WOUNDING SENSIBILITIES: HOLOCAUST MEMOIRS THROUGH THE SCREEN OF ADAPTATION by Jeffrey Eric Wolfson APPROVED BY SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE: ________________________________________ David Patterson, Co-Chair ________________________________________ Zsuzsanna Ozsváth, Co-Chair ________________________________________ Adrienne McLean ________________________________________ Nils Roemer Copyright 2019 Jeffrey Eric Wolfson All Rights Reserved I dedicate this work to three individuals, and may their memories be for a blessing: my grandmother, Sadie Finkelstein Wolfson; her friend, Holocaust survivor Esther Herz; and my friend, Holocaust survivor Walter Kase. תהיינה נפשותם צרורות בצרור החיים WOUNDING SENSIBILITIES: HOLOCAUST MEMOIRS THROUGH THE SCREEN OF ADAPTATION by JEFFREY ERIC WOLFSON, BA, MA DISSERTATION Presented to the Faculty of The University of Texas at Dallas in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HUMANITIES - MAJOR IN STUDIES IN LITERATURE THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT DALLAS December 2019 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I begin by thanking my supervisory committee. David Patterson and Zsuzsanna Ozsváth shared the roles of mensch and mentor. He gave fast, thoughtful, thought-provoking feedback; prodded me to argue without restraint; and fed me (with Gerri’s help!) at his family table. She drew on her experience not just as a scholar, but as a survivor-memoirist, to communicate with passion and clarity her vision of ethical parameters for Holocaust representation. Adrienne McLean’s notions were ardently expressed. Nils Roemer took an interest in my success and made a point of propping me up at times when my morale was low. My gratitude extends beyond my committee. Lourdes Molina attentively proofread chapters, Donald Firsching kindly donated his tech support wizardry, and Cheyanne Perkins and Christian Acevedo did both. The UT Dallas Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies awarded me its Belofsky Fellowship and an earlier scholarship. UT Dallas Arts and Humanities awarded me a scholarship and also provided me with a travel grant to a conference. The Texas Holocaust and Genocide Commission funded travel to other conferences. The Modern Language Association and the American Comparative Literature Association provided forums for me to present early drafts of chapters and to gain helpful feedback. I received valuable, seemingly countless hours of professional development from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Facing History and Ourselves, the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, Yad Vashem’s Echoes and Reflections, Chabad’s Beyond Never Again, the Anti-Defamation League, Holocaust Museum Houston, the Dallas Holocaust Museum, the El Paso Holocaust Museum, the San Antonio Holocaust Museum, v the USC Shoah Foundation, the Association of Holocaust Organizations, and The Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches. I thank my parents, Linda and Howard, who paved my way for this journey, and whose love is appreciated and returned. Even from across the country, they make me feel lucky. Rabbi Daniel Millner taught me and cared about my progress inside and outside of shul. Other relatives and friends, as well as colleagues and students, supported me by bringing laughter. To their everlasting credit, I still have hair that is not torn out, even if they could not prevent its graying. I thank the survivors who chose to present firsthand accounts of the Shoah to people who were not always eager to receive them. Controversies surrounding Fania Fénelon’s memoir and its telefilm adaptation planted the seeds of my interest in Holocaust memoir adaptation. Several survivors wrote memoirs that comprise the starting point of this study and are named therein. Gerda Weissmann Klein, Nechama Tec, and other survivor-memoirists were encouraging when I met them. And then there were survivors who carried testimonies that never appeared in memoirs. My grandmother’s friend, Esther Herz of New Jersey, was the first person I knew to be a survivor. Her story includes the betrayal by neighbors who had hidden her, the desperate escape on a bicycle through guarded city streets while holding her baby daughter, and the loss of her husband and only son to the murderers. Maybe she would have recorded her experiences, were it not for the Alzheimer’s that afflicted her later years. Her live-in nurse had little success in calming the confused and tearful woman whenever frequent panic attacks convinced her that the Nazis were coming for all of us. Decades after “liberation” and up until her death, the scenario of Nazis still on the hunt became her only surviving perception of reality. By contrast, Walter Kase vi of Texas always remained lucid in proclaiming his mission to testify. As a friend of his daughter and son-in-law, and as his grandson’s teacher, I was truly fortunate to get to know him. Among the nightmares he revealed are the final cries of his little sister, Rysia, who was executed in front of him and their parents, and the horror of being in a camp, where the SS singled him out for his youth and small stature to assist in hangings of his fellow inmates. Audiences were moved by his tears, elocution, style, and charisma until, to our great sadness, we lost him in 2015. Holocaust survivors’ wounding accounts still matter. In this light, I also thank a select number of adapters for their daring and imaginative efforts to use filmic language to tell us so. October 2019 vii WOUNDING SENSIBILITIES: HOLOCAUST MEMOIRS THROUGH THE SCREEN OF ADAPTATION Jeffrey Eric Wolfson, PhD The University of Texas at Dallas, 2019 Supervising Professors: Dr. David A. Patterson, Co-Chair Dr. Zsuzsanna Ozsváth, Co-Chair This dissertation looks at what is gained and what is lost, especially on an ethical level, when literary memoirs about the Holocaust are adapted into films. It asserts that the key features of Holocaust memoirs inevitably complicate the process of adaptation by imposing ethical limitations on what filmmakers should cut from or add to their source material. Yet, for a variety of reasons, primarily commercial and aesthetic, most adapters have sought to soften, thwart, or altogether eliminate essential elements of the memoirs. That is, most film adaptations find ways to avoid transmitting the parts of the books that most graphically and directly speak to the cruelty of the Nazi assault on the ethical imperative and what was thereby annihilated. By making changes to avoid the wounding of audience sensibilities, adapters effectively minimize and deny the evil of the Nazis’ systematic torture and mass murder of Jews, and sometimes even blame the victims for their own suffering and that of others. Such a displacement of the survivors’ expressed points of view gives Nazism a convenient cover—and a voice—in our time and amounts to no less than Holocaust denial. Drawing on the scholarship of Elie Wiesel, Alvin Rosenfeld, Lawrence Langer, David Patterson, adaptation theorists, and others, this dissertation examines three source memoirs and their viii respective film adaptations side-by-side. The case studies include Agnieszka Holland’s 1991 theatrical release, Europa Europa, based on a memoir by Solomon Perel; Francesco Rosi’s 1997 theatrical release, The Truce, based on a memoir by Primo Levi; and Joseph Sargent’s 2003 cable network telefilm, Out of the Ashes, based on a memoir by Gisella Perl. Some of these adaptations display disturbing patterns regarding an ongoing, subversive promotion of the Nazi vision at the expense of survivor testimony. However, they also demonstrate that audiovisual media have a potential, though seldom fulfilled, to translate aspects of the Holocaust memoir into a cinematic or televisual language that respects the ethical parameters of the subject. At a time when few survivors are still alive to reveal their wounds, this dissertation contends that it still matters how their stories are told. ix TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ..............................................................................................................v ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................viii CHAPTER 1 THE HOLOCAUST AND ADAPTATION: A CASE FOR WOUNDING SENSIBILITIES .......................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 2 HOLOCAUST MEMOIRS: THE TERRIBLE PARADOX OF LIFE WRITING AFTER ONE’S OWN DEATH .............................................................................. 39 CHAPTER 3 THE JEW UNCUT: CIRCUMCISING THE SURVIVOR’S MEMORY IN EUROPA, EUROPA (1990) .................................................................................... 69 CHAPTER 4 THE JEW UNSPOKEN: COMPROMISING THE SURVIVOR’S CHARACTER IN THE TRUCE (1997) .........................................................................................109 CHAPTER 5 THE JEW UNDEFENDED: INDICTING THE SURVIVOR’S SURVIVAL IN OUT OF THE ASHES (2003) ................................................................................154 CHAPTER 6 THE JEWS UNHEEDED: SCORNING SURVIVORS’ SENSIBILITIES IN THE POST-HOLOCAUST WORLD.............................................................................197 WORKS CITED ..........................................................................................................................214 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................................223 CURRICULUM VITAE x These prophets prophesy