In
the shadow of history: second generation writers and artists and
the shaping of Holocaust memory in Israel and America. (For Israel's
Jubilee Year) Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life
and Thought; 3/22/1998; Sicher, Efraim
Several authors
discuss their experiences during the Holocaust in their writings.
Helen Epstein portrays the sad memories of the Holocaust sufferings
her parents endured through her books 'Children of the Holocaust'
and 'Where She Came From: A Daughter's Search For Her Mother's History.'
Theo Richmond deftly narrates his family's demise in his book 'Konin:
A Quest.' One of the autobiographical works through which they shared
their parents' stories include Julie Salamon's 'Net of Dreams: A
Family's Search for a Rightful Place.'
We now stand half a century after the holocaust, as Israel marks
its fiftieth anniversary, yet the issues raised by that cataclysmic
event are no clearer now than they were in 1948 when the state was
established; indeed, many of the attempts to forge a new identity
and mold a collective memory now seem simplistic or have been discredited.
In the renewed debate over the legacy of the Holocaust in Israel's
collective identity and public memory questions are being asked
that undermine the official line of the state's early years: What
exactly is the place of the Holocaust in Jewish history? What is
the place of Israel in Jewish history? Is it a new beginning, or
a stage in the coming redemption? Why has the past refused to go
away? Why has no happy medium apparently been found between forgetting
everything in order to start new lives free of the past and remembering
so much that any political or moral decision-making is crippled
by the Holocaust complex? Something has gone seriously wrong with
the shaping of public memory and it is not clear anything but confusion
is being bequeathed to the future.
Not only has the memory of the Holocaust become disturbingly obsessive
in Israel's national culture, as well as in the Diaspora, but it
has thrown open questions of Jewish identity and, particularly,
the national versus universalistic meaning of being a Jew and of
Jewishness.(1) Moreover, the institutionalization
of the memory of the Holocaust and its conscription to sometimes
opposing ideologies has become inextricably entangled with the ongoing
debate over Jewish identity and particularly over the identity of
a Jewish State which inevitably dominates community politics in
America and national politics in Israel. The status of identity
(as the recent conversion law controversy showed) is no longer a
matter of largely American or Israeli concern, but a messy story
of rivalries and common causes between and within the two largest
centers of Jewish population. The memorialization of the Holocaust,
too, reflects common concerns as well as sharp differences. This
is no mere academic question, since the competition for control
of memory is also a contest for formation of identity of the State
of Israel, and it is an issue which must no longer be a squabble
over which historian is "right," but in which version
of history and religion we believe we are living now.
One of the ways in which this confused public discourse gets aired
and a major medium for the transferal and shaping of collective
memory is their inscription in literature and art. Fiction, moreover,
gives space in the imagination for what cannot be said otherwise,
for what has not been experienced directly but must be reconstructed
or even invented.(2) In Israel and in North America,
with the passing of the survivor-witnesses, the task of transmitting
the memory has been bequeathed to the second generation, to those
who were not "there." This means that the indirect experience
and the gaps in personal and collective history have to be largely
imagined, so it is in writing (whether creative, testimonial, or
academic) that we are seeing the emergence of narratives of post-Holocaust
identity. In Children of the Holocaust (1979), Helen Epstein wrote
about the "iron box" deep in her psyche of the buried
Holocaust memory of her parents. Since then many children of survivors
have, like other stigmatized minority groups, "come out"
and told of their inherited traumas, exploring their own identity
and unlocking the "iron box" of their family memory. Apart
from Epstein's new book, Where She Came From: A Daughter's Search
For Her Mother's History, and Theo Richmond's careful reconstruction
of his family's shtetl, Konin: A Quest, autobiographies in which
the children of survivors give voice to their parents' stories and
space to their destroyed communities include Julie Salamon's Net
of Dreams: A Family's Search for a Rightful Place, and Anne Karpf's
The War After: Living with the Holocaust (both first published in
1996). In doing so they find their own voices, rather in the way
Art Spiegelman's recording of his father's testimony in Maus becomes
part of his own story, and his New York childhood is inset in the
map of Auschwitz. These are journeys into a past which enable the
second generation to know who they are, where their family comes
from, and, most important, the sources of the neuroses with which
they are inflicted as a result of the horror which history has written
into their stories before they were born. Salamon's book is a travelogue
of revisiting the camps, illustrated with tourist snapshots of the
author and her family, while Karpf's quest for self-knowledge widens
to a sociological and psychological attempt to break from the compulsive
pathology of a victim status. Both authors write their books out
of loss for a dead father and Karpf gives birth in the writing of
the book to another generation, to whom she has to pass on the burden
of memory.
The pent-up anger of Anne Karpf at the deafness of the world (including
the Jewish community) to her parents' story is shared by Israel
Rozenson, who writes letters from the Lebanese front in Sikhah 'im
zikaron (Conversation with Memory, 1997) about the distortion of
memory of Auschwitz by Ka-Tzemik and official histories. Like Karpf's
book, Rozenson's epistolary essay is an act of resistance to the
inevitable amnesia of time and to erasure or accommodation by a
pragmatic Realpolitik. Above all it rewrites identity by starting
the story "over there," to fill in the blanks in family
and national genealogy, as Hannah Hertsig tries to do in her Tmunot
mekhapsot kkoteret (Pictures in Search of Captions, 1997). This
is a last-minute attempt to rescue memory from the boydem in the
attic, though it comes too late to question parents about their
untold stories of camp life and fighting as partisans which this
Israeli reserve soldier discovers for the first time in the letters
he has found. Though a minor off-shoot of the genre of the Memorbuch,
this is a remarkable document if only because it is published by
the Israeli Ministry of Defense in its educational and polemical
series for soldiers and the larger population. Like the award-winning
IDF film Beshem hadorot akharei (In the Name of the Generations
After, 1994), made for the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation
of the camps, this is an acknowledgment of the turnaround in collective
memory which has replaced the former silence with a recognition
of the place of the Holocaust victims in Jewish martyrdom and the
contribution of the survivors to national building.(3)
The phoenix-like birth of the Jewish State fifty years ago could
not after all escape the shadows of Jewish history in Europe, despite
the attempt to create a new Sabra culture and despite the stigmatization
of the Holocaust survivors in the early years of the state. The
drive to start new lives, to succeed and assimilate, plus Ben-Gurion's
determination to mold a nation out of what he called "avak
haadam" (the human debris of the survivor-immigrants) and the
political caution under Roosevelt and during the McCarthy years
in the United States, all did much to delay the impact of Holocaust
memory. After the Eichmann Trial a new consciousness of the Holocaust
formed in both Israel and America, for now a sovereign Jewish state
had taken justice into its own hands and Holocaust survivors had
confronted the perpetrator as they took the witness stand in front
of the whole world. Ben-Tsion Tomer's Children of the Shadows (1963)
and Yehuda Amichai's Not of this Time, Not of This Place (1963)
were indicative of the cathartic confrontation of an entire nation
with its past and with Germany. Amichai's novel in particular gives
an idea of the feeling of being "here" and "over
there" at the same time, of some unfinished business which
creeps into the imagination of those who were not there as they
contend with the surreal existence of a state under siege, haunted
by an archeological memory of an ever-present past that defies closure.
The Holocaust is a shadow that won't go away. It is indelibly inscribed
in ethnic and cultural identity in Israel for reasons not unconnected
with changes in Israeli society and politics, especially following
the traumatic puncturing of national pride and aggressive independence
in the Yom Kippur war, which led some Israelis to question their
moral rights to territory that could only be held by force. The
Lebanon War and the Sabra and Shatilla massacres highlighted the
self-doubts. If Nazi racism had singled out the Jews as victims,
then leftist intellectuals felt that the Jew must abandon any nationalist
ideology which excludes others, particularly one based on military
occupation. According to this logic, the Palestinian Arabs became
the Jews' Jews. In particular, Menachem Begin's use of the Holocaust
to justify Israel's obsession with security was attacked by the
Left. Influenced by the rise of the New Left in Europe in the sixties,
this may be in part a response to a siege mentality, partly a defense
mechanism for the vacuity of an Israeli identity which often denied
the Jewish ground on which it stood. In any case it is a position
that is inscribed in its various mutations in much of the discourse
that touches on the Holocaust and on the role of the establishment
of the state in Jewish history.
If the generation of 1948 had cut off history, their children could
cut off their fathers, the pioneers of the Palmach, and the heroes
who conquered the land. Like the grandchild who rebels against its
father and so takes after its grandfather, the children of the post-Yom
Kippur War baby-boom started questioning their identity without
holding sacred the Zionist truths which negated the Diaspora and
stigmatized Holocaust victims as "sheep to slaughter."
Some were quick to buy the Americanization ("Cocacolanization")
of Israeli society and decided their birthplace was purely coincidental,
that the world was a free consumer market of life-styles and materialistic
aspirations. Others began questioning their personal and collective
identities. In the eighties, we started hearing of the second generation
of Holocaust survivors, who voiced their inherited traumas in film,
literature, and art. At the 1988 International Gathering of Children
of Survivors in Jerusalem they discovered the "iron box"
was shared by many around the world and that there was a growing
psychological literature of case-histories of children of survivors
in therapy.
The Holocaust was a trauma whose intergenerational after-effects
were for many years overlooked in the treatment of the offspring
of survivors. Moreover, the disbelief encountered by survivors and
the social pressure to assimilate in new countries where they found
refuge, as well as the need to start new lives, often led to a silencing
of the past. There were things that could not be said and there
were things which could not be possibly spoken. Some children grew
up without being told the stories of their survivor parents and
discovered those stories in a cathartic release of trauma at a belated
stage, by reading about the Holocaust, or when their own children
were told stories by the grandparents. Being brought up in that
silence, or, conversely, having lived the Holocaust daily through
overexposure to their parents' nightmares and to the constant repetition
of their story, has not enabled a coherent transmission of memory
to the next generations - the more so when in different countries
collective amnesia, on the one hand, and political appropriation
of the past, on the other, has distorted the shaping of memory.
The Israeli short-story writer Savyon Liebrecht has speculated that
homes which maintained almost total silence about the Holocaust
bred creativity because of the space available for fantasy. The
child of eight or so begins to suspect that this thing that has
gone terribly wrong in the family and made the child's home different
from others is actually part of some larger, collective, universal
secret. The code of silence, claims Liebrecht, also gave her the
gift to understand the unsaid and the unsayable. And perhaps because
she grew up in a generation that did not know its grandparents,
her stories harp on family occasions that allow her to invent them
and to bridge the generation gap by telling stories: "I had
to tell stories to myself. Mostly because the best way to break
a silence is by telling stories."(4) One of
her stories, "Kritah" (Excision, 1988), tells of the breaking
of silence when a grandmother relives her camp experience of forty-five
years previously. Henia cuts her granddaughter's hair to excise
the lice the little girl has picked up at kindergarten, but she
is also passing on to the third generation her story, much to the
consternation of her daughter-in-law who shrieks that four-year-olds
should be hearing about Cinderella, not Auschwitz. Cutting away
here undoes the cutting away or excision from a past by a new Israeli
culture. The wall of silence between the survivors and their children
is broken when the survivors tell their story to their grandchildren.
Failure to communicate and schizophrenia are central to other stories
by Liebrecht, such as "Horses on the Geha Highway" (1988)
and "I Might As Well Be Speaking Chinese" (1992); here
cracks or contaminating stains in the parental home yield their
traumatic and secret inheritance after the death of the Holocaust
victim.
As in many narratives by children of survivors, the Holocaust is
not directly mentioned in Liebrecht's "I Might As Well Be Speaking
Chinese." The Ghetto Uprising is only hinted at in the name
of the street of the parents' home, and by the detail that one of
the photos in the estate agent's office was taken in Germany: the
home of memory is always "over there," however much home
is the here and now of modern Israel. A wealthy blonde persuades
the estate agent to admit her into her former home, now up for rent.
The stains on the apartment ceiling she remembers from her adolescence
are still there. The stains of memory are reminders of the emotional
and communication gap between her parents, in particular of her
father's deafness to her mother's complaints, and her mother's refusal
of marital relations, which she discovered one night. That traumatic
primal scene is one she tried to drown out in the bath, muffling
the faucet with towels in a symbolic transferal of the act of silencing.
Now she reenacts the primal scene with the estate agent who suddenly
finds his client wants a different service from the one he had in
mind. Liberated from the trauma, the woman reassures the estate
agent, "You'll find tenants easily. It's a very good apartment.
Just be sure to paint the ceiling."(5)
In making the estate agent the object of release of sexual repression,
the woman is here releasing another trauma within the trauma. Like
sex, the Holocaust is a taboo in the childhood home, a secret knowledge
that is silenced and that forms a bond between the survivor parents
which excludes the child. So by releasing her mother's sexual repression,
the woman (who is not named in the story) is unconsciously touching
the forbidden in an act of adultery that expresses incestuous desire
and trying to wipe out its contamination, symbolized by the butterfly
shaped stains on the ceiling. Moreover, the lack of communication
between the parents is matched by the silence between the generations,
the failure to transmit memory and adequately to prepare the next
generation for the task of bearing the horror of evil. The act of
release is described here as sexual, as an act in the gender battle,
but it is not hard to see that it is itself an act of repression
rather than repair - to wipe out the stains is both to listen to
the mother and an act of denial.
In homes where the story of the parents' Holocaust experience was
told only too much, where that experience was relived day in and
day out, the burden of memory was a "Glass Hat" (as in
Navah Semel's 1986 story collection of that name, Kov'a zkhukhit),
weighing down the children of survivors and invisibly setting them
apart from their contemporaries. A persistent theme of these stories
is the communication gap not only between survivors and the next
generation, but also with the rest of the world. Blindness is an
obvious metaphor for the inadequacy of response to Holocaust suffering
in a collection by Esty G. Hayim, Rakdanit shekhora belahakat yakhid
(Black Dancer in a Solo Troupe, 1997). In "Hi ohevet otkha,
ken, ken, ken" (She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah), Mrs. Stein
is deaf to the needs of her blind daughter, Julia, forcing on her
the art and music of her pre-Holocaust Austrian home which no longer
exists. As in Liebrecht's "I Might As Well Be Speaking Chinese,"
denial is symbolized by the woman's frigid lack of response to her
husband, by her obsession with constant baths to clean herself from
his seminal contamination, while the daughter has run away to France,
to the place of the Holocaust scenario which so terrifyingly haunts
the present. Mrs. Adela Miller, the Holocaust survivor in the story
of that name in the same collection, is so obsessed by communication
that, when she makes endless calls to her dead daughter in Vienna,
angry neighbors protest her monopoly of the only public pay phone
in the neighborhood by having her taken away, symbolically still
inside the phone-booth.
Like Cynthia Ozick's Rosa, whose shawl milked and stifled a baby
in the camps and whose shawl stifles the phone link with her daughter
in New York until she finds someone in Miami Beach to listen to
her, Adela Miller represents the inability to communicate the survivors'
story in an indifferent society at a time when the traumatic effects
of the Holocaust and the desperate need to tell and to be silent
were enough to stigmatize the survivor as crazy. The survivors are
nowadays portrayed as worthy of empathy and compassion, not to be
dismissed as crazed weirdoes. Above all they are to be listened
to through the medium of story as links in the generational chain,
however much they have caused emotional disturbance in their children,
have failed for want of role-models in some aspects of parenting,
or were overprotective and suffered from separation anxiety. Let's
not forget that in the camps separation was often for ever).
Something may have died in the victims in the camps, and now that
they again face mortality the responsibility of caring and the burden
of memory weigh all the more on their children. The children of
survivors, the "memorial candles" who carry the names
of the dead and who bear the burden of replacing murdered relatives,(6)
have to discover their personal and collective identity like anyone
else but they are handicapped by having to match up to their parents'
expectations as children of the Holocaust They must also cope with
its daily aftereffects on their parents and with the survivors'
sometimes humiliating dependency on them as they age, though they
may in fact be prevented from knowing their past or their own story
and identity by their parents' silence. In many cases the second
generation do not know the names of their relatives who perished,
and their family history is filled with blanks, with what the second-generation
French novelist Henri Raczymow once termed "la memoire trouee"
- a memory not of what was lost, but of loss of memory of what was
destroyed in the Holocaust and not transmitted.(7)
The plight of the second generation is shared by some of the children
hidden during the Holocaust who discovered only recently that they
were not who they thought they were, but after growing up with non-Jewish
families under false identities had been brought to Israel after
the war as orphans with new names. The trauma of this revelation
is described in the title-story of Rinah Uziel-Blumenthal's Etsba'ot
elokim (God's Fingers, 1997). The shock of discovering in middle
age that you are not who you had thought you were dissolved the
solidity of personal identity, and, as in the on-going scandal over
the "lost" Yemenite children, undermined the forced construction
of Israeli identity.
A different kind of rhetoric is now being heard that has exploded
the former silence. By the mid-nineties the return to the past had
become something of a national obsession. School trips to Poland,
renewed searches for lost family, and the reevaluation of the cultural
heritage of East European Jewry coincided with a deepening polarization
of Israeli politics, a precarious balance of political factions
and coalitions, but increasingly controlled by the religious parties
and the right Meanwhile, the Middle East peace process and the end
of the cold war each helped both to normalize Israel's situation
and to accentuate the risks involved, especially when Iraq's biological
and chemical warfare capability threatened Israeli cities during
the Gulf War (and again during the recent crisis): the irony was
not missed that to defend themselves from chemical weapons (manufactured
with the assistance of German companies under the guise of pesticide),
Israelis had to sit in sealed rooms wearing gas-masks (some of them
German-made), once more helpless victims, not powerful macho Sabras.
The new Israeli gave way to a rediscovered old Jew, though one perhaps
there all the time lurking in the bottom drawer, waiting for someone
like A. B. Yehoshu'a to go back in time and space in Mr. Mani or
Mas'a el ha-elef(Journey to the End of the Millennium) and reclaim
a pre-Zionist Sefardic past. I think this last example shows that
secular and religious worlds are not quite exclusive, despite the
psychological, political, and legal barriers between them (not least
the laws affecting identity). However, nobody can deny that there
are different views of Jewish history on a collision course.
Traditional patterns of redemption view the Holocaust as signaling
the final end of exile (as did the Hazon Ish) or perceive in the
declaration of independence the birth-pangs of the third redemption
(as did the disciples of Harav Kook). The late Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik
regarded the Holocaust as an ex-post facto situation in which the
modern Jonah could not evade the Divine call for His Beloved. Michal
Govrin's novel Hashem (The Name, 1995) takes up these questions
in the wake of the religious revival that has swept Israel since
the eighties. It is an ambitious novel which does not just debate
a theological point but attempts a tikkun, or healing of the soul,
and cosmic repair. The partially silenced story of survivor parents,
in particular a father's first wife who committed suicide in the
camps, is only one from the past that Amalia is trying to erase.
The ending of the novel is open, leaving it unclear whether Amalia
commits suicide or whether her writing does help repair her soul
and relieve her guilt (ashema) as family scapegoat, so that she
can find her own identity (hashem - her name as well as God's).
She weaves the sacred textile of the curtain of the Holy Ark and
the text of her story in the days of the 'Greet count from the Exodus
from Egypt on Passover to the revelation at Sinai on Pentecost -
days of a mystical symbolic process in Cabala and Jewish history
from bondage to redemption, from destruction to rebirth, from Holocaust
Day to Independence Day.
The left-dominated media and the literary establishment that came
to the fore after the Six-Day War takes a very different view of
Jewish history and history in general. In Raft Bukaee's 1997 film
Marco Polo, for example, the story of the legendary explorer is
more or less faithful to the facts until we touch Jewish history.
Tamara is the daughter of victims of German crusaders led by one
Adolf, and thus she represents the second generation of Holocaust
survivors when she falls for the film's hero in a crude allegory
of sexual love conquering racial hatred and fanaticism (read: also
Jewish nationalism and religion). This fantasy resists Zionist or
religious eschatology which places the Crusades and the Holocaust
in a series of catastrophes that can only be ended by the return
to Zion, but in doing so it effaces all separate identity to the
point of self-hatred.
In the United States the reasons for the reassessment of the legacy
of the Holocaust were bound up with the growing sense of security
among American Jews, on the one hand, and the central position of
Israel in Jewish communal politics and fundraising, on the other,
especially when Israel seemed threatened by extermination prior
to the Six-Day War and when ethnicity became the in-thing in the
seventies. Rampant assimilation among the Jewish population of the
United States and criticism of Israel's treatment of the Palestinian
Arabs may have downgraded Israel's place as a second home; Alan
M. Dershowitz has pointed to the increasing comfort and acculturation
of American Jews as reason to fear the American Jew's disappearance.(8)
Yet the Holocaust has remained the major symbol of Jewish identification
after the disappearance of issues which could engage American Jews
actively (such as Soviet and Syrian Jewry). Many a bar/bat-mitzvah
is now presented in a central part of the confirmation ceremony
with a certificate attesting to the adoption of a Holocaust victim,
an identification which reconnects the initiate with the lost Jewish
way of life that the immigrant generation had worked so hard to
forget in their struggle to become Americans; this is something,
however, that can turn the Holocaust into an absolute criterion
of Jewishness.
The Holocaust has finally entered popular culture as an American
experience, accessible in films such as Schindler's List and in
the National Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. This does not make
the place of the Holocaust in public memory any less controversial,
nor is a consensus any more viable. On the contrary, appropriation
of the Holocaust for all kinds of agendas has made it more likely
the Holocaust will be met as a trivial, vulgarized trope, as a representation
of a memory or as a memory of a memory. If there is a pattern in
the shaping of the memory as the Holocaust passes into history,
it sounds much like a survivalist creed in a postmodern world of
sex and violence, rather than the legacy of the survivors who had
somehow maintained their human dignity and a Jewish identity.
That seems to be the bottom line of After, a novel by Melvin Jules
Bukiet, a child of survivors who takes up the story left off by
the surviving witnesses - what came after liberation of Buchenwald
by the Americans. What came after is a postmodern free-for-all that
makes nonsense of any moral or spiritual redemption, any Jewish
referentiality meaningless, a chaos devoid of law or identity. This
is a postmodernist rewriting of Defoe after Auschwitz:
Crusoe washed up on shore, woke with sand-covered lips, salt-caked
shirt and trousers, crazy, hungry, bruised by the waves, curled
into a question mark beside a dead crab on the sandy crescent of
the new world that was not, above all other qualities, his, his
absolutely, if temporarily, for as long as he could compel the scattered
palms to relinquish the coconuts necessary to slake his thirst,
and give him strength to proclaim his kingship among the seaweed
citizenry of his realm. Property laws aside, survival is nine-tenths
of dominion.(9)
Bukiet's portrait of the survivors is hardly flattering, and their
scramble for ill-gotten gains, including reclamation of the gold
stolen from the victims' teeth, is made to look as legitimate as
anything else that goes in this genocidal world.
Destruction, however, has marked time into Before and After, and
it is a chronology that cancels the promise of a better future.
All eschatologies, the Jewish and the Christian, are mocked. Here
and in his short-story collection Stories of an Imaginary Childhood(1992),
Bukiet has invented an imaginary past, "Proszowice," in
order to provide a prehistory for what has been destroyed and is
no more, an absence which has left a trace in the present, like
the construction of the East European past by Alain Finkielkraut's
"imaginary Jew." As the prominent French historian Pierre
Nora has noted, the community of memory or the "milieux de
memoire" that represented a whole culture and way of life,
that gave meaning and identity to its inhabitants and their descendants,
has been replaced with a constantly reinvented past and traditions.(10)
The resulting simulacrum is more like a museum of artifacts that
are reinterpreted rather than a living tradition,(11)
like many American attempts to invent a past-though if anything
the Jews suffer from a surfeit of memory, and the proliferation
of Holocaust museums and monuments may be welcomed as a belated
rescue of memory. Yet for Jews it is doubtful whether there are
"lieux de memoires" beyond these imaginary objects of
mourning. Claude Lanzmann has spoken of the "non-lieux de memoire"(12)
to describe these blanks in the map of memory and the difficulty
in resisting closure which will finally bring forgetfulness by divorcing
"here" from "there" and "then" from
"now" (a connection which Lanzmann takes pains to maintain
in his film Shoah by emphasizing the presentness of the past and
the "hereness" of the camps). Bukiet inscribes the present
moment as a palimpsest in a chronology of disasters; there is not
even anybody to whom to pass such a fragmentary and fragile memory
except the "last Jews" who will somehow always survive
and prosper, laughing in the face of history. In this Bukiet rejects
the traditional Jewish response of the ethical command to remember,
a religious duty incumbent on the individual who connects with the
collective past in daily commemoration, a portable site of memory
that chronicles the history of destruction and exile.
A very different view of the memory of trauma transmitted to the
second generation is offered by Thane Rosenbaum in his short-story
collection Elijah Visible (1996). Each story tells of a different
Adam Posner, a different Adam of the new age. Each speaks to an
alternate response to trauma and memory ranging, on the one hand,
from a totalizing paranoiac obsession, ascribing all of life to
the trauma of the past, all disasters a replay of the Holocaust
("Cattle Car Complex"), to the other extreme, denial and
amnesia in a carefree "who needs it?" attitude, the insistence
that life must be lived without the burden of the past. At one end
of the scale the memory of trauma is so paralyzing that Adam cannot
take any meaningful action in life, cannot be an efficient and responsible
transmitter of the memory. He teaches the Holocaust to college students
and when he invites a survivor-relative to his class he is shocked
to encounter an aging man about town, a fun-loving man of the world
who careers wildly around Central Park on a hired bicycle and tells
his students the story of Adam's father which he has never heard
before ("Act of Defiance"). The opposite extreme is the
painter struggling with memory of his parents' traumatic past who
lets a luscious Aryan blonde push aside the memorial candle for
his mother and lure him into the pleasures of the flesh ("Romancing
the Yohrtseit Light"). The canvases of smudged memorial candles
suggest that when there is nothing to remember memory is an abstract
blur of confused colors. In such a canvas, the real issues of faith
after Auschwitz amount to little more than a tennis match, like
the one a rabbi with atheist tendencies (a parody of Richard Rubenstein)
plays on a bet whether G-d was there in the camps ("The Rabbi
Double-faults"). In all these stories, the trauma of the parents'
Holocaust experience is a crippling inheritance, especially when
memory is silenced, while in America's plurality of ethnic identities
and memories remembrance risks becoming a meaningless ritual.
The Passover festival becomes meaningful to contemporary American
Jews at a mock-seder in the title story of Elijah Visible only when
Adam forces his family to face the Holocaust past which they have
always repressed and silenced, and forces them to accept their moral
responsibility for carrying on the story. They have cast off their
Holocaust survivor cousin in Europe and with him their Jewish heritage.
Now he is on his way to visit them: "Elijah had not visited
the Posners this year, but Cousin Artur was on his way."(13)
By contrast, when the camp inmates are given the chance to celebrate
the Passover shortly after liberation in Bukiet's After, the retelling
of the Exodus ends in a mockery of the seder, rendering meaningless
the traditional narratives of communal identity in this new liberation
of slaves (the option of Brikhah and fighting for the new Jewish
state chosen by many DPs is dismissed in an orgy of postwar racketeering
and prostitution).
A tendency towards hedonistic pragmatism can nevertheless reveal
an anguished search for faith and for meaning. A first novel by
Toronto poet Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces (1996), which beat Margaret
Atwood's Alias Grace to win the 1997 Orange Prize, is a long poetic
evocation of the loss left by the Holocaust and of the attempt to
heal the loss through love. Michaels imagines herself into the body
and mind of a child hidden during the Holocaust on a Greek island:
Jakob Beer searches for a language which is not a language of denial
and of destruction in order to give name and therefore existence
to his lost sister, Bella. Jakob does this in poetry and in English,
which is a neutral language never occupied, a nowhere from which
to return and dig the archeology literally destroyed by the Nazis
of the peat bogs of his native Biskupin. For Jakob as for Seamus
Heaney excavating the peat-bog of his native Ireland in his well-known
poem, "Digging," the pen is a stubborn witness to roots.
Jakob Beer is rescued out of that archeological quagmire and smuggled
by his rescuer Athos Roussos to his Greek homeland under his greatcoat.
The rescue effects a rescue of memory and of self, not just for
the Jewish child but also for his rescuer. Like other hidden children,
Jakob must grow up unable and indeed forbidden to say who he is,
while the Jews on the island are rounded up and taken away. The
construction of identity must be achieved from a vacuum, from a
void of knowledge and memory, which must be discovered through an
exploration of imagined time and space. In a sense Jacob's rescuer
gives birth to him from under his coat: in nurturing him through
love he finds peace for himself, and they "carry" each
other through the war to postwar Canada, where Athos finds a job
in a university geography department.
Archeology and geology are the sustaining metaphors and historical
analogies of the narrative, just as they are the sustaining interest
of Jakob's rescuer. Athos recalls the demigod of pre-Nazi European
humanism rooted in Greek classicism and Greek landscape; his is
a Hellenism far more real than the Hebrew tradition which is learnt
from translations pulled down from a bookshelf. The Rousseauesque
(or in this case Roussosesque) philosophy and wisdom which Athos
passes on to his protege, a lesson of ardent passion for man and
nature, drives Jakob in his own poetry and in his love for Michaela,
another alter-ego of Michaels. In a succession of narrative loops,
this poetry and passion touch Ben, a child of survivors, for whom
it is an outlet for the silence of his own Holocaust survivor parents,
as well as a working through of the survivors' syndrome. That is
imprinted on his psyche through transference of constant anxiety
and denial of the past, as well as a working through of resentment
at having been designated the role of memorial candle for the child
who did not survive (Ben is in fact not a name but Hebrew for a
son, as if naming was to tempt fate, and not naming is an act of
denial of loss).
Michaels writes with an intensely sensuous and seductive passion.
Her women are vehicles of that passion, though never fully given
life beyond their dimension of male desire. They are also vehicles
of transmission, whether as daughter-in-laws who are entrusted with
the secrets of the kitchen, or biologically as potential mothers.
The autobiographical sign of the author's signature is a fugitive
one, which looks to love for the expression of humanity capable
of surviving the cataclysmic catastrophes which have overcome humankind
since time immemorial. Michaels has said of Jakob that he "needs
to come to terms with the past, to remember and honor the dead before
he can truly love those who are alive, and embrace the redemption
of love."(14) Writing restores time and space
to the lost Jews who vanished in Polish mud; it resists the denial
of history, which, like the prehistoric valley in which Toronto
is built, buries its relics just below the surface: "Redemption
through cataclysm; what had once been transformed might be transformed
again."(15)
Jewish identity, insists Anne Michaels' narrator, is possible without
faith and religion, reminding us of the American scholar Walter
Berm Michaels' definition of Jewishness as a "deconstructive
performative" that does not depend on race or nation in the
consanguinity of victimhood.(16) For Anne Michaels
faith is defined by absence, as is the candle-light by the surrounding
darkness, the existence of God confirmed by His hiding, a cabalistic
notion expressed in aphorisms more reminiscent of Dostoevsky, rendered
poetically in the style of Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova, than
the Chasidic masters retold by Martin Buber or Elie Wiesel. It is
a hope for memory and for a future, yet it remains a solitary hope
that appeals to a belief (apparently discredited by postmodernism)
in a morality based on love and learning (not necessarily the same
as knowledge and understanding) as the only way of connecting with
a history in which the individual is powerless in the face of horror
and violence. It is as if remembering was an act of moral vigilance,
as if "doing good" on behalf of the dead guaranteed what
Athos calls their "moral progress." True, there is a Jewish
practice of doing good deeds "on behalf" of the deceased,
so that what they cannot accomplish should be reckoned to their
credit, but here "doing good" amounts to little more than
being "good," with all the ambiguity of the term and devoid
of any reference to repairing the world or reaching out beyond intimacy
to a larger community of faith or nation.
In Israel, as well as in America, the literary configuration of
"Over There" ("Eretz sham") challenges conventions
and taboos in public discourse, as well as confronting Adorno's
declaration that writing poetry "After Auschwitz" would
be barbaric. To find a language that speaks in a way that recovers
literary value without accepting a canonical Jewish voice or the
"Zionist myth" means also to redefine oneself as writer
and Jew, as well as one's relation to the Diaspora past, and to
redefine ideas of community and nation. These are themes which undercut
the narratives of self-definition in Philip Roth's Operation Shylock
and in David Grossman's See Under: Love, as well as to some extent
in Cynthia Ozick's The Messiah of Stockholm and in Art Spiegelman's
Maus. The situation is complicated by the legitimization of a new
diasporism and the proliferation of competing histories. Not only
has the Holocaust been appropriated for the postmodernist agenda
of fluidity of biological or racial identities in a global village,
but its appropriation more than anything else deconstructs narratives
of Jewish self-definition because nobody can agree whether Auschwitz
leads to Jerusalem - as in the kitschy Hollywood ending of Spielberg's
Schindler's List, - to Hiroshima - in the trajectory of a common
human evil, - or to Miami Beach - where survivors could forget in
very different kinds of camps, as in the black humor of Thane Rosenbaum's
sketches of the survivor communities, or Cynthia Ozick's "Rosa."
In his 1986 novel 'Ayen 'erekh: ahavah (See Under: Love), David
Grossman confesses that to emerge sane from the Holocaust complex,
from the imagination's White Room at Yad Vashem is not easy: "In
the White Room everything comes out of your own self, out of your
own guts, victim and murderer, compassion and cruelty. . . ."(17)
In order to imagine the Holocaust, a necessary condition for mourning
and working through, Planet Auschwitz must be understood as real,
as a place where, even there, stories could be told. Grossman works
to challenge the "unrepresentability" of the Holocaust
and its canonical place in official discourse. His novel is paradigmatic
of the struggle to claim legitimacy for art in the wake of destruction
and to find a status for the post-Holocaust Jew beyond that of victim.
That search is personally agonizing for Israeli artist Haim Maor,
a child of survivors and the foremost Israeli artist to deal with
what it means to live after, to inherit the Holocaust. Maor is,
I suppose, representative in the sense that his art expresses a
response of his generation to the inherited trauma as he articulates
his own story, a personal identity which confronts public and collective
memory in a problematic way. Like Grossman's Momik, for which he
served as a model,(18) he heard stories about the
Holocaust from his blind grandfather, a tombstone engraver, and
like Navah Semel he wears an invisible glass hat which weighs down
on him with the burden of memory, a magnifying glass of pain which
could not be voiced. Together Maor and Semel revisited the dead
in Poland, "accompanying them without coffins or shrouds, and
sealing the cycle of mourning which has not yet ended. Because we
did not dare weep for them properly. We internalized the pain, substituting
rituals and official memorial days for the scar. Beneath the invisible
coffin-lids the dead seek their mourning."(19)
In succeeding exhibitions From Birkenau to Tel-Hai, The Faces of
Race and Memory and Haim Maor: The Forbidden Library, Maor has inscribed
for his family the tombstones which they never had, having inherited
from his grandfather's life-story the task of inscribing the faces
of his lost family, but also of his parents and himself. In his
exhibited installations planks resembling coffin lids carry portraits
of his family, but as in some interchangeable puzzle we can never
be sure of identity. This is a personal story, an autobiography
which tattoos Van Gogh with the artist's Auschwitz number, and deconstructs
conventions of the self in Western art from Faiyum to Andy Warhol.
Identity becomes fluid and blurred; no image gives certain knowledge.
One self-portrait shows Maor's head with a missing segment of the
wooden board (of a coffin) on which it is painted, that same "missing
memory" of which Henri Raczymow spoke in describing the black
hole in the psyche of the second generation.
Brought up in that European cultural tradition from which the survivors
had been violently wrenched and for which they felt nostalgia, Maor
turns Christian iconology on its head, portraying himself in a triptych
of the crucifix, and reveals the image of man to be bestial, driven
by sexual passion. Adam and Eve have tasted from the Tree of Knowledge
and cannot now return to some innocent state which did not know
the evil of Auschwitz. Haim Maor: The Forbidden Library, which was
shown, among other locations, at Ben-Gurion University's Central
Library, in Beer-Sheba, is a Pandora's box of"forbidden"
knowledge, a counter-library that subverts the "official"
library and the Sabra myth associated with the man whose name that
university bears. This is a private library of untold stories in
which the failure to tell the story succeeds in conveying the impossibility
of telling it,(20) so that we cannot walk away
feeling we have "mastered" the lessons of Auschwitz or
feel easy that now we "know."
In a series of nudes, Maor has photographed figures bound and blindfolded.
The victim is universalized. The Mark of Cain (in a self-portrait
of that tide) is the self facing the post-Auschwitz human condition:
Cain could equally be Abel, as in Dan Pagis's "Written in Pencil
in the Sealed Railway-Car," when the Jewish mother Eve leaves
a cryptic message for Cain, who is son of Adam but also "ben
adam," a human being capable of sending his mother and brother
to their deaths. The viewer enters Haim Maor's "forbidden library"
and is confronted by a collage of family photographs and rows of
"mug shots." One is not supposed to be able to tell convicts
from Jews, victim from perpetrator. Prejudices, as in the earlier
Faces of Race and Memory (1988), are externalized so that the viewer
is made to experience the stereotyped responses in himself or herself.
We recall Vladek's outburst in Maus when his son gives a ride to
a black, as well as Spiegelman's playful stereotyping in his depiction
of masks of Poles, Germans, and Jews.
In order to identify victim and perpetrator as equally human, as
equally susceptible to absolute evil (or complicit in it), the artist
confronts us with a comparison of the two lives of Haim Maor and
a German woman called Susanne (Sanna), whom Maor befriended on his
kibbutz - the Susanna in "Susanna - Shoshanat Ya'akov,"
an exhibition for Israel's fiftieth Independence day at the National
Jewish Museum in Washington DC., which opened April 30, 1998. A
retrospective show of Maor's work, it focuses on the question of
Jewish and human identity as seen by a leading Israeli artist, and
plays on double identity that coalesces German and Jewish opposites
and deconstructs Israeli and Jewish identity.
Sanna's story remains an enigma: was her family involved in the
atrocities? Did they collaborate in any way? Or did they stand by
passively? Sanna has become something of a fetish in Maor's work,
and one can understand that some would be disturbed at this fascination
with the body of a German woman whose pose is not the commercial
relationship of model and artist, not just the female held under
male gaze, but the object of power who must stand and sit to command,
while also playing Eve to Maor's Adam, his Jungian anima and shadow.
The present exhibition achieves a new level of a relationship which
started with a stereotypical suspicion of the Aryan and now superimposes
the images of Jew and German so that they cannot be easily separated.
By playing with various identities, the artist compounds the enigma
of "Susanna" with the encounter with Africa, where she
resides, hiding and perhaps denying her German past. With its folklore
motifs and traditional masks that hide identity, Africa can turn
Itsik Manger's Golden Peacock into a menacing Nazi eagle, while
the bowl of fruit offered by "Susanna" becomes an ambiguous
propitiatory tribal offering. The striped African cloth provides
a bar-code for identification, but also a prayer-shawl shrouding
the German woman in a Jewish identity of Zion - which is also spelt
"tsiyun," a grave marker once again reminding us of the
inert presence of the Holocaust, but stripped of any orienting Israeli
or Jewish geographical and historical signposts. In conversations
with me, Maor has spoken of feeling a "stranger" in his
own land, and his own search for identity seems to need to explore
"Susanna" and Africa in order to find himself.
In Maor's earlier exhibitions, "Susanna" is shown as a
frontal nude, like the artist, and both cover their genitals in
shame at their shared legacy. The use of similar images in Maor's
installations (for example a self-portrait of the artist covering
his breast like a Jewish mother waiting to be shot) thus forces
on the spectator the voyeuristic viewpoint of the perpetrator, while
the demonization of woman externalizes male desire and raises against
the artist the inevitable charge of pornography.(21)
The manipulation of the viewer into positions of oppressor and oppressed
is an almost violent brainwashing, as in much political discourse
in Israel, that warns us at the same time that art does manipulate.
In the exhibition Haim Maor: The Forbidden Library signs reading
"shower" and "selection" teach the simplistic
but far from superfluous lesson that language can deceive us into
blindly obeying authority, while forbidden words like "love"
and "father" remind us of their suppression in memory.
It also draws attention to the way language has been corrupted to
serve the sinister ends of the "Final Solution." And,
as in David Grossman's "encyclopedia" in See Under: Love,
Maor seeks to restore the missing entries in our knowledge.
We pass through twelve stations of the cross in the "Forbidden
Library" until we reach an execution chair underneath a predatory
bird (a leitmotif in Maor's work) surrounded by mirrors at a dead
end from which there is no escape ("Echo Chamber," 1988-93).
At the opening of the exhibition Haim Maor: The Forbidden Library
in 1994, I refused the artist's request to sit myself down on the
execution chair and identify myself as being "over there,"
a potential victim of the Holocaust and of oppression everywhere.
I frankly found the whole exercise distasteful and provocative in
its almost violent bullying of the viewer into compromising positions.
Not just because I was a resistant reader who did not wish to deconstruct
the identities of victim and perpetrator (and hasn't Primo Levi
said that they are distinct and separate?),(22)
but because we live here and now, fifty years after Israel has rebuilt
a state. If the continuity of universities and yeshivot, of poets
and rabbis, of birth and marriage, is scarred by the unfathomable
loss of the six million, it is nevertheless a continuum which remembers
the rupture and which continues despite and because of it. We are
not the victims, nor are we rootless cosmopolitans. Maor's art can
be seen as a public working through of the Holocaust trauma, which
challenges his society to face unthinkable and disturbing questions,
in particular forcing Israelis to confront the children of Germany
without assuming any firm or consistent identity of Jew or German.
But in working through inherited trauma there comes a stage of separation
from the dead, from the corpses, when the "memorial candle"
discovers its own identity, achieves the tikkun of becoming whole
and passes on the legacy by telling the story of the Exodus to the
next generation.(23) That is the step facing us
as the State of Israel reaches middle age.
NOTES
An earlier version of part of this essay was presented at the 29th
convention of the Association of Jewish Studies, Boston 1997, in
a special session on the Second Generation.
1. See Robert S. Wistrich, "Israel, the Diaspora
and the Holocaust Trauma," Jewish Studies Quarterly 4, 2 (1997):
191-199.
2. On the ways in which literature reconstructs
the unknown past in order to form personal and collective identity
in Israel and America, see my "The Burden of Memory: The Writing
of the Post-Holocaust Generation," in Breaking Crystal: Writing
and Memory After Auschwitz, edited by Efraim Sicher (Urbana &
Chicago: Illinois University Press, 1998), pp. 19-88.
3. On the fiftieth anniversary of Israel's independence
the Ministry of Defense produced a booklet on Israel and the Holocaust,
Masuot (edited by Yosef Rappel) and at the independence celebrations
a Holocaust survivor was awarded the Israel Prize for lifetime achievement
to symbolize the contribution of survivors to the state. It was
also announced that army officers were to take special courses on
the Holocaust, though visits to Yad Vashem have been mandatory for
some years.
4. Savyon Liebrecht, "The Influence of the
Holocaust on My Work," in Hebrew Literature in the Wake of
the Holocaust, edited by Leon Yudkin (London & Toronto: Associated
University Presses, 1993), p. 130.
5. Savyon Liebrecht, Sinit ani medaberet eleikha
(Jerusalem: Keter, 1992), p. 23.
6. See Dina Wardi, Nosei hakhotem: Dialog 'im bnei
hador hasheni lashoah (Jerusalem: Keter, 1990), English translation:
Memorial Candles: Children of the Holocaust (London: Routledge,
1992).
7. Henri Raczymow, "Memory Shot through with
Holes," translated by Alan Astro, Yale French Studies (Special
Issue: "Discourses of Jewish Identity in Twentieth-Century
France"), no. 85 (1994): 98-105.
8. See Alan M. Dershowitz, The Vanishing American
Jew: In Search of Jewish Identity for the Next Century (Boston:
Little Brown, 1996).
9. Melvin Jules Bukiet, After (New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1996), p. 97.
10. Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History:
Les Lieux de Memoire," Representations no. 26 (1989): 7-8.
11. On the museum culture of memory see Andreas
Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Making Time in a Culture of Amnesia
(New York: Routledge, 1995); on the postmodernist simulacrum see
Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena,
translated by James Benedict (London & New York: Verso, 1993).
12. Claude Lanzmann, "Les non-lieux de memoire,"
in Au sujet de Shoah:Le film de Claude Lanzmann (Paris: Belin, 1990),
pp. 281-282.
13. Thane Rosenbaum, Elijah Visible (New York:
St. Martin's Press, 1996), p. 103.
14. Anne Michaels, Address to the Toronto Writers'
Festival in 1997, quoted in Pearl Sheffy Gefen, "One Woman's
Search for Faith," Jerusalem Post (Magazine Section) (23 January
1998): 24.
15. Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces (London: Bloomsbury,
1997), p. 101.
16. Walter Benn Michaels, "'You Who Never
Was There': Slavery and the New Historicism, Deconstruction and
the Holocaust," Narrative 4, no. 1 (1996): 1-16.
17. David Grossman, See Under:Love, translated
from the Hebrew by Betsy Rosenberg (New York : Farrar Straus Giroux,
1989), p. 210.
18. As the artist confirmed in a conversation with
the present author, January 3, 1997.
19. Navah Semel, "An Eye in a Plank,"
in Haim Maor, The Facts of Race and Memory (exhibition catalog,
Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 1988), n.p.
20. This last point is made by the Israeli art
historian and literary scholar, Haim Finkelstein, "The Crumbling
of Memory," in his exhibition catalog, Haim Maor: The Forbidden
Library (Beer-Sheba: Avraham Baron Art Gallery, Ben-Gurion University
of the Negev, 1994), n.p.
21. An obvious objection is that in Nazi photographs,
the victims cover their private parts out of a deep-seated tradition
of modesty, not shame, and their exposure was part of the Nazi attempt
to humiliate and dehumanize them. A similar issue was raised in
the controversial installation by second-generation Israeli artist
Roee Rosen, "Live and Die as Eva Braun-Hitler's Mistress in
the Berlin Bunker and Beyond: An Illustrated Proposal for a Virtual
Reality Scenario," exhibited at the Israel Museum, November
1997-January 1998. In asking us to experience depravity, the artist
is stripping away the cliches that prevent our dealing with the
Holocaust, but ignores the obscenity of an identification which
must remain repulsive to a Jewish sensibility of humanity as created
in the Divine image. Likewise, not only survivors may find difficulty
in identifying the "little Nazi inside you," as Grossman
put it in his novel. See the vocal protests reported in Meir Ronnen,
"Sex and Suicide with Hitler," Jerusalem Post (14 November
1997): 16.
22. Primo Levi, "The Memory of the Offense,"
in Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective, edited by Geoffrey
Hartman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 130-137.
23. For a description of this stage see Wardi,
Memorial Candles, pp. 214-258.
EFRAIM SICHER teaches British and comparative literature at Ben-Gurion
University of the Negev. A graduate of London University, Professor
Sicher did his doctoral work at Oxford, and held a Junior Research
Fellowship at Wolfson College. His previous publications include
books and essays on a wide range of topics in English and comparative
literature from Charles Dickens to Arnold Wesker, as well as modern
Jewish culture. His collection of essays on Holocaust memory, Breaking
Crystal: Writing and Memory after Auschwitz, appeared earlier this
year. He is at present completing a book on representation of moral
space in the nineteenth-century novel
.
COPYRIGHT 1998 American Jewish Congress
This material is published under license from the publisher through
the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding
rights should be directed to the Gale Group.
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