Introduction
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Notes Introduction 1. Binjamin Wilkomirski, Fragments: Memories of a Childhood, 1939–1948, trans. Carol Brown Janeway, London: Picador 1996 [1995]. See Stefan Maechler, The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Truth, trans. John E. Woods, New York: Schocken 2001 for a full account. 2. In Britain, the controversy was first reported by Philipp Blom, in the Independent Sunday Review, 30 September 1998, p. 1. 3. Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan, trans. and ed. Abraham I. Katsch, New York: Macmillan 1965. 4. See the ‘Literary and cultural criticism’ section of the bibliography for other works on children and the Holocaust; most of these concern either texts for a child readership, or include children involved in the war as a whole, not the Holocaust specifically. 5. In practice this means focusing on texts not directed at a child readership, although some of those I discuss have at some point in their publication history also been explicitly aimed at children or young adults. On the notion of ‘crossover’ texts, see Sandra Beckett, ed., Transcending Boundaries: Writing for a Dual Audience of Children and Adults, New York: Garland 1999. 6. This is also Serge Klarsfeld’s practice in his French Children of the Holocaust: AMemorial, trans. Glorianne Depondt, New York: New York University Press 1996. 7. Johan P. Snapper, essay on Marga Minco in S. Lillian Kremer, ed., Holocaust Literature: An Encyclopedia of Writers and Their Work, London and New York: Routledge 2002, p. 850. 8. Hans Keilson, Sequential Traumatization in Children: A clinical and statistical follow-up of the Jewish war orphans in the Netherlands, with the collaboration of Herman R. Sarphatie, trans. Yvonne Bearne, Hilary Coleman and Deirdre Winter, Jerusalem: The Magnes Press 1992, p. 37. 9. See Debórah Dwork, Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1991): ‘[Children’s] death was a matter of automatic procedure’ in the death-camps (p. x). 10. Keilson, Sequential Traumatizaion, p. 125. 11. The World Movement for the Care of Children (Kindertransport movement) brought around 7400 unaccompanied Jewish children on commissioned trains from occupied Europe to Britain in 1938 and 1939. 12. See for instance, David Storey’s This Sporting Life (London: Longman 1960), which consists of present-tense, present-time narration alternating with past-tense, past-time narrative. 13. I use ‘trauma’ in Cathy Caruth’s sense: she follows Freud in defining trauma as, ‘the response to a sudden or unexpected threat of death that happens too soon to be fully known and is then endlessly repeated in reenactments and nightmares that attempt to relive, but in fact only miss again, the original 165 166 Notes event’ (Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press 1996, p. 139, n. 5). 14. See the ‘History’ section of the bibliography. 15. See Himmler’s speech at Posen to the Gauleiters and Reichsleiters on 6 October 1943: ‘Then the question arose: What about the women and children? I decided to find a perfectly clear-cut solution to this too. For I did not feel justified in exterminating the men – that is, to kill them or to have them killed – while allowing the avengers, in the form of their children, to grow up in the midst of our sons and grandsons’ (quoted in Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1984, p. 57). 16. Norman Geras, The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy after the Holocaust, London: Verso 1998, p. 81. Peter Novick raises a different, political caveat by contrasting contemporary (American) awareness of the ‘indiffer- ence’ that led to the deaths of over a million children during the Holocaust years, with present-day indifference to the fact that, ‘well over ten times that many children around the world die of malnutrition and preventable dis- eases every year’ (The Holocaust and Collective Memory: The American Experience, London: Bloomsbury 2001, p. 255). See Alex Callinicos’ discussion of this point in his ‘Plumbing the Depths: Marxism and the Holocaust’ (Yale Journal of Criticism 14(2) 2001: pp. 385–414): he concludes that rather than ‘relativiz[ing] the Holocaust out of existence’ such comparisons show that ‘avoidable, socially caused mass death’ of historically specific kinds ‘is a chronic feature of the modern world’ (p. 411). 17. Gabriel Motola, ‘Children of the Holocaust’, TriQuarterly 105, 1999, pp. 209–32: 212. 18. Motola’s description is only at all true of Fragments (the article was published before Wilkomirski’s unmasking), which he uses to stand metonymically for the other writers’ works. Motola concludes his article by inveighing against perpetrators, thus thoroughly confusing history and representation (ibid., p. 231). 19. Lawrence L. Langer, ‘Family Dilemmas in Holocaust Literature’, Michigan Quarterly Review, 26(2) 1987, pp. 387–99: 392. 20. Irving Greenberg, ‘Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire’, Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical Implications, eds John K. Roth and Michael Berenbaum, New York: Paragon House 1989, p. 318. 21. Ibid., p. 323. 22. David Patterson, Along the Edge of Annihilation: The Collapse and Recovery of Life in the Holocaust Diary, Seattle and London: University of Washington Press 1999, p. 200. 23. ‘Backshadowing’ means that past events are seen as inevitable to such an extent that their victims may be blamed for not anticipating them. See Michael André Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History, Berkeley and London: University of California Press 1994. 24. One might argue that diaries or testimony gathered immediately after the war do represent children’s voices in their own terms; however, as I argue in Chapter 7, even the diary cannot completely unite the moment of énoncé with that of énonciation, although diaries do achieve the closest fit of all between narrator and character – both are children, separated temporally by at most a few days. Notes 167 25. János Nyiri, Battlefields and Playgrounds, trans. William Brandon and János Nyiri, Hanover and London: University Press of New England/Brandeis University Press 1994 [1989]. 26. Nyiri, Battlefields and Playgrounds, pp. 180, 201. 27. Ibid., p. 367. 28. ‘This memoir is the result of an intensely creative collaboration between those who experienced the events it describes and one who attempted to bring their stories . back to life on the page’ (prefatory note, Fay Walker and Leo Rosen, with Caren S. Neile, Hidden: A Sister and Brother in Nazi Poland, University of Wisconsin Press 2002, p. iii). 29. See Henry Greenspan, On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Recounting and Life History, Westport, CT and London: Prager 1998; and Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1991. 30. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson, Min- neapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1984, p. 8. 31. Ibid., p. 191. 32. Walker and Rosen, Hidden, pp. 9–10. 33. See Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press 1981, p. 366. 34. Leah Iglinski-Goodman, For Love of Life, London: Vallentine Mitchell 2002, p. 1. 35. Martin Gilbert, ‘Foreword’ to ibid., p. iii. 36. Cordelia Edvardson, The Burned Child Seeks the Fire: A Memoir, trans. Joel Agee, Boston: Beacon Press 1997 [1984] (thanks to Joan Michelson for bringing this text to my attention); Karen Gershon, A Lesser Child: An Autobiography, trans. unnamed, London: Peter Owen 1992. Gershon wrote her memoir in German, despite having lived in Britain since 1938, as another narrative means of conveying the distinction between past and present. 37. ‘Gershon’, Paul Loewenthal’s Hebrew name, is the author’s nom de plume; it means ‘stranger in a strange land’ (Peter Lawson, essay on Gershon in Kremer, ed., Holocaust Literature, p. 416). 38. Gershon, A Lesser Child, p. 102. 39. Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1998, p. 47. 40. See Carmel Finnan, ‘Autobiography, Memory and the Shoah: German-Jewish Identity in Autobiographical Writings by Ruth Klüger, Cordelia Edvardson and Laura Waco’, in Pól O’Dochartaigh, ed., Jews in German Literature Since 1945: German-Jewish Literature, Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi 2000, p. 451. 41. Edvardson, The Burned Child Seeks the Fire, p. 18. 42. Ibid., p. 19. 43. ‘Translator’s Note’, Bogdan Wojdowski, Bread for the Departed, trans. Madeline G. Levine, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press 1997 [1971], p. xi. 44. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, pp. 6, 15, italics in original. 45. See the Foreword by Henryk Grynberg to Wojdowski, Bread for the Departed, p. ix. The one voice not represented among the text’s polyphony is that of the 168 Notes Nazi Sturmbannfürher Höfle, who makes a speech (352–8); instead, we hear the audience’s responses to it. 46. Levine mentions the ‘ingenious blend of standard Polish, Warsaw dialect, thieves’ argot, Yiddish and Hebrew words or phonemes’, alongside passages of German, in the original (‘Translator’s Note’, p. xi). 47. Wojdowski, Bread for the Departed, p. 240. 48. Ruth Kluger, Landscapes of Memory: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, London: Bloomsbury 2003. 49. See Andrea Hammel, ‘Gender, Individualism and Dialogue: Jakov Lind’s Counting My Steps and Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben’, in Silke Hassler and Edward Timms, eds, Writing after Hitler: The Work of Jakov Lind, Cardiff: University of Wales Press 2001, p. 189. In her memoir of life in hiding in wartime Buda- pest, Magda Denes uses a similar technique to comic effect; the adult narra- tor supplies the commentary and ripostes that the child could not (Castles Burning: A Child’s Life in War, London: Anchor 1997). 50. The title of the American edition is Still Alive, New York: Feminist Press at CUNY 2003.