Doherty, letter dated 27 September 1945, in Letters from Belsen 1945: An Australian Nurse’s Experiences with the Survivors of War, eds. Judith Cornell and R. Lynette Russell (St. Leonards, NSW, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 2000), 145. 11. Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (1992; repr. with new epilogue, New York: Basic Books, 2015), 189. 12.  Miriam Berger, “Vengefulness as a Discredited Emotion,” in Victimhood, Vengefulness, and the Culture of Forgiveness, eds. Ivan Urlié, Miriam Berger, and Avi Berman (Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2013), 64, 74, ProQuest Ebook Central. 13. Sidney Glucksman, VHA, IC 26276, Segs. 72–74 and 89–91. 14. Nathan Nothman, VHA, IC 10564, Segs. 84–89. 15. Herschel Balter, VHA, IC 35851, Seg. 424. 16. Robert Mendler, VHA, IC 22889, Seg. 191. 17. Jacob Biber, Risen from the Ashes (San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press, 1990), 79. 18. Amy L. Cota-McKinley, William Douglas Woody, Paul A. Bell, “Vengeance: Effects of Gender, Age, and Religious Background,” Aggressive Behavior 27 (2001): 344, Wiley Online Library. 19.  Esther Brunstein, quoted in Belsen in History and Memory, eds. David Cesarani, Tony Kushner, Jo Reilly, and Colin Richmond Jo Reilly (London: Frank Cass, 1997), 214. 20. Pearl Benisch, To Vanquish the Dragon (New York: Feldheim Publishers, 1991), 405. 21. Amelia Berko, VHA, IC 11719, Seg. 127.

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22. Flora Altman, VHA, IC 2831, Seg. 65. 23. Henry Stone, VHA, IC 994, Segs. 95–96. 24. Ludvig Sendery, VHA, IC 18001, Segs. 120–124. 25. Leslie Aigner, VHA, IC 1400, Seg. 85; Sidney Glucksman, VHA, IC 26276, Seg. 81. 26. Dennis Urstein, VHA, IC 6719, Seg. 187. 27. Max Durst, VHA, IC 2004, Segs. 150–152. 28. Leslie Aigner, VHA, IC 1400, Seg. 85; Max Durst, VHA, IC 2004, Segs. 150–152; Sam Solnik, VHA, IC 9951, Seg. 77; Bruno Zwass, VHA, IC 5551, Segs. 98–100. 29. Paula Bialek, VHA, IC 20304, Seg. 57. 30.  Pascale Rachel Bos, “Women and the Holocaust: Analyzing Gender Difference,” in Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust, eds. Elizabeth R. Baer and Myrna Goldenberg (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2003), 33–34; Hadassah Rosensaft, Yesterday: My Story (Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2004), 197. 31. Baba Igla, VHA IC 15793 Seg. 92–93. See also, Agnes Glick, VHA IC 7133, Seg. 95; Sally Horn, VHA IC 12629, Seg. 75; Fela Lewin, VHA IC 13925, Segs. 78–74; Yetta Posesorski, VHA IC 54245, Seg. 48–49. 32. In some rare cases, women even expressed compassion for some of their concentration camp guards, and in one case they protected a guard and her family from raping Soviet soldiers. In this case, the women identified as women with the former guard and not as Jew and German. Regina Feldman, VHA, IC 20671, Seg. 25. 33. Ludwig Strauss, VHA, IC 3964, Seg. 39. 34. Dennis Urstein, VHA, 6719, Segs. 198–199. 35. Herschel Balter, VHA, 35851, Segs. 417–425. 36. Lucille Eichengreen, From Ashes to Life: My Memories of the Holocaust (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1994), 149–150. 37. Zula Schibuk, VHA, IC37065, Segs. 189–192. 38. Claudia Card, “Rape as a Weapon of War,” Hypatia 11, no. 4 (Autumn 1996): 11. 39. Samuel Bak, “Landsberg Revisited,” Dimensions 13, no. 2 (1999): 33. 40.  Margarete Myers Feinstein, Holocaust Survivors in Postwar Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 157; see also, Atina Grossmann, “Trauma, Memory and Motherhood: Germans and Jewish Displaced Persons in Post-Nazi Germany, 1945–1949,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 38 (1998): 230–234. 41. Mania Feldman, VHA, IC 418, Segs. 101–104. 42. Sara Hauptman, VHA, IC 28669, Segs. 33–34. 43. Abraham Besser, VHA, IC 19988, Seg. 146; other examples include Helen Goldring, VHA, IC 5590, Seg. 135; Zula Schibuk, VHA, IC 37065, Segs. 189–192. 44. Elie Wiesel, “An Appointment with Hate,” Commentary 34, no. 6 (December 1, 1962): 470–476, ProQuest. 45. Elie Wiesel, Night, trans. Marion Wiesel (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), xii. 46. Elie Wiesel, The Fifth Son, trans. Marion Wiesel (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), 162.

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Bibliography Astro, Alan. “Revisiting Wiesel’s Night in Yiddish, French, and English.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 12, no. 1 (January 2014): 127–153. Project Muse. Bak, Samuel. “Landsberg Revisited.” Dimensions 13, no. 2 (1999): 31–36. Benisch, Pearl. To Vanquish the Dragon. New York: Feldheim Publishers, 1991. Berger, Miriam. “Vengefulness as a Discredited Emotion.” In Victimhood, Vengefulness, and the Culture of Forgiveness, edited by Ivan Urlié, Miriam Berger, and Avi Berman, 65–88. Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central. Biber, Jacob. Risen From the Ashes. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press, 1990. Bos, Pascale Rachel. “Women and the Holocaust: Analyzing Gender Difference.” In Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust, edited by Elizabeth R. Baer and Myrna Goldenberg, 23–50. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2003. Card, Claudia. “Rape as a Weapon of War.” Hypatia 11, no. 4 (Autumn, 1996): 5–18. Cesarani, David, Tony Kushner, Jo Reilly, and Colin Richmond. Belsen in History and Memory. London: Frank Cass, 1997. Cota-McKinley, Amy L., William Douglas Woody, and Paul A. Bell. “Vengeance: Effects of Gender, Age, and Religious Background.” Aggressive Behavior 27 (2001): 343–350, Wiley Online Library. Doherty, Muriel Knox. Letters from Belsen 1945: An Australian Nurse’s Experiences with the Survivors of War. Edited by Judith Cornell and R. Lynette Russell. St. Leonards, NSW, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 2000. Eichengreen, Lucille. From Ashes to Life: My Memories of the Holocaust. San Francisco: Mercury House, 1994. Feinstein, Margarete Myers. Holocaust Survivors in Postwar Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Feldman, Louis H. ‘Remember Amalek!’ Vengeance, Zealotry, and Group Destruction in the Bible according to Philo, Pseudo-Philo, and Josephus. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2004. Gäbler, Ira, and Andreas Maercker. “Revenge After Trauma: Theoretical Outline.” In Embitterment: Societal, Psychological, and Clinical Perspectives, edited by Michael Linden and Andreas Maercker, 42–69. New York: Springer, 2011. Grossmann, Atina. “Trauma, Memory and Motherhood: Germans and Jewish Displaced Persons in Post-Nazi Germany, 1945–1949.” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 38 (1998): 215–239. Harmatz, Joseph. From the Wings: A Long Journey, 1940–1960. Sussex, UK: The Book Guild, 1998. Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, 1992. Reprinted with new epilogue. New York: Basic Books, 2015. Horowitz, Eliott. Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Porat, Dina. The Fall of a Sparrow: The Life and Times of Abba Kovner. Translated and edited by Elizabeth Yuval. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010.

760  M. M. FEINSTEIN Rosensaft, Hadassah. Yesterday: My Story. Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2004. Seidman, Naomi. “Elie Wiesel and the Scandal of Jewish Rage.” Jewish Social Studies (Ser. 2) 3 (1996): 1–19. JSTOR. USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive. Wiesel, Elie. “An Appointment with Hate.” Commentary 34, no. 6 (December 1, 1962): 470–476. ProQuest. ———. The Fifth Son. Translated by Marion Wiesel. New York: Schocken Books, 1985. ———. Night. Translated by Marion Wiesel. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006.

CHAPTER 41

Holocaust Shoes: Metonymy, Matter, Memory Sharon B. Oster

“Death begins with the shoes,” writes Primo Levi in Survival in Auschwitz (1947), revealing, with this blunt claim, the stark interdependency of human life and key material objects.1 The book’s second chapter, “On the Bottom,” recounts in excruciating detail the process of Levi’s and others’ shocking arrival at Auschwitz, immediate selection, and processing for Lager “life,” including the confiscation of all of personal possessions. Dispossessed, showered, shorn, and finally ill clad in prisoners’ clothing, the former civilians are transformed into a “hundred miserable and sordid puppets,” just like “the phantoms glimpsed yesterday evening,” the Häftlinge (Survival, 26). Levi sums up this swift and brutal transformation in the phrase “the demolition of a man” (26). They realize, as Levi writes, “we had reached the bottom” (26–27). And though this “offense” is so great, practically beyond words, Levi nonetheless writes: Nothing belongs to us anymore; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to find ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains. (27)

Presumably, the “something of us, of us as we were,” that remains is a shred of humanity. What has just barely protected it until this moment is the

S. B. Oster (*)  University of Redlands, Redlands, CA, USA © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_41

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basic components of human experience, both intrinsic and extrinsic, that in other contexts might be taken for granted: one’s voice, one’s hair, but also one’s given name, clothes, and yes, one’s shoes. In a different situation, shoes might seem a luxury; here, in this degrading process and in Levi’s subsequent account, their value is as high as other essentials on the list. Shoes are a matter of life and death. The process of creating the Häftlinge intensifies to an extreme degree the relationship between concrete and abstract components of human experience, both material and immaterial, given the ways in which mundane objects like shoes were pressed into the service of torture and often murder. As Levi describes it, when a man is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often easily loses himself. He will be a man whose life or death can be lightly decided with no sense of human affinity, in the most fortunate of cases, on the basis of a pure judgement of utility. (27)

Concentration camp initiation thus rendered clothing, possessed objects, and loved ones equivalent in their essential non-value, their swift disposability. Yet shoes, like other Holocaust objects—human remnants such as hair, ash— were also revalued, literally and figuratively. The story of the shoes offers a key example of how value and meaning persistently inhere in stolen objects— as things, as theft, as representations, as objects of memory—albeit in vexed, incomplete ways. Here, I explore the story of shoes in Holocaust literature and visual culture and argue that Holocaust shoes served as things in themselves, that is, as shoes, but were also profoundly misused as vehicles of Nazi power. Given the changes in their use, exchange, and symbolic values over time, we see how these objects led an intrinsic “social life” of their own, to use Arjun Appadurai’s phrase, whose “thingness,” combining animacy and inanimacy according to Bill Brown, is irreducible to their form.2 Alvin Rosenfeld once claimed that Holocaust things cannot function as metaphors—“the flames were real flames, the ashes only ashes, the smoke always and only smoke […] the burnings do not lend themselves to metaphor, simile or symbol—to likeness or association with anything else.”3 Yet we nonetheless see that Holocaust shoes functioned both literally and symbolically: as shoes, but also, I contend, as other things. They marked the literal border between life and death: ill-fitting, rough wooden clogs produced pain, bleeding, infection, often mortality. Shoes became substitute forms of torture or punishment: Prisoners had their shoes stolen or were given two left-only or right-only shoes, too large or too small. Shoes also served symbolically as currency: Confiscated upon concentration camp arrival for those condemned to labor or gathered at the gas chamber anteroom for those

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condemned to immediate death, they were often “organized,” or stolen by other prisoners or prisoner functionaries, to be traded on the camp black market for valued goods like bread or favors. Good shoes, moreover, lent one symbolic capital and power.4 Shoes were also loot, converted to economic value to enrich the Nazi state. We know from Jan Gross’s Golden Harvest (2012) and studies of material culture and Jewish restitution that stolen Holocaust objects (shoes, but also human remnants—hair, ash) retained their value, such theft having begun well before the concentration camp, beginning with the “Aryanization” of Jewish property in the 1930s.5 What culminated in the camps was a condition of radical dispossession, of irreversible, often total, loss. Yet when Nazis ordered the Sonderkommando at the gas chambers, and prisoners on “Canada” duty at Auschwitz, to confiscate, sort, and store piles of shoes and other objects, those objects, once owned and valued by Jews and other prisoners, became revalued as Reich property. They went on to lead “social lives” entirely apart from their original owners. The question is whether or not the residue of these erroneous lives persists in postwar memorial culture which resurrects recovered shoes as memorial objects, remnants of individuals who once wore them, and of whole communities dissolved in moments of death. After all, they once protected feet; enabled labor and leisure; and marked distinctions of gender, profession, age, and class, all annihilated in the Nazi genocide. Liberation photography gave us the first images of piles of orphaned shoes—evidence of genocidal murder and economic plunder. Piles of stolen shoes recovered from concentration camp warehouses (or portions of them) have since become museum displays—at Auschwitz and at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC—to serve a collective, public memorial function. But what do these objects ask us to remember? Do they successfully mark their former owners’ vast losses, indeed their very deaths? Do they invoke history? Or, revalued once again as new “things” with new purposes in their own right, do they fail to signify beyond their own present materiality? Bozena Shallcross argues that over time, the “physical remains of human victims—their jewelry, shoes, clothes, and even their hair—have become the Holocaust’s dominant metonymy,” “fragments,” she claims, that “speak on behalf of past wholeness.”6 Yet James E. Young skeptically asks: “Beyond affect, what does our knowledge of these objects […] have to do with our knowledge of historical events?”7 Michael Bernard-Donals goes further: Holocaust shoes and other objects, when presented as a “pile,” disrupt memory and disarticulate the “whole.”8 Such objects instead create what he calls “kairotic” memory, invoking “other” memories than those of the historical past (79, 128). I agree with Young and Bernard-Donals that, as material objects, the shoes are problematic conduits of memory. Encountered now in museum displays, extracted from their former realms of use and exchange, they are mute, inert things; they fail to signify beyond their own materiality. They instead fulfill their new function as “Holocaust memorial objects.”

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Despite their powerful sensory effects, I argue, they serve as impossible metaphors for the past, bearing only imagined traces of the humans whose feet once wore them. To invoke these traces, I will show, material objects need a story: words, narrative, descriptions, lists, figures of speech, poems. In poetry, shoes begin as words, concepts that figure an object’s materiality, but take us metonymically from object to abstraction, to memory. In Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever’s secret Holocaust writing, we will see, the shoes succeed as metaphors. They evoke the border between life and death and, re-personalized as witnesses, even accomplices, to genocidal crimes, they signify well beyond their object function with metonymic power to represent individual lives. The profound cultural legacy of Holocaust shoes has provided not just memorial objects, but also vehicles for reimagining Jewishness. In the second season of the TV series Transparent (2015), to take a recent example, Ali Pfefferman’s magical red shoes do not try to stand in for past wearers; however, they enable a different fantasy, of Holocaust witnessing through time travel. Postmemorial conduits, the shoes transport Ali to pre-War Berlin to witness the lynching of her Jewish transgender aunt Gittel, connecting Ali’s dawning awareness of centuries-old Jewish diasporic otherness with that of the transgender women in her family. Ali’s “trans-shoes,” I argue, enable imagined circuits of Jewish continuity, connection, and translation across bounds of sexual and religious experience, persecution, and centuries of time.

The “Secret Life” of Holocaust Shoes Holocaust shoes, misappropriated and abused to the point of near non-­ recognition, reveal only perversely how they were supposed to be used. The various values attached to them—as weapons, as currency—illustrate Brown’s argument that mundane objects can be repurposed, re-signified, their “misuse value” emerging through their new and different human uses (55). He calls this “redemptive reification” (55). However, I hesitate to adopt the latter term, as it implies a kind of re-enchantment of the material object through a use other than that for which it was intended. In this case, the violent repurposing of Holocaust shoes renders any such notion of redemption repulsive, reprehensible. The shoes only reify the total power of the Nazi Reich. Brown further contends that the very meaning, or “life of things,” is “made manifest in the time of misuse”; this is the “secret in plain sight,” the “secret life” of things (51). Holocaust shoes expose the ethical limits of this claim: After all, what is the “secret life” of Holocaust shoes but their ultimate capacity to kill? In Art Spiegelman’s graphic co-mix, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Volume II (1991), Vladek Spiegelman recounts how he helped a friend in Auschwitz named Mandelbaum to locate a pair of shoes that actually fit. According to Vladek, Mandelbaum could not adapt to concentration camp life. As Vladek tells it,

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Mandelbaum was a mess. His pants were big like for 2 people, and he had not even a piece of string to make a belt. He had all day to hold them with one hand … One shoe, his foot was too big to go in. This also he had to hold so he could find maybe with whom to exchange it. One shoe was big like a boat. But this at least he could wear. It was winter, and everywhere he had to go around with one foot into the snow.9

Mandelbaum laments, “Please God… help me find a piece of string and a shoe that fits!” (II: 29). When Vladek delivers him a spoon, a belt, and new shoes, Mandelbaum cries: “Sob. My God. My God. My God…It’s a miracle, Vladek. God sent shoes through you” (II: 34). As divine objects, the shoes have only temporary power, unlike their ever-renewing value as things: as an even exchange for food, but also for human life. For the SS, shoes were more valuable than people. When Vladek fakes his way as a shoemaker in Auschwitz, he earns both real and symbolic capital: bread rations, a warm, private room, and new shoes of his own, but also a modicum of status. Spiegelman devotes a half-page panel to ­ visualizing Vladek’s description of how to fix an officer’s shoe, illustrating its extraordinary value (II: 60). When Vladek returns to his barrack newly clad, Mandelbaum is struck with Vladek’s powerful appearance: “Vladek?!! You look like a…a general!” (II: 34). Later called to fix a Gestapo member’s boot, Vladek trades a day’s ration of bread so a fellow prisoner would show him how, and when he repeats the repair process for the officer, he earns a “whole sausage” (II: 61). That he eats it so fast as to make him sick illustrates his vexed role as Auschwitz shoemaker, and the perverse symbolic power of shoes, as Peter Stallybrass describes it in a different context: “The shoemaker is the social foot […] at the same time, through the fabrication of the shoe, the shoemaker fabricates the ‘basis’ for society itself [….] she or he is the person most trodden upon by a hierarchical society that imagines itself in terms of an elite who put their foot upon those whom they subordinate.”10 As the “social foot” of Auschwitz, Vladek’s one source of power—made evident in the detailed descriptions and depiction of his craft—is ironically to repair the boot that in its metaphorical implication would crush the necks of otherwise useless Jewish häftlinge like him. The value of good, functioning shoes in the Lager is a familiar story. Olga Lengyel describes how her Auschwitz “blocova,” Irka, demanded to have Lengyel’s boots or else she would denounce her for engaging in an “illegal” clothing exchange with other prisoners, which would result in her certain selection. Lengyel agreed to the deal, she gave up her boots, and describes how in return, she “received two different kinds of shoes, both for the left foot, both in shreds and almost entirely soleless,” but she “dared not complain. I had not made such a bad bargain. I was still among the living.”11 Dr. Gisella Perl notes how “shoes were a question of life and death.”12 “Sore feet,” she writes, “were reason enough for our Dr. Mengele to send us to the crematory” (110). After two months without any shoes, Perl managed

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to acquire a pair that was too big. She discovered an old Polish prisoner who had the string needed to keep them on, but he would trade it only for sex. “How high the price of a piece of string had soared,” comments Perl (109), her shoes the very benchmark of value, weighed as they are against her dignity and the sanctity of her own body.

Shoes as Loot and Evidence: Holocaust Photography If shoes led secret lives as weapons and valuable currency during the Holocaust, their meaning changed dramatically in the postwar era. Immediately after the war, shoes became primary forms of evidence of Nazi crimes. We are by now familiar with images of piles of shoes found at the Auschwitz concentration camp (Figs. 41.1 and 41.2). When journalists first reported about such warehouses in the immediate postwar period, the shoes took on this fundamentally new and crucial significance as evidence. On October 28, 1944, American journalist Edgar Snow published an exposé of Majdanek, the first liberated death camp near Lublin, Poland, in a Saturday Evening Post piece titled “Here the Nazi Butchers Wasted Nothing.”13 Snow made two trips to document “the crowning achievement of Nazi totalitarianism executed with German efficiency,” one “so loathsome as to make the meanest beast seem clean and wholesome by comparison” (18). His thesis centers on the Nazi “motto,” how all prisoners were looted and burned in the same crematoria, so that “Nothing was wasted,” as Snow describes: The bulk of the ashes was strewn upon the Nazis’ vegetable fields and the commandant’s flower gardens. Gold fillings were removed from the teeth of the corpses, and sometimes from live prisoners. Serviceable clothing was sent to the large warehouse, converted from an unfinished theater owned by the Catholic church. Even rags were fumigated and preserved, for buttons and bits of cloth. Not far from the ovens you can still today see what is the most sickening display of all in this evidence of mass murder. (96)

As Snow reports, the Nazis looted from concentration camp prisoners every last material scrap, from their “gold fillings” down to their “rags.” To provide photodocumentary evidence of the economic efficiency of Majdanek’s murderous design, the Post included a half-page image of warehouse contents, the now-iconic photo of shoes. The caption reads: “Part of the vast accumulation of shoes which Edgar Snow describes as ‘the most sickening display of all in this evidence of mass murder.’ Among them are hundreds of babies’ shoes” (19) (Fig. 41.3). This may have been the first of such photographs, since Majdanek, liberated by the Soviets, was among the first death camps to be featured in the Western Press.14 Implicit in this warehouse “devoted solely to old shoes” is the gruesome revaluation of objects stolen from innocent people (Snow, 96).

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Fig. 41.1  USHMM #51175—Pile of shoes stored in a warehouse in Auschwitz, Photographer unknown, January 1945

While the image furnishes a powerful example of the shoes as evidence of genocidal crimes, to have it also serve as evidence of the individuals who once wore them requires a narrative: Hundreds of thousands of pairs of them lie there closely packed down, footwear of every description, and each pair a tragic history of a vanished owner. There are babies’ tiny shoes and children’s boots, hundreds of them. There are little red slippers, gold evening shoes, the high lace boots of an elderly woman,

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Fig. 41.2  USHMM #77394—Auschwitz women inmates sort through a huge pile of shoes from the transport of Hungarian Jews (From “The Auschwitz Album,” Lili Meier Photo taken by SS-Hauptscharführer Bernhardt Walter and his assistant, SS-Unterscharführer Ernst Hofmann, May 1944) the worn sandals of peasants, the frayed valenki of Russians and Poles, rubbers from Akron—footwear from Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Warsaw, Prague, Antwerp, Rotterdam, Madrid and Moscow. Here mute testimony corroborates the evidence of passports and other records I saw which indicates that people from infants to octogenarians were wiped out. (Snow, 96)

When Snow’s account slips into imagining the victims themselves, he treats the shoes as synechdochic substitutes: “each pair a tragic history of a vanished owner.” Yet it is doubtful any were actually in pairs. The haphazard pile thus requires a story to achieve metonymic representation of the many who were murdered. No one shoe can contain “the whole” story of human victimization, so he itemizes the shoes ranging in gender and size from those of “tiny babies” to “children,” to little girls’ “red slippers” to a woman’s “gold evening shoes” to an elderly woman’s “high lace boots,” revealing victims’ ages, professions, class positions, as well as geography, the genocide spanning the whole European continent. If individual shoes fail as synechdochic substitutes, or stand-ins, for particular individuals, who cannot be known anyway, they succeed as metonyms, or parts, for whole categories of victims.15 But even so, no individual shoe can do the work of metonymy alone. The humanizing of the pile requires the list, one which could simply go on, including each imagined

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Fig. 41.3  Edgar Snow, “Here the Nazi Butchers Wasted Nothing,” Saturday Evening Post, October 28, 1944, p. 20

victim’s specificity. Details like this drive the point home: “Most of all, I remember the shoe of a crippled woman, with a built-up sole six inches high. Near by were a truss and a knee-length brace. All these items were kept for shoemaker’s spares. Nothing was wasted” (20). Each material shoe provides

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a shard of evidence to the crimes to which it can only iteratively gesture, but never complete, as evident in Snow’s list, and his seemingly inexhaustible effort to imagine the totality of lives obliterated in the pile.

Shoes as Memorial Objects: Metonymy and Synechdoche Snow’s account of the Majdanek shoes illustrates the need for interpretation and narrative to complete the metonymic circuit of reference and remembrance from shoe to Holocaust victim, whether an individual or a category. What happens when these same shoes, in the pile, are intentionally displayed to the public as memorial objects? In his recent study of the USHMM permanent exhibit, Bernard-Donals does us the tremendous favor of distinguishing “metonymy” from “synechdoche.” In A Grammar of Motives (1945), he notes, Kenneth Burke defined metonymy as a representation that conveys an “incorporeal or intangible state in terms of the corporeal or tangible, e.g., to speak of ‘the heart’ rather than ‘the emotions.’”16 Metonymy is thus a process of “reduction” of the “spiritual” realm into its “material equivalents” (507). Synechdoche is also a “representation,” but the part doesn’t reduce the whole as much as become a substitute for it, as in “microcosm” as a replica of the “macrocosm,” and vice versa, differing only in scale (508). If the metonym represents the abstractions associated with the whole, with synechdoche, the part becomes a representative for the whole, its stand-in or substitute (509). Using Burke’s distinctions, Bernard-Donals claims that the Majdanek shoes on display in the USHMM permanent exhibit function more as synechdoche than metonymy, and as such, they derail memory of the past they are meant to evoke.17 A careful look at the pile might give way to the individual objects that compose it, provoking questions about past wearers, and about history, but it can also lead viewers to look to their own shoes.18 As metonymy, in other words, the shoes evoke the millions of murdered Jews, directing us toward Holocaust memory, but as synechdoche, the shoes become substitutes for the victims, and vice versa. I would argue that this derailment of memory occurs precisely because of the shoes’ materiality, and their profound material presence in the room-length display which they almost entirely fill (Fig. 41.4). As with Snow’s narrative account of the pile and his list, in the USHMM, it is the poem by Moses Schulstein displayed on the adjacent wall that serves to move viewers beyond the shoes’ materiality, and into the realm of metonymy. The poem clarifies the exhibit’s intent—to present the shoes as evidence of crimes committed—but it also does what the shoes alone cannot do, personify themselves as surviving witnesses: We are the shoes; we are the last witnesses. We are shoes from grandchildren and grandfathers From Prague, Paris, and Amsterdam, And because we are only made of fabric and leather And not of blood and flesh, each one of us avoided the hellfire. (USHMM permanent exhibit)

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Fig. 41.4  Shoes from Majdanek (USHMM Permanent Exhibit)

Schulstein’s poem emphasizes the shoes as objects, but in turn, endows the material pile with meaning, content, and above all, a collective voice—the “we” who speak as survivors. The poem achieves this effect using both rhetorical figures—as metonyms, the shoes refer, as they did for Snow, to whole categories, the “grandchildren and grandfathers / From Prague, Paris, and Amsterdam,” a sample representing a wide range of age groups and geographical origins of the victims. But they are also synechdochic substitutes, the personified relics of victims, the “last” witnesses, survivors precisely because of their “fabric and leather,” that is, their very materiality. Yet only the poem can personify the material shoes with voices from the Holocaust past, something about which curators may have been aware given the choice to display it alongside the pile. For Jeffrey Feldman, it is the materiality of the Holocaust shoes in the pile, specifically their smell, that enables memory, creating a visceral connection to the events that created the human loss.19 The sensory experience of the “deep-down stench of mildew mixed with rotting leather”—this is the “big story” the shoes have to tell (121, 122). Feldman’s account is provocative: even if the current stench itself is far removed from “the smell of genocide,” it remains “the richest and most painful memorial nexus” of past genocidal acts (122, 124). In other words, the shoes are powerful precisely

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as synechdoche—their smell substitutes for actual smells of the past, but this nonetheless makes viewers “pay attention” to the boundary the shoes represent, as Levi showed, between “hunger and death” (129). In my view, this can be misleading: The experience may be powerful and long remembered, but what if visitors remember not the murdered victims (who haven’t worn the shoes for decades, and who remain unknown), but only the rotting, half preserved objects, the smell of shoe corpses? Feldman unapologetically compares the shoes to “sacred relics,” records of the bodily experiences of genocidal murder that bring these histories to light (126). Yet he minimizes the risk of sacralizing, even fetishizing, the shoes as Nazi-distorted, profoundly misused objects. He also overlooks how the shoes may simply fail to provoke meaningful backward looks; or may incite disgust; or inspire only sentimental, hackneyed responses; or focus viewers on their own overwhelming sensory experience of the shoes’ material presence in the here and now, and away from the past altogether. I thus share Young’s skepticism about the shoes as vehicles for historical knowledge: In the best cases, they “remind us not of the lives that once animated them, so much as the brokenness of lives,” the “dismembered fragments” of a whole, so that we see the murdered Jews, ironically, “as the Germans have remembered them to us: in the collected debris of a destroyed civilization” (Young, 132–133). Tim Cole invokes a different dark side, critiquing the commodification and commercial exploitation of the Holocaust shoes: He sees the shoes exhibit at the Auschwitz concentration camp as just one more “contrived tourist attraction” composed of relics, like Elvis’ Graceland, but here in the “Holocaust theme-park” he dubs “Auschwitzland.”20 For these compelling reasons, I would agree with Jessica Lang’s claim that collections like the Holocaust shoes, because they eschew critical reading, “obscure the very event being memorialized,” creating monuments for what “cannot be monumentalized.”21 Whereas metonymic encounters with Holocaust shoes, with the aid of narrative or poetry, can guide v­ iewers from the material object to reflections on the humans who suffered, or on broader historical events, synechdochic encounters fail to refer beyond the thing itself, so that what is remembered is not the past, but the shoe itself as memorial object. An illuminating example of the problems with the synechdochic experience of Holocaust shoes is a youthful, somewhat overwrought, essay “Walking with Living Feet” (1993), by novelist Dara Horn. Horn describes her encounter at age fifteen with the shoes at the Majdanek Death Camp as a “turning point” in her life: “I learned more there than I learned during my entire life in school [….] And I will never forget it.”22 Yet what she will “never forget” is not necessarily “The Holocaust,” whose meaning in her essay remains opaque, but her own experience of transformation that day: “once I stepped out of a gas chamber, I became a different person” (1). She writes, “You cannot visit this planet through any film or book; photographs

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cannot bring you here” (2). If “being there” tops film, books, and photographs as vehicles of knowledge, it was above all the shoes that made her experience of “being there” authentic: The worst were the shoes [….] it was an ocean of shoes, five feet deep [….] The photographs meant nothing to me, the history lessons and names and numbers were never strong enough. But here each shoe is different, a different size and shape, a high heel, a sandal, a baby’s shoe so tiny that its owner couldn’t have been old enough to walk, and shoes like mine. Each pair of those shoes walked a path all its own, guided its owner through his or her life and to all of their deaths. Thousands and thousands of shoes, each pair different, each pair silently screaming someone’s murdered dreams. No book can teach me what I saw there with my own eyes! (2; emphasis mine)

For Horn, the shoes are substitutes not just for the “history lessons and names and numbers” but also for her own shoes, and vice versa: “it seemed like every shoe there was my shoe [….] as I touched my own toe, tears welled in my eyes as my fingers traced the edges of my dusty, living shoes. Eight hundred and fifty thousand pairs of shoes, but now I understood: they weren’t numbers, they were people” (2). In her phenomenological encounter with the shoes, Horn thinks of the possible individuals for whom she cries, yet her meditation, untrammeled by historical specificity, circles interchangeably through her own shoes, between past and present. When she itemizes “the child whose mother’s sandals rested on that pile,” and “the girl whose best friend’s slippers were buried in that ocean,” we see her rehearse Snow’s dilemma of metonymy, creating an imagined, yet inadequate, endless list. Less focused on the discovery of criminal evidence than Snow, crimes which were presumably well known to her, Horn is instead engaged in her own experience, of the shoes, of her imagination. The pile at Majdanek opens up space for her to meditate on multiple associations at once, past and present, rational and affective, revealing not “the whole, but the hole, the absence of the past or the ability to make a connection” to it (Bernard-Donals, Figures of Memory, 82). As objects, the Majdanek shoes are generative of ­narrative, but finally, remain unredemptive, reifying the experience of trying to ­remember rather than of the past itself. In contrast with the unredemptive pile of Holocaust shoes, shoes in other memorials more successfully represent their former wearers, that is, less as potential relics and more referentially. For one, in these memorials, shoes are united as a pair and placed so as to gesture toward a phantom, though unspecified individual human being standing in them. “Shoes on the Danube Bank,” created by artist Gyula Pauer and film director Can Togay, and erected in April 2005 in Budapest, Hungary, memorializes the 3500 people, 800 of them Jews, who were murdered in the last weeks of World War II before liberation. The victims were robbed of their last valuables, lined up at the bank, ordered to take off their shoes, and shot into the river by the fascist Arrow Cross gangs

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Fig. 41.5  Can Togay and Gyula Pauer’s “Shoes on the Danube Bank” memorial in Budapest (Gem Russan, 5 February 2019. Alamy stock photo)

in Budapest (Fig. 41.5).23 To represent the shoes left behind, Pauer created sixty pairs of period appropriate shoes out of iron.24 Because they are not authentic remnants, or evidence of the crimes, but rather replicas secured to the stone edge of the riverbank, these shoes lack what Feldman describes as the “putrid sensory qualities of Holocaust relics” (Feldman, 128). But this is also what makes them effective as memorials: They do not try to stand in for, or substitute as pieces of, actual murdered individuals. They instead function metonymically: as realist representations of the parts that evoke, in material form, the absent whole—those who died there. They are “representations” in that they reproduce not the actual shoes, but the types of shoes worn. “Shoes on the Danube Bank” is distinct from the “field of shoes” style memorials that feature new shoes, such as the “Eyes Wide Open,” exhibit for fallen soldiers and civilians in Iraq. Like Grace Lin’s Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, “Eyes Wide Open” creates a memorial space, but also a sense of number and scale (Feldman, 126–127). “Shoes on the Danube Bank” differs significantly from both the relic and the “field” or “collection”: It offers neither a pile of authentic relics with visceral sensory qualities, nor brand new shoes lined up to symbolize neat cemetery-like rows. Instead, it presents replicas of real shoes, clearly artistic representations, presented somewhat haphazardly so as to tell a story: that of the hasty removal of victims’ real shoes in their last moments of life and sudden death. The image was inspired by the 1955 Félix Máriássy film Budapesti tavasz (Springtime in Budapest), which was itself based

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on a novel by Ferenc Karinthy (1921–1992).25 The installation’s narrative sources only increase these shoes’ representational power as memorial objects. It takes viewers effectively from object to narrative history, because unlike the pile, it makes no claims to material authenticity. Less a re-enactment than an artistic envisioning of what took place there, one based on other artworks, “Shoes on the Danube Bank,” as Edna Nahshon claims, instead “highlight[s] the iconicity of the shoe as Holocaust metonym” (30). A number of memorials, many temporary, have been erected in recent years to honor and remember victims of violent mass deaths, featuring shoes as metonymic memorial objects. For example, Svetlana Bachevanova photographed female victims’ shoes covered in ash less than 24 hours after the World Trade Center attack in New York in 2001. A 2013 makeshift memorial to victims of the Boston Marathon attack featured rows of pairs of running shoes with attached notes dedicated to the dead. And a spontaneous memorial to the victims of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico arose when local residents began leaving pairs of victims’ shoes in rows outside the island’s capital building in San Juan, in May 2018. The phantom wearers of these shoes seemed to confront the government, like now-deceased US citizens asserting their ghostly legal rights to FEMA aid, government protection, and storm relief. The memorial was accompanied by protests, including signs like one that simply stated “GENOCIDIO.”26 These various memorials collectively suggest how the shoes have begun to form what Young might call a sculptural memorial “vernacular” that, taking their lead from Holocaust memorial culture, mark sites of tragedy and remembrance with objects that strive to achieve metonymy.27

The Pile Redeemed: Abraham Sutzkever’s “A Load of Shoes” Abraham Sutzkever’s poem, “A Vogn Shikh” (“A Load of Shoes”), composed January 1, 1943, in the Vilna Ghetto, also uses shoes as metonymy for Holocaust victims. But as a poet, as well as eyewitness to murders being committed around him, Sutzkever uses poetic form and technique to re-personalize what are, only retrospectively, Holocaust shoes. “A Load of Shoes” features a wagon full of shoes seized from dead Jews clattering through Vilna to be transported to Germany.28 Like Snow’s article, the poem offers a snapshot of the monstrous looting of European and Russian Jewish property by the Third Reich. Yet Sutzkever’s poem, like those by other Holocaust survivors such as Charlotte Delbo and Dan Pagis, is notable for its form, brevity, and mastery of verbal, rather than photographic, images. Written in hiding, it also conveys the urgency of the covert eyewitness. Snow’s piece voices the outrage and horror of an American reporter confronting with certainty brutal evidence of “loathsome” Nazi crimes already committed. But Sutzkever’s speaker is uncomprehending, shocked, almost muted by the wagon passing before him, evidence of crimes unfolding in real time, direct threats to himself and his immediate family. After all, by the time he escaped the ghetto

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in September 1943 together with his wife and a group of Soviet Jewish partisans, his mother and newborn son had already been murdered (the latter event the subject of his poem, “To My Child” (In Sundquist, 97, 101–103). “A Load of Shoes,” composed of nine brief stanzas, for one critic epitomizes Sutzkever’s attention to poetic form and structure in the midst of violence and chaos.29 It is written in iambic diameter with a fairly regular rhyme scheme: The stanzas are all four lines each, the second and fourth lines of each rhyming with one another. In fact, each pair of lines reads as one thought unit, but the line breaks create smaller units with only two stressed syllables each, suggesting a sense of brokenness amid an otherwise flowing set of rhymes. Consistent with postwar Holocaust objects, the wartime shoes in the poem are the personified remains of the dead, representing different categories of victims. But unique to the poetic representation of these shoes is their complex temporal reach: Even as the speaker looks back to those who once wore them, the shoes themselves seem to look forward to an unknown future in Berlin. They are also sentient objects, manifesting in the first stanza what the speaker feels while watching the wagon hastily pass, the terrifying uncertainty of their own fate: The cartwheels rush, quivering. What is their burden? Shoes, shivering. (ll. 1–4)

The “cartwheels” are “quivering” (the word isolated in its own line) like the “Shoes, shivering” (ll. 2, 4). When the speaker immediately questions, “What is their burden?” (l. 3), we know he speaks metaphorically, and that the point of the poem (and the “load”) will be to concretize the more abstract and momentous “burden” of the dead contained in the shoes—that of their murders, that is—as well as the awful portend they hold for those still alive. In the second stanza, the speaker begins to fish for familiar ways to translate what he sees. “The cart is like / a great hall,” as if the shoes were “crushed together / as though at a ball” (ll. 6–8). But no sooner does he utter these words than he rejects his own absurd comparison in the following stanza—“A wedding? A party? / Have I gone blind?”—and gets to the real question, the one that the poem leaves unanswered: “Who have these shoes / left behind?” (ll. 9–12). The profound silence following this question encompasses multitudes: The shoes are personified, at once fortunate to escape, yet guilty of having abandoned their former wearers, those left behind in the Vilna Ghetto, evidently to meet their own demise. The only response is the passive sound of the heels clattering “with a fearsome din” as they are “transported from Vilna / to Berlin” (ll. 14–16), objects trapped in a state of haphazard transition between past and future, use and misuse. In the first three stanzas, the speaker quietly wonders, posing questions to himself about the shoes in the third person. However, stanza four, repeated

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verbatim as the final ninth stanza, emphasizes the poem’s historical context— these shoes are loot of the Reich plundered from Vilna Jews—thus marking a profound shift in the poem’s tone. In stanza five, the speaker overcomes his muteness, finds his voice, and questions the shoes directly: “I should be still, / my tongue is like meat, / but the truth, shoes, / where are your feet?” (ll. 17–20). This is no longer a matter of wonder, but of accusation, a demand for information. The next two stanzas deepen this confrontational question, specifying, like Snow, the categories of the dead—the “body,” “bride,” “child” and “maiden”—who once wore them. Yet for all that, the questions culminate in specificity, with the speaker’s fleeting encounter with his own mother’s shoes mixed in with the others, “her Sabbath pair” no less, her best (ll. 31–32). Perhaps it is this one personal detail, this awful discovery, that pushes the speaker not just to render the shoes interlocutors, but also mute accomplices at whom he directs his increasingly enraged, unanswerable, and as yet unanswered, questions, about his own murdered family. Unlike the mute, inert, rotting pile of memorial shoes, reminiscent of piles of human corpses found upon liberation, Sutzkever’s shoes cannot be sacralized as relics, because they are not yet dead. They are silent, but still alive, unlike the victims to whom they metonymically refer.

Shoes as Postmemorial Teleporters: Transparent The cultural legacy of Holocaust shoes, finally, continues to find novel forms in post-Holocaust culture. A compelling example occurs in the TV series, Transparent (2014), created by Jill Soloway, which tells the story of Maura Pfefferman, a transgender woman, professor, and head of a Jewish family, whose transition shapes and is shaped by her already complicated relationships with her ex-wife and three children. While the show explores a range of questions about gender and sexual identity, it also explores myriad forms of Jewishness in the show’s principle characters, most explicitly through Ali Pfefferman, the youngest daughter whose subplot is shaped by a quest to understand her Jewishness and her family’s place in Jewish history. In season two (2015), episode eight, “Man on the Land,” Ali discovers an epigenetic link, a wormhole into her familial past of Nazi genocidal ­persecution, through a pair of jingling red shoes. At first glance, the shoes might seem to have little to do with Holocaust memorial culture. Ali, her sister, and their “Moppa” (the family’s affectionate mash-up of “Momma” and “Poppa”) have ventured for a weekend together to an all-women’s music festival in fictional Idyllwild. The plot revolves around a controversy that erupts at a campfire among the festival’s female founders: Are transwomen like Maura welcome? Are they “real women,” meaning assigned female at birth?30 Offended and indignant by the implications, Maura flees, disruptively exiting the campsite shouting, “Man on the Land!” while Ali wanders alone in the forest searching for her. Yet the scenes are intercut with flashbacks to Ali’s grandmother Rose and her transgender sister, Gittel, in Nazi-era Berlin,

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at the Magnus Hirschfeld Institute in the midst of the 1933 raid by Nazi youth. The Idyllwild campfire is juxtaposed against a Nazi book-burning of Hirschfeld’s entire sexology library. So just at the moment that Ali becomes keenly aware of Maura’s transgender otherness and exclusion, the red shoes with the white stripe and little bells appear on her feet, as if to transport Ali through time and space to witness Gittel’s terrifying arrest and lynching. Jonathan Freedman describes the scene as Ali’s “vision,” in which she imagines herself wearing “Jew shoes” that plunge her not only into the scene of the Nazi raid, but “next to and almost touching the young version of her grandmother Rose, crying in horror as Gittel is carted away.”31 Freedman calls it one of “the most controversial moments in the series,” not because it equates, as he puts it, “femi-Nazis” policing the Idyllwild festival with real Nazis, but rather that it shows how “history—the historical experience of trauma—shapes the ways that people perceive events, understand their world even when that world is no longer suffused with an immediate threat.”32 What is controversial, in other words, is how the scene dramatizes epigenetics in action, the theorized phenomenon of inherited trauma that, in an earlier episode, Ali is shown researching in the library, as if to explain her family’s overall dysfunction.33 Ali experiences Maura’s ejection from Idyllwild as repeating past historical traumas, like those inflicted upon Nazi-era Jews (including her own family), traumas that are, in fact, unknown to her. What matters here is that the material mechanism, the objects that concretize the epigenetic connection, or inheritance of memories across generations, are the shoes. By “Jew shoes,” Freedman suggests that Soloway refers back to Jewish women in twelfth-century Baghdad ordered to announce their presence by wearing shoes with bells on them.34 If so, then for Ali, the shoes connect her not just to the trans-otherness of both Maura and Gittel, but also to Jewish persecution under Nazism, and to a centuries-old dress code that marked Jewish “differentiation and humiliation” among Muslims (16).35 Whether the scene is meant to be Ali’s epigenetic vision or one of time travel, the point is how the medieval Baghdad “Jew shoes” also travel through time and space. They materialize Jewish continuity, survival, and self-consciousness of the marginalization of Jews across centuries and continents. Like Sutzkever’s Holocaust shoes, Ali’s “Jew shoes” move both backward and forward in time, bearing the residue of both individual and collective Jewish suffering. However, these are neither metonymic nor synechdochic shoes. Although they evoke the broad cultural resonance of Holocaust shoes, they neither represent nor stand in for past Jewish lives, whether individual or collective. They are neither orphaned nor separated in a haphazard, rotting pile; Ali is wearing them, a new, bright pair, their bells still jingling for their wearer to hear. Rather, they function more like “trans-shoes,” in the literal sense of conducting circuits of connection and translation across time and space, taking Ali across the bounds of persecution, and of her own sexual and religious experiences, to those of her Jewish ancestors.36

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If Ali’s “trans-shoes” create just such a bridge between present-day Los Angeles and the Nazi past, across experiences of otherness and vulnerability, for Ali such transness is at once literal and metaphorical: She is literally able to witness firsthand the frightening realities of violence exacted upon her transgender and Jewish relatives, but then as quickly to escape danger herself.37 As New York Times TV writer Rachel Syme describes this scene, “History and modern day collapse on each other, but the overlap isn’t violent; instead, the past and the present gently come together, allowing Ali to have a quiet revelation about her grandmother and hold her gaze for several long seconds of anguish.”38 Unlike the pearl ring passed on from Gittel to Grandma Rose, then from Josh to Raquel (who rejects it), the relic that also passes through time but is the “Holocaust heirloom” no one wants to keep, the shoes symbolize Ali’s intentional, curious, and only slightly perilous, wanderings into the past, or her fantasies thereof. She is not traumatized by what the shoes reveal (though that is painful enough), as much as liberated by the knowledge and understanding it brings to explain her present and even future. If so, then we might conclude that, through Ali, Transparent allows us to imagine what it would be like if memory could skip a generation or transcend multiple generations—an ambivalent fantasy of connection and reckoning with the memories of one’s parents and grandparents, without hearing the stories, or seeing the photos, but with the right shoes, of course.



Notes





1. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 34. 2. See The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Bill Brown, Other Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 3–4. Other late twentieth-century material cultural studies include Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter, ed. Daniel Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); History from Things: Essays on Material Culture, eds. Steven Lubar and W. David Kingery (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993); The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, ed. Victoria de Grazia, with Ellen Furlough (Berkeley: University of California, 1996). 3. Alvin Rosenfeld, A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1980), 27. 4. Pierre Bourdieu defines “symbolic capital” as “the acquisition of a reputation for competence and an image of respectability and honourability that are easily converted into political positions as a local or national notable.” See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 291. 5. Jan Tomasz Gross, Golden Harvest: Events at the Periphery of the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 11–12. See also David Gerlach, “Toward a Material Culture of Jewish Loss,” Jewish Culture and History 18, no. 1 (2017): 17–33.

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6. Bozena Shallcross, The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-Jewish Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 1, 2. 7. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 132. 8. Michael Bernard-Donals, Figures of Memory: The Rhetoric of Displacement at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016), 77–79. 9. Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, II: And Here My Troubles Began (New York: Pantheon, 1991), 29. 10. Peter Stallybrass, “Footnotes,” in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, eds. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York: Routledge, 1997), 320. 11. Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor’s True Story of Auschwitz (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1995), 68. 12. Gisella Perl, “The Value of a Piece of String,” from A Doctor in Auschwitz, excerpted in Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, eds., Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust (New York: Paragon, 1993), 108. 13. Edgar Snow, “Here the Nazi Butchers Wasted Nothing,” The Saturday Evening Post, October 23, 1944, 18–19, 96. Thanks to Eric Sundquist for help locating this source. 14. See Robert H. Abzug, Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). According to Abzug, Ohrdruf concentration camp in Germany was the first camp discovered by American liberating forces, and the Nordhausen-Dora complex was the first to be featured in the press, by Al Newman in Newsweek (22, 40–41). See also Liberation 1945, published on the occasion of the exhibition Liberation 1945, held at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, May 9, 1995–January 7, 1996 (West Haven, CT: Herlin Press, 1995). 15. One is reminded of a similar metonymic use of shoes to tell a more complicated emotional narrative in the rumored Ernest Hemingway story of only six words: “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.” 16. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1945), 506, http://www.communicationcache.com/uploads/1/0/8/8/10887248/kenneth_burke_-_a_grammar_of_motives_1945.pdf, accessed 31 January 2019. 17. When several thousand shoes from Majdanek arrived at the Maryland storage facility in late 1989, the museum curators were cautious about dealing with these rarely documented or displayed objects. See Bernard-Donals, Figures of Memory, 77. 18. Bernard-Donals, Figures of Memory, 78. In his research on the USHMM permanent exhibition, he found that many visitors made just such substitutions, taking them from the historical past into their own present. For example, a visitor named Audria writes, “the sheer number of Holocaust victims hit me when I saw the shoes … everyday ordinary people doing everyday, ordinary things … just like you and me.” USHMM Visitor Comments, 15 June 2006; qtd. in Figures of Memory, 69.

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19. Jeffrey Feldman, “The Holocaust Shoe, Untying Memory: Shoes as Holocaust Memorial Experience,” in Jews and Shoes, ed. Edna Nahshon (Oxford: Berg, 2008), 121. 20. Tim Cole, Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler, How History Is Bought, Packaged, and Sold (New York: Routledge, 2000), 98, 111. 21. Jessica Lang, Textual Silence: Unreadability and the Holocaust (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 2017), 42. 22. Dara Horn, “Walking with Living Feet,” Merlyn Pen’s Magazine, October/ November, 1993, 1. 23. See Edna Nahshon, “Jews and Shoes,” in Jews and Shoes, 30–31. 24.  “Shoes on the Danube Bank,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Shoes_on_the_Danube_Bank, accessed 22 October 2018. At three points, cast iron signs in Hungarian, English, and Hebrew read: “To the memory of the victims shot into the Danube by Arrow Cross militiamen in 1944–45. Erected 16 April 2005.” 25. Nahshon, “Jews and Shoes,” 30. 26. On Bachenavova’s work, see https://womennewsnetwork.net/2013/11/06/ truth-photojournalism-woman/; on the Boston memorial, see Andrea Shea, “In New Exhibit, Running Shoes are Potent Symbol of Boston Bombing,” National Public Radio, April 7, 2014, https://www.npr. org/2014/04/07/300234751/in-new-exhibit-running-shoes-are-potentsymbol-of-boston-bombing; and on the San Juan shoes memorial, see Sara Bobolz, “Hundreds of Shoes Form Memorial in Puerto Rico After Maria Death Toll Spikes,” Huffington Post, June 2, 2018, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hundreds-of-shoes-form-memorial-outside-puerto-ricocapitol-after-death-toll-spikes_us_5b130048e4b02143b7cce6b6?ncid=%20 edlinkusaolp00000029. 27.  See James E. Young, The Stages of Memory (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016). 28. Abraham Sutzkever, “A Load of Shoes,” trans. by C. K. Williams, in Writing in Witness: A Holocaust Reader, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (Albany: SUNY Press, 2018), 97–99. 29. See Ruth R. Wisse, “The Last Great Yiddish Poet?” Commentary (November 1983): 45; David H. Hirsch, “Abraham Sutzkever’s Vilna Poems,” Modern Language Studies 16, no. 1 (Winter 1986): 38. 30.  The scene references the actual controversy that broke out the same year, 2015, over whether or not transgender women were permitted to attend the Michigan Womyn’s Festival, upon which the fictional Idyllwild plotline is based. Thanks to Kadin Henningsen for a meaningful discussion of this scene. 31. Jonathan Freedman, “Transparent: A Guide for the Perplexed,” LARB, April 10, 2016. 32. Freedman, ibid. 33. See Rachel Syme, “Season 2, Episode 4: Cherry Blossoms,” The New York Times, December 15, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/15/arts/ television/transparent-season-2-episodes-4-and-5-raffles-and-mee-maw.html. 34. See Edna Nahshon, “Jews and shoes,” 16. 35. This tension arguably gets taken up in Season four, when Ali and Maura go to Israel.

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36. It is possible that “trans*shoes” is the better term, since the asterisk, according to Avery Tompkins, indicates “the possibility of a deeper meaning than the prefix itself might suggest,” and may be a “footnote indicator, implying a complication or suggesting further investigation.” See Avery Tompkins, “Asterisk,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, no. 1–2: 27. 37.  V. Varun Chaudry warns that trans “expansiveness” and other theoretical emphases “on transgender in name and idea alone” can “obscure the often-precarious realities for trans and gender-nonconforming people.” See V. Varun Chaudry, “Centering the ‘Evil Twin’: Rethinking Transgender in Queer Theory,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 25, no. 1 (January 2019): 47. 38. Rachel Syme, “‘Transparent’ Episodes 8 and 9: Idyllwild and Berlin,” The New York Times, December 18, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/17/ arts/television/transparent-episodes-8-9-review-womens-festival.html.

Bibliography Abzug, Robert H. Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of Nazi Concentration. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Appadurai, Arjun, ed. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Bernard-Donals, Michael. Figures of Memory: The Rhetoric of Displacements at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Albany: SUNY Press, 2016. Bobolz, Sara. “Hundreds of Shoes Form Memorial in Puerto Rico After Death Toll Spike.” Huffington Post, June 2, 2018. https://www.huffingtonpost. com/entr y/hundreds-of-shoes-form-memorial-outside-puer to-rico-capitol-after-death-toll-spikes_us_5b130048e4b02143b7cce6b6?ncid=%20 edlinkusaolp00000029. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. Brown, Bill. Other Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1945. Chaudry, V. Varun. “Centering the ‘Evil Twin’: Rethinking Transgender in Queer Theory.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 25, no. 1 (January 2019): 47. Cole, Time. Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler, How History Is Bought, Packaged, and Sold. New York: Routledge, 2000. De Grazia, Victoria, with Furlough, Ellen, eds. The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective. Berkeley: University of California, 1996. Feldman, Jeffrey. “The Holocaust Shoe, Untying Memory: Shoes as Holocaust Memorial Experience.” In Jews and Shoes, edited by Edna Nahshon. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2008. http://dx.doi.org.libproxy1.usc. edu/10.2752/9781847887207/JEWSHOES0013. Freedman, Jonathan. “Transparent: A Guide for the Perplexed.” LARB, April 10, 2016. Gerlach, David. “Toward a Material Culture of Jewish Loss.” Jewish Culture and History 18, no. 1 (2017): 17–33. Gross, Jan Tomasz. Golden Harvest: Events at the Periphery of the Holocaust. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

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Hirsch, David H. “Abraham Sutzkever’s Vilna Poems.” Modern Language Studies 16, no. 1 (Winter 1986): 38. Horn, Dara. “Walking with Living Feet.” Merlyn Pen’s Magazine, October/ November, 1993: 1–3. Lang, Jessica. Textual Silence: Unreadability and the Holocaust. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2017. Lebovic, Matt. “Boston Jews Ready for First Post-Attack Marathon.” Times of Isreal, April 20, 2014. Lengyel, Olga. Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor’s True Story of Auschwitz. Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1995. Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz. New York: Touchstone, 1996. Liberation 1945. West Haven, CT: Herlin Press, 1995. Lubar, Steven, and Kingery, W. David, eds. History from Things: Essays on Material Culture. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993. Miller, Daniel, ed. Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Nahshon, Edna. “Jews and Shoes.” In Jews and Shoes. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2008. http://dx.doi.org.libproxy1.usc.edu/10.2752/9781847887207/JEWSHOES0004. Perl, Gisella. “The Value of a Piece of String,” from A Doctor in Auschwitz, excerpted in Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust, edited by Carol Rittner and John K. Roth. New York: Paragon, 1993. Rosenfeld, Alvin. A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1980. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford, 1985. Shallcross, Bozena. The Holocaust Object in Polish-Jewish Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. Shea, Andrea. “In New Exhibit, Running Shoes are Potent Symbol of Boston Bombing.” National Public Radio, April 7, 2014. https://www.npr. org/2014/04/07/300234751/in-new-exhibit-running-shoes-are-potent-symbolof-boston-bombing. “Shoes on the Danube Bank.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoes_on_ the_Danube_Bank. Accessed 22 October 2018. Snow, Edgar. “Here the Nazi Butchers Wasted Nothing.” The Saturday Evening Post, October 23, 1944. Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, II: And Here My Troubles Began. New York: Pantheon, 1991. ———. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. New York: Pantheon, 1991. Stallybrass, Peter. “Footnotes.” In The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, edited by David Hillman and Carla Mazzio. New York: Routledge, 1997. Sutzkever, Abraham. “A Load of Shoes.” In Writing in Witness: A Holocaust Reader, edited by Eric J. Sundquist, translated by C. K. Williams. Albany: SUNY Press, 2018. Syme, Rachel. “Season 2, Episode 4: Cherry Blossoms.” The New York Times, December 15, 2015.

784  S. B. OSTER ———. “‘Transparent’ Episode 8 and 9: Idyllwild and Berlin.” The New York Times, December 18, 2015. Tompkins, Avery. “Asterisk.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, no. 1–2: 27. Wisse, Ruth R. “The Last Great Yiddish Poet?” Commentary 75, no. 5 (November 1983): 41–48. Young, James E. The Stages of Memory. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016. ———. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

CHAPTER 42

From Holocast Studies to Trauma Studies and Back Again Hilene Flanzbaum

In the past two decades, the study of trauma as a discipline in the humanities has flourished, while its parent, Holocaust studies has fallen into its shadow. In 1995, when I first taught a course in Literature of the Holocaust, I was riding a wave of Holocaust consciousness—one that had come as far as central Indiana. Three years earlier, the United States Holocaust Museum and Memorial had opened, drawing record-breaking crowds, and Schindler’s List had won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Still, my chair worried that in a university that was not even 2% Jewish, my course would not be fully enrolled. He was wrong—even the waiting list was full, and would remain so for almost two decades. In the last several years, however, I have needed to modify this course. In order to fill a class, as well as to stay current in the field, I have broadened its focus: I now teach “Literature of Trauma,” rather than just “Holocaust Literature.” We read Art Spiegelman in combination with Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods, and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing—just to name a few of my recent choices. More than anecdotal evidence, however, confirms the popularity of trauma studies. In recent years, humanities departments at American universities and colleges have offered classes on “European Trauma and Cultural Memory” (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), “Trauma and Global Literature” (University of Maryland), “Passing on Trauma” (Berkeley), “Trauma and Asian-American Literature” (Wesleyan), and “Narrating Queer Trauma” (Stanford).1 Looking at the MLA International Bibliography, we also see

H. Flanzbaum (*)  Butler University, Indianapolis, IN, USA © The Author(s) 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_42

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a dramatic rise in scholarly attention. Between 1990 and 1999, the word “trauma” appeared in the title of 179 MLA-listed articles. For the years 2000 to 2009, this figure rises to 998 articles. For 2010–2018, the same query yields 1354 results.2 For those unacquainted with the fine distinctions of academic disciplines or for those academics who are, but still not familiar with these two fields, I pause to explain a few properties that distinguish Holocaust studies from Trauma studies, both in their origin and in their practice. The discovery of trauma and trauma-related symptoms obviously does not begin in literary or cultural studies; rather, its home is in psychiatry and dates back to the early twentieth century and the work of Sigmund Freud, who found it a useful tool to explain neurosis and unhealthy behaviors attached to sexuality. As Freud saw it, traumatic issues arose in and around family dysfunction, of a sexual nature, and occurred as a result of direct environmental factors. Although one might argue that several principles of Freudian theory have been discredited, his work on the unconscious and its vulnerability to traumatic events have been central to psychology for a century, though was not applied in an extra-disciplinary context until the mid-twentieth century; as I will argue, only after Holocaust studies had captured the attention of so many practitioners of other disciplines in the Humanities. For obvious reasons, Holocaust studies took hold later in the century— with no one person credited with its arrival. A field that advances as a result of a global political disruption, it will take decades to understand its particulars, its relationship to other disciplines and will always be subject to the complex negotiations reserved for processing historical events. In any case, history is subject to political alliances, shifting perspectives, and changing attitudes. In an historical event of such massive scale and catastrophe, the historiography of the Holocaust has been additionally complex—first it placed the act of remembering under duress—and in doing so, it has its most direct link to Trauma Studies. Second, the tendency to look away from what feels too horrible to absorb, and the living presence of victims and mourners, placed the Holocaust under a veil of inviolability that compelled thoughtful people to approach the topic with both caution and hypersensitivity. For half a century or more, representations of the Holocaust have been met by criticism usually reserved for historical documents, rather than artistic performance: Did the writer have the right to tell the story if they had not gone through it themselves? Was it appropriate to subject the event to human imagination? Could representation come close enough to reality? Could writers use comedy to tell this story? And so on. We will look at this a bit later, still it would take a library to fully explore and recount these controversies. To understand how inveterate and ineluctable the debate about proper representation, however, one need to go only as far as any history of a Holocaust monument and memorial in one the countries affected. To this day, telling the story of the genocide is subject to a host of particular political issues.

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One might notice that as recently as 2018, for instance, the Polish government criminalized any public admission of national responsibility for the murder of its three million Jews. In short, the representation of the Holocaust did and always will be accountable to political forces. Research, discussion, and the pedagogy of the Holocaust can never be separated from history, politics, and ideology. This is not the case with Trauma Studies: With its roots in psychology—a positivist science—it leans toward a more totalizing discourse. Freud kept his distance from politics: The sickness of individuals he thought curable; the sickness of entire cultures left him stymied. Indeed, his insistence that religion was a fantasy, his blindness to the ascension of the Nazis in Austria and his refusal to leave his native country until the Nazis threatened his daughter’s life is legendary. Finally, Freud’s definition of trauma does not account for scale: Since all trauma yields like behaviors, and can be cured by similar method, what actually caused the trauma—while crucial to uncover—does not matter in treatment or cure. For a fictional, but brilliant, excursion into the consequences of global trauma versus individual trauma, D.M. Thomas’s The White Hotel, a mainstay of Holocaust literature, is illustrative.3 One might debate Freud’s usefulness to contemporary trauma theory; in any case, it was not his looming presence that opened trauma to humanistic inquiry. In the last 25 years, multiple cultural and sociological factors have contributed to that broadening of focus, but as intellectual historian Michael S. Roth argues in his 2011 book Memory, Trauma, and History, “academic currency in postmodernism and anti-foundationalism has been vital.”4 The poststructuralist revolution to which Roth refers was itself a response to historical events and developments of the past century: the Holocaust, as well as two world wars, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a protracted Cold War, a topic we will discuss in detail shortly. Crucial to note here, however, the recognition of trauma—as a diagnosis and a general state-of-mind— acquired cultural resonance. The maturation of memoir as a literary genre and the increased visibility of survivors of sexual assault have made the terminology of trauma available to all. The influx of trauma theory into humanities departments owes a great deal to several watershed texts: among them, Cathy Caruth’s Trauma: Explorations in Memory, and Testimony, a collaboration between literary critic Shoshana Felman and psychoanalyst Dori Laub. These theorists first looked at the memories of Holocaust survivors and then moved outward—or inward—to personal trauma. In Holocaust Studies, the effort to explore the relationship “between narrative and history, between art and memory, between speech and survival,” as well as “the common ground between literature and ethics,” became available for wider appropriation.5 By the mid-nineties, many academics viewed trauma studies as the bright, shiny penny, while the Holocaust was yesterday’s news. In popular culture, however, the memory of the Holocaust continued to find new expressions. Markus Zusak’s 2005 novel The Book Thief spent 500 weeks on the

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New York Times bestseller list,6 and a film version grossed over 76 million dollars.7 Novels about France under Nazi occupation, including Tatiana de Rosnay’s Sarah’s Key and Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, have also been adapted for film, and such narratives have proved to be eminently marketable. In 2006, Oprah Winfrey chose Elie Wiesel’s Night for her book club (a half-century after it was published), placing it for the first time on the New York Times bestseller list. In a “Special Presentation” for The Oprah Winfrey Show, she and Wiesel led viewers on a tour of what still stands of Auschwitz,8 and in the subsequent interview with Elie Wiesel, she asked him to acknowledge “that something good” had come from the genocide. In their treatment of the Holocaust, Americans had come full circle—from hiding survivors to celebrating them, from averting their gaze to looking too long. Other discursive shifts could be detected. In the decades after World War II, there were multiple attempts to “police” representations of the Holocaust. Think, for example, of Theodor Adorno’s over-cited (and misunderstood) statement that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”9; or of Cynthia Ozick’s notorious complaints about the ubiquity of Anne Frank10; or of the outrage a “comic” Holocaust movie like Life is Beautiful once inspired. Such protestations have all but disappeared—to the point where even Paul Verhoeven’s gross-out, campy Black Book (2006), about a female Jewish resistance fighter who sleeps with a Nazi, was largely taken in stride. No longer recondite, mysterious, or repressed, the Holocaust—for better or for worse—had become a subject available to everyone. The “popularity” of the Holocaust may have been partly responsible for driving academics away from the subject. Just as important to the sidelining of Holocaust-related studies, however, has been the growing demand for diversity in curricula and faculty. More urgent and local injustices confronted the American public and its students. In the past quarter-century, humanities syllabi have been flooded with readings about colonialism, racial oppression, and gender inequity. Meanwhile, in the lexicon of David Biale, Jewish-Americans have become “insiders,”11 part of the cultural mainstream. Fifty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Jewish-Americans had a notable presence in politics, universities, financial institutions, and government jobs; moreover, the accumulated wealth and cultural capital of a substantial sector of that population could not be ignored. In the current lexicon, JewishAmericans have “white privilege.” Without question, the right-wing politics of Israel have tarnished Jewish Studies departments. The left has characterized Israel as the oppressor, and in colleges across the country, the BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction Israel) movement has found a home. Those who oppose BDS argue, among other things, that even if not all anti-Zionists are antisemitic, all antisemites are anti-Zionists; in other words, BDS provides a tent large enough to provide cover for both antisemites and Holocaust deniers. For the past ten years, antisemitic incidents on college campuses

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(and off) have risen steadily.12 In academic organizations and at conferences, pro- and anti-BDS factions have argued bitterly, making Jewish Studies and related fields inhospitable to young scholars. For all of the reasons cited, Holocaust studies, which opened the space for trauma studies as a field in the humanities, has been gradually obscured. Michael Rothberg’s well-regarded Multidirectional Memory tackles this problem head-on, “by uncovering a countertradition in which remembrance of the Holocaust intersects with the legacies of colonialism and slavery and ongoing processes of decolonization” (xiii).13 Rothberg interrogates the logic of the “zero-sum game,” according to which we think either about the Holocaust or about other global traumas. He is right to approach this “competition” skeptically, of course; yet the urgency of Rothberg’s study, the fact that it feels both necessary and refreshing, speaks to the highly politicized and identitarian climate in which scholars operate. In his book, Rothberg reasserts the commonsense notion that those teaching the Holocaust, especially in the lower grades, have known for a long time: That in order to get non-Jewish students to “relate” to the Holocaust, it can be helpful to make them feel persecuted—or implicated in the persecution of others. In one controversial exercise, originally intended to help white students understand racism—but often used in units about the Holocaust, teachers tell their students that brown-eyed students are smarter, more talented, and more hardworking, and therefore deserving of special privileges; blue-eyed students, in contrast, are said to be lazy and destructive.14 Yet Rothberg has been so influential because he gave scholars permission to view the Holocaust in relation to other global catastrophes. In a notable crosshatching, Marianne Hirsch’s term “postmemory,” originally coined to describe the condition of the children of Holocaust survivors,15 has proved useful to scholars who write about other constituencies and contingencies: In Bridges to Memory, Maria Rice Bellamy applies the postmemory “paradigm” to her discussions of Toni Morrison, Edwidge Danticat, and other diasporic authors.16 In earlier decades, projects like Rothberg’s, which draws deliberate connections between the Holocaust and other collective traumas, would have been unwelcome. Once, scholars sought to label the Holocaust unique, incomparable, and unrepresentable; to argue otherwise was viewed as heresy, the first step on the path to denial. By now, most Holocaust scholars have overcome this fear; they realize that, if Holocaust studies is to remain a vital field of study, the event will have to take its place in the global landscape of persecutions and genocides. As a result of this repositioning, however, the exceptionalism of the Holocaust has started to fade. On one level, this is ironic: It is as if the language, imagery, and overall gestalt of Holocaust studies have been so thoroughly absorbed by academic discourse that they have become invisible. One thinks of Jacques Derrida’s notion of catachresis, in which the trope that silently controls the imagining of our lives wears

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away but still abides, an anchor to our most enduring formulations. It now falls to the Holocaust scholar to examine language, cultural trends, and movements—especially trauma studies—in order to reassert the primacy of Holocaust studies in the twentieth-century history of ideas and in contemporary perception. This has become an especially urgent task in recent years, in an international climate of resurgent right-wing nationalism, antisemitism, and outright Holocaust denial.

The Holocaust and Trauma in Contemporary Literature Prominent Jewish-American novelist Jonathan Safran Foer has targeted the intersection of the three vectors under scrutiny here: Holocaust Studies, trauma Studies, and poststructuralism. Read in tandem, his first two novels, Everything Is Illuminated (2002) and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), demonstrate the position of Holocaust studies in the twenty-first century, and the relation of the field to its neighbors. Published to wide acclaim—writing in The New York Times, Francine Prose called it “virtuosic”17—Illuminated presents itself as an autobiographical novel: The hero is named Jonathan Safran Foer, and, like the author himself, is the American grandson of a Holocaust survivor. The reader recognizes here a gesture common to postmodern representations, which often interrogate the boundary between fiction and non-fiction. Such a move again reminds us of how far the representation of the Holocaust has come; reading Illuminated, one is easily confused about what is true and what is not, what may or may not have happened to the actual Jonathan Safran Foer, and what has happened to the fictional one. The book opens with a sequence of letters, exchanged by the narrator Jonathan and a non-Jewish Ukrainian man, Alexander Petrov, whose errors in English diction and syntax are funny, though they also seem intended to point to the inherent imprecision of language. Through these letters, we learn that Jonathan has come to Ukraine to find a woman named Augustine, who reportedly saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Jonathan and Alex Jr. are joined by Alex’s grandfather, Alex Sr. Thus, there are two young men, and two grandfathers, a doubling which raises the specters of alternate family histories and unresolved fates. Though Jonathan does encounter a possible Augustine, the reader is never certain of the woman’s identity: She could be the real savior, or her sister, or a friend, or just the Trochimbrod librarian. The woman herself seems not to be sure who she is, mostly denying that she is the person sought; still, the reader wonders if Augustine has been so traumatized that she has dissociated herself from the woman who lived through the violent uprooting of her village and its inhabitants. For Jonathan then, nothing in particular is “illuminated.” For Alex Jr. and his grandfather, however, a buried truth comes to light. As Alex Sr. returns to the Odessa countryside, walks the same grounds he did as a young man, and re-acquaints himself

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with “Augustine” (who he seems to have known in the past), the old man can no longer ignore his own traumatic history. A repressed memory rises to consciousness: Ordered by the Nazis to identify Jews, Alex Sr. pointed to his best friend, who he then saw shot before his eyes. After remembering and confronting his complicity in his friend’s death, Alex Sr. commits suicide. Ironically, this “illumination” has come to one who did not seek it; and the light shed on the past brings only ultimate darkness. Any discussion of Illuminated must take place on several fronts: First, we should address the novel’s place in the canon of Holocaust literature; second, its intersection with developments in trauma studies and third, its postmodern indeterminacy. Foer’s first novel falls well within the category of third-generation survivor fiction, a genre with its own informal conventions: In these novels, historical events commonly merge with imaginary ones. This confusion reflects the relationship of the ancestor-survivor’s lived trauma to the grandchild’s “inheritance” of that experience, a reliving which always involves a certain amount of invention. Third-generation writers sense that they have been altered by the knowledge of what their grandparent-ancestors went through—even when that knowledge is limited.18 Foer varies the formula, however, by representing two types of “survivors.” The character Jonathan is a typical third-generation protagonist: He has grown up knowing a good deal about what happened to his grandparents. Knowledge of the Holocaust is woven into his DNA (both metaphorically and literally, a phenomenon I will get to shortly). Alex Jr., on the other hand, is descended from a perpetrator, whose crime has been repressed. Jonathan’s quest forces the Ukrainians to confront their complicity, for what appears to be the first time. As the grandfather tells his own tragic story, he admonishes his grandson, “it happened to everybody, do not make any mistakes. Just because I was not a Jew, it does not mean that it did not happen to me.”19 Foer thus acknowledges the Holocaust as a collective trauma, one which “happened to” whole towns and nations. While Jewish families inherit the terrible burdens of pain and loss, many others are bequeathed a legacy of guilt. At the end of the novel, Alexander tells Jonathan that his grandfather has committed suicide, dying of “melancholy.” For the first time, Alex sees his grandfather “at peace.” Foer suggests that Alex Sr. has been tortured his entire life by his act of betrayal and its repression. Notably, the reader does not mourn Herschel, Alex Sr.’s murdered friend, simply because we do not meet him; rather, we sympathize with the man who betrayed him. In short, Foer’s first book, written by a third-generation survivor and received as a Holocaust novel, charts an untrodden path: He asks his readers to sympathize with a different kind of victim—a man who perpetrated violence because he thought he had no other choice, coerced by unconquerable political forces. Because Foer humanizes a wrongdoer, he compels his readers to consider their own complicity: Would the reader place her own life in jeopardy to save

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her best friend, let alone a stranger? Nathan Englander’s short story, “What We Talk About when We Talk About Anne Frank,” originally published in the New Yorker in 2011, enlarges these issues, asking students to examine the limits of their own compassion: Englander’s story poses these questions: What would you do? How much would you risk? Are you sure you are better than those who turned their backs on desperate Jews? In the presence of current global atrocities, are human beings really getting more humane?20 For those teaching the Holocaust in the twenty-first century, these questions acquire more, rather than less, urgency. In Foer’s second novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, he again writes the story of a grandfather and grandson who are both victims of trauma. This time, a non-Jewish, German grandfather has lived through the bombing of Dresden, in which he saw his fiancée killed, and has ceased to speak, rendered mute by the horror of what he witnessed. His grandson Oskar, the novel’s precocious nine-year-old narrator, lost his father in the attacks of September 11, 2001. Foer contrasts the grandfather’s direct experience of Dresden with the child’s loss of his father, which he experiences in a technologically mediated way, via phone messages, television footage, and photography. Is “watching” trauma through screens and recordings as debilitating as seeing it in person? Is Oskar’s suffering greater or lesser than his grandfather’s? The reader is left to speculate here: Intellectual clarity is not granted; the novel’s apparent epiphanies are purely emotional. At the conclusion of Extremely, grandfather and grandson are partnered in their struggles. Even before reconnecting with his grandfather, Oskar has begun to heal. The novel’s plot involves Oskar traveling through New York City, seeking help from strangers as he investigates the mystery of his father’s death. Oskar’s odyssey recalls the Jewish religious ritual of shiva—where the mourner sits at home, telling her story again and again to successive visitors. These retellings are believed to help the mourner grieve and move on. In Foer’s version of shiva, however, Oskar must leave his dwelling to perform the requisite ritual. Oskar’s desire to tell his story might remind us of Toni Morrison’s character Sethe, the heroine of Beloved, who wishes to speak in order to heal; or of Sethe’s daughter Denver, who, like Oskar, goes on a journey, seeking a community of listeners.21 In the end, Oskar draws the most strength from a particular kind of audience—his silent grandfather, a fellow trauma survivor: I asked [him], “Can I tell you my story?” He opened his left hand. So I put my story into it.22

Though Oskar’s grandfather cannot speak, he declares himself receptive with a simple gesture. Foer suggests that while trauma can be transmitted across generations, so can comfort.

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Both Beloved and Extremely have been important to contemporary academic discussions about trauma, which tend to assume that healing, while not a certainty, remains possible—and although the plots are in no way alike, they impart similar lessons. In Beloved, the nineteenth-century heroine, Sethe, a former slave raped and beaten to within an inch of her life must also witness the torture of her husband, and has not been able to exorcise the ghosts of her past. In Extremely, a twenty-first-century young boy loses his father in the 9/11 attack, but himself undergoes no physical violence or even mistreatment. The world treats him kindly, even if historical events have treated him poorly. Despite the differences in Sethe and Oskar’s experiences, and their relative scale, Morrison and Foer prescribe similar methods for getting over trauma that echo contemporary attitudes. As Felman explains, traumatic experiences (can) be “employed to unify individuals and collectives; we are called on to discover new forms of listening and new responsibilities of transmission.”23 Mirroring changes in academic discourse, Foer begins his career thinking about the Holocaust, but soon moves outward, away from himself and from the Jewish experience, as if he had made a deliberate commitment to consider the universality of trauma, instead of the specificity of one. Foer’s evolution as a novelist also parallels developments in the social sciences: In psychology, similar developments took root. In the mid-80s, mental-health specialists became interested in researching the transmission of trauma to third-generation Holocaust survivors. Doctors who had treated the seven-year-old grandson of a survivor argued that the effects of the Holocaust on this demographic were manifest and ought to be considered in diagnosis and treatment. Researchers continue to debate whether and how inheritance of the knowledge of the Holocaust had been transmitted across generations. In 2003, a significant study found that grandchildren of survivors represented 300 times the population in child-psych units and that eating, depressive or anxiety disorders and a higher abuse of drugs. In the past ten years, the heritability of trauma has been widely accepted, with some scientists investigating epigenetics, the theory that trauma affects genetic composition across multiple generations.24 By 2000, scientists who had been working with the descendants of Holocaust survivors realized that their methods could be applied to other oppressed ethnic and social groups, as well as war victims and combatants—whatever their affiliations. Extremely declines to weigh one trauma against another. For therapists, as for Foer, comparing traumas is neither relevant nor interesting. In academia, likewise, what cynics once dubbed “comparative victim studies” has been permanently abandoned. Scholars should no longer ask, for example, whether what black people suffered during the Middle Passage was worse than what Jews suffered during the Holocaust. Suffering is suffering, and relief from that suffering—and let me pause here for a moment of affect—is an achievable goal.

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Do Foer’s novels suggest that suffering can be alleviated, or that traumas can be resolved? In the end, both Illuminated and Extremely present coherent narratives: Eventually, most of the gaps in each story are filled. Yet neither novel is exactly cheerful or affirmative; their endings are in certain ways indeterminate. Illuminated closes with an incomplete, quasi-Biblical sentence: “I will open the door in darkness and I will …” Does this door lead to more darkness? Or is the narrator Jonathan about to step into a psychological or spiritual light? This unfinished statement leaves room for hope, as if to partially de-ironize the title (maybe something is illuminated after all). Certainly, Foer does not leave the reader in a nihilistic vacuum, but in a world of many possible meanings. Indeed, one imagines that this would be an ending Foer’s editors would endorse. The novel’s conclusion is not tragic, but ambiguous— open-ended enough to make for a good Hollywood film.

The Postmodern Condition Like all cultural trends, the growth of Holocaust studies in the seventies and the subsequent rise of trauma studies were determined by many factors (some of which I have already articulated); but one would be hard-pressed to argue that these emerging fields reflected a strengthening of individual human agency. To the contrary, the birth of Holocaust and trauma studies in humanities departments is symptomatic of the postmodern condition, generally said to involve a growing suspicion about language, a sense that reality is ineluctably mediated, as well as a feeling of powerlessness in the face of an impersonal, totalizing force. Only four years after World War II ended, George Orwell named this force Big Brother; Marxist theorists then and now call it corporate capitalism; today, conspiracy theorists call it the “deep state.” Whatever its name, this unnamed power is believed to rob human beings of individual rights and choices, and to stunt their humanity. Since the turn of the century, rapid advances in technology have only heightened this anxiety: The continuing automation of the workforce, the emergence of data-mining personal data as a high-profit business, or the various electronic media the government uses in order to track the whereabouts of individuals at any time reinforce the belief that human beings are being held hostage to entities that have little regard for its health and happiness. What role did the Holocaust play in determining or shaping the postmodern condition, and the accompanying epistemological shift? Almost seventy years after the liberation of the Nazi death camps, we now have the perspective we need to understand the “historical coincidence” of the Holocaust and the birth of poststructuralism. The realization that these two events were inextricably linked has emerged slowly, as if heavy clouds and then lighter ones have gradually disappeared, to reveal a blinding sun. Twenty years ago, the prevailing scholarly consensus might have mapped the fields “poststructuralism” and “the Holocaust” as a Venn diagram—two circles that only

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marginally overlapped. Today, we have a more accurate picture in mind: Poststructuralist theory is more like a subset of the historical event, a circle within the broader circle. Certainly, knowing what happened to the Jews, or the gypsies, or the disabled matters for its own sake. But it is also crucial to acknowledge that the genocide had broader implications, not as easily verified, for Western culture and thought. In every branch of the humanities and in many social-science disciplines, the knowledge that the Holocaust happened destabilized truth claims and prompted a crisis in knowing that animated the poststructuralist project. In time, the subversion of master narratives generated more than an heuristic crisis among intellectuals: Epistemological skepticism and an accompanying sense of disorientation are the characteristics of Generation Y and successive generations. One term that connects Holocaust studies, trauma studies, and poststructuralism is “unknowability.” This word can be traced back to the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, whose stature in humanities departments has risen considerably in the past few decades, and for whom “the Holocaust is[…] an event of inexhaustible meaning.”25 “Unknowability” has a unique history in Holocaust studies, where for twenty-five years, scholars frequently called the event “unrepresentable,” “untellable,” and “unrecoverable”—ultimately “unknowable.” The subsequent inferences that all lived experience is such, and that language can never “truly” represent experience, are among the discoveries of postmodern thought. The linguistic crisis initiated by the Holocaust can be seen most directly in the memoirs of survivors. “For the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offence,” writes Primo Levi in Survival in Auschwitz, published only two years after his liberation. Despite Levi’s efforts to render what happened to him in the most precise and scientific terms, the insufficiency of language is one of the major themes of Survival. “We say ‘hunger,’ we say ‘tiredness,’ ‘fear,’ ‘pain,’ we say ‘winter’ [….] They are free words, created and used by free men who lived in comfort and suffering in their homes,” Levi reflects. Even the strongest words in this “free” (Italian) language seem inadequate to describe life in the camp. The Holocaust victim thus experiences firsthand what structuralist and poststructuralist theorists would emphasize: that signifiers do not refer to pre-existing ideas, which remain identical over time. Levi goes on to speculate, “If the Lagers had lasted longer, a new, harsh language would have been born.”26 If the phenomenon of internment had “lasted longer,” Levi suggests, a harsher way of speaking and writing would have been its inevitable, monstrous offspring. Latent in this morbid prediction is an acknowledgment that languages are historical, that they change to reflect changing material circumstances. Normally, these changes happen too slowly to be perceived. But the camps, with their unprecedented cruelty and squalor, introduced an obvious disjunction: History “got ahead of” language, which—fortunately, in this case—was not given time to catch up.

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As Robert Eaglestone has argued, poststructuralism arose in France for an identifiable historical reason: French thinkers had seen the most radical contingency of value poised upon the line between Vichy and free Paris. For French theorists, the mass genocide, which they had seen up close, marked the culmination of a century of rapid advances in technology that the West fetishized and made murderous. The Holocaust demystified the notion of “enlightenment,” revealing it to be a sham: Knowledge or scientific achievement plainly did not lead to a more civilized society. Indeed, the perpetual wonder that this type of brutality could come from a country as “enlightened” and “civilized” as Germany—one that had given the world both Goethe and Beethoven (the most tired of clichés)—is both banal and disingenuous, and typical of those who have still not confronted the reality of the Holocaust. The effect of the Holocaust on French thought is perhaps most visible and striking in Derrida’s body of work. For Derrida, the event of Auschwitz is irreducible and isolated, “unlinkable” with anything else. Like Levi, he recognizes a danger in saying anything at all about the Holocaust. Though we would like to honor the singularity of what transpired, we are constrained to use words that efface this singularity, “normalizing” it. At the same time, however, we are “enjoined to make links,” to recognize a horrifying continuity: Nazism was not born in the desert … it had grown in the shadow of big trees … In their bushy taxonomy, they would bear the names of religions, philosophies, political regimes, economic structures, religious or academic institutions. In short, what is just as confusedly called culture, or the world of the spirit.27

Derrida gives no priority to any particular cultural phenomenon or political ideology (“economic structures” are “confusedly” assimilated into the “world of the spirit”). Instead, Nazism is said to have been “nurtured” by Western civilization as a whole. For Derrida, it is a never-ending task to acknowledge this connection (“Auschwitz has obsessed everything I have ever been able to think”28). Once these links have been brought to light, one then proceeds to unsettle the grounds of this “bushy taxonomy,” to uproot the institutions, concepts, values, and habits of thought whose complicity can always be demonstrated. The motives for Derrida’s version of deconstruction, in other words, were avowedly anti-totalitarian, marked from the start by the memory of industrialized genocide. Other influential theorists have affirmed this deep connection between the Holocaust and postmodern Western civilization. In Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer, Jewish victims of the Holocaust represent a “privileged negative referent” for modern biopower, which reduces human beings to extinguishable “bare life”: These victims, denied the rights and privileges of the modern state, fell into a legal limbo, which made their deaths strictly meaningless, unredeemable by any cultural discourse. According to Agamben, this figure

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of “bare life” is now all-pervasive, so that the Nazi death camps expose “the hidden matrix of the politics in which we are still living.”29 Here again, it is useful to return to Survival in Auschwitz, which anticipates—and may have influenced—Agamben. Reading the most referred-to and reproduced section of Levi’s book, “The Drowned and the Saved,” one notices certain strangely familiar details.30 Those who managed to survive the camp, as described by Levi, bear a troubling resemblance to those who prosper in the contemporary capitalist state. Levi’s “saved” include L., “the determined and joyless dominator”; the “physically indestructible” Elias, a “madman” and “para-human”; and Henri, who is “enclosed in armour” and “incomprehensible, like the serpent in Genesis.” (Levi, of course, never rid himself of the notion that he was among these monstrous survivors.) Levi’s most enduring archetype, however, is that of the Musselman (“Muslim”), a slang term used in the camp to refer to prisoners who had no chance of surviving. Musselmanner were the “dead walking among the living,” the anonymous masses who perished within days of entering the camp, having forfeited all of their energy and will. To extend our analogy, is there a resemblance between these lost souls and the human individuals considered expendable by global capitalism?31 Arguably, the figure of the Musulman has invaded popular culture in the form of the zombie. Perhaps the most well-known recent example is the television series The Walking Dead, in which a small-town sheriff wakes up from a coma to find that a pathogen has turned most Americans into zombies. As of this writing, the series has aired on AMC for eight years and is still running. This is only one iteration of a current cultural obsession with the living dead: In the past two decades, zombies have been box-office dynamite.32 Several cultural critics have commented upon what these ubiquitous undead might signify.33 For my purposes, we will turn to Jon Stratton, whose article “The Trouble with Zombies: Bare Life, Muselmanner and Displaced People” brings together Agamben, Levi, and the figure of the zombie. In Stratton’s view, the popularity of the zombie myth testifies to the anxiety people in developed countries feel when confronted with images of migrants and refugees displaced from the global South.34 Stratton tends to emphasize how political oppression forces people from their homelands. I would add that both in reality and in fiction, not only oppressive political policies, but also rising sea levels, shortages of clean water, and contagious diseases have and will continue to create large groups of displaced peoples that threaten to test national borders, social policies, and human empathy. In World War Z, a novel by Max Brooks adapted for film in 2013, zombie-fication spreads by a virus; survivors trek from place to place, looking for land that has not yet been contaminated. Fittingly, in Brooks’s fictional world, the last safe place is Israel, because while “most people don’t believe something can happen until it already has,” the Israelis are not so naive.35 Without naming it, Brooks alludes to the Holocaust, pointing to an analogy that lingers in the background, though it usually remains unspoken.

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The Holocaust was something that never could have happened—but did. The zombie fantasy, in its very implausibility, memorializes this unanticipated trauma. If Auschwitz was possible, what isn’t? The ground beneath us shakes. We are indeed standing at the abyss—and yet, as Agamben tells us, “interrogating” or “listening to” a lacuna is not “fruitless work.”36 My goal here is not to plunge the reader into existential despair, but rather to reassert the centrality of Holocaust studies to any investigation of twentieth-century thought and twenty-first-century subjectivity. Scholars that point to the Holocaust as the beginning of the postmodern era have not gotten more attention because, despite the avid attention given to the victims—in books, in movies, on television, and in classrooms—we remain reluctant to stare into an abyss of unknowability, to confront fully the ethical and political horror of what transpired. In the United States especially, engagement with the Holocaust has focused on how best to represent what happened, while very little energy has been devoted to the question of what this might mean for human history. The realization that twenty-first-century subjectivity reflects a political and intellectual crisis initiated by the Holocaust is far from universal. While many misguided Americans have wished to dismiss deconstruction as an amoral exercise in sophistry, it must be remembered that French thinkers such as Derrida were responding to a concrete historical experience. Practitioners of trauma studies may choose not to acknowledge what launched them, and contemporary scholars may be interested in exploring new and different events. But awareness of how the Holocaust molded postmodern subjectivity, and of the way its tropes, symbols, and metaphors have taken root (to the point where they can be difficult to see) remain indispensable. To conclude, let us return to Foer—whose knowledge of the Holocaust was a birthright, as it was for many third-generation survivors. Foer always “knew of” the Holocaust; yet both Illuminated and Extremely insist on the limits of human knowledge, the ineradicable gap between language and experience. Occasionally, Foer seems to give up on words completely, resorting to images and photos, as if these might be able to say what language cannot. Like William Faulkner’s “Dry September” or Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, Foer’s novels are built around traumas never directly represented in the text. As his narrator remarks toward the end of Illuminated, “the origin of the story is always an absence.”37 I have no idea whether Foer has read Derrida—though I suspect not, since most writers I know shudder at his name. But it hardly matters. Foer needed no poststructuralist theory to feel the void that the Holocaust left; he needed only to talk to his grandparents. We don’t live in a world of thought, especially deconstructive thought. We don’t want to live in a world of missed meanings and emptiness; we can’t live in the aporia between what was said and what was heard; nor can we spend too much time in the abyss that the Holocaust has left. If we are American, we live in a country where happiness feels like a birthright; those who cannot

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attain it on their own can stream Netflix, take medicine, and talk to therapists. We do understand the difference between a red light and a green one, despite the unreadability of the sign. In addition, we need students for our classes. Thus, we recognize that the ascendancy of trauma studies, with its semi-inspiring message, is a good thing, even if more and more of its practitioners fail to recognize how it was born. It may now be fashionable to look at the progeny of Holocaust Studies, and to look away from the pit where mass genocide brings us. But every so often, when we are in a safe place—among friends—we should remind ourselves and others of how crucial the Holocaust has been to the way we think now.

Notes









1. Lauren Berlant’s course “Trauma Studies,” at the University of Chicago, is typical: Her syllabus includes Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel MAUS, Michael Herr’s Vietnam memoir Dispatches, and Sylvia Plath’s suicidal collection Ariel (among other texts). 2. Searches were performed in the MLA International Bibliography database on November 21, 2018. 3. In D. M. Thomas’s, The White Hotel, Viking Press, 1981, the heroine’s psychotherapy with Dr. Freud is interrupted by her capture by the Nazis. 4.  Michael S. Roth, Memory, Trauma and History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), XXXIII. 5. Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1991). 6. Penguin Random House, “#1 New York Times and Internationally Bestselling Author of THE BOOK THIEF, Markus Zusak, to Publish His Eagerly Awaited Next Novel, BRIDGE OF CLAY, This Fall,” press release, March 13, 2018, http://global.penguinrandomhouse.com/announcements/1-newyork-times-and-internationally-bestselling-author-of-the-book-thief-markuszusak-to-publish-his-eagerly-awaited-next-novel-bridge-of-clay-this-fall. 7. “The Book Thief (2013),” https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0816442. 8. Before Night, Winfrey had chosen for her book club James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, which was then revealed to be a semi-invented memoir, exposing her to serious criticism. In choosing Wiesel’s memoir, Oprah, perhaps, hoped to render herself immune to further criticism. The Oprah Winfrey Show, “A Special Presentation: Oprah and Elie Wiesel at Auschwitz Death Camp,” ABC, 2006, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IJ4mpCDVpE&t=60s. 9. Theodor Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 33. Adorno’s essay was originally written in 1951. 10. Cynthia Ozick, “The Misuses of Anne Frank’s Diary,” New Yorker, October 6, 1997, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1997/10/06/who-owns-annefrank.

800  H. FLANZBAUM 11.  See David Biale, et  al., eds., Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1998). 12. For one comprehensive account of these unfortunate developments, see “AntiSemitic Incidents Surge on Campus After Pittsburgh Shooting,” Chronicle of Higher Education, December 5, 2018. 13. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford University Press, 2009), xiii. 14. For a summary of the experiment and its legacy, see Stephen G. Bloom, “Lesson of a Lifetime,” Smithsonian Magazine, September, 2005, https://www. smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/lesson-of-a-lifetime-72754306; Katrina Bland, “Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes: What Jane Elliott’s Famous Experiment Says About Race 50 Years on,” The Arizona Republic, November 17, 2017, https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/karinabland/2017/11/17/ blue-eyes-brown-eyes-jane-elliotts-exercise-race-50-years-later/860287001. 15. Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 16. Maria Rice Bellamy, Bridges to Memory: Postmemory in Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015). 17. Francine Prose, “Back in the Totally Awesome USSR,” The New York Times, April 14, 2002, https://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/14/books/back-inthe-totally-awesome-ussr.html. 18.  Victoria Aarons and Alan L. Berger, Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, Memory (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017). Virtuosic Vicki Aarons. 19. Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 245–246. 20. Englander, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” originally published in the New Yorker, December 12, 2011, and collected in a volume of the same name, Knopf 2012. 21. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 1988). 22. Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005), 238. 23. Felman and Laub, xiii. 24. Rachel Yehuda, et al., “Holocaust Exposure Induced Intergenerational Effects on FKBP5 Methylation,” Biological Psychiatry 80, no. 5 (2016): 372–380, https:// www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S0006-3223(15)00652-6/pdf. A journalistic summary can be found in Helen Thompson, “Study of Holocaust Survivors Finds Trauma Passed on to Children’s Genes,” The Guardian, August 21, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/aug/21/ study-of-holocaust-survivors-finds-trauma-passed-on-to-childrens-genes. 25. Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, trans. Michel B. Smith (London: Athlone Press, 1999), 161. Quoted in Robert Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford University Press, 2004), 250. 26. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Touchstone, 1958), 123. 27. Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 109–110. Quoted in Eaglestone, 295.

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28.  Derrida, “Canons and Metonymies: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in Logomachia: The Contest of the Faculties, ed. Richard Rand (London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992). Quoted in Eaglestone, 279. 29. Agamben demonstrates how the camps were founded on a particular legal theory, the state of exception, which continues to underwrite the foundation of “exceptional” spaces, from refugee camps to waiting areas in airports: “the birth of the camp… decisively signals the political space of modernity.” Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford University Press, 1998), 113–115, 166–180. 30. Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 95–100. 31. The Muselmann has proven to be a metaphor of compelling interest. See Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford University Press, 2003). A scholar of religion and religious discourse, Anidjar is more concerned with the cultural history of Jewish-Arab relations than with the Holocaust. For Anidjar, the concentration-camp “Muslim” epitomizes the stereotypical, fatalistic Arab: Muslims are figures of “disappearance,” destined to die, “forgotten and forgettable,” except as “sites of memory” for others (119, 143). See also The Shoah Research Center, “Muselmann,” The International School for Holocaust Studies, https://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20 Word%20-%206474.pdf. 32. Major entries in the twenty-first-century zombie-film canon include Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002) and its sequel 28 Weeks Later (2007); Zack Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead (2004); the Resident Evil franchise (2002–2016), which adapted a popular video game, and David Robert Mitchell’s highly aestheticized It Follows (2014). 33. See, for example, James McFarland, “Philosophy of the Living Dead: At the Origin of the Zombie-Image,” Cultural Critique 90 (2015). 34.  Jon Stratton, “The Trouble with Zombies: Bare Life, Muselmanner and Displaced People,” Somatechnics 1 no. 1 (2011): 188–205. In 2017, the US Holocaust Museum and Memorial housed a special exhibition on the Syrian refugee crisis. Stratton. 35. Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (Broadway Paperbacks, 2013), 32. 36. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 13. 37. Foer, Everything is Illuminated, 230.

Bibliography Aarons, Victoria, and Alan L. Berger. Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, Memory. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017. Adorno, Theodor. “Cultural Criticism and Society.” In Prisms. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998. ———. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone Books, 1999.

802  H. FLANZBAUM Anidjar, Gil. The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003. “Anti-Semitic Incidents Surge on Campus.” https://www.insidehighered.com/ news/2018/12/05/anti-semitic-incidents-surge-college-campuses-after-pittsburgh-synagogue-shooting. Bellamy, Maria R. Bridges to Memory: Postmemory in Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Biale, David, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel, eds. Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism. Oakland: University of California Press, 1998. Bland, Katrina. “Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes: What Jane Elliot’s Famous Experiment Says About Race 50 Years on.” The Arizona Republic, November 17, 2017. https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/katrinabland/2017/11/17/ blue-eyes-brown-eyes-jane-elliotts-exercise-race-50-years-later/860287001. Bloom, Stephen G. “Lesson of a Lifetime.” Smithsonian Magazine, September 2005. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/lesson-of-a-lifetime-72754306. Boyle, Danny. 28 Days Later. DVD. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2002. ———. 28 Weeks Later. DVD. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2007. Brooks, Max. World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. New York: Broadway Paperbacks, 2013. Caruth, Cathy. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Derrida, Jacques. Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. London: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Eaglestone, Robert. The Holocaust and the Postmodern. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Englander, Nathan. What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012. Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge, 1991. Foer, Jonathan S. Everything Is Illuminated. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. ———. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. Frey, James. A Million Little Pieces. New York: Anchor Books, 2003. Herr, Michael. Dispatches. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977. Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz. New York: Touchstone, 1958. Levinas, Emmanuel. Alterity and Transcendence. London: Athlone Press, 1999. McFarland, James. “Philosophy of the Living Dead: At the Origin of the ZombieImage.” Cultural Critique 90 (2015): 22–63. Mitchell, David R. It Follows. DVD. The Weinstein Company, 2014. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf Doubleday, 1988. Ozick, Cynthia. “The Misuses of Anne Frank’s Diary.” New Yorker, October 6, 1997. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1997/10/06/who-owns-anne-frank. Path, Sylvia. Ariel. New York: HarperCollins, 1965.

42  FROM HOLOCAUST STUDIES TO TRAUMA STUDIES AND BACK AGAIN 

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Penguin Random House. “#1 New York Times and Internationally Bestselling Author of THE BOOK THIEF, Markus Zusak, to Publish His Eagerly Awaited Next Novel, BRIDGE OF CLAY, This Fall.” https://global.penguinrandomhouse. com/announcements/1-new-york-times-and-internationally-bestselling-author-ofthe-book-thief-markus-zusak-to-publish-his-eagerly-awaited-next-novel-bridge-ofclay-this. Prose, Francine. “Back in the Totally Awesome USSR.” The New York Times, April 14, 2002. https://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/14/books/back-in-the-totallyawesome-ussr.html. Pugliese, Stanislao, ed. The Legacy of Primo Levi. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Rand, Richard, ed. Logomachia: The Contest of the Faculties. London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. Roth, Michael S. Trauma and History. New York: Columbia Press University, 2011. Rothberg, Mic. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009. Snyder, Zack. Dawn of the Dead. DVD. Universal Pictures, 2004. Spiegelman, Art. MAUS. N.p.: Pantheon Books, 1991. Stratton, Jon. “The Trouble with Zombies: Bare Life, Muselmanner and Displaced People.” Somatechnics 1, no. 1 (2011): 188–205. “The Book Thief (2013).” https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0816442. The Shoah Research Center. “Muselmann.” https://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/ Microsoft%20Word%20-%206474.pdf. Thomas, D. M. The White Hotel. London: Viking Press, 1981. Thompson, Helen. “Study of Holocaust Survivors Finds Trauma Passed on to Children’s Genes.” The Guardian, August 21, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/ science/2015/aug/21/study-of-holocaust-survivors-finds-trauma-passed-on-tochildrens-genes. Yehuda, Rachel, et. al. “Holocaust Exposure Induced Intergenerational Effects on FKBP5 Methylation.” Biological Psychiatry 80, no. 5 (2016): 372–380. Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972.

Contributors’ Notes

Victoria Aarons holds the position of O. R. and Eva Mitchell Distinguished Professor of Literature at Trinity University where she teaches courses on American Jewish and Holocaust literatures. She is the author of over seventy scholarly articles and author or editor of A Measure of Memory: Storytelling and Identity in American Jewish Fiction and What Happened to Abraham: Reinventing the Covenant in American Jewish Fiction, both recipients of the CHOICE Award for Outstanding Academic Book; The New Diaspora: The Changing Landscape of American Jewish Fiction; Bernard Malamud: A Centennial Tribute; Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives: Memory in Memoir and Fiction; The Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow; Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, and Memory, co-authored with Alan L. Berger; New Directions in Jewish American and Holocaust Literature: Reading and Teaching; and The New Jewish-American Literary Studies: Twenty-First Century Critical Revisions. She is a contributor to the two-volume Encyclopedia of Holocaust Literature: Writers and Their Works, and she was an invited speaker at the 80th birthday celebration/symposium for Elie Wiesel. Aarons is one of three judges for the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, an annual award given to a rising American Jewish writer of fiction. Her work has appeared in a number of scholarly venues, and she is on the editorial board of several journals, including Philip Roth Studies, Studies in American Jewish Literature, and Women in Judaism. Her most recent monograph, Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma, and Memory, was published by Rutgers University Press in 2020. Wendy Adele-Marie is Professor of History and Coordinator of Jewish Studies at Oakton Community College, where she has developed and taught a number of courses including History of the Holocaust, History of Genocide, Introduction to Jewish Studies, and History of Nazi Germany. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4

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She is the author of the book Women as Nazis, is editor of the series Annual Editions: United States History, Volume 1: Colonial Through Reconstruction, and Annual Editions: United States History, Volume II: Reconstruction Through Present, and has written twelve book reviews, twenty-one essays and articles, and two textbook modules. Her research focuses on the psychological/sociological aspects behind female perpetrators of the Holocaust, women’s motivations during war, and pop-cultural imaging of women in the twentieth century. Alan Astro is a native of Brooklyn and has taught for 35 years at Trinity University, San Antonio. The author of over 35 articles on writers as varied as Bashevis, Baudelaire, Beckett, and Borges, he is the editor of Yiddish South of the Border: An Anthology of Yiddish Writing from Latin America (published by University of New Mexico Press). His translation of Eric Marty’s Radical French Thought and the Return of the “Jewish Question” appeared in 2015 with Indiana University Press. Together with Malena Chinski of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris, Astro edited a multi-authored volume, Splendor, Decline, and Rediscovery of Yiddish in Latin America, which Brill published in 2018. Elizabeth R. Baer serves as Research Professor of English and African Studies at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota. She is currently working at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC, doing research for the Senior Historian Division. In 2016–2017, Dr. Baer held the position of Ida E. King Distinguished Visiting Scholar of Holocaust Studies at Stockton University in New Jersey where she taught courses on gender and genocide. She has published five books on the topics of war and genocide: Shadows on My Heart: The Civil War Diary of Lucy Buck of Virginia (1997); The Blessed Abyss: Inmate #6582 in Ravensbrück Concentration Camp for Women (2000), co-edited with Dr. Hester Baer, a critical edition of a memoir originally published in Germany in 1946; Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust (2003), co-edited, with Dr. Myrna Goldenberg, an anthology of essays on gender and the Holocaust; The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post-Holocaust Fiction (2012), which traces the intertextual appropriation of the golem legend in contemporary Jewish-American fiction, graphic novels, comics, The X-Files, and films; and her most recent book, The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich (2017)., which has subsequently been published in an African edition. She is the recipient of several awards, including a Fulbright to study the history of Jews in Germany and the Virginia Hamilton Prize for the best essay on multicultural children’s literature. Alan L. Berger occupies the Raddock Family Eminent Scholar Chair for Holocaust Studies, the first Holocaust chair established in the state of Florida, and is Professor of Judaic Studies at Florida Atlantic University, where he also directs the Center for the Study of Values and Violence after Auschwitz. He was series editor of “Religion, Theology, and the Holocaust,”

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Syracuse University Press (1998–2004). Among his books are Crisis and Covenant: The Holocaust in American Jewish Fiction, Judaism in the Modern World (Editor), and Children of Job: American Second-Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust (Foreword by Elie Wiesel), the first systematic study of American films and novels of children of Holocaust survivors analyzing the legacy of the Holocaust on the second generation. Second-Generation Voices: Reflections by Children of Holocaust Survivors and Perpetrators, which he and his wife Naomi co-edited, won the 2002 B’nai Zion National Media Award. He is also co-editor of Encyclopedia of Holocaust Literature, which received a Booklist Best Reference Book of 2002 award and the Outstanding Reference Source 2003—Reference and User Services Association of the ALA (RUSA). The Continuing Agony: From the Carmelite Convent to the Crosses at Auschwitz (2004) was nominated for the American Catholic Historical Association’s John Gilmary Shea Prize. He is also the author of Jewish American and Holocaust Literature: Representation in the Postmodern World (2004) and co-author with David Patterson of Jewish-Christian Dialogue: Drawing Honey from the Rock of which he is co-author (2008). He is co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Jewish-American Literature (2009) and editor of Trialogue and Terror: Judaism, Christianity and Islam Respond to 9/11 (2012) and Post-Holocaust Jewish/Christian Dialogue: After the Flood Before the Rainbow (2015). He is co-author (with Victoria Aarons) of Third-Generation Holocaust Representation, Trauma, History, and Memory (2017). Elie Wiesel Messenger for Peace is contracted with Routledge Press in their Historical Americans Series. His many articles, essays, and book chapters appear in a variety of places including Modern Judaism, Modern Language Studies, Religion and American Culture, Journal of Ecumenical Studies, Studies in American Jewish Literature, Saul Bellow Journal, Jewish Book Annual, Sociological Analysis, Australian Journal of Jewish Studies, Judaism, Literature and Belief, Shofar, and Encyclopedia of Genocide. He was guest editor for two special issues of the journal Literature and Belief: “Holocaust Rescuers” and “Elie Wiesel.” He also served as guest editor for a special issue of the Saul Bellow Journal: “Bellow and the Holocaust” and for the Festschrift issue of Studies in American Jewish Literature honoring Dan Walden. Berger’s reviews have also appeared in leading Jewish periodicals including The Forward, Tikkun, Hadassah Magazine and Midstream. Rachel F. Brenner is Max and Frieda Weinstein-Bascom Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature at the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has published widely on responses to the Holocaust in Jewish Diaspora literature, Israeli literature, and Polish Literature and has held fellowships at the Hebrew University, the Oxford Center for Jewish Studies, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Institute for Research in Humanities in the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her books include Writing as Resistance: Four Women Confronting the Holocaust: Edith Stein, Simone Weil, Anne Frank, and Etty

808  Contributors’ Notes

Hillesum; Inextricably Bonded—Israeli Jewish and Arab Writers Re-Visioning Culture and The Freedom to Write: The Woman-Artist and the World in Ruth Almog’s Fiction (in Hebrew). Her latest book The Ethics of Witnessing: The Holocaust in Polish Writers’ Diaries from Warsaw, 1939–1945, was published by The Northwestern University Press in 2014. It received the University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies. David Caplan is the author of five books of literary criticism and poetry, most recently, Rhyme’s Challenge: Hip Hop, Poetry, and Contemporary Rhyming Culture (Oxford University Press, 2014) and an edited essay collection, On Rhyme (Presses Universitaires de Liège, 2017). Charles M. Weis, Professor of English at Ohio Wesleyan University, has twice served as a Fulbright lecturer in American literature. His other honors include the Virginia Quarterly Review’s Emily Clark Balch Prize for Poetry. His current projects include American Poetry: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, under contact). Tim Cole, University of Bristow Institute at the University of Bristol, is the author of Images of the Holocaust/Selling the Holocaust (1999), Holocaust City (2003), Traces of the Holocaust (2011), and Holocaust Landscapes (2016) and a co-editor of Militarized Landscapes (2010) and Geographies of the Holocaust (2014). Sarah Cushman is Director of the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University and a lecturer in the History Department at Northwestern. The Holocaust Educational Foundation advances Holocaust education at the university level throughout the world by supporting scholarship and teaching. She has been involved in Holocaust Education and scholarship for nearly two decades, serving as Director of Youth Education at the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Long Island and Head of Educational Programming at the Strassler Center of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. She earned her doctorate in Holocaust History from Clark University and her research centers on women’s experiences during the Holocaust. She is currently working on her first book, Auschwitz: The Women’s Camp, which will be an adaptation of her dissertation. Jeffrey Scott Demsky is an Associate Professor of History at San Bernardino Valley College. His scholarship exists at the intersection of postwar American cultural history and Holocaust memorialization. Dr. Demsky’s manuscript, “Irreverent Remembrance: Nazi and Holocaust Memorialization in AngloAmerican Popular Culture, 1945–2020” is under contract with Academic Studies Press. He has published numerous academic essays and articles on these topics in the US, UK, Canada, France, and Germany. Margarete Myers Feinstein holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of California at Davis. She is the author of Holocaust Survivors in Postwar Germany, 1945–1957 (Cambridge University Press, 2010), State Symbols: The Quest for Legitimacy in the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic, 1945–1959 (Brill, 2002), and many articles. She teaches

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in the Jewish Studies Program at Loyola Marymount University. Her research interests focus on how people came to terms with the legacies of Nazism, including questions of revenge and the return of German victims of Nazism. Hilene Flanzbaum is the Allegra Stewart Chair of Modern Literature and the Director of the MFA program at Butler University. She is the editor and a contributor to The Americanization of the Holocaust and the managing editor of Jewish-American Literature: A Norton Anthology. She has published articles about Jewish-American literature in English Literary History; American Literary History; Studies in American Jewish Literature; and the Yale Journal of Criticism, among other places. Sandor Goodhart is Professor of English and Jewish Studies at Purdue University in the Department of English and Director of the Religious Studies Program in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at Purdue. He is the author of seven books on literature, philosophy, and Jewish Studies including Of Levinas and Shakespeare: “To See Another Thus” (Purdue University Press, 2018; co-edited with Moshe Gold), Möbian Nights: Reading Literature and Darkness (Bloomsbury, 2017), The Prophetic Law: Essays in Judaism, Girardianism, Literary Studies, and the Ethical (Michigan State University Press, 2014), Sacrifice, Scripture, and Substitution: Readings in Ancient Judaism and Christianity (Notre Dame University Press, 2011; co-edited with Ann Astell), For René Girard: Essays in Friendship and Truth (Michigan State University Press, 2009; co-edited with James Williams, Thomas Ryba, and Jørgen Jørgensen), Reading Stephen Sondheim: A Collection of Critical Essays (Garland, 2000), and Sacrificing Commentary: Reading the End of Literature (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). He directed the Jewish Studies Program at Purdue (1997–2002), the Philosophy and Literature Program (2005), and the Classical Studies Program (2007– 2011). He served as guest editor for a special issue of Shofar, 26.4 (Summer 2008) on Emmanuel Levinas, as the co-editor (with Monica Osborne) of a special issue of Modern Fiction Studies, 54.1 (Spring 2008) on Emmanuel Levinas, and as the editor of a special issue of Religion: An International Journal, 37.1 (March 2007) on René Girard. In 2012 and 2013, he co-hosted (with Benoît Chantre) an international conference on Emmanuel Levinas and René Girard (“Du sacré au saint”) at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the École Normale Supérieure. He is a founding board member of the North American Levinas Society (now in its fifteenth year), the former President of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion (2004–2007), and the author of over one hundred essays. Claire Gorrara is Professor of French at Cardiff University and Dean of Research Culture and Environment. She has published widely on cultural memories of World War II in France, French women’s writing and French crime fiction, including The Roman Noir in French Culture: Dark Fictions (Oxford University Press, 2003) and Past Crimes, Present Memories: French Crime Fiction and the Second World War (Manchester University Press,

810  Contributors’ Notes

2012). More recently, she has shifted her focus to visual cultures of war, with an article on British Army photographers in Liberation France for the Journal of War and Culture Studies (2016), and an article on French comic books and the Algerian War in the journal French Politics, Culture and Society (2018). She is currently writing a monograph on transnational narratives of war and the graphic novel. Marat Grinberg is Associate Professor of Russian and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, OR. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in Comparative Literature in 2006. A scholar of both literature and film, he is the author of two books, “I Am to Be Read Not from Left to Right, but in Jewish: From Right to Left”: The Poetics of Boris Slutsky (2011) and Aleksandr Askoldov: The Commissar (2016), and a co-editor of Woody on Rye: Jewishness in the Films and Plays of Woody Allen (2013). Sara R. Horowitz is Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities and former Director of the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University in Toronto. She is the author of Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction, which received the Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Book, and served as the senior founding editor of the Azrieli Series of Holocaust Memoirs—Canada (Series 1 and 2). She is the editor of Lessons and Legacies of the Holocaust Volume X: Back to the Sources (2012) and co-editor of the forthcoming Shadows on the City of Lights: Jewish Post-War French Writing, of Hans Günther Adler: Life, Literature, Legacy (2016), which received the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, and of Encounter with Appelfeld, and other books. In addition, she is founding co-editor of the journal KEREM: A Journal of Creative Explorations in Judaism. She served as editor for Literature for The Cambridge Dictionary of Judaism and Jewish Culture (ed. Judith Baskin). She publishes extensively on contemporary Holocaust literature, gender and Holocaust memory survivors, and Jewish North American fiction. She served as President of the Association for Jewish Studies and sits on the Academic Advisory Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Academic Advisory Council of the Holocaust Education Foundation. Currently, she is completing a book called “Gender, Genocide, and Jewish Memory.” Till Kinzel received his Dr. phil. (2002) and Habilitation (2005) from the Technical University of Berlin (English and American literature). He has published some books, on Allan Bloom (Platonische Kulturkritik in Amerika; 2002), Nicolás Gómez Dávila (2003; 4th ed. 2015), on Philip Roth (Die Tragödie und Komödie des amerikanischen Lebens, 2006), and on Michael Oakeshott (2007). He is currently writing a book on Johann Georg Hamann. Most recently, he has edited a number of writings and translations by Johann Joachim Eschenburg (e.g., Von Chaucer zu Pope. Essays und Übersetzungen zur englischen Literatur des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit; Über William Hogarth und seine Erklärer; both 2013; Kleine

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Geschichte des Romans von der Antike bis zur Aufklärung; 2015) and co-edited Imaginary Dialogues in English: Explorations of a Literary Form (2012) and Imaginary Dialogues in American Literature and Philosophy: Beyond the Mainstream (2014) and Audionarratology (2016, all with Jarmila Mildorf), as well as Johann Joachim Eschenburg und die Künste und Wissenschaften zwischen Aufklärung und Romantik (2013), a book on the reception of Edward Gibbon in Germany (2015) as well as Johann Arnold Ebert. Dichtung, Übersetzung und Kulturtransfer in der Aufklärung (2016; all with CordFriedrich Berghahn) and Johann Joachim Christoph Bode. Studien zu Leben und Werk (2017). Karolina Krasuska is Assistant Professor at American Studies Center at the University of Warsaw, Poland, and the founding director of the research unit Gender/Sexuality at the ASC. She is the author of a monograph examining modernist poetry from a transnational, gender-oriented perspective Płeć i naród: Translokacje [Gender and nation: Translocations], Warsaw 2012 and a co-editor and co-author of the pioneer Encyklopedia gender, Warsaw 2014. She is also the Polish translator of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (Uwikłani w płeć, Warszawa 2008). Her newest book publication is a co-edited volume (with Andrea Peto and Louise Hecht) Women and the Holocaust: New Perspectives and Challenges, Warsaw 2015. Currently, she is working on a project on gendered modes of the twenty-first-century Jewish-American fiction. Joanna Krongold is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at the University of Toronto in collaboration with the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies. She completed her MSt in English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford, where she studied literary representations of trauma. Her doctoral dissertation focuses on the use of metaphor and figurative dynamics in youth literature of the Holocaust. Jessica Lang is Professor of English at Baruch College. She is the founding Newman Director of the Wasserman Jewish Studies Center and the author of Textual Silence: Unreadability and the Holocaust (Rutgers University Press, 2017). Phyllis Lassner is Professor Emerita in The Crown Center for Jewish and Israel Studies and The Gender Studies and Writing Programs at Northwestern University. Her publications include studies of interwar, World War II, and postwar women writers, including two books on the Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen, British Women Writers of World War II, Colonial Strangers: Women Writing the End of the British Empire, and Anglo-Jewish Women Writing the Holocaust. She co-edited the volumes Antisemitism and Philosemitism in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries: Representing Jews, Jewishness, and Modern Culture and Rumer Godden: International and Intermodern Storyteller. Her most recent book is Espionage and Exile: Fascism and Anti-Fascism in British Spy Fiction and Film (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). She was the recipient of the International Diamond Jubilee

812  Contributors’ Notes

Fellowship 2015–2017 at Southampton University, UK, for her work on Holocaust representation. She and Danny M. Cohen co-authored the introduction to their new edition of Gisella Perl’s memoir, I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz (Lexington Books, 2019). Her current and forthcoming publications include essays on Polish post-Holocaust film, Eva Hoffman’s post-Holocaust play, The Ceremony, Josef Herman’s art of Holocaust lamentation, and the escape memoir of Trudi Kanter. She serves on the Education and Outreach Committee of the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center. Holli Levitsky holds a B.A. and an M.A. in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan, an M.A. in Comparative Literature, and a Ph.D. in English and American Literature from the University of California, Irvine. Founder and director of the Jewish Studies Program and Professor of English at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, she has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, a Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Literature in Poland, a Schusterman Fellow at the Summer Institute for Israel Studies, a Florida International University Exile Studies Scholarin-Residence, and co-directs the annual Jewish American and Holocaust Literature Symposium. She works primarily in the areas of Jewish-American literature, Holocaust studies, and Exile studies, and has published articles, book chapters, and essays in these areas. Most recently, she is the co-editor of several volumes, New Directions in Jewish American and Holocaust Literature: Reading and Teaching (2019); The Literature of Exile and Displacement: American Identity in a Time of Crisis (2016) and Summer Haven: The Catskills, the Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (2015). Paule Lévy is Professor of American literature at the University of Versailles, France. Her research focuses on Jewish-American literature, ethnic studies, and women’s writing, on which she has written extensively. In addition to numerous articles, her book publications include Figures de l’artiste: identité et écriture dans la littérature juive américaine de la deuxième moitié du vingtième siècle (2006), American Pastoral: La Vie réinventée (2012), and the edited or co-edited volumes, Profils américains: Philip Roth (2002), Ecritures contemporaines de la différence (2003), Mémoires d’Amériques (2009), Autour de Saul Bellow (2010), American Pastoral: Lectures d’une oeuvre (2011) and a Special Issue on Grace Paley (Journal of the Short Story in English, 2015). Shellie McCullough is currently a Humanities Lecturer at The University of Texas at Dallas and the author of the book Engaging the Shoah Through the Poetry of Dan Pagis: Memory and Metaphor with Roman & Littlefield (Dec 2016). Shellie’s work has also appeared in The University of Bucharest Review, World Literature Today as well as Blackwell’s Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, in which she authored the entry for “Zionism.”

Contributors’ Notes

  813

Richard Middleton-Kaplan is Dean of Arts & Sciences, Criminal Justice, Education, and Human and Social Services at Walla Walla Community College in Washington State. In 2011, Richard spent a sabbatical at the Centre for Applied Human Rights at The University of York in England, where he helped to develop a course on literature and human rights. His articles have appeared in Leviathan, Modern Fiction Studies, The Canadian Journal of Peace and Conflict Studies, and the collection Levinas and Twentieth-Century Literature (University of Delaware Press, 2013). Richard’s essay “The Myth of Jewish Passivity” forms the opening section of Jewish Resistance Against the Nazis (The Catholic University of America Press, 2014). Golan Moskowitz is the Ray D. Wolfe Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto, where he teaches courses on post-Holocaust literature and Jewish comics and graphic novels. He has also taught at Smith College and Tufts University. Golan’s writing appears in Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture, as well as In the Shadows of Memory: The Holocaust and the Third Generation (Vallentine Mitchell, 2016), edited by Esther Jilovsky, Jordana Silverstein, and David Slucki. His monograph on queerness and Jewishness in the life and work of Maurice Sendak is forthcoming. Ira Nadel is Professor of English and Distinguished University Scholar at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. He has written biographies of Leonard Cohen, Tom Stoppard, David Mamet, and Leon Uris and such critical works as Joyce and The Jews and Modernism’s Second Act. His published essays include “The Fingerprint and the Photograph: The Fiction of Biographical Facts,” “Oriental Modernism,” and “Laughter in Jerusalem: Brecht, Arendt and Eichmann,” forthcoming in Clio. Gila Safran Naveh is Professor of Judaic Studies and Comparative Literature and Affiliate Faculty in WGSS and European Studies. She is Judaic Studies Department Head and Endowed Jewish Foundation of Cincinnati Chair. Professor Safran Naveh is author of Biblical Parables and Their Modern Re-creations: From Apples of Gold in Silver Settings to Imperial Messages, published with SUNY Press and nominated for the national Jewish Book award in the Scholarly Division; contributing author to Cultural Shaping of Violence, with Purdue University Press, and American Jewish and Holocaust Literature, with SUNY Press, and co-editor of The Formal Complexity of Natural Language, with Reidel Press. Presently, Professor Naveh is completing a book length entitled, Unpacking the Heart with Words: Women Survivors of the Holocaust Healing the Self. She is author of numerous scholarly articles engaging current theoretical frameworks and focusing on interdisciplinary approaches and global issues. For her outstanding teaching and scholarship, Professor Safran Naveh was awarded the A.B.D. Cohen Award for outstanding university teaching, the Edith Alexander Award, The Leading Edge Award, and the George C. Barbour Award. She has also received the Skirball Fellowship for excellence in research, a Fellowship at Oxford University,

814  Contributors’ Notes

NEH grants and numerous other travel and research grants. Professor Safran Naveh teaches Holocaust and Genocide, Film and Fiction, American Jewish Fiction, World Literature, Semiotics, Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism, Freud Studies, Kafka, Jewish and Women’s Humor, and Jewish Women Salons and Their Impact on History, and Culture, Identity, and Sexuality. Cary Nelson is Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an affiliated faculty member at the University of Haifa. He is the author or editor of 33 books, including Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left and Israel Denial: Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism, & The Faculty Campaign Against the Jewish State. His several books about modern poetry reflect a long-term interest in Holocaust poetry. Sharon B. Oster is Professor of English at the University of Redlands, and author of No Place in Time: The Hebraic Myth in Late-Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Wayne State University Press, 2018). Her publications on American, Jewish, and Holocaust literature include essays in English Literary History and Prooftexts, and forthcoming contributions to Lessons and Legacies XIV: The Holocaust in the 21st Century, and to a special issue, “Rethinking the Muselmann,” for The Journal of Holocaust Research. She has been a fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, where she has developed digital humanities pedagogical tools, including an interdisciplinary GIS mapping project. She is currently completing a book manuscript on Holocaust literature and visual culture titled “Impossible Holocaust Metaphors: The Muselmann.” Ashley A. Passmore is Assistant Professor of German and International Studies at Texas A&M University. Her recent articles include “The Artful Dodge: The Appearance of the Schnorrer in German Literature” (Journal of Austrian Studies, 2017) and “Their Feet Will Become Fins Again: Theodor Herzl’s View of Darwinian Transformation” (Israel Studies, 2017). She is currently working on a monograph called “Axis Berlin/Tel Aviv” about the reevaluation of the idea of “Diaspora” for third-generation Israelis and German Jews. In 2014, she was awarded a fellowship by the Schusterman Institute of Israel Studies at Brandeis University. Avinoam J. Patt is the Philip D. Feltman Professor of Modern Jewish History at the Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Hartford, where he is also director of the Museum of Jewish Civilization. Previously, he worked as the Miles Lerman Applied Research Scholar for Jewish Life and Culture at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). He received his Ph.D. in Modern European History and Hebrew and Judaic Studies from New York University. He is the author of Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish Youth and Zionism in the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Wayne State

Contributors’ Notes

  815

University Press, 2009) and the co-editor (with Michael Berkowitz) of a collected volume on Jewish Displaced Persons, titled We Are Here: New Approaches to the Study of Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (Wayne State University Press, 2010). He is a contributor to several projects at the USHMM and is co-author of the recently published source volume, Jewish Responses to Persecution, 1938–1940 (USHMM/Alta Mira Press, 2011). He has also published numerous articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia articles on various topics related to Jewish life and culture before, during, and after the Holocaust and is director of the In Our Words Interview Project with the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. Most recently, he is co-editor of the anthology of contemporary American Jewish fiction The New Diaspora: The Changing Face of American Jewish Fiction. In Celebration of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for American Jewish Fiction (with Victoria Aarons and Mark Shechner, Wayne State University Press, 2015 and finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, Anthologies). Patt teaches courses on Modern Jewish History, American Jewish History, the Holocaust, the History of Zionism and the State of Israel, Jewish film, and Modern Jewish Literature among others. He is currently co-editing a new volume on The Joint Distribution Committee: 100 Years of Jewish History (Wayne State University Press, 2017) and writing a new book on the early wartime and postwar memory of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. David Patterson holds the Hillel A. Feinberg Distinguished Chair in Holocaust Studies, Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies, and The University of Texas at Dallas. A winner of the National Jewish Book Award and Koret Jewish Book Award, he has published more than 35 books and more than 200 articles, essays, and book chapters on various topics in literature, philosophy, the Holocaust, and Jewish studies. His most recent books include The Hasidic Legacy of Elie Wiesel: Portraits (forthcoming), The Holocaust and the Non-Representable (2018); Anti-Semitism and Its Metaphysical Origins (2015); Genocide in Jewish Thought (2012); and A Genealogy of Evil: Anti-Semitism from Nazism to Islamic Jihad (2011). Alexis Pogorelskin chaired the History Dept. of the University of Minnesota-Duluth for nineteen years. She has served as guest editor for Russian Review/Histoire Russe (2004), the Journal of Finnish Studies (2004), Canadian-American Slavic Studies (2018), and co-editor of a special issue of The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914–1945 (2020) devoted to international cinema. She was founding editor of The NEP Era: Soviet History, 1921–1928. In 2010, she was Visiting Fulbright Professor at the Russian State University for the Humanities (Moscow) and Sr. Research Fellow at RGASPI, the former party archive. In 2015, she was the first Vera Brittain Scholar on Women and War at the University of Southampton. She has published extensively on the history of Russian liberalism in Oxford Slavonic Papers, Slavic Review, and with Cambridge University Press. She has also published extensively on the opposition to Stalin in the 1920s. An essay on that subject

816  Contributors’ Notes

titled “Kamenev’s Revolutionary Biography and Trotsky’s Interpretation of it in Lessons of October” is forthcoming in the collection Russia in War and Revolution, 1914–1922. She is working on a monograph on the MGM feature film of 1940, The Mortal Storm, titled America’s Mortal Storm: Hollywood and the Nazis on the Eve of War. Her essay on the film shared the Space Between prize in 2009. Her articles on that film have appeared in The Space Between, Journal of European Popular Culture (co-authored with Phyllis Lassner), and a collection published by Northwestern University Press (co-authored with Phyllis Lassner). Another essay on Holocaust cinema is forthcoming in Jewish Cinema and New Media, titled “Questions of Jewish Identity: Comparing The Great Dictator to Genghis Cohn.” Megan V. Reynolds is a Ph.D. student at the University of Oregon where she studies contemporary American and Jewish Literature, Trauma Studies, and Visual Media. She has presented her work at the Chaminade University in Honolulu, Trinity University in San Antonio, and California State University in Palm Springs. She will begin her doctoral thesis in 2020 and is currently working on visual representations of Holocaust trauma in graphic memoirs and theories of subjectivity after extreme trauma. Naomi Sokoloff is Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization and Professor of Comparative Literature, Cinema and Media at the University of Washington (Seattle). She teaches modern Jewish literature, Hebrew, and Israeli culture. She is the author of Imagining the Child in Modern Jewish Fiction (1992) and of numerous articles on Israeli authors and on American Jewish literature. Her co-edited volumes include Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature (1992); Infant Tongues: The Voice of the Child in Literature (1994); Traditions and Transitions in Israel Studies (2002); Boundaries of Jewish Identity (2010); and a special issue of Prooftexts (2015) that focuses on the fiction of David Grossman and evolution of Holocaust studies. Oren Baruch Stier is Director of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Program and Professor of Religious Studies at Florida International University, where he also directs the Jewish Studies Certificate Program. He is the author of Holocaust Icons: Symbolizing the Shoah in History and Memory (Rutgers University Press, 2015) and Committed to Memory: Cultural Mediations of the Holocaust (University of Massachusetts Press, 2003) and co-editor of Religion, Violence, Memory, and Place (Indiana University Press, 2006). He has been a Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and was the Guest Curator for an exhibition on “Race and Visual Culture under National Socialism” at The Wolfsonian Teaching Gallery at FIU’s Frost Art Museum in 2013. Stier has served as Co-Chair of the Religion, Holocaust, and Genocide Group of the American Academy of Religion and was a founding board member of Limmud Miami. His current research, for which

Contributors’ Notes

  817

he was awarded a spring 2017 sabbatical, examines the dimensions of testimony in Elie Wiesel’s writings. Martín Urdiales-Shaw is Senior Lecturer at the Department of English, French, and German at the University of Vigo, Spain, where he has been teaching since 2000. He belongs to the NETEC research group (netec.webs. uvigo.es), which promotes a multidisciplinary and cross-cultural approach to modern and contemporary cultures and literatures in English, focusing on the study of textual and cultural practices regarding cultures in context and contact, the transmission of texts (through adaptation, rewriting, or translation), and transferences and negotiations between different genres and media. He specializes in the fields of ethnicity in American Literature, Jewish-American fiction and culture, Translation Studies, Holocaust Studies, and graphic novels. His publications include the monograph Ethnic Identities in Bernard Malamud’s Fiction (Universidad de Oviedo, 2000) and articles and book chapters on the works of Malamud, Saul Bellow, Henry Roth, Michael Gold, Clifford Odets, Edward Dahlberg, and Art Spiegelman. Within the field of Holocaust-related poetry and testimony, he has published several book reviews in the journal Translation and Literature (Edinburgh University Press). His most recent publications include a contribution to Bernard Malamud: A Centennial Tribute (Wayne State University Press, 2016) and the chapter “Race and Cultural Politics in Bellow’s Fiction” in The Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Melissa Weininger is the Anna Smith Fine Senior Lecturer in Jewish Studies and Associate Director of the Program in Jewish Studies at Rice University. Her research focuses on Modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature, and she is currently at work on a book project on diaspora Israeli literature and culture. Her recent articles include, “A Poetic Paradox: Gender and Self in Anna Margolin’s Mary Cycle” (In Geveb, 2017) and “Nationalism and Monolingualism: the ‘Language Wars’ and the Resurgence of Israeli Multilingualism” (Polylinguality and Transcultural Practices, 2019). Edward B. Westermann, Professor of History at Texas A&M UniversitySan Antonio, received his Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars: Comparing Genocide and Conquest (University of Oklahoma Press, 2016), Hitler’s Police Battalions: Enforcing Racial War in the East (University Press of Kansas, 2005), and Flak: German Anti-Aircraft Defenses, 1914– 1945 (University Press of Kansas, 2001). He also is a contributor to the Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies (Oxford University Press, 2012). Dr. Westermann has published extensively in the areas of Holocaust and military history. He has been a Fulbright Fellow, a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Fellow on three occasions, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

818  Contributors’ Notes

Anthony C. Wexler received his Ph.D. in English from Johns Hopkins University, and he is currently a lecturer in the English department at Case Western Reserve University. He studies postwar American literature, specializing in Jewish American literature and the Holocaust in American life. He has held research and teaching fellowships at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Colby College, Johns Hopkins University, and Northwestern University. His current book project is titled At a Distance of Years: The Novel of Aging in the Shadow of Auschwitz. In it, he examines how a group of late-life novels challenge the ways the Holocaust has been received and represented in American life.

Index

A Aarons, Victoria, 1 on graphic storytelling of Holocaust, 493–505 on third-generation narratives, 121, 218 abortions in concentration camps, 626 Absurdistan (Shteyngart), 260 Abuyah, Elisha ben, 15 Ackerman, Diane, 8, 91, 93–97 Adele-Marie, Wendy, 8, 725–737 Adelman, Gary, 688, 689 Ade, Maren, 450 Adler, Celia, 79 Adler, H.G., 687 Adler, Jankel, 692 Adler, Luther, 79 Adorno, Theodor, 31, 126, 308, 343 on Beckett, 687, 690, 698 African-Americans, Holocaust and experience of, 178 “Aftermath, Part Two” (X-Men comic), 603 Against Generational Thinking in Holocaust Studies (Weissman), 30 Agamben, Giorgio, 796 aging, memory and effects of, 29–31 Agnon, S.Y., 352 Ahmed, Sara, 486

“Ainsi a-t-on beau” (Beckett), 694 Aira, César, 514 Akedah (binding of Isaac), 18 Alekseyeva, Julia, 252, 256–258 Alesch, Robert, 693 Alighieri, Dante, 34, 419, 432 Allen, Woody, 221, 461 All the Light We Cannot See (Doerr), 788 Also sprach Zarathustra [Thus Spoke Zarathustra] (Nietzsche), 206 Altman, Tosia, 68 Amalekite legend rage and revenge and, 745 Amar, Tarik, 253 American Jewish Committee, 70 American League for a Free Palestine, 79 American National Socialist Party, 331 American Splendor series, 532 Amichai, Yehuda, 318 Anderton, Joseph, 688 Andrzejewski, Jerzy, 233 Holy Week written by, 238–240 Warsaw Ghetto testimony of, 236 Angelus Novus (Klee), 225 Anglophone fiction, Soviet Holocaust narrative and, 254 Anielewicz, Mordechai, 534 Anil’s Ghost (Ondaatje), 798 Ani Ma’amin: A Song Lost and Found Again, (Wiesel), 19, 624

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 V. Aarons and P. Lassner (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4

819

820  Index Animal studies film and, 97–99 representation of Holocaust in, 8, 91–104 See Under: Love (Grossman) and, 99–104 “An Animal to the Memory” (Bezmozgis), 251, 259 Antigone (Sophocles), 432 antisemitism African Americans and, 178 circumcision obsession and, 135 in contemporary Germany, 217 Nazi patriotism linked to, 373 Nazi poetry and promotion of, 357–394 Polish resurgence of, 233–247 women and, 727 Appadurai, Arjun, 762 Appelfeld, Aharon, 138, 144, 358, 697 Appignanesi, Lisa, 503 Applebaum, Molly, 47, 54–59 “An Appointment With Hate” (Wiesel), 744 appropriateness, in children’s Holocaust literature, 112 Arab-Israeli Six-Day War Polish reaction to, 298 Soviet Jews and, 319, 321 Arbat trilogy (Rybakov), 268 Arbeitshäftlinge (forced workers), 605 Arbeter Ring, 77 “Arènes de Lutèce” (Beckett), 695 Argentina Holocaust literature in, 181–196 Arikha, Alba, 687 Arikha, Avigdor, 687 Aristotle, 150 Arslan, Thomas, 450 art animal studies and role of, 96, 98, 103 as countermonument, 486–488 “Aryan Papers” (Fink), 45–47 Ash and Fire (Pat), 75 “Ashes” (Lipkin), 319 assimilation, Jewish difficulties in America with, 542 Assmann, Aleida, 219, 234, 575

Astro, Alan, 181–196 Astronauts (Lem), 296 Aszendorf, Israel, 181, 188–196 Athens, Lonnie, 151 Atrocity (De-Nur), 620 Auden, W.H., 330 Auerbach, Rachael, 84 Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, 16 Auschwitz comic book images of, 600–603 film representations of, 447 hierarchy of prisoners in, 712 non-prisoner women in, 716 photographs of, 622–625, 633–645 Sonderkommando revolt in, 429 survivors’ testimony about, 615–628 women’s camp in, 8, 401–414, 707–720 Auschwitz (Croci), 533 Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land (Nomberg-Przytyk), 294, 715 Austin Powers, (film), 537 Ausubel, Nathan, 83 “Autumn Day” (Rilke), 446 auto-prosopopoeia in Diary of Anne Frank, 114 Avengers group, 745, 748 Avisar, Ilan, 461 Avodah (Labor) (film), 478 B Baade, Paul, 76 “Babii Yar” (Evtushenko), 276, 318 Babii Yar (Kuznetsov), 276 Babii Yar massacre, 275 Bachevanova, Svetlana, 775 Bacon, Betty, 112 Badenheim 1939 (Appelfeld), 358 Baer, Elizabeth, 651–665 Bair, Deirdre, 688 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 538 Bak, Samuel, 752 “Ballad of the Jew’s Whore Marie Sanders” (Brecht), 446 Balter, Herschel, 748 bard movement, 320 Bar-On, Dan, 4, 560

Index

Bartana, Yael, 475–488 Barthes, Roland, 634 Bartov, Omer, 138, 142 Baskind, Samantha, 503 “The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto” (radio play), 67, 70 Battle of Waterberg, 652 Bayer, Gerd, 504 BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction Israel) movement, 788 beatrice & virgil (Martell), 700 Beckett, Samuel Holocaust literature of, 5 on Holocaust, 687–700 Beckett’s Creatures (Anderton), 688 Beckett’s Political Imagination (Morin), 688 Bellamy, Maria Rice, 789 Bellow, Saul, 432 Ben-Ami, Jacob, 73 Benisch, Pearl, 749 Benjamin, Andrew, 160 Benjamin, Walter, 225, 519 Benson, John, 494 Beran, Karel, 635 Berger, Alan L., 15–23 on third-generation narratives, 218 Berger, Miriam, 747 Bergson, Peter (aka Hillel Kook), 79 Berko, Amelia, 750 Berlin…Endstation (Hilsenrath), 200–201 Berliner, Dorothy, 680 Berlin, Isaiah, 334 Berlin School (film directors), 450 Berlinski, Hirsch, 68 Berman, Adolf, 69 Berman, Antoine, 514 Berman, Russell, 366 Bernard-Donals, Michael, 670, 763, 770 Bernstein, J.M., 156 Between Witness and Testimony (BernardDonals and Glejzer), 670 Bewer, Max, 360 Bezmozgis, David, 251, 259 Biale, David, 788 Biber, Jacob, 749

  821

“Biedni Polacy patrzą na getto” [“The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto”] (Błoński), 233, 242–244 “Biedny Chrześcijanin patrzy na getto” [“A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto”] (Miłosz), 233, 242 Bitton-Jackson, Livia, 117 Black Atlantic literature of, 166 The Black Book of Russian Jewry, 270 Black Book (Verhoeven), 788 black history Jewish history and, 167–168 Blackman, Jackie, 688, 693 Blau, Magda, 715 The Blessed Abyss (Herbermann), 661 Blessed is the Match (Syrkin), 81 Bleter oyfn vint [Leaves in the Wind] (Sneh), 187–188 Błoński, Jan, 233, 235 criticism of, 234 cultural memory of Holocaust and, 240–241 moral transformation rhetoric and, 241–242 on Polish Catholic greatness, 242–244, 247 Bloodlands (Snyder), 378 Blue Book on German atrocities, 653 Bock, Gisela, 8 Boder, David, 675 Bomba, Abraham, 431 Book League of the Jewish People’s Fraternal Order, 77 The Book Thief (Zusak), 594, 787 bordellos, in concentration camps, 662 Borges, Jorge Luis, 195 Borowski, Tadeusz, 294 Borzykowski, Tuvia, 68 boyhood in Holocaust fiction and film, 129–143 The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, 144, 594 A Boy in Winter (Seiffert), 132–138 Brandl, Theresa, 717 Brando, Marlon, 79 Brandt, Willy, 447 Braunhat, Helmut, 202 Brecht, Bertold, 446

822  Index Brenner, Rachel F., 233–247 Briar Rose (Yolen), 120 Bridges to Memory (Bellamy), 789 Brodsky, Joseph, 320 Brombert, Victor, 34 Brooks, Max, 797 Brown, Bill, 762, 764 Browning, Christopher, 674 Brunstein, Esther, 749 Brygidki prison pogrom, 294, 298 Budapesti tavasz (film), 774 Bund Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and, 81 “Burdened by feelings of kinship…” (Slutsky), 315 Burger, Ariel, 23 Buried Words (Appelbaum), 58 Burke, Kenneth, 770 Bytwerk, Randall, 386 C Call of the Wild (London), 130 “The Calmative” (Beckett), 696 “Campo di Fiori” (Miłosz), 233, 237–238 “Canto 45” (Pound), 362 Caplan, David, 327 Captain America, comic series, 542, 594 “The Capital of the Ruins” (Beckett), 696 Card, Claudia, 751 Carey, Mike, 601 Cargas, James, 19 Caribbean literature intellectuals and, 166 Jewish identity in, 166 “Carlsberg, May 11, 1941” (antisemitic poem), 375 Carter, Jimmy, 543 Caruth, Cathy, 165, 170, 787 Casteel, Sarah, 166 catachresis, 789 Catastrophe (Beckett), 688 Catholic Church in Wajda’s films, 244–246 Nazi attacks on, 364

Polish identity with, 235–236 Cayrol, Jean, 447, 448 Celan, Dan post-Holocaust assessment of, 9 Celan, Paul “black milk” imagery of, 405 McCullough’s discussion of, 343 mother figure in poetry of, 311 publication in Russia of, 320, 321 Resnais’s Night and Fog and, 447 suicide of, 351 traumatic realism in poetry of, 347–351, 349 “Chance and Order” (Lem), 300 Chandler, Robert, 269 Chaplin, Charlie, 537 chastushki (Russian poetic tradition), 378 Cheyette, Bryan, 168, 169 Chiens maudits [Bad Dogs] (LoustaunauLacau), 690 child abuse women’s testimony about, 52–54 children boyhood in Holocaust fiction and film, 129–143 sexuality in Holocaust accounts of, 45–61 children’s Holocaust literature figurative dynamics in, 111–125 choice sexuality in women’s Holocaust accounts and, 45–61 “Chocolate” (Sneh), 185 “Christmas: 1924” (Hardy), 329 Chute, Hillary, 495, 501, 504 Cichocki, Sebastian, 475 circumcision antisemitic obsession with, 135 Jewish masculinity and, 134–135 Claremont, Chris, 595, 596, 604 Clark, Katarina, 269 Clingman, Stephen, 171 Clowes, Edith, 276, 279, 282 Coates, Paul, 244 Coetzee, J.M., 93, 172 Coffin, William Sloane, 335 Cohen, Danny M., 121

Index

Cohen, Steven M., 554 Cole, Tim, 633–645, 772 Colin, Amy, 349 “The Collectors”, 380 Collins, Suzanne, 123 Colman, Felicity, 445 colonialism sexual violence a, 651–660 Come and See (film), 426 comics Aarons’s discussion of, 493–505 Holocaust representations in, 529–543, 593–609 irresponsible Holocaust representations in, 536–541 as third-generation narratives, 575–588 comix movement, 532 commentary, poetry of, 308 “Commitment” (Adorno), 309 commodification of Holocaust memorial objects and, 772 photograpy at Auschwitz and, 633–645 Complex Theatre (Dublin) Delbo’s Who Will Carry the Word in, 409 complicity role of, in Holocaust studies, 31 Confessions (Augustine of Hippo), 16 Confino, Alon, 133 Contemporary literature Holocaust in, 790–794 continuity thesis Nazi ideology and culture and, 651–660 A Contract with God (Eisner), 532 A Cookbook for Political Imagination, 475, 477, 487 countermonument art as, 486–488 Cramer, Ludwig, 658 Croci, Pascal, 533 Crumb, Robert, 532 Curb Your Enthusiasm (television series) “Survivor” episode, 531 Cushman, Sarah, 8, 707–720 Czollek, Max, 220, 221

  823

D Dachau comic book images of, 600–603 Dalziel, Imogen, 634 Danquart, Pepe, 132–134 Danziger, Gisela, 357 Danziger, Gustav, 357 Das Märchen vom letzten Gedanken [The Story of the Last Thought] (Hilsenrath), 200, 210 Dawidowicz, Lucy S., 68, 82 “A Day at Harmenz” (Borowski), 294 The Dead Class (Kantor), 294 “Death Fugue” (Celan), 320, 321 DEFA (Deutsche Film AG), 440 deferred narratives sexuality during Holocaust and, 46 deity (Din Torah) in Wiesel’s writing, 15–23 Delbo, Charlotte, 401–414, 775 Demsky, Jeffrey Scott, 529–543 De-Nur, Yehiel (Ka-tzetnik 135633), 615–628 “Der Ewige Jude” (film), 440 Der Judenspiegel (Marr), 362 “Der Judenspiegel” (“A Mirror to the Jews”), 362 Der Judenspiegel (Pfefferkorn), 362 “Der Meridan” (Celan), 347 Der Nazi & der Friseur (Hilsenrath), 201, 203–211 Der Nes in Geto (Leivick), 67 Der Nes In Geto (The Miracle of the Ghetto) (Leivick), 74–75 de Rosnay, Tatiana, 788 Derrida, Jacques, 789, 796, 798 Der Stürmer (newspaper), 359, 393 Der Völkermord (The Genocide) (Lem), 299–301 Derwin, Susan, 48, 61 Desintegriert Euch! [Disintegrate Yourselves!] (Czollek), 220 de Souza Bierrenbach, Ana Maria, 517 Des Pres, Terrence, 404, 534 The Devil’s Arithmetic (Yolen), 120 de Waal, Edmund, 2 Diamant, Naomi, 2 Diamond of the Night (Nĕmec), 131

824  Index Diary of Anne Frank figurative dynamics and, 114–116 “The Diary of Mini Horrorwitz”, 567–570 “Di bagegenish” [The Encounter] (Aszendorf), 194–195 “Die Bleierne Zeit” (The German Sisters), 445 “Dieppe” (Beckett), 695 Die Niemandsrose (Celan), 347 Di Goldene Keyt, 84 “Dimensions in Testimony” holographic museum, 675, 683 Diner, Hasia, 531 DiPaolo, Marc, 594 Disaster Drawn (Chute), 495 Disintegration Congress (Berlin), 221 Disintegriert Euch! [Disintegrate Yourselves!] (Czollek), 220 Di Yiddishe Tsaytung, 75–77 Doerr, Anthony, 788 Dos geshrey in der nakht [The Cry in the Night] (Sneh), 186 Dream of Fair to Middling Women (Beckett), 691, 692 Drechsler, Horst, 653 Dreifus, Erika, 556 Dreschler, Margot, 717 Dres, Jérémie, 579, 588 The Drowned and the Saved (Levi), 521 gray zone chapter in, 36–40 Wexler’s analysis of, 27–41 Druker, Jonathan, 27 Drury, John, 330 “Dry September” (Faulkner), 798 E Eaglestone, Robert, 594, 796 “Echo’s Bones—The Vulture” (Beckett), 694 Edelman, Marek, 68 Edfelt, Johannes, 352 Education After Auschwitz (Adorno), 31 education on Holocaust changing strategies in, 30–31 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 270–271, 276, 281, 311 Eichengreen, Lucille, 751

Eichler, Jeremy, 80 Eichmann, Adolf survivors’ testimony about, 615–628, 675 trial of, 269 Eichmann, Veronika (Vera), 727, 729, 734 Eilat, Galit, 475 Einhorn, Barbara, 224 Eisen, Arnold M., 554 Eisenstein, Bernice, 505 Eisler, Hanns, 447 Eisner, Will, 493, 532 Ekelöf, Gunnar, 352 “Elegy to Yiddish” (Aszendorf), 190 Eleutheria (Beckett), 688 “The Eleventh Voyage” (Lem), 288, 292, 295 Eliot, T.S., 335, 336 Ellis, Frank, 382 El pan y la sangre [Bread and Blood] (Sneh), 182 Emerson, Caryl, 269 Emil and Karl (Glatsheyn), 113 “The End” (Beckett), 697 Endgame (Beckett), 687, 690, 698 The End of the Holocaust (Rosenfeld), 28–29 Ensslin, Gudrun, 445 Epstein, Helen, 555 Erll, Astrid, 254 Ertel, Judith, 518 “Eternal Transit” (Galich), 321 ethics of Holocaust representation, 7 identity-deliberation and, 160–161 Ethics (Spinoza), 694 Ethiopian Jews Phillips’s discussion of, 175 Europa, Europa (film), 134, 143 Europa, Europa (Perel), 131 The European Tribe (Phillips), 166, 167, 169 Shylock discussed in, 174 And Europe Will Be Stunned video installation, 475–488 Evening Standard (London), 68 Everything Is Illuminated (Foer), 332, 790–794 Evtushenko, Evgenii, 276

Index

Exit Ghost (Roth), 29 “The Expelled” (Beckett), 697 Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Foer), 790–794 “Eyes Wide Open” exhibit, 774 Ezrahi, Sidra, 520 F Fackenheim, Emil, 628 fairy tales figurative dynamics in, 120–122 Family Guy (television series), 531, 537 Fast, Howard, 77 Fatelessness (Kertész), 131 Faurholt, Gry, 162 Fax from Sarajevo (Kubert), 534 Federman, Raymond, 688 Feinstein, Margarete, 131, 743–756 Feldman, Jackie, 531 Feldman, Jeffrey, 771 Feldman, Mania, 752 Feldstein, Al, 493–505 Felman, Shoshana, 787 The Female Face of God in Auschwitz (Delbo), 407 Feuer, Kathryn, 271 figurative dynamics Holocaust as, 122–125 in Diary of Anne Frank, 114–116 in fairy tales, 120–122 in postwar memoirs, 116–118 in youth Holocaust literature, 111–125 film Holocaust images in, 417–434 Jewish bodies in, 439–454 traumatic realism in, 459–473 Film Guild (Nazi organization), 441 film, Holocaust in children in, 104 in Holocaust fiction and film, 129–143 Fink, Ida, 45–47 Fishman, Boris, 252, 258–259 Fitterman, Robert, 337 A Flag is Born (Hecht), 79–80 Flanzbaum, Hilene, 2 Flying Couch (Kurzweil), 505, 580 Foer, Jonathan Safran, 790–794

  825

Fogu, Claudio, 4 Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur, 693 For Every Sin (Applefeld), 697 The Forgotten (Wiesel), 21–22 Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, 671, 676 Four Quartets (Eliot), 335 fourth-generation Holocaust narratives, 252 Frank, Anne comic and cartoon images of, 537 figurative dynamics in work of, 114–116 Phillips on influence of, 166, 175 Roth’s absurdist representation of, 535 Frankel, Alona, 484 Franklin, Ruth, 327 Frankl, Viktor, 532 Frederick Downing, Frederick, 17 Freedman, Jonathan, 778 Frenssen, Gustav, 656 Freud, Sigmund, 538, 786 Fridman, Yoram, 138 Friese, Heidrun, 155 Frohlinger, Alexander, 680 Frye, Northrup, 330 Funk, Mirna, 217–227 The Futurological Congress (Lem), 301 futurology, Lem’s writing about, 301 G Gäbler, Ira, 747 Gajewska, Agnieszka, 288, 296 Galich, Aleksandr, 308, 320–324 Garloff, Katja, 224 Garrison, Alysia, 688 The Gates of the Forest (Wiesel), 20, 24 Gateward, Frances, 132 Geisel, Theodore (Dr. Seuss), 595 gender Aryan feminity and, 725–737 in Holocaust fiction and film, 129–143 intergenerational trauma and, 560–562 Nazi ideology and culture and, 8–9, 651–665 personhood and, 94 rage and revenge and, 748–753 generational chasm

826  Index memory of Holocaust and, 33–36 The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich (Baer), 652 Geppert, Hans Vilmar, 200 German Democratic Republic in third-generation Holocaust narratives, 222 German Diaries 1936-37 (Beckett), 692 German Jewish experience in third-generation narratives, 219, 224 German South West Africa (GWSA) Nazi ideology and culture and, 651–665 Germany contemporary Holocaust studies and, 217 Nazi’s binary vision of, 386–394 recent Jewish migrants to, 220 Gershenson, Olga, 258 The Ghost Writer (Roth), 535 Gies, Miep, 115, 538 Gilman, Sander, 8, 135 Gilroy, Paul, 166 Ginzburg, Lev, 320 Gitelman, Zvi, 253 Glanz, Armin, 636 Glatshteyn, Yankev, 113 Glatstein, Jacob, 189 Glejzer, Richard, 670 Gliński, Mikołaj, 288, 296 “Gloria SMH” Resistance cell, 690, 700 Glucksman, Sidney, 748 God in Wiesel’s writing, 15–23 Goebbels, Josef, 392 Goebbels, Magda, 725, 727, 729, 733, 736 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 329 Goldenberg, Eliyahu, 617 Golden Harves (Gross), 763 Golding, William, 130 Goldstein, Rebecca, 332 Goligorsky, Eduardo, 514 Goodhart, Sandor, 459–473 Gordon, Lois, 688 Gorrara, Claire, 575–588

Gouri, Haim, 617 Grade, Chaim, 147–161 The Grail (journal), 660 A Grammar of Motives (Burke), 770 graphic novels, 493–505 Aarons’s discussion of, 493–505 graphic novels as, 575–588 Holocaust narrative in, 529–543, 252 The Great Dictator (film), 537 Greenspan, Henry, 48, 672 Gregor the Overlander (Collins), 123 Greif, Gideon, 432 The Grey Zone (film), 430 Grinberg, Marat, 296, 307–325 Gropper, William, 77 Gross, Jan, 234, 763 Gross, Magdalena, 96, 98 Grossman, David, 4, 91, 93, 560 Grossman, Vasily fiction of, 268–275, 324 as news correspondent, 267, 281 Rybakov compared to, 267, 280–283 group identity in German Jewish experience, 219 memory and, 165 The Gulag Archipelago (Solzhenitsyn), 199 H Haendler, Cecilia, 225 Haendler, Yair, 225 Haft, Cynthia, 412 “Hail to our Führer!” (“Heil unserm Führer!”), 390 Halbwachs, 234 Halperin, Irving, 116 Hammerschlag, Sarah, 486 “Hannah Arendt” (film), 445 Hardy, Thomas, 329 The Hare with Amber Eyes (de Waal), 2 Harlow, Jules, 336 Harry Potter series (Rowling), 123 Hartman, Geoffrey, 48, 503, 530 Hartmann, Christian, 382 Hartmann, Wolfram, 654 Hasse, Elisabeth, 717 Hauptman, Sara, 752

Index

Hausner, Gideon, 615 Haynes, Steven, 129 Heavy Sand (Rybakov), 268, 275–283 Hebrew Holocaust poetry in, 345 Hecht, Anthony, 327 Hecht, Ben, 79 Heck, Lutz, 94, 98 Hegel, G.F.W., 419 Heimat: A German Family Album (Krug), 588 Heine, Heinrich, 223 Heisenberg, Benjamin, 450 Heller, Fanya Gottesfeld, 47, 48–49, 51, 59 Helmreich, William, 555 Herbermann, Nanda, 660 Herero people German colonial genocide of, 651–660 “Here the Nazi Butchers Wasted Nothing” (Snow), 766 Herf, Jeffrey, 360 Herman, Judith, 747 Hersey, John, 67 Heydrich, Lina, 727, 729, 736 Heydrich, Reinhard, 605, 709, 736 Heydrich, Silke, 730 Highcastle: A Remembrance (Lem), 292–293, 300 Higher Ground (Phillips), 167 Hilsenrath, Edgar, 199–211 CD recordings by, 202 Himmelfarb, Milton, 155 Himmler, Heinrich, 601, 661, 662, 708, 732 Himmler, Margarethe, 730 Hirsch, Joshua, 5 Hirsch, Marianne, 530 Hirsch, Roslyn, 294 Hirt, August, 601 His Master’s Voice (Lem), 297–299, 301 Hitler, Adolf cartoon images of, 542, 595 in Hilsenrath’s fiction, 203–211 poetry to cult of, 386–394 Stalin compared to, 273–275 women’s admiration for, 726 Hochhäusler, Christoph, 450 Hoffman, Eva, 1

  827

Hogan’s Heroe (television series), 537 Holland, Agnieska, 144 Holocaust (mini-series), 84, 461 Holocaust Museum (Fitterman), 337 Holocaust studies animal studies and, 92–94 postmodern condition and, 794–799 trauma studies and, 785–799 twenty-first century approaches to, 1 Holocaust Testimonies (Langer), 671 Holy Week (film), 244–246 Homa u’migdal (wall and tower) Jewish settlements in Palestine, 481 Homo Sacer (Agamben), 796 homosexuality in women’s Holocaust narratives, 56 Horn, Dara, 772 Horowitz, Sara R., 45–61 The Hospital of Transfiguration (Lem), 295 Höss, Rudolf, 717 House of Dolls (De-Nur), 621 Howe, Irving, 29, 336 “Huhediblu” (Celan), 347–351 HumHAG (German law), 220 “humor chic” cartooning, 534 in Holocaust narratives, 534 Hungerford, Amy, 560 Huyssen, Andreas, 222 I identity-deliberation ethical engagement and, 160–161 Grade’s “My Quarrel”, 147–161 If This is a Man (Levi), 699 Ignatieff, Michael, 334 The Incredible Hulk (comic series), 604 Inferno (Dante), 419, 432 Inglourious Basterds (film), 221, 536 In Heldiszn Gerangl [In Heroic Struggle], 81 “In Love with Hiding” (Perloff), 693 Insdorf, Innette, 445, 461 intergenerational trauma third-generation Holocaust literature and, 217–227 internal rhetoric Nienkamp’s theory of, 154

828  Index International Workers Order, 77 In the Shadow of No Towers (Spiegelman_, 433 “I Saw It” (Selvinsky), 313 Israel Jewish migration to Germany from, 221 “It Out-Herods Herod. Pray You Avoid It” (Hecht), 329 I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors, (Eisenstein), 505 J Jablon, Bronia, 47, 49–51 Jacob, Rosamond, 691 The Jargon of Authenticity (Adorno), 698 Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive, 672 Jeffords, Susan, 129 Jewish-American literature Hecht’s poetry, 327 The Jewish Daily Forward, 72 Jewish Frontier, 81 Jewish identity in Holocaust narratives, 147–161 Jewish Labor Committee, 68, 72 Jewish National Committee, 69 Jewish People’s Fraternal Order, 77 Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (JRMiP), 475–488 Jewish revitalization projects in contemporary Germany, 220 Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), 72, 68–70 The Jew’s Body (Gilman), 8 The Jews of Silence (Wiesel), 20 John Paul II (Pope), 235 Jones, David Houston, 688 Jossel Wassermanns Heimkehr (Hilsenrath), 200 Jouvet, Louis, 401 Judgment at Nuremberg (film), 269 “Jud Süss” (film), 440 Jukovsky, Martin, 493 Julius, Anthony, 336

K Kafka, Franz, 432 Kanal, Israel, 68 Kandel, Michael, 298 Kansteiner, Wulf, 4 Kantor, Tadeusz, 294 Karinthy, Ferenc, 775 Kasakove, David, 494 Katin, Miriam, 505 Katz, Daniel, 688 Ka-tzetnik 135633 (Holocaust survivor), 615–628 Ka-tzetnik Prize, 618 Katz, Steven, 20 Kaufman, Debra, 554 Kazin, Alfred, 27 Keilbach, Judith, 633 Kent, Elizabeth, 639 Kertész, Imre, 131 Kertzer, Adrienne, 112 Khrushchev, NIkita, 268, 273, 282, 317 Kinzel, Till, 199–211 Kirby, Jack, 542, 595 Klee, Paul, 225 Klein, Helene, 718 Klepfish, Michael, 69 Klimov, 426 Kluger, Ruth, 2–3 Knowlson, James, 688, 690, 693–694 Kolitz, Zvi, 75–77 “Kontingentflüchtlinge” (quota refugees) (Germany), 221 Kovner, Abba, 745, 748 Kowalczuk, Iko-Sascha, 222 Kramer, Stanley, 269 Krasuska, Karolina, 251–260 Kremer, S. Lillian, 4, 530 Krigstein, Bernie, 493–505 Kristeva, Julia, 414 Krongold, Joanna, 111–125 Krug,Nora, 588 Kruk, Herman, 625 Kubert, Joe, 505, 533 Kukulin, Ilya, 308 Kurzweil, Amy, 9, 505, 580

Index

L LaCapra, Dominick, 530 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 419 Lageröf, Selma, 352 Lamont, Rosette, 688–689 Landsberg, Alison, 531 Lang, Berel, 2, 9–10 Langefeld, Johanna, 717 Langer, Lawrence, 27, 48 “choiceless choice” concept of, 118 on Holocaust testimonies, 671 on postwar memoirs, 116 Lang, Jessica, 439–454 Lanzmann, Claude, 234, 418, 432 interview style of, 675 traumatic realism of, 344 Larkey, Uta, 367 “La sexta punta” [The Sixth Point], 185 Lassner, Phyllis, 1, 121, 129–143 The Last Days (film), 682 The Last Goodbye, 683 Last Judgment (Memling), 37 Last Laugh (film), 531 Laub, Dori, 48, 52, 787 Laytner, Anson, 18 Leavitt, Moses, 84 Leben mit einem Kriegsverbrecher (Life with a war crimina (Heydrich), 730 lebensraum as colonial legacy, 652 Hitler’s campaign for, 728 Le cinquième fils/The Fifth Son (Wiesel), 744, 755 Le convoi du 24 janvier (Convoy to Auschwitz) (Delbo), 401 Ledent, Bénédicte, 171 Lee, Stan, 595 Leff, Leonard, 461 Leitner, Isabella, 718 Leivick, H., 67, 72, 74, 188 Lem, Stanisław early work of, 294–296 faux book reviews by, 299–301 futurology works by, 301 personal life in fiction of, 296–297 science fiction of, 287 Lemelman, Martin, 505

  829

Lengyel, Olga, 765 Léon, Paul, 690, 693 Lerski, Helmar, 478 LeStrange, Gesele, 347 Letste shriftn (Last Writings) (Aszendorf), 189 “Let Us Die Fighting”: The Struggle of the Herero and Nama against German Imperialism (1884-1915) (Drechsler), 653 Levi, Primo Beckett on, 699 on degradation of camps, 712 on language, 521, 795 on life and material objects, 761 on survivors, 420 post-Holocaust assessment of, 9 suicide of, 27–28 Wexer’s analysis of, 27–41 Levi, Renzo, 29 Lévy, Paule, 165–176 “A Liberal’s Auschwitz” (Ozick), 168 Life and Fate (Grossman), 267–275, 280–283 A Life Force (Eisner), 532 Life is Beautiful (film), 594, 788 Lindergren, Erik, 352 Lines of Time, 320 Linville, Susan, 445 Lipkin, Raphael, 21 Lipkin, Semyon, 308, 317–320, 323 Lipstadt, Deborah, 82 Litvak, Olga, 317 London, Jack, 130 London, Yaron, 485 Look Magazine comic images of Hitler in, 595 Lopate, Phillip, 296 Lord of the Flies (Golding), 130 Lorenz, Konrad, 92 “The Lost Ones” (Beckett), 699 Lothe, Jacob, 2 Loustaunau-Lacau, Georges, 690 Lubetkin, Tzivia, 68 Lüderitz, Adolf, 652 Lumet, Sidney, 460 Lustiger, Jean-Marie, 16

830  Index M Mad Magazine, 532 Maercker, Andreas, 747 The Magic People: an Irishman Appraises the Jews (Ussher), 692 Mahzor for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, 336 Malamud, Bernard on Jewish identity, 168 Mama Penee Transcending the Genocide, 657 Mandel, Maris, 717 Manhattan (film), 221 Man Search for Meaning (Frankl), 532 Mantel, Hilary, 167 “Marianne and Juliane” (film), 439, 444 Máriássy, Félix, 774 Markish, Peretz, 314 Marr, WIlhelm, 362 Martel, Yann, 700 Mary Koszmary (Nightmares or Haunted Dreams), which video installation, 476, 479 masculinity in Holocaust fiction and film, 129–143 “Master Race” (Krigstein and Feldstein) Aarons’s discussion of, 493–505 material objects memory and, 773 Maus (Spiegelman) animal studies and, 92 critical success of, 495, 530 English and Yiddish vernacular in, 511–525 intergenerational trauma and, 587 intergenerational trauma in, 559, 576 metaphor in, 118–120 objects as metaphor in, 764 Spanish and Romance language publication of, 514–519 translations of, 511–525 Mazursky, Paul, 433 McClatchy, J.D., 333 McCormack, W.J., 693 McCullough, Shellie, 343–355 The Measure of Our Days (Delbo), 402 Memling, Hans, 37 memory

aging and loss of, 29–34 failed politics of cultural memory, 240–241 group identity and, 165 in third-generation graphic narratives, 583–587 metaphor and, 773 multidirectionality of, 165, 483–486 pathemic (affective), 425 Soviet genealogy of, 253 time and alteration of, 31–33 visual allusion and, 478–479 Memory, Trauma, and History (Roth), 787 Mendel’s Daughter (Lemelman), 505 Men, Father Alexander, 320 Mengele, Josef, 601 Mesnard, Philippe, 432 metaphor memory and, 773 “Metaphor and Memory” (Ozick), 168 Holocaust as metaphor and, 122–125 memory and, 168, 761 Spiegelman’s use of, 118–120 metonymy memorial objects and, 770 Michel, Ilse, 712 MIddleton-Kaplan, Richard, 287 Midrash Rabbah Lamentations (Wiesel), 19 migrants crisis in Germany involving, 227 in post-Soviet era, 251–260 Jewish migrants, German programs for, 220 Mikhoels, Solomon, 314 Mila 18 (Uris), 84 Millar, Mark, 604 Miller, Frank, 604 Miller, Nancy K., 512 Millu, Liana, 662, 712 Miłosz, Czesław, 233 Warsaw Ghetto testimony of, 236 Minz, Alan, 432 Miracle of the Warsaw Ghetto (Lievick), 73 Mitchell, Breanna, 633 Modan, Rutu, 580

Index

Molloy (Beckett), 699 “More Light! More Light!” (Hecht), 328 More Pricks than Kicks (Beckett), 691 Morin, Emilie, 688 Moskowitz, Golan, 553–570 mother in Holocaust poetry, 311 murder of, in Holocaust testimony, 615–628 Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty (Rose), 567 Mr. Sammler’s Planet (Bellow), 432 Mucha, Stanislav, 633 Muckermann, Friedrich (Father), 660 Mueller, Agnes, 224 Müller, Filip, 431 Müller, Irmgard, 711 Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in an Age of Decolonization (Rothberg), 165 Multidirectional Memory (Rothberg), 165, 789 Muni, Paul, 79 Murav, Harriet, 254 “The Murderers Are Among Us” (film), 439–444 Mur I Wieza (Wall and Tower) video installation, 476 Murphy (Beckett), 694 museum exhibitions representations of Holocaust in, 6 Mussarists, 162 “My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner” (Grade), 147–161 self-deliberation in, 149–160 N Nacht (1964) [Night] (Hilsenrath), 202 Nadel, Ira, 5, 687–700 Nahshon, Edna, 79 Nama people German colonial genocide of, 651–660 Naming Beckett’s Unnamable (Adelman), 688 narrative Holocaust studies as, 3–4 third-generation narratives, 7

  831

The Nature of Blood (Phillips), 165–176 Naveh, GIla Safran, 417–434 Na ve’nad (Sneh), 186, 182–184 Nazarian, Allison, 555 “Nazi Beast” trope in Holocaust literature, 101 in literary and cultural studies, 92 Nazi ideology and culture Aryan feminity and, 725–737 perspectives of perpetrators, 8 sexual violence a, 651–660 Nazi Reichskommissariat Ukraine, 377 Negative Dialectics (Adorno), 698 Neighbors (Gross), 234 Nelson, Cary, 8, 357–394 Nelson, Tim Blake, 430 Neme, László, 417–434 Nĕmec, Jan, 131 Never to Forget, The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto (Fast & Gropper), 77–78 New German Cinema, 444, 450 The New Rhetoric (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, 149 news coverage Warsaw Ghetto Revolt, 68–70 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 150 Niendorf-Broda-Klemm, Trude, 390 Nienkamp, Jean, 154, 159 “Night and Fog” (“Nuit et Brouillard”) (film), 447 Night (Wiesel) critical reactions to, 532 images of children and youth in, 116–118 rage and revenge in, 756 theological perspectives in, 15–16 translations of, 525 Winfrey’s promotion of, 788 Yiddish precursor to, 743 “Nisht oysgemitn dem goyrl” [The Fate Not Averted] (Aszendorf), 191 Nomberg-Przytyk, Sara, 294, 622, 715 None of Us Will Return (Delbo), 402 No Racism, No Antisemitism (Palombo), 534 “Notes on Beckett” (Adorno), 699 Nous n’irons pas voir Auschwitz (We Won’t See Auschwitz) (Dres), 579 Nowogrodzki, Mark, 82

832  Index Noy (Neustadt), Melech, 69 Nyiszli, Miklos, 431 O “O die Schornsteine” (“O the Chimneys”) (Sachs), 353 “Ohne mich” [Without Me] (Funk), 217 Oktiabr’ (journal), 275 Okudzha, Bulat, 320 Olbrechts-Tyteca, Lucie, 149 Omer-Sherman, Ranen, 503 Ondaatje, Michael, 798 Oneg Shabbat, 625 Open Heart (Wiesel), 22 “Operation Reinhard” death camps, 604, 709 “Organizzazione Otto”, 663 Orlev, Uri, 132–134 Orwell, George, 794 Oster, Sharon, 6 Othello in “European Tribe”, 169 in Nature of Blood, 167, 173 Othello (Shakespeare), 174 Otto, Rudolf, 406 Oyf fremde vegn [On Foreign Ways] (Sneh), 182 Oysyes (Letters) (Aszedorf), 189 Ozick, Cynthia, 27 on Eliot, 336 on Holocausst, 168 on images, 440 on Levi’s suicide, 28, 37 on metaphor, 168 P Pagis, Dan McCullough’s discussion of, 343 poetry of, 775 post-Holocaust assessment of, 9 traumatic realism in poetry of, 344–347 Pakula, Alan, 433 Palombo, AleXsandro, 534 “Part Hole” (Moskowitz), 564 A Part of Me (Jablon), 49–51 Passmore, Ashley, 217–227

pathemic (affective) memory, 425 Pat, Jacob, 72, 75 patriotism Nazi antisemitism linked to, 373 Patt, Avinoam J., 67–85 Patterson, David, 615–628 Pauer, Guya, 773 Paul, Christa, 662 Paulsson, Gunnar, 255 The Pawnbroker (film), 459–473 pedagogy in Holocaust studies, 31 Pekar, Harvey, 532 The Penal Colony (Kafka), 432 Perelman, Chaïm, 149 Perel, Solomon, 131, 134, 138 Perlaki, Judith, 639 Perl, Gisella (Dr.), 765 Perloff, Marjorie, 690, 693 Péron, Alfred, 690 personhood animal studies and, 93 personification in children’s Holocaust literature, 113 Peter Moor’s Journey to the Southwest (Frenssen), 656 Petropolis (Ulinich), 260 Pettitt, Joanne, 576 Petzold, Christian, 450 Pfefferkorn, Johannes, 362 Pfeffer, Morris, 637 Phelan, James, 2 Phillips, Caryl, 165–176 philosemitism, 203 The Philosophy of Art (Hegel), 419 “Phoenix” (film), 439, 449 photography as evidence, 766 by survivors, 633–645 graphic novels and use of, 587 of Auschwitz, 622–625 of colonial sexual violence, 657 The Pianist (film), 426 Picabia, Jean, 693 Plath, Sylvia, 99 Podgorny, Nikolai, 282 Poèmes 1937-39 (Beckett), 695 poetic tradition Hecht’s postwar poetry and, 327 in Holocaust literature, 237

Index

in Russian Holocaust literature, 307–325 McCullough’s examination of, 343–355 Nazi promotion of antisemitism using, 357–394 poetry, 307–325 Pogorelskin, Alexis, 267–283 Poland Catholicism in, 233–247 contemporary return of Jews to, 475–488 post-war political ideology in, 294 right-wing government in, 234 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and, 233–247 Polanski, Roman, 433 Pomerance, Murray, 132 popular culture Holocaust in, 785–799 Holocaust representations in, 593–609 intergenerational trauma and, 567–570 prominence in American popular culture of, 104 third-generation narratives and, 553–570 post-Holocaust studies Soviet Jewish culture in, 316–317 theological protest and, 18 postmemory contemporary diasporic literature and, 789 Holocaust survival and, 480 in second-generation Holocaust narratives, 530 postmodernism Holocaust studies and, 794–799 poststructuralism Holocaust studies and, 794–799 postwar Jewish literature figurative dynamics in, 116–118 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in, 67–85 Pound, Ezra, 362 power in women’s Holocaust accounts, 45–61 zoos as abuse of power, 94 Powers of Horror (Kristeva), 414 Prager, Jeffrey, 48

  833

Prague Spring, 298 A Prayer for the Days of Awe (Wiesel), 21 pregnancy as survivors’ revenge, 752 Presner, Todd, 4 Previtali, Cristina, 519 Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture, 4 The Property (Modan), 580 “The Prophet Jonah” (Stoltze), 380 Provocation (Lem), 299–301 psychic integration representation and, 434 psychology of revenge, 747 Q queer studies intergenerational trauma and, 560– 562, 567–570 Quiet Americans (Dreifus), 556 R Raddatz, Fritz J., 203 “Radikal jüdische Kulturtage” [“Radical Jewish Culture Days”] festival, 221 Radnóti, Miklós, 394 Rafle du Velodrome d’Hiver, 692 rage in women’s Holocaust accounts, 45–61 rage and revenge gender and, 748–753 of survivors, 743–756 psychology of, 747 Rage is the Subtext (Derwin), 61 Rassenschande (German racial shame), 655 Ravitch, Melech, 188 The Reader (Schlink), 429 A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett (Kenner), 688 Red Army Faction (RAF), 445 “Reich Business” (Beckett), 697 Reichert, Orli, 715 Reich, Walter, 541 “Reisebilder” [Travel Pictures] (Heine), 223

834  Index Reiss, Johanna, 117 “Relatives of Christ” (Slutsky), 316, 323 Remembering Survival (Browning), 674 A Replacement Life (Fishman), 252, 258–259 representations of Holocaust irresponsible Holocaust representations in, 536–541 Nazi ideology and culture and, 651–660 photograpy at Auschwitz and, 633–645 psychic integration and, 434 recent innovations in, 6 “Representing Holocaust Trauma” (Verstrynge), 461 “Requiem for Those Who Were not Killed or the Song Composed in Error” (Galich), 321 rescue stories as rescuers, 138–140 in popular culture, 104 Resistance Beckett’s participation in, 693 Resnais, Alain, 447 responsible fiction German colonal genocide, 531 restoration Holocaust narratives and myth of, 141–142 reverse migration narratives, 259 Reynolds, Daniel, 644 Reynolds, Megan V., 147–161 Ricks, Christopher, 336 Riefenstahl, Leni, 479 Rifas, Leonard, 495 Righteous Gentiles prominence in popular culture of, 104 “The Rights of History and the Rights of Imagination” (Ozick), 440 Rigney, Ann, 2 Ringelblum, Emanuel, 81, 625 Ringelblum Oneg Shabbes archive, 76 “Rites and Ceremonies” (Hecht), 334 Roberts, Adam, 596 Robot Chicken (television series), 531, 537, 539 Rodríguez, Cruz, 515

Rodríguez, Roberto, 515 “The Rogue of a Jew”, 330 Rose, Jacqueline, 567 Rosen, Alan, 511, 675 Rosenblum, Ralph, 461 Rosenfeld, Alvin, 27 on figurative language and metaphor, 111 on Levi’s work, 28–29 on objects as metaphor, 762 Rosenshield, Gary, 275, 277, 280 “Rosenstrasse” (film), 445 Roskies, David, 2, 91 on postwar memoirs, 116 on Yiddish literature, 155, 158 Rotem, Simcha (Kazik), 68 Rothberg, Michael P., 120, 165 on dialect and vernacular, 512 on memory and group identity, 165 on multidirectional memory, 227, 317, 483, 789 on Phillips’s Nature of Blood, 169 on traumatic realism, 344 Roth, Michael S., 787 Roth, Philip absurdist Holocaust representation and, 535 Levi’s influence on, 29 on writing, 10 Rottenberg, Anda, 484 Rousset, David, 520 Rowling, J.K., 123 rubble films (trümmerfilme), 440 Rubenstein, Richard, 18 Rubin, Agi, 711 Rubinstein, Artur, 299 Run Boy Run (film), 132–134 rescue narrative in, 139 Run Boy Run (Orlev), 132–134 landscape in, 135–138 rescue narrative in, 139 Ruppert, Elisabeth, 717 Ruprecht, Philipp, 362 Russia poetic responses to Holocaust in, 307–325 post-Soviet era Holocaust narratives and, 251–260

Index

The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (Shteyngart), 251 Rybakov, Anatoly Arbat trilogy of, 268 Grossman compared to, 267–283 Holocaust fiction by, 269, 275–282 S Sachs, Nelly, 351–354 Sadowski, Greg, 494 Saint Chéron, Michael de, 17 Salamandra (De-Nur), 618 Salkeld, Cecil, 691 Samuel Beckett, A Critical Study (Kenner), 688 Samuel Beckett and Testimony (Jones), 688 “Sand” (Galich), 321 Sarah’s Key (de Rosnay), 788 Sarraute, Nathalie, 693 Satunovsky, Yan, 308–314 Schanelec, Angela, 450 Schapire, Rosa, 692 “Scheiss Egal” (Millu), 663 Schindler’s List (film), 426, 461, 594, 681 Schlink, Bernard, 429 Schneerson, Menachem Mendel (Rebbe), 20, 382 Schoenberg, Arnold, 80, 309 Schulstein, Moses, 770 science fiction Holocaust memory in, 287 Science Fiction and Futurology (Lem), 301 screen memory in Holocaust films, 462 Scrolls of Auschwitz (Sonderkommando diaries), 427, 431 second-generation Holocaust writers, 7 See Under: Love (Grossman), 91, 99–104 Sefer Ha Zohar (Book of Splendor), 19 Seidman, Naomi, 48, 743, 744 Seiffert, Rachel, 132–134 Seinfeld (television series) “Soup Nazi” episode, 531 self-deliberation

  835

in Grade’s “My Quarrel”, 149–160 selfies at Auschwitz, 633 Selvinsky, Ilya, 313 Sender, Ruth Minsky, 117 Sensory memory, 402, 771 sexuality Aryan feminity and, 725–737 in post-Soviet narratives, 256, 262 in women’s Holocaust accounts, 45–61 sexual violence and abuse cartoon images of, 651–660 children of Holocaust, accounts of, 45–61 in German culture, 651–660 of women camp inmates, 660–665, 718 women’s testimony about, 52–54 “Sexual Urges in the Colony” (Hartmann), 654 Shallcross, Bozena, 763 Shandler, Jeffrey, 70 Shapiro, James, 168 Shenker, Noah, 674, 678 Shildkret, Lucy, 68 Shivitti (De-Nur), 619–622 Shoah (documentary), 234, 418, 432, 461 shoes, as memorial object, 761 “Shoes on the Danube Bank” (Pauer and Togay installation), 761 “A Shout of Joy” (“Ein Jubelruf!”), 387 Shteyngart, Gary, 251, 260 Shtibel, Rachel, 47, 52–54, 56, 60 Siegal, Aranka, 117 Siegel, Norman, 335 Sierakowski, Dana, 483 Sierakowski, Sławomir, 476, 479 Silber, Godel, 679 Silberbauer, Karl, 115 silence Soviet memory of Holocaust and, 253 Wiesel’s discussion of, 20 Simon, Joe, 542 Simplicissimus (magazine), 658 The Simpsons-NEVER AGAIN (Palombo), 534 Sinclair, Peggy, 691

836  Index Sinclair, William “Boss”, 691 Singer, I.B., 93 Sinkoff, Nancy, 83 Sin rumbo (Aimless) (Sneh), 182–184 “Sistine Madonna” (Grossman), 324 sitcoms and cartoons Holocaust representations in, 529–543 Slutsky, Boris, 308, 314–316, 323 “The Smeraldina’s Billet Doux” (Beckett), 691 Smith, Dinita, 333 Smoke over Birkenau (Millu), 662 Sneh, Simja, 181–196 Snow, Edgar, 766 Snyder, Timothy, 378 social media photograpy at Auschwitz and, 633–645 Soderbergh, Steven, 287 Sokoloff, Naomi, 8, 91–104 Solaris (Lem), 290–291 Solidarność [Solidarity] movement, 235 Solomons, Estella, 691 Soloway, Jill, 562–564, 777 Solshenitsyn, Aleksandr, 199, 276 Sommer, Robert, 662 Sonderkommando diaries of, 427 in film, 420 in graphic narratives, 534 Levi’s discussion of, 38 revolt in Auschwitz by, 429 Son of Saul (film), 417–434 Sontag, Susan on ethics of representation, 8 Sophie’s Choice (Styron), 603 Sophocles, 432 Souls on Fire (Wiesel), 23 South Park (television series), 531, 537 Soviet Daughter (Alekseyeva), 256–258 “Soviet ‘Equality’ or the Career of Aron Shmeerzon”, 382 Soviet Union Holocaust fiction from, 267–283 Jewish emigration from, 276 memory of Holocaust in context of, 253 Nazi antisemitic poetry dissemination in, 377–385

poetry of Holocaust in era of, 307–325 repression of dissidents in, 276 Stalin cult in, 268 Third Reich compared to, 272 Spadi, Milvia, 36 Spiegelman, Art animal studies and work of, 92 Beckett’s influence on, 700 criticism of, 529 early cartooning by, 532 figurative dynamics in work of, 113 intergenerational trauma in work of, 559, 576 material objects in work of, 764 metaphor in, 118–120 on graphic narratives of Holocaust, 494 post-9/11 cartoon book of, 433 Spinoza, Baruch, 694 Sprachgitter (Celan), 347 squatters’ rights movement (post-unification Berlin), 222 Stalin, Josef, 268, 272 cartoon images of, 595 Hitler compared to, 273–275 Nazi depiction as Jewish, 378 Stanley, Tarshia L., 130 The Star Diaries, 288–289 Star of Ashes (De-Nur), 620, 623 Staudte, Wolfgang, 441 Steele, Timothy, 330 Steiner, George, 111 on postwar memoirs, 116 Stern, Helen, 711 Stier, Oren Baruch, 669–684 Stille, Alexander, 27 “Stirrings Still” (Beckett), 699 St. John Gogarty, Oliver, 691 Stoler, Ann Laura, 654 Stoltze, Friedrich, 380 Stone, Henry, 750 The Storm (Ehrenburg), 276 Strange and Unexpected Love (Heller), 48–49 Stratton, Jon, 797 Strauss, Leo, 316 Streicher, Julius, 359 Styron, William, 603 Suleiman, Susan Rubin, 2

Index

Sundquist, Eric, 29 Superhero post-war culture and emergence of, 594–600 Survival in Auschwitz (Levi), 34, 35, 761, 795, 797 A Survivor from Warsaw (Schoenberg), 80 survivors of Holocaust in film, 444, 459–473 photography by, 633–645 rage and revenge of, 743–756 third-generation descendants, 554–559 videotestimony by, 669–684 Survivors of Warsaw (Schoenberg), 309 Sutzkever, Abraham, 764, 775 Syme, Rachel, 779 Synagogue Council of America, 72 synechdoche memorial objects and, 770 Synger, Paula, 718 Syrkin, Marie, 81 Szafran, Dora, 718 Szyk, Arthur, 73 T “Taiga” (Lipkin), 318 Tales of Pirx the Pilot (Lem), 293–294, 298 Tarantino, Quentin, 221, 536 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 287 Tarr, Béla, 433 Tettlebaum, Marianne, 308 Texts for Nothing (Beckett), 693 theatre Holocaust productions in, 401–414 theology Wiesel and, 16–19 “There Are Jews in My House” (Vapnyar), 252, 254–255 third-generation narratives Anglophone fiction and, 254 as graphic novels, 575–588 estranged affect in, 553–570 figurative dynamics in, 120–122 in post-Soviet era, 251–260 intergenerational trauma and, 217–227 reverse journeys in, 259

  837

Third Reich ephemera of, 359 Soviet Union compared to, 272 “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen” (Borowski), 294 Thomas, D.M., 787 “Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit” (Beckett), 690 time memory and passage of, 31–33 The Time of the Uprooted (Wiesel), 23 Togay, Can, 773 Tolstoy, Leo, 269–270, 281 To-Morrow magazine, 691 “To My Child” (Sutzkever), 776 Torah on Tour, 225 Torberg, Friedrich, 203 tourist experiences of Holocaust photograpy at Auschwitz and, 633–645 The Town Beyond the Wall (Wiesel), 16 “The Train” (Galich), 322 Train of Life (film), 531 translation studies Holocaust literature and, 511–525 “The Translator’s Task” (Benjamin), 519 Transparent (television series), 562–564, 777 “Trauma and the Unnamable” (Garrison), 688 genetics and influence of, 554 third-generation Holocaust literature and, 554 Trauma: Explorations in Memory, and Testimony (Caruth), 787 Trauma studies Holocaust and, 785–799 traumatic realism in Celan’s poetry, 347–351 in film, 459–473 poetics of Holocaust and, 344 traumatic realism in, 459–473 Treaty of Berlin, 652 Trezise, Thomas, 161 The Trial of God (As it Was Held on February 25, 1649 in Shamgorad) (Wiesel), 18 Trilling, Lionel, 334

838  Index Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will) (documentary), 479 “The Trouble with Zombies: Bare Life, Muselmanner and Displaced People”;trouble (Stratton), 797 T.S. Eliot and Prejudice (Ricks), 336 T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (Julius), 336 Tsvetaeva, Marina, 694 Twilight (Wiesel), 21 “Two Hopes Away from the Battle” (Amichai), 318 Tygodnik Powszechny magazine, 233 Tzofen: E.D.M.A., (De-Nur), 627

Venezia, Shlomo, 431 Verhoeven, Paul, 788 Verlaine, Paul, 350 Verstrynge, Raïssa, 461 Videotestimony of survivors, 669–684 Vieira de Lima, Jose, 517 The VIolin (Shtibel), 52–54, 56 “A Vogn Shikh,” (“A Load of Shoes”) (Sutzkever), 775 Volkenrath, Elisabeth, 717 von Galen, Clemens August (Bishop), 660 von Trotta, Margarethe, 445, 447 Vysotsky, Vladimir, 320

U Ukraine anticommunist ideology in, 378 Nazi exploitation of antisemitism in, 377 Ulinich, Anya, 260 The Underland Chronicles (Collins), 123 Un di velt hut geshvign—And the World Remained Silent (Wiesel), 17, 743 Undzer Vort (Parisian Yiddish daily), 188 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), 672, 763 Unnamable (Beckett), 690 Un prénom républicain [An Administrative Name] (BurkoFalcman), 193 urban spaces in post-unification Berlin, 222 Urdiales-Shaw, Martin, 511–525 Uris, Leon, 84 Urstein, Dennis, 751, 753 USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, 635, 678 Useless Knowledge (Delbo), 402, 405 USHMM exhibit, 7 Ussher, Arland, 692 “The Utter Sadness of the Survivor” (Howe), 29

W Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 689 Wajda, Andrzej, 233, 235 criticism of, 234 cultural memory of Holocaust and, 240–241 “Dead Class” adaptation by, 294 film version of, 244–246 moral transformation rhetoric of, 242, 247 Wajsbort, Inka, 712 The Walking Dead (television series), 797 “Walking With Living Feet” (Horn), 772 The Wall (Hersey), 67, 81–84 Walton, Douglas, 150, 153 War and Peace (Tolstoy), 269–270, 281 Warsaw Ghetto Revolt news coverage of, 68–70 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 67–87 historical and literary legacy of, 84 Polish Catholics and, 233–247 Warsaw Zoo art in, 96 cultural transmutation of Holocaust in, 94 Grossman’s depiction of, 100 Watkins, Mary M., 152, 154 Watt (Beckett), 689, 693 We Are On Our Own (Katin), 505 Weckel, Ulrike, 441 Weill, Kurt, 79, 453 Weininger, Marilyn, 475–488 Weissman, Gary, 30

V van der Kolk, Bessel, 152, 160 Vapnyar, Lara, 252, 254–255 Velodrom d’Hiver, 695

Index

“Wenn Alle Menschen Juden Wären” (“If All People Were Jews”) (Nazi antisemitic ballad), 360 Westermann, Edward B., 593–609 We Will Never Die pageant, 79 Wexler, Anthony C., 27–41 “The Whale and the Yid”, 380 “What Remains of Beckett: Evasion and History” (Katz), 688 When the Shooting Stops (Rosenblum), 461 The White Hotel (Thomas), 787 Who Will Carry the Word? (Delbo), 401 Wielki Tydzień [Holy Week] (Andrzejewski), 233, 238–240 film version of, 244–246 Wiesel, Elie as protest theologian, 16–19 Berger’s discussion of, 15–23 Nemes’ films and influence of, 431 on figurative language and metaphor, 111 on postwar memoirs, 116, 496, 622 on rage and revenge of survivors, 743–756 Oprah Winfrey and, 788 post-Holocaust assessment of, 9 Rubinstein’s exchange wit, 18 traumatic realism of, 344 Wieseltier, Leon, 41 Wieviorka, Annette, 674, 676, 681 Wildenthal, Lora, 658 Wilson, Edmund, 335 Winfrey, Oprah, 788 Winternähe (Funk), 217–227 Wishengrad, Morton, 70, 72 Wisse, Ruth R., 154–155, 158 Wojtyła, Karol, 235 Wolk, Marcin, 295–296 Women Aryan feminity and, 725–737 as Nazi perpetrators, 8–9 camp experiences of, 707–720 German Jewish women, in contemporary Germany, 226 German Jewish women, in postwar Germany, 224 in animal studies, 94, 98

  839

rage and revenge of survivors among, 750 sexuality in Holocaust accounts by, 45–61 sexual violence and abuse in camps of, 660–665 women rescuers in, 138–140 Worcester, Kent, 577 “Words for the Day of Atonement” (Hecht), 335 The Workmen’s Circle, 77 “The World as Holocaust” (Lem) faux book reviews by, 299–301 “The World at War” (television series), 166 The World of Samuel Beckett, 1906-1946 (Gordon), 688 World War Z (Brooks), 797 “Written in Pencil in a Sealed Railway Car” (Pagis), 344 X X-Men comics series Holocaust representations in, 593–609 Y Yiddish literature Grade’s “My Quarrel”, 147–161 Holocaust’s impact on, 155 in Argentina, 181–196 Spiegelman’s Maus as, 511–525 Stalin’s destruction of, 314 Wiesel’s contributions to, 743 Yolen, Jane, 120–122 “Yosl Rakover Talks to God” (Kolitz), 67, 75–77 Yossel: April 19, 1943 (Kubert), 505, 533 Young, James E., 168, 477, 763, 772 youth Holocaust literature figurative dynamics in, 111–125 Z Żabiński, Antonina, 91, 94 agency of, 99 in film, 97

840  Index Żabiński, Jan, 91, 95 Zamach (Assassination) video installation, 481 Zanthier, Agnieszka von, 208 Zeltser, Arkadi, 253 Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland [Central Council of Jews in Germany], 220 Zionism American propaganda in support of, 79–80 Zionist propaganda films, 478 The Zookeeper’s Wife (Ackerman), 8, 94–97 historical accuracy of, 93

“The Zookeeper’s Wife” (film), 91–93, 97–99, 439–440, 444–445, 449 “The Zoo Keeper’s Wife” (Plath), 99 zoology animal studies and, 94 Zuckerman, Yitzhak, 68 Zusak, Markus, 787 Zwei Seiten der Erinnerung: Die Brüder Edgar und Manfred Hilsenrath (Dittrich), 213 Żydokomuna (Judeo-Communism) Polish interwar denunciation of, 235 Zylberberg, Michael, 639