What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank:
Re-Forming Holocaust Memory Through The Fictional Narratives of
Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth, and Nathan Englander
by
Samantha Miller
A Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts
Approved April 2020 by the Graduate Supervisory Committee:
Brian Goodman, Chair Christine Holbo Joe Lockard
ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY
May 2020 ABSTRACT
This thesis analyzes the unsettling presence of the Holocaust in Cynthia Ozick’s
The Shawl (1980), Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer (1979), and Nathan Englander’s What
We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (2013). Characters in these texts struggle to maintain a stable sense of what it means to be Jewish in America outside of a relationship to the Holocaust. This leaves the characters only able to form negative associations about what it means to live with the memory of the Holocaust or to over- identify so heavily with the memory that they can’t lead a normal life. These authors construct a re-formed memory of the Holocaust in ways that prompt a new focus on how permanently intertwined the Holocaust and Jewish identity are. In this context, re-formed means the way Jewish American writers have reconstructed the connection between
Jewish identity and its relation to the Holocaust in ways that highlight issues of over- identification and negative identity associations.
By pushing past the trope of unspeakability that often surrounds the Holocaust, these authors construct a re-formed memory that allows for the formation of Jewish
American identity as permanently bound with constant Holocaust preoccupation, the memory of Anne Frank, and the Holocaust itself. The authors’ treatment of issues surrounding Jewish identity contribute to the genre of post-Holocaust literature, which focuses on re-forming the discussion about present day Jewish American connection to the Holocaust. Giving voice to the Holocaust in new ways provides an opportunity for current and future generations of Jewish Americans to again consider the continued importance of the Holocaust as a historical event within the Jewish community.
i In a world that is once again becoming increasingly anti-semitic as a result of the current political climate, white supremacist riots, desecration of Jewish grave sites, and shootings at temples, the discussion that these texts open up is increasingly important and should remain at the forefront of American consciousness. The research in this thesis reveals that through the process of Holocaust memory constantly being re-formed through the work of these Jewish American authors, its continued influence on Jewish
American culture is not forgotten.
ii TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
CHAPTER
1 INTRODUCTION ...... 1
2 "WHO OWNS ANNE FRANK?" ...... 11
3 THE SHAWL ...... 20
4 THE GHOST WRITER ...... 32
5 WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT ANNE FRANK ...... 48
6 CONCLUSION ...... 57
REFERENCES ...... 60
iii CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
Looking semi-chronologically at Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl (1980), Philip
Roth’s The Ghost Writer (1979), and Nathan Englander’s What We Talk About When We
Talk About Anne Frank (2013) demonstrates over time, in albeit disturbing ways, a multi- generational responsibility of the Jewish literary community to rebuild and re-form
Holocaust memory after World War II. These authors construct a re-formed memory of the Holocaust in ways that prompt a new focus on how permanently intertwined Jewish identity and the Holocaust are. By pushing past the trope of unspeakability that often surrounds the Holocaust, these authors make paths for new discussions about how Jewish
American identity is bound up with constant preoccupation about the Holocaust, the memory of Anne Frank, and the Holocaust as a static historical event. With this persistent influence looming over characters in these texts, issues of over-identification arise.
Characters in these texts are only able to relate to their Jewish identity through the memory of the Holocaust and its continued trauma which exists as their only cultural link. After World War II, Adolf Hitler, and the concentration camps, the first immediate association between Jews and the rest of the world became the Holocaust and the negative stereotypes it left in place. The effects of the Holocaust left an entire population permanently preoccupied with how their Jewish identity is viewed negatively in the eyes of non-Jews. The authors I have chosen to discuss in this thesis, through their fictional characters and discussions of the Holocaust’s continued influence over Jews in America, have created a deformed character map of Jewish identities as a direct result of the
Holocaust.
1 The main texts in this thesis each focus on over-identification and the formation of Jewish identity as negatively associated with the memory of the Holocaust. Ozick’s writing exists on one end of the spectrum where Jewish identity functions as a barrier for her characters when they try to assimilate into America. They feel no one can understand them. Roth and Englander’s works exist on another end of that spectrum where their characters rely on Jewish American’s preoccupation with memories of the Holocaust and
Anne Frank. Roth and Englander’s characters try so desperately to connect to their
Jewish identity, but the only point of connection they can make is through the Holocaust and Anne Frank. These characters think it is the only way to connect to Jewish identity.
By pushing past the trope of unspeakability that often surrounds the Holocaust, Ozick,
Roth, and Englander construct a space to re-form memories of the Holocaust’s impact on the formation of Jewish American identity. Their work highlights how constant
Holocaust preoccupation, the memory of Anne Frank, and the Holocaust as a historical event are permanently bound with Jewish American identity.
Ozick and Roth come from the same generation of writers, with Englander following later. This emphasizes a difference in how Holocaust memory is represented and discussed over time across various generations of Jewish American writers. Ozick and Roth’s depictions of their characters’ Jewish lives and memories are much more crude and visceral, while Englander’s characters lead a more muted, average life. The generational time gap between these texts also highlights the continued responsibility literature holds in representing Holocaust memory and the ways in which that discussion has evolved between the 1980s and the mid 2000s.
2 Ozick, Roth, and Englander are not aiming to accurately portray what happened between 1933-1945, but to discuss what happened after and the lasting effects. Through these three texts, the authors aim to re-form memories about the Holocaust that conjure up the past while also finding ways to move forward and discuss the unspeakability of a horrible event that influenced, and will continue to influence, Jewish memory, identity, and existence for decades. Unfortunately, the Holocaust has become a defining historical event for the Jewish community and resulted in the formation of over-identification and negative identity associations where Jews and the Holocaust are permanently intertwined.
Characters in these three texts suffer from their connection to these negative identity associations so much so that they are unable to live unburdened by memories of the
Holocaust. Very few of them are directly affected by it, although all are indirectly affected. The Holocaust has become inseparable from what it means to be Jewish, and especially what it means to be Jewish in America, where the Jewish communities in these texts rely heavily on Holocaust memory as an identity marker.
For Ozick, Roth, and Englander, they each re-form Holocaust memory in different ways through their fictional characters and scenarios, and they all attempt to bridge the gap between experiential trauma and generational trauma. Quoting Dori Laub, Luminita
Dragulescu writes “‘The fear that fate will strike again is crucial to the memory of trauma, and to the inability to talk about it’” (67). The varying degrees of trauma related to the Holocaust and its legacy continue to stay rooted in the Jewish community for the fear that if it is forgotten, it will happen again. The texts discussed in this thesis do an effective job of pushing past that inability and navigating ways to remember the past while also trying to create a future, even though the foreshadowed future is not always
3 successful in these fictional worlds. The relationships between the characters convey intergenerational trauma in a way that is both unsettling and necessary to think about. If we are, in the present time, meant to understand how the Holocaust continues to shape
Jewish identity, perception of anti-semitic events, Jewish American literature, and day-to- day life, it is increasingly important to address these concerns while the Holocaust is still at the forefront of Jewish American consciousness. The Holocaust stays static as a memory, holding a shadow over the literature and art that tries to address it. It has become a necessary component when discussing Jewish identity and the way it is represented in literature. In Ozick, Roth, and Englander’s works, the characters are unable to talk about Jewishness without being reminded of the Holocaust or Anne Frank in some way. Emily Budick states that the Holocaust lingers over Jewish American literature like a ghost, making its way into post-Holocaust work in ways that are constant and pervasive (“The Ghost of the Holocaust”). Budick argues that Roth’s novel “creates one of the dominant tropes that will accompany the Holocaust subject through its transmigrations and transformations in American writing: the idea of the Holocaust as a ghost. This ghost is often, like the Anne Frank in Roth’s novel, a resurrected victim”
(Budick “The Ghost”).
No matter how far the main characters are from the Holocaust, either geographically or generationally, they are all unavoidably affected by it. These authors succeed in making the memory of the Holocaust and the discussion of Jewish identity more fluid through their fictional representations in ways that prompt discussions about the lasting effects of the Holocaust on Jewish American identity and literature.
Fortunately, history has not repeated itself for Jews. This is in part due to the fact that the
4 Holocaust demands to be remembered through the literature, memorials, and museums it lives on through. Jewish American literature keeps the memory of the Holocaust alive and at the forefront of American consciousness even generations after. Discussions such as this allow an ongoing dialogue to continue about the ethical implications and consequences the mass murder and the concentration camps had, and will continue to have, on the Jewish community. Ozick, Roth, and Englander use the Holocaust as a propelling force as to why we should continue to have conversations about Holocaust memory, no matter how uncomfortable. Pushing past the inability Dragulescu refers to, and continuing to discuss the events and effects of World War II, is the only chance there is at preventing a similar event in the future. Ozick, Roth, and Englander ignore the unspeakability by outwardly addressing Holocaust memory, trauma, and Anne Frank as a modern figure. These repeated tropes are used as a way of forming the Jewish world around their characters in America, which is complicated by the distance of Jewish
American life from the atrocities of the Holocaust.
Ozick, Roth, and Englander each address the unspeakability of the Holocaust through the ways their characters seem unable to discuss the actual event for what it was, but are able to discuss the fallout and lasting effects. Victoria Aarons’ writes that “it is no surprise that we characteristically find tropes of unspeakability in literary attempts to describe the atrocities of the Holocaust” (“The Certainties of History”). By addressing the
Holocaust’s lasting effects, the main characters and in turn authors, are directly addressing the unspeakability that Aarons refers to. The texts in this thesis push past the unspeakability and make it possible to talk about the memory of trauma through the ways the main characters interact with, and to a certain extent are bound by, their Jewish
5 identity in the modern world. Their fears, anxieties, and interactions reflect the current ethical concerns of why we should continually be reading and addressing post-Holocaust literature and trauma as long as these negative associations exist. Being so far away chronologically and geographically creates a physical separation, but there seems to be no gap in suffering for the characters in this set of texts. Jewish American literature has found ways to open up a conversation about trauma in ways that are present and honest.
Collectively, if we choose to forget, we are very likely to experience a similar event, which makes studying post-Holocaust literature, defined in this thesis as literature after the 1960s and after the memorialization of the Holocaust, in addition to studying
Holocaust literature, continually necessary. Through Ozick’s traumatized anti-assimilable characters, Roth’s Anne Frank imposter, and Englander’s Anne Frank game, these texts directly address the unspeakability of the Holocaust as a means of continuing the conversation about identity formation and trauma generations later. By making unspeakability their main subject, these texts push the boundaries of what it means to think about Jewish American identity in relation to the Holocaust. They also push the boundaries of what is acceptable to add into the fictional narrative of Holocaust memory, including the possibility of Jewish Americans as permanently unassimilable (Ozick), and modern day renditions of Anne Frank and her memory (Roth and Englander).
The field of Jewish American Studies has previously discussed how the Holocaust lingers as a shadow over Jewish American identity and literature. This shadow has created an aspect of “unspeakability” that surrounds discussions of the Holocaust as
Victoria Aarons states in her article “The Certainties of History and the Uncertainties of
Representation in Post-Holocaust Writing”. Similar to the idea of a lingering shadow,
6 Emily Budick refers the Holocaust as a “ghost” that continually haunts Jewish American literature, in her article “The Ghost of the Holocaust in the Construction of Jewish
American Literature”. Ozick, Roth, and Englander’s texts all confirm this idea of the
Holocaust as ghost, as each text is set post in a World War II era where the characters are endlessly consumed by memories of the Holocaust. Sophia Lehmann argues that “The theological uses to which the Holocaust has been put by an assimilated American Jewish community are so diverse that the Holocaust has begun to replace the Bible as the new text that we must interpret” (29), in her article “’And Here [Their] Troubles Began’: The
Legacy of the Holocaust in the Writing of Cynthia Ozick, Art Spiegelman, and Philip
Roth”. The need to interpret the Holocaust stands as a way of trying to work through the lasting trauma it has left on Jews in America. The Holocaust exists as a permanent negative identity marker and when it is paired with the trope of unspeakability, both act as a barrier when trying to write about Holocaust memory directly.
These three texts work as a way of reclaiming what it means to be Jewish in
America in relation to the Holocaust, which manifests as a type of “Holocaust consciousness” (Novick The Holocaust in American Life ) for the characters in the texts as well as the authors. Quoting Peter Novick, Roberta Rosenberg writes, “As Peter Novick argues in The Holocaust in American Life , although Jews rejected the status of ‘victim community’ in the early postwar years, during the 1970s, there was now a reversion to traditional type: Jews defined themselves by their history of victimization…in which the
Holocaust became the central symbol of Jewish identity’ (171)” (115). Without the heavy religious presence in America for Jews, the community sought out other means of connecting to their Jewish identity, which manifested in communal feelings of
7 victimhood as a result of the Holocaust. As religion fell out of focus, Jewish Americans sought out new ways of identifying as both Jewish and American (Flanzbaum “In Our
Image: The Staging of Jewish-American Identity”). Sanford Pinsker, in his article, “Anne
Frank and the ‘What If?’ School of Fiction”, refers to the category of “what-if” fiction or meta fiction about modern day Anne Frank, which Roth’s The Ghost Writer and parts of
Englander’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank rely on as a means of discussing memories of the Holocaust and their lasting impact on Jewish Americans. In addition to being categorizes as “what-if” fiction, Roth and Englander also use humor and satire as a means of working through trauma, which is another trope of the field, as noted by Roberta Rosenberg. In her article, “Jewish ‘Diasporic Humor’ and Contemporary
Jewish-American Identity”, Rosenberg notes that the use of humor and satire displays the need to memorialize the past while somehow trying to move forward. The negative implications of living with the Holocaust consciousness that Novick refers to is partially the reason that Ozick, Roth, and Englander as well as other authors in the field rely on humor and satire as a way to memorialize the past.
Using humor and satire takes away some of the darkness of what happened during the Holocaust without altering historical accuracy. These authors are able to present the
Holocaust in a way that is more accessible to a wider range of readers. Rosenberg writes,
“And it is for this reason, among others, that Jewish humor, which had been traditionally used to combat antisemitism, would begin to satirize this Holocaust preoccupation, not disrespecting the memory of its victims but rather critiquing an overemphasis that produced fear, anxiety, and doubt” (115). Roth and Englander critique this idea of over
8 emphasis directly through their main characters, as their characters use humor to make meaning out of their own preoccupation with the Holocaust.
Ozick, Roth, and Englander each use the Holocaust as a defining symbol of
Jewish American identity, although Ozick’s main character is the only one who is a direct victim of the Holocaust. Each of the main characters in these texts over-identify with their Jewish identity and its connection to Holocaust memory to the extent that it begins to impact their perception of reality. Rosenberg continues that “Novick interprets this single focus on the Holocaust as an ‘inward turn of organized American Jewry’ as well as the creation of a ‘fortress mentality that was both the source and consequence of that consciousness’ (181)” (115). All the characters, and in turn all the authors in this thesis, are interconnected through their ties to the Holocaust, creating a community of people trying to process what it means to be so connected and conscious at all times of such a horrible event. This thesis remains as an exploration of an irresolvable problem, with unfortunately no definitive solution. The Holocaust is permanently linked to Jewish
American identity, but continuing to discuss this connection through memory re- formation, humor, satire, and a focus on issues of over-identification, the door remains open for new conversations about the Holocaust’s lasting effects on the Jewish community to take place.
As far as a roadmap goes, this thesis will be looking at the texts semi- chronologically. Prior to the exploration of the fictional texts, I will start with Cynthia
Ozick’s essay, “Who Owns Anne Frank?” (1997), then transition to the three main texts,
The Shawl, The Ghost Writer, and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne
Frank . Ozick’s essay is not one of the main texts being discussed, but instead I will be
9 using her essay as a way to frame concerns about negatively re-forming the memory of the Holocaust and Anne Frank the way Roth and Englander do. It is necessary to address the negative consequences memory re-formation can have, especially concerning Anne
Frank. In “Who Owns Anne Frank?” Ozick discusses what she views as unacceptable renditions when re-forming Holocaust memory, which the three fictional texts in this thesis, including her own, oppose. More importantly, I want to start with Ozick’s essay because she shames all modern day renditions of Anne Frank as unholy and unlawful. In contrast to Ozick’s argument, Roth and Englander’s uses of Anne Frank are deliberately provocative and serve as a means to analyze Jewish American preoccupation with the
Holocaust. Ozick’s argument potentially discredits the benefits that creating modern
Anne Frank figures can have on moving the discussion of Jewish identity, in relation to the Holocaust, forward.
10 CHAPTER 2
"WHO OWNS ANNE FRANK?"
Ozick indirectly brings into question whether it is harmful to conjure up Anne
Frank as a modern day scandalous woman the way Roth’s narrator does in The Ghost
Writer , and if it is equally disturbing that Englander’s characters conjure up the memory of Anne Frank only to unite themselves to their hyper-religious Jewish friends. These questions in relation to Ozick’s essay serve as an important backdrop when exploring what it means to re-form Holocaust memory in ways that can be potentially harmful because they insert fictional narratives, like the modern life of Anne Frank, into the historical narrative. Budick states, referring to works that re-form memories about the
Holocaust, that “As many critics have argued, the production of a literary work about such horrific events seemed both inadequate to the task of representation and morally suspect” (“The Ghost”). These questions as well as Budick’s previous statement are helpful in thinking through these uncomfortable, and potentially ethically and morally suspect scenarios where these texts directly discuss the unspeakability of the Holocaust and issues of over-identification and negative identity. The way authors like Roth and
Englander use the memory of Anne Frank and the Holocaust as their main subject produces concerns about accurate representation. Texts that create modernized versions of Anne Frank do initially appear “morally suspect” solely because of their topic.
Regardless, the texts in this thesis provide an accurate representation of Jewish American preoccupation with the Holocaust, which makes them successful in their representation of the continued effects of the Holocaust.
11 The depiction of Anne Frank’s life in Ozick’s essay is very similar to the portrait
Ozick paints of her main character, Rosa, in The Shawl . The most notable difference between Ozick’s two pieces (minus the subject of Anne Frank and nonfiction versus fictional representation) is that Rosa receives a silver lining at the end of the book. Her life is able to continue. Even Ozick, although she does not tamper with Anne Frank’s memory in her book, creates fictional renditions of Holocaust survivors and of the experiences they had in the concentration camps through the fictional story of Rosa. By doing this, whether intentionally or not, Ozick has contributed to the fictional re-forming and rebuilding of Holocaust memory, continuing the conversation of how Jewish identity is permanently linked to the Holocaust. Even Rosa, a tortured woman living in her own misery and reliving the loss of her daughter, has the possibility of escaping and creating a new life. However, as readers we know that Anne Frank did not outlive the Holocaust, which Ozick makes painfully clear in her essay. Ozick points out that “Anne Frank’s story, truthfully told, is unredeemed and unredeemable” (“Who Owns” 78). In contrast to the bleak view Ozick presents in “Who Owns Anne Frank?”, her fictional narrative provides some hope, and leaves something redeemable to take away from the story. Post-
Holocaust fiction leaves open the possibility to think that somewhere after all of the suffering, some lives did not meet their predetermined end.
As demonstrated in The Shawl , Ozick shows that it is possible to create a fictional world about the Holocaust that does not tamper with Anne Frank’s memory. Ozick writes that “any projection of Anne Frank as a contemporary figure is an unholy speculation; it tampers with history, with reality, with deadly truth” (“Who Owns” 76). When these other authors invoke Anne Frank’s memory it tampers with her as a static historical
12 figure, but it is not intentioned the way tampering with her diary was. Roth and
Englander are not censoring the truth, which sets them apart from the “authors” Ozick calls out in her essay who altered Anne Frank’s diary with the intention to blot out the suffering she experienced. Roth and Englander are both able to create new avenues to discuss the impacts of the Holocaust on Jewish identity through their re-formation of the memory and discussion of Anne Frank. In using modern day Anne Frank figures to convey how the Holocaust still impacts the Jewish community, some renditions come across as more tasteful than others. Ozick’s essay does not deal specifically with other authors’ work outside of Anne Frank’s diary, however, the claims she makes can be extended to other Jewish American works as a means of trying to understand how this singular event has influenced all aspects of Jewish American life. Ozick’s essay raises warranted concerns about why blotting out the suffering, death, and trauma of the
Holocaust for the sake of sanitizing history is not only unethical, but also permanently alters historical accuracy.
Ozick argues that inserting modern day Anne Frank figures into the historical narrative in ways that distort her life, even if fictionally, cause a misrepresentation of
Holocaust memory in a way that is harmful to factual accounts of remembrance (“Who
Owns” 76). The bulk of “Who Owns Anne Frank?” argues and provides historical evidence that when Anne Frank’s diary became a tangible object that everyone had access to, it also became censored in order to fit whatever medium it was being performed or read in. This view of Ozick’s is supported by other scholars in the field, such as Dick Bernard, who states that “what has happened to the Diary is that it became a cottage industry, variously owned and exploited” (“Quarrel & Quandry”). The act of
13 censoring the diary to fit certain needs is confirmed by Max Page, who states that at
“every stage of its life in public, the document has been reinvented, by everyone from
Anne Frank herself to her father, to translators, playwrights, filmmakers, school teachers, foundations, and reviewers. The Diary of Anne Frank , which virtually all of us read as children, adolescents, or adults, is a radically altered, shortened, and skewed document
(89). Ozick is not alone in her view that the censoring and excessive editing of Anne
Frank’s diary was harmful. She is also not alone in her view of how heavily edited the diary had become in order to fit the specific vision of whoever was producing it.
To further highlight the specific censoring that took place, Ozick details that as the diary was adapted into a play and widely distributed in Germany, anti-German sentiments were removed from the text, leading to an erasure of Jewish suffering in the experiences Anne Frank recounted in her diary. Ozick writes that the German editors and translators, in order to “mask or soft-petal German culpability went about blurring hostile references to Germans and Germany” (“Who Owns” 82). Additionally, Anne Frank’s list of house rules were changed from “‘It is necessary to speak softly at all times. Only the language of civilized people may be spoken, thus no German’”, to the German translation which reads, “‘all civilized languages ... but softly!’” (“Who Owns” 82). Ozick points out lines in yet another stage adaptation that were added to omit German culpability. She details that the Nazified notion of race that “leaped out in a line attributed to Hellman
[was] nowhere present in the diary” (“Who Owns” 85). This version of Anne Frank in
Hellman’s version proudly stated that “‘We're not the only people that've had to suffer…There've always been people that've had to…sometimes one race…sometimes another’” (“Who Owns” 85). The claims in Ozick’s essay bring attention to the ethical
14 concerns of the erasure of historical accuracy, Holocaust memories, and firsthand experience that should not be altered to ignore the horror of what happened. Page confirms the lasting effects of this type of censoring by explaining that the new story of
Anne Frank became “a radically altered version of Anne Frank's life as told in the diary, designed to fit the needs of Broadway producers and Americans in the 1950s. It has continued to serve the needs of hundreds of thousands of teachers worldwide, who have found the diary the perfect answer to their search for an accessible, and perhaps not too depressing, work on the Holocaust” (90). Specific phrases were taken out as a pressing need for accessibility crept in, in order to make the diary more digestible for large audiences without coming across as too depressing or evoking the Holocaust too directly.
This intentional re-forming and restructuring of Anne Frank’s diary removed much of what made the diary so remarkable- that Anne Frank, a 15 year old living in hiding, was well aware of what was going on and chose to document it in all its truth.
The main goal of editing out the tragedy in the diary was to reach a large audience with waves of positivity about Anne Frank’s struggle, although purposely leaving out the main cause of her struggle in order to make the text more accessible. The editing purposefully and wrongfully pushes history forward blindly without paying tribute to why Anne Frank was in hiding in the first place. Ozick writes that “A deep truth telling has been turned into an instrument of partial truth… Almost every hand that has approached the diary with the well-meaning intention of publicizing it has contributed to the subversion of history” (“Who Owns” 78). Ozick continues, arguing that “all these appropriations, whether cheaply personal or densely ideological, whether seen as exalting or denigrating, have contributed to the conversion of Anne Frank into usable goods”
15 (“Who Owns” 87). In his essay “A Multiplicity of Annes”, Robert Skloot answers
Ozick’s question and title of her essay, “Who Owns Anne Frank?”, with the response that
“It may be sad knowledge, but inescapable nonetheless, that everyone owns Anne Frank, even those who don’t deserve her” (20). Anne Frank’s identity as an individual was erased and she became as a symbol of positivity and light to represent all Jews, she became a commodity to be owned by everyone. Ozick writes that “There are no diary entries that register and memorialize the suffering of her spirit” (“Who Owns” 76), Anne
Frank “was designed to be erased from living, to leave no grave, no sign, no physical trace of any kind. Her fault- her crime- was having been born a Jew, and as such she was classified among those who had the right to exist: not as a subject people, not as an inferior breed, not even as usable slaves” (“Who Owns” 76). The suffering Anne Frank experienced, which was the same suffering that determined the outcome of many Jewish lives, was edited out purposefully from the diary. This editing lead to the wrongful representation of Anne Frank as a symbol of lasting hope. Removing the anti-German sentiments and partly erasing her Jewish identity and personal suffering, warps global perception of just how ruthlessly Hitler, the Nazis, and the concentration camps were as they decimated entire populations of Jews across Europe. As Ozick argues, editing out
Germany’s accountability in the diary does not change history or its motivations.
Ozick argues that a German drama offered the perspective that in Anne Frank’s fate, it is possible to see the collective fate and tragedy of the human existence (“Who
Owns” 86). “Hannah Arendt, philosopher and Hitler refugee, scorned such oceanic expressions, calling it ‘cheap sentimentality at the expense of a great catastrophe’”
(“Who Owns” 86). It is extremely reductive and wholly inappropriate to claim that
16 Jewish suffering reflects how everyone is suffering, because between 1933-1945, that was very clearly not true. Ozick continues by saying that “A decade after the fall of
Nazism, the spirited and sanitized young girl of the play became a vehicle for German communal identification with the victim, not the persecutors and, according to Rosenfeld, a continuing ‘symbol of moral and intellectual convenience’” (“Who Owns” 86). This kind of identification, through the sanitizing of Anne Frank’s story, removes all culpability from the persecutors in the eyes of the audience, and leads their attention away from the persecutors and root causes of the Holocaust. “The Anne Frank whom thousands saw in seven openings in seven cities ‘spoke affirmatively about life and not accusingly of her tortures’”, which was only because of the way the diary was censored and adapted for the stage. This left Anne Frank as “a ready-at-hand formula for easy forgiveness” (“Who Owns” 86). These statements from Ozick highlight how damaging and inaccurate the versions of Anne Frank’s diary are for historical understanding about the significance and lasting effects of the Holocaust.
The systematic erasure of Anne Frank’s suffering highlights the risk of deliberately brushing over details about Jewish suffering, identity, and anti-German bias.
Censoring her diary shows a complete disregard for historical accuracy. Pain and trauma should not be forgotten for the sake of making literature digestible for those who prefer not to hear an accurate rendition. Ozick writes, “Anne Frank’s written narrative, moreover, is not the story of Anne Frank, and never has been… It has been infantilized,
Americanized, homogenized, sentimentalized, falsified… in fact, blatantly and arrogantly denied” (“Who Owns” 78). This type of overarching sympathy that was made possible through the censoring of Anne Frank’s diary is not inherently bad. However, it remains
17 problematic because the root cause of her suffering was washed away, it was not the part people were given access to or sympathizing with, depending on the version of Anne
Frank’s diary that was being performed. Anne Frank was fully aware of the situation she was in, but that gets discounted when she is reduced to a struggling young girl trying to find herself. As Ozick states, Anne Frank’s own words in her diary “do not soften, ameliorate, or give the lie to the pervasive horror of her time. Nor do they pull the wool over the eyes of history” (“Who Owns” 81).
Anne Frank’s diary should speak to a higher purpose than something similar to books like chicken soup for the teenage soul, which censoring has aimed to make it into.
Holocaust memoirs serve as a memorial to ensure that an event like this does not repeat itself. Sympathy, even if shallowly thought through, is certainly not the worst outcome of reading Holocaust memoirs, but collectively we can do better than just having vague feelings of sympathy for such a horrid event. Anne Frank’s diary was, at its core, an accurate account of unimaginable death, fear, and suffering. It deserves to be discussed in full. Sophia Lehmann writes that “Robert Alter refers to ‘the Holocaust phenomenon’ in
America, alluding to the way in which it has become tamed of its historical horror within academic, commercial, political, and religious spheres” (32). Ozick’s essay speaks to and criticizes the “taming of the Holocaust” that often happens when the historical horror is removed, like it was in the diary. The systematic removal of historical accuracy and suffering only leads to a misrepresentation of actual events, leaving large pieces of history to fall out of mainstream consciousness.
The texts in this thesis are successful in not reinforcing the commercialization of
Holocaust memory, leaving it void of its historical horror. Even though The Shawl, The
18 Ghost Writer, and What We Talk About re-form history and memory, they do it in a way that maintains and addresses that the core of Jewish suffering in American is deeply tied to the Holocaust. The information Ozick presents in “Who Owns Anne Frank?” is a testament to real accounts of the consequences of re-forming history for the sole purpose of making it more accessible and easily digestible for the general public. Holocaust memory cannot be meaningfully discussed if it is only told in partial truth. While the main texts in this thesis convey a fictional re-forming, they remain largely unharmful because they do not blot out the memory of the Holocaust. If anything, they reinforce its impact and historical significance. Through their fictional work Ozick, Roth, and
Englander are not erasing the memory of what happened, nor are they editing out the human suffering Anne Frank or victims of the Holocaust experienced. Instead, they comment on and critique how the memory of Anne Frank and the memory of the
Holocaust functions in Jewish American consciousness after the initial memorialization of the Holocaust.
19 CHAPTER 3
THE SHAWL
Ozick’s two part book, The Shawl (1979) and her essay “Who Owns Anne
Frank?” (1997) serve two different purposes, highlighting the importance of looking at
Ozick’s fiction and nonfiction side by side. While the eighteen year time gap between these two pieces might account for ideological differences concerning the problem of re- forming Holocaust memory, looking at her two pieces together helps aid in the understanding of how Holocaust memory and Jewish American identity are still heavily intertwined. In her essay, Ozick condemns fictional re-formations of the Holocaust, specifically concerning Anne Frank and her diary. The Shawl depicts a fictional recreation of Holocaust memory through the main character, Rosa, but it remains void of any direct references to Anne Frank. Ozick’s two varied works provide insight into both the harm and the benefits of re-forming Holocaust memory, largely dependent on the intention behind the re-formation and the extent to which it is re-formed. While the same tone of severity about the lasting effects of the Holocaust are carried between “Who
Owns Anne Frank?” and The Shawl , the most notable difference is that Rosa’s individual story is fabricated and she is able to live a life after the Holocaust, although not separate from it. Rosa is also afforded a silver lining at the end of the book. From what we can gather as readers from Anne Frank’s diary and Ozick’s essay, it is clear that Anne
Frank’s life did not end with a silver lining.
To tie back into the overarching themes of this thesis, Ozick’s main character over-identifies so heavily with her Jewish identity and its ties to the Holocaust that she is unable to lead a normal life. Her association with the Holocaust physically stops her from
20 assimilating into America once she is liberated from the camps, even years after. Rosa stays holed up in her one room living space, condemning everyone else for continuing to live a normal life. She is fairly disconnected from, or possibly exists adjacent to reality as she continues to live in the past. Rosa is closer in comparison to the “out of touch with reality” character of Amy Bellette in Roth’s novel, who takes on the form of modern day
Anne Frank. Ozick, like Roth, leaves little out of the narrative on human suffering when it comes to the Holocaust through her characters. Among other Holocaust texts, “Ozick’s
The Shawl is the best representation of the phenomenon of blocked mourning” (Budick
“The Ghost”). This idea of blocked mourning and Rosa’s over-identification with the
Holocaust is apparent in her everyday life as she struggles to move past her experiences in the concentration camps. Ozick accurately portrays what Jewish identity can look like to an extreme in a post-Holocaust era through Rosa.
Rosa over-identifies so heavily with her past trauma, which is directly linked to her Jewishness, that she remains rooted in past memories which stops her from functioning and integrating into society. Her current identity is almost solely formed through negative associations to the Holocaust to the point where she identifies as a permanent victim. The Holocaust has become inextricable from Rosa’s Jewish identity.
Trying to process the trauma and re-form her life has become an insurmountable barrier to surviving. Rosa stands apart from the other fictional characters presented in this thesis, seeing as she has purposefully set herself apart from everyone around her. Rosa and her niece, Stella, survived the concentration camps and then immigrated to America, which puts them in a different position than the American born characters in Roth or
Englander’s texts. Rosa’s inability to live a functional life in the present is due to the
21 death of her daughter, Magda, who did not survive the camps, her strained relationship with Stella, who refuses to acknowledge their shared experience in Europe, and her new environment in Florida which is not conducive to living a happy life for her, although it seems to be for most people around her. Rosa is unable to blend in because her ties to her past are so strong that the trauma she experienced during the Holocaust now haunts and guides her thoughts and actions. She constantly reminds others around her that she has refused to assimilate and lead a normal life, because in her eyes that would mean forgetting what happened to her and Magda. The most disruptive factor that keeps Rosa from integrating into the present is her self-indulgent fantasy that Magda is still alive and reading the letters Rosa writes to her in Polish. These choices, both conscious and unconscious, make Rosa irreconcilably different from the people around her and also bind her Jewish identity directly to the Holocaust.
For the characters in all three texts in this thesis, parts of their lives are stuck forever in the past to the point that their behaviors, that they have linked as a part of their
Jewish identity, have kept them separate from the people around them, consciously or not. In Rosa’s case, it was a conscious choice. This suggests that extreme over- identification with the Holocaust can serve as a permanent barrier to assimilation and a normal life. Ozick’s depiction of the Holocaust and its effects on Jewish identity in The
Shawl sets up an image of what happens when Holocaust memory is not re-formed and becomes inaccessible to process, like it does for Rosa. The memory becomes rooted in the past and stays as a static, insurmountable trauma that is impossible to talk about, leaving Rosa stuck in a loop of memories focused on suffering. The consequence of this
22 lack of accessibility is that the Holocaust becomes left as an unthinkable historical event that can only be remembered for its traumatic effects on the Jewish population.
The uncomfortable spaces Ozick’s characters exist in highlight the over- identification or the extreme obsession with their own Jewish identity that is inescapable and invasive like Zuckerman’s obsession with his imagined Anne Frank. Both situations present equally important concerns when thinking about what the Holocaust means in the lives of present day Jewish Americans. “In The Shawl, for instance, Ozick explores the consequences of the survivor Rosa's memory in terms of her behavior in present day
Florida. Only a tenth of the novella occurs during the Holocaust; the rest concerns what follows” (Lehmann 35). The part that follows, which is a majority of Rosa’s adult life, sets up a clear link between Rosa’s Jewish identity in the present and her experiences during the Holocaust. In Part One, Rosa repeats as if she already knows, that Magda will die ( The Shawl 5, 7-9). The repeated image and eventual fulfillment of Magda’s death sets Rosa up for a doomed future as her narrative progresses. Because of Rosa’s indirect yet highly descriptive narration about the events, it is easy to miss what is going on in
Part One of the story. Nothing in Part One is explicitly stated. The fact that Rosa, Magda, and Stella are in the camps, or the way Magda is thrown to her death into the electric fence by the guard ( The Shawl 9) have to be heavily inferred through context clues in the narrative. The indirect explanation of events exemplifies the almost indescribable distance Rosa feels and forever holds between herself and the rest of humanity in Part
Two.
Rosa resents the people around her, Jewish or not, claiming that they have forgotten, they do not care about the past anymore, meaning that they specifically do not
23 care about Rosa’s past and the Holocaust. Rosa has more or less become a hermit in
Florida. She refuses to go out unless she has to do her laundry, she takes her meals in her room, and she has virtually no social contact outside of her letters with Stella and the receptionist at her hotel. Ozick writes, “It seemed to Rosa Lubin that the whole peninsula of Florida was weighted down with regret. Everyone had left behind a real life, here they had nothing. They were all scarecrows, blown about under the murdering sunball with empty rib cages” ( The Shawl 16). Rosa is only in her 60s, significantly younger than most of the people she describes living around her. While not exactly a senior citizen, she has assumed the role of one. Her experience has aged her rapidly. For Rosa, Florida is nothing, it is void of history, it is empty, it is a space for people to wither away. Part Two opens with Ozick introducing Rosa in present day. Not only is Rosa immediately framed as unstable, she’s also destroyed any resemblance of the normal life she had in New York after she was liberated from the camps. “Rosa Lublin, a madwomen and a scavenger, gave up her store- she smashed it up herself- and moved to Miami. It was a mad thing to do” ( The Shawl 13). Rosa now lives in Florida where Stella supports her by sending money from New York ( The Shawl 13). Rosa was almost able to lead a normal life after
Magda’s death until she destroyed her antique store, claiming it was because people did not want to hear about “real” history and were unburdened by the past. In Rosa’s eyes, the patrons of her shop did not care about the past, nor did they care about the Holocaust, suffering, or the trauma Rosa experienced ( The Shawl 27). This is the first time the reader sees Rosa verbally explaining the distance she feels from the rest of the world as a result of her experience during the Holocaust. Rosa states “Whoever came, they were like deaf people. Whatever you explained to them, they didn’t understand” ( The Shawl 27). Rosa is
24 able to feel the distance she puts between herself and others and she is well aware it is because of her over-identification with her memories from the Holocaust. Even though
Rosa is aware that this is the reason for the separation, she is unwilling, or possibly unable, to change it.
Even during Rosa’s successful attempt at being part of modern society where she was able to run her own business and support herself, she still felt like she was living a separate life from the people around her. Her negative associations with her Jewish identity derive from her experience in the camps and watching the death of her infant daughter. Rosa can now only understand her Jewish identity as the reason she was persecuted and her life was taken from her. In addition, the imagery of the camps haunts
Rosa’s everyday life. She describes the conditions of Florida with language that evokes the conditions of the camps as she described them in Part One, further solidifying that she can only associate her life and her surroundings in relation to the Holocaust. Rosa narrates, “The streets were a furnace, the sun an executioner. Everyday without fail it blazed and blazed…” ( The Shawl 14). This brings to mind the death chambers and burning of Jewish bodies, little shelter from the elements, and the unlivable conditions inside concentration camps. In contrast to this imagery, Rosa’s narration in Part One describes the summer scene outside the camp fences as something she longs for. A positive association of summer has now become a negative one due to Rosa’s experiences.
When Rosa meets Persky, a man in his late 70’s at the laundromat, he is the first person who has the potential to pull her out of the dark void of memories she lives inside of. Although Rosa and Persky share a similar cultural background, she refuses to find any
25 common ground with him because he did not endure the concentration camps like she did. She repeatedly tells Persky that “my Warsaw isn’t your Warsaw” ( The Shawl 19), meaning just because they were born in the same place 20 some years apart, it does not mean they have anything worthwhile in common. Persky and his family immigrated to
America avoiding the camps, allowing him to live an easier life in Rosa’s eyes. In contrast, Rosa’s life was taken from her, which remains something she has yet to recover from. Fairly soon into their relationship Persky says to Rosa, “‘What… you’re still afraid? Nazis we ain’t got, even Ku Kluxers we ain’t got. What kind of person are you, you’re still afraid?’” ( The Shawl 19). To which Rosa vaguely replies that thirty-nine years ago, she was a different person ( The Shawl 19). Not only does this demonstrate Persky’s inability to understand Rosa’s suffering, but it reinforces the idea that the only way for her to live a good life is to forget what happened to her. Rosa in unable to form a present day self-image that is separate from her associations to the Holocaust. Rosa’s mindset for having no control or say over what happens in her life comes from the fact that she feels her life was taken from her by thieves ( The Shawl 20), which she had no ability to stop.
Because of Rosa’s past experiences, she feels her life is out of her hands, she has no control over what is given to her or taken from her because that has been her only narrative for a long time. Persky becomes dedicated to trying to change Rosa’s perspective on this, though his urgings often fall flat when he tells her that she has no reason to be afraid, and that she really should try and move on. Unfortunately, their conversations often represent the two perspectives that the texts in this thesis struggle to find a middle ground between when it comes to talking about Holocaust memory. There is either the option to move on and forget, or remain stuck in the past, unable to move
26 forward. Neither scenario is ideal. The characters who feel the pressure to pick one extreme end up staying rooted in the past because to them it means not forgetting. This is not an ideal way to live, nor is it healthy or productive in terms of finding ways to move forward while still acknowledging and honoring the past.
Through the narrative of Rosa, Ozick sets up the idea that the past, pre-Holocaust, was and will remain better than the present where the trauma has come to live as part of everyday life. Focusing in on this idea, Ozick narrates that “The Warsaw of her girlhood: a great light; switched it on, she wanted to live inside her eyes” ( The Shawl 20). Rosa is constantly reminded by Persky that she cannot live in the past ( The Shawl 23) but because Persky did not undergo the same experiences as Rosa, she feels that his opinions are crude and irrelevant. There is a continued dialogue between Rosa and Persky that shows Rosa’s longing for the past, pre-Holocaust and pre Magda’s death, and her conscious inability to move forward and continue her life. The conversation between these two characters highlights Persky’s insistence that Rosa moves on, because things are different now, and she needs to live a modern lifestyle. He speculates that Rosa wants everything to be the way it was before ( The Shawl 58), to which Rosa replies, “‘It can’t be [the way it was before]… Before is a dream. After is a joke. Only during stays. And to call it a life is a lie” ( The Shawl 58). These lines from Rosa convey how much the
Holocaust has destroyed her life. They also convey that Rosa is fully aware that she cannot move on, and that she has chosen this way of living in the past as her means of existing, although it becomes increasingly unsustainable over time. Persky, playing the role of the voice saying that Rosa must move forward in order to survive, goes on to say that the Holocaust is over, that she went through it, and “now you owe yourself
27 something” (The Shawl 58). Immediately feeling attacked, Rosa has now equated Persky to Stella, who is as cruel and demeaning as possible when she talks to Rosa about her unhealthy obsession with Magda and the Holocaust, even though Stella herself shares the same past as Rosa. Rosa narrates to Persky that “‘Stella is self indulgent. She wants to wipe out memory’” ( The Shawl 58). Again, we are reminded of the polarity that can exist when one end of the extreme is represented as the only solution to suffering. Stella is arguing that the only way to move on is to forget completely without paying tribute to the past. Because of Persky’s ongoing insistence that Rosa needs to forget and move forward, she equates his constant pushing with Stella’s. Stella is also openly vindictive, and knows exactly why Rosa turned out the way she did, but is still cruel and condescending to her about her over-identification. In line with Stella again, Persky urges that “‘Sometimes a little forgetting is necessary… if you want to get something out of life…You ain’t in a camp. It’s finished. Long ago it’s finished. Look around, you’ll see human beings’” ( The
Shawl 58). It is difficult to argue that Persky is wrong in his honest intention to get Rosa to see the good things her current life has to offer. Even though that may be true, his stance on forgetting in order to survive comes across as an unfair expectation. Persky’s behavior also solidifies that forgetting is the only way to move on, as if that will solve
Rosa’s entire identity crisis as a Jewish person who is tied so deeply to the Holocaust. In turn, Persky’s urging that she forget is only making Rosa more defensive, resulting in her feeling as though he is another person on the never ending list of people in her life who could care less about what happened to her or about the Holocaust.
Every event in Rosa’s life has become tied to the Holocaust, and in turn tied to how she identifies herself as separate from everyone else. The negative reactions Rosa
28 displays in response to the things she encounters are a direct result of what happened to her in the concentration camps. Rosa’s only mode of thinking about her life is how it is negatively impacted and permanently tied to the Holocaust. Even though Rosa’s mind is stuck in the past, it does not mean she wishes to relive her experience in the camps. Rosa shows explicit horror when she gets caught in another hotel's beach area, locked again behind a barbed wire fence from which she cannot escape. As narrated by Rosa, Ozick writes, “To be locked behind barbed wire! No one knew who she was; what had happened to her; where she came from. Their gates, their terrible ruse of their keys, wire brambles… No one to help. In the morning they would arrest her” ( The Shawl 49). Upon escaping barbed wire a second time, Rosa then goes on to berate the hotel manager about the wire fence entrapment. Causing a scene and screaming, Rosa shouts, “In America it’s no place for barbed wire on top of fences… Only Nazis catch innocent people behind barbed wire” ( The Shawl 51). The manager responds, ashamed, that his name is
Finkelstein (admitting that he is Jewish), while Rosa continues to scream at him that he of all people should know better ( The Shawl 51). The manager becomes another person, like
Persky and Stella, who acts as though the suffering of survivors is less important now that the initial memorialization of the Holocaust is over.
Existing closer on the spectrum to Persky, Stella has chosen to live life as an assimilated Jewish American by completely ignoring the impact the Holocaust had on her and Rosa’s lives. This is damaging to Rosa, who is still suffering, and also to the memory of the Holocaust as a defining factor in Jewish American life. Stella has chosen to move on the best she can, although Rosa describes her as heartless and cruel because of it.
Stella’s direct association with the Holocaust has caused her to form an identity that is
29 pushed so far away from identifying as Jewish that she is condescending to Rosa, solely because Rosa chooses to identify as both Jewish and as a Holocaust victim. Stella’s experience inside the camp has also directly influenced how she sees the world. Rosa narrates, “As if innocent, as if ignorant, as if not there . Stella, an ordinary American, indistinguishable! No one could guess what hell she had crawled out of until she opened her mouth and up coiled the smoke of accent” ( The Shawl 33). Rosa makes it seem as though Stella is indifferent to human suffering because she forgot what happened to them, or at least she acts like it. Additionally, Rosa states that Stella’s accent, which distinguishes her as a Jew from Europe, has marked Stella’s identity as an American negatively. In her letters to Magda, which is a continued delusion Rosa uses to link herself to the past, she has an outlet to talk about how vile she feels Stella is. “Even
Stella, who can remember, refuses. She calls me a parable-maker” ( The Shawl 41).
Through the letters she writes to Magda, Rosa re-forms her own history and her memory of the Holocaust by keeping Magda alive. In a final effort to use escapism to distract herself from the misery of her life, Rosa conjures Magda up from the baby shawl sent to her by Stella, positing that Stella was a liar and that somewhere, Magda is still alive ( The
Shawl 35). In the last pages of the book, Persky comes up to Rosa’s room, only for Rosa to watch Magda disappear again. In some ways, seeing Magda again but in her adolescent form, seeing that she did survive (even if only in Rosa’s mind) has given Rosa enough closure to move forward and try at a normal life with Persky.
Through the scene with the hotel manager, Rosa seems to personify a fear of
Ozick’s that Lehmann describes, “Cynthia Ozick stresses the fear of a second Holocaust in America, based on the knowledge that the first one occurred in a place where Jews had
30 become highly assimilated and successful” (30). This fear comes through in Rosa’s panic as she is once again trapped behind barbed wire, in America, where she should be safe.
Lehmann points to this fear as one of the motivating factors for why the authors in this thesis are so crucial to Jewish American literature. Lehmann states that texts like the ones discusses in this thesis contribute significantly to the ability to discuss the Holocaust’s ongoing trauma and effect on Jewish identity, in the hope that these discussions will prompt continued exploration of how Jewish American identity and the Holocaust are permanently linked. The fear that the same fate will strike twice is reason enough to continue discussing the Holocaust’s influence on Jewish lives and to keep the memory at the forefront of American consciousness.
Living with the memory of the Holocaust for the generations that follow does not necessarily mean re-living it every day like Rosa, nor does it imply that everyone has to forget in order to move on. Both extremes are equally harmful to the memory of the
Holocaust and human life in the present. At the end of Ozick’s book, Rosa is given the option to live a better life in the future through her relationship with Persky. This future focuses on forming an identity not so tied to the Holocaust, but it does not renounce
Rosa’s experience as a Holocaust survivor. Through the end of Rosa’s narrative, The
Shawl aims to find a middle ground where Holocaust memory can be discussed, reimagined, and re-formed, without being forgotten.
31 CHAPTER 4
THE GHOST WRITER
The Ghost Writer offers a lot to discuss when it comes to how characters in the novel relate to their Jewish identity through over-identification with the Holocaust. I want to focus on two specific scenes, the first involving Nathan Zuckerman (the main character), his father, and Judge Wapter. The second scene consists of Zuckerman’s extended narrative about modern day Anne Frank, also known in the novel as Amy
Bellette. In Roth’s novel, Anne Frank is not only alive and breathing, but the woman
Zuckerman plans to take home to his family as his future wife so he can show his true
Jewishness to the world. These two scenes deserve equal attention as they both focus on the existence of Jewish identity and Holocaust preoccupation in America. The scenes focus heavily on re-forming the memory of trauma in a post-Holocaust era several generations after the end of World War II. Lehmann writes that “The difficulty of writing about the Holocaust is compounded for American Jews by their distance from the event, both geographically and, increasingly, chronologically” (30), which is displayed through
Zuckerman’s narrative and in turn Roth’s authorship. Through Roth’s fictional Anne
Frank, The Ghost Writer is able to add to the conversation of how the Holocaust continues to pervade Jewish American life.
The Ghost Writer is the most productive book discussed in this thesis in terms of how it narrates several generations of American Jews trying to re-form Holocaust memory differently and its effects on Jewish American identity. Jennifer Slivka argues that “The Ghost Writer uses parody to subvert the power of history” (133), and also functions as a means of using counter history by envisioning Anne Frank as alive and
32 well as a tool for meaning making (135) to continue the discussion about the influence of the Holocaust. In order to create new conversations about what it means to live with the memory of the Holocaust while being so far removed from it, some reimagining is necessary. Lehmann writes that through imagination, authors like Roth are able to “renew and transmit the memory of the Holocaust, portraying it in an interactive relationship with the present” which reaffirms its continued influence and importance (35). Roth confirms this idea through the narration of Zuckerman and his obsession with the memory of Anne Frank. Zuckerman’s relationship is interactive with the present in the way he brings Anne Frank back to life and molds her story to fit her assimilation into
America. Zuckerman’s over-identification with the memory of Anne Frank demonstrates the continued influence the Holocaust has over Jewish American identity.
Zuckerman, a self-admitted unreliable narrator, functions as a pseudo extension of
Roth. Zuckerman is 23 and struggling through an identity crisis in this novel, but he is narrating the story as a middle aged man looking back on his life. The Ghost Writer is
Zuckerman’s narration of his own memories. Zuckerman is looking for admiration and acceptance from the famous Jewish writer E.I. Lonoff, whose house he is invited to after publishing a short story titled “Higher Education” about an inter-family money feud.
Zuckerman’s life as a Jewish boy growing into manhood is going seemingly well until 1)
He writes a short story and his family accuses him of being anti-semitic (Roth 108) and
2) He conjures up the ghost of Anne Frank in the form of Amy Bellette, who is also staying at E.I. Lonoff’s house, as his prospective new wife. While two out of the three texts examined in this thesis border on being horribly offensive in their renditions of
33 Anne Frank and her memory, Roth depicts the most unsettling version of a modern day
Anne Frank as a young adulteress who exudes childlike purity.
At the root of Zuckerman’s short story are stereotypes that trigger older biases about Jews, ones that were used to persecute and identify the Jewish community during the Holocaust. This is very problematic in the eyes of Zuckerman’s father because his
Jewish son, who his whole life has abided by the practices of Judaism, has now made the
Jewish community look like monsters. Zuckerman’s story details a feud between Meema
Chaya, Essie, and her sons which results in the whole family looking like greedy, crazy
Jews, who are only interested in money and adultery (Roth 79, 81).
In looking at Roth’s text through a post-Holocaust lens and as an extension of the lasting trauma after World War II, the conversation between Zuckerman and his father shows inter-generational differences in dealing with trauma after the Holocaust.
Zuckerman’s father is concerned about the family's name and identity in America as viewed by non-Jews, while Zuckerman is trying to process what it means to be Jewish in
America through the ways his identity is bound with the memory of the Holocaust and
Anne Frank. Zuckerman’s father notes that the first main detail of the story that becomes a source of outrage is Zuckerman’s portrayal of cousin Sidney and his multiple women,
“his ill-used wife Jenny, and his mysterious Polish tootsie Annie, whose scandalously florid shmatas were much discussed, if never once seen, at the family weddings, funerals, etc.” (Roth 82). Ironically, as Zuckerman is dismissing his father’s preoccupation with
Jewish identity during their fight about the short story, the detail slips that Zuckerman idolized Sidney as a child because he was a defender of the Jews (Roth 82). The second detail of the story that upsets Zuckerman’s father is the depiction of the rest of the family
34 as absolutely insane. Sidney is a drunk with a mistress, and Essie smashes a man’s hand with a hammer for touching her knee, “she broke the hand for him, at the wrist, with the hammer carried in her purse all these years to protect herself and the future of the two fatherless sons” (Roth 83). This scene, according to Zuckerman’s father, makes Sidney and Essie prototypes of all Jews, all of which are seemingly promiscuous and unstable.
Early on, it is clear that Zuckerman has some sort of Jewish loyalty to his family based on his relationship with Sidney that isn’t rooted in over-identification. Somewhere along the line, Zuckerman has lost his ability to relate to his Jewish identity naturally, and becomes consumed with the idea of Anne Frank. In his adult life, over-identification with memories of the Holocaust and Anne Frank are the only ways Zuckerman can see as a way of connecting back to his roots.
Zuckerman’s estrangement from his family is due to an initial rejection of his
Jewish identity. He feels as though his father is too caught up in how Jews are viewed in
America, leaving Zuckerman unable to identify with that specific idea, prompting him to find a connection elsewhere. The argument between Zuckerman and his father about his story ends ultimately unresolved, and Zuckerman leaves his father in the snow as he boards the bus back to Quahsay (Roth 90, 91). Zuckerman’s father over-identifies with the memory of the Holocaust through his worries about Jews being permanently persecuted by the rest of the world, especially when the negative stereotypes that
Zuckerman evokes are still present, even years after the Holocaust. Zuckerman’s father lectures him about the published story, which turns into the father guilting him about how he has made the family look bad, and finishes with the statement that this must be what
Zuckerman wants everyone to think about all Jews. His father points out that Zuckerman
35 has made “everybody seem awfully greedy” (Roth 86), to which Zuckerman replies that everybody was (Roth 86). The father’s reactions to Zuckerman’s story are dictated with thoughts about the Holocaust’s effects in the back of his mind. Directly voicing his anxieties, the father says, “‘The point is, there is far more to our family than this. And you know that’” (Roth 86). And again, trying to reinforce the larger implications of what
Zuckerman is perpetuating, he says, “‘And do you fully understand what a story like this story, when it’s published, will mean to people who don’t know us?’” (Roth 88).
Unfortunately his father’s warning has no effect in that moment, and it is not until later that Zuckerman realizes the larger implications of his actions.
Although the Holocaust is not discussed in Roth’s novel in typical ways,
Zuckerman’s father’s fears imply that the Holocaust is the core source of his own anxiety about the negative stereotypes in Zuckerman’s story. Being a generation older, and a generation closer to the Holocaust, his father has experienced more overt hatred for Jews than Zuckerman has and cautions him to pull the story based on the repercussions it is likely to have. His father says he knows what will happen when people read the story, because he’s seen what can happen to Jews, and there’s no way Zuckerman can know because his parents have sheltered him from anti-Jewish sentiments his whole life (Roth
91). His father goes on to say, “‘I wonder if you fully understand just how very little love is in this world for Jewish people. I don’t mean in Germany, either, under the Nazis. I mean in run-of-the-mill Americans… Nathan it is there… I have seen it, I have felt it…’”
(Roth 92). This collection of accusations and fears against Zuckerman’s story leads to the entire family labeling him as anti-semitic and ruthless in the pursuit of his fame as a writer. To his mother, it seems as though Zuckerman has renounced his Jewish identity in
36 order to become famous, and it seems like he does not “really like the Jews very much” at all (Roth 108). For a while, it is not clear what Zuckerman’s stance on being Jewish is until he meets Anne/Amy.
Zuckerman’s main issue with his father’s concerns is that they are not in the
1940s, and that he is not writing about the Holocaust or Jews directly, although indirectly he has written about both and portrayed everyone very poorly. Part of Zuckerman’s frustration is that his work is only seen as Holocaust literature, even though the story’s only direct connection to the Holocaust is that it is about Jews. Zuckerman is unwilling to accept his father’s concerns as legitimate, even when his father tells him that “‘as far as
Gentiles are concerned… [the story is about] Kikes are their love of money. That is all our good Christian friends will see’” (Roth 94). Zuckerman, two generations removed from the Holocaust, claims not to feel this same anxiety and preoccupation with the
Holocaust and Jewish identity as his father. In fact, he writes it off as absurd, screaming at his mother that they do not live in the time of the camps, “‘We are not in the wretched of Belsen! We are not the victims of that crime!’” (Roth 106). Zuckerman purposely sets himself apart from the experiences of suffering in the Holocaust, thinking that because he lives in the present day, it is not possible for the consequences of World War II to affect him. Lehmann writes that Robert Alter discusses the ways in which “our contemporary existence ‘is warped by being viewed in the dark glass of the Holocaust’” and that we are not able to put the Holocaust or what happened in Europe out of our minds, but what happened to them is not our same fate (30). Lehmann continues that Alter envisions a space where an “interaction between past and present…encompasses the importance of memory while simultaneously allowing for future development and change” (30). The
37 Ghost Writer , as well as the other two texts in this thesis, are aiming to accomplish a similar goal. After failing to talk sense into his son, father Zuckerman reaches out to
Judge Wapter to talk some sense into Zuckerman instead. This goes horribly wrong, not surprisingly, leading to an even angrier Zuckerman, who had no intention of pulling the story anyway. Zuckerman continues to pursue his writing career with angry passion, caring little about the harm he may cause. Judge Wapter, like Zuckerman’s father, is only able to see Zuckerman’s story in connection with the Holocaust. The Judge’s over- identification with the Holocaust is so strong that he is unable to ask questions about
Zuckerman’s story that are not Holocaust related.
The Judge and his wife prepare a terrible and highly offensive questionnaire for
Zuckerman right before suggesting that he see the Broadway adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary (Roth 101). Considering Ozick’s point from her essay that the on stage version was very much sanitized, the Judge’s suggestion is an unfortunate one. The questions, which read more as accusations, consist of the Judge and his wife asking Zuckerman if he would have written this story had he lived in Nazi Germany, and what does he do that qualifies him to write about Jewish life. They follow-up by asking if his story really depicts a fair and accurate representation of Jews, and why must there be “adultery, incessant fighting within family over money, and warped human behavior in general” as the focal point in stories about Jews, Zuckerman’s included. The final, and by far the worst accusation, is that the Judge and his wife firmly believe that Zuckerman’s story would warm the heart of Julius Streicher or Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s advisors (Roth 103,104). This questionnaire provided for Zuckerman shows the Judge’s ability to only think of
Zuckerman’s story in relation to the Holocaust, solely because Jews are the main subject.
38 Budick states that similar to “Roth’s own earlier fiction, Zuckerman’s recently published short story does not, in the least, concern the Holocaust” (“The Ghost”). This is true, but
Zuckerman’s short story indirectly references the Holocaust because of the stereotypes it evokes, which is what the Judge and his father focus on. Zuckerman’s father’s reaction is directly related to lingering anxiety about how Jews are viewed as a result of the
Holocaust. Budick goes on to argue that Zuckerman’s short story “replicates the community’s own wish to marry itself to past suffering, to wed the ghost of the past”
(“The Ghost”), which is shown through both the father’s and Judge Wapter’s intense focus on the Holocaust after reading Zuckerman’s fiction. Each character is completely unable to live a life that is not in some way connected to and influenced by the Holocaust.
Because Zuckerman comes a generation later than his father, his concerns about his own relationship to Jewish identity present differently and manifest in his obsession with the “ghost” of Anne Frank when he meets her in the form of Amy Bellette in
Lonoff’s house. Zuckerman later proves that he is indeed an indirect victim of the
Holocaust when he develops an unhealthy obsession with the memory of Anne Frank.
She is the most unanimous historical figure of Holocaust suffering and Zuckerman has chosen her to latch on to. Budick argues that Roth’s novel creates a dominant trope in
Jewish American literature where the Holocaust is present in the form of a ghost, or a
“resurrected victim” like Anne Frank in Roth’s novel (“The Ghost”).
The rejection from Zuckerman’s father leads him to look for a Jewish link elsewhere, which is where he finds Lonoff. Zuckerman narrates, “I discovered E.I.
Lonoff, whose fiction seemed to me a response to the same burden of exclusion and confinement that still weighed upon the lives of those who had raised me, and that had
39 informed our relentless household obsession with the status of Jews” (Roth 12). While
Zuckerman writes off his father’s concerns as nonsense, he admires Lonoff’s focus on
Jewish identity in his writing as something remarkable. Talking about the heroes in
Lonoff’s stories, Zuckerman narrates that Lonoff’s characters, “some ten years after
Hitler, seemed to say something new and wrenching to Gentiles about Jews, and to Jews about themselves, and to the readers and writers of that recuperative decade generally about the… anxieties of disorder…” (Roth 13). In contrast, what Zuckerman has just described is exactly what he is so angry at his father and Judge Wapter for pointing out.
Zuckerman’s obsession with Lonoff is partly due to Lonoff’s status as a writer, but more importantly his status as a Jewish writer, and his evasion of suffering in Russia and the pogroms (Roth 50). Lonoff’s relationship with his writing protege, Amy Bellette, is the means through which Zuckerman’s real obsession with Jewish identity begins when he decides that Amy is really Anne Frank.
Through Zuckerman’s reimagining, the Holocaust appears in the form of a ghostly memory like Budick and Lehmann suggest. Anne Frank, and in turn the memory of the Holocaust, comes to the forefront of Zuckerman’s mind and remains there through the rest of the novel. Lehmann writes that “Roth's emphasis on what came later is an acknowledgment of distance on the part of later generations. The title of The Ghost
Writer accentuates Zuckerman's distance from the past: it is in the form of a ghost, rather than a reality, that the Holocaust appears” (46). The absurdity of Zuckerman’s imaginings highlight his distance from the Holocaust as a historical event, as he can only relate to it by creating a scenario where Anne Frank survived. Zuckerman’s relationship to his
Jewish identity is seen through his (possibly misplaced) loyalty to Anne/Amy as his new
40 wife. His actions are selfishly motivated by his need to prove to his family that he is a good Jewish boy, who cares for the Jewish people, despite the story he wrote, because he chose to “selflessly” marry Anne Frank. Even though Zuckerman rejects the way his father identifies with being Jewish, Zuckerman develops his own obsessive over- identification that is equally as consuming as his fathers. Zuckerman intends to use Anne
Frank’s importance as a Jewish figure to establish his own selfhood in relation to
Judaism, but also to reconnect him to his Jewish identity and family. Slivka writes that
“Roth’s characters, specifically Nathan Zuckerman, seek to uncover history as a way to establish a selfhood” (128). Zuckerman begins to feel the only way to prove his Jewish loyalty to his family is to take Anne Frank, in her modern day form, as his wife.
Zuckerman’s association with his Jewish identity starts off as loose and then transitions into a full-fledged, all-consuming obsession once he meets Amy. Through this, Zuckerman provides a valid model that demonstrates how difficult it can be to separate Jewish identity from the Holocaust. For both Zuckerman and his father, the separation is not possible, leaving them permanently tied to the Holocaust as a way of making meaning out of their Jewish identity. Lehmann writes that “Philip Roth has
Nathan Zuckerman create a fantasy about Anne Frank in response to challenges to his own, present-day Jewish loyalty” (35). Anne Frank would serve as his Jewish tie back into his family, no questions asked, and all ill-intentions forgotten. The scenes between
Zuckerman and his father make it much clearer as to why Zuckerman later becomes so obsessed with bringing Anne/Amy into his life as a permanent fixture.
Zuckerman’s internal conflict leads into a more serious discussion outside the novel of how Jewish identity is often formed negatively and only in relation to the
41 Holocaust for Jews in America. Once he denounces his family, Zuckerman feels his only tie back to his roots is to become reconnected through marrying Anne Frank. Budick writes that The Ghost Writer is “the American text that first establishes the Holocaust as a topic of serious philosophical and cultural discussion, not as a sensationalist and exclusively Jewish object of discourse but as a paradigm of the complexities of moral and aesthetic thinking” (“The Ghost”). Roth’s focus on the Holocaust’s indirect effects through Zuckerman’s narration moves the discussion of Holocaust preoccupation into
American consciousness.
Zuckerman’s initial fixation with Anne/Amy starts near the beginning of the novel when he first sees her. Through Zuckerman’s narration, she is highly sexualized and described as Shakespeare-esque and very young (Roth 17). The all-consuming obsession with Jewish identity begins, or is more likely realized, when Zuckerman starts to string together who Amy could possibly be. He speculates, “I wondered if the dark refugee girl with the curious name Bellette could be Jewish, and in Europe had suffered from worse than starvation” (Roth 54). Here it becomes clear that Zuckerman is just as attached to the memory of the Holocaust as his father is, but with a very different focal point. Zuckerman’s interest in Anne/Amy completely breaks from reality when he is imagining what he (may or may not have) overheard between Amy and Lonoff about her real identity (Roth 112). Zuckerman details the history of how Anne became Amy, and how she had to recreate her life and create a new identity after she had learned of her family's death in the camps (Roth 125, 126). Zuckerman details events of Anne’s life, none of which he could know for certain. All of these “facts” about Amy are fabricated from his obsessive imagining of her as Anne Frank. Roth writes that everyone pitied
42 Anne and her experience, especially her teachers who were “always giving the orphaned little Jewess tender glances during history class” (Roth 130). They would question her endlessly about her past life, which Anne had resolved to not speak of (Roth 130).
Through this traumatizing life after the Holocaust, Anne became Amy so she could create a new life separate from her memories of the concentration camps.
Similar to Rosa, the idea comes through that no one can understand Anne’s experience, that she is alone in her suffering. Anne refuses to answer any questions because how could people question her about “what they couldn’t possibly understand”
(Roth 131). Zuckerman goes into detail about Anne’s own feelings about being Anne
Frank, “If she was going to be thought exceptional, it would not be because of Auschwitz and Belsen but because of what she had made herself since” (Roth 132). Zuckerman narrates that Anne feels as though she will always be “this half-flayed thing” (Roth 152) that can never escape her past. Anne in The Ghost Writer recognizes how deeply she is tied to the Holocaust, it is a memory she cannot escape and will not outlive. Zuckerman’s conjuring up of her memory and this invented narrative about her life shows how much time he has spent dedicated to something he can only imagine and confirms his inability to separate himself from the Holocaust. Zuckerman’s obsession continues as he narrates that he is writing home to his family about how Anne is pregnant with his child and she is happier than ever (Roth 161). Zuckerman also admits that “[he] was continually drawn back into the fiction [he] had evolved about her” (Roth 157). But when it really comes down to it, Zuckerman is forced to admit that the preoccupation with the Holocaust is his own obsession when he tries to get Amy to admit to being Anne Frank, but she has nothing to say to him (Roth 169, 170). Zuckerman is forced to admit that there is no real
43 Anne Frank living in Lonoff’s house. On the very last page of the novel, realizing his own internalized obsession Zuckerman says, “What do I know, other than what I can imagine?” (Roth 180). Lehmann writes that “The contrast between the history-less Amy
Bellette and the historically paralyzed Anne Frank reveals the difficulty of simultaneously honoring history and using the imagination to explore its influence” (48).
It is uncertain whether or not Roth honors Anne Frank through Zuckerman’s narrative, but Roth does leave a fair amount of room for the characters in the novel, and the readers, to explore the influence of the Holocaust on Jewish identity.
Although Anne is 26 in this re-telling, she is nonetheless infantilized through both her speech and her actions (Roth 125). What does it mean that Roth has a pseudo Anne
Frank character who is having an affair with the famous author E.I. Lonoff who she also called Dad-da (Roth 125, 152)? It disrupts the child-like purity Anne Frank holds as a symbol of the Holocaust. Talking with Lonoff in the room above Zuckerman, she says “I wouldn’t be your little girl over there. I would when we played, but otherwise I’d be your wife” (Roth 119). Zuckerman, in his delusional fantasy about Anne Frank as his spouse, also realizes that Amy is proposing something equally as delusional, there is no way she can really be Anne Frank. Roth writes, “That was her story. And what did Lonoff think of it when she was finished? That she meant every word of it and that not a word was true”
(150). Amy’s idea of herself as Anne Frank had become an all “consuming delusion”
(Roth 152) that she had only invented to impress Lonoff (Roth 155), according to
Zuckerman.
As disruptive as Roth’s portrayal of Anne Frank is to her actual memory as a historical figure, these interactions and descriptions both sensationalize her and normalize
44 her. Roth makes Anne Frank, had she survived, as normal and flawed as everyone else.
She is completing school, is possibly having an affair, feeling lost in her life, and has the sinking feeling that she cannot let her past define her. Anne’s wish to be normal is voiced clearly when she says to Lonoff, “Oh Manny, their Anne Frank is theirs; I want to be your Anne Frank. I’d like at last to be my own. Child Martyr and Holy Saint isn’t really a position I’m qualified for anymore. They wouldn’t even have me… longing for somebody else’s husband, begging him to leave his loyal wife to run off with a girl half his age” (Roth 154).
By using a modern Anne Frank figure as the central focus of most of the book
“[Roth] emphasizes both the openness of the future and the unrealized possibilities of the past that were obliterated with the Holocaust” (Lehmann 45). The willingness to look towards the future comes from Roth’s work's ability to open up the discussion about the lasting impacts of Anne Frank’s memory in ways that are unexpected and mostly unsettling (Zuckerman using her as a tie through marriage back into his Jewish family and Jewish identity). This also shows how pervasive Holocaust preoccupation continues to be and how heavily it contributes to the formation of identity for Jews in America.
Zuckerman is surprisingly reflective about his own actions early on, and looking at his actions retrospectively shows Zuckerman’s realization that his time in college apart from his family “had done more to make me realize how much I was still my family’s Jewish offspring than anything I had carried forward” (Roth 11). Even though Zuckerman seems to be well aware of how he is tied to his Jewish identity, he is also very resistant to it, until he meets Amy. Slivka writes that “Roth questions and manipulates such ‘traps of history’ in order to create a transformative space” for the protagonists in his novels,
45 including Zuckerman in The Ghost Writer (128). When Slivka refers to traps of history, she is referring to Roth’s portrayal of Anne Frank and the way he distorts and re-forms her memory in order to create a discussion about the Holocaust’s impact on current generations of Jews.
Lehmann refers to the unspeakability of the Holocaust mentioned earlier in this thesis by Aarons, stating that “The casual and excessive representation of the Holocaust in pop culture is an inverse reflection of the long-standing debate about the impossibility of representing the Holocaust” (41). Roth’s Anne Frank is impossible, but through that impossibility Roth opens a discussion about the Holocaust and Holocaust memory. This allows, through casual and excessive representation, a discussion to happen that otherwise would not be possible. Slivka writes that Anne Frank “is always present, but never there, first a fiction, then a fantasy, an ever-receding but ineluctable ‘real’ for
Jewish Americans (45)” (131). This re-imagining of Anne Frank through the character of
Amy Bellette also leads into a discussion about preoccupation of Holocaust memory even in its most disturbing forms. “Roth introduces what will become a recurring motif in
Jewish American writing: the degree to which, in the view of its major authors, American
Jewry (perhaps world Jewry) is haunted by a past that cannot easily be put to rest but that…Rather the past must be mourned and buried, even if never forgotten” (Budick “The
Ghost”). The trauma of Anne Frank’s life has had, and will continue to have, lasting effects on Jewish identity and Jewish personhood for the foreseeable future. Budick argues “Like his character Zuckerman, Roth in this book is no less haunted by the ghost of the Holocaust than the community…as she is in the other novels that re-resurrect her, such as Nathan Englander’s What We Talk about When We Talk about Anne Frank ?
46 (2013)” (“The Ghost”). Zuckerman is no less obsessed with the Holocaust and Anne
Frank than Englander’s characters are, where the main focus of the story is the Anne
Frank game that the characters play.
These scenes of either intense rejection or intense over-identification in Roth’s novel concerning Jewish identity gives a window into how Zuckerman is trying to navigate being Jewish in America, while still feeling plagued by the trauma of the
Holocaust. The Holocaust provides a negative association and is often a point of over- identification in the context of Roth’s novel. This applies specifically to Zuckerman, but also to Englander and Ozick’s characters. The Holocaust is used as a means of connections for all these characters when there is (seemingly) nothing else available.
Because Zuckerman has denounced his father’s extreme identification with being Jewish, he has forged his own connection through the memory of Anne Frank. Additionally, the memory of the Holocaust is used as a binding force to unite Jews for better or worse, in
Roth’s novel as well as Englander’s.
47 CHAPTER 5
WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT ANNE FRANK
In contrast to Roth’s unsettling revisioning of Anne Frank, Nathan Englander presents Anne Frank in a way that is more abstract but somehow still equally abrasive when it comes to the ethical concerns Ozick raises of using Anne Frank’s image for modern use. “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” is the first short story in the collection of seven from Englander’s book, What We Talk About When We
Talk About Anne Frank . Englander’s story deals with issues of negative identity formation and over-identification with the Holocaust in ways that are similar to The
Shawl and The Ghost Writer . In Englander’s story, Deb, one of the four main characters, over-identifies so heavily with Holocaust memory that it impacts how her husband and friends view her connection to being Jewish. Deb displays an obsessive identification with the Holocaust through her attempts to bridge the time gap between the Holocaust and her own life by imagining what it would be like if it happened again through the
“Anne Frank game”. This game, referred to as a “thought exercise” by Deb, is also called the “righteous Gentile game” and “who will hide me”. It forces the players to imagine if their spouses or neighbors would hide them during a second Holocaust.
The different names point to both the absurdity of the game and also the absurdity that this is something Jewish people often think about compulsively. While the premise may seem mildly offensive, or deliberately provocative like Roth, the idea of an “Anne
Frank game” in Englander’s story forces the audience to come face to face with the lasting trauma and Jewish preoccupation with the Holocaust. Aarons writes that “For these writers, generations born after 1945, after the end of the war, the physical liberation
48 of the concentration camps, and the relocation and refashioning of lives, the ‘memory’ of the Holocaust remains a haunting legacy that is as foundational to the composition of felt space and time as it is to the formation of identity” (138). Englander’s characters, especially Deb, feel that the Holocaust is absolutely central for the formation of Jewish identity in America, where it feels like there may be no other point of connection.
Memory and re-forming memory becomes the only way for the characters in these texts to bridge the gap between what happened during the Holocaust and the present, where the
Holocaust is still currently effecting Jewish Americans.
In contrast to Roth and Ozick, Englander’s story is less abrasive in the way that it presents the Holocaust as a lasting influence over Jewish identity in America, although conveying it just as accurately. Englander’s characters are soft-spoken, soft-willed, and less blunt in their mannerisms, especially compared to Ozick’s Rosa or Roth’s
Zuckerman. Englander’s writing comes off as fairly sincere, in a way that Ozick’s and
Roth’s do not because their main characters are so harshly described, Zuckerman more so than Rosa. Englander’s characters come across as average everyday Jewish Americans.
There is nothing unusual about their existence, unlike Zuckerman’s imagined Anne Frank or Rosa conjuring up of her dead daughter. However, this does not mean any of these characters are more valid than others in their representation of Jewish American identity or Holocaust preoccupation. For the main characters in Englander’s fiction, it is imagining who would hide them in a second Holocaust and finding comfort in the fact that they believe their neighbors are good people. This idea offers Deb and her friends ways to re-form memory that results in people doing the right thing and helping Jews survive. The game they act out is another way of re-forming Holocaust memory and what
49 it means to deal with trauma generations later. Deb, her husband, and their friends are trying to find new ways to talk about and push past the unspeakability of the Holocaust through their own means.
At first reading, Englander’s story is disturbingly relatable. It is fairly emotional trying to understand the weight of the characters' concerns in “What We Talk About”.
Englander’s writing through the first person perspective of Deb’s husband feels accurate to what it is like thinking about the Holocaust from an American perspective, especially so far away from the initial event. As Deb demonstrates, there are few ways to relate to
Holocaust other than imagining what it must have been like or what it would be in the future. Englander’s fiction is an accurate representation of the Jewish experience in
America as a people who are, for the most part, still closely connected to the trauma of the Holocaust. On the second reading of “What We Talk About”, the characters' interactions with each other felt reductive. The story sets up an uncomfortable “us versus them” dichotomy between secular and non-secular Jews only until they are all commonly united by the memory of the Holocaust. The Holocaust should not be the only event with the ability to unite Jews across various religious and social planes as Shoshana’s husband points out. Yerucham argues, “What I’m trying to say, whether you want to take it seriously or not, is that you can’t build Judaism only on the foundation of one terrible crime. It is about this obsession with the Holocaust as a necessary sign of identity. As your only educational tool. Because for the children, there is no connection otherwise.
Nothing Jewish that binds.” (Englander 24). Yerucham then goes on to talk about how
Jewish culture is not Jewish life, that without the religious aspect, only being culturally
Jewish does not count as being Jewish at all. “Culture is nothing. Culture is some
50 construction of the modern world. And because of that, it is not fixed; it is ever-changing, and a weak way to bind generations” (Englander 25). Yerucham over-identifies in the way that if you are Jewish, it has to be an all or nothing commitment to both religion and culture. Nothing in between counts.
Lehmann argues that “It is in religious terms that the Holocaust assumes its most complicated role. The memory of the historical atrocity has in large part come to replace spirituality and traditional Judaic knowledge among assimilated American Jews, thereby providing a negative center for Jewish identification” (33). Lehmann highlights the concern that Yerucham expresses, which is Jews should not only be united by this single horrible event, even though this event has managed to replace traditional religion in many cases. Lehmann goes on to say that “Remembering the Holocaust—the ‘negative miracle,’ as it has been termed becomes the only ‘tradition’ that assimilated American
Jews share. And as the Holocaust becomes more and more central to Jewish American identity, the fear of forgetting the Holocaust comes to represent and replace the loss of the rest of Jewish tradition and collective memory” (Lehmann 33). The Holocaust has come to hold so much weight in the Jewish American community partly due to the fact that it is one of the few things binding assimilated Jews together.
Even though these two readings are at odds with each other, both readings remain true at the same time. These opposing readings are productive when it comes to thinking about how Holocaust trauma is processed and how it is still very alive and at the forefront of Jewish American consciousness. Both readings can be productive ways of opening up the discussion of how Jewish Americans process trauma after the Holocaust, over 75 years later. This forces readers to critically examine how the characters in Englander’s
51 story can be viewed as an extension of how real people process trauma. Englander’s text also works to create new ways to talk about trauma that help push past the silence that surrounds the Holocaust by making it the main subject of “What We Talk About”.
The husband in Englander’s story simultaneously details his relationship with his wife, Deb, and their newly forming relationship with Deb’s Jewish friends. Lauren, who now goes by Shoshana, and her husband Mark, who now goes by Yerucham. Englander’s story immediately opens up with the topic of Jewish identity as a problem, with the narrator mocking Shoshana and Yerucham for their Orthodox Jewish practices and intense connection to Judaism and Israel. Not long after the husband is done mocking them, he moves on to exploit his wife’s obsession with Anne Frank and the Holocaust.
The husband mocks Jewish over-identification the same way Zuckerman does with his father, leaving him outside the circle that everyone around him identifies inside. Because
Englander narrates the story though the first person perspective of Deb’s husband, who remains unnamed, the reader to feel as if they are getting an honest, firsthand account of what is happening- but only from one heavily biased perspective. The husband finds it off-putting that these friends of his wife suddenly moved to Israel and became hyper religious Orthodox Jews after having the same upbringing as Deb, who does not practice
Judaism religiously anymore (as far as the reader knows). He narrates that Shoshana was
Deb’s best friend forever, until Deb married him and he turned her secular (Englander 5).
Englander writes in the voice of the husband, “... soon after Lauren met Mark and they went off to the Holy Land and went from Orthodox to ultra -Orthodox… we’re supposed to be calling them Shoshana and Yerucham” (Englander 5). The husband refuses to call
Shoshana and Yerucham by their Jewish names, pushing back against Jewish
52 identification with Israel, and instead calls them by their American names, as if identifying heavily with Jewish religious traditions is a negative. After Deb’s teenage son leaves for the day, the four adults get drunk and then decide to smoke weed Deb found in her son's hamper. Well into their festivities, Yerucham begins to critique Deb and her husband for not living a Jewish enough life, and goes on several rants about how in Israel they have different problems as Jews (debating they are worse off in Israel, facing real problems, rather than in America with big houses and few religious ties). It does not take long before Deb’s husband brings up Deb's “Anne Frank game”. Deb, trying to defend her game and make herself look less obsessed with the Holocaust, argues that “‘it’s not a game. It’s just what we talk about when we talk about Anne Frank’” (Englander 32). This phrase alone speaks volumes about how Jewish Americans, in this story, are trying desperately to connect to an event that they feel is a defining facet of Jewish identity.
Deb’s only way to talk about Anne Frank and the Holocaust is through imagining. Deb goes on to explain that, “‘In the event of a second Holocaust…It’s a serious exploration, a thought experiment we engage in’” (Englander 32).
Shoshana understands the game because Deb forced her to play it when they were younger, showing that Deb’s over-identification with the Holocaust started early on, it has been her way of connecting to Jewish identity for a while. Yerucham fails to understand Deb’s game even though he is the character who most heavily identifies with his Jewish identity, stating that he is “more Jewish” than the rest of them because of his beliefs, practices, etc. While they are all stuck in the pantry and acting out the game,
Yerucham says, “‘But if I weren’t Jewish, I wouldn’t be me’” (Englander 34). This later turns out to be a fairly significant problem because he is the only one in the game who
53 they all realize would not hide Jewish families during a second Holocaust (Englander 36).
While that explicit fact remains unsaid, it is inherently felt throughout the pantry they are all locked inside when the story ends. What statement is that making? Is Yerucham overcompensating when he boasts his Jewishness over his new friends? Being Jewish is so central to his identity that it is his entire identity, but he is the only one who raises doubts when it comes to the topic of protecting Jews in another Holocaust. The irony of
Yerucham being the one who is perceived as unwilling to hide Jews in this hypothetical scenario is weird, to say the least.
Deb’s husband is the first character to point out Deb’s over-identification with the
Holocaust and how her preoccupation is almost to the point of being unhealthy for her.
The husband’s negative bias as well as Deb’s overt Holocaust obsession both come across as manifestations of over-identification or negative identity association with
Jewishness and the Holocaust. For the husband, he pushes away from extreme Jewish identity whereas Deb is completely immersed in it. Early on, it is set up that Deb has an unhealthy obsession, so much so that it affects how her family views the event and views her connection to being Jewish. In the voice of Deb’s husband, Englander writes, “Deb is very interested in Mark’s parents. They’re Holocaust survivors. And Deb has what can only be called an unhealthy obsession with the idea of that generation being gone. Don’t get me wrong. It’s important to me, too. I care, too. All I’m saying is, there’s healthy and unhealthy, and my wife, she gives that subject a lot, a lot , of time” (9). As stated by her husband, Deb’s only connection to the Holocaust is that she is Jewish, her whole family grew up in the U.S., their lives were not taken by the concentration camps, which he continues to make painfully clear to their guests. The husband continues, saying that Deb
54 acts like she’s a survivor’s child, “‘It’s like here we are twenty minutes from downtown
Miami, but really it's 1937 and we live on the edge of Berlin. It’s astounding’”
(Englander 13). Not only is Deb’s husband well aware of her preoccupation, he finds it disturbing the way it consumes her. Deb’s over-identification with the Holocaust as an
American seems to suggests that the further removed you are, whether through family connections or through geographical distance, the more pressure there is to connect. This is at least true for Deb, and also true for Zuckerman in Roth’s novel. Both characters reach so far into reimagining the Holocaust that they become consumed by the memory as it becomes the only way to tie them to their identity as Jews.
Her husband's constant reminders to the readers and the characters in the story emphasize Deb’s over-identification and extreme Holocaust obsession which in many ways keep her from living a normal life. Her husband narrates that completely out of nowhere Deb will ask him and their son if they know that “‘World War Two veterans die at a rate of a thousand a day’” (Englander 9). In contrast, Shoshanna and Yerucham, who live in Israel and have a relationship with Yerucham’s parents who are survivors, are far less consumed by Holocaust memory than Deb. When the story Mark tells about his parents fails to have a wholesome happy ending, Deb becomes noticeably upset. When she realizes that this story, which in her mind could partially right the wrongs of the horrible things that happened during the Holocaust, doesn’t have a fulfilling ending, she looks “crestfallen” (Englander 12). The husband narrates Deb’s reaction, “She was expecting something empowering. Some story with which to educate Trevor, to reconfirm belief in humanity that, from inhumanity, forms” (Englander 12). The story
Yerucham tells is about his father and another man in the retirement home, both with
55 numbers tattooed on their arms several numerical places apart. It turns out that the two men were only separated by a few spaces in line when being tattooed upon entering the concentration camps. However, after barely recognizing each other, the two old men could care less. All it meant to them was that someone was cutting in line and got tattooed sooner. Going on to speak for Deb, the husband says aloud, “‘She won’t tell you but she’s a little obsessed with the Holocaust. And that story, no offense, Mark, but it’s not what she had in mind’” (Englander 13). In Deb’s mind, if there are people today that are coming together again because of the Holocaust and reconnecting, then it wasn’t all horrible. Deb’s only way to relate is to imagine how things could have turned out better, similar to Zuckerman’s projection of Anne Frank as still alive.
The characters in both Englander and Roth’s texts are considering what their identity means in relation to the Holocaust, and how that identity, because of its historical significance, alters the way they are viewed as people, as Jews, and as Americans. All too relatable, both Englander and Roth hit on issues of post-Holocaust trauma surrounding present day Jewish American identity and the concerns of living with a culturally defining event such as the Holocaust. This ongoing discussion about what Jewish identity signifies post World War II opens up new ways to talk about how identity functions as a unifying marker generations after a trauma like the Holocaust.
56 CHAPTER 6
CONCLUSION
Ozick, Roth, and Englander open up the genre of what post-Holocaust literature can look like in terms of having a current conversation about the impact of historical figures like Anne Frank, the lasting impact of the Holocaust, and Jewish American’s geographical distance from an event that still heavily impacts them. Even though giving voice to the Holocaust simultaneously extends the trauma, it gives future generations a way to explore its continued importance as part of the Jewish community. Lehmann writes that “In this capacity, fiction serves as a conduit between the Holocaust and the present, an affirmation rather than an erasure of the Holocaust's historical importance”
(34). This thesis has focused on looking at how these texts address the ethical concerns of talking about the Holocaust generations after and how these authors create a genre of post-Holocaust literature that discusses the Holocaust as a direct influence on Jewish
American identity. These texts also allow the genre room to talk about other concerns like the re-shaping and re-writing of history to deal with past trauma in ways that are productive. Discussing the Holocaust in present day through fictional narratives gives readers a chance to re-evaluate the discussions about how we deal with the trauma in ways that can continually educate the public about the deep sense of loss that is present in the Jewish community as a result of the Holocaust.
Even though the texts I have chosen to analyze are fictional, they convey an honest truth about the lasting trauma the Holocaust imprinted on the Jewish community and how the community is left to work through that trauma generations later. Aarons writes, “As Berel Lang cautions, ‘No Holocaust writing gives preference to silence’, the
57 ‘cost [of] inviting the vacuum of forgetfulness—is too high,’ preferring instead an imperfect…ongoing—articulation of memory undiminished and untarnished” (18, 19).
The dangers in staying so focused on the Holocaust in these fictional accounts presents the possibility “that a preoccupation with the Holocaust will, like a vortex, carry one into places from which there is no clear, safe return” (Aarons 138). This thesis ends as exploration of an irresolvable problem. It explores the problems of over-identification and negative identity associations concerning Jewish preoccupation with the Holocaust, to which there is no clear answer of how to separate the two. Post-Holocaust literature as a genre is not only hard to define, but it is hard for Jewish American literature to exist as independent from it. It is evident in the works of Ozick, Roth, and Englander that Jewish identity and the Holocaust remain permanently intertwined and through fictional representations of the lasting trauma, we are able to continue to have conversations about the Holocaust’s impact. Lehmann speculates the future of post-Holocaust as “literature that no longer addresses the Holocaust directly, because it is beyond the author's purview, but nonetheless transpires in the conspicuous shadow of the Holocaust” (52).
Due to current political leadership, white supremacist riots, desecration of Jewish grave sites, and shootings at temples, levels of anti-semitism are continuing to rise. Given this, the discussion that these texts open up becomes increasingly important. The texts discussed in this thesis make space to talk about newly ascendant anti-semitism in
America. Aarons writes that “Perhaps, in large part, this return to the tragic past has come about as a response to legitimate concerns that the Holocaust, despite its place in moral consciousness, is receding from public awareness…a relic from the distant past” (138).
Literature holds a responsibility to rebuild cultural knowledge after times of suffering and
58 atrocity. There is more to Jewish American literature and Jewish American writers than just the memory of the Holocaust.
Additionally, the way we teach Jewish literature in schools needs to be about more than just censored memories about Anne Frank and Holocaust. Ozick, Roth, and
Englander, while still focused on the Holocaust, show that there are more ways to think about Jewish identity than just writing about it in the historical vacuum of the Holocaust.
Using Jewish American authors to teach Holocaust literature takes the Holocaust out of its historical vacuum and reaffirms its importance as a defining event within the Jewish community. Anti-semitism and racism do not exist in a historical vacuum and continuing education on these topics leaves space for meaningful conversations about a post-
Holocaust world and Jewish space in America. Budick hopes that “The United States of
America…will provide a creative future for American Jews, even if the ghosts of the
Holocaust may still continue to haunt the Jewish imagination and, perhaps, even, create a post-Holocaust aesthetic that is specifically Jewish” (“The Ghost”). The texts in this thesis speak to a similar goal.
I would like to end this thesis with Ozick’s argument “that Auschwitz and
Bergen-Belsen, however sacramentally prodded, can never yield light” (“Who Owns”
79). Ozick is right, there is nothing redeemable in that dark hole of history but this serves as a tribute to not letting those lives that were extinguished to be forgotten in that black void of history. And, even though it seems an impossible task, it is necessary to continue the process of trying to bring some light from the darkness, which is a worthwhile task in and of itself.
59 REFERENCES
Aarons, Victoria. “The Certainties of History and the Uncertainties of Representation in Post-Holocaust Writing.” Studies in American Jewish Literature , vol. 31, no. 2, 2012, pp. 134–148. EBSCOhost , doi:10.5325/studamerjewilite.31.2.0134.
Budick, Emily Miller. “The Ghost of the Holocaust in the Construction of Jewish American Literature.” The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature, edited by Hana Wirth-Nesher, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2015, pp. 343–361.
Comninos, Susan. “How To Carry On.” Forward , 2010, pp. 17,19.
Dick, Bernard. “Quarrel & Quandry.” World Literature Today , vol. 75, no. 2, 2001, p. 339.
Dragulescu, Luminita M. "Race Trauma at the End of the Millennium: (Narrative) Passing in Philip Roth's The Human Stain." Philip Roth Studies 10.1 (2014): 91- 108. Web.
Duban, James. "From Negative Identity to Existential Nothingness: Philip Roth and the Younger Jewish Intellectuals." Partial Answers 13.1 (2015): 43-55. Web.
Englander, Nathan. What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank . New York, Vintage Books, 2013.
Flanzbaum, Hilene. “In Our Image: The Staging of Jewish-American Identity.” American Literary History , vol. 25, no. 2, 2013, pp. 485–494. EBSCOhost , doi:10.1093/alh/ajt007.
Larson, Thomas. “‘In Spite of Everything’: The Definitive Indefinite Anne Frank.” The Antioch Review , vol. 58, no. 1, 2000, pp. 40–54
Lehmann, Sophia. “‘And Here [Their] Troubles Began’: The Legacy of the Holocaust in the Writing of Cynthia Ozick, Art Spiegelman, and Philip Roth.” CLIO: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History , vol. 28, no. 1, 1998, pp. 29–52.
Miller Budick, Emily. “The Holocaust in the Jewish American Literary Imagination.” The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature , edited by Hana Wirth-Nesher and Michael P. Kramer, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003, pp. 212–230. Cambridge Companions to Literature.
Novick, Peter. The Holocaust in American Life . Houghton Mifflin, 1999.
60 Ozick, Cynthia. The Shawl . New York, Vintage Books, 1980.
Ozick, Cynthia. “Who Owns Anne Frank?” The New Yorker, 1997, 76-87.
Page, Max. The Public Historian. Vol. 21 No. 1, Winter, 1999. (pp. 87-97) DOI: 10.2307/3379114
Pinsker, Sanford. “Anne Frank and the ‘What If?’ School of Fiction.” Sewanee Review , vol. 122, no. 2, 2014, pp. 340–344. EBSCOhost , doi:10.1353/sew.2014.0048.
Roth, Philip. The Ghost Writer . New York, Vintage Books, 1979.
Rosenberg, Roberta. “Jewish ‘Diasporic Humor’ and Contemporary Jewish-American Identity.” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, vol. 33, no. 3, 2015, pp. 110–138. EBSCOhost.
Rosenblatt, Roger. “The Diarist: ANNE FRANK With a Diary Kept in a Secret Attic, She Braved the Nazis and Lent a Searing Voice to the Fight for Human Dignity (TIME 100).” Time , vol. 153, no. 23, 1999, p. 80.
Skloot, Robert. “A Multiplicity of Annes.” The Nation , vol. 267, no. 16, 1998, pp. 20–25.
Slivka, Jennifer A. “History and the ‘I’ Trapped in the Middle: Negotiating the Past in Roth’s The Ghost Writer and The Plot against America.” Philip Roth Studies , vol. 8, no. 2, 2012, pp. 127–144. EBSCOhost .
61