Writing the Holocaust

JACOB GLATSTEIN’S PROPHECY

2011-11-03T00:41:00.009-04:00

JACOB GLATSTEIN’S PROPHECY

Dara Horn

Jewish Review of Books, Summer 2011

It isn’t every day that one has the opportunity to read a literary masterpiece. But a literary masterpiece that doubles as a work of prophecy? Such books have been rare since the death of Isaiah--which is why this new English edition of The Glatstein Chronicles deserves not only praise but its own cantillation. Largely set in a Jewish sanatorium-resort in 1934 Poland, The Glatstein Chronicles is easy to label as a Jewish Magic Mountain. But Thomas Mann’s novel about the decline of European civilization as dramatized at a sanatorium-resort was published in 1925, after the ravages of World War I made his characters’ prewar lives poetically moot. The Glatstein Chronicles might have been that book, had it been written in 1946. Instead, this devastating kaleidoscopic vision of doom for Jewish Europe first appeared in print in . . . 1934. Jacob Glatstein was no mere poet, but a Yiddish prophet. And now American Jews can rediscover what prophecy really means.

Like most prophets, Glatstein at first resisted the call. Born in Lublin in 1896, he escaped Poland’s painfully circumscribed opportunities by convincing his parents to send him to America at age 17--where his one American uncle couldn’t even leave his sweatshop job to meet him at the dock. Bright enough (and fluent enough in English) to enroll in New York University Law School, and also bright enough to voluntarily drop out, Glatstein at 24 made a conscious decision to live his literary life in Yiddish. His early poetry is phenomenal, world-class modernist verse that catapulted Yiddish into the worlds of Eliot and Joyce and beyond. Almost untranslatable because of his punning and layering of nearly every word (in Yiddish, Hebrew, English, and Polish) and his clever references to both Yiddish highbrow and children’s culture (all, by 2011, requiring extensive footnotes), Glatstein’s first three published books of poetry are works of genius by a writer stretching his wings in a Jewish world that felt too small for his talents.

But in time Glatstein saw that these brilliant tours de force could be no more than brilliant, and the growing crisis in Europe made him see the pitiful aspect of writing Yiddish verse modeled on the language games of Anglo-American poets. Like claiming today that his novel is a “Jewish Magic Mountain,” this kind of work suggests that Jewish literature is a pale imitation of “world literature,” rather than the generator of world literature’s most fundamental themes. Without anti-Semitism, this assumption would be merely pathetic. But when one considers the active degrading of Jewish culture within the most lauded realms of Western civilization, the idea that Jewish literature ought to mirror its non-Jewish counterpart becomes worse than base. After violent pogroms in Poland in 1938, Glatstein in New York wrote his most famous poem, “Good Night, World,” which bids a sarcastic farewell to the supposed glories of Western civilization, insisting to the non-Jewish world that “Not you, but I slam the gate,” as the poet rejects Western culture for a stunted Judaism that at least opposes the wider world’s moral hypocrisy:

Good night, world. I’ll give you a parting gift
Of all my liberators.
Take your Jesusmarxes, choke on their courage.
Croak on a drop of our baptized blood…
From Wagner’s idol-music to wordless melody, to humming.
I kiss you, cankered Jewish life.
It weeps in me, the joy of coming home.

In The Glatstein Chronicles, the poet literally comes home. Composed as two novellas here combined in one English volume, The Glatstein Chronicles is a work in the great 200-year-old tradition of Jewish autobiographical novels--including masterpieces ranging from S.Y. Agnon’s A Guest for the Night (also about a Jewish man visiting his hometown in 1930s Poland) to Saul Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March. But it surpasses even those, because its majesty derives from the author’s reimagining of the Hebrew Bible’s recurrent motifs of personal and national betrayal--and from his astonishing power of genuine prophecy. Of the dozens of thematically interlocked layers that this book offers its readers, many of which have been richly mined by scholars, it is its prophecy that resonates loudest of all in 2011. Reading this work today, one cannot help continuously flipping back to editor Ruth R. Wisse’s insightful introduction to check the book’s publication history, incredulous. The second novella first appeared in 1940, though it was likely composed long before that. The first was already serialized in 1934.

The novel’s putative story is that of an unnamed narrator whose biography matches Glatstein’s exactly (the Yiddish titles included the narrator’s name, “Yash,” a diminutive for Jacob), and who after 20 years in America is called back to Poland to attend his mother’s death. The book’s first half, “Homeward Bound” (in Yiddish, Ven Yash is geforn, “When Yash Set Out”), follows the narrator’s Atlantic crossing and his journey through Europe, focusing on his encounters with the cosmopolitan Jews and non-Jews whom he meets on the way. Its second half, “Homecoming at Twilight” (in Yiddish, Ven Yash iz gekumen, “When Yash Arrived”), takes place at a Jewish sanatorium-resort in southern Poland where the narrator stays after his mother’s death--and where his fellow residents from all walks of Polish Jewish life share their stories and ultimately die. We never meet the narrator’s dying mother, who was supposedly the purpose of his journey; nor does he even mention her, except in a few flashbacks to his childhood and negotiations over her burial, which are written to resemble the biblical Abraham’s purchase of the Cave of Machpelah. Instead, we are left with the impression that the dying mother to whom he has come to bid farewell is Jewish Poland itself. And this is where the book crosses the line from travelogue to prophecy.

The narrator’s prophetic visions begin on the Atlantic crossing. During the voyage, word arrives of the “Night of Long Knives,” Hitler’s first violent purge of his Nazi rivals. Seeking others who share his panic, the narrator tests out the news on his fellow passengers--and finds that the ship is divided, as Europe soon would be, between Jews and non-Jews:

"I realized that to the Gentiles, Hitler meant something altogether different than he did to me. My non-Jewish fellow passengers . . . regarded Hitler as merely Germany’s dictator. To me, to 600,000 German Jews, and indeed to all the 17 million Jews worldwide, Hitler was the embodiment of the dreaded historical hatemonger, latest in a long line of persecutors that stretched from Haman . . . wielding a bloody pen that was writing a dreadful new chapter of Jewish history."

These discussions remain theoretical until the ship docks in Europe--and the narrator must travel to Poland through Germany, via trains packed with Hitler youth.

In Poland, it becomes clear that anti-Semitic fury has already begun to take its toll on Jewish youth. Young people train for professions that will not admit them, and then fall back on flimsy businesses that barely survive ongoing boycotts, causing “love to die among them” as even romance falls prey to the practicalities of their artificially-induced poverty. They endure this poverty on a knife’s edge. At first, the narrator’s intimations of mortality are subtle or atmospheric, taking the form of dreams involving “a vague fear of impending destruction,” or an observation that “It was the end of August, and these men were probably the first to become aware, in the midst of summer pleasures, that winter was on the way.”

But as he meets more and more desperate Jews who try to stuff his suitcases with messages begging for help from their American relatives, the narrator’s intimations of doom give way to a stunning clarity. On nearly every page of this magnificent novel, one finds astonishing remarks like these from Polish Jews in 1934:

“The fact is that a real war is being waged against us, a war of attrition. . . . There’s no escaping it: all the countries have imposed a siege. . . . Believe me, the Poles are much cleverer than Hitler. They don’t rant and rave, they just pass over our bodies with a steamroller and drive us right into the ground. . . . Formerly you could escape by emigrating. Today our people are staring death in the eyes.”

Nor is this intended to be figurative, as conversations like the following make abundantly clear:

“It started with Pharaoh who bathed in the blood of Jewish children. Why, oh why, why do we deserve this, Mr. Steinman? What do they have against us, Mr. Steinman?”

“Ah, you’re raising fundamental questions,” Steinman said. He had become grave. “You want to go to the root of things. Well, I’ll tell you: they want to destroy us, nothing less. Yes, to destroy us. For instance, take me--I am a patriotic Pole. And yet they’d destroy me too. They want to exterminate us, purely and simply. Yes, exterminate us.”

The “Haman” dimension of current events is hauntingly evoked near the book’s conclusion, when the narrator visits Kazimierz. A picturesque resort beloved by artists, Kazimierz is a town with a Jewish-Polish myth attached to it. Its ruined castle was once occupied by King Casimir the Great, a real 14th-century Polish monarch who, according to legend, had a Jewish lover named Esther who lived in the castle as his queen. The story was imagined variously in Polish and Yiddish sources as abduction or seduction, but among Polish Jews it usually evoked a sense of Polish-Jewish interdependency and belonging, echoing the biblical Book of Esther with its irresistible Jewish woman married to a non-Jewish king--with the queen placed in the palace for the Jews’ eventual rescue.

The narrator goes to Kazimierz almost by accident, when a driver appears at the hotel with the mistaken information that he has planned a day trip there. Another guest, in love with the town, decides to go and invites the narrator along, explaining: “You see, it’s fate. A man has to visit Kazimierz sooner or later, so what difference does it make when you go?” With its echo of the appointment in Samarra, “visiting Kazimierz” becomes a metaphor for the destiny of Polish Jews: everyone believes in this myth of Gentile-Jewish romance at some point, just as the poet Glatstein once did, until the myth is revealed to be a picturesque ruin--or worse.

Once in Kazimierz, the narrator climbs up to the ruined castle with his traveling companion, who caresses its stones and describes it as holy, suggesting the ruins of the ancient Temple:

For what has really gone on here in Kazimierz? I think I can help you to understand. The Jew had his own poor world, and the Gentile led his own separate life. We always walked as far as the city gates, beyond which death lies--a great cemetery full of ancestors. In other words, walk no farther than the gates and turn right back, for you can see only too clearly what lies in store. The grave. But the people created a legend in defiance of the limitations of this life.

This legend claims to be a Purim story, but in Glatstein’s prophetic vision, it is really a story about Tisha b’Av--and Jewish Poland is the latest holy temple on the verge of destruction. Returning from Kazimierz, the narrator considers this “dark omen.” Alluding to a Spanish novel about a wounded Casanova, he reflects: “All of us . . . would very soon arrive at winter with a hand shot off. That would be the hand which, I had vowed, I would let wither if I forgot you, and you, and everything that had ever imprinted itself on my eyes and mind.”

Reading The Glatstein Chronicles is itself an act of mourning, and the editor and translators must have endured this grief all the more acutely. The translation is rendered magnificently, and Wisse and the translators (Maier Deshell and the late Norbert Guterman) have taken great pains to produce the illusion that we are reading this masterpiece as the author wrote it. Terms that would have felt natural to 20th-century Yiddish speakers have been subtly explained within the text; more complex cultural references are explicated in unobtrusive endnotes.

But the reader familiar with the original cannot but mourn--not only for the doomed community captured within its pages, but also for the world of readers lost with it. The book offers its readers endless unspoken references to once-famous works of Yiddish literature, like I. L. Peretz’s “At Night in the Old Marketplace,” a surrealist play set among the living dead (at one point the novel is subsumed by a surrealist play), as well as brilliant portraits of real figures who once illuminated the Jewish world: the Hebrew poet Hayyim Nahman Bialik, the German historian Heinrich Graetz, the Yiddish playwright Jacob Gordin, and even a sanatorium resident modeled on Peretz himself. One misses, painfully, the world that once existed where every reader of this novel would have known these references as household names.

Unfortunately, The Glatstein Chronicles is unlikely to find a wide audience among American readers, even American Jewish ones. Americans are taught to seek in literature the satisfaction of our own hunger for action and unambiguous resolutions--neither of which are on offer here. In a contemporary review of Glatstein’s book, Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose popularity came largely from fulfilling American literary expectations, complained that “Jules Verne would not have wasted ten lines on a journey so bereft of adventure or romance.” He was certainly right, but the observation does more harm to the critic than to the author. For the patient reader open to other possibilities, The Glatstein Chronicles does progress--in a symphonic rather than a linear fashion--toward important revelations. And time has only added new layers of power to its prose.

Now that the prophesied destruction has come to pass, the few moments where Glatstein’s prophecies fail him have an even more terrible poignancy. “It occurred to me,” Glatstein’s narrator muses as he arrives in Europe, “that in twenty-five years such travelers returning to pay respects to the graves of forefathers will have disappeared. . . . Should their children ever think of visiting Soviet Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Romania, they would go as one might visit Paris, Switzerland, or Italy. . . . There will be tourists, but no one going home to see a dying mother or father, or to mourn dead parents.”

In 1934, even the prophet Glatstein could not imagine that American Jews would someday go as tourists to Poland exclusively to mourn.

But Glatstein’s Poland is not only a place of mourning. It also has an eerie consoling power. In the sanatorium, where “you never know whether you’re talking to a mental case,” the narrator’s prescience is amplified by the haunting symbolism of the hotel guests. In one scene, the narrator comes across the hotel’s proprietor standing watch in the hallway at the witching hour:

“You aren’t asleep yet?” I stammered, vaguely frightened.
“I can’t sleep until my last guest has turned in,” he said. “I’m responsible for the lot of you, you know. That’s the kind of job it is.”

Reading these lines, one thinks of the translators of Yiddish in the 21st century--and of the editor Ruth R. Wisse, who has brought this and many other Yiddish masterpieces to new generations of readers and students. The second novella’s opening line, spoken by one of the central figures at the hotel, is “Even from the gutter will I sing praises to Thee, O Lord, even from the gutter.” Seventy years after Glatstein’s devastating prophecy came true, the consoling miracle is that these volumes still sing.

(Dara Horn is the award-winning author of three novels,
the most recent of which is All Other Nights [Norton].)

Tourist Season at Auschwitz by Mark Lewandowski

2011-10-24T14:12:00.004-04:00

Polish-American novelist Leslie Pietrzyk has recently started a website called Redux to showcase classic pieces of creative writing that have so far not been published online.

The fifth installment features Mark Lewandowski's essay "Tourist Season at Auschwitz," originally published in The Gettysburg Review (1999).

I first read this essay about 3 years ago, and I thought then that I had never read anything better about what it feels like to visit Auschwitz. I had visited there in 1990 and written about the visit a number of times, about what it was like being a tourist there, but nothing I've written and nothing I've read by other writers compares to what Mark Lewandowski offers in this superb essay. Here is an excerpt. The entire essay along with a brief piece by Mark about how he came to write the essay is available at the website.

"Tourist Season at Auschwitz"

On the morning of the October day that England qualified for Italia ’90 (the World Cup soccer tournament), a small group of Englishmen were seen by some of the sports press at Auschwitz, laughing and posing as they took pictures of each other—doing the Nazi salute. Pete Davies, “All Played Out”

At Birkenau stands a mound unlike those dotting the countryside that Poles have built in remembrance of past generals and statesmen. You will not see picknickers lay out blankets on it or watch their children roll down the slopes. The Birkenau mound is a mass grave for Soviet soldiers killed by the Nazis. The bodies were packed so tightly together that they are still decomposing, and when it rains now, almost fifty years later, human grease rises to the surface and fans out through the grass in a brilliant rainbow of color.

Not far from the mound lies what looks like an ordinary pond. Bend over and peer into its depths and you might be surprised not to see a minnow or two, at least, in the water. Take a stick. Dip it into the water and movie it in circles. Soon, a whirlpool of gray ash will funnel to the surface. This pond is only one repository for the remains of the Jews.

A Polish actor told me that these were just a couple of the sights in the Auschwitz complex most tourists miss. I was with two American women I had met in a youth hostel in Kraków. This was the summer of 1990. The Berlin Wall had been down for only seven months. American tourists were still a novelty to most Poles. The actor, who spoke English fluently, spied us three on the rickety commuter train from Kraców to Oświęcim, site of Auschwitz and Birkenau. He was going to visit his mother, who was a librarian at the Auschwitz museum.

“By all means,” the actor said, “do not spend the entire afternoon in Auschwitz. After you have watched the movie and seen the major displays, go to Birkenau. The barracks still stand unmolested by museum directors. Wander the buildings and you will read messages written in coal by the inmates. You will find fragments of clothing, steel cans, rotted straw, heating stoves. Leave the barracks and follow the tracks to the gas chambers. They have not been reconstructed. They have been left the way they were found, a much more profound statement to the horrors of the Holocaust than the glitz you will find in Auschwitz. Why would the retreating soldiers bother to destroy the evidence if they were not aware of the incredible crimes they had committed against humanity? Do not believe that they felt justified or that Hitler brainwashed them. They knew their sin. You will not experience their guilt among the glassed-in cases of human hair and suitcases at Auschwitz. Only in Birkenau, the much larger of the camps, will you find what you are seeking.”

And what were we seeking? What do the hundreds of thousands who visist concentration camps every year hope to find amongst the barbed wire, the staggering statistics pasted to barracks walls, the bricks riddled with bullet holes and once saturated with blood?

________________________________

To read the entire essay, click here: Redux.

Rosenbaum on Rosenfeld: A Strong Review of an Important New Book

2011-10-14T20:19:00.002-04:00

Faustian Bargain
The singular horror of the Holocaust is being lost in exchange for enshrining rare moments of inspiration and universal narratives of suffering

By Ron Rosenbaum |October 10, 2011 7:00 AM

Alvin Rosenfeld is a brave man, and his new work is courageous. The book [1] is called The End of the Holocaust, and it is not reluctant to take on the unexamined pieties that have grown up around the slaughter, and the sentimentalization that threatens to smother it in meretricious uplift.

The real “end of the Holocaust,” he argues, is the transformation of it into a lesson about the “triumph of the human spirit” or some such affirmation. Rosenfeld, the founder and former director of the Jewish studies program at Indiana University, which has made itself a major center of Jewish publishing and learning, is a mainstream scholar who has seen the flaw in mainstream Holocaust discourse. He has made it his mission to rescue the Holocaust from the Faustian bargain Jews have made with history and memory, the Faustian bargain that results when we trade the specifics of memory, the Jewishness of the Holocaust, and the Jew-hatred that gave it its rationale and identity, for the weepy universalism of such phrases as “the long record of man’s inhumanity to man.”

The impulse to find the silver lining is relentless, though. Suffering and grief must be transformed into affirmation, and the bleak irrecoverable fate of the victims must be given a redemptive aspect for those of us alive. In fact it’s an insult to the dead to rob their graves to make ourselves feel better. One recent manifestation Rosenfeld has shrewdly noticed is the way there has been a subtle shift in the popular representation of the Holocaust—a shift in the attention once given to the murdered victims to comparatively uplifting stories of survivors, of the “righteous gentiles,” of the scarce “rescuers,” and the even scarcer “avengers,” e.g., Quentin Tarantino’s fake-glorious fictional crew.

Rosenfeld is not afraid to contend with the fact that, as he writes, “with new atrocities filling the news each day and only so much sympathy to go around, there are people who simply do not want to hear any more about the Jews and their sorrows. There are other dead to be buried, they say.” The sad, deplorable, but, he says, “unavoidable” consequence of what may be the necessary limits of human sympathy is that “the more successfully [the Holocaust] enters the cultural mainstream, the more commonplace it becomes. A less taxing version of a tragic history begins to emerge, still full of suffering, to be sure, but a suffering relieved of many of its weightiest moral and intellectual demands and, consequently easier to be … normalized.”

Normalized? The Holocaust as one more instance in the long chronicle of “man’s inhumanity to man”? Rosenfeld’s book offers a welcome contrarian take on the trend. Yes, we’ve had enough, as Rosenfeld points out, of museums that cumulatively obscure memory in a fog of well-meaning but misleading inspirational brotherhood-of-man rhetoric. We’ve had enough of films like the execrable Oscar-winning Life Is Beautiful and the well-intentioned but misguided Schindler’s List, with its sad lack of self-awareness that a happy ending, celebrating a Christian rescuer and some lucky Jewish survivors, is woefully off base. We’ve had enough of phony-memoir love stories, and we’ve had enough of the way a genuine tragic heroine and victim of Nazi death camps like Anne Frank is mendaciously turned into a spokeswoman for the “goodnesss of man.”

What we haven’t had enough of is a careful consideration of the implications of the Holocaust for the nature of human nature. As George Steiner told me (for my book, Explaining Hitler [2]), “the Holocaust removed the re-insurance from human hope”—the psychic safety net we imagine marked the absolute depth of human nature. The Holocaust tore through that net heading for hell. Human nature could be—at the promptings of a charismatic and evil demagogue, religious hate, and so-called “scientific racism”—even worse than we imagined. No one wants to hear that. We want to hear uplifting stories about that nice Mr. Schindler. We want affirmations!

And the fact that it was not just one man but an entire continent that enthusiastically pitched in or stood by while 6 million were murdered: Doesn’t that call for us to spend a little time re-thinking what we still reverently speak of as “European civilization”? Or to investigate the roots of that European hatred? How much weight do the Holocaust museums give to the two millennia of Christian Jew-hatred, murderous pogroms, blood libels, and other degradations? Or do they prefer to focus on “righteous gentiles” in order to avoid offending their gentile hosts?

And for all their “reaching out” and “teachable moments,” how much do the Holocaust museums and Holocaust curricula connect the hatred of the recent past with contemporary exterminationist Jew-hatred, the vast numbers of people who deny the first, but hunger for a second, Holocaust? It’s a threat some fear even to contemplate—the potential destruction of the 5 million Jews of Israel with a single well-placed nuclear blast—a nightmarish but not unforseeable possibility to which Rosenfeld is unafraid to devote the final section of his book.

It’s something I speculated about in the Tablet Magazine excerpt [3] from my book [4] How the End Begins. It’s something spoken of eloquently by Imre Kertész, one of the writers Rosenfeld wishes to rescue from the “end of the Holocaust.” (Only two novels by this Hungarian survivor of Nazism and Stalinist oppression, a 2002 Nobel Prize winner, have been translated, a situation I would like to formally petition some serious-minded publisher to remedy forthwith.)

“Before Auschwitz,” Kertesz writes, “Auschwitz was unimaginable. That is no longer so today. Because Auschwitz in fact occurred, it has now been established in our imaginations as a firm possibility. What we are able to imagine, especially because it once was, can be again.” I wonder what our dedicated affirmationists who once disdainfully mocked concerns about a second Holocaust would say to Kertesz.

But no one wants to hear about such grim implications anymore. In a way, who can blame them? Why let the dead have so much power over us? How do we decide how much mental space the Holocaust should occupy? What do we owe the dead? Rosenfeld is on a lonely mission to prevent their disappearance into the maw of generalized human tragedy.

It’s been said before and it’s probably far too late to make a difference, but to me the process began—the process of the de-natured representation of the murder of 6 million—with the near universal acceptance of the word “Holocaust” for Hitler’s exterminationist crime. I’m speaking for myself here, not Rosenfeld, though inspired to express my anger by his eloquent despair. But it cannot be denied that the use of the word “Holocaust”—a Greek-derived word for a religious ritual, a sacrificial offering to the gods that is wholly burnt to ashes—is a lamentable formulation that is an attempt to vaguely sacralize and rationalize mass murder. It gives to the frenzied bloodthirsty slaughter an aura of dignity, religiosity—bestowed not on the victims but to the slaughterers. It’s problematic not because of its pretentiously classical Greek derivation, but because it seeks to give a monstrous crime a transcendent meaning with a vaguely salvific, even redemptive tone.

A burnt offering! Remind me who “offered”? I think it’s unfortunate, but it’s too late now—though I wince every time I feel compelled to use the term, a choice that goes to the deepest ramifications of Rosenfeld’s thinking: It is unbearable to live with the naked, uninsulated, unpunished horror of it all without some phony affirmation. So we clothe it in the fake gravitas of Greek and the fake piety of ritual. Whatever you choose, do not gaze upon the horror without some semantic scrim to veil its monstrousness. Worse is the impulse to somehow make what happened consonant with a religious worldview when in fact, to my mind (and here, again, I’m not speaking for Rosenfeld), the Shoah calls into question the religious interpretation of history. The image of the all-powerful, loving, protective—and interventionist—God that Jews pray to. The one we’re so special to.

Of course to some Jews there are no questions, no problems. You are aware I’m sure of the pronouncement of a former chief rabbi of the Sephardic Shas movement in Israel, who called the murder of 6 million Jews God’s righteous punishment of secularized European Jews for straying from Orthodoxy into modernism. That Hitler was not evil but rather “the rod of God’s anger.” But even for those believers who don’t stoop to such obscenity there seems a necessity to absolve God of Hitler. To those who still pray and praise Him as the living protector of His beloved Jewish people: Was He just a little busy during those six years from 1939 to 1945? Other things on His plate? Or it was “part of God’s plan” to—what plan was that exactly? To establish the State of Israel? What an ingenious plan! Didn’t He have any others on hand?

The question remains for believers who still offer up those prayers to the God who is their shepherd: Where was God during those years? And please don’t tell me—in the latest “sophisticated” rationalization theodicy, the one you hear from very modern rabbis—that “God was in the camps,” in every act of goodness and self-sacrifice by the inmates there. It’s a formulation that takes from the brave desperate inmates the credit they deserve for their acts and gives it to Someone who was not there. Wouldn’t it have been better if God had been in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, slitting the throats of Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich? What an inglorious bastard He would have been.

Sometimes I think the Jewish people who still pray to this God, praising Him for all He’s done for us, have acceded to a kind of Stockholm syndrome in which they will find any excuse for their heavenly captor’s acts or lack thereof.

Again, I’m sure Rosenfeld would disavow any such sentiments provoked by his book in malcontents like me. But it is one of the virtues of his book, his discussion of how the Holocaust has been sentimentalized to death, that it can fire you with fresh anger at an act that repeated exposure to diminished versions of can dull. I’d guess most people are weary of the subject and would rather not think about it. That’s the true “end of the Holocaust” and Rosenfeld is determined not to let us off the hook.

Consider the Faustian bargain that Holocaust museums in America have so often made with the non-Jewish majority: The survivors and eyewitnesses of the Holocaust are dying, and the only way to get Americans to care about the destruction of the Jews, the only way we will get a (nearly) front row seat on the National Mall in Washington for our Holocaust museum, is by convincing Americans that the Holocaust can be a “teachable moment” in America’s uplifting struggle against intolerance. Rosenfeld calls this bargain “the Americanization of the Holocaust,” and even though he’s on the executive committee of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum he’s not happy about the tendency.

In discussing, for instance, the Los Angeles-based Museum of Tolerance (the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Holocaust museum), he says that “by situating the Holocaust within a historical framework that includes such quintessentially American experiences as the Los Angeles riots and the struggle for black civil rights, both of which are prominently illustrated, the Museum of Tolerance relativizes the catastrophe brought on by Naziism in a radical way. America’s social problems, for all their gravity, are not genocidal in character and simply do not resemble the persecution and systematic slaughter of European Jews during World War II.” It’s a critique I first saw articulated by Jonathan Rosen in a 1993 New York Times op-ed called “The Misguided Holocaust Museum” back when the museum on the Mall was first opening. At first I was surprised, but then I was persuaded, at least to a certain extent, by Rosen’s impassioned dissent from the conventional wisdom.

And of course there is the difficult question of how one compares such tragedies. Why not a Cambodian genocide museum? In what ways are the Cambodian, the Armenian, and the Rwandan genocides similar and different from the Nazi genocide? If the Rodney King riots do not deserve being placed on the same plane shouldn’t the casualties of slavery in America, an institution that killed the bodies and murdered the souls of those who survived, count just as much?

There’s an argument that it’s a politically savvy heuristic strategy to unite with other sufferers against the murderous haters rather than set our suffering apart. And Jews have a strong record of concern for the sufferings of others. Solidarity! But Rosenfeld is on a mission not to allow the differences of the identity of the Jewish victims to disappear, and he is both a moral thinker and an astute cultural critic.

I first came across his work when I was writing Explaining Hitler, preparing to interview one of the most brilliant historians of our age, H.R. Trevor-Roper, whose biography of Hiter (Hitler: The Last Days) set the tone for envisioning the Fuhrer for decades after the war. Trevor-Roper was feared for his venomous, devastating attacks on fellow historians, but Rosenfeld found the flaw in Trevor-Roper’s analysis of Hitler. In his book Imagining Hitler, which was a study of mainly fictional and film visions of Hitler, Rosenfeld picked up on the language Trevor-Roper used to describe Hitler, as a mystical, numinous, spell-binding, virtually occult figure. Rosenfeld essentially blamed Trevor-Roper for falling under Hitler’s spell himself in his prose and thereby planting in the collective imagination of his millions of readers a superhuman vision of Hitler that precluded rational analysis of why he succeeded—and failed.

I’ll never forget the moment I gingerly brought up Rosenfed’s critique to Trevor-Roper face-to-face at a parlor in London’s Oxford and Cambridge Club. It was an awkward moment. I think he realized there was some truth to it, and it had gotten under his skin.

And Rosenfeld reminds us that even stories of survivors are not necessarily triumphs over evil. His chapters on Jean Améry, Primo Levi, Imre Kertész, and Elie Wiesel include accounts of suicide and anguish despite survival. Rosenfeld deserves honor for having preserved their truths in all their brutal honesty.

My own feeling is that the end of the Holocaust will not come from Holocaust denial, or Holocaust affirmation kitsch, or even dissolution in universalism. It will come in what I’ve called “Holocaust inconsequentialism”—the sequestering of the Holocaust from history. One saw it not long ago in an article by a prominent British intellectual who claimed Menachem Begin should have been “ashamed” to invoke the Holocaust when he announced the 1981 Israeli raid on Saddam’s nuclear reactor at Osirak. Begin said he did it because he was thinking of the million infants killed in Hitler’s Holocaust and the responsibility he felt never to allow it to happen again. Our British intellectual harrumphed and said Begin shouldn’t have made such an inflammatory connection. But in fact such connections are what historical consciousness is about.

There are only two points in this valuable book I found myself questioning. First is Rosenfeld’s citation of a typically portentous pronouncement from Claude Lanzmann, director of Shoah:

“ ‘To portray the Holocaust,’ Claude Lanzmann once said to me,” Rosenfeld writes, “ ‘one has to create a work of art.’ ” This is one of those profound-sounding decrees Lanzmann is given to. Only artistes like Lanzmann are qualified, not the humble survivors themselves, for instance. One could argue exactly the opposite of Lanzmann, in fact—and it seems to me the thrust of Rosenfeld’s book is that unmediated testimony is a higher form of Holocaust discourse. Artistic license can lead to corruption of the truth. To Life Is Beautiful.

One cannot deny the importance of Shoah, nor can one deny the self-importance of Lanzmann, who, as I point out in Explaining Hitler, misunderstands and distorts one of the key statements of Primo Levi about Auschwitz—the one in which Levi quotes an SS man declaring to him: “Here,” in the camps, “there is no why.” Lanzmann turns this brutal Nazi reproof into an esthetic commandment for Jews, against investigation or interpretation. Against asking why. Lanzmann tells post-Holocaust Jews we must follow the orders of an SS man. It is an inconsequentialist attempt to cut the Holocaust off from human inquiry.

This is “mystification of the Holocaust,” as the influential Israeli scholar Yehuda Bauer calls it, that is of a piece with treacly affirmationism.

The other point I don’t disagree with so much as think it’s been made too often. It has to do with Rosenfeld’s critique of the misuse of Anne Frank’s legacy. Yes, it’s true she’s become an instance of the Faustian bargain: the need to give non-Jews a way of relating to the Holocaust that doesn’t make them feel too bad about human nature. Hence the focus on a single sentence in her diary: “In spite of everything, I believe that people are good at heart.”

Yes, it’s true, as Rosenfeld puts it, that this sentence, written before her capture, may well not be the way the real Anne Frank felt once her family had been betrayed and she had been taken by the Nazis. As Rosenfeld puts it, “surrounded by the dead and dying of Auschwitz and later herself a victim of the deprivations and diseases of Bergen-Belsen [where she died, probably of typhus] it is doubtful that such a passage from the diary represented anything close to what Anne Frank must have felt at the end.”

I would agree with Rosenfeld that the case of Anne Frank has been a particularly striking instance of affirmationism occluding the ugly truth with fraudulent uplift. And yet I feel this wasn’t her fault, she shouldn’t be written out of the story because people take away the wrong lesson from it. The number of recent attacks on the misuse of that one “goodness at heart” line have begun to seem like an attack on her. Let poor Anne alone already. Is it such a crime that a child in Japan or South Africa comes to awareness of the Holocaust through Anne Frank? Better they be ignorant? That’s the choice the Faustian bargain forces us to make.

Don’t blame Anne for the Faustian bargain. Do read Rosenfeld to understand and struggle with it.

Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust

2011-08-25T11:34:00.007-04:00

Over the years, I've read a number of anthologies of poetry on the Holocaust. Among them are Beyond Lament: Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust, The Last Lullaby: Poetry from the Holocaust, Holocaust Poetry, and Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust.

Each has its own special focus. One concentrates on poets alive during the Holocaust; another gathers together poems from around the world; and a third looks at poems written by Holocaust survivors and victims. All of these works, of course, are valuable, but I find myself most often returning to one anthology of Holocaust poetry, the one edited by Charles Adès Fishman, my co-editor here at Writing the Holocaust. The range of poets represented is truly extensive, and whenever I find myself wanting to see what a poet has written about the Holocaust, Fishman's Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust is the book I turn to first.

It contains the work of over 200 poets, some old, some new, some well known and others not so well known, but the breadth and depth of writing here is remarkable. Also valuable are the personal remarks made by many of the poets regarding what moved them to write poetry in response to the Holocaust.

Take a look.

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An extensive review of this book by Michael R. Burch appears at Hypertexts.

Hope by Barry Koplen

2011-08-23T10:10:00.004-04:00

Occasionally, we run across a piece of writing about the Holocaust that we want to share with people. "Hope" is one of those pieces. It was written by Barry Koplen, a poet and blogger. He writes often about chance meetings he's had with people as he travels or works in his clothing store in Danville, Virginia. This essay is about one of those encounters.

HOPE

Assertively, the butcher with a patch over his right eye responded to a comment I had made to my daughter about the sign that advertised kosher salami made from turkey.

"H'it comes from Israel," he announced with a stoic's pride. His 'it' sounded a little like 'hit', his vestigial ch suggesting an accent from the Mideast. "You want a taste?"

"Yes, please," I said, cheerfully, to the man who resembled Moishe Dayan. Moments later, on a piece of wax paper, he slid two thin slices toward me. "That's too much," I said, tearing off a small section of one slice.

"How you gonna know what it tastes like?" Impatient with me, he seemed to be telling me that I knew nothing about some of the world's finest salami. What I did know was that I can't tolerate ordinary beef salami because it's too garlicky.

This was different, milder. "I'll take a quarter pound," I said with a smile.

Moments later, he nodded as he handed me the wrapped packet. I didn't tell my daughter what I thought I had seen in the man's eye, a suppressed pain that she probably hadn't noticed. She was too excited; we had just toured Towson University, and she loved the school. It seemed she had decided to do her graduate work there in Jewish studies.

"Look at this!" I exclaimed seconds later when I spotted delicacies I had often known as a child. We marveled at a row of five varieties of fresh knishes, then turned from the meat counter to examine ten different kinds of kugel. "Even in Israel, I didn't see a store like this," the 7Mile Market, a kosher supermarket on the outskirts of Baltimore.

On inviting shelves, we saw breads and pastries, including boxes of what appeared to be the kosher version of Little Debbie Cakes by Entenmann's in New York. "I like to give these as gifts," my daughter said, as she examined the different flavors.

Leaving her there, I returned to the meats, and, since I was the only customer approaching that counter, was spotted by the butcher I had spoken to earlier. "Yes?' he asked, his expressive voice a match for his sullen demeanor.

"Are you from Israel?" I felt sure I had I identified his accent.

"Tel Aviv."

"I went there a few years ago," I told him, "to meet the man who wrote Light One Candle. He is a Holocaust survivor, Solly Ganor."

"I know the book," he said, eying me with more interest.

"Solly came from Lithuania. I met him when I went to Israel for his annual Holocaust survivors' reunion at Ramat Gan. Have you been there?"

His left eye widened as he beckoned to me. "My mother and her sister were in the Holocaust. They survived..." He paused.

"Then you've been to the reunions?"

"Yes, but before you were there. My mother died two years ago."

I could hear my daughter calling for me. But there was so much more I wanted to hear, stories I wanted him to share, reminiscences I would have listened to for hours and hours. Perhaps I would have had a chance to tell him about a woman I had met, an American who's Dad had fought in World War II. He'd been in Germany, had seen a concentration camp liberated, had taken pictures of the prisoners. A month ago, her Dad died. While sorting through his memorabilia, she found an album of those pictures, actually two.

His collection was one she had never seen. Nor had she seen the other one she found, a scrapbook with German inscriptions; its images of a Nazi soldier, standing tall amidst downtrodden Jews. Her father had probably pilfered it, she told me, a trophy from the war.

She was concerned about giving it back to the soldier's family. I wasn't at all sure that anyone would want to claim those confirming images. Many Germans I had known didn't want to think their relatives had anything to do with Nazi atrocities.

The butcher was speaking to me as my mind wandered to thoughts about that woman and her compelling albums. "Do you want to know how they escaped?" His focus riveted mine.

I didn't breathe, barely shook my head as if to acknowledge and, at the same time, ward off the horrible details I knew I was about to hear.

"In the lines, when the ones to the right went to the gas chambers, Eichmann told her and her sister to go to the left. Then he took them out of the line to be his secretaries."

"Adolph Eichmann?" I wanted to ask. But I didn't have to.

"Eichmann," he said, as if that fact still seemed irreconcilable.

I held his eye as if he had just shared a story that was still too difficult for him to bear alone. "Will you come back again?" he asked, as he reached out to shake my hand.

"Yes!" I wanted to exclaim, "to see my daughter and you. And to hear more about your remarkable family." But I didn't say a word. I had to process what he'd told me, had to consider the profound bit of history he had shared.
So I said very quietly. "Yes, I will see you when I return again."

He smiled at me, a smile so knowing it filled me with wonder. "Shalom," he said, with a caring glance.

"Shalom," I responded, as one who had been humbled by a story that seemed a most uncommon blessing.

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To read more of Barry Koplen's writing, stop by his blog, Poetscry.

The photo above shows Barry at the recent wedding of his daughter Chana Batya Anderson.

Elegy For the Shtetlen

2011-08-09T13:10:00.015-04:00

Writing the Holocaust has primarily focused on scholarly work on the literature of the Holocaust, but occasionally we find a creative work that we like to share with others.

"Elegy for the Shtetlen" is such a poem. It is a lament for the predominantly Jewish small towns of Poland that were lost because of the Holocaust. Originally written in Polish (Elegia miasteczek żydowskich) by Antoni Slonimski (1895 – 1976), the translation here is by Scottish writer Jennifer Robertson and her husband Stuart.

Elegy For the Shtetlen

No more, no more shtetlen in Poland,
whether in Hrubieszów, Karczew, Brody or Falenica
ou’d be hard put to find lit candles in their windows,
or catch the strains of song in wooden synagogues.

The last vestiges of Jewish life have gone;
blood covered over with sand, all traces swept away,
walls whitened with fresh coats of lime
as if some plague has passed, or a feast is welcomed in.

Here the moon shines solitary, alien, chill, and pale.
Out of town, on the highway, where night is ablaze,
my Jewish kinsfolk, makars a, will not find
Chagall’s two golden moons.

Those moons illumine another planet now.
They fled, frightened by the sombre silence.
The shtetlen are no more where the cobbler was a poet,
the watchmaker a philosopher, barber a troubadour.

The shtetlen are no more where Bible chants
swirled on the wind with Polish song and Slav lament,
where Jewish grandfathers, secluded in shady cherry orchards,
mourned the holy walls of Jerusalem.

Those shtetlen are no more, vanished with a shadow,
and this shadow will intrude between our words
until the advent of brotherhood, unity renewed:
two nations nourished by centuries of suffering.

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We were curious about the words "makars a" in the third line in the third stanza, and Ms. Robertson said, "The line you are asking about is my rendering of krewni moi zydowscy, poetyczni chłopscy, which literally means my Jewish relatives, poetic lads (or boys). My husband Stuart suggested putting the slightly pawkish humour of the phrase into the Scots makars a - makar is the Scots for poet (maker) and a, all is sometimes written with an apostrophe, a', though purists of the Scots tongue prefer to omit these apostrophes as they suggest something is missing ie the English form and thus dilutes the Scots!"

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Ms. Robertson is the author of a number of works on the Holocaust, including a collection of poems about the Warsaw Ghetto entitled Ghetto (Lion Publishing, 1989)and Don’t go to Uncle’s Wedding: Voices from the Warsaw Ghetto (Azure /SPCK).

She feels that it's important to continue to write about the Holocaust despite the pressure sometimes not to.

You can read more about her writing at her website.

Anne Frank's Birthday, June 12

2011-06-11T09:53:00.004-04:00

Anne Frank's birthday is June 12. She would have been 82 years old if the Nazis had not killed her.

I first read her diary for a class in high school. I don't remember which class or which teacher or how old I was or what I was obsessing about, but I remember her book, the silence I felt as I read it, and I remember how slowly I read it because I didn't want the book and her life to end.

There weren't a lot of books about the Holocaust available to me back then in the early 60s. This book was the first, and it taught me something profound about that experience. The suffering and death of even a single person can touch and change a person.

Here's a link to one of the best website's about her: the Anne Frank page at the US Holocaust Memorial.

The site includes interviews with those who knew Anne Frank, information about her diary, weblinks, and the shared thoughts of many people who have read Anne's diary and been touched by her and her story.

You might also want to take a look at a youtube done by the poet Lois P. Jones. It collects a series of photos of Anne and her family. Click here.

Feel free also to leave a note here about Anne Frank.

Free Access to the National Holocaust Archive

2011-05-02T13:37:00.005-04:00

During the month of May, free access to the National Archive of Holocaust Materials is available through the cooperation of footnote.com and the US Holocaust Memorial. The site contains stories from the Holocaust, information about the various camps, and records from the National Archive.

Click here to go to the site.

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The picture above was taken by Margaret Bourke-White of the prisoners at Buchenwald where my father was. More of her photos are available at this online cite.

Auschwitz Revises Its Exhibition to Meet New Mission of Education - NYTimes.com

2011-02-20T18:05:00.003-05:00

An interesting article from the New York Times focusing on the changing nature of the exhibits at Auschwitz. Especially interesting are some of the final remarks of Marek Zajac, a 31-year-old Polish magazine editor who serves as secretary for The International Auschwitz Council.

To read the article click on the following:

Auschwitz Revises Its Exhibition to Meet New Mission of Education - NYTimes.com

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The illustration above is by Voytek Luka and is taken from my book Third Winter of War.

Shattering Shame and Silence

2011-01-26T21:50:00.004-05:00

Written by Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel, the following article originally appeared in the Jerusalem Post:

As the United Nations observes Holocaust Remembrance Day today, we should be mindful to include the history of sexual violence against Jewish women during that genocide. Especially because this year’s theme is “Women and the Holocaust: Courage and Compassion,” it is appropriate to call attention to that neglected aspect of Holocaust history.

Jewish women were among those subjected to sexual abuse during the Holocaust and World War II. However, this issue has always been hidden in plain view. Eyewitness accounts can be found in the archives of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, Germany. This type of brutality is included in some memoirs and reports, as well as in documentary films and literature.

In addition, more than 1,000 testimonies housed in the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education mention rape and “coerced sexual activities” by Nazis and their collaborators, as well as by other Jews, non-Jews and liberators. These assaults took place in ghettos, in hiding and in concentration camps. Nevertheless, the subject has been swept under the rug, ignored or denied for more than 65 years.

DURING THE Nuremberg and lesser-known Nazi war criminal trials, rape was not among the charges as a crime against humanity or a component of genocide. Rape was not defined as such under international law until 1998, by a decision of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, established by the UN. Based on this definition, verdicts have been passed against the perpetrators – Bosnian Serbs accused of systematic sexual violence against Muslim women during the Bosnian war, and Jean-Paul Akayesu, mayor of the Taba township, in connection with the mass raping of Tutsi women by Hutu men in Rwanda.

Rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo is the subject of Lynn Nottage’s powerful off- Broadway play Ruined, which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2009. Nottage poignantly exposes the horrors of the Congolese war and the bravery of the women subjected to its brutality. “Ruined” is a euphemism for raped, with mutilation of genitalia, as well as psychological ruin and rejection by society. In Congo, as in Rwanda, women were raped and then excluded from their own communities – considered defiled because they had been raped.

When it comes to sexual violence, there are similarities and differences between what happened to women during the Holocaust and in later genocides. The similarities stem from the fact that violence against women has been universal and timeless, especially when accompanied by genocide. Rape involves subjugation and humiliation of a vulnerable victim. In all cases, women were doubly defiled – as females, and as members of a perceived lower class of human beings. For example, the Hutu called their Tutsi neighbors “cockroaches,” just as the Nazis called their Jewish compatriots “untermenschen” (subhumans) and “vermin.”

Unlike later genocides that encouraged sexual violence against the perceived enemy, the Nazis had a race defilement law that prohibited sexual relations between Germans and Jews. But this law did not necessarily protect Jewish women, just as anti-rape laws today do not prevent rape. Sexual abuse of Jewish women may not have been part of German genocidal policy, but rape by Nazis nevertheless occurred, and was an intrinsic part of Jewish women’s experiences during the Holocaust. Subsequent murder of the victim was the most expedient way to deny that the act had taken place.

The UN, born out of the ashes of the Holocaust and World War II, is striving to combat the atrocities that women are suffering during current genocidal situations, and to prevent recurrences. We commend it for choosing the topic of “Women and the Holocaust: Courage and Compassion” as the theme for this year’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, and hope that the issue of sexual violence will be given proper attention.

The writers are coeditors of Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust (Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England, 2010). www.rememberwomen.org

Response to Dr. Goska's Review of Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust

2011-01-07T09:37:00.005-05:00

The following is a response by Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel, the co-editors of Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust, to Dr. Goska's review:

As co-editors of the anthology Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust, we appreciate Dr. Danuska Goska's taking the time to read and comment. We are somewhat surprised, however, that she would expect a book with this title to deal with subjects of broader interest, such as the Polish victims of the Nazi regime. In case readers of the book or the review have any doubts, the book is part of the Hadassah-Brandeis Series on Jewish Women, and it is about Jewish women.

As Dr. Goska writes in her review, "sexual violence against non-Jewish women is mentioned, but not focused on, and non-Jewish survivors' voices are not heard." She is correct, because the book is a scholarly interdisciplinary study about Jewish women. While we sympathize with all suffering, especially that of all women who were subjected to sexual abuse during the Holocaust and World War II, our specific academic research has the purpose of shedding light on only this one aspect of sexual violence. Other volumes need to be written focusing on such issues as the travails of Polish and other women during that period. However, that is not what our groundbreaking book is about.

While accusing the book of leaving out non-Jewish women, the reviewer contradicts herself by complaining that one of the authors provided an account about non-Jewish Yugoslav women. The review even criticized the book for leaving out the starvation of Jewish men, again, not the volume's subject. Furthermore, writing about the book's foreword by the series editor, the reviewer inappropriately turned "the history of men and women" into "men v. women."

When the reviewer declares that "there is no attempt to systematize knowledge about sexual violence against Jewish women," and asks "how many victims were there," clearly she does not understand that this is unfeasible. The Nazis did not keep records of such violence and often their victims were murdered. Scholars are therefore left mostly with survivor and bystander accounts. In this context, it is generally accepted (and even utilized by the reviewer) that memoirs and literature and their analysis are a legitimate part of academic discourse. This book examines the issue of sexual violence against Jewish women from various academic perspectives. Even so, many questions are unanswered and will never be answered.

Leaving aside various other inconsistencies in the review, accusing the book of claiming that "Polish Catholics, not German Nazis, are the perpetrators" of the Holocaust could be considered libelous. The book makes no such claim. The chapter authors address sexual violence against Jewish women by Nazis, by their collaborators, by liberators, and even by Jewish men. It is questionable why the reviewer is so indignant about parts of the book that deal with violence by Poles, but neglects to mention an entire chapter about atrocities in Ukraine. The review serves an agenda that could be described as "ideologically-tinged scholarship," which the reviewer instead attributes to the editors of the book.

Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust, with chapters by a distinguished interdisciplinary and international group of scholars, was vetted by stringent peer review before being accepted by the prestigious University Press of New England/Brandeis University Press for publication. It has been recognized as "significantly expand[ing] scholarship about the Holocaust's extremity" and "deserv[ing] great credit" by leading Holocaust scholars.

It seems oddly unbalanced that any reviewer would have such a strong negative opinion about an entire book with chapters written by eighteen authors. We believe otherwise, and hope to have clarified for the benefit of the reader the main issues raised by the reviewer. We suggest that interested individuals read Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust and make their own judgments.

Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel, Co-editors

Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust

www.rememberwomen.org

Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During the Holocaust: A Review

2011-01-03T13:56:00.014-05:00

The following review was written for Writing the Holocaust by Dr. Danusha Goska:

When I was a kid, my mother took me to her natal village in Slovakia. It was like standing under an avalanche of relatives: poor Catholics, rich Communists, city mice, country cousins, hugs, kisses, slivovice. I was taken aside and given a speech before we met one aunt. During WWII, advancing Red Army soldiers gang-raped her when she was a little girl, I was told, and she had taken it badly. She had never had the normal romantic life of a young woman. When she was close to spinsterhood, an exceptional man – a dissident – married her. He understood that she could never give him children. Around her, I was to be particularly restrained in my behavior. "She had taken it badly": this locution suggested to me that others of my loved ones had been raped, as well. This Slovak woman was different not because she was violated by invaders, but because she had taken it badly.

During that 1974 visit, we were surrounded by street banners announcing Soviet domination. We were in Czechoslovakia six years after Soviet tanks crushed 1968's "Prague Spring." Graffiti from '68 was visible on buildings. The Russians left the graffiti up, my mother said, to emphasize to the Slovaks their complete impotence in the face of Soviet power. My aunt's husband, the dissident, lived the life of a non-person – no work, few friends, no freedom of movement. We ran into Russian soldiers everywhere. I made faces at them. My mother chided me. "It's not their fault. They're just kids."

My aunt, when I met her, surprised. She had the modestly pretty mien of a 1950s TV sitcom mom, and she was deeply gracious. All my loved ones had spent their lives wrestling with crushing forces. This aunt stood out. She radiated: "I know I am broken and vulnerable, and I build what strength I have on awareness of that."

I am not special because I have an aunt who was sexually violated by invaders under whose thumb she lived most of her life. My friend, the poet John Guzlowski, introduced me, via his poetry, to his Aunt Sophie, who was raped, and his Aunt Genia, who was murdered and sexually mutilated with a bayonet, by Nazis and Ukrainians. Another friend's mother was injected with chemicals in a Nazi concentration camp as part of an experiment to discover methods to mass-sterilize Poles.

In the US, I attended meetings for survivors of sexual assault. Every survivor there knew that a conquered territory where anything goes can be as small as a suburban bedroom. One California grandmother discovered this truth on December 3, 2010. Her two-year-old granddaughter was sexually assaulted by another shopper in a Dollar Store as she Christmas shopped in the next aisle. "Man is wolf to man," Janusz Bardach said. Bardach, a Polish Jew, had been a devout leftist. Imprisonment in the notorious Soviet gulag of Kolyma cured him of that.

What to make of the evil of sexual violation? Scholar Peter Viereck outlined the left's and the right's approach to evil thus, ''The liberal sees outer, removable institutions as the ultimate source of evil; sees man's social task as creating a world in which evil will disappear … The conservative sees the inner unremovable nature of man as the ultimate source of evil; sees man's social task as coming to terms with a world in which evil is perpetual and in which justice and compassion will both be perpetually necessary. His tools for this task are the maintenance of ethical restraints inside the individual and the maintenance of unbroken, continuous social patterns inside the given culture as a whole'' (35).

The sex abuse survivors I have known have all been, in their actions and worldview, deeply conservative, according to Viereck's definition. Academic feminism has been wildly leftist. "Patriarchy" is to blame. According to Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade, humanity was egalitarian and peaceful before patriarchy was invented and ruined everything. This patriarchy is popularly understood to be a Judeo-Christian invention (Antonelli). Interestingly, Eisler's utopian book shares roots with Nazism's neo-paganism (Anthony).

Academic feminists group patriarchy with colonialism and white supremacy as the antagonists that must be eliminated before sexual abuse can stop. The usual suspects are heterosexual, white, male, Christian Westerners. To support this position, selective focus is applied. Feminists have devoted much energy to protesting sexism in America, but are less likely to note sexism in non-Western and non-white societies, for example, mass female infanticide and resultant high sex ratios in Hindu, Muslim, and Confucian Asia (Hudson), or culturally-supported gang-rape among Australian Aborigines (Nowra). And feminists have chosen to ignore the key role white, Christian imperialists played in resisting sati (suttee), or widow burning, in India and foot-binding in China.

In recent years, sociobiologists have developed a scientific answer to the evil of sex abuse. The urge to rape is a Darwinian inevitability. Men's urge to rape can be thwarted through training; women can be trained to protect themselves (Thornhill and Palmer 5). Though associated with atheism, this view jibes with the right-wing position: civilization is something humans create to protect the vulnerable and rein in exploitative impulses.

Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During the Holocaust, edited by Sonja M. Hedgepeth, Professor of German at Middle Tennessee State University, and Rochelle G. Saidel, founder of Remember the Women Institute, describes itself as "the first English-language book to address the sexual violation of Jewish women during the Holocaust" (1).

Sexual Violence is an anthology with contributions by eighteen different authors. It is a choppy read, and the aesthetic discomfort it engenders in the reader signals deeper problems. For example, it is asserted several times that attention has not been paid to sexual violence against Jewish women during the Holocaust. This assertion is merely repeated, without any sustained analysis as to why. The repetitions should have been edited out. The lack of analysis of this lacuna in the vast body of Holocaust scholarship is a serious problem, for reasons that will be discussed, below. There is no attempt to systematize knowledge about sexual violence against Jewish women. How many victims were there, how did Nazi or Soviet policy affect violations, how did aid agencies respond or record these violations? No attempt is made to answer these questions definitively.

Sexual violence against non-Jewish women is mentioned, but it is not focused on, and non-Jewish survivors' voices are not heard. Polish and Romani contributors are absent from the book's list of authors. There may be sound scholarly reasons for focusing on sex abuse of Jewish women, and not non-Jewish women. Those reasons are never so much as alluded to in the text.

In fact, every form of sex abuse against Jewish women described in Sexual Violence was committed against non-Jewish women as well. The text pays much attention to Nazis shaving Jewish women's heads; this painful process reduced Jewish women to "animals" to the "sub-human" to "a species they have never seen before" (77). Polish concentration camp inmates' heads were also shaved. Jewish women traded sex for food or other forms of protection. Irene Gut Opdyke, a Polish Catholic, was forced to provide sexual services to a 70 year old Nazi in order to safeguard the lives of the twelve Jews she saved. Nazis sterilized Jewish women. Nazis developed several methods to suppress reproduction of Poles, including forced sterilization. Nazis passed race laws criminalizing sexual contact between Jews and non-Jews. Hitler demanded that any Polish man who had sex with a German woman be shot, and that the German woman be pilloried and sent to a concentration camp. Germany exploited millions of Slavic slave laborers. Slavic women were impounded in brothels to service them, to prevent sex relations between Germans and Slavs. Germans who had Slavic slave laborers received a notification stating, "Keep German blood pure … every German who has intimate relations with a Polish man or woman transgresses" (Weikart 146-47). Jewish women witnessed the deaths of their children. Polish women watched their children starve in Ravensbruck and elsewhere. Ravensbruck is mentioned again and again in the text. Poles outnumbered Jews in Ravensbruck.

Nazis enslaved German and Polish women in brothels in concentration camps. A chilly, decontextualized chapter of Sexual Violence acknowledges this. Polish female victims are statistics; in contrast to treatment of Jewish victims, no attempt is made to add flesh to exploited Polish womens' bones, poignancy to their plight. The book repeatedly refers to Jewish women who, the authors insist, were similarly enslaved, in spite of Nazi policy forbidding it. It seems bizarre to insist that Jewish women's being violated in this way matters, and is part of the larger Nazi project of genocide, and that Jewish women's grief over this is worth attending to, but that none of that applies to Polish women. Romani, aka Gypsies, are cited throughout the text as suffering the same fate as Jewish women. Gypsies are not Jews; most in Europe are Catholic.

The most macabre account in the book details five women in advanced stages of pregnancy, weakened by starvation in the Ravensbruck concentration camp, struggling to give birth during a death march to Auschwitz, but too weakened to fully expel their newborns. The women were in labor for three days, snow falling the entire time. The concentration-camp-survivor witness reports that the event was so gruesome that "That was a picture which I shall not be able to forget in my lifetime" (143). All five women were Yugoslavs, and non-Jews.

Further, Sexual Violence points out that starvation in concentration camps especially victimized Jewish women because it shrank their breasts and hips, "regions stereotypically associated with femininity and attractiveness" (80). Concentration camp starvation similarly shrink areas of men's bodies associated with masculinity, for example their biceps. It's not clear why focus on Jewish women, exclusive of Jewish men, is necessary here.

I do not point out these realities as part of an effort to protect Poland's good name, or to enter Poland in the dubious honor of being counted as victim, but rather to argue that while Sexual Violence's selective focus may serve currently popular academic ideology, it does not best serve understanding. Sexual Violence's foreword states that the book begins the exploration of a "horrific chapter in the history of men and women, and of Jews and antisemites" (x). Those dichotomies – men v. women, antisemites v. Jews – are inadequate to plumb the questions at hand.

The emphasis on Jewish women may be easier to understand if one factors in potential reasons why, as the authors repeat again and again, sexual abuse of women has been ignored in Holocaust scholarship. As my own book, Bieganski, points out, some Jews cite the Holocaust as an identity-cementing aid in a time of increased secularism and assimilation. Focus on women's suffering might threaten some readers because it vitiates the Holocaust's cited ability to keep Jews united and feeling Jewish. There is another reason. How we categorize molds how we think, and vice versa. If one focuses on gender as a significant category, Jewish women have something in common with Polish Catholic women victims. Some would prefer not to see that happen.

It gets more challenging. One of the most notorious gender-related atrocities in history was the mass rape of women, including German women, by the advancing Red Army. These rapes were sanctioned by Soviet leadership (Beevor). One cannot adequately focus on sexual violations committed against any ethnicity in WW II without at least placing such violations in the context of these mass rapes. Acknowledging that communism produced this mass crime against women will be challenging to some scholars who would like to locate the source of sexual violence in a patriarchy invented by the Judeo-Christian tradition. Further, mentioning Soviet mass rapes of Germans will tempt the reader to feel sympathy for, and solidarity with, German women. Sympathy for and solidarity with women who had cheered on Nazism is difficult. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was an eyewitness. His poem "Prussian Nights" forces the confrontation upon us:

The little daughter's on the mattress,
Dead. How many have been on it
A platoon, a company perhaps?
A girl's been turned into a woman,
A woman turned into a corpse.
It's all come down to simple phrases:
Do not forget! Do not forgive!
Blood for blood! A tooth for a tooth!

There is another reason why sexual violence against Jewish women during the Holocaust has been under-examined, and that the authors never so much as hint at it does not speak well for their ability to profoundly probe this topic. Men are supposed to protect their womenfolk from the ravages of other men. Those men who fail to do so feel special pain and humiliation. The pain and shame of Jewish men whom he assessed as failing in this duty was vividly provoked by H. N. Bialik. Bialik, "Israel's National Poet," described the 1903 Kishniev pogrom in his poem, "In the City of Slaughter." Bialik describes Jewish men crouched, hiding in corners, watching their wives, sisters, daughters and fiancées being raped. "In the City of Slaughter" played a role in the formation of self-defense groups in Russia and the Haganah in Palestine. The point here is not that Jewish men had the ability to protect Jewish women from Nazi violations – Jewish men did not have that power. The point is that, given the tradition of men assuming responsibility for their women, some will feel that Jewish men failed in their task to protect Jewish women, and this feeling makes discussion of sexual violations against Jewish women too uncomfortable to Jewish men to be acceptable. The same goes for Polish men, Gypsy men, or, indeed, for the suburban American father whose daughter is raped. Part of what makes it hard for that man to confront what happened to his daughter is that he will torment himself with the merciless conviction that he should have been there, and he should have protected her, and that he has failed as a man. Indeed, sexual violation of women is also a violation of the men who love them. The authors miss, or choose to downplay, this point.

The theme of Jewish men's failure to protect Jewish women is in the background of Miryam Sivan's contribution to the volume. Sivan teaches in Israel. She reports that "Jews in the Diaspora" are "intimidated" by the topic of sexual violence against Jewish women, and so it is "cloaked in denial." Israelis, on the other hand, command "military agency," they emphasize "durability, resilience, and fortitude" (201) so they are not afraid to address the topic.

There is disturbing and unfortunate material in Sexual Violence that supports the chauvinist interpretation of the book's emphasis on Jewish, exclusive of other, women. Sexual Violence is yet another Holocaust book that works to displace rage against and guilt for German Nazi crimes onto Polish Catholics. If "Sexual Violence" were fully to include Polish Catholic women victims in its purview, its displacement of Holocaust guilt from Nazis to Poles would make less sense.

Most accounts of sexual violence in the book are brief and disjointed from original context. The longest account of sexual violence against a Jewish female is two pages long. It does not describe an assault by a German Nazi, rather, in detail, it describes an assault by a Catholic Pole on a Jewish girl. Another account details a Polish Catholic priest who protects a Jewish girl from rapist Poles. Disgusted with his own people, this priest removes his cross from his neck, throws it to the ground, and announces that, from this moment forward, he is a Jew (228). A remarkable feature of both accounts is that they are both fiction. That's right – a scholarly book published by a university press addressing assaults against Jewish women during the Holocaust – for which there is a heartbreakingly large amount of veridical data – resorts to reserving its longest uninterrupted passages to fictional accounts in which Polish Catholics, not German Nazis, are the perpetrators. In case the reader misses the point that Poles are responsible for the Holocaust, one author, S. Lillian Kremer, emerita distinguished professor, hammers it home. She applauds the author of the fictional piece she discusses for "masterfully adding German to characterize the Polish betrayer" thereby the author "links the Polish blackmailer to Nazism." The Pole "allies himself with the Nazis" (185). In another "masterful" touch, one fiction story cited in the book depicts a rescuer honored at Yad Vashem as merely a rapist who saved Jews (and risked death for the entire family at the hands of the Nazis thereby) just to have a Jewish female to rape. The rapist is not isolated; his parents and the village priest know about his crimes. These Righteous Gentiles just did it for the sex. This narrative works to undermine even the respect and gratitude one might cede to Polish rescuers at Yad Vashem. If there is any doubt, the subsequent paragraph demolishes it. Jews died not because of Nazism, but because of Poles' "ingrained antisemitism" (225). We must be exposed to such stories, "Sexual Violence"'s editors, Hedgepeth and Saidel insist, even if they are fiction, because "there is danger that the perpetrator may be recast as the victim" (231). One may not talk of Poles as victims of Nazis. One must tell stories in which Poles are perpetrators. Because, of course, Poles are worse than Nazis. "Not every German was bad," the book reminds the reader. Contributor Eva Fogelman, a psychologist, quotes one Jewish Holocaust survivor as reporting, "I was never raped by a German. Not one German ever laid a finger on me." The Germans, Fogelman reports, "liked her looks, but treated her like a Fraulein, giving her food and milk." "By contrast with her praise of the Germans, she said, 'What I do hate is Ukrainians and Poles. I shiver when I see them in the streets'" (269). In case the reader misses the point, Fogelman, lists "Germans, Poles, Ukrainians" as "persecutors" (272).

Given the history of the use of The Painted Bird as Holocaust educational material, the use of fictional accounts of Polish Catholic men acting as Nazis in their rape of Jewish women in a first-of-its-kind scholarly book is especially unfortunate. The Painted Bird was a sensationalistic novel by Jerzy Kosinski. It depicted bestial Slavic men committing sex crimes against women. The book was presented as autobiographical non-fiction, and used in Holocaust education classes. Later, Joanna Siedlecka, a Polish writer, exposed The Painted Bird as fiction. Kosinski had survived the war with the aid of Polish Catholics.

There is another possible reason why Sexual Violence downplays Polish victimization at the hands of the Nazis. The book reports that "Extreme racism dominated National Socialist ideology. This racism was particularly aimed at two groups of people, Jews and so-called Gypsies" (33). Poles are not included in this formulation. One wonders why Gypsies are. Perhaps because the authors classify Gypsies as non-white and their inclusion supports the understanding that white people are uniquely guilty of racism, and non-whites are uniquely victimized by it. The author of the above quote cites a work entitled "The Privilege of Invisibility: Racism from the Viewpoint of Being White." The book devotes time to explaining how Africans in Europe were victimized by Nazi racial ideology (159), though Africans in Europe were very few in number, constituted a statistically insignificant number of victims of Nazism, and were not a focus of Nazi ideology. Though Poles are quite pale-skinned, they were categorized as racially inferior by both Nazis and the Scientific Racists in the US, including Madison Grant, who inspired the Nazis. Including Poles in the list of those significantly victimized by the Nazis would throw a monkey wrench at the "whites are victimizers; darker skinned persons are victims" Politically Correct construct.

If guilt for the Holocaust, including sexual violation of Jewish women, can be displaced from neo-Pagan, atheist, and scientific Nazis onto the famously Catholic Poles, the belief that evil is a product of "patriarchy," a human invention associated with the Judeo-Christian tradition, is supported. A human invention, patriarchy, makes men rape, not human nature. To stop rape and other sexual abuses, we need not look to human nature, we need not demand that men and women take stock of themselves and learn to confront and defeat evil in their own hearts, rather, we must progress past the alleged sexism of the West and of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Anyone who has stopped going to church and who votes left gets a free pass, and need never examine his own misogyny.

In any case, any reader might object to Sexual Violence's inclusion of fictional, and cinematic, accounts. An entire chapter is devoted to Yehiel Dinur's work, which has been denounced as both fictional and pornographic. Only in the footnotes does this chapter's author acknowledge that Dinur, though writing about his sister, never had a sister. A chapter is devoted to films, including The Night Porter, a soft-porn, Holocaust-exploitation movie. Another chapter details a self-published, sado-masochistic sex fantasy. This chapter's author, Eva Fogelman, theorizes that sex abuse may have turned the Holocaust-survivor author of this fantastical account into a crazy liar (258, 263). Survivors of sexual assault have always been called liars. To include fictional accounts in this book dishonors survivors of such abuse.

The Jews v. antisemites, men v. women construct can't get to the truth of sexual violence against Jewish women during the Holocaust. One can easily find photographic souvenirs posted on the web of Indonesian Muslim men gang raping non-Muslim, Chinese women during the 1998 Jakarta riots. Accounts of rape in Congo and Darfur abound. Women continue to do sexual violence to other women, both in and out of conflict zones. Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, during the Rwandan Genocide, incited the mass rape, murder, and torture of Tutsi women – though she herself was both a woman, and of at least partial Tutsi descent. Jews raped, as well. The most notorious is Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, head of the Judenrat in the Lodz Ghetto. He is mentioned once in Sexual Violence, and only in passing. Understanding sexual violence against Jewish women during the Holocaust will be advanced, not hampered, by factoring in sexual violence against all victims during all periods of chaos. To fully honor the chosen topic, one must understand more than the chosen topic. To do less is to fall prey to the same failing that the authors themselves criticize others for falling prey to: to marginalize other victims, including those Polish internees at Ravensbruck and in the concentration camp brothels, to marginalize women who were raped by other women and the number, however small, of Jewish women raped by Jews. A specific example: in her article, Nomi Levenkron, an Israeli attorney, mentions "trafficking Jewish Eastern European women to South America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries." She cites Edward Bristow's book Prostitution and Prejudice. Bristow's book is a harrowing read. Unlike Levenkron's formulation, it does not hesitate to identify who was doing this horrific trafficking: Jewish men. Levenkron is more forthcoming in the rest of her article, citing instances where vulnerable Jewish girls and women were sexually menaced or at least used by Jewish men, including a girl in hiding with an adult Jewish man (21), a Jewish Red Army captain who did not protect women menaced by Red Army soldiers (19) and forest-dwelling partisans who exchanged protection for sex (22). These mentions of violations that do not fit the book's overall dichotomies of "men and women, Jews and anti-Semites" are never woven into any final analysis.

Examples of what struck this reader as ideologically-tinged scholarship and jargon include the following. After the above-described account of Yugoslav concentration camp victims struggling to give birth in snow, which would seem to require no commentary to amplify its tragedy, the article's author, Helga Amesberger, Senior Researcher at the Institute of Conflict Research in Vienna, steps in to explain that "according to bourgeois patriarchal notions, motherhood is to be understood as the fulfillment of a woman's life." Women "suffer when they cannot meet society's expectations" (145). "The female body is seen as the "symbolic representation of the national body" (31), Brigitte Halbmayr, also at the Institute of Conflict Research, reports in her contribution. "The root cause for sexualized violence is widely seen as located in … the centuries-old tradition of patriarchal societies" (32). Kirsty Chatwood places pomo scare quotes around the word "factual" (61). Monika J. Flaschka attributes sexual violence to a "rape culture," (78) thus suggesting that there are such things as non-rape cultures that one might aspire to. She makes this clear: "I operate under the assumption that gender identities are constructed … are performed in social environments" (79). She suggests that there are societies where rape is not such a big deal: "there is nothing inherent or given about the effect of rape on the development or maintenance of gender identities. Rather, rape is assigned a specific meaning by specific societies … gender identities are constructed, fluid, performed in a theoretical sense … [rape is not] a transhistorical mechanism of women's oppression" (79). Rape follows a "script," Flaschka reports; the scare quotes are hers. "women were perceived as rapable" Flaschka says (89). Again, this awkward and ugly word suggests that Flaschka believes in a brave new world where women are not rapable. "The 'rape script' can be changed so that rape ceases to be a way to define what it means to be a woman." We can "imagine" women free of "rapability" (90, 93). The hard reality we must all come to terms with is that no such rape-free world exists, or has ever existed, or can be "imagined" into existence by pomo scholarship.

There is an unforgettable passage in Bernat Rosner's Holocaust memoir. He describes being rounded up in his Hungarian hometown.

Right in front of him, Bernie's mother was forced to take off all her clothes. He had to watch while, naked and helpless, she was searched at the hands of a hostile Nazi thug. One might argue that Bernie had to endure worse atrocities later at Auschwitz and beyond, but he was only twelve, and he had never seen an adult, much less his mother, naked. The evil mix of forced nudity, the public humiliation, and the physical molestation converged to form an enormous emotional shock for him that symbolized a loss of innocence as well as the beginning of unimaginable horrors to come. For a brief moment, Bernie's mother was stripped of her social persona, her family status, and turned into a helpless creature subjected to the crude hands of an anonymous oppressor. (72)

I learned more from Rosner's passage about sexual violence against Jewish women in the Holocaust than I did from Hedgepeth and Saidel's entire book. Sex abuse dehumanizes and commodifies its victims. Sometimes so does scholarship.

Anthony, D. W. 1995. Nazi and Eco-Feminist Prehistories: Ideology and Empiricism in Indo-European Archaeology. In "Nationalism, Politics, and the Practice of Archaeology," eds. P. L. Kohl and C. Fawcett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 82-96.

Antonelli, Judith S. "Debunking the Goddess Myth." Utne Reader. November-December, 1997.

Beevor, Antony. Berlin: The Downfall, 1945. London: Penguin, 2003.

Goska, Danusha V. Bieganski: The Brute Polak Stereotype, Its Role in Polish-Jewish Relations and American Popular Culture. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2010.

Hedgepeth, Sonja M. and Rochelle G. Saidel. Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women during the Holocaust. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2010.

Hudson, Valerie and Andrea den Boer. Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia's Surplus Male Population. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.

Nowra, Louis. Bad Dreaming: Aboriginal Men's Violence Against Women and Children. North Melbourne: Pluto Press, 2007.

Rosner, Bernat and Sally P. Tubach. An Uncommon Friendship: From Opposite Sides of the Holocaust. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Thornhill, Randy and Craig T. Palmer. "Why Men Rape." The Sciences. (Jan/Feb 2000): 30-36.

Viereck, Peter. "Unadjusted Man." Transaction, 2004.

Weikart, Richard. Hitler's ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009.

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The editors of Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During the Holocaust responded to Dr. Goska's review. Click here to read the response.

Danusha Goska is the author of Bieganski: The Brute Polak Stereotype, Its Role in Polish-Jewish Relations and American Popular Culture, winner of the 2010 Halecki Award. Her work also appears in the books Folklore Muse and The Impossible Will Take a Little While.

The Holocaust's Uneasy Relationship With Literature

2010-12-29T14:31:00.002-05:00

The following article appears in the Dec. 28, 2010 issue of The Atlantic Monthly:

Literature and the Holocaust have a complicated relationship. This isn't to say, of course, that the pairing isn't a fruitful one—the Holocaust has influenced, if not defined, nearly every Jewish writer since, from Saul Bellow to Jonathan Safran Foer, and many non-Jews besides, like W.G. Sebald and Jorge Semprun. Still, literature qua art—innately concerned with representation and appropriation—seemingly stands opposed to the immutability of the Holocaust and our oversized obligations to its memory. Good literature makes artistic demands, flexes and contorts narratives, resists limpid morality, compromises reality's details. Regarding the Holocaust, this seems unconscionable, even blasphemous. The horrors of Auschwitz and Buchenwald need no artistic amplification.

Since the genre emerged, this has been the defining stance of Holocaust literature—that a work's verisimilitude, or its truth-value, far outweighs its literary merit. The memoir, the first-person unembellished account, has long been considered the apotheosis of the form. Or even, according to some, the only acceptable form—confining Holocaust literature to documentation, and reflexively censuring everything else for crassly misrepresenting the unrepresentable.

Elie Wiesel—the personification of Holocaust remembrance—is the fiercest exponent of art's illegitimacy with respect to the Holocaust. "Then, [Auschwitz] defeated culture; later, it defeated art," he wrote. "The truth of Auschwitz remains hidden in its ashes." Theodore Adorno's famous dictum, that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, has been frequently invoked to criticize any artistic appropriation of the Holocaust.

The apprehension is certainly understandable. The Holocaust is, 60-plus years later, still politicized, and suspect to questionable artistic ambitions and misleading emphases and glosses; the six million deserve unqualified deference, not just our idle respect. Apprehension, however, shouldn't precipitate repudiation; and Holocaust literature's potential shouldn't be understated (or denied), nor its definition misconstrued.

Too many critics, instead of assessing and parsing and criticizing (in the healthiest sense), treat Holocaust works as inviolable, beyond judgment or even approach. Such sacralization is a disservice, smothering the critical dialogue that great literature engenders. Ruth Franklin's new book, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction, is therefore more than a towering work of criticism and insight—it's an invaluable corrective. Franklin, the in-house critic at The New Republic, seeks to reclaim Holocaust literature as just that—literature about and inspired by the Holocaust—and to reaffirm its significance.

The memoir's primacy over 'standard' literature is misguided for two overlapping reasons: first, the distinction between the two is deceivingly small; and second, their respective functions are aligned. Franklin devotes each chapter to a major Holocaust work (or body of works), from Night to Schindler's List, repeatedly demonstrating just how slippery and arbitrary the division between fact and fiction really is. Because the memoir as unfiltered actuality is a myth. Fickle and unreliable memories must be reconstructed and made coherent; a story's assembly, style, and characterization will inevitably compromise any strict retelling. Emphatically, this does not mean the work is less autobiographically or historically valid—only that it is never pure autobiography or history, and has to be understood and embraced thus. Truth isn't synonymous with historicity, and infidelity to the latter isn't necessarily betrayal of the former.

Even Wiesel's Night, when compared to his autobiography, All Rivers Run to the Sea, betrays some artistic license: Moshe the Beadle is, in fact, a composite character, and much of Wiesel's ordeal was excised and sharpened for Night's publication. (The original Yiddish manuscript was, Weisel himself reports, more than 800 pages long, about 700 pages longer than the finished product.) The Diary of Anne Frank was edited by Anne herself, then further edited (and censored) by her father, Otto. (Later, playwrights cut and reworked passages for a decidedly more universal and cheery flavor. Diary, in book and stage form, is for many the primary (or only) exposure to the Holocaust, and serves as a cautionary demonstration of art's role in shaping historical perspective.)

The line between novel and memoir, between story and history, is fine indeed. Franklin illustrates how many exemplary (though not necessarily renowned) Holocaust works dance between genres—and are no less valuable for it. In Piotr Rawicz's Blood From the Sky , the narrator (who may or may not be a survivor) patches together a semi-invented character's chaotic manuscript, with dates and names changed or omitted, all amid surrealist elements. W.G. Sebald blends facts and borrows histories and layers narration to produce his masterpieces. Jakob Littners Aufzeichnungen aus einem Erdloch is a book originally believed to be fiction and later discovered to be based on fact (its history is a dizzying stream of authorships, ghost-authorships, translations, and revisions, all superbly traced by Franklin); and despite its shifting context, it retains its value (albeit in various currencies).

Memoirs, even Holocaust memoirs, might be properly understood as, or at least overlapping with, literature. This is no downgrade. Literature is supplementary, not antithetical, to history: it allows, and in the best instances demands readers to universalize, empathize, to visualize and imagine, not merely to be informed. Testimony is critical, of course, as are scholarship and personal histories. The Holocaust is one of the most thoroughly documented events in history, and still entirely resists comprehension. The unadorned facts and uninflected history—pictures, texts, accounts—are almost unbearably distressing. Viewing images of stacked corpses or skimming meticulously organized lists of dead children or hearing of the unlimited fuel for the ovens, what soul doesn't collapse?

Literature, though, affects us in ways that even the most brutal history cannot. It vivifies and propels an event, however geographically and temporally and psychologically removed, towards the personal and immediate. If history teaches and (harshly) informs, then literature rouses and intimately disturbs. Literature is an emotional chronicle, a history of the intangible, a quest to impart sentiment, not information. Conveyance of the Holocaust is an impossible but necessary appeal to our imagination; and literature is the pathos to history's logos. Not merely learning about, but identifying with.

Memoirs are surely part of this legacy. Night's power isn't derived only from its harrowing story, but from its unflinching, deceptively plain delivery of that story, as well. Like other celebrated Holocaust works, it hits a perfect emotional pitch, if you will; notes of tragedy in agonizingly effective arrangement—an arrangement that's measured, appreciated, and felt with literary instruments. Knowing the history isn't enough: literature—and humanism in general—is, as Franklin points out, the spiritual retort to the Nazis' crazed and brutal program of dehumanization. It's more than memory that we must keep alive. Literature reminds us that significance isn't time-dependent, that empathy isn't delimited by proximity, that victims aren't statistics. For the role of Holocaust literature—the eternal role of literature, period—is to make it new again, to make it real, to make it felt.

______________________

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2010/12/the-holocausts-uneasy-relationship-with-literature/67998/

Copyright © 2010 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.

Art: Visions stained by the Holocaust | Philadelphia Inquirer | 11/21/2010

2010-11-23T11:28:00.001-05:00

Three East Coast artists, two of whom are survivors, exhibit their work on the Holocaust.

Art: Visions stained by the Holocaust | Philadelphia Inquirer | 11/21/2010

Ostatni Etap--The Last Stage: One of the first films about Auschwitz

2010-08-11T10:17:00.000-04:00

The following article about Ostatni Etap, one of the first films about Auschwitz, was written by John Bertram and first appeared at his blog Venus Febriculosa:

I first learned about the existence of this relatively obscure (in the United States, anyway) film while perusing a gallery of vintage Polish film posters. My eye was immediately caught by one similar to the original cover for We Were in Auschwitz designed by Anatol Girs. Its designer, Tadeusz Trepkowski (1914-1954), a largely self-taught artist from Warsaw, was one of the original graphic designers commissioned after World War II by Film Polski and Central Wynajmu Filmow (state-run film producers and distributors) to design film posters. The film Ostatni Etap was a semi-autobiographical story about prison life in the women’s barracks at Auschwitz.

A member of the Polish resistance during the war, director and co-writer Wanda Jakubowska (1907-1998) was arrested in 1942 and spent six months in Warsaw’s Pawiak prison before being sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau where, she says, “the decision to make a film…originated when I crossed the camp’s gate.” A member of the camp resistance, she was moved to the Rajsko, an experimental agricultural station and one of more than 40 sub-camps, and in early 1945 was transferred to Ravensbruck where she was liberated by the Soviet Army. Once free, Jakubowska immediately began work on the script with another survivor Gerda Schneider, a German Communist, based exclusively on events witnessed by them and their fellow prisoners. By the end of the year they had produced a first draft and, returning to Auschwitz in the spring of 1946 where she had decided to film, she was shocked to find “daisies of monstrous proportions and exuberant, indescribable vegetation on the soil that was fertilized by blood and sweat.”

Filming at Auschwitz-Birkenau began in the spring of the following year. Actors, many of whom were originally interned at Auschwitz, lived in the former barracks and instead of costumes wore authentic striped prison uniforms. One actor noted that “the air was filled with a characteristic unpleasant smell that had a depressing effect on us.” As harrowing as the movie is, Jakubowska notes that “the camp’s reality was human skeletons, piles of dead bodies, lice, rats, and various disgusting diseases. On the screen this reality would certainly cause dread and repulsion. It was necessary to eliminate those elements which, although authentic and typical, were unbearable for the post-war viewer.”

Released in Poland in March 1948 barely three years after Auschwitz was liberated, Ostatni etap was the second film produced by Film Polski and the first Polish film to get international distribution. Writing in The New York Times upon the occasion of the film’s U.S. release in March 1949, Bosley Crowther points out:

“ …the story itself is secondary…to the staggering accumulation of daily atrocities, seen in the pattern of the story through a pitilessly factual camera’s eye. From the opening shot in the death camp, showing the brutality of a guard to a pregnant girl, standing among a group of women in a dreary sea of mud, the film is a continuation of horrifying episodes which make up a modest realization of the inhumanity of the Nazi camps.

There is the episode, for instance, of the murder of the baby born to the suffering girl. There is the arrival of a trainload of Jewish prisoners who are brutally separated, some to be gassed. There are terrifying scenes of the inmates being driven and beaten in the prison yard while a band plays serenely cheerful music under the baton of an agonized girl. And there is one simply overwhelming sequence of little children being marched off to be killed, with a cut of their discarded toys piled up among the relics of all the dead. There are also recognitions of the frailties of the inmates themselves, revealed in vicious and deceitful stratagems and deeds.”

Interestingly, Wanda Jakubowska’s creative arc parallels that of Tadeusz Borowski’s: imprisoned at Pawiak, then Auschwitz, shortly thereafter producing an authentic, unflinching landmark work based upon harrowing experiences. However, whereas Borowski’s stories remain completely free of any trace of ideology, in Ostatni etap, Jakubowska’s Communist leanings are clear to the point that to some the propagandist nature of the film (at one point, for instance, Stalin’s name is reverently invoked) leave it irrevocably compromised. Still, it remains a valuable document for its powerful imagery that has served as template for numerous subsequent films on Auschwitz.

Special thanks to Polish film historian Professor J. Marek Haltof of Northern Michigan University whose book Polish National Cinema (New York/Oxford, 2002) and essay “The Monstrosity of Auschwitz in Wanda Jakubowska’s The Last Stage (1948)” provided indispensable background material for this post.

For more information, see Women in Polish Cinema, Chapter 8, Wanda Jakubowska: The Communist Fighter, by Ewa Mazierska.

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To read more about women and what happens to them in war, please click to my post Women in War.

New Tadeusz Borowski Collection

2010-08-01T20:29:00.004-04:00

This October, Yale University Press will release a new collection of stories by Tadeusz Borowski (1922-1951). Here in Our Auschwitz and Other Stories, translated by Madeline Levine, offers “the first authoritative translation of Borowski’s prose fiction, including numerous stories that have never appeared in English before.”

Arrested and taken to Auschwitz in 1943, Borowski is one of the most important writers of the Holocaust. His book of stories, This Way For the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, is essential reading about what happened in Auschwitz.

The following poem by Borowski is taken from a site dedicated to his poetry. To read other poems click here.

CURRICVULUM VITAE

I did not join the Home Army
I did not work for the Resistance.
I spent my nights studying
at the underground university.

My friends looked death in the face,
many were killed, as in any battle,
and I wrote about Liebert,
Staff, epithets and rhythm.

I did not smuggle goods to Warsaw,
I never went to trendy bars.
I wrote poems. Not for fame,
but because I had to. Trifles. Youth.

I was not a gold broker,
I didn't know the rates of exchange.
I had a girl. Long nights, my love ...
Where is she? Torture ...

That was my life ... poems, love,
without character, empty, pale.
Perhaps it would not have been wasted
if I'd killed just one single German.

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By the way, there is a competition to design a cover for This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman. To read about it, click here.

Code Name: Zegota: Rescuing Jews in Occupied Poland, 1942-1945: The Most Dangerous Conspiracy

2010-06-07T10:33:00.002-04:00

Irene Tomaszewski and Tecia Werbowski have recently published the American edition of their book about Polish attempts to save Jews during the Holocaust.

Code Name: Zegota: Rescuing Jews in Occupied Poland, 1942-1945: The Most Dangerous Conspiracy in Wartime Europe tells the story of the only secret organization in occupied Europe set up for the sole purpose of saving Jews. The first book on the subject in English, it details the danger and complexity behind Zegota rescue attempts, clarifying the relationship of the Germans, who had total control; the Poles, who were relegated to sub-human status and treated as slave labor; and the Jews, designated nonhuman and collectively condemned to death. Illuminating the moral dilemmas that arose as one life was pitted against another under the lawless apartheid conditions created by the Nazis, Code Name: Zegota explores the critical situation in occupied Poland and the personalities that responded to desperate conditions with a mix of courage and creativity. It profiles the key players and the network behind them and describes the sophisticated organization and its mode of operation. The cast of characters ranges from members of prewar Poland's cultural and political elite to Girl Guides and Boy Scouts, who worked as couriers. As this inspiring book shows, all of these brave souls risked torture, concentration camps, and death—and many paid the price.

_____________

The book is available from Greenwood Press and Amazon.

Irene Tomaszewski is one of the editors of Cosmopolitan Review.

Prism: Spring 2010

2010-05-26T10:59:00.007-04:00

The latest issue of Prism (volume 1, issue 2) is now available. Earlier, Charles Fishman conducted an extensive interview with Dr. Karen Shawn of Yeshiva University regarding this journal devoted to Holocaust educators.

The recently-published issue of PRISM discusses the complex story of those who remained bystanders during the Holocaust. The short story “Prelude” by American author and child of Jewish Lithuanian immigrants, Albert Halper, serves as the literary centerpiece of the spring issue. Readers will find a wealth of essays, poetry, art, and archival photographs on this complex subject

Editors Karen Shawn and Jeffrey Glanz of Prism have generously offered to send complimentary copies of the journal to our readers. For a complimentary copy of Prism, please send your complete mailing address to prism@yu.edu.

Years Later We Would Remember

2010-04-09T10:03:00.004-04:00

Years Later We Would Remember is the forthcoming memoir and film from Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Martin Kent, who has made over 60 films, including a documentary on Oskar Schindler for A&E’s popular Biography series. Of the current work-in-progress, Schindler’s List author Thomas Keneally wrote: “I found it enlightening and engrossing.” Holocaust authority Dr. Michael Berenbaum said: “What results is a story of love and commitment amidst destruction, a glimpse into decency amidst death and devastation and of the price paid for love.”

Here is an excerpt from Years Later We Would Remember:

I grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust. No grandparents. No aunts and uncles around. In their place — big black holes. While my parents tried to shield me from the details of the horrors they experienced in Poland during the 1930s and ‘40s, they couldn’t protect me from them. No one goes through something like that and leaves it behind. Misery, sorrow and pain are such clever hitchhikers.

Growing up in New York City during the ‘50s and ‘60s, my childhood outside my home was exciting, interesting, stimulating. But inside those four walls, I felt like I was living within a box – one that contained a giant jigsaw puzzle. Many of the pieces were not exactly missing; some were faded, or frayed, and hard to discern; others were locked away – on purpose. My mother Roza (her American name) had a great capacity for joy, but she could also quickly slip into a state of melancholy. My father Jack (also his American name) was remote, quiet, off at work all the time, and had little patience for the precocious, artistic, curious child I was. I had an older brother, Joseph, who found his own coping mechanism for our dysfunctional family. He was never home. We were four people living under the same roof. But we really weren’t a family. Our home was full of secrets. Full of walls. Full of feelings that were alternately repressed — or suddenly, explosively — released.

For most of my life, my parents’ story remained shrouded in mystery. It was something they just couldn’t bring themselves to talk about. At the age of nine, I was shocked to learn my father was Catholic. And yet, my mother was Jewish, and all the cousins we knew — all Holocaust survivors — were also Jewish. So not only was our refugee family different from most Americans, we were different from all our relatives. How did that happen? No explanations. Shhhhhh! Don’t ask questions. My mother and father were unknowable. So… if I couldn’t know my parents, how could I ever hope to truly know myself?

In 1963, when I was twelve years old, I got a glimpse into the mystery of my identity. After much talk and planning, my mother and I boarded an El Al jet and flew to Israel — to spend a summer with her surviving brother and sister, who’d emigrated to the Promised Land after surviving the ravages of Nazi-occupied Poland. We split our time between visits with her brother Jacob, who delivered baked goods in Tel Aviv, and her sister Clara, who ran a small farm with her husband Herman in Nahariya.

Two things struck me immediately about Israel: it felt like a frontier, a work in progress, lacking some of the conveniences we took for granted in America; and yet, everyone seemed happy. Really happy. Passionate. Excited. Hopeful. I never witnessed emotions like that before.

But the most incredible aspect of this experience was that at last, after feeling like an olive in a dish of cherries my whole life, I suddenly felt a sense of belonging. Not just with my aunt and uncle and their families — with whom I experienced an immediate bond of love — but with the whole country. Everywhere I went, I felt like I was with family. A taxi driver wasn’t just someone hired to take us from point A to point B. For a brief moment in time, he was a part of our journey. He wanted to know all about us. And he wanted to share things about himself as well. My big black holes of the Holocaust were now being bombarded with millions of sparks of light.

Until we left.

The first night away, I began to cry, and couldn’t help myself. When my mother asked me why I was suddenly so sad, I told her how much I missed my family in Israel. But my tears weren’t only for them. My mother had told me there were two other siblings — her older brothers Salo and Muno — resistance fighters murdered by the Nazis. I had never emotionally connected to them. They were just names. But now, having spent time with my mother’s surviving brother and sister, I suddenly felt the full weight of the loss of the two other brothers. My brave, beautiful uncles. How can you miss something you never had? You can’t. But somehow, I did. I missed Salo and Muno. I felt them. I loved them. I would never stop cherishing them.

The echoes of my summer in Israel never subsided. The door that had opened prompted me to become a person who would open as many doors as possible. I was fearless. I was determined to explore the world. To dig into the past. To uncover the motivations of people who shaped history. To just know things. I carved out a satisfying career as a journalist, an occasional university instructor and a documentary filmmaker (returning to Israel to make King David, and King Herod’s Lost City) — sharing my passions, telling other people’s stories.

Then in 1999, my life took an irrevocable turn. After the 1993 release of Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List,” based on Thomas Keneally’s 1982 book (originally entitled “Schindler’s Ark”), Hearst Entertainment hired me to write, produce and direct an A&E Biography of Oskar Schindler, the Nazi who saved over 1,200 Jews from certain death at the hands of his fellow Nazis. Was this by coincidence? Nothing happens by coincidence. This was my gateway to the dark days of the Holocaust. In the process of making this film, I interviewed survivors, Thomas Keneally, world-renowned Holocaust historian Dr. Michael Berenbaum, did all the necessary research and legwork, and looked at all the horrific film footage. When I told my mother about this project, she showed no surprise at all. “Oh, Oskar Schindler? Yes, I knew all about him. You remember my friend Sally Huppert? She was one of the people he saved.”

I considered the irony that one of the greatest stories of the 20th century had been right under my nose for all those years.

“Mom,” I said, “what other stories haven’t you told me about? Isn’t it finally time for you and dad to tell me what happened back in Poland?”

My mother took some time to consider what I had said, and the fact that I had been adequately inoculated by all my work on the Schindler documentary. One morning, she phoned me and said, “Ok, I’ve thought about it. I’m appointing you family historian.” We had had a historian in our family. The late Dr. Philip Friedman, widely considered the father of Holocaust history, was our cousin. Could I walk in his giant footsteps?

At long last my mother felt I was ready to face the demons and ghosts she and my father had tried to tamp down in that jigsaw box for a lifetime. They too had to face them. It was difficult for both of them to delve into their tragic past, but they did it, and they did it for me. Often with tears. Often with self-imposed interruptions, when the burden of memory threatened to crush them.

I spent a year interviewing my parents and doing background research. The story was revealed gradually. Like some sacred, mystical text, it required study, meditation and a pilgrimage. I felt compelled to make a trip to Poland, a place I’d never wanted to visit. I needed to experience total immersion in this process. But by this time, my mother was too frail to make the trip. Still, there was no turning back. I packed a video camera and embarked on a journey to spend nearly a month on the road with a stranger – a man I hardly knew — my father. I had to learn the true story of my parents’ survival and unravel the personas of the two people whom I’d sought to know and understand my whole life.

In Poland, as I walked on ground that held the blood and ashes of millions of murdered souls, I pointed my camera at my father and all the places he wanted to show me. I found out that over half a century ago, my father Olek (his Polish name), a brash Polish Catholic boy of 19, had met my mother Ziuta (as she was known back then), a terrified Jewish girl of 20, when she was on the run after she’d survived two Nazi massacres of 6,500 Jews in her village, some 400 kilometers away from his. The Nazis had murdered her two older brothers, Salo and Muno, shortly after they’d gotten my mother out of the Jewish ghetto.

One day, she walked into the tavern that my father and his father Antoni ran, asking for a job. She was hired on the spot. Olek took an immediate liking to her. A few months later, in a private moment, he confessed to Ziuta the feelings that had grown and overwhelmed him. He told her he’d fallen in love with her.

She was shocked. “Well, I have a shock for you,” she replied. “I’m Jewish.” My father considered the full weight of what she’d said. And then, as only a 19-year-old with stars in his eyes and love in his heart could respond, he said: “You’re Jewish? That’s great! Now I can prove my love for you. I can lay my life on the line.” And he did just that. For two and a half years, they were on the run, with the Nazis at their heels. With bravado, with cunning, he protected her every step of that perilous journey. Or did his love for my mother create an ever-expanding state of grace? One that produced miracle after miracle. In any case, this is why I’m here today. My brother Joseph, too, who was born during that time.

In the course of my research, interviews and journey to Poland, I finally got to know and truly appreciate the wonderful, albeit strange people who’d raised me and made me who I am. When I returned to the United States, I sent a detailed account of this story, along with supporting documentary evidence, to Yad Vashem in Israel. About a year and a half later, they came to a decision. On Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Memorial Day, 2003, in a packed ceremony at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles — before the Mayor, and diplomats from Poland and Israel — Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the center, bestowed my father with Israel’s highest honor, the Righteous Among the Nations award — the very same medal of heroism Oskar Schindler had received. The story had come full circle.

My mother passed away on the night of January 16, 2009, at the age of 87. My father and I were at her bedside, holding her hands, telling her how much she was loved. She’d led a full and incredible life. I know I was blessed to have her as a mother. But twice blessed to have had the opportunity to discover the truth and meaning of the life she and my father had led before I came into this world. They were together for 67 years.

As for my father and I — we are no longer strangers. I won’t sugarcoat this — we can still get under each other’s skin. But I see him with greater clarity now. I have more compassion for the man. Love doesn’t even begin to describe my feelings for him.

The ghosts and demons my parents tried to keep from me for nearly a lifetime are still there. But they’re no longer a gnawing mystery. I’ve shared a vodka with them. I’ve looked into their eyes. They no longer have power over me.

As difficult as my experiences were, I have no regrets about the doors I chose to open and enter. I hope our family story inspires others to open some new doors — to look inside, to fathom the mysteries of the heart, family, and discover stories never known. I hope it inspires tolerance of those who pray to a different deity, look different, or look at the world differently. And lastly, I hope it inspires unconditional love – not just romantic love, but the love of fellow human beings. We needed that so much back then. We certainly need it now.

####

About Martin Kent:

Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Martin Kent has made over 60 documentaries during his distinguished career. His work, seen by 100 million viewers, has been critically acclaimed and featured on NBC, ABC, PBS, A&E, History Channel, Discovery, TLC, Animal Planet, Fox Sports and VH1, among others. Mr. Kent’s most recent documentary is Oil Apocalypse, currently in rotation on the History Channel. He is in production on Years Later We Would Remember, a documentary focusing on love and heroism during the Holocaust. Mr. Kent was a founding production executive of the E! Channel. He began his career as a print journalist; his work appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times syndicate, and other noteworthy publications. From 1979-82 he was Editor of the Hollywood Reporter; his significant contributions to the improvement of that paper were reported in Time magazine. Mr. Kent holds a Masters Degree in Broadcast Communications from Stanford University and has taught and lectured at UCLA.

To view Martin’s work please visit: http://www.youtube.com/user/martinkentfilms

To learn more about Martin, please visit:

http://yearslaterwewouldremember.com/ or http://www.martinkentproductions.com/

Life Isn't Beautiful by Cynthia Ozick

2010-03-28T11:02:00.011-04:00

Since starting Writing the Holocaust in April 2009, one of the questions that my co-editor Charles Fishman and I have been interested in examining is how the Holocaust is represented. As part of this discussion, Charles posted his essay "Some Cautions on Writing Holocaust Poetry" and discussed questions of representation with poet Louis Daniel Brodsky in both Part 1 and Part 2 of the interview we recently published here.

Recently in the March 15, 2010 edition of Newsweek, novelist and essayist Cynthia Ozick published a compelling article called "Life Isn't Beautiful" about how the Holocaust is depicted.

Here are the opening paragraphs of her essay. The remainder is available online at Newsweek:

Life Isn’t Beautiful
Not all Holocaust art is authentic. In fact, much of it is fraudulent.

By Cynthia Ozick | NEWSWEEK

Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway-Car

here in this carload
i am eve
with abel my son
if you see my older son
cain son of man
tell him that i

—Dan Pagis (from the Hebrew)

In "Commitment," his 1963 essay, the philosopher Theodor Adorno remarked that writing poetry in the deadly wake of Auschwitz would be "barbaric." Since then, "after the Holocaust, no poetry" has become a kind of overriding moral mantra, with "poetry" encompassing not writing alone but standing for art in general. Yet the making of art cannot be stopped by a powerful phrase, however renowned or revered: plays, novels, poems, songs, symphonies, films, paintings, sculptures, all stream from a source that will not be stilled. Imagination demands its rights: to impress, to move, to feel, to heighten, to interpret, to transmute.

And to lie.

Consider a handful of movies that profess to render the Holocaust. "Life Is Beautiful," a naive, well-intentioned, preposterous, painfully absurd, and ignorant lie. "Inglourious Basterds," a defamation, a canard—what Frederic Raphael, writing in Commentary, calls "doing the Jews a favor by showing that they, too, given the chance, coulda/woulda behaved like mindless monsters," even as he compares it to "Jew Süss," the notorious Goebbels film. "The Reader," like the novel it derives from, no better than Nazi porn, and drawn from the self-serving notion that the then most literate and cultivated nation in Europe may be exculpated from mass murder by the claim of illiteracy. As for Schindler's List, its most honest moment, after its parade of fake-looking victims, comes at the very close of the film, and in documentary mode, when the living survivors appear on screen.

So where can the truth be found? In Anne Frank's diary? Yes, but the diary, intended as a report, as a document, can tell only a partial and preliminary truth, since the remarkable child was writing in a shelter—precarious, threatened, and temporary; nevertheless a protected space. Anne Frank did not, could not, record the atrocity she endured while tormented by lice, clothed in a rag, and dying of typhus in Bergen-Belsen. For what we call "truth" we must go into the bottom-most interior of that hell. And as Primo Levi admonishes, only the dead went down to the Nazi hell's lowest rung....

_________________

The entire essay is available online at Newsweek. Please click here.

Ozick's most recent book is a collection of stories called Dictation: A Quartet.

An Interview with Louis Daniel Brodsky: Part II

2010-03-23T10:43:00.012-04:00

By Charles Fishman

This second part of my interview with Louis Daniel Brodsky continues with our discussion of his Holocaust poetry and explores our differing views regarding the writing of poetry on the Shoah. (To view the first part click here.)

CF: Please comment on your collaboration with William Heyen on the breakthrough book, Falling from Heaven. Did you or Bill initiate that project?

LDB: In 1990, feeling extraordinary respect for Bill Heyen's Holocaust poetry, I invited him to join me in blending our different heritages, religions, and voices in what I believed could be a very evocative and resonant book. In June 1991, Time Being Books published Falling from Heaven: Holocaust Poems of a Jew and a Gentile. Both of us contributed twenty-five of our strongest Holocaust poems, which we chose to alternate in five parts. Many of Bill's poems came from his book Erika: Poems of the Holocaust. All of mine were new, written after The Thorough Earth. As awful as the subject matter is, the book was very satisfying, and, in December 1992, Time Being Books released my book Gestapo Crows: Holocaust Poems. Then in May 1998, The Eleventh Lost Tribe: Poems of the Holocaust was also published by Time Being Books.

By that time, I'd been writing Holocaust poems with dizzying frequency. They simply wouldn't release me from their throes, give me any kind of peace at all, rather kept assaulting my sensibility, as though fearing that were they to stop, I might stop paying attention to them, composing them into life, out of death, nothingness. So, I persevered, shaping two new books, which I hoped would appear, in 2000 and 2001, respectively: Rabbi Auschwitz: Poems of the Shoah and The Swastika Clock: Holocaust Poems.

But a major event no one could have anticipated sidetracked my publication schedule. 9/11 threw everything I'd intended to do into disarray. It distracted my focus, compelled me to write five volumes of a book called Shadow War: A Poetic Chronicle of September 11 and Beyond, and it kept my focus distracted during the eight years of the George W. Bush administration, writing satirical and venomous political poems.

Despite this detour, in 2008, I completed my seventh Holocaust book, The Location of the Unknown: Shoah Poems, and, in 2009, Kampf: Poems of the Holocaust, both of which will likely remain unpublished for the next five or six years.

CF: So nearly a decade after the trauma of 9/11 and with “W” fading into the blur of memory, you decided to bring out the two collections on the Shoah you had expected to issue in 2000 and 2001: Rabbi Auschwitz, which came out last month, and The Swastika Clock, which Time Being Books will publish in 2011. What do you hope to accomplish by releasing such similar books so closely together?

LDB: Why will these two books come out so close together? Because they need to breathe, need their release, their freedom, from me, so that they can have their vehemently uncompromising, unforgetting, unforgiving voices made manifest. It makes no difference how close together they appear, since no matter when they're published — one, five, ten, twenty years apart — they'd still be close together, kin, brethren, tribe, in spirit, because they're part of the family of six million that, in perishing, will always live close, inextricably close. All that matters is that they achieve existence, be, and, in being, exterminate, eradicate, silence silence — the sooner the better. Too soon is decidedly not nearly soon enough, since silence is the ally of apathy, and apathy, smugness, indifference are the Satanic trinity of manifest evil, and evil is the be-all-and-end-all enemy of whatever's left after death abandons mankind to its own signature murderous rapaciousness.

CF: Falling from Heaven showed how much you admire William Heyen's poems on the Shoah. To what extent do you feel his 1977 book The Swastika Poems, and his subsequent books on this subject, Erika: Poems of the Holocaust (Vanguard, 1984 and later editions) and Shoah Train (Etruscan Press, 2003), have influenced your own work and the work of other poets? Is the title of one of your forthcoming booklength collections, The Swastika Clock, meant to acknowledge your debt to Heyen's work in The Swastika Poems?

LDB: I can't really speak for other poets, but I do know that he's had a strong presence in my mind. I don't feel I've borrowed anything specifically from Bill's work. His rhythms, meters, phraseology, his syntax and voice are altogether different from mine. Most significantly, he writes from what he reads, almost exclusively, it seems to me, not so much from his guts, blood, raw emotion, but from his exceedingly brilliant and highly honed intellect. Imagination isn't his starting point, though he has a splendid imagination; rather, he chooses to exercise restraint, so careful is he to keep his distance while going as close as he dares to what he sees as the sacredness of their bones, souls. My poetry is more of a lyrical and narrative variety, lyrical in the sense that I rely heavily on assonance, internal rhyming; narrative in the sense that I prefer to weave stories, shy away from purely imagistic and metaphorical evocations and distillations. Having said this, I believe that Bill's achievements, his creations, have had a strong effect on my desire to write Holocaust poems as honestly and powerfully and poignantly and plaintively as I possibly can. When I first read Erika, back in 1989, I had just finished working on The Thorough Earth, and I was so very exhilarated to find a fellow poet working so strenuously, so passionately, so compassionately in this vein. I remember writing a very effusive letter to Bill, telling him how moved I was by his book, how much I wanted to meet him.

As for the title of my 2011 book, The Swastika Clock, it in no way reflects any artistic indebtedness to Bill's precursor to Erika — The Swastika Poems. As I've said, Bill's influence on me has everything to do with pure admiration, respect, awe, nothing at all to do with stylistic matters. Though kindred, our sensibilities are aesthetically and artistically far apart. To take this further, though I've read a reasonable amount of Holocaust literature, I can honestly say that there are no sources from which I've borrowed other than from my own reservoir of intuition and imagination.

CF: Which other writers have had an impact on the writing you have done in response to the Shoah?

LDB: I like the word "impact," as you use it. It seems much more effective to me than "influence," since my mind is open to being moved by something without being moved to emulate it stylistically.

There are specific books that have had an inexpressible but overarching impact on my emotions, so powerfully that they've moved me to the kind of tears that are located so deep in my psyche and the cells of my body that I've felt compelled to find my own words, to portray my agony.

I've already mentioned Jean-François Steiner's Treblinka and Thomas Kenneally's Schindler's Ark (published in this country as Schindler's List). Certainly, Elie Wiesel's little big book, Night, dismantled me, brought my heart to its knees. William Styron's Sophie's Choice is a book no one should overlook. Badenheim: 1939, by Ahron Appelfeld, bespelled me, with its mystical language and misty aura. Art Spiegelman's Maus I and II still turn me upside down every time I return to them. They're brilliant. Strangely, a rather sentimental book by Gerald Green, titled Holocaust, has called me back to its pages almost every other year, for the past two decades. Most recently, Bernhard Schlink's The Reader has reminded me, all over, how terribly beautiful the horrible things that happened in the Holocaust can be, if they're portrayed by a highly sensitive, intelligent, and compassionate writer. This book reinstills in me that original desire that drove me when I began to write Holocaust poems that can move the human heart to believe that its host just might transcend whatever is base in us.

Naturally, I've read myriad histories and memoirs about the Holocaust. Among those which stand out are Moments of Reprieve, The Drowned and the Saved, Survival in Auschwitz, and The Reawakening, all by Primo Levi; Man's Search for Meaning, by Viktor E. Frankl; The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War, by Martin Gilbert; Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, by John Cornwell; IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation, by Edwin Black; My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin, by Peter Gay; The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, by William L. Shirer; The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945, by David S. Wyman; and Łódź Ghetto: Inside a Community Under Siege, edited by Alan Adelson and Robert Lapides.

Interestingly, the great Holocaust poets have had far less of an impact on my writing, and I've certainly read the best of them — Radnóti, Sutzkever, Celan, Borowski, Sachs, Glatstein, and Klepfisz, among them. Possibly, this is because I wouldn't want to ever echo any other poet. Possibly, my own poetic voice is so strong that it doesn't allow me to be as receptive as I might otherwise be. Also, with regard to the foreign poets I just mentioned, it's because translations, no matter how excellent they are, always remind me that the real poetry remains in the mother tongue and necessarily must be read in that tongue. Of this, I speak with a degree of authority. Two of my Holocaust books, The Thorough Earth, translated by Jean Lambert as Le Terre Avide, and Falling from Heaven: Holocaust Poems of a Jew and a Gentile, translated by Rachel Ertel as Chassés du Paradis: Poèmes de l'Holocauste à Deux Voix, both published by Éditions Gallimard, in 1992 and 1997, respectively, seem, to me, to have lost much of their mellifluity, music, and assonance, in translation.

CF: Time Being Books has published other Holocaust-related collections, perhaps most notably the revised, second edition of my anthology, Blood To Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust (2007), but also William Heyen's Erika: Poems of the Holocaust; Harry James Cargas's Telling the Tale: A Tribute to Elie Wiesel on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday – Essays, Reflections, and Poems; Norbert Krapf's Blue-Eyed Grass: Poems of Germany; Judith Chalmers's Out of History's Junk Jar: Poems of a Mixed Inheritance; Micheal O'Siadhail's The Gossamer Wall: Poems in Witness to the Holocaust; and my own collection, Chopin's Piano. Do you consider your responsibility, as a publisher, to include publishing books about the Holocaust? And are you currently thinking of publishing any new collections or anthologies of poetry that focus on the Holocaust?

LDB: I'll always be receptive to new books of Holocaust poetry. They're too important a contribution to humanity to dismiss. It's unlikely that Time Being Books will do another anthology. The splendid one you edited, Blood to Remember, was an undertaking of immense complexity and difficulty, for our small press. Our mission would be best served by our continuing to focus on individual volumes of poetry.

CF: Aside from Micheal O'Siadhail's collection, are you familiar with poetry on the Shoah that has been written by poets who are not Americans? If so, which poets' work would you most encourage followers of this blog to read?

LDB: Only those I've already mentioned.

CF: Among those poets whose work you follow, and who are still writing about the Shoah, what in their work do you find most powerful and significant?

LDB: I really can't answer this, since I don't follow any contemporary Holocaust writers.

CF: There are many as yet untranslated poems by Holocaust survivors. Would you commission work on a book of translations of these almost-lost poems?

LDB: I think the idea of bringing such work into public recognition is, per se, a noble idea. But personally, as I've said, I don't really trust translations to accurately convey authorial intention. I'd be very leery of having Time Being Books publish such a work.

CF: Do you believe the time will come when writing poems about the Holocaust will no longer be necessary?

LDB: Inherent in your question, as I see it, is a hypothetical scenario in which mankind has recreated the prelapsarian Garden of Eden. Even if this were to come about, I believe we'd still find the writing of poems about the Holocaust necessary, indispensable, if for no other reason than to remind ourselves to be alert for the viper, crawling on his belly, poised to beguile us with visions of power, superiority, annihilation.

CF: You have recently written poems in which you speak from the point of view of a Holocaust survivor, but you are not a survivor of the ghettoes and camps. How do you justify taking this approach in some of your recent poems when actual camp survivors are still living among us?

LDB: Just to qualify your question, let me say that I've not just recently written Holocaust poems using characters I invent, imagine, transfigure. I've been employing this approach, with all of my poems, from the very outset, back in the late sixties.

Debate has long raged about who is qualified to tackle the delicate topic of the Holocaust. Is it only the victims, survivors, and their families? Is it historians and documentary-makers? Or should the net be cast wider, to include those poets, painters, sculptors, dancers, musicians who have no familial connection with the Holocaust or are too young to have any firsthand knowledge of it, and if so, is there a place for fictional works?

When I first began my collaborative efforts with Bill Heyen, for the 1991 volume Falling from Heaven, I started to understand the scope of this issue, when he sent this response to my draft-work typescript for the poem "Under the Circumstances," which I'd intended to include in that book but decided not to, for needing to mull over his reservations about the poem, especially the lines "Who would ever have believed / We'd condone, let alone encourage, / Our own issue soliciting on street corners / Where our elite once converged, / Become History's pimps, / Forcing our daughters and wives / To go down on their backs, hoist knees, / And make their fleshy temples / Accessible to anyone with pfennigs for bread?" Bill said, "Strong, strong, but worries me: this is one of those poems where we have to be careful, careful how we speak for the dead. I'm not sure about the 'resignation' here. If this were taken from some definite testimony, that would be one thing. But to invent a Jew who speaks in these terms?"

Subsequently, in my 1992 book Gestapo Crows: Holocaust Poems, I chose to include the poem as I'd originally written it.

Under the Circumstances, Warsaw Ghetto, 1942

Surviving in the ghetto
Has its occasional consolations,
Its brief reprieves,
But they're not always easy to detect
When the cock crows with a loon's hysteria,
The stork refuses to transport cargo,
And the cuckoo ululates its idiotic ritual
Every hour, dark and light,
Intimating the Gestapo's imminent knock at the door.

Although the insomnious waiting is torture,
Horror does exempt us
From tending to chores, maintaining decorum.
No one expends much energy anymore
Lamenting each recent surrender to death.
We've even suspended teaching, praying,
Meeting collectively to discuss events
We've absolutely no say-so in swaying.
Resignation is easier to sustain than faith.

More to the point, who would have ever believed
We'd condone, let alone encourage,
Our own women's soliciting on street corners
Where our patricians once convened
Or that we would become history's pimps,
Forcing our wives and daughters
To lie down on their backs, spread their legs,
And make the gates of their temples
Accessible to anyone with pfennigs for bread?

CF: I understand that you felt compelled to disregard Bill’s caution flag, but why? Do you have evidence that any Jewish men trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto encouraged their “wives and daughters” to prostitute themselves?

LDB: It's all a matter of drama, poetic drama. For me, the facts are always subservient to the verities of the heart, truths derived from the long procession of civilization's degrading travails and noble accomplishments. Given sufficient desperation, I know, intuitively, as well as from personal experience, that people can bring themselves to commit any kind of inappropriate act that may seem appropriate, at the time, to alleviate their distress. I have not relied on oral testimonies or memoirs, as "evidence," to tell me how people can, should, must, do act. I rely on my own gut instincts, in any given situation I create, any dramatic scene I set for the characters I place in the vast panoply of my Holocaust dramas. Given the looming presence of devastating starvation and horrific fear, a person can be driven to anything, even something as unsacred, profane, heinous, monstrous as offering up a beloved wife to prostitution, a helpless, innocent child to its own death, if, somehow, doing so might allow that person to perpetuate his/her own life. Desperation does terrible things to the psyche, puts demands on moral rectitude and physical propriety that one could, would never, in his/her right mind, consider. And this is why I could not, finally, accept Bill Heyen's reservation. The only "definite testimony," as Bill referred to a proper source for my dramatization, in "Under the Circumstances," was, is, that which I derived from my own heart, my guts, my pounding blood, my trembling soul, as I wrote that poem through, to its profoundly painful closure. I had no choice but to accede to the poem's requirements.

And during correspondence with you, Charles, over the last few years, I've again faced the critical relevance of my fictional works, when discussing your perspectives, documented in the essay "Some Cautions on Writing Holocaust Poetry," in which you note that "the tendency for writers to place themselves at Auschwitz; to take on the mantle of victimhood or martyrdom — the special aura of the survivor — has become more noticeable, and more disturbing" and you deride the "hubris of those who would masquerade as survivors or invent dialogue for actual people who lived and died."

Speaking of fictional first-person Holocaust poems, you write, "Does it honor the dead or present us with a rich new vision of historical truth? Is this merely another entertainment? Or is it something more problematic and unsettling? Can we escape the conclusion that what this poet [W. D. Snodgrass] offers us, out of the entire colossal record of the Shoah, is a rather strange and unsettling orchestration of unreal voices and a text marked by dubious sympathies?"

Such poems, you say, "occupy a space in which truth is virtually indistinguishable from fantasy, so that the real and the verifiable is trivialized and devalued. . . . I read this as a kind of literary charade, in which the writer seeks to create the illusion of proximity to, and intimacy with, the Holocaust — to generate what might pass for a sense of permission to write these things . . . permission and authority."

You go on to suggest that "the desire to speak in the voices of real or imagined victims, survivors (often quite capable of speaking for themselves, once they choose to address their personal histories), or perpetrators (most of whom have remained silent, in the aftermath of their crimes) too often leads to misguided projects that delegitimize the voices of the living and rebury the voices of the dead . . . For too many American poets, this murky picture of the actual presents them with no incontestable reason to hold back from imagining the 'unimaginable,' to resist speaking as Hitler or revealing a possible, yet false, death for Anne Frank. In a world in which the Holocaust itself has repeatedly been called into question [and] in which a literary fraud can pass as a stand-in for the real, as if the real wasn't actual, wrenching, haunting, or persuasive enough, it seems essential that we honor the genuine article, authentic voice."

While I concur that inventing a deceptive account of Anne Frank's death seemingly serves no constructive purpose, and although I've rarely attempted to depict the thoughts or words of a real person ("Himmler at Auschwitz, 1942" being a rare exception), I take great umbrage with the notion that creating a composite character of a victim or survivor might somehow "trivialize" the experience of an actual victim or survivor.

In fact, I feel that placing such constraints upon one's own writing (or that of others) is tantamount to stifling the poet's voice altogether — censorship. I agree that survivors' testimonies are essential, whether in prose or verse, yet I know that allowing only those who experienced the camps to write about the experience will eventually shut out the rest of the world, forcing that piece of history to disappear, quietly, with the last survivor.

CF: As publisher of the revised, second edition of Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, you know I agree that poets who are not survivors of the camps must feel free to write in response to the Holocaust. That’s why my anthology foregrounds the work of more than two hundred poets, most of whom were not in Auschwitz or the thousands of other camps the Nazis and their collaborators established as short- or long-term holding pens for their victims. I also understand that there are shades of difference in the way each poet responds to the Holocaust and accept that there is no single path that is the correct one. Still, I regret the lack of a frame in some of the Holocaust poems you write. An epigraph to a poem like “Under the Circumstances” or a brief preface to a booklength volume like Rabbi Auschwitz could easily, and succinctly, make clear that the stories you have been inventing for us are not verifiable slices of history but are passionate attempts to awaken your readers and to enlighten them regarding the fate of Jews before, during, and after, the Shoah.

But please continue. I sense that you have more to say about your unapologetic, even insistent, use of “imaginary” and “composite” characters and about what irks you in the statements of critics.

LDB: What I find particularly disconcerting are the three words I've encountered, time and again, in deliberations over writing first-person verse about the Holocaust: "irreverence," "marginalization," and "exploitation."

Countering the perception of "irreverence," I would argue that a carefully conceived character (whether wholly invented or a subtle composite), speaking within his or her own present-tense realm, might actually strike a more immediate chord with the reader, thus potentially eliciting a deeper response than a third-person narrator ever could. I stand firm in my belief that my fictional Holocaust pieces (first-, second-, and third-person alike), as well as my many nonfictional, non-character-driven pieces, have the same purpose: they're meant to awaken the audience to a wider awareness, promote respect for those who suffered the atrocities, and spark deeper contemplation and thoughtful dialogue on a subject already too far removed from the public at large.

Similarly, "marginalization" implies that opening the topic up, to a substantially broader range of writers, somehow undercuts the authenticity of victims' and survivors' gut-wrenching personal experiences. To me, the reverse applies: the more voices that bring the subject to palpable, visceral life, the longer it will remain in the spirits and souls of the audience. And to silence the pens and tongues of those who did not witness the atrocities face to face, permitting only actual victims and survivors to create the art that will pass to future generations, is to create a hallowed but inaccessible oeuvre that, through circumscription, risks extinction.

In addressing the issue of "exploitation," it is perhaps best to draw a parallel to the realm of Renaissance art. Imagine the legacy, had the Vatican insisted that only men of the cloth — indeed only Adam and Eve or, to inflexibly hew to this notion, only God Himself — not sculptors and painters, be allowed to depict holy scenes from the Bible, in the Sistine Chapel and other houses of worship. It is known that such artists were often fulfilling commissions or obliging patrons, yet their works speak to their passion and dedication and to the selflessness of their labors, and, after so many centuries, still speak to us. When such art is encouraged, not suppressed, it fulfills its purpose, extending beyond often-sterile, -static historical chronicles, to become an emotive force that pushes the reader to think, feel, and learn about the experience, learn about himself, herself, in the deepest recesses of sensibility, psyche, soul.

Nonfictional Holocaust poems are frequently a mere regurgitation of the poet's own reading — delineating the war's progression or reciting various statistics about the victims. Charles Reznikoff's Holocaust, for example, which many regard as a sort of Holy Grail of Shoah poetry, seems to miss the point entirely. I can't help but question whether this book is really art at all, when Reznikoff is nothing more than a skillful editor, who brings a journalist's and lawyer's trained mind to the task of dramatizing dry testimony. His material is derived, entirely, from two major sources: Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals Under Control Council Law No. 10 and Verbatim Record of the Trial and Appeal of Adolf Eichmann: In the District Court of Jerusalem, Criminal Case No. 40/61: The Attorney-General of the Government of Israel v. Adolf, the son of Adolf Karl Eichmann. Minutes of Session No. 1-121; In the Supreme Court of Israel, Criminal Appeal No. 336/61. Minutes of Session No. 1-7 and Judgment. His "art" is one of appropriation, appropriation that's been rigorously edited. In doing this, Reznikoff makes a point of actually removing figurative language, finally excising whatever life there might be in the material presented by witnesses for the prosecution and the defense.

My Holocaust poetry requires, demands emotion, imaginary connection with existence at the edge of the precipice. My art asks, of me, full creative immersion. What I hope to accomplish when an idea for a new Holocaust poem overtakes me is nothing short of shaping, fleshing out, a dominant character who will, in all respects, be believable, one who achieves verisimilitude and radiates a sense that he is three dimensional, exists in time and space, is real. What I mean by "real" is that he casts a shadow, persuades the reader that his hopes and sorrows, his actions and words, are genuine, palpable, that they lift off of the page and enter the here and now.

To do this, I have to enter into the character's psyche, move with him, become one with his troubles, fears, that which he suffers at the hands of whatever it is that fate has in mind, for him — death, escape, assimilation, suicide, death in life. And I always know when I'm succeeding at portraying my characters authentically, because they communicate with me, tell me so. Almost always, I so identify with these people who populate my Holocaust poems, be they in ghettoes, shtetls, concentration or death camps, that I actually find myself weeping, suffering their suffering. They become part of who I'm becoming. It's when I feel this way that I know I've succeeded.

I still remember that first day of June 1990, when I wrote a poem called "Grodsky the Cobbler."

I was driving through a section of St. Louis known as the Delmar Loop, an area that, during the twenties through the sixties, was predominantly Jewish. I imagined an old man in a decrepit shoe-repair shop, in that neighborhood. I was so taken by this ghost, that I parked on a side street and began scribbling ideas and images of the man, for the walls of a poem into which I could insert him, as though my poem were his shop. And I borrowed, from myself, this man's name, simply changing the first letter of my surname. The poem ended up in Gestapo Crows.

Grodsky the Cobbler

Near the Delmar Loop in St. Louis
(No one knows for sure
In which tenement he dwells),
There lives and dies daily
A Jewish cobbler,
Who bears just above his bony wrist
Greenish-blue Auschwitz numerals
Obscenely tattooed to his skin
Like an oozing cicatrix,
Shapes crazily misaligned
Like figures floating in alphabet soup.

By trade a shoe repairer,
Anachronous, obsolete,
He still waits — sometimes all day
Without one person in need of his services —
To ply his skills despite near blindness,
Enfeeblement. An octogenarian
Who has no business doing business,
He yet paces sidewalks and crosses streets
As if back in Bremerhaven
Instead of persisting in this American ghetto
Inhabited by blacks, college students, and the elderly,

Where thirty years earlier
The city's most esteemed "kikes" resided —
University professors, symphony musicians,
Bankers, merchants, attorneys, surgeons,
The cream of Midwestern Jewry,
Who, not to their collective face
But always behind their back, were reviled,
Their display windows cracked, cemeteries desecrated —
Spurned because of their learning,
Fenced off by their affluence,
And, finally, betrayed by their success.

Half a century later, lapsing from consciousness,
This ash of a man stoops over his bench,
Apron strings cinching his waist
To keep his pants from falling to his shoes,
Shoes he's mended so many times
Their original German leather no longer exists,
Nor do their soles remember the Vaterland's cobblestones,
Which wore them smooth as he fled,
His possessions possessed,
Shoes he maintains, nonetheless,
In case he needs to make another hasty escape.

Not long after this poem was first published, in the St. Louis Jewish Light, in 1991 (before it appeared in Gestapo Crows, a year later), a number of people approached me, saying that they'd read my poem about the shoe repairman whose shop is in the Loop and that they were astonished at how perfectly I'd captured him. They asked me how I knew him. When I told them I had no idea there was a cobbler in the Loop, they were even more amazed.

I've given more than a few poetry readings to audiences made up, almost exclusively, of camp survivors, and with few exceptions, they've greeted me, after my readings, tearfully, thanking me for sharing moving depictions of people they recognized, from their own histories. This kind of validation has encouraged me to continue developing character-driven Holocaust poems that I always hope will connect the reader to a time that's fast receding into the forgetfulness of history.

I hope to reach my audience on a much more direct and personal level, documenting not fact after fact, from some pat rubric or book or oral testimony, but universal truths, leaving the role of historian to Saul Friedlander and Martin Gilbert, and the role of social psychologist to Raul Hilberg and Lawrence L. Langer, while confirming William Faulkner's take, from The Town, that "poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth."

I believe this idea is reflected in May Sarton's endorsement of Falling from Heaven: "Perhaps for the first time we see creation outside actual facts making its way through deep layers of the psyche as the Holocaust has done over the years." Of Gestapo Crows, Karl Shapiro writes, "Almost unbearably graphic — how can it be otherwise? — and yet imaginative, outraged and remarkably personal, these poems exemplify the contagion of the horror which more than any other series of events, mars the name of the Twentieth Century." Elie Wiesel echoes this sentiment when he writes, about Gestapo Crows: "One cannot but respond with deep emotion and affection to the anguish and pain one finds in your poems. Granted, words are often unable to express the ineffable; but isn't poetry the art of transcending words?" I truly believe that Elie wouldn't have said this if he'd sensed there was anything inauthentic or inappropriate about my poems, the slightest trace of exploitation that might shame or defile those who suffered the awful horrors of the Nazi scourge.

The biggest challenge, now, for me, is finding new ways of expressing the ineffable, by imagining the unimaginable. I tremble when I think that I might have to follow anyone's rules regarding what I can write about and how I should go about doing so. I am, in no way, defiling the privacy, the memory, or the sanctity — the humanity — of those who can no longer speak for themselves or those who survived but can't or won't speak for themselves. Without artists who develop the courage to "trespass" on "sacred ground," the history of the Holocaust would become nothing but stacks of shoes, piles of eyeglasses, photos of naked corpses in mass graves, rows of ovens and gas chambers, perimeters of electrified barbwire fences — a litany of clichés devoid of the palpitant heart.

CF: Thank you for this eloquent defense of your “invented” and “composite” characters and the very powerful poems they inhabit. Your arguments are strong ones, and I want to emphasize that, with rare exceptions, I applaud the poems your anger, your pain, your memory, and your potent imagination have driven you to write.

__________________

Louis Daniel Brodsky (b. 1941) has written sixty-four volumes of poetry, including the five-volume Shadow War: A Poetic Chronicle of September 11 and Beyond. You Can’t Go Back, Exactly won the Center for Great Lakes Culture's (Michigan State University) 2004 best book of poetry award. He has also authored fourteen volumes of fiction and coauthored eight books on William Faulkner.

The link for Time Being Books is http://www.timebeingbooks.com/. Louis Daniel Brodsky’s website is www.louisdanielbrodsky.com.

An Interview with Louis Daniel Brodsky: Part I

2010-03-01T10:20:00.014-05:00

By Charles Fishman:

Louis Daniel Brodsky is the publisher of Time Being Books in St. Louis and a gifted and driven poet who produces volumes of his own poetry with astonishing regularity. I have read at least six collections of his poetry and recently tore through Rabbi Auschwitz, released earlier this month, and The Swastika Clock, which is scheduled for 2011 publication. Many of the poems in these two outstanding collections are marked by originality and power, and I have read them many times. I should also mention that “L.D.” brought out my 2006 collection, Chopin’s Piano, and the second (and extensively revised) edition of Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust (2007). It should be no secret, then, that I consider his work, both as a small press publisher and as a poet, exceptional and believe it merits our close attention. It was partly for this reason that I decided to conduct an interview with him, but it is also true that I wanted to learn why this amazingly productive literary man has written so many poems about the Holocaust and why he often uses wholly imagined and “composite characters,” as he calls them, when writing poems that relate to the Shoah.

The interview was conducted during January and February 2010. This is the first of two installments; the second will be posted later this month.

CF: Did you begin to write poetry because you wanted to express your feelings about living as a Jew in the aftermath of the Holocaust?

LDB: No. In fact, all through high school, back in the fifties, and beyond the mid-sixties, spanning my graduate-school years, when I began my writing career, I wasn't cognizant of the Holocaust. No one spoke of it, in my teenage years especially. It was as though the very word "Holocaust" was taboo, a stigma, a subject one didn't mention anymore than Orthodox Jews spoke the word "God." I had no training in Holocaust literature. There wasn't very much of it, back then. Since no one in my family was affected by the Holocaust, I didn't even have the secondhand perspective that heritage provides — stories handed down, whispered with lamentation. I was passionately interested in Spanish and English and American literature. In the month before I graduated Yale, in 1963, I wrote my first two poems and sensed, then, if inchoately, that I wanted to be a writer who would write about everything, spend the rest of my life composing poems that would connect me to the world beyond myself, worlds waiting to be, waiting for me to discover and expose them, breathe life into them. One such world would be Europe, Nazi Germany, 1933-1945.

CF: It’s a little surprising that you are not a Holocaust survivor or a relative of a survivor, yet you have probably written more poems about the Holocaust than any other American poet. In a recent email, you stated the following: "I've written, since 1967, 322 of them. Would that I had written not one. But such is not the terribly tormented truth." What is it that drives you to continue wrestling with the Shoah in your poetry?

LDB: What it is that drives me is a lingering self-consciousness that began in fifth grade, when my parents sent me to what was considered the finest private boys' school in the city, St. Louis Country Day School, whose enrollment was overwhelmingly white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant, a school that had an unwritten quota of 10 percent Jews, 5 percent Catholics, no blacks. I felt very excluded from social events, felt extremely uncomfortable attending chapel services, every morning, before class. I was required to sing hymns to Jesus Christ and listen to theological speakers. All of it reminded me that my fellow students went to church, every Sunday. Over the eight years I spent there, I always felt ostracized. I was never invited to the gentile parties and dances, couldn't take spring-break trips to Fort Lauderdale, because Jews were off limits there — another of those unwritten quotas. I always sensed that I was an outsider, a pariah, decidedly second-class, no matter my distinguished athletic and scholastic accomplishments.

One incident, in particular, from that time, yet lingers as a painful reminder of just how estranged I felt from Country Day's class of '59. During the final months of my senior year, I and three of my classmates learned that we'd been accepted into Yale's class of 1963. Having never been away from home, by myself, other than for my annual eight weeks at summer camp, I was extremely relieved when the four of us decided to sign up to room together. Toward the end of the summer, just weeks prior to our leaving for New Haven, I was casually informed, by one of the three, that a fourth classmate, whose wealthy father had bought him in to Yale, was going to room with them, instead. It was apparent to me that they wanted to maintain their WASP integrity. Suddenly, I found myself not only persona non grata but cast adrift. At that point, I was more terrified than angry. While flying to New York, then taking the train to New Haven, I'd never felt lonelier.

But something happened, then. My fear transformed into anger, anger to outrage, outrage to an overwhelming sense of purpose. I needed to punish those fellows, and the only way I had for doing so was to try to best them in athletics and scholastics, to which end I devoted myself, with almost maniacal focus. That year, I was first-string left fullback on the freshman soccer team and earned my numerals. Also, I stroked the freshman heavyweight crew. At season's end, I was given the Coach's Cup, for being the best oarsman, and, again, got my numerals. Two of those four classmates, on the other hand, who tried out for the freshman football team (they were outstanding players at Country Day — better than I, by far), ended up being cut. All four of them had very inferior grade-point averages, that year, but I made the dean's list, both semesters.

What I learned, that first year, was that the bigotry those four exhibited went far beyond them. Yale was nothing other than a more sophisticated extension of St. Louis Country Day School, an even more elitist confederation of entitled prep-school legacies and jocks. Because Yale was larger, less personal, the anti-Semitism didn't seem as noticeable, flagrant. Yet it was a given that I would never be tapped for Skull & Bones.

In hindsight, what I can so clearly see is that for my parents to be able to send their firstborn child, their oldest son, to two such prestigious schools was the overt sign that they had arrived, no matter that both schools were Protestant bastions of blue-blood, old-money, patrician society.

After all, my great-grandfather, Daniel Brodsky, had begun, in the late 1870s, hawking hand-me-downs, yet succeeded, by the end of his life, in acquiring some modest real estate, and seeing to it that my grandfather, my namesake, Louis Daniel, had enough wherewithal to start Nelson Trouser Co., a modest enterprise with a decidedly non-Jewish-sounding name, so that, in his time, his son, my father, Saul, could do his apprenticeship before his father suffered bankruptcy, two years before the Great Depression, only to have my dad resurrect the company as Biltwell Company Manufacturers, a maker of men's jodhpurs and dress slacks, which he'd bring to the pinnacle of success, in the post-World War II years. By the mid-fifties, my father would become a self-made millionaire, albeit with too many memories of having been discriminated against repeatedly, told "Jews aren't welcome here," when he'd ply the highways, with his sample garments stuffed into bulging black cases.

I suppose the humiliations from those early days of working with his father (and, later, driving a five-state sales circuit and nurturing my broken grandfather, by making a place for him, in his new business, until the day, in 1937, when Louis Daniel — Lou — died of a heart attack, out on the sidewalk, smoking his signature meerschaum pipe, in front of my dad's office, at 1128 Washington Avenue) were why Saul would never share, with me, any of his deeply suppressed memories of his youth, almost never disclose why he'd straightened his curly hair, why, in his affluent years, he'd personally hand out Christmas gifts to the entire St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, with each officer coming into his '50s-modern headquarters, still at 1128 Washington Avenue, one by one, to choose between a ham or a turkey, a scene that I, at six, eight, ten, could only marvel at; after all, that was my three-piece-suited dad those fully uniformed, black-booted, square-chinned motorcycle, horse, and street cops thanked profusely. Being extremely taciturn with me, he never elaborated on all the Jew-hating entrepreneurs in the small towns of the Illinois prairie, the Jew-baiting backwashes of Arkansas, Tennessee, and northern Mississippi, the plains ranging just beyond Missouri, into Kansas and Oklahoma, all of whom dismissed him before he could get two steps past their polished-brass front-door step plate.

Now, I certainly see it — why he never would tell me about his past. He was still smarting, still ashamed, still scarred despite his ultimate wealth.

In fact, after all these years, I vividly remember a scene in which my father and I, in early 1980, were sitting in the breakfast room of his house. I was so excited to show him the galley proofs of two of my poems, "Résumé of a Scrapegoat" and "Between Connections," which were scheduled to appear in the December issue of the Southern Review. My pride was twofold: first, that my work was appearing in such a prestigious literary magazine; second, that the magazine's editor, Lewis P. Simpson, had responded with such enthusiasm to the poems' subject matter — my Jewish traveling salesman, Willy Sypher, peddling his garments through the Midwest and the Mid-South, having to confront the bigotry of small-town U.S.A. When I handed the proofs to my father and watched his eyes skitter back and forth, over the pages, I was anticipating his validation. Instead, he looked up, bewildered, scowling, and remonstrated, "You're not going to publish these, are you?" My heart sank. Suddenly, it came rushing up to me: he was shocked, appalled, that I would expose my Judaism to public scrutiny, make myself vulnerable, open to ridicule, castigation — this when he was in his financially-secure early seventies and had no need to worry about exposing himself as a Jew and, thus, risking his career. I still recall becoming defensive, rebuking him for his still feeling the need to hide his identity. I slunk out of his house, disappointed, dejected, humiliated.

Yet his reaction should probably not have come as such a surprise to me, since it was, in fact, commensurate with the protective behavior he'd exhibited toward me throughout my youth. His impulse had always been to spare me the corrosive anti-Semitism that had dogged him from his teens well into his fifties, little realizing that his newly established fortune would make it all the easier for me to discover the true nature of racial discrimination, when he thrust me right into the lion's den — a ten-year-old kid encountering, for the first time, in Class 8 (fifth grade), at St. Louis Country Day School, the inculcated disdain of gentiles threatened by the gradual incursion of nouveau-riche Jews into their long-established social and mercantile corridors.

By the time I entered the graduate English program at Washington University, in St. Louis, in 1963, I'd developed a justified sensitivity to intolerance, bigotry, hypocrisy of the religious, more than the political, variety. But not until 1967 did I write my very first Holocaust poem, to my great surprise: "Valediction Forbidding Despair." It erupted from my guts more than from my intellect, from a nauseating, appalling sense of disgust, on having finished reading Jean-François Steiner's book Treblinka, which was prepublished, in English, translated from the French, in two successive issues of Look magazine and was truly my first exposure to the ghastly, atrocious events of the Shoah.

Valediction Forbidding Despair

This summer is Treblinka;
Its regimental months
Are maws that caress us
In bloodless custody.

Victims, like crickets
Scratching dryness from limbs,
Chant hymns from lips
Which shape the air
With unfinished kisses.
Musicians and carpenters
Guard darker silences
Of those who crowd naked
In boxcars and chambers
Where perfumed night descends.
Memories race down chutes
To steaming graves
Obsequious few ply with balm.

Yet
Minds are excused from spirit.
The end obliterates nothing
But flesh
And the temporary wish
To rest.

This poem shocked and horrified me. It also released a terrible, gnawing sense of shame and guilt. And though I couldn't have known it then, it held the seeds of what would blossom into a very, very ugly and poisonous plant. I didn't know I had such angst in me, such rage, such hatred toward what and who it was I didn't even understand at that point. Nor did I know that I wouldn't write another Holocaust poem until 1974. All I knew was that I couldn't believe people could possibly treat other people with such brutality, such merciless murderousness.

By then, I had decided against teaching, as a profession, and was living with my wife and first child, in a small mid-Missouri town that seemed to boast one Jew: me. In the end of July 1974, on a trip I made to a factory that was part of Biltwell Co., Inc. (my father's company, for which I now worked), as I focused on all the women at their sewing machines, I began to imagine my family heritage, those ragmen from a past my father never talked to me about, a past that played itself out in Ukraine, from which my great-grandfather, Daniel, and great-grandmother, Anne, emigrated, in 1875, before arriving in New York, then St. Louis, to begin life anew, as less-than-modest merchants who bought, for pennies, garments needing to be repaired and washed, which they did, before putting them up for resale, for nickels, dimes, quarters, in an outdoor stall. That night, I wrote a breakthrough poem, one that I couldn't know would open up a whole vista into my heritage, albeit one I'd mainly have to invent out of tatters and strands and threads of my imagination: "Breaking Stallions."

Breaking Stallions

I ride naked
Atop the sweaty genome of chromosomes
Bucking dizzily in a corral
Where generations of my forebears
Have been thrown
And broken their spines in the dust.

Ancient eyes are on my performance,
As I try to break the leaping creature
Trapped in its frenzied fear
Of not being able to unseat me.
We hang as one on the hot air,
Each obsessed with maintaining stability

And prevailing in the face of a history
Racially oppressed for ages.
Damn the whiskered ragmen
Who've tracked me to this time!
Goddamn them for reminding me
Of the proud and threadbare tailors

Who rose from crude peasant stock
Ravaged in the Steppes beyond Kiev!
Why, for so long, have I eluded
Their hereditary nets and thrived
In an academic nether world,
Only to be dragged back

And forced into a raw saddle
Atop survival's frothing wild stallion?
I reel in a drunken paraplegia.
My feet rip loose from the stirrups.
Caught in the vortex of old dust
Blocking my nostrils and throat,

The stench of my flowing blood
And the shame locked in my brain
Can't mistake the truth of my defeat
Or negotiate another compromise
With genes that have permanently hurled me
Into a factory of trouser-making machines.

This poem had such a transformational effect on me because it made me aware of my ancestry, something I hadn't ever been exposed to, growing up.

A month before I composed "Breaking Stallions," I experienced an anomaly, in the form of a poem called "Panning for Gold." Most likely mentally cued to such atrocities, from having read Steiner's book, I must have read an article about the gold fillings Nazis extracted from Jewish corpses and found it so grotesque that I had no choice but to write about it. That this poem virtually coincided with "Breaking Stallions" wasn't serendipitous.

Panning for Gold

In among the ash heaps,
Prospectors haggle over the gold teeth.
Each keeps a daily assay
Of nuggets he retrieves: caps and inlays
Once securely positioned
In upper-class European circles
Of smartly dressed patronesses of the arts,
Sophisticated financiers, politicians,

Concert pianists, and rabbis
Named Jacobs, Weinstein, Prinzmetal,
Schwartzkopf, Kalish, Abrams,
Rabinovitz, and Glazer.
Now, forty-three years later,
Bounty hunters shake their sieves
At Auschwitz, Bełżec, Chełmno;
Their death rattles shatter the silence
With white noise so loud
It would wake the dead were any still alive.

As the teeth are brought to auction,
Bidders grow restless; they get frenzied,
Aggressive, hostile, genocidal.
Their ear-to-ear sneers
Expose myriad gold-filled cavities,
Intricate bridges and plates.
Dealers trip over numb tongues,
Bite lips to bleeding,
Quixotically jumping their own bids
To insure they secure the lot.
After all, they have clients worldwide
Whose collections are complete . . .
Except for the extremely precious teeth.

Something about this poem, not only the gruesome idea of auctioning the teeth but the grisly irony of the last three lines, brought my intellect to its knees.

A month later, I wrote a poem called "Grandfather," which incorporated both my family heritage and the Holocaust.

Grandfather

Damn it. Goddamnit.
That dear man is dying of cancer.
He refuses to eat or be fed intravenously,
Desires to die at home in bed, desires
To die,
and here I am lamenting his loss
As though I know him for the close friend
I wish he had become
rather than the shadow
Of a vague acquaintanceship we made
On occasional High Holy Days and Friday nights.
We're the keepers of their ashes,
those gone souls
Devastated by wars among their leaders,
People designated by scrolls on their doorposts
And frontlets between their frightened eyes
to be spared famines and blights on Pharaoh
For the cyanide.
We're their keepers
In spirit, self-appointed, properly anointed
With a seminal heritage we share
through ancient marriages.
Our births, though fifty-five years apart,
Are marked by a tribal family name
Sealed in common ceremony.
That dying man,
With whom I tried to reason only once
Concerning the meaning of a living religion,
Is reason enough for my lamentation:
His loss is mine;
his departing shadow
Will deprive me of that constant reminder
That all those gone people
rely on me
To substantiate the decency of their existence.

That was in August 1974. It would take me another sixteen months before the Holocaust poem "Dreamscape with Three Crows" would be written. I must have needed that hiatus, interlude, moratorium, to allow my mind to assimilate these two deep, vast veins, which would begin to manifest themselves in obsessions that, to this day, thirty-five years later, continue to trouble and anger and sadden me enough, beg me, exhort me, force me, to give them life, in the form of Holocaust poems.

When I reread "Grandfather," today, I realize that what's inherent in this poem from so long ago is the core of that which still motivates me to write Holocaust poems. I feel that I'm the keeper of my people's ashes, a keeper in spirit, a self-appointed scribe, sofer, and that it's my responsibility, my mandate, my mission never to lose touch with them. I'm best able to do so when I'm deeply immersed in the Shoah, through poetry.

CF: Was Falling from Heaven: Holocaust Poems by a Jew and a Gentile (Time Being Books, 1990), the collection of poems you collaborated on with William Heyen, the first book of poems on the Holocaust that you published?

LDB: No. My first book was The Thorough Earth (Timeless Press, 1989), and it came about as follows.

In June 1976, I composed another poem, "Résumé of a Scrapegoat," that would significantly jolt my self-awareness. It was a full-fledged portrayal of me as a ragman/road peddler and the victim of age-old Jewish oppression. The nameless character is the creative, imaginative epitome, manifestation of what I'd experienced in my very narrow and highly insular life, to that point. The poem captures the essence of the self-conscious me in disguise. I was that scrapegoat — the lowliest of the goats, the one who "scrapes" the bottom of the barrel, the one who was beginning to take the shape of the downtrodden traveling salesman I'd soon name Willy Sypher, who'd become the embodiment of, the synecdoche for, the victims of Pharaohs, Nebuchadnezzars, Herods, Hitlers, the sad, lonely, proud, indefatigable soul I'd eventually immortalize in a book devoted to his daily travails and tribulations, his lifetime of disappointments and small successes, a book of poems very close to my heart, Peddler on the Road: Days in the Life of Willy Sypher (Time Being Books, 2005). Willy is a Jewish schlepper who represents, for me, not only my great-grandfather and father, not only their forebears from the shtetls of Eastern Europe, not only their tribal sand-dwelling ancestors of the Abramic and Mosaical days in the Biblical Fertile Crescent, Mesopotamia, but me, as well.

Résumé of a Scrapegoat

Every highway I drive,
With station wagon straining to contain goods
Brought up out of steerage,
Is Hester Street,

And I'm the displaced waif
A hundred ancient diasporas left behind
To hawk rags and stitched shit
Made in sweltering lofts and dank basements.

I'm the entremanure of flawed raiment,
Remainders dead as flounder
Stacked flat on shelves
Or hanging in static masses from racks

The lowest class capitalist,
Searching low and lower for newer Laputas
In whose depraved precincts
I might display my thieves' market.

I'm the wide-smiling, gold-filled mouth,
The glistening, beady eye,
The hooknosed, seven-foot shadow
That demonizes Teutonic children's dreams,

The eternal, stereotypical victim
Hanging by my three pawned balls
Outside the emporium with shattered plate glass,
Cluttered with xenophobic bigotries.

I'm the scrapegoat for last season's guilt,
Soiled hopes, dreams with tiny holes,
Spirits returned for overlooked defects,
Mismatched leisure lifestyles,

The robber baron impeding competition
By fixing prices on perfects
I label "Irregular" and flawed garments
I advertise as "Grade A" merchandise.

History's kiss has touched my lips
With the viper's flicking tongue,
Singled me out from the crowd
To toil in dirty gutters and alleys

With cunning and guile, quietly,
By the sweat of my Semitic brow,
While crawling naked on my scaly belly
To avoid being swastikaed by sign crews

Gluing posters, on every available board,
With news of another outlet-store
Or wholesale-chain opening
In a strip mall or shopping center. Amen.

Shit! I'd give my eyetooth
Just to be the solid-gold watch
Tucked neatly in Pierpont Morgan's
Well-stretched Protestant vest pocket,

Instead of a thimble-fingered tailor
Drawing chalk lines and pinning seams
Across the whim of every fat ass
Able to afford his own graded patterns.

Yet history's also nourished me
With fruits from the tree of life eternal.
I've peddled myself from one generation
To the next, a perpetual hand-me-down,

Promoting my own brand of survival
At cut-rate prices, offering my soul,
On a moment's notice, to anyone
Who'd wear robes like those I sewed for Moses.

In October 1982, I read a review of a book, published in England, that piqued me in a very strange way, a volume by Australian writer Thomas Kenneally, Schindler's Ark. I bought the book and read it in two sleepless nights in that small Missouri town, where, as a father of two children, by then, I was working in Biltwell's Farmington factory. As had been the case with Steiner's Treblinka, I was stupefied, appalled. I felt personally degraded. I reread the book, a few months later, and in April 1983, I composed "Cracow Now," a poem in which I staked claim to my role as poet-in-residence for my people, a "messenger for the dispossessed."

Cracow Now

Defeated, exiled, indefensibly committed,
Those dispensable souls
Relegated to the ghetto in Cracow:
Bankers, Talmudic scholars, grocers, musicians,
Strict, disciplined family men,
Whose reverential Leahs, Rachels, Miriams
Bore, in pride, brilliant children —
Ghosts now, still guiding wheelbarrows,
Filled with pillows and sheets,
From cultured salons, in family estates,
To ventilator shafts, attics,
And dead air-space between rooms
In hovels cluttering memory's tear ducts.

The metamorphosis of three centuries,
Accomplished in months: Jew to lice to typhus.
Then the Madagascar Plan.
In the end, only Hitler's witless tactics

(Matching his storm troops
Against Russia's forces of winter)
Could suspend the Final Solution,
For tribes confined to greenhouses
Producing a variety of Venus's-flytraps so profuse
Neither Linnaeus nor Darwin
Could have classified them:
Auschwitz, Treblinka, Bełżec,
Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibor.

Just writing their bleak syllables chokes me.
Each is a puff of black smoke
Escaping crematory stacks
Punctuating skylines of my verse,
Each a caesura too frequently breathed.
This morning, four decades downwind,
The measures of my sanity dwindle.
I, too, as messenger for the dispossessed,
Wearing a "J" on my brain-band,
Push all my earthly belongings — paltry words —
In a rickety wheelbarrow, across the years,
Toward precarious lodging
In the ghettos of your unsuspecting ears.

Not until May 1986 did I actually group some of what I considered my most powerful Holocaust poems together, in a pamphlet called "Selections from the Ash Keeper's Everlasting Passion Week." The term "ash keeper" had stuck with me, from 1974's poem "Grandfather," in which I determined that my grandfather, whom I didn't really know, and I would be "the keepers of their ashes," those of our agelessly persecuted people. This collection would be the germ for the conception of my first book of Holocaust poems, titled The Thorough Earth, which was published by Timeless Press, in August 1989.

Regarding this first of my nine completed volumes of poetry about the Holocaust, Lewis P. Simpson wrote:

No achievement in his poetic career exceeds Louis Daniel Brodsky's creation, a Jewish travelling salesman for a Midwestern manufacturer of men's clothing, who, in an earlier version of his life, “sewed and sold to Abraham and Moses.” Juxtaposing a series of poems about Willy's career and a series of poems reflecting on the Nazi Holocaust, Brodsky projects a vision of Jewish history in The Thorough Earth that includes in its range the comic compulsiveness of Willy's quest for sales and the unspeakable horror of the death camps. No poet at work today has a more vividly ironic sense of history combined with a more passionate regard for the infinite worth of the experience of being alive.

__________________

Louis Daniel Brodsky, born in 1941, has written sixty-four volumes of poetry, including the five-volume Shadow War: A Poetic Chronicle of September 11 and Beyond. You Can’t Go Back, Exactly won the Center for Great Lakes Culture's (Michigan State University) 2004 best book of poetry award. He has also authored fourteen volumes of fiction and coauthored eight books on William Faulkner.

The link for Time Being Books is http://www.timebeingbooks.com/. Louis Daniel Brodsky’s website is http://www.louisdanielbrodsky.com.

The second part of this interview with Louis Daniel Brodsky will appear on Writing the Holocaust later this month.

Abraham Sutzkever, 96, Jewish Poet and Partisan, Dies

2010-01-25T00:14:00.003-05:00

The following article by Joesph Berger appeared in the New York Times:

Abraham Sutzkever, one of the great Yiddish poets of his generation who evoked the nightmare of the Holocaust with images of a wagonload of worn shoes and the haunting silence of a sky of white stars, died Wednesday in Tel Aviv. He was 96.

His daughter Mira Sutzkever confirmed his death.

“In the postwar world, he was the most important Jewish poet and a world class poet in general,” said Dr. Paul Glasser, associate dean of the Max Weinreich Center for Advanced Jewish Studies at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Manhattan. “People thought he should have gotten the Nobel Prize, but now he won’t.”

Mr. Sutzkever had helped rescue YIVO manuscripts and other treasures from the Nazis when they occupied the Lithuanian city of Vilna.

Writing poetry helped Mr. Sutzkever survive a war in which he lost his mother and an infant son as well as the Jewish soul of his beloved city of Vilna, which prided itself as the Jerusalem of Lithuania for its fiercely cultivated intellectualism.

There, with his sometimes flint-hard, sometimes lyrical voice, he found an audience as a member of a renowned group of Yiddish artists and writers, Yung Vilne, which included Chaim Grade, Shmerke Kaczerginski and Leyzer Volf.

That golden age came to an end in June 1941, when the Nazis invaded the city and eventually herded its 60,000 Jews — one-third of its population — into a ghetto as the first step toward mass killings in giant pits and deportations to concentration camps.

Mr. Sutzkever, a wiry man with an impish sense of humor and a full-throated appetite for living, smuggled arms into the ghetto. When he was assigned by the Nazis to round up books that would be sent to Frankfurt for an ominously named Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question, he and other intellectuals in a so-called Paper Brigade concealed precious books and art works, including a diary by Theodor Herzl and drawings by Chagall, in building cavities and crannies.

He helped unearth many of them when he briefly returned to Vilna after the war, and those treasures wound up in YIVO’s home in exile in Manhattan.

All that time he composed poems, writing, he once said, while crawling through sewers and even while hiding in a coffin.

“If I didn’t write, I wouldn’t live,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 1985 while reminiscing over a glass of French cognac. “When I was in the Vilna ghetto, I believed, as an observant Jew believes in the Messiah, that as long as I was writing, was able to be a poet, I would have a weapon against death.”

In a 1942 poem called “My Mother,” he wrote of a dead mother who tells her son:

If you remain

I will still be alive

as the pit of the plum

contains in itself the tree

the nest and the bird

and all else besides.

His poem about a sky filled with white stars was put to a plaintive melody and became a classic of Yiddish song — “Unter Dayne Vayse Shtern” (“Beneath the Whiteness of Your Stars”).

Mr. Sutzkever and his wife, Freydke, fled the ghetto with a group of partisans and were airlifted to Moscow, where their daughter Rina was born. The family made its way to Poland and Paris and finally to the British mandate of Palestine, where they remained after independence in 1948.

In Israel, where modern Hebrew was the muscular language, he devoted himself to keeping Yiddish alive even as the number of speakers diminished year after year. He founded and edited Israel’s leading Yiddish literary journal, Di Goldene Keyt (The Golden Chain), until it stopped publishing in 1995. And he continued to turn out Yiddish poetry, most notably “Lider fun Togbukh” (“Poems From a Diary 1974-1981”), which many regard as his masterpiece. In 1985, he was awarded the country’s most prestigious award, the Israel Prize.

Mr. Sutzkever’s wife died seven years ago. In addition to his daughters Mira and Rina Sutzkever Kalderon, he is survived by two grandchildren.

Abraham Sutzkever was born in 1913 in Smargon, a small industrial city southwest of Vilna in today’s Belarus. With the outbreak of World War I, his parents fled to Siberia.

In 1921, after the death of his father, his mother resettled the family in Vilna, where Mr. Sutzkever attended Polish-Jewish schools, audited Polish literature classes at Vilna’s university and studied Yiddish literature with the great linguist Max Weinreich. His debut on the Vilna cultural scene was notable for his rejection of politically themed poems for ones that emphasized wordplay and experiments with sound and rhythm.

Many readers remember him most, however, for poems that capture the pathos of what he and other Jews experienced in the war, like the verses he wrote in 1942 in “A Vogn Shikh” (“A Wagon of Shoes”), about a wagon clattering through Vilna’s alleys filled with a heap of “throbbing shoes.”

The poet asks:

Tell me the truth, oh, shoes,

Where disappeared the feet?

The feet of pumps so shoddy,

With buttondrops like dew —

Where is the little body?

Where is the woman, too?

All children’s shoes — but where

Are all the children’s feet?

Will Amazon.com Continue to Support Holocaust Denial?

2009-11-19T19:42:00.008-05:00

Charles Fishman sent the following article by Randall Bytwerk, Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at Calvin College, regarding the promotion of books denying the Holocaust at the Amazon.com site:

If one goes to amazon.com and searches for books promoting Holocaust denial, most of them have 5-star reviews at the top. How has that happened? Amazon ranks reviews by how "helpful" or "unhelpful" customers rate them. Take Arthur Butz's The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. There are a total of 49 customer reviews. 17 are 5-star. 25 are 1-star. However, the top review (5-star) has been rated as helpful by 83 of 110 customers. One of the better 1-star reviews has 61 helpful ratings out of 105 total ratings, with the result that it is way down on the list. The consequence is that unsuspecting customers, seeing all those 5-star reviews at the top, may be inclined to think the book must be good.

What to do? First, one must be an amazon customer. If you are, there are two things to consider.

First, it would be good to have some strong reviews of the various Holocaust denial books. Quite a few of the 1-star reviews are filled with invective, which is not persuasive to many readers. Amazon allows one to post reviews under one's real name if one wishes, but since that opens one up to various unpleasant consequences, one can also use a different name.

Second, and easier, one can rate existing reviews as "helpful" or "unhelpful." That option is available at the end of each customer review. Most readers of this list will know the names to look for, but here is my list of leading "Revisionist" authors: Arthur Butz, Thomas Dalton, Germar Rudolf, Veronica Clark (a relative newcomer), and Carlo Mottogno. Others will probably suggest additions to this list.

I'd also appreciate help with a related book: Michael Ford's self-published translation of Mein Kampf. I don't think Ford himself is a neo-Nazi (although the promotional material for his book on amazon states: "decide for yourself if he was a mad-man or a genius," and it's clear that he doesn't think Hitler was a mad-man). Ford's translation is pretty bad (his previous books include how to avoid being scammed on eBay and how to find a job if you are a felon). However, some neo-Nazis have jumped to his defense, and have been going after me with some energy (look at the comments on reviews if you are curious). "Helpful" ratings of my review would be appreciated.

A hundred or so "unhelpful" ratings will drive most of these books into the amazon cellar.

-----

Professor Bytwerk is currently working on a website exploring Nazi Propoganda.

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If you're interested in finding out what you can do, drop Writing the Holocaust a note c/o of jzguzlowski (at) gmail.com (substitute @ for "at").

An Interview with Dr. Karen Shawn, co-editor of PRISM

2009-07-16T19:08:00.012-04:00

By Charles Fishman

I first became aware of Karen Shawn and PRISM: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Holocaust Educators when I read a notice about her new journal on the Association of Holocaust Organizations list in June 2008. I sent Dr. Shawn an email to see if she might be interested in adding me to the journal’s editorial board, which did not appear to include a poetry editor. She replied immediately and I was soon appointed to that position for the journal. In the 13 months Karen Shawn and I have been debating the virtues of one poem or another, I have always found her to be among the wisest and most fair-minded of editors . . . and also among the most persistent. She has watched over her new journal with the careful attention of a beekeeper or a cultivator of rare orchids. Consequently, the slow-to-arrive first issue — scheduled for release in September — should prove to be aesthetically, as well as intellectually, engaging: a vital new affirmation of the importance of Holocaust Education in a world that seems to have lost its ethical compass.

About two months ago, I decided to interview Dr. Shawn. I thought it would be helpful to followers of this blog to know something about her background and her reasons for bringing a new scholarly journal into the world.

CF: You are co-creator and co-editor of Prism. Can you tell us a little about the other editor?

KS: My co-editor is Dr. Jeffrey Glanz, Professor of Education at Yeshiva University’s Azrieli Graduate School of Jewish Education and Administration. He holds the Raine and Stanley Silverstein Chair in Professional Ethics and Values and is a specialist in the fields of curriculum and instruction and educational leadership.

CF: How do you and Jeffrey divide your responsibilities as editors of the journal?

KS: Dr. Glanz is the APA guru and the business person, as well as a reader, reviewer, and manuscript editor. Except in the case of poetry, I’m the person who makes contact with authors and reads and edits initial submissions; I edit the final manuscript, suggest the art and literature to be used and secure permissions; and I recommend the timetable for completing this work and organizing it. Together, Jeffrey and I read everything, edit everything, and plan the themes, design, layout, and publication dates.

CF: Is this sharing of obligations something each of you finds satisfying?

KS: We are happiest when we are working together!

CF: Was it you or Jeffrey who gave the journal its name?

KS: We thought of it more or less together; we were both searching for just the right word to crystallize and illustrate our pedagogical vision of offering readers a variety of viewpoints on the same theme or topic, and the word "prism," we felt, captured our concept beautifully and best.

CF: I realize that PRISM is a journal that has been designed to foster Holocaust education, but will it also have a political or religious dimension?

KS: No. Authors may, of course, choose to examine how the Holocaust is taught in Catholic vs. Jewish schools or discuss survivors’ religious beliefs after the Shoah; someone may analyze the American response to the Holocaust. That is the way politics and religion will be expressed.

CF: What is your background in Holocaust scholarship and teaching and what drew you to this field?

KS: I have been learning and teaching about this subject for 25 years, here and in Israel, where I studied at Yad Vashem, Beit Lohame HaGeta’ot (the Ghetto Fighters’ Museum), and Hebrew University. I taught the pedagogy of the Holocaust in the Yad Vashem Summer Study Fellowship Program for Educators from Abroad for 10 years and served as educational consultant to the American Friends of the Ghetto Fighters Museum for another decade. Survivors and the subject itself drew me, captured me, and continue to engage me on a daily basis.

CF: What were your goals in co-creating PRISM?

KS: One goal was to offer materials that allow and encourage a differentiated approach to Holocaust education; hence the poetry, art, and story amid the history and pedagogy. Another was to offer educators methods and materials that may help them identify and teach essential truths about this subject and examine, through a variety of lenses, its complex nature. Finally, we wanted to inspire and to reinforce the good work already being done in so many quarters of the educational community worldwide.

CF: Now that the editing of Issue #1 has been completed and Issue #2 is also in an advanced stage of development, are you confident that the journal will help you achieve those goals?

KS: We are, but of course we will be eager to hear readers’ responses.

CF: What changes or additions may be needed?

KS: We will probably need to include a “Letters” section.

CF: Please comment on the focus of the debut issue and on the thematic content of future issues that are currently planned.

KS: The debut issue, which is just about to go to press, examines the complex theme of trauma and resilience in children during the Shoah. We have expanded it to include what is called “secondary trauma,” that which occurs in those who are exposed over time to the trauma of others — people such as first responders, rape crisis counselors, and those who teach and learn about the Shoah for extended periods. Themes for future issues include the role of the bystander during the Shoah, the family unit during and after the Shoah, and heroism during the Shoah.

CF: What role do you see for poetry and other literary genres in this academic journal?

KS: Poetry will play a major role, as will art and story; these genres will allow teachers who are not historians to find a comfortable, fruitful, and legitimate way in to teaching the subject, a way that hopefully will lead to the necessary historical contextualization that other essays in our journal will help provide.

CF: Will the visual arts also have a distinctive presence in this journal?

KS: The premier issue includes color portraits of children painted during the Holocaust; art by a child of survivors; and examples of modern art as a reflection of the pervasive influence of the Holocaust on creative work done in its shadow.

CF: When do you expect the first few numbers of the journal to appear?

KS: We are planning publication for September 2009, April 2010, and January 2011; after that, we will see!

CF: Will PRISM have a web presence?

KS: Eventually!

CF: Can those interested in writing for the journal submit work for consideration?

KS: Writers should query first and include a brief bio.

CF: Is there anything you would like to add?

KS: Your work as our journal’s poetry editor has added to its power and its value, and we appreciate all that you contribute!

CF: Thank you for sharing your thoughts and feelings about this exciting new journal — and thanks, too, for the personal vote of confidence!

___________________________

Karen Shawn, Ph.D., is a former English teacher, director of Holocaust education, and middle school assistant principal. She is Visiting Associate Professor of Jewish Education at the Azrieli Graduate School of Jewish Education and Administration of Yeshiva University and Senior Fellow of Azrieli’s Institute–School Partnership.

With Dr. Jeffrey Glanz, she is co-editor of Azrieli’s publication PRISM: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Holocaust Educators. Dr. Shawn taught for 10 years at the Yad Vashem Summer Institute for Educators from Abroad and at the same time served as educational consultant for the American Friends of the Ghetto Fighters’ Museum. The founder of the Holocaust Educators’ Consortium, an international, interreligious Community of Practice, she has written extensively on Holocaust education.

Her most recent edited volumes are an anthology of Holocaust narratives and an accompanying teacher’s guide, The Call of Memory: Learning about the Holocaust Through Narrative (Ben Yehuda Press, 2008).

The mailing address for PRISM: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Holocaust Educators is Karen Shawn, Ph.D. / Azrieli Graduate School / 500 W. 185th St – BH 326 / NY, NY 10033. To subscribe to PRISM, or to query re submissions, send an email message to Dr. Shawn, shawn@yu.edu or Dr. Glanz, glanz@yu.edu.

___________________________

Information about Prism is available at the website of the International Association of Genocide Scholars.

Helen Degen Cohen's Habry

2009-07-08T14:11:00.009-04:00

I first read Helen Degen Cohen's poems about her experiences and her parents' experiences during and after the Holocaust in the early 90s. At the time, I was writing about my parents and their experiences in the slave labor camps in Germany, and I found in Helen's poetry a voice that seemed to understand and speak of a world with a depth and complexity and compassion that I wished I could echo.

Helen wrote about her experiences as a child during the war. She was in the Lida Ghetto in Belorus, then in hiding with her parents in the town's little prison (where her father, a barber and jack-of-all-trades, created a flood only he could fix, in order to show the Gestapo how indispensable he was). Later, separated from her parents, she was in hiding again in a cabin surrounded by the farm fields she grew to love and the flowers that grew alongside them. The flowers were like habry, cornflowers. While she was in hiding, her parents were with the partisns in the resistance, as described in the new movie Defiance.

Her story and the way she told it touched me. I still can't relate what happened to her when she became separated from her parents and her mother gave her a tin cup without tears coming into my voice. I searched out her writing in little magazines like Spoon River Poetry Review and The Wire and anthologies like Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust and Concert at Chopin's House: A Collection of Polish-American Writing.

Her fiction and essays blew me away, but I found myself especially drawn to the voice in her poems. I re-read them and thought about them and wrote a scholarly article about them.

When I heard that Helen was finally gathering these poems together and publishing them along with more recent poems about her experiences, I looked forward to her book more than I can remember looking forward to any other book of poems.

That book Habry was everything I had hoped it to be.

Here is one of my favorite poems from Helen's new collection:

I remember coming into Warsaw, a child

out of a sheer, sunlit countryside,
where sometimes a goat made the only sound in
all the universe, and a car engine would certainly
tear the wing of an angel. Entering burnt Warsaw
and the Sound of the World, how strange, how lonely
the separate notes of Everything, lost in a smell of
spent shots still smoking, a ghost of bombs, a silence
of so many voices, the ruined city singing not only
a post-war song but an Everything hymn of dogs wailing,
a car, a horse, a droning plane, a slow, distant
demolition, hammers like rain, the hum, the hum,
bells and levers and voices leveled and absorbed
into the infinite hum in which the ruins
sat empty and low like well-behaved children,
the ruins, their holes, like eyes, secretly open,
passing on either side, as we entered Warsaw, an air
of lost worlds in a smoky sweet light ghosting
and willing their sounding and resounding remains

______________________

Helen Degen Cohen's book Habry is available from Puddin'head Press and Amazon.

I've also posted a blog about her earlier book On a Good Day One Discovers a Poet at the blog Writing the Polish Diaspora.

Helen's memoir about returning to Warsaw to find the Polish woman who helped save her appears at The Scream on Line along with a number of her poems and a short story based on her childhood experiences, "The Edge of the Field."

Jehanne Dubrow's The Hardship Post

2009-06-01T09:30:00.009-04:00

Jehanne Dubrow’s The Hardship Post (winner of the Three Candles Press 1st Book Award) is not afraid to ask hard, necessary questions about identity and memory, grief, and art as they relate to the Holocaust.

In these poems, she questions, for example, whether she has a right to talk about the past, the Holocaust. And if she does, what gives her that right, and then how should she talk about the Holocaust? What kind of language should she use to embody what she feels? And is there even such a language? And what should she say to those who feel she doesn’t have the right to talk about the Holocaust? And what should she say to those who feel that whether or not she has that right is really unimportant because the Holocaust is not important?

Dubrow’s answers are shaped into verse that is constantly moving with thought and feeling at the intersection of her own and her family’s past. She speaks of her birth, her travels to Africa and Eastern Europe, her life as a diplomat’s daughter, but always with the sense that her life is a life in exile, separated from the unspeakable that touched her family and millions of others despite her best efforts to understand what happened.

She speaks of, writes about, these lives with a care, imagination, and thoughtfulness that finally convince us of the depth of her closeness to and love for these lives.

We see this in so many of the poems but perhaps most fully in the following poem:

Zeno's Paradox of the Shtetl

It is the frozen world that I’ve approached
for thirty years but cannot reach—

halfway
to Poland in a sleigh,

imagining the silver runners sled across
the permafrost,

and halfway to Galicia again,
passing the wooden synagogues, the men

who wear black coats and fur-trimmed hats,
their wives and daughters fat

with goosedown layers,
mittens, scarves, babushkas covering black hair,

the women’s faces lined, opaque,
a pewter sheet of ice above a lake,

and halfway to a town that shivers by
the Vistula, the river’s luminosity

like fish scales scraped
away with knives, then halfway following the liquid shape

which water makes through land,
always the distances expanding,

a home so faraway it can’t be seized,
intangible as winter through the trees.

__________________________

Jehanne Dubrow was born in Italy and grew up in Poland, Yugoslavia, Zaire, Belgium, Austria, and the United States. Her work has appeared in Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust (ed. Charles Adés Fishman), Poetry, The Hudson Review, New England Review, Barrow Street, Gulf Coast, Poetry Northwest, and others. She was the Editor's Choice at KRITYA, and a number of her poems are featured there.

She is also the author of a chapbook, The Promised Bride (Finishing Line Press 2007). A second poetry collection, From the Fever-World, won the Washington Writers' Publishing House Prize and will be published in 2009. A third collection, Stateside, will be released by Northwestern University Press in 2010.

She blogs at Notes from the Gefilte Review. Her website is at www.jehannedubrow.com.

The Hardship Post is available at three candles press and at Amazon.

Some Cautions on Writing Holocaust Poetry

2009-04-17T12:24:00.000-04:00

In the decades since the publication of Charles Reznikoff’s groundbreaking and virtually egoless masterwork, Holocaust, the tendency for writers to place themselves at Auschwitz; to take on the mantle of victimhood or martyrdom --the special aura of the survivor -- has become more noticeable, and more disturbing. In that booklength sequence of poems that Rezikoff based on the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial records and on the records of the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem, he never uses the personal pronoun “I” and remains invisible before the agonizing story he relates in twelve unsparing, and historically accurate, sections. There’s no confusion about who is speaking at any point in the text, and it is easy to see why: Reznikoff reports faithfully things that clearly shocked and angered and wounded him, but he invents nothing. He puts words in no one’s mouth -- certainly not on the lips of survivors or victims . . . and not on the tongues of their tormentors and killers. He knows the record itself -- which includes the testimony of survivors, the memoirs of the victims, and the meticulously documented and archived accounts of the perpetrators -- is sufficient to his task. His work as a poet, and as a human being, is to carefully select his material from the overwhelmingly dense and detailed historical record: to select and organize and illuminate by juxtaposing what needs to be understood in context.

How different Reznikoff’s humility seems when set against the hubris of those who would masquerade as survivors or invent dialogue for actual people who lived and died and, in some noteworthy instances, spoke and wrote as themselves. Here, I need to say that it is not the use of the first person itself that I object to -- in fact, I do believe a poet may use the personal “I” when writing poems about the Holocaust, if the poems are clearly and accurately framed. My objections and cautions have more to do with motivation and intention. What, for example, is gained when W. D. Snodgrass, in his Führer Bunker, speaks through the mask of Hitler or his mistress, Eva Braun, or through mentally deranged caricatures of Martin Bormann and Magda Goebbels? Does it honor the dead or present us with a rich new vision of historical truth? Is this merely another entertainment? or is it something more problematic and unsettling? Can we escape the conclusion that what this poet offers us, out of the entire colossal record of the Shoah, is a rather strange and unsettling orchestration of unreal voices and a text marked by dubious sympathies? Doesn’t the simplest, least sophisticated, verse written by a survivor give us what Snodgrass does not? I refer, of course, to our hunger for authentic voice; for events faithfully remembered, not whimsically imagined; for poetry that stands as witness to the world we have inherited, the world that has shaped us and that shapes us still.

I don’t mean to single-out Snodgrass, much of whose work I admire, for there are more dangerous missteps and more calculated presumptions than his. What, for instance, should I have thought, in 1983 or ‘84, while I was editing the Texas Tech edition of Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, when one widely published poet sent me a group of poems in which she presented herself as a survivor who had suffered grotesquely at the hands of concentration camp guards and other Nazis? Although I was certain she was not a survivor who had experienced such terrors, should I have overcome my revulsion and applauded her for her courage? or should I have questioned her about this need to pass herself off as something she was not and should feel blessed not to be? I rejected her poems because I believed then (as I still do) that they occupy a space in which truth is virtually indistinguishable from fantasy, so that the real and the verifiable is trivialized and devalued. Since then, I have received too many poems by writers who were not near the camps during the Holocaust, much less inside them -- but who, nonetheless, have succumbed to the temptation to speak as survivors or victims -- to believe that the first-person voice in that unsettling packet of poems I received in the early 80s was an aberration. Sadly, in the past quarter century, the inclination to impersonate the living and the dead, to bear false witness, of one kind or another, has burgeoned rather than withered.

In her 1986 collection, Your Native Land, Your Life, Adrienne Rich appears to reflect on the increasing use such “techniques” and “strategies” in contemporary literature. In the long poem, “Source,” dedicated to Helen Smelser, she states: “I have resisted this for years, writing to you as if you could hear me. It’s been different with my father: he and I always had a kind of rhetoric going with each other, a battle between us, it didn’t matter if one of us was alive or dead. But, you, I’ve had a sense of protecting your existence, not using it merely as a theme for poetry or tragic musings; letting you dwell in the minds of those who have reason to miss you, in your way, or their way, not mine. The living, writers especially, are terrible projectionists. I hate the way they use the dead.”

I like Rich’s use of the word “projectionists,” for isn’t the constructed “I” in the sort of poem I’ve been objecting to an “I” that announces the writer’s need for personal connection with the Holocaust -- that projects that need onto invented characters or onto actual people whose true inner voice the writer could not have known and, in most instances, doesn’t really care to know? I read this as a kind of literary charade, in which the writer seeks to create the illusion of proximity to, and intimacy with, the Holocaust -- to generate what might pass for a sense of permission to write these things . . . permission and authority. And isn’t it true that most of these efforts fail, in part, because they are prompted by the need to gain a measure of control over the enormity of the Holocaust and because the authors have miscalculated the importance of context and consequence in writing about this darkest of subjects? It is ironic, I think, that -- in the worst instances -- poems like those I have been discussing constitute a kind of literary necrophilia that leads writers to devour the dead, instead of revivifying them or honoring their memory.

An especially troubling example of this kind can be seen in the early published version of C. K. Williams’ poem, “A Day for Anne Frank,” in which Williams imagined a scenario for the final days of the famous diarist whose life ended in Belsen. Williams described Anne’s last day, in which -- as he envisioned it -- she was raped and murdered by an SS guard. The poem was powerful, a tour de force . . . but it recorded for posterity a conclusion to Anne’s life that, put as gently as possible, is simply untrue. Williams, in crossing the boundary between what can be known and what cannot, between what can be imagined and what should be written and published, managed to both muddy the waters of history and to set up his own poem for instant obsolescence, once the genuine facts of Anne’s death became known: she died of typhus in the final days of the war, a fact attested to by survivors who remembered her and were with her when she died. Although Williams revised the ending of his poem about Anne soon after I sent him my reasons for not accepting it for Blood to Remember, in that initial misrepresentation of a moment in history he was not yet privy to know, he had constructed a false picture of Anne’s fate, as if she were not an actual person who had died -- and lived.

Yet there are successful examples of the dramatic monologue in post-War American poetry. These include booklength sequences, such as Julie N. Heifetz’s Oral History and the Holocaust, with its narrative versions of videotaped survivor testimony; Barbara Helfgott Hyett’s In Evidence: Poems of the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps, her series of terse but affecting poems based on taped testimony of American GIs who helped to open the camps; and individual poems that come to the reader with a specific frame that underscores the intended separation between authorial voice and the voice of the subject. I include here, in particular, Edward Hirsch’s “Paul Celan: A Grave and Mysterious Sentence.” Especially when accompanied by the remarks he makes in Blood to Remember, Hirsch’s representation of Celan’s voice, as well as Celan’s concerns following the war -- including the fate of his language and his own survival -- is rooted in verifiable details of his subject’s life and is shaped by the poet’s passion to bear witness to the truth, however complex and ragged it may be.

I suggest that the desire to speak in the voices of real or imagined victims, survivors (often quite capable of speaking for themselves, once they choose to address their personal histories), or perpetrators (most of whom have remained silent, in the aftermath of their crimes) too often leads to misguided projects that delegitimize the voices of the living and rebury the voices of the dead. This seems to me a perverse and, at times, obscene outgrowth of the postmodern inclination to relativize and neutralize all things by making all subjects available and, if possible, interchangeable and equal in value. For too many American poets, this murky picture of the actual presents them with no incontestable reason to hold back from imagining the “unimaginable,” to resist speaking as Hitler or revealing a possible, yet false, death for Anne Frank. In a world in which the Holocaust itself has repeatedly been called into question -- in which those who have our ear can deny the reality that hundreds of thousands of still living survivors experienced and remember, that General Eisenhower and thousands of American GIs under his command stood shocked and silent before -- in such a world, in which a literary fraud can pass as a stand-in for the real, as if the real wasn’t actual, wrenching, haunting, or persuasive enough, it seems essential that we honor the genuine article, authentic voice. In the writing of Holocaust poetry, the dramatic monologue is rarely the appropriate vehicle to carry this burden.

Charles Adés Fishman
April 2009

____________________________

Books and Articles Referred to:

Fishman, Charles. Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust (Texas Tech University Press, 1991).

Fishman, Charles Adés. Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust. Rev. Second Ed. (Time Being Books, 2007).

Heifetz, Julie N. Oral History and the Holocaust Pergamon Press, 1985).

Hirsch, Edward. “Paul Celan: A Grave and Mysterious Sentence,” in Wild Gratitude (Alfred A. Knopf, 1986).

Hyett, Barbara Helfgott. In Evidence: Poems on the Liberation of Nazi Concencentration Camps (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986).

Reznikoff, Charles. Holocaust (Black Sparrow Press, 1975).

Rich, Adrienne. Section XXII, from “Sources,” in Your Native Land, Your Life (W.W. Norton, 1986).

Snodgrass, W. D. The Führer Bunker: The Complete Cycle (BOA Editions, 1995).

Williams, C. K. “A Day for Anne Frank,” in A Day for Anne Frank (Houghton Mifflin,1968).

The Permeability of Memory -- A Book of Poems by Helen Eisen

2009-03-27T15:10:00.000-04:00

Recently, I read a book of poems about the Holocaust and the years in the DP camps by Helen Eisen called The Permeability of Memory. The book drew me in because Helen does something that I find myself unable to do.

I've written a lot about my father and mother and their experiences in the concentration camps but I've seldom been able to write about my own memories of my experiences in the refugee camps, the DP camps, after the war. Part of this, I'm sure is my inability to remember much about those times. I was born in 1948 and left the camps in 1951 to come to America with my parents. Another part of this, however, I think, is my sense that my story -- as opposed to the story of my parents and the people of their generation -- is nothing. I find it almost impossible to think of my parents' experiences within the context of my experiences. I can't think about that connection. When I write, I write about them. I seldom appear in my poems. Sometimes, I feel that I don't know how to talk about myself in relationship to my parents.

Helen Eisen, however, has somehow found a way of connecting herself to her past and her parents in ways I can't, and I admire her writing and her gift for doing this.

I asked her a couple questions about memory and about the title of her work The Permeability of Memory.

Here's what I wrote to her:

The Permeability of Memory? Can you please explain the title? Memory is something that really interests me. I write a lot about my parents and I know that my memories of their past don't always line up with their memories of their past or my sister's memories of the past. In fact, I wrote a poem about the distance between my mom's memories and mine. It's called "My Mother Reads My Poem 'Cattle Train to Magdeburg.'" In addition, my mother didn't want to share her memories for a long time, while my dad was always interested in doing so.

Here's Helen Eisen's response to my questions:

I also find memory fascinating, what it is, how it works, how it's transmitted. I meant the title to talk to that-- how memories are passed on, the movement of memory over time and distance. I think it is lovely that you use the word "distance" when you say in your email, "I wrote a poem about the distance between my mother's memories and mine." At different times I've been asked, "When did you first learn about the Holocaust?" (By the way, we never used the term. We just called it the war. It's like if a relative were standing in your kitchen dressed in an old bathrobe and you say, "Mr. Buckleboren, what would you like for breakfast today? I do hope we can appropriately accommodate you.") The thing is I don't remember when I learned about the war, it's like I always knew about it, which of course at some level I did. Its effects, if not the actual verbalized memories, were transmitted by my parents and the other survivors that used to visit our apartment, but seemed to live with us. Their visits were never just visits. And with them came all the memories, like butter spread on rye and radishes in the cottage cheese. Everyone disagreed about the wheres and whens, and there was a lot of (to me bizarre) laughter. I'd stay very quiet and listen, trying to make sense of it all. I have memories of hiding under the kitchen table, but I don't believe I really did because it was a small table. But I think I imagined this memory because I knew if they became aware of me in the room they'd shoo me out, so how would I have stayed in the room if I wasn't hiding?

To return to my explanation: I learned about the war through the memories of my parents, which they relayed verbally and non-verbally. (Father much more verbal and very, very confusing). Memories live (and die) in the body. I think the non-verbal transmission was more potent, more constant/consistent, more direct, more exact--even if I can't translate this exactness. All mothers sigh, no mother sighs like my mother. She is holding me as a baby, and when she let them other women in the DP camp held me. What passed through them to the children, in my case, to me? I'm sure the particular tensing of their muscles, their breath, their scent, all their vital, non-verbal, sub-vocal, innate and learned vocabularies left some kind of imprint.

Mostly knowledge of the war--my memories of the war--came through the body of my mother. I think memories live in the body, and die, change, devolve, grow, dependent like anything else on relative conditions and context. Who is listening? What's the temperature when I'm talking? How well do I remember this recipe when I'm starving? When I'm full?

From the body of my mother to my body. I see it as a kind of osmosis--the permeability of the membranes between us, and the membranes between memories within her. What she's closed off, what she's let through. How far through? What's the resistance to letting me see them, letting me in, how much of it because she wants to keep me out, how much because she wants me to see because she is alone there, but doesn't want to want me to be there.

Osmotic passage occurs from the more dense to the less dense. From my mother's milk, I drew my breath, and she filled me.

Here's one of the poems from Helen Eisen's Permeability of Memory:

MY MOTHER MY MOTHER

Was starving
Was starving
After the war
Was another war
My mother my mother
Was starving
After the war
She stuffed food into me
Because she was starving
After the war during
Which she was starving
She stuffed food into me
Because she was starving
I can see her pushing the food into my mouth
I cannot feel I cannot feel the food pushing into the mouth
I can see my mother
Starving
For the food she put into me
To feed herself
My mother pushed food into me
To feel herself
While she was starving all of the life pushed
To feed herself
To feel herself
Starving
I can't feel the food
Or taste
What my mother fed me
She took
The food away
From herself
I can see her starving
To feed me
Greasy lamb from her fingers
Here taste
Of her saliva
On my tongue
My mother
I loved her
I fed her
Myself

___________

Helen Eisen's The Permeabilty of Memory is published by Cherry Pie Press. You can read more about the book by clicking here.