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Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust

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Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust Page i Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust Page ii Jewish Literature and Culture Series Editor, Alvin Rosenfeld Page iii Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation James E. Young INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington and Indianapolis Page iv First Midland Book Edition 1990 Publication of this work has been supported in part by a grant from the Abraham and Rebecca Stein Faculty Publications Fund of New York University, Department of English. © 1988 by James E. Young All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging­in­Publication Data Young, James Edward. Writing and rewriting the Holocaust. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939­1945)—Historiography. 2. Holocaust, Jewish (1939­1945)—Personal narratives— History and criticism. 3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939­1945), in literature. I. Title. D810.J4Y58 1988 940.53'15'039240072 87­35791 ISBN 0­253­36716­6 ISBN 0­253­20613­8 (pbk.) 4 5 6 7 8 02 01 00 99 98 Page v CONTENTS Preface vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation 1 I. Interpreting Literary Testimony 1. On Rereading Holocaust Diaries and Memoirs 15 2. From Witness to Legend: Tales of the Holocaust 40 3. Holocaust Documentary Fiction: Novelist as Eyewitness 51 4. Documentary Theater, Ideology, and the Rhetoric of Fact 64 II. Figuring and Refiguring the Holocaust: Interpreting Holocaust Metaphor 5. Names of the Holocaust: Meaning and Consequences 83 6. The Holocaust Becomes an Archetype 99 7. The Holocaust Confessions of Sylvia Plath 117 8. When Soldier­Poets Remember the Holocaust: Antiwar Poetry in Israel 134 III. Texts of the Holocaust: A Narrative Critique Introduction 149 9. Holocaust Video and Cinemagraphic Testimony: Documenting the Witness 157 10. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning 172 Conclusion 190 Notes 193 Bibliography 207 Index 236 Page vii PREFACE This study began when I realized that none of us coming to the Holocaust afterwards can know these events outside the ways they are passed down to us. In attempting over several years to learn all there was to know of the annihilation of European Jewry during World War II, I found that my knowledge and understanding of events were dependent on their representations by victims in diaries, by survivors in memoirs, by historians and philosophers in their investigative works, and even by our communities in contemporary Jewish liturgy and days of remembrance. On devoting myself to the study of this era, therefore, I gave myself as well to the study of its representations. The twin aims of my study and teaching of Holocaust narrative have necessarily become both a deep knowledge of events and an awareness of how this knowledge is gained. Unfortunately, the sheer horror at the core of the Holocaust has often swamped other, more important historical and literary questions. The pathos and outrage that move so many students to study this period and others to avoid it altogether become for some the object of Holocaust inquiry. For these students of Holocaust writing, critical inquiry too often begins and ends with how the horror of mass murder is represented, or how the terror of such suffering is grasped. The present study does not inquire into the thematic representation of bloody horror, but into the narrative representation of events themselves. Rather than concentrating on the numbing shock evoked by the calculated murder of a people, this study asks precisely how historical memory, understanding, and meaning are constructed in Holocaust narrative. At Yad Vashem Memorial Authority in Jerusalem, lecturers to student groups, tourists, and soldiers introduce their presentations through a similar method. In beginning our study of the Holocaust, they announce, we start by looking at: how the Germans understood the Jews in their midst, and how this understanding led to their massacre of innocents. This is followed with an equally—perhaps more—important look at how the Jews then understood their own predicament and the Germans' intentions—and how this understanding led to particular Jewish responses. In my own teaching at both Yad Vashem and American universities, I ask these questions as well, and then extend them to ask how we, in the next generation, now understand the entire matrix of events. For as the killers' and victims' grasp of events influenced their actions, I find that our own understanding and remembrance of events now lead directly to our responses to the world around us. In fact, it was precisely this self­inquiry on my part into how I live in and respond to the world after the Holocaust that inspired—and has since become the guiding reason for—this study. The impossible questions that drove me long ago away from the song of Keats's nightingale to the Holocaust survivor's whisper have moved many other scholars before me to the study of this literature. Inasmuch as these writers have begun the critical dialogue I am attempting to sustain, I am humbly indebted to all of them. In particular, this present work owes a vast debt to the writings of Alvin Rosenfeld, Lawrence Langer, David Roskies, Alan Mintz—and especially Sidra Ezrahi, whose work brought me to Israel and whose compassionate counsel nourished me there, Page viii both as part of her family and as part of the larger—more volatile—family that is Am Yisra'el. Two other teachers have also contributed to this study in ways they may never fully fathom: Thomas A. Vogler, who brought me back to literature through his belief that writing and what I had to say about it can make a difference in this world; and Murray Baumgarten, who brought me into the fold of critically thinking Jews. Several dear friends and colleagues who read parts of this manuscript and shared their learning with me will also find their imprint in these pages. It would have been impossible to persevere without crucial advice and encouragement from Paul Mann, Susan Shapiro, Robert McMahon, Geoffrey Hartman, Anita Norich, and Saul Friedländer. Less visible in these pages, but no less present in the inner life that has borne them are: Benni and Tali Bar­Yosef, Peter Brod, Toman and Libuse * Brod, Dasa* Najbrtova, Wiebke Suhrbier, Clive and Fran Sinclair, Dan and Elly Wolf, and Rabbi Alfred Wolf. I also owe a great debt of gratitude to the Dorot Foundation in the person of Joy Ungerleider­Mayerson for endowing the Dorot Teaching Fellowship at New York University, under which most of this book was written. In allowing my teaching and writing in Jewish literature to nourish each other in equal measure, the chair of the English department at New York University, John Maynard, and the associate vice­president for Academic Affairs, Leslie Berlowitz, also deserve special praise for administering the Dorot Fellowship so graciously. Other institutions and people have also given of themselves generously over the course of this writing. I am grateful to the University of California and its regents for their fellowships; to the YIVO Institute in New York for access to its human and archival resources; to the Institute of International Education and the Israel Government for their generous grant; to the Institute of Contemporary Jewry and its director, Yehuda Bauer, for the Alexander Silberman Fellowship at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem; to the National Endowment for the Humanities for the Summer Stipend; to Elly Dlin and Shalmi Bar­Mor in the Education office at Yad Vashem Memorial Authority in Jerusalem for the opportunity to teach and learn there; to Joanne Rudof and Sandra Rosenstock at the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University for their expert assistance; and to T. Carmi and Limor Raviv for checking my Hebrew translations. It is finally to my family that I owe the least articulable but most profound thanks: to my mother and father, brother and sister for their encouragement, love, and patience along every step of what has at times been as difficult a path to comprehend as it has been to traverse; to my grandparents, who were the first to teach me that the love of ideas and of life are really one and the same calling; and to my wife, Lori J. Friedman, whose love gives new reason for my life's work, even as it has added several months more to my writing time. It is to these special people in my life—and others unnamed here—that I remain forever indebted. But it is to the coming generations that I hope to repay this debt, and it is to them that I dedicate this study. Page ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Parts of this study have appeared previously in different form. I would like to thank the editors of the following journals and collected volumes for permission to reprint portions of articles: Geoffrey Hartman, ed., Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); Clio: A Journal of Literature, History and the Philosophy of History; Contemporary Literature; Dimensions: A Journal of Holocaust Studies; Jewish Chronicle; Midstream; Modern Judaism; New Literary History; Partisan Review; Philological Quarterly; PMLA; Studies in Contemporary Jewry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986 and 1987), vols. III and IV; and University of Hartford Studies in Literature: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Criticism. For her exquisite photographs of memorials in Poland, I am grateful to Monika Krajewska; and for providing me with stills from Shoah and from video testimony taping sessions at Yale, I thank Sarah Talbot of New Yorker Films and the Yale University Office of Public Information, respectively.
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