JOKE JACOBS 2008-2009
MASTER THESIS
“GUARDIANS OF AN ABSENT MEANING”: TRANSGENERATIONAL TRAUMA AND (DIS)CONTINUITIES
BETWEEN JEWISH AMERICAN WRITERS OF THE SECOND AND THIRD GENERATION.
ART SPIEGELMAN’S MAUS AND JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER’S EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED.
Supervisor: DR. PHILIPPE CODDE Department of English Literature
Paper submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements
for the degree of “MASTER IN DE VERGELIJKENDE MODERNE LETTERKUNDE”
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. PREFACE 5
II. INTRODUCTION 6
III. THE SECOND GENERATION 9
THE INITIAL TRAUMA
PASSING ON A LEGACY: MEMORIAL CANDLES
THE CHILD AS VICARIOUS WITNESS
“I WASN’T THERE”: A LIFE IN EXILE OR THE ABSENT PRESENCE OF THE HOLOCAUST
THE TRAUMA OF THE SECOND GENERATION
WRITING AS A WAY OF WORKING THROUGH: KEEPING A NON-MEMORY ALIVE
IV. ART SPIEGELMAN’S MAUS AS AN ILLUSTRATION OF SECOND-GENERATION WRITING 23
“MY FATHER BLEEDS HISTORY”
“…AND HERE MY TROUBLES BEGAN…”
“PRISONER ON THE HELL PLANET”
WRITING POETRY AFTER [M]AUSCHWITZ IS BARBARIC
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V. THE THIRD GENERATION: JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER’S EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED 33
EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED IN THE LIGHT OF THE SECOND GENERATION AND MAUS
CONTROVERSIAL NARRATION
AUTHORIAL PRESENCE AND IDENTITY
MEDIATION AND LAYERING
THIRD-GENERATION CHARACTERISTICS?
A POETICS OF ABSENCE
THE POWER OF FICTION AND THE FAILURE OF LANGUAGE
POSTMEMORIAL INVENTION
HISTORICAL DISTANCE AND ETHICAL CONCERNS
VI. CONCLUSION 54
HISTORY, MEMORY AND POSTMEMORY
IDENTITY ISSUES: HOW THE HOLOCAUST DEFINES YIDDISHKEIT
“THE POST-HOLOCAUST CONDITION”
THIRD-GENERATION TRAUMA?
VII. BIBLIOGRAPHY 60
VIII. APPENDIX: ILLUSTRATIONS 64
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I. PREFACE
I would first of all like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Philippe Codde, for very valuable corrections and advice, and for his interesting course on contemporary American literature last semester, which helped me a lot in writing my master thesis. I would also like to thank Dr. Stef Craps for arousing my interest in trauma studies in his course on postcolonial trauma literature last year. In general, my acknowledgement goes to the university, especially the departments of English and Latin, where I have always enjoyed studying the last four years. From the department of Latin, I would like to mention Prof. Wim Verbaal and Dr. Yanick Maes; I will always remember their classes and vibrant enthusiasm, both for their field of study as for the students.
I would like to thank my family as well. First and foremost, my parents and grandparents, for their love and (moral and financial) support during the entire period of my studies. In particular my father for re-readings of my thesis and advice in general. A lot of thanks goes to my sister, Eline Jacobs, for being there for me at any time. I also want to thank my close friends and classmates for all the good times (many of which undoubtedly yet to come) and precious memories. Finally, I want to thank my boyfriend, Omar García, who, however literally from a distance at times, always believes in me with unconditional love.
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II. INTRODUCTION
1 “Schreib und farschreib! Keep writing it down!”
The main subject of my master thesis concerns the third generation of Jewish American writers. With this term I refer to the sons and daughters of the second generation, who are themselves children of Holocaust survivors who emigrated to the United States after World War II. My interest goes to the writers of the second and third generation and the way they deal with the Holocaust legacy in their work. For the theoretical frame of my research I rely on trauma studies, since my main concern is the way in which the original Holocaust trauma lives on throughout the generations. How do these writers deal with an event with such an impact and of such magnitude? To what extent do they still feel personally involved? Why does the Holocaust remain such an important topic in all sorts of literature, after more than fifty years? And more important, how do these aspects evolve as they are passed on to the next generation?
The second generation has already provided a lot of food for thought the last decades and a wide range of scientific literature is dedicated to their pathology and – in the case of novelists – to their writing. The third generation however, born for the most part from the 1970s onward, has not yet been that elaborately discussed, or be it by writers discussing the second generation and assuming that a certain continuity in ‘symptoms’ is passed on to their offspring, but further details are often not provided. It is precisely my aim to focus on that third generation, whose work is specifically illustrated by Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Everything Is Illuminated, and I will focus in particular on the fact of (dis)continuity between this generation and the previous. To do so, however, it is necessary to explore what is known about the second generation. In order to search for similarities or differences between two phenomena, a good awareness of both separately is needed. Since it concerns a natural evolution, it makes sense to regard the third generation as a (chrono)logical sequel to the second. The second generation will therefore always provide a certain frame, keeping in mind that for the last two decades, the writers of these generations have been active simultaneously.
1 These famous words were spoken by the Jewish historian Simon Dubnow when he was killed by the Germans in Riga. I found this quote in Geoffrey Hartman’s work Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory (2) and it was also mentioned by Ephraim Sicher (1998, 44). I am using it here as a motto, since continuing to write ‘it’ down, is exactly what fundamentally defines the post-Holocaust generations. Moreover, it seemed an encouraging reminder during my own writing process. 6
The first chapter of my dissertation will thus be entirely dedicated to the second generation; I will try to define what this term means in general and describe certain recurrent characteristics of how these individuals deal with being raised by parents who have survived the atrocities of one of the biggest genocides in human history. In order to obtain a better idea of what it means to be a second-generation ‘survivor’, I have consulted various scientific and non-scientific literature available on the topic. In the second chapter, I will focus on the literary production of this generation – which proved to be of a high quantity and quality – and more specifically in the United States. Art Spiegelman’s Maus will serve as an illustration to demonstrate how second-generation trauma is represented and dealt with in literature.
In the next chapter, I will discuss Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel in the light of the second- generation characteristics. It is my intention to see how Foer, being another step further separated from the initial trauma, writes about the Holocaust in his novel. I will elaborate on the narrative techniques he uses, how certain themes are dealt with, and more importantly, what remains of the Holocaust trauma and if it is possible to still speak of a true trauma. It is interesting to see to what extent Foer’s work definitely differs from Spiegelman’s, but at the same time also shows certain similarities. Important points of discussion will be the issue of the author and the protagonist sharing the same name in both works, the way in which both narrate their stories, the creative and somewhat mythical invention in which Foer engages, the staging of victim and perpetrator in Foer’s novel, and most importantly, the way in which Spiegelman and Foer relate to the trauma of their respective parents and grandparents and to what extent they feel themselves personally affected by this trauma.
In the concluding chapter, I will elaborate on some recurrent themes in the literary works I discussed and the secondary literature I consulted to do this. To begin with, the importance of memory, for Jews in particular but also in general; an obsession with the past over the last decades seems to have created a true memory-cult. It is interesting to see how the boundaries of memory are being explored when latter generations reflect on the Holocaust. Memory makes place for “postmemory”, especially in the third generation, as Everything Is Illuminated will prove. A second theme is that of identity and more specifically the troubles post-Holocaust (American) Jews often face when trying to define their identity and how they personally relate to ‘Yiddishkeit’. Knowing that the majority of the Jews have been chased away or killed precisely because of their faith, how do offspring of Holocaust survivors relate to this faith? And the curious thing about Judaism is that it
7 does not seem to imply merely a religion, but an entire identity. Ultimately, I would like to touch upon the idea of levelling the post-Holocaust with the postmodern condition.
Discussing these themes will provide an interesting view on the evolution from the second to the third generation and consequently raise questions concerning future generations. Therefore this will lead me back to the core of my thesis, namely, in what way does the initial Holocaust trauma live on in latter generations, especially the third. Is it still possible to speak of trauma as such? Or is there, on the other hand, a form of closure or redemption available? How to explain the continuing obsession with the Holocaust after half a century? Is the third generation finally able to break loose from its family’s dark ghost? Is it able to give meaning or find some consolation in the void the Holocaust left behind? And what is the prospective for future generations? Is it possible to see a certain evolution? The answers to all these questions are not that obvious of course, and much is yet to be written and read as novels of the third generation are only just emerging since about a decade ago.
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III. THE SECOND GENERATION
“Their role in a way is even more difficult than ours. They are responsible for a world they didn’t create. They who did not go through the experience must transmit it” (Elie Wiesel, in Berger 1)
This first chapter will be dedicated to forming a more exact idea of the second generation – sons and daughters of Holocaust survivors. Only after studying how this generation has been defined is it possible to have a closer look at the third generation and explore which (dis)continuities are to be found. As not a lot of systematic research has been done on the third generation until now, it is necessary to ground my statements for the biggest part in what is known about the second generation.
For the sake of convention I will stick to the term ‘second-generation survivors’ (and derived from that, ‘third generation’). In a strict sense these people are not survivors but children of survivors, although some do consider them as such because of the specific trauma incurred due to their parents’ survivor’s trauma, which makes them in a way still suffer the original ‘survival’. “They are, as second-generation novelist Thane Rosenbaum puts it, ‘survivors of survivors,’ witnesses not to the Holocaust, but ‘to its aftermath’” (Sicher 2005, 134). Since the second generation is thus in the first place witness to the aftermath of the Holocaust, the trauma they bear is in many ways very different from their parents’ trauma. In a certain way they do not (always or primarily) suffer what their parents undergo, but they first and foremost suffer from the fact of having grown up in a traumatized or so-called dysfunctional family. Ernst Van Alphen in his article “Second-Generation Testimony, Transmission of Trauma, and Postmemory” notices that “*o+ne might expect the experiences and memories of Holocaust survivors and of their children to be fundamentally different, but the expression ‘second generation’ seems to bridge that divide and to introduce the idea of continuity between the generations. I wish to question the possibility and the nature of that continuity” (474). Precisely because of my decision to use this term (‘second-generation survivors’), I make a contrary statement, namely of assuming a certain continuity between the first and second generation, and subsequently also the third. In what follows therefore, I will begin with the beginning – the Holocaust survivors – and explore what happens to their children. The reason why I quoted van Alphen then, has to do with the fact that it is necessary at all times to stay alert and not assume certain (dis)continuities without looking into them in a detailed manner. That will be the challenge for this thesis – to describe the changes in a seemingly very natural evolution, that of the succession of generations, and figure out the influence of a traumatic experience such as the Holocaust. 9
With the term second generation I specifically refer to sons and daughters of Holocaust survivors, and not the generation after in general as Efraim Sicher mentions in Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory after Auschwitz: “[f]or George Steiner2, those who live ‘after Auschwitz’ are in a sense survivors of the Holocaust. They cannot escape the complexes of living in the aftermath of the Holocaust, nor can they escape a past that is for many not within living memory” (19). This haunting past can indeed be seen as a general influence on the entire Jewish people who are living ‘after’. The difficulty for contemporary Jews to define their identity in the shadow of the Holocaust, is a recurrent theme in Holocaust literature. The idea of ‘living after is living with a burden’ is to be found in the levelling of a post-Holocaust state of mind with that of the postmodern condition. Helplessness, emptiness and insecurity are typically postmodern phenomena that find their echo in what the Holocaust has caused for survivors and their family. My aim is thus in the first place to discuss particularly those who are sons and daughters of survivors; individuals who have grown up in a home where the traumas of the Holocaust were very present. As Efraim Sicher sums it up in another one of his works, The Holocaust Novel,
The ‘second generation’ is a term used by clinical psychologists and therapists for the children of Holocaust survivors who have in various ways been affected by the after-effects of their parents’ experience of deportation, forced labor, imprisonment in a concentration camp, or other forms of persecution by the Nazis. A latent damage was inflicted on the survivors’ children through the intergenerational transmission of anxieties about food, fears of separation, expectancy of over-fulfilment, and constant reliving of traumatic experiences. (133)
My fascination concerns the way in which these children relate to their parents’ often troubled way of educating, how in most cases their fate is sadly determined by growing up in a dysfunctional family and dealing with a past they have not experienced, of which they can only access texts, documentaries, testimonies – and often without the help of their parents, who want their children to grow up without the burdensome past. It is interesting to see how these children of survivors go about with such a family history, how they eventually can even pass it on to their own children.
Since every human being is unique, it is impossible to provide a list of characteristics that all children of Holocaust survivors share, as Efraim Sicher rightfully points out: “the children of survivors
2 Steiner, George. “A Kind of Survivor.” Language and Silence: Essays, 1958-1966. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969. 119-35. 10 are in any case a heterogeneous group, and it is debatable whether they share a common pathology” (“The Future” 66). Based on different academic works I have read on the subject however, it is possible to find some striking recurrent elements. For my research on the second generation, I have mainly relied on Alan L. Berger’s Children of Job: American Second-Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust, Dina Wardi’s Memorial Candles, Efraim Sicher’s Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory after Auschwitz, Geoffrey Hartman’s Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory, Helen Epstein’s Children of the Holocaust and a handful of useful articles by various authors which I will mention later on. I will elaborate on the characteristics which find their resonance in the literary works I am going to discuss. It will become clear that all symptoms eventually lead up to a sort of ‘after-syndrome’, having to live – or rather find a way to live – with the continuous “absent presence” of the Holocaust. The term “absent presence” or “present absence” finds its origin in Deconstruction, more specifically in the theory of Jacques Derrida. Gayatri Spivak coined the term “trace” in her English translation of Derrida’s De la grammatologie. “Trace” refers to “a mark of the absence of a presence, an always-already absent present".3 This linguistic notion can be applied to the way the latter generations relate to the Holocaust; it is an event they have not experienced, and never will experience (and therefore a clear absence), but that they are nevertheless constantly confronted with – on a personal and religious level (and therefore it is also a clear presence). In the words of Efraim Sicher: “the past is a trace in the present that haunts the second generation with the presence of the absent memory, an amnesia in which the only memory is of not remembering anything” (“The Burden” 30).
THE INITIAL TRAUMA
“The traumatized, we might say, carry an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess” (Caruth, “Trauma and Experience” 5)
In this chapter I will elaborate on the initial trauma Holocaust survivors suffered. Knowing exactly what suffering from PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) entails will help in understanding why it was possible that this trauma has been transmitted across the generations and in what form it has been passed on. ‘Trauma’ is a very broad and complex notion. Originally meaning ‘wound’, it is the consequence of a severe experience with such an impact that the brain is not capable of registering it
3 Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976. 11 at the moment of its occurrence. The Holocaust undoubtedly was such an experience for the majority of the Jewish survivors, and often for perpetrators as well – as is illustrated in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated. Because an experience is not fully realized, it fails to be integrated in a framework of understanding and the memory of the event is not registered in a normal way. As a consequence, people who have suffered from a traumatic experience, cannot recall it as they do with other memories because it is not stored as a normal memory; the trauma cannot be imagined or narrated. It is precisely this fact that makes trauma a very powerful phenomenon, since “the force of this experience would appear to arise precisely . . . in the collapse of its understanding” (Caruth, “Trauma and Experience” 7). Because of this collapse in understanding, the trauma keeps haunting the victim, albeit not as a memory, but in the form of dreams, delusions, flashbacks, etc. The effect of the trauma is only belated, is of a compulsive character and stretches over a much wider time span than the actual event. Cathy Caruth describes this phenomenon as follows:
there is a response, sometimes delayed, to an overwhelming event or events, which takes the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviors stemming from the event, along with numbing that may have begun during or after the experience, and possibly also increased arousal to (and avoidance of) stimuli recalling the event. (Caruth, “Trauma and Experience” 4)
The only way for the victim to gain access to the traumatic experience, is by talking about it to someone else, someone who can witness for the victim, since the trauma of the victim is caused by his own failure to witness. “*T+he history of a trauma, in its inherent belatedness, can only take place through the listening of another” (Caruth, “Trauma and Experience” 11). Dori Laub has done some interesting research about bearing witness, to oneself as well as to someone else. He states that the victim, at the moment of the traumatic experience, is unable to bear witness for him/herself; the individual is not able to grasp what is happening at a given moment and by failing to understand it, cannot integrate the experience as a memory. In the case of the Holocaust, this lack of witnessing was so widespread that “*t+he Holocaust created in this way a world in which one could not bear witness to oneself” (“Truth and Testimony” 66). In this sentence, Laub aptly describes the overall trauma caused by the Holocaust.
It is here that the importance of intimates of the traumatized person begins, and in the case of Holocaust survivors, these are often the children. The close relation between parents and their
12 children entails that the latter are listeners to their parents’ trauma from a very young age onwards, i.e. when they have not yet developed an apt framework for understanding and therefore are not able to be healthy witnesses for such a trauma. The opposite is also possible: an overwhelming silence that takes the place of the trauma; the parents do not want their children to know about the horrors and grow up with them. But just by doing so, they leave a big emptiness and a lot of questions to their offspring. Nadine Fresco for example, makes this conclusion after her conversations with members of the second generation: the parents “transmitted only the wound to their children, to whom the memory had been refused and who grew up in the compact void of the unspeakable”.4 The specific pathology of Holocaust survivors and their relationship with their children will be discussed in the following paragraphs.
PASSING ON A LEGACY: MEMORIAL CANDLES
“They buried me with the dead while I’m still alive. It’s hard for me to drag their dead around with me all the time”5
Offspring of Holocaust survivors often carry a big burden on their shoulders – the burden of expectations but also the burden to ‘remember’ – not just on a familial level, in the name of all their family members who did not survive, but also on a broader religious level. As Dina Wardi notes:
The cutting off of the natural processes of intergenerational continuity has imposed on the second generation both the privilege and the obligation of being the connecting link that heals the trauma of the cutting off and fulfils the enormous expectations of their parents – and perhaps not theirs alone, but also, to some extent, those of the entire Jewish people. (6)
A logical ‘strategy’ for survivors in order to make up for the loss of family members during the war seems to consist of designating their children as so-called ‘memorial candles’. This often means giving their son or daughter the name of a perished family member. “They were not perceived as separate individuals but as symbols of everything the parents had lost in the course of their lives” (Wardi 27). These children represented new life after so much death, replacing the ones who were lost, but also providing new hope and a new life for the parents. In their children the survivors
4 From Remembering the Unknown by Nadine Fresco, no page numbers provided; a link to the online article can be found in the bibliography. 5 Testimony of a member of the second generation, quoted in Wardi 36. 13 seemed to search for an identity, a raison d’être; they project themselves onto their children and hope that they may live the life that was taken from them by the Holocaust. In doing so, however, the parents do not allow their children to gain a unique identity of their own. “The children of survivors, the ‘memorial candles’ who carry the names of the dead and who bear the burden of replacing murdered relatives, have to discover their personal and collective identity like anyone else but they are handicapped by having to match up to their parents’ expectations as children of the Holocaust” (Sicher, “In the Shadow” 175). However, the opposite also occurs since every parent-child relationship is unique. As Dina Wardi noticed in her therapeutic research with people of the second generation: “one of the characteristic features of survivors’ families is the placing of the role of scapegoat on one of the children” (30). This is a phenomenon occurring in Maus, where Art’s father seems to blame his son for the death of his younger brother. However hard it may be for the second generation to come to terms with their family history and create an identity for themselves, it is not impossible. Moreover, literature will prove to be one of the most important instruments to achieve this.
THE CHILD AS VICARIOUS WITNESS
A second negative consequence for children of survivors is mentioned by Alan Berger: that members of the second generation become vicarious witnesses to the trauma of their parents. This can occur for two reasons: first, for being confronted from their birth with the stories of their parents, or second, because the parents rely on their children to communicate their stories. The second generation after all has a better knowledge of the language of the ‘New World’ and they in turn will have to convey these stories to their own children and be the bearers of a family legacy. Language thus plays an important role, as Berger notes that
offspring of survivors frequently ‘parent’ their parents. This ‘parenting’ occurs, at least in ‘survivor’ or ‘numb’ families, on the levels of culture and language. On the level of language, because English is their native tongue, American children of Job are able to make themselves understood in a way unavailable to most of their parents. This means that the second generation feels that it has a mission to bear witness for its parents. (Berger 186; my emphasis)
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The ‘numb’ families mentioned by Berger are the other extreme: parents who do not want to talk about their experiences, never mention them or even deny them. “Holocaust is a taboo in the childhood home, a secret knowledge that is silenced and that forms a bond between the survivor parents which excludes the child” (Sicher, “In the Shadow of History” 173).
Although these two extremes – an overflow of stories about the Holocaust or an absolute silencing of the events – concern very different situations, both lack one of the most essential elements of working through a trauma, namely that of bearing witness, of testifying in a mournful and not a melancholic way. Dori Laub distinguishes between three levels of witnessing, “the level of being a witness to oneself within the experience, the level of being a witness to the testimonies of others, and the level of being a witness to the process of witnessing itself” (“Truth and Testimony” 61). The failure of witnessing on the first level is what causes the initial trauma – as I have explained above. When one is unable to bear witness to oneself during some sort of extreme experience, there is no correct processing of that event in one’s mind. The way to work through such a trauma would be by a belated witnessing, which can only be achieved in the form of a testimony. In telling his story in a specific therapeutically correct way to an empathic listener, the trauma victim can witness for the first time the experience that was not fully understood when it happened. The testimonial process is thus a kind of forced return to the trauma itself, where the traumatized individual is again confronted with the experience in order to understand it and be able to mourn and work through it. This is a very precarious undertaking, as Dori Laub comments: “if one talks about the trauma without being truly heard or truly listened to, the telling might itself be lived as a return of the trauma – a re- experiencing of the event itself” (“Bearing Witness” 67). The role of the listener is therefore very crucial for the testifying survivor. The listener is often someone whom the victim trusts and confides in; this can be a therapist, a good friend or the victim’s child. Bearing witness to a victim’s trauma nevertheless entails some risks: “*t+he listener . . . has to be at the same time a witness to the trauma witness and a witness to himself” (Laub, “Bearing Witness” 58). What Laub means is that listening to someone’s testimony can be a very unsettling affair. “There are hazards to the listening to trauma. Trauma – and its impact on the hearer – leaves, indeed, no hiding place intact. As one comes to know the survivor, one really comes to know oneself; and that is not a simple task” (Laub, “Bearing Witness” 72). By listening to a victim’s trauma, the listener is not only a witness on the second level (cf. supra), to the testimony of someone else, but also on the first level, to oneself within the experience. Not seldom do listeners appropriate the victim’s trauma. In doing so, he is no longer an apt listener, but a vicarious witness.
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It is clear that much of the trauma of the second generation is related to this (un)willingly bearing witness to the trauma of their parents, which puts them even more at risk of appropriating their trauma. As Dominick LaCapra writes:
[O]ne may experience aspects of trauma or undergo secondary traumatisation, at least through the manifestation of symptomatic effects such as extreme anxiety, panic attacks, startle reactions, or recurrent nightmares, without personally living through the traumatizing event to which such effects are ascribed. . . .this is the case in the intergenerational transmission of trauma, notably through processes of identification with the (actual or imagined) experience of intimates. (“Trauma Studies” 114)
It is thus possible for children of Holocaust survivors to identify with their parents and appropriate their trauma in such a way that they subsequently become traumatized.
“I WASN’T THERE”: A LIFE IN EXILE OR THE ABSENT PRESENCE OF THE HOLOCAUST
“Our past is literally a foreign country we can never hope to visit” (Hirsch, Family Frames 244)
One of the most frustrating feelings for individuals of the second generation consist of the fact that they are constantly confronted with a past that is not their own. Their lives are determined for a great part by an atrocious event they have not even witnessed but from which they see their parents suffer every day. This idea of ‘not being part of it’ is even more stressed in the case of American Jews, since the Holocaust also took away the ‘old country’, the world of ‘shtetls’ their parents have grown up in; children of survivors get to know their family history as something they were essentially not a part of. Marianne Hirsch, in her book Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory, describes this feeling as a “sense of exile from a world we have never seen and which, because it was irreparably changed or destroyed not by natural or historical evolution over time but by the sudden violent annihilation of the Holocaust, we will never see” (242). In a wider perspective, this feeling of absence is spread over Jewish post-Holocaust generation. Alain Finkielkraut notes in his book, The Imaginary Jew that “*w+hat makes me a Jew is the acute consciousness of a lack, of a continuous absence: my exile from a civilization which, ‘for my own good,’ my parents did not wish me to keep in trust” (114). This is a consequence of the diasporic nature of Judaism which was already a fact in the pre-war ages, but evolved into extremes after the Holocaust. Survivors of the Holocaust had lost their homes and often the majority of their family;
16 they wanted to leave the Europe of destruction and death behind them and start a new life. This was the case for many Jewish American immigrants. As I have already mentioned, the survivors wanted their children to grow up without this past. This is not a realistic goal however, since a child always searches for its roots, the story of its family, etc. But all the second generation could find was a big black hole, a void, “both the gaping hole of genocide and the gaping hole of silence” (Laub, “Bearing Witness” 65).
Postmemory, a term coined by Marianne Hirsch, is one of the strategies of the second generation (and as will become clear, also of the third) to cope with this ‘present absence’ of the Holocaust.
…postmemory is distuingished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection. Postmemory is a powerful and very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation. This is not to say that memory itself is unmediated, but that it is more directly connected to the past. Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated. (Family Frames 23)
The writer Henri Raczymow, just like Hirsch a member of the second generation, has described the same feeling of exile by the term “mémoire trouée”, a “memory shot through with holes”. He explains: “I attempted to explore the ‘next-to-nothing’ in my own memory. A memory devoid of memory, without content, beyond exile, beyond the forgotten” (100). Raczymow too testifies to a feeling of not belonging, of not possessing the memory of an event that for many was so life- changing and that determined the identity of the second generation to a great extent. There is a sense of constant frustration to be found in the testimonies and writings of the second generation; “*w+e cannot even say that we were almost deported” (Raczymow 104).
Nadine Fresco, in her text Remembering the Unknown in which she explores characteristics of second-generation survivors, also pays much attention to this feeling of not having been there, of being left with a void, a nothingness. She also speaks of a sense of exile: “the Jews I am speaking of here feel their existence as a sort of exile, not from a place in the present or future, but from a time, now gone forever, which would have been that of identity itself”.6 Fresco further accurately describes the consequence of the Holocaust for the second generation, how they are constantly
6 No page numbers available; a link to the online article can be found in the bibliography. 17 haunted by the past and are frustratingly unable to fully understand it since they cannot ‘remember’ it, but only ‘imagine’:
What the Nazis had annihilated over and above individuals, was the very substance of a world, a culture, a history, a way of life. The success of their enterprise of eradication lay ultimately in that colonization of life by death, in that anachronistic hold of the present on the past. The pre-war Jewish world had been retrospectively annihilated, made non-existent. Life was now the trace moulded by death. (my emphasis)7
My main interest however, goes to the way Marianne Hirsch defines the term postmemory and how she applies it to second-generation Jewish literature and art. One of her discussions concerns Spiegelman’s Maus, on which I will elaborate in the next chapter. Postmemory will also be of great relevance in discussing Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, since he takes the “recollection . . . through an imaginative investment and creation” to a further level, namely by creating his own family history.
THE TRAUMA OF THE SECOND GENERATION
“I believe it has to do with the feeling all of us have, deep down, of having missed a train” (Raczymow 105)
After having discussed the trauma of the first generation – the Holocaust survivors – and what happens to their children, I can now try to formulate an answer to the question: ‘in what way is this trauma transferred to the second generation?’ A few deciding factors are to be discerned in the transmission of trauma to the next generation.
First, there is a second-generation trauma caused by intergenerational transmission. With this I mean the kind of trauma that children inherit directly from their parents. Dominick LaCapra notes that
the intergenerational transmission of trauma refers to the way those not directly living through an event may nonetheless experience and manifest its posttraumatic symptoms, something especially prominent in the children or intimates of survivors or at times perpetrators who are possessed of, and even by, the past and tend to relive what others have lived. (“Trauma Studies” 108)
7 Id. 18
This is the ‘purest’ form of inherited trauma since the second generation ‘copies’ the initial trauma. Through the process of vicarious witnessing they are suffering almost the same fears and post- traumatic symptoms as their parents do. As Victoria Elmwood concludes in her article on the transmission of trauma between the generations that “*t+he trauma will be reinflicted if the second generation identifies excessively with trauma that affects them indirectly” (718). Second, the consequences of growing up in a dysfunctional family. As will be illustrated in my discussion of Maus, Art’s trauma is to a great extent caused by his mother’s suicide and by his troubled relationship with his father. Both elements are due to how his parents are unable, because of their personal traumas, to fulfil their parenting relationship – his mother is depressed and his father sees educating as ‘teaching to survive’ – and not because Art has appropriated their trauma. Art’s biggest troubles are caused by the frustration of not understanding his parents. This brings me to the third point, the so-called ‘living-after-syndrome’. This is where the particularity of second-generation trauma lies: being confronted every day with a past they have no direct access to, the feeling of an “absent presence” I mentioned earlier. Moreover, second- generation survivors are often tempted to experience this absence as a loss, although they have never ‘had’ the experience and thus strictly considered could not have lost it either (LaCapra, “Trauma Studies” 116). The children of survivors have the task to cope with post-Holocaust Jewish identity in its most fragmented form. They are confronted everyday with the past that defines their identity. There is no way of ‘going around’ the Holocaust; it demands confrontation precisely because of its incomprehensibility. So the third constituting fact in the trauma of the second generation lies in historical determination; the frustration of never being able to fully ‘know’ the past.
With this I would like to conclude that there is a certain transmission of trauma to the second generation, but that often the particularity of second-generation trauma lies in the fact of being brought up by Holocaust survivors. This means that the second generation does not always suffer the same trauma experienced by their parents, but that they develop their own pathology, their own specific form of trauma. In a sense there is thus a certain transgenerational trauma, albeit not in the same form; the second generation seems to suffer more from being born after the Holocaust than from the Holocaust trauma itself. The literary works I will discuss therefore testify to a very personal ‘working through’ by the author and will precisely focus on this particular second (and third) generation trauma instead of merely wanting to tell the ‘Holocaust story’. “*C+hildren of survivors do not presume to speak instead of the witnesses. Rather, they give their voice to the Holocaust’s continuing impact on Jewish identity” (Berger 10). Art Spiegelman, for example, wants to tell his 19 father’s story but at the same time also narrates (and depicts) very explicitly the writing/drawing process and how the author is literally drawn down by this experience. Jonathan Safran Foer on the other hand turns away from the factual events and invents himself a family history.
WRITING AS A WAY OF WORKING THROUGH: KEEPING A NON-MEMORY ALIVE
“Writing was and still is the only way I could deal with the past, the whole past, the only way I could tell myself about the past – even if it is, by definition, a recreated past. It is a question of filling in gaps, of putting scraps together” (Raczymow 103)
Narration and telling one’s story has been widely recognized as one of the best ways to try to work through a trauma. “Narrative is a way of making sense, of putting one’s life in order, doubly difficult after the Holocaust left blanks and disorder” (Sicher, “Introduction” 6). The importance of the testimonial process entails that the trauma victim tells his or her story. It is an attempt to make a narrative memory of a traumatic experience which until then had been stored in the victim’s mind as a fragmented memory, appearing at any time in the form of dreams, flashbacks, etc. Second-generation writers, often even more than actual survivors, feel the need to convey the Holocaust legacy in their literary works. It gives them a way to ‘come to terms’ with the past (of their parents). Often these writings do not take the form of testimony (like in Maus for example, where Spiegelman narrates the testimony of his father), but of fiction. Fiction provides a way for members of the second generation to ‘imagine’ their version of the Holocaust through a postmemorial process. It is ironically by an imaginative effort that healing can be achieved in real life. As Efraim Sicher comments on the healing power of narration for the second generation:
Telling the story is a form of working through trauma, which ideally ends with the separation of the second generation from the dead and their connection to a real past, to a family and people in which they are a living link, transmitting a heritage to future generations. It is storytelling above all that shapes collective and personal memory in that transmission, and the way the story is told, the issue of narrativity itself, therefore must be central to any discussion of the situation of the post-Holocaust generation, which is positioned between history and memory and is removed from the experience by fifty years and more. (“Introduction” 13)
The particular healing aspect of narrativity as emphasized by Sicher, is one of the main subjects in the literary works I will discuss. Both in Spiegelman’s Maus and in Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, the 20 specific techniques of narration will prove to be very significant; Maus as a graphic novel, and Everything Is Illuminated as a pre-eminently postmodern novel.
As mentioned before, narrative in the form of testimony is very crucial for trauma victims in the process of working through. They need the ability to bear witness belatedly to the traumatic event that they were unable to witness at the moment it occurred. Chronologically telling or writing down their memories can therefore be a healing process. Later generations however, do not have this access to the Holocaust past through memory. Nevertheless, they often feel an equally big or even bigger urge ‘to tell their story’, albeit by using fictional approaches and historical research. As Sara Horowitz states in her article “Auto/Biography and Fiction after Auschwitz”:
Post-Holocaust writing becomes less clearly témoignage and more historicized or more imaginative as the writers become more distant from the events of the Holocaust. Whether literally and narrowly defined as writing by children of survivors or figuratively and broadly defined as writing by those who were not there, second-generation writing is no longer a matter of eyewitnessing. Survivors write out of a compulsion to bear witness – for oneself, for one’s losses and one’s survival, and for other. The second generation, to borrow from the poet Paul Celan, bears witness for the witness. (278)
Writing fiction about an event like the Holocaust has raised some questions, mostly rooted in Theodor Adorno’s infamous statement that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”8. Although Adorno later revised his radical conclusion, this sentence had a reverberating effect during the last decades. Is it ethically just to write stories about an event that caused the death of so many? Especially when the author himself has not lived the Holocaust himself. A second implication of Adorno’s statement is that “*t+o write ‘after’ is to be aware that something vitally human has gone forever . . . that culture can exist alongside barbarism” (Horowitz 298). The existence of culture alongside barbarism had a twofold meaning during the Holocaust; first, the fact that the majority of civilization simply turned away from the knowledge of what was happening to the Jews, and second, that “*w+e know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning” (George Steiner9 in Sicher, “The Holocaust” 298). What is the value of culture in this respect? Of art and literature? These are post-Holocaust doubts that find their resonance in postmodern discourse, as I shall elaborate on later.
8 Adorno, Theodor W. “Cultural Criticism and Society.” Prisms. Cambridge (Mass.): MIT Press, 1988. 18-34. 9 Language and Silence: Essays, 1958-1966. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969. 15. 21
Considering the question “to write or not to write?”, there is of course a certain ‘danger’ of the creation of more sentimental and mainstream Holocaust narratives that attempt to be too redemptive or want to provide a sense of closure, to provoke a kind of “all’s well that ends well”- effect. These concerns however, are of little importance compared to the healing effects narration can have for Holocaust survivors, and for the later generations. They do not write out of a need for closure, but are rather stimulated by the imperative to ‘never forget’. Holocaust survivors and their offspring are confronted with the necessity to pass on their legacy (un)willingly to the next generations and to the world in general, be it only out of a feeling of responsibility towards all those who passed away and to make sure it never happens again. In the words of Alain Finkielkraut: “*o+f course we return to the past, good people, it’s this very obsession that keeps us modern: it’s our way of assuring that such a past will never return” (53).
In the following chapter, I will show how Spiegelman comments on the ethical concerns raised by Adorno with his graphic novel Maus.
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IV. ART SPIEGELMAN’S MAUS AS AN ILLUSTRATION OF SECOND-GENERATION WRITING
“Samuel Beckett once said: ‘Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.’ . . . On the other hand, he said it” (Spiegelman 205)
With Maus, Art Spiegelman has written one of the most classic and most controversial works of Jewish American literature of the second generation. Classic because it accurately depicts the trauma of the second generation, controversial because it uses an unprecedented style and narrative technique to deal with the Holocaust. Maus consists of two parts: the first one is titled My Father Bleeds History, the second one And Here My Troubles Began. The idea for Art Spiegelman was to write a book about his father’s story of how he had survived the Holocaust. Not only does he relate his father’s story, but he also depicts the testimonial process – ‘depicts’, since Maus is a so-called graphic novel, a comic book. In conveying not only the Holocaust story, but also the present-day story of how Vladek Spiegelman tells this story to his son Artie and how the latter makes all this into a book, Spiegelman has created a multilayered work. Precisely because of its visuality, Maus manages to show the survivor’s story and at the same time it is able to depict the particular aspects of second-generation trauma I have discussed above. Elements such as troubled parent-child relationships, the child who is unable to comprehend or fully grasp the events of the Holocaust but has a need to know, the child’s urge to write himself into his parents’ story, etc. It is also useful to take a closer look at the way Spiegelman has narrated his story since this will be one of the points of comparison between his work and Foer’s. Maus, apart from being a comic book, uses a cat-and-mouse metaphor to depict Germans and Jews. This daring decision brings with it many ethical questions stimulated by the so-called ‘Adorno-debate’, whether it is ‘responsible’ or ethically right to write poetry/fiction after and about Auschwitz or the Holocaust in general. A part of my discussion of Maus will therefore be dedicated to the controversy Spiegelman caused by narrating his story as an animal fable in comic book form.
“MY FATHER BLEEDS HISTORY”
In the first part, My Father Bleeds History, Spiegelman presents his intentions to the reader; the book begins with a visit to his father and already on the second page Art mentions: “I still want to draw that book about you…The one I used to talk to you about.. About your life in Poland, and the
23 war” (14). This immediately shows Art’s10 urge to know about the past, to know about the events that determined also his life. Consequently, Vladek starts telling his story from the beginning. The first part of the book remains very faithful to the structure of Art paying visits to his father and the latter telling about his experiences. The reader gets to know father and son as mutually unable to comprehend each other; Vladek as a grumpy and miserly old man with a heart condition, Artie as the middle-aged chain- smoking cartoonist who cannot cope with his father’s character very well. Throughout the book it becomes clear – as they spend more time together – what the annoyances and sensitive issues are in this father-son relationship. For example, when Art spills ashes on the carpet: “But look what you do, Artie”’ “Huh?” “You’re dropping on the carpet cigarette ashes. You want it should be like a stable here?” “Oops. Sorry.” “Clean it, yes? Otherwise I have to do it. Mala could let it sit like this for a week and never touch it” (54)11. It quickly becomes clear that Art’s father in a way does “bleed history”, in the sense that Vladek –in addition to the actual story he tells his son – cannot stop talking or referring to the Holocaust and to the camps. Already in the first scene that Spiegelman includes as a kind of prologue, we see that Art has grown up with the Holocaust, as a dialogue between the 11-year-old Art and his father shows: “[w]hy do you cry, Artie?” “I-I fell, and my friends skated away w-without me.” “Friends? Your friends?... If you lock them together in a room with no food for a week…. Then you could see what it is, friends!” (6). Another similar scene takes place at the dinner table when Vladek wants Art to finish his plate, and Art – a grown man by now – answers,
Y’know, Mala *Vladek’s second wife+, when I was little, if I didn’t eat everything mom served, pop and I would argue ‘til I ran to my room crying… Mom would offer to cook something I liked better, but pop just wanted to leave the leftover food around until I ate it. Sometimes he’d even save it to serve again and again until I’d eat it or starve. (45)
Efraim Sicher describes this father-son relation as follows: “*t+he artist feels castrated by his father’s very ability to survive. His father’s role model as survivor makes him feel small and incompetent” (“The Burden” 50). Vladek does not even trust his son with simple things like counting out his pills (Maus 32). Art complains about this situation to his wife Françoise:
[h]e loved showing off how handy he was… And proving that anything I did was all wrong. He made me completely neurotic about fixing stuff. I mean, I didn’t even own a hammer before
10 I will speak of ‘Art’ when I mean Art Spiegelman as the protagonist, and ‘Spiegelman’ when I am talking about Art Spiegelman as the artist, the author. 11 In the quotes from Maus I include, the words that are put bigger and bold, I here put in italics to convey an equal effect. 24
we moved into this place! One reason I became an artist was that he thought it was impractical – just a waste of time… It was an area where I wouldn’t have to compete with him. (99)
The book is full of indications of how Art’s identity is built on what his parents experienced in the war. For example, when Vladek tells the story of a vision he had that came true i.e. that on ‘parshas truma’, a specific day of the year, he would be liberated from the prisoner of war-camp, and Art asks him: “You mean your ‘parshas truma’ dream actually came true?” “Yes – this is for me a very important date… I checked later on a calendar – it was this parsha on the week I got married to Anja. …And this was the parsha in 1948, after the war, on the week you were born!.. And so it came out to be this parsha you sang on the Saturday of your bar mitzvah!” (61). Art’s birth and bar mitzvah (the coming of age ceremony for Jewish boys) are thus – at least in Vladek’s mind – inextricably bound to his father’s experiences during the Holocaust.
“...AND HERE MY TROUBLES BEGAN...”
And Here My Trouble Began is the title of the second part of Maus as well as the third chapter of that second part. It is a (somewhat ironic) sentence uttered by Vladek when he is talking about the transfer from Auschwitz to a camp in Dachau near the end of the war, mainly because in Dachau he suffered from typhus. By using this sentence not only as a title for this particular chapter, but also as the title for the entire second part, Spiegelman also makes the phrase refer to himself. In Maus II (published eight years after Maus I), Spiegelman foregrounds himself as a character much more than in the first part. The reader learns more about how Art thinks and the consequences of his parents’ traumatic experiences for him personally; how his “troubles” began. In the beginning for example, he has a three-page long conversation with Françoise on this subject: “Depressed again?” “Just thinking about my book… It’s so presumptuous of me. I mean, I can’t even make any sense out of my relationship with my father… How am I supposed to make any sense out of Auschwitz?... Of the Holocaust?...” (174). In the same conversation he somewhat ironically denies an obsession with the Holocaust that is in a way typical of the second generation:
Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t obsessed with this stuff… It’s just that sometimes I’d fantasize Zyklon B coming out of our shower instead of water. I know this is insane, but I somehow wish I had been in Auschwitz with my parents so I could really know what they lived through!... I guess it’s some kind of guilt about having had an easier life than they did. (176)
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It is precisely this feeling of guilt that forms an important part of Art’s trauma. In the same conversation, Spiegelman takes the metafictional level of Maus to a new height by emphasizing the writing and drawing process:
Sigh. I feel so inadequate trying to reconstruct a reality that was worse than my darkest dreams. And trying to do it as a comic strip! I guess I bit off more than I can chew. Maybe I ought to forget the whole thing. There’s so much I’ll never be able to understand or visualize. I mean, reality is too complex for comics…So much has to be left out or distorted.” “Just keep it honest, honey.” “See what I mean… In real life you’d never have let me talk this long without interrupting”. (176)
The same doubts return in the second chapter of Maus II (201-6; see fig. 112) as we see him seated at his drawing table (not with the head of a mouse but merely a mouse mask) and subsequently in a consultation with his shrink, discussing the publication of Maus I. These few pages are very significant in Maus, since they depict Art’s troubles. By staging himself as an author, the telling of the story becomes part of the story itself; Spiegelman writes himself into a book that originally would be about his father. Victoria Elmwood describes this as “the author’s need to write himself into a family from whose founding trauma he was absent” (691). Spiegelman does not only do this by specifically staging himself as the author as I just described; he also achieves this effect in a more subtle way, namely by literally breaking the frames of his comic strip. For example when Art is lying at his father’s feet, listening to the story about Vladek fighting in the Polish army, Art’s body is divided over two frames (47; see fig. 2). Or rather, his legs break into the previous frame where we see his father as a soldier, while the upper part of his body is in the next (unframed) drawing, on the carpet of Vladek’s living room. Another example is when Art is taking a walk with his father while the latter tells about how he had to move to the Jewish ghetto of a village called Srodula (107; see fig. 3). They are literally walking into the frame of the picture that depicts the entrance of the ghetto. Further on, when Vladek is telling about Anja’s fear of rats when they were hiding in a Polish woman’s house, the last two frames on the page show on the one hand Anja and Vladek in a cellar in Poland and on the other hand Art and his aged father in Rego Park, New York. The two scenes are separated by an enlarged barrel from the Polish cellar and so it seems as if Art and his father are only hiding on the other side of the barrel, as if they are present in every corner, constantly commenting on the story (149; see fig. 4).
12 I have included the illustrations from Maus that are particularly important or depict visual effects in the appendix. 26
Spiegelman also does the reverse – a ‘warframe’ that intrudes into a present day-frame – with an unmistakable effect: there is a scene where the last frame on the page depicts a tower from the Auschwitz crematorium Vladek was sent to, and the frame above is Art smoking and listening to Vladek. The Auschwitz tower however breaks out of its frame and intrudes into the bottom of the frame above in such a way that Art’s cigarette smoke seems to come out of the crematorium tower, implying that Art constantly ‘inhales’ the fumes of Auschwitz, the fumes of the past (229; see fig. 5). All these scenes illustrate the visual techniques Spiegelman uses constantly to mix past with present, to tell not only his father’s story, but also very clearly his own story. In doing this, Spiegelman emphasizes how the present is haunted by the past. In the words of James Young, “*i+n Maus, not only are past and present linked, but they constantly intrude and occasionally even collapse into each other” (“The Holocaust” 682). In a significant scene, Vladek, Françoise and Art are driving while Vladek tells about four young girls who were hanged after having tried to revolt in Auschwitz. While he is telling this, we see their car passing some trees from which eight legs in striped uniform are dangling (239; see fig. 6). Froma Zeitlin, in her article on Maus, interprets this linking of past and present to be a consequence of “belatedness” (6), of the determinacy of ‘coming after’. Since the second generation can never experience in real life the trauma their parents lived, they can try to achieve this effect in their art or writing. In doing so, Spiegelman writes a so-called “received history”, a term coined by James Young that is closely related to Marianne Hirsch’s postmemory, since he describes it as “a narrative hybrid that interweaves both events of the Holocaust and the ways they are passed down to us” (“The Holocaust” 669). Young even goes as far as to say that “*t+he historical facts of the Holocaust . . . include the fact of their eventual transmission. This is why the ‘autobiographical history of the survivor’s tale’ necessarily begins, then, not in the father’s experiences but in Artie’s own” (“The Holocaust” 678). With this he argues for a progressive view on the Holocaust history. It is true that, while survivors themselves are slowly disappearing – and have by now almost entirely disappeared – that the second generation is almost the only, be it indirect, access we have to the Holocaust testimonies. Moreover, it is indeed part of the ‘Holocaust story’ to be aware of how such an incredible event is passed on and remembered. This is where the historical importance of writings by the second and third (and future) generations sets in.
At the end of his story, when he is reunited with Anja, Vladek says: “[m]ore I don’t need to tell you, we were both very happy, and lived happy, happy ever after” (296). Upon finishing Maus, the reader knows that at that moment perhaps the most difficult task was yet to come for Vladek and Anja: starting a normal life again. Which, as Spiegelman has shown, was quite impossible – his mother committed suicide, his father feels as if he is still in constant struggle to survive and Art, as 27 their child, has to bear the consequences. Victoria Elmwood states that “*t+he last page’s fairytale ‘happy, happy ever after’ ending provides a formulaic close to a narrative in which the characters demonstrably do not live happily ever after” (712). This is especially true for Art, which is emphasized by Vladek saying in the last scene “[s]o… Let’s stop, please, your tape recorder… I’m tired from talking, Richieu, and it’s enough stories for now…” (296). He calls Art with the name of his dead brother, Richieu; a painful reminder that Art as a son constantly stands in the shadow of his brother. This closing scene is an indication that even after the whole writing process of Maus, an important aspect of Art’s trauma remains, since he is confronted again with the fact of being merely a kind of ‘substitute’ for the child that died in the Holocaust; the child in the picture with whom he felt he had to compete with all his life. There is only one scene in which Art talks about his “ghost- brother”, again at the beginning of the second part, when he is in the car with Françoise:
“I wonder if Richieu and I would get along if he was still alive.” “Your brother?” “My ghost- brother, since he got killed before I was born. He was only five or six. . . . I didn’t think about him much when I was growing up… He was mainly a large, blurry photograph hanging in my parents’ bedroom.” “Uh-huh. I thought that was a picture of you, though it didn’t look like you.” “That’s the point. They didn’t need photos of me in their room… I was alive!... The photo never threw tantrums or got in any kind of trouble… It was an ideal kid, and I was a pain in the ass. I couldn’t compete. They didn’t talk about Richieu, but that photo was a kind of reproach, he’d have become a doctor, and married a wealthy Jewish girl… the creep. But at least we could’ve made him go deal with Vladek. …It’s spooky, having sibling rivalry with a snapshot!” (175)
Precisely this snapshot is included in Maus, at the beginning of Maus II (which, as mentioned earlier, focuses more on Art’s trauma). What is more, above the photograph it reads “for Richieu” and below “and for Nadja and Dashiell” (see fig. 7). Nadja and Dashiell are Spiegelman’s own children. In putting them alongside Richieu under a picture of Richieu, Spiegelman makes a clear statement of connecting past with present. In doing so he also ‘burdens’ his children already with his own trauma, with the past of his and consequently their family (Hirsch, Family Frames 36-37). It may be seen as a harsh reality but also in a positive way as an appeal to the future generations to ‘never forget’. In Dominick LaCapra’s words, “Maus is not simply about the past or the relation between the present and the past but also about the future” (History and Memory 173).
“PRISONER ON THE HELL PLANET”
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Prisoner on the Hell Planet is a story Spiegelman wrote before Maus about his mother’s suicide. It is embedded in the first part of Maus. This story stands in shrill contrast with the rest of Maus, since the characters are not animals as in the rest of the book, but more human, expressionistic figures with faces full of pain and sorrow; “they seem, even more than the other drawings in Maus, to be haunting, unworked-through traces of trauma of the outlines of still open wounds” (LaCapra, History and Memory 159). Although these characters seem to be more humanlike, they cause a more estranging effect than the mouse-characters. In four pages the story of his mother’s suicide is told and the traumatic experience this was for Art. He blames his mother for the trauma he has to live with due to her death: “*w+ell, mom, if you’re listening… Congratulations!... You’ve committed the perfect crime….You put me here… Shorted all my circuits…Cut my nerve endings…And crossed my wires!.... You murdered me, mommy, and you left me here to take the rap!!!” (105; see fig. 8). About this scene, Marianne Hirsch notes that
Art remains imprisoned in his camp uniform and in the black-bordered spaces of his psyche. Drawing Maus, it is implied, represents his attempt both to get deeper into his postmemory and to find a way out. In “Hell Planet” the two chronological levels of Maus merge, and in this convergence between past and present, destruction and survival, primary and secondary trauma – incarnated by Anja’s suicide – lies the root of Art’s (perhaps temporary) insanity. (Family Frames 32)
Anja’s story appears to be the “negative center of gravity” (Young, “The Holocaust” 686) in Maus, she is the big absence in the whole narrative. She is given a voice only by Vladek or Art, there is no source of her personal testimony available, and that explains to a great extent why Art is so angry at his father for burning Anja’s diaries. Art realizes that his silenced mother will never enable him to come to terms with the traumatic past that keeps haunting him.
This embedded story is the most direct reference in Maus to Art’s personal trauma caused by his mother’s suicide, and therefore stands on the same level as the picture of Richieu. It is no coincidence that three real pictures are included in Maus and that all three refer to Art’s secondary trauma. The three pictures depict – in that order – Art as a child with his mother (see fig. 9), at the beginning of Prisoner on the Hell Planet; second, Richieu’s picture as a dedication before Maus II (see fig. 7), and third (near the end), the picture of Vladek posing in a camp uniform (see fig. 10). These three pictures represent the core of Art’s trauma; his relationship with his mother, blaming her as
29 well as feeling guilty for her death. The sibling rivalry with his “ghost-brother” and the troubled relationship with his father with which we are confronted throughout the testimonial process.
All three photographs “break the frame” in a certain way, just as in Maus the past is constantly breaking the frames of the present and vice versa (Hirsch, Family Frames 40). The picture of his mother is part of a story that is isolated from the rest of Maus in content and style (even when the book is closed, the black pages are clearly visible). The picture of Richieu is not included in Maus (or at least not as a real picture; on page 288, the reader sees the same picture but in the mouse-like comic book form), but as a kind of dedication before the second part begins. And the third picture breaks the frame literally. Marianne Hirsch concludes that
[t]hese photographs connect the two levels of Spiegelman’s text, the past and the present, the story of the father and the story of the son, because these family photographs are documents both of memory (the survivor’s) and of ‘postmemory’ (that of the child of survivors) . . . They affirm the past’s existence and, in their flat two-dimensionality, they signal its unbridgeable distance. (Family Frames 21-3)
“WRITING POETRY AFTER [M]AUSCHWITZ IS BARBARIC”
As mentioned above, I will discuss here the ways in which Maus challenges the ‘limits of representation’ of the Holocaust. Not only is Maus a comic book, it is also an animal fable that consists of different layers of mediation and transgresses the boundaries of fiction and testimony. It is clear when reading Maus that Spiegelman was very aware of the modes of representation he uses and the difficulties and questions these raised.
Art Spiegelman’s Maus constantly draws attention to the difficulty of writing about the Holocaust in its self-reflexive framing devices and authorial comments, foregrounding the production of the text to question the cultural, semantic, philosophical, and commercial values ascribed to it, while its author boosts the commodification of the book as a Holocaust text in publicity hype, interviews, exhibitions, and a CD ROM. (Sicher, “The Holocaust” 306)
Although the term ‘comic book’ seems to be defined essentially by humour or a certain ‘comic’ element, Art Spiegelman has been known to prefer the term ‘commix’ instead of comics. With this he emphasizes the commingling, “mixing together words and pictures to tell a story”
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(Spiegelman13 in Young, “The Holocaust” 672). In the case of Maus, Vladek provides the words and Art the pictures, “one provides most of the verbal narrative, the other the visual; one gives testimony while the other receives and transmits it” (Hirsch, Family Frames 34). A process of transmission thus, on a literary-artistic level and on a literally traumatic level. It is however not so clear-cut that Vladek provides the words and Art the pictures since we also see Art the character/Spiegelman the author depicted by himself. This causes a confusion for the reader between ‘Art Spiegelman’ as author and protagonist. A layered and mediated narrative is created which is not always easy to understand; who is speaking here, the character or the artist? Spiegelman probably intended to do this in order to question the ways of representation and mediation when it comes to Holocaust testimony. He achieves the same effect by including real photographs next to the mouse-photographs (274-76). Marianne Hirsch concludes that
By placing three photographs into his graphic narrative, Art Spiegelman raises not only the question of how, forty years after Adorno’s dictum, the Holocaust can be represented, but also the question of how different media – comics, photographs, narrative, testimony – can interact to produce a more permeable and multiple text that may recast the problematics of Holocaust representation and definitely eradicate any clear-cut distinction between documentary and aesthetic. (Family Frames 25)
A second representational oddity is the way Spiegelman depicts humans as animals, the Jews are mice and the Germans cats. In doing this, Spiegelman emphasizes the prey and predator roles to which the Holocaust could be narrowed down. It is also a clear reference to the Jews being put in the role of rodents during the war; of annoying creatures that had to be exterminated. Spiegelman alludes to this by including two quotes. Maus I opens with Hitler’s quote that “*t+he Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human” (10). Maus II opens with another quote, now more specifically referring to the image of mice, from a newspaper article which condemns the Disney character Mickey Mouse:
Mickey Mouse is the most miserable ideal ever revealed.... Healthy emotions tell every independent young man and every honourable youth that the dirty and filth-covered vermin, the greatest bacteria carrier in the animal kingdom, cannot be the ideal type of animal.... Away with Jewish brutalization of the people! Down with Mickey Mouse! Wear the Swastika Cross! (164)
13 Spiegelman, Art. "Commix: An Idiosyn-cratic Historical and Aesthetic Overview." Print 42 (Nov.-Dec. 1988). 31
A clear connection is thus made between Jews and Mickey Mouse on the ground of being both mouse(like). Nevertheless, Spiegelman does make his characters explicitly human; only the head is an animal’s head, and the reader is capable of responding empathically to these mouse-like characters. Spiegelman loves to play with these different levels of representation, as he also includes real mice and cats in his story. For example, on the inside of the back cover there is an image of Art in his mouse-appearance who is holding a rat in his hands while in the background there is an image of Mickey Mouse (see fig. 11).
A second implication of the use of the mouse-image, is the way in which it questions identity, and more precisely Jewish identity. Vladek for example is a Polish Jew, but when they are hiding during the war, he and Anja have to put on pig masks (the Poles are depicted as pigs) to not be recognized (Maus 127). This emphasizes the fact that they are in the first place Jewish and not Polish, that being Jewish (partly due to the Holocaust) does not only constitute a religious conviction but a total identity. In the second chapter of Maus II, where Art is depicted as the artist questioning his success, he is wearing a mouse mask on a human head (see fig. 1). I think that the use of the mask here, as it is accompanied by a monologue in which Art constantly links past and present occurrences, has the meaning of Art trying to construct an identity for himself. In some way he does not manage to do so, precisely because he continues to consider his life and present events in the light of past events. This scene is crucial in representing Art’s trauma, namely of being unable to arrive at a proper self image, haunted by the past as he is seated on a pile of mouse-corpses. Meanwhile the literal ‘time flies’ are circling around the artist, confronting him with the fact that time really does fly (as eight years passed between the publication of Maus I and II and his father in the meanwhile has passed away) but that at the same time he remains ironically troubled by the past. Therefore it can be said that Maus clearly denies a sense of closure, of coming to peace with the past and its unknowability.
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V. THE THIRD GENERATION: JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER’S EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED
“The great thing about fiction is that it has very little to do with the circumstances of our lives, it has much more to do with the things that are deep, deep down inside of us” (Foer, Wereldgasten)
In this chapter I will discuss Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Everything Is Illuminated as an example of Holocaust fiction written by third-generation survivors. My aim is to explore how Foer ‘uses’ the Holocaust in his narrative; whether it is possible to speak of a change in the approach to history between the second and the third generation. In what way is the Holocaust present in this book? How is it represented?
The novel is essentially postmodern in its narrative techniques. Three storylines run next to each other, mixing realism, myth, autobiography and letter writing, and using techniques such as stream of consciousness, chapters from other fictional books, embedded stories, etc. “The result is an extreme postmodernism that could have been a spoof of the genre, except that it is about the Holocaust” (Kohn 245). It is precisely with these extreme postmodernist techniques that Foer achieves the novel’s effects; I will show how absence and the question of truth are thematized precisely by using certain narrative oddities. It will become clear, as Daniel Mendelsohn notices, that Foer “has put his narrative prestidigitation in the service of some very serious themes”.
Everything Is Illuminated consists of three different narrative strands that constantly interact and finally come together in the events of the Holocaust. The first is narrated by Alex, Jonathan’s Ukrainian translator, who tells the story of Jonathan’s trip to the Ukraine to find the small town of Trachimbrod where his grandfather is from, and also to find Augustine, the woman who allegedly saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Alex tells the story in a kind of self-studied English that causes a lot of hilarity: “My legal name is Alexander Perchov. But all of my many friends dub me Alex, because that is a more flaccid-to-utter version of my legal name” (1). Apart from Alex, Jonathan is accompanied by Alex’s grandfather (the ‘blind’ driver) and his dog, Sammy Davis Junior, Junior (the grandfather’s “seeing-eye bitch”).
The second narrative is written by Jonathan. He narrates the history of the Jewish shtetl Trachimbrod. He clearly stages himself as the author inventing a mythical tale of origins, beginning in 1791 “when Trachim B’s double-axle wagon either did or did not pin him against the bottom of the Brod River” (8). After this accident a child floats to the surface of the river, a baby girl who appears to
33 be Jonathan’s great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, named Brod after the river. Brod’s birth in 1791 marks the beginning of Jonathan’s family lineage, founded in a traumatic, mythical event. Both novels (Jonathan’s and Alex’s) come together in the end and “*a]t the quite devastating climax of the book, you realize how the two tales are related, a connection that forever sunders Alex from Jonathan” (Mendelsohn).
The third line of narrative in the book consists of letters that Alex writes to Jonathan, in retrospect, about the search for Trachimbrod. It becomes clear that Alex sends the different chapters of his story along with the letters. Conversely, Jonathan does the same with his story; he sends his chapters to Alex. However, Jonathan’s letters are remarkably absent from the novel. The reader only gets to know Jonathan from what Alex tells about him – in Alex’s Trachimbrod-story as well as in his letters – and from what Jonathan himself tells in the mythical tale of Trachimbrod’s and his family’s origins. Therefore, while Jonathan is the protagonist and was even given the name of the author, Jonathan at the same time appears to be the most mediated and least accessible character of the two. It is remarkable that the character with which the reader is ‘forced’ to empathize most, is Alex, the grandson of a perpetrator, and not Jonathan, the grandson of survivors. This undoubtedly is an important point of discussion, a decision with which Foer challenges ethical boundaries; a decision that seems to be understandable only when considering Foer’s substantial distance from the historical events. However, it is – quite paradoxically – his personal connection – as a member of the third generation – that ‘allows’ him to do this.
In the following paragraphs, I will first discuss characteristics that Everything Is Illuminated has in common with Maus, as concerns the literary techniques and the content; viz. how they represent the Holocaust in their own specific way. An important element in this discussion is their controversial narrative techniques: Spiegelman’s comic book style and meta-narrative, Foer’s humoristic and very postmodern approach. Secondly, the sometimes ambiguous authorial presence, caused by the fact that the protagonists in both Everything Is Illuminated and Maus have the same name as the author. In what way are author and protagonist alike? What are the consequences of this for the readers when trying to comprehend the narratives? The third point of attention derives from the above, namely the mediated nature of both books. When comparing Everything Is Illuminated to Maus, it becomes clear that Foer and Spiegelman often use the same techniques but reach totally different results.
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To conclude, I will focus on particularities that stand out in Everything Is Illuminated. For example, one could say that Foer creates a true ‘poetics of absence’14 illustrated by his play with language and typography. By thematizing absence and loss and engaging in a more extreme form of postmemorial invention, Foer takes the way of dealing with the troubling ‘absent presence’ of the Holocaust to another level. This poetics of absence, together with the ethical and political questions he raises (e.g. concerning the perpetrator’s view and historical truth), could be seen as third-generation characteristics. I will try to demonstrate that Foer offers the reader a different experience when it comes to reading about the Holocaust. In a way, he distances himself as a writer from the more emotionally involved second generation and puts the responsibility for making an all-encompassing narrative in the reader’s hands. He does so by engaging in a game of language and postmemorial invention.
Ultimately, in the concluding chapter, it is left for me to ask whether it is still possible to speak of ‘trauma’ when talking about the third generation.
EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED IN THE LIGHT OF THE SECOND GENERATION AND MAUS
CONTROVERSIAL NARRATION
“*H+umorous is the only truthful way to tell a sad story” (Foer, Everything Is Illuminated 53)
Both Spiegelman’s and Foer’s work have caused a certain controversy with respect to their way of handling the subject of the Holocaust. This controversy is reflected in the following questions pertinent to their novels: “can you make a comic book about the Holocaust?” and “is one allowed to ‘laugh’ with a novel that is about the Holocaust?” The weird thing is, however, that the power of both works of literature lies precisely in their controversial uses of narrative. By depicting himself as inhaling the fumes of Auschwitz, Spiegelman achieves an unequivocal effect of mixing past and present. Foer, by contrasting humour, the absurd or the grotesque with sadness, provokes a greater reaction and creates a greater sense of tragedy. In the words of the Dutch journalist Dirk-Jan Arensman, Everything Is Illuminated is “*e+en roman die je met frisse ogen naar de geschiedenis laat kijken en laat gieren van het lachen, tot het drama tot je doordringt”15. For example, when he tells
14 A term I borrowed from Dr. Codde’s discussion on Everything Is Illuminated. 15 “A novel that offers you a fresh look on history and makes you laugh your head off until the drama sinks in” (my translation). 35 about his newlywed grandfather Safran having his first orgasm at the same time when Trachimbrod is bombed by the Nazis for the first time:
And then something extraordinary happened. The house shook with such a violence as to make the day’s earlier disturbances seem like the burps of a baby. KABOOM! in the distance. Approaching KABOOM! KABOOM! Light poured in through the cracks between cellar door planks, filling the room with the warm and dynamic radiance of German bombs exploding in the nearby hills. KABOOOOM! Zosha howled in fear – of physical love, of war, of emotional love, of dying – and my grandfather was filled with a coital energy of such force that when it unleashed itself – KA-BOOOOOOOOOOOOOM! KA-BOO- BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOM! KA-KA-KA-KA-KA-KA- BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM! – when he tripped over the precipice of civilized humanity into the free fall of unadulterated animal rapture, when, in seven eternal seconds, he more than made up for the sum of what was now more than 2,700 acts without consequence, when he flooded Zosha with a deluge of what could no longer be held back, when he released into the universe a copulative light so powerful that if it could have been harnessed and utilized, rather than sent forth and wasted, the Germans wouldn’t have had a chance, he wondered if one of the bombs hadn’t landed on the marriage bed, wedged itself between the shuddering body of his new wife and his own, and obliterated Trachimbrod. But when he hit the rocky canyon’s floor, when the seven seconds of bombing ended and his head settled into the pillow damp with Zosha’s tears and drenched with his semen, he understood that he was not dead, but in love” (257).
In this way, his grandfather is being closely connected to the Nazi bombing, and no further factual description of the events is given. What is more, the events of the war throughout the novel (or rather at the end, because only then they appear, in a climactic way) are only mentioned between brackets:
Shtetl meetings were held daily, news reports (NAZIS KILL 8,200 ON UKRAINIAN BORDER) examined with the care of editors, plans of action drawn up and crumpled up, large maps spread out on tables like patients waiting to be cut open . . . They wrapped Menachem’s jumbo trout in
newspaper (NAZIS APPROACH LUTSK) and carried beef briskets in wicker baskets to picnics under tall tree canopies by the small falls (262) . . . The travelling journalist Shakel R held the Lvov
Daily Observed (NAZIS MOVE EAST) over his head (266) . . . One end of white string tied around
the volume knob of a radio (NAZIS ENTER UKRAINE, MOVE EAST WITH SPEED) on the wobbly bookcase in Benjamin T’s one-room shanty . . . white string connecting freelance journalist
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(GERMANS PUSH ON, SENSING IMMINENT VICTORY) to electrician over the tranquil and anticipating palm of the River Brod. (267)
Following this scene, is the bombing of Trachimbrod and the invasion of the shtetl by the Nazis. The bombing itself is obliterated from the book by an entire series of dots (“…………”) covering a page and a half (270-71). The next page begins immediately after the bombing: “*a+fter the bombing was over, the Nazis moved through the shtetl” (272). The event of the bombing is narrated by a stream of consciousness from a predictive dream Brod had and that was recorded in a book in which Trachimbroders collected their dreams (and which reflects the stream of consciousness of Alex narrating his grandfather’s testimony a few pages earlier):
“A young soldier tossed the nine volumes of The Book of Recurrent Dreams onto the bonfire of Jews, not noticing, in his haste to grab and destroy more, that one of the pages fell out of one of the books and descended, coming to rest like a veil on a child’s burnt face:
9:613 – The dream of the end of the world. bombs poured down from the sky explod- ing across trachimbrod in bursts of light and heat those watching the festivities hollered ran frantically ...... my safran picked up his wife and carried her like a newlywed into the water ...... into the brod that river with my name I embraced them with open arms come to me come I wanted to save them all to save everybody from every- body the bombs rained from the sky . . .” (272)
By connecting the bombing to Brod through this dream, the circle is complete; with Brod the reader is brought back to the beginning of the story, but the bombing means the ‘end’, both literally and figuratively: the end of the book and the end in the sense of the Holocaust.
These examples illustrate that Foer also engages in a certain kind of visuality. By playing with different typographies and lay-outs he wants to achieve certain effects. For example, the Holocaust is an event for which there literally are no words, and he represents it by a series of dots. This
37 transgression of typographical boundaries is a general characteristic of Foer’s writing, since in his second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, he also uses similar techniques. As he explains in an interview with Robert Birnbaum:
I was raised with a different kind of television and music. Music for example that depends very much on borrowing from different traditions, sampling pieces of other music and overlaying different rhythms and melodies and I think that is reflected in my writing. . . . I think that comes across in the typography and in the style in the combination of voices. The world is more of a collage everyday [sic]. It seems like there is less unity of voice everyday [sic]. (Foer, Identity Theory)
As Deborah Solomon notes, Foer “wants to offer us not just a reading experience, but a visual experience as well, as if words alone can no longer be trusted to tell our life stories” (Foer, NY Times Magazine).
His use of visual techniques is opposed to that of Spiegelman in intentions: he does not engage in literally describing the events of the Holocaust, while Spiegelman does precisely that. Spiegelman’s main interest lies in a depiction of the experiences of his father in the most precise and detailed way. He was able to do that by the combination of his father’s testimony and his rigid historical research on chronology and facts, of the war in general and of the camps specifically. Spiegelman wanted to fill in the gaps he cannot remember himself; his work is mostly made out of frustration and personal need. Foer on the other hand, seems to be more at peace with the fact that the Holocaust can never be fully known and works this out to the extreme; he makes it a preliminary condition since everything in his novel is based on absence, void and loss. Foer is rather trying to explore the consequences the Holocaust still has on his generation, both for offspring of survivors and of perpetrators.
What both books certainly have in common, is that they defy a sense of closure or redemption. Art at the end of Maus is more than ever confronted with the roots of his trauma when his father calls him “Richieu”, and in Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan cannot arrive at forgiving Alex’s grandfather or Alex himself. As Saul Friedländer remarks: being ‘truthful’ is more valuable than striving for closure, since “*c+losure . . . would represent an obvious avoidance of what remains indeterminate, elusive and opaque” (“Trauma” 261).
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Both Jonathan Safran Foer and Art Spiegelman prove that any form of redemption is impossible when it comes to the Holocaust. ‘Living after’ is characterized by the difficulty of living with history and absent memory.
AUTHORIAL PRESENCE AND IDENTITY
The protagonists of both Everything Is Illuminated and Maus bear the name of their respective creators, Jonathan Safran Foer and Art Spiegelman. Both works are also to some extent – Maus more than Everything Is Illuminated – based on autobiographical facts. Spiegelman goes as far as to even stage himself as the author contemplating Maus while he is writing it. It is sometimes difficult for the reader to distinguish between the character and the author. As far as Foer is concerned we know that he has actually visited the Ukraine prior to writing his book, in search of the town where his grandfather came from, named Trochenbrod. It is known for a fact that Trochenbrod was swiped of the map by the Nazis: “[i]n August and September 1942 the Nazis and their helpers murdered the people of Trochenbrod-Sofiyovka . . . there had been none but Jews in Trochenbrod, no one was left there, and all traces of the town soon were erased from the face of the Earth”16
Foer actually was guided to the site of Trachimbrod, but all that was left was a memorial stone (which also appears in the novel) and he always mentions in interviews that the trip was rather a disappointment. Almost all other elements therefore – Alex and his grandfather, the search, the encounter with Augustine/Lista, etc. – are fictional, together with the second ‘novel’ in the book about Jonathan’s family history. When asked if the character of Jonathan is autobiographical, Foer answered: “I tried to use other names. Even at the end I did one of those search-and-replaces, *but+ it didn’t feel genuine. This is how I am honest, by beginning with the life of my circumstances” (Foer, Newsweek). Thus, by using his own name, Foer blurs the boundaries between autobiography and fiction. “Discussing what constitutes the autobiographical pact, Philippe Lejeune notes, ‘The deep subject of biography is the proper name’” (Horowitz 286). Using one’s own name for a fictional account automatically means that the author is playing with the concept of identity. Just as Spiegelman does when he makes his characters animals or at times just humans wearing mouse masks (especially when depicting himself as the author).
16 From the website “Beit Tal – Trochenbrod and Lozisht Community.” http://bet-tal.com/index.aspx?id=2411.
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Efraim Sicher notes that “*n+arrative recreates different identities and acts out in fantasy form repressed stories which test the freedom or dependence of the individual vis-à-vis the past but also, in the writing of the memoir, form a relationship with the parent” (2001, 81). This attempt at forming a relationship with the parent is particularly present in Maus, as well as the relation Art has with the past. Everything Is Illuminated is a nice example of how for Foer narrative “acts out in fantasy form repressed stories which test the freedom or dependence of the individual vis-à-vis the past”. As he often repeats in interviews, he did not set out to write a so-called ‘Jewish’ book, he did not even undertake the journey to the Ukraine with the intention of ‘discovering the past’. Only in the course of writing did he realize the kind of religion and history he carried with him: “My God, I was interested in Jewish things? I had no idea! Here’s a piece of evidence of what I actually was. It’s like looking at a picture of yourself and realizing you were pudgier than you thought” (Foer, Newsweek). In a Dutch interview with Dirk-Jan Arensman, he says
[d]e daad van een boek creëren zag ik altijd als een manier om tot het antwoord op vragen te komen, problemen op te lossen. Maar wat ik ben gaan inzien, is dat je juist vragen en problemen oproept. En met die vragen verander je jezelf. Toen ik Alex schiep, heb ik tijdens dat proces bijvoorbeeld heel veel nagedacht over communicatie en medeleven, eerlijkheid en schuldgevoel. En bij het bedenken van de geschiedenis van Trachimbrod realiseerde [ik] me pas dat ik joods was.17
Here we learn that Foer became fully aware of his position and identity as a member of the third generation during the writing process only. As is shown by both Maus and Everything Is Illuminated, identity, and Jewish identity in particular, is a very important aspect of post-Holocaust writing.
MEDIATION AND LAYERING
Both Everything Is Illuminated and Maus are strongly mediated and layered works that defy a straightforward interpretation. This is for a great part due to the fact that both authors engage in ‘postmemorial invention’. As I have explained, postmemory lies between memory and history and is characteristic for the generations ‘after’ because these generations want to remember something
17 “I used to consider the act of writing a book as a way to beget answers to certain questions, to solve problems. But what I have come to realise, is that by writing you create questions and problems. And with these questions you change yourself. When I created Alex for example, I thought a lot about communication and empathy, about honesty and guilt. And only by inventing the history of Trachimbrod, I realised that I was Jewish” (my translation). 40 that they have not experienced and thus have no memory of. For the second and third (and later) generations, the only easy access to the events of the Holocaust is through history. History however, because of the “deep personal connection” (Hirsch) these individuals feel to their family’s past, does not suffice in providing them with an idea of the events. Therefore, in both Maus and – to a greater extent – Everything Is Illuminated, the act of recalling takes place somewhere between memory and history. In Maus, Art Spiegelman relies both on history (in the form of research) and on memory (both his and his father’s). As a result, he has made a work that tells not only the tale of the Holocaust, but also how it lives on in the second generation, and how Art’s depiction of the war as remembered by his father is inevitably influenced by what Art already knows from history. For example, when Vladek tells about how he and Anja walked away from Srodula in the direction of Sosnowiec, the road has the form of a swastika, predicting what Art already knows, viz. that no direction will save his parents from the Nazis (127; see fig. 12).
Jonathan Safran Foer takes postmemorial invention much further than Spiegelman, given that he engages almost solely in invention. I am referring in particular to the ‘novel’ that the character Jonathan is writing about the mythical origins of Trachimbrod. As I have mentioned, Trachimbrod was a real Jewish shtetl from which his grandfather originated and that was completely destroyed by the Nazis in 1942. These are the actual events that frame Jonathan’s story; the rest is invented. It is Jonathan’s intention to re-create his family’s history. He does so however by only discussing in detail two members of the genealogy, his great-great-great-great-great-grandmother Brod, named after the river in Trachimbrod in which she was born, and his grandfather Safran. In doing so, Jonathan sees himself clearly connected with two important moments: the origin of his family, born from a traumatic, mythical event (Brod’s birth) and the Holocaust, which means the end of Trachimbrod and of the whole family lineage as it was founded by Brod. Surprisingly, Jonathan sees the bombing of Trachimbrod as both a beginning and an end; the title of the last chapter is “The Beginning of the World often Comes, 1942-1791”, but Brod’s predictive dream which is recounted in The Book of Recurrent Dreams is embedded at the end of this last chapter and is titled “The dream of the end of the world” (272). This can be seen as Foer’s way of mixing past with present, of stating that his novel is not so much about the past as it is about the resonances of the past in the present. Because of this, Everything Is Illuminated seems to have the Holocaust as its main topic, but actually – and the same goes for Maus – it is about the aftermath, of how the next generations find ways to deal with the past. Jonathan does this by inventing his family history; Art also reconstructs his family’s past, but based on actual testimony and historical facts.
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Both Foer and Spiegelman engage in their re-membering by staging a protagonist who is named after themselves. In doing so, the authors are put in a vulnerable position, since the reader will constantly confuse the protagonist with the author. Another consequence of this technique is that the author is blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality.
Throughout his book, Foer stresses the novel’s fictionality. He wants the reader to wonder whether it is the author or the character speaking. He explores the boundaries and possibilities of fiction and writing. For example, Alex in his letters refers to changes Jonathan proposes for the story Alex is writing (about the search for Augustine and Trachimbrod) and the reader is forced to wonder to what extent these events took place. In the first letter the reader is already made aware of this when Alex says: “*y+ou must know that I have performed the corrections you demanded. I apologize for the last line, about how you are a very spoiled Jew. It has been changed, and is now written, ‘I do not want to drive ten hours to an ugly city to attend to a spoiled Jew’” (24). In this case it only concerns a mere choice of words, but in his second letter, Alex already admits that “I also invented things that I thought would appease you, funny things and sad things. I am certain that you will inform me when I have traveled too far” (54). And further on, clearly after Jonathan has shown his dislike of the grandfather’s dog Sammy Davis Junior, Junior, Alex tries to convince Jonathan by saying that the dog “is a very distinguished character” and that Jonathan should not be so hasty in dismissing her from the story: “*l+et us view her evolution and then resolve” (55). Also in the mythical storyline, the omniscient narrator intrudes, especially towards the climax, into the bombing of Trachimbrod: “(Here it is almost impossible to go on, because we know what happens, and wonder why they don’t. Or it’s impossible because we fear that they do)” (270). At the end of the novel the reader is completely confused. Alex’s last letter to Jonathan only contains the translation of his grandfather’s suicide note: “[d]ear Jonathan, If you are reading this, it is because Sasha found it and translated it for you. It means that I am dead, and that Sasha is alive” (274). Further on in this suicide note, Alex’s grandfather goes on to tell how Sasha (this is how Alex is called by his grandfather) rebelled against his father. In the middle of the book however, Alex reads a part from Jonathan’s notebook for his story about Trachimbrod, and finds exactly the same lines:
He told his father that he could care for Mother and Little Igor. It took his saying it to make it true. Finally, he was ready. His father could not believe this thing. What? he asked. What? And Sasha told him again that he would take care of the family, that he would understand if his father had to leave and never return, and that it would not even make him less of a father. He told his father that he would forgive. Oh, father became so angry, so full of wrath, and he told Sasha that he would kill him, and Sasha told his father that he would kill him, and they
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moved at each other with violence and his father said, Say it to my face, not to the floor, and Sasha said, You are not my father. (160, 274)
To sum up, this passage is written by Jonathan in his notebook, in a story narrated by Alex, and is repeated in a suicide note written by Alex’s grandfather and translated by Alex himself. All this of course, is invented by Foer. Everything Is Illuminated is all about writing – Jonathan writing his novel, Alex writing his, Alex also writing letters (as well as Jonathan, but the reader never sees them), and the characters in Jonathan’s story who also seem to spend most of their time writing letters, novels, notes and entries in The Book of Recurrent Dreams and The Book of Antecedents. The reader gets to know the overall story of the novel (in as far as there is only ‘one’ story) in a mediated way, not told by one voice, but by different voices that together constitute the book. As Marion Spies remarks, “*w+e as a reader are asked to construct the final narrative” (258).
THIRD-GENERATION CHARACTERISTICS?
In this chapter I will arrive at what I set out to research: to focus on certain aspects in Foer’s novel that could be – compared to the second generation – characteristic for the third generation in general. I can however only suggest these characteristics and not draw any certain conclusions, since I have based my findings only on two works of literature while there are obviously many left to be read and discussed. Points of interest include what Foer does with the ‘absent presence’-feeling, how he makes a strength of his weakness as it were. Further, how Foer plays with language and repeatedly questions the power of language as well as its constant failure since Everything Is Illuminated is full of acts of failed communication. Thirdly, I will return to discussing Foer’s postmemorial invention in detail, the effects achieved by creating the Trachimbrod storyline. Ultimately, my attention goes to the ethical and political questions Foer is able to raise in his work due to his increased distance to the facts of the Holocaust.
A POETICS OF ABSENCE
“An absence haunts the rhetoric of postwar Jewish identity” (Finkielkraut viii-ix)
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As I have already touched upon, the idea of absence is ‘present’ throughout Everything Is Illuminated. To such an extent that it could be said that Foer writes according to a certain ‘poetics of absence’(Codde, 2009). “I think creativity almost always arises out of a need” (Foer, Wereldgasten) he says in an interview. This is something he likes to repeat, as he says in another interview: “[s]chrijven heeft voor mij te maken met iets wat afwezig is. Met iets wat ik wil, maar niet heb”18 (Foer, Libelle). Specifically about how Everything Is Illuminated came into being, he explains:
[i]k ben maar drie dagen in Oekraïne geweest en heb daar letterlijk niets aangetroffen. Nou ja, op de plaats waar Trachimbrod zich ooit bevond, staat nu een gedenksteen. Die wordt ook in het boek genoemd. Verder was die reis eigenlijk één groot gat: er was niets. Het schrijven van het boek was voor mij zoiets als het opvullen van dat gat met allemaal woorden. Dus niet scheppen maar vervangen: het vervangen van de leegte door woorden. Dat klinkt misschien als een onbeduidend verschil, maar voor mij veranderde het de manier waarop ik tegen dingen aankeek totaal.19 (Foer, De Volkskrant)
In the novel itself there are also literal references to this, for example in a scene with Jonathan’s grandfather and the Gypsy girl he is in love with: “She told him of ship voyages she had taken to places he had never heard of, and stories he knew were all untrue, were bad not-truths, even, but he nodded and tried to convince himself to be convinced, tried to believe her, because he knew that the origin of a story is always an absence, and he wanted her to live among presences” (230; my emphasis). Less literal references are recurrent throughout the book, like the absence of Jonathan’s letters or the ‘absence’ of the Holocaust as mentioned before. Characters in this novel constantly decide to ‘not’ do things, negations and absences are all around. For example when Yankel, Brod’s adoptive father, falls in love with his “never-wife”, the mother he invents for Brod:
[h]e would wake from sleep to miss the weight that never depressed the bed next to him, remember in earnest the weight of gestures she never made, long for the un-weight of her un-arm slung over his too real chest, making his widower’s remembrances that much more convincing and his pain that much more real. He felt that he had lost her. He had lost her. At night he would reread the letters that she had never written him. (48-9)
18 “Writing for me has to do with something that is absent. With something that I want but do not have” (my translation). 19 “I was in the Ukraine for three days only and have found absolutely nothing there. Where Trachimbrod used to be, there is a memorial stone, which is mentioned in the book. The trip was actually one big void: there was nothing. Writing the book had something to do with filling that void with words. So not creation but replacement: replacing emptiness with words. That might sound like an insignificant difference, but for me it changed the way I looked at things” (my translation). 44
Further, when Brod does not want her husband, the Kolker, to go to the flour mill: “[t]his is love, she thought, isn’t it? When you notice someone’s absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even, than you love his presence?” (121). How, when the Kolker gets the saw blade in his head and becomes very violent, they have to make love through a hole in the wall: “[t]hey lived with the hole. The absence that defined it became a presence that defined them. Life was a small negative space cut out of the eternal solidity, and for the first time, it felt precious – not like all of the words that had come to mean nothing, but like the last breath of a drowning victim” (135). And later on, when the Kolker dies and Brod cuts the hole out of the wall to wear it on a necklace: “[t]his new bead would remind her of the second man she had lost in her eighteen years, and of the hole that she was learning is not the exception in life, but the rule. The hole is no void; the void exists around it” (139). Many more examples of such ‘absent presences’ can be found throughout the narrative. The whole history of Trachimbrod is based on something that ‘might not even have really happened’: “*i+t was March 18, 1791, when Trachim B’s double-axle wagon either did or did not pin him against the bottom of the Brod River” (8).
Furthermore, nothing in the novel seems to be ‘whole’; everything consists of fragments, of bits and pieces, memories of things that once were but that are now out of reach forever. For example, Augustine’s/Lista’s boxes of memorabilia she collected from the inhabitants of Trachimbrod after everyone but herself had died. Or how Brod – and consequently Jonathan’s entire family – is born out of fragments, namely a whole collection of memorabilia of a past life that came to the surface of the river Brod together with her.
Characters constantly decide to not do things, even in extremis when the Nazis are approaching the shtetl, the villagers are overcome with the urge to remember:
Activity was replaced with thought. Memory. Everything reminded everyone of something . . . Memory took the place of terror. In their efforts to remember what it was they were trying so hard to remember, they could finally think over the fear of the war. The memories of birth, childhood, and adolescence resonated with greater volume that the din of exploding shells. So nothing was done. No decisions were made. No bags packed or houses emptied. No trenches dug or buildings fortified. Nothing. (258, 262)
A climax of absence is reached with the suicide of Alex’s grandfather. He had survived the Holocaust and was therefore an eyewitness to inform later generations of what happened. Alex and Jonathan, and the reader as well, however, never get to know everything. A lot about the grandfather’s past
45 remains unknown and will stay that way due to his death. Even his suicide note ends with an incomplete sentence, with an absence: “I will walk without noise, and I will open the door in darkness, and I will” (276).
Because of these absences and uncertainties, the reader fails to reconstruct the entire story. The cover text of Everything Is Illuminated reads “What they *Jonathan, Alex and his grandfather+ are looking for seems elusive – a truth hidden behind veils of time, language and the horrors of war”. And this truth appears to be as elusive in the end as it was in the beginning, as elusive for the reader as it is for the characters. The question of truth, more specifically historical truth is problematized throughout the novel, as I will illustrate in the next chapter. In the end it seems that the truth does not exist; there is only a void, an undecidedness that denies closure. In this way, as Dr. Codde pointed out, Foer manages to put the reader in his position, that of the third generation survivor, who is ‘left behind’ with only questions and no answers.
To conclude, in Maus we have seen that Spiegelman foregrounds a feeling of frustration and incomprehensibility when trying to cope with the Holocaust. He has an urge to know exactly what happened to his parents and constantly considers his own life in the light of their experiences. Foer on the other hand seems to have a completely different way to deal with the ‘absent presence’ of the Holocaust. He appears to be at peace with the fact that the Holocaust can never be fully known, that the event that changed the life of his grandparents and consequently also his, is too elusive to allow a full understanding. What is more, Foer goes as far as to create a certain aesthetics of absence; in Everything Is Illuminated, absence seems to be a preliminary condition for all emotional thinking and interaction. This could be seen as a logical evolution, considering Spiegelman’s closer connection to the Holocaust (as a member of the second and not the third generation).
THE POWER OF FICTION AND THE FAILURE OF LANGUAGE
A typical postmodern aspect of Everything Is Illuminated is the way Foer plays with language, not only in the story itself but also on a meta-level, by having his characters say certain things or by the narrator making specific comments. The author both wants to stress the importance and the potential of language but at the same time wants to point out its constant failure. As Foer himself says in an interview: “My books are about loss but I think, I hope that they’re about different kinds of
46 loss. They’re about historical loss but they’re also about the loss that one feels when you can’t communicate properly” (Foer, Zomergasten; my emphasis). In a Dutch interview, Foer says,
[w]e lachen om Alex, deels omdat we bepaalde zaken in hem herkennen. Niemand zegt bijvoorbeeld ooit precies wat hij wil zeggen: we zijn allemaal tot op zeker hoogte mislukte communicatoren. Wanneer je om Alex lacht, is dat niet omdat je op hem neerkijkt en blij bent dat je niet bent zoals hij. Het is hilariteit die voortkomt uit de herkenning.20 (Foer, De Volkskrant)
Just by having Alex speak like this, the reader is forced to think about language, translation and communication. Another example is found in The Book of Antecedents, when invented words like “ifice” and “ifact” are explained. The entry of “ifactifice” reads:
Music is beautiful. Since the beginning of time, we (the Jews) have been looking for a new way of speaking. We often blame our treatment throughout history on terrible misunderstandings. (Words never mean what we want them to mean.) If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand. This was the origin of Torah chanting and, in all likelihood, Yiddish – the most onomatopoeic of all languages. It is also the reason that the elderly among us, particularly those who survived a pogrom, hum so often, indeed seem unable to stop humming, seem dead set on preventing any silence or linguistic meaning in. But until we find this new way of speaking, until we can find a nonapproximate vocabulary, nonsense words are the best thing we’ve got. Ifactifice is one such word. (203; my emphasis)
This book confronts the reader with the problem of how language can never approximate life: “The Book of Antecedents, once updated yearly, was now continually updated, and when there was nothing to report, the full-time committee would report its reporting, just to keep the book moving, expanding, becoming more like life: We are writing . . . We are writing . . . We are writing . . .” (196). A page and a half of this chapter is indeed filled with “. . . We are writing . . .” (212-13).
Next to the failure of language and communication, Foer explores the possibilities of fiction. He touches upon, in the words of Daniel Mendelsohn, “an issue of considerable urgency in Holocaust literature: the seemingly hopeless split between history and narrative, between what happened and what can be told”.
20 “We laugh with Alex partly because we recognise certain things in him. For example, nobody ever says precisely what he wants to say: to a certain extent we are all failed communicators. When you laugh with Alex, it is not because you look down on him and are glad that you are not like him. It is hilarity that comes from recognition” (my translation). 47
In fiction everything can be told, one can create a whole new world, adapt what one wants to adapt, leave out what one wants to leave out. Since both protagonists, Jonathan and Alex are engaged in the act of writing a novel, a lot of thought is given to what the possibilities of fiction are. Especially in Alex’s letters, we see how Alex is constantly exploring the boundaries between the real and the invented. He sees storytelling as a way to present a better version of life:
I think that this is why I relish writing for you so much. It makes it possible for me to be not like I am, but as I desire for Little Igor to see me. I can be funny, because I have time to meditate about how to be funny, and I can repair my mistakes when I perform mistakes, and I can be a melancholy person in manners that are interesting, not only melancholy. With writing, we have second chances. (144)
Later on he repeats (and comments like this keep returning), “I do not think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem” (180).
Jonathan on the other hand, writes a rather tragic novel about absence, sadness, memory, impossible loves, death, etc. Alex’s view on writing is influenced by Jonathan’s novel, as he is trying to make sense of the excerpts that Jonathan sends him. As the book evolves, it becomes clear that Alex’s narrative also becomes less light-hearted and more sincere, with a climax when he gets to know his grandfather’s past. The text mirrors this in the last parts of the story, when we see how Alex is constantly mediating what he tells the reader (Jonathan in particular) by what he puts between brackets:
“You *Alex+ do not have to present not-truths to me *Alex’s grandfather+, Sasha. I am not a child.” (But I do. That is what you always fail to understand. I present not-truths in order to protect you. That is also why I try so inflexibly to be a funny person. Everything is to protect you. I exist in case you need to be protected.) “I do not understand,” I said. (I understand.) “You do not?” he asked. (You do.) (227)
With his story, Alex had set out to make life more beautiful than it is, but as he learns what the actual truth might be, he lacks narrative control to recount it. When he is telling about what his grandfather did during the war, he does so in a long fragment in parenthesis that stretches over six pages and ends in a stream of consciousness in which he ends up wondering if he is still guilty for what his grandfather did (namely pointing out his friend Hershel as a Jew to the Nazis).
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The two narratives come together in the events of the Holocaust and at that moment there is little humour left and the real questions arise. Does Alex still have to feel guilty about what his grandfather did? Can we judge his grandfather for what he did? And, in what way is it possible to speak of a historical truth? There seems to be no simple answer available; only more questions arise. The reader is again confronted with the irony that everything is far from illuminated and he or she comes to realize that “fiction, even fantastic or apocryphal or anachronistic fiction, can compete with the official record as a vehicle of historical truth” (McHale21 in Kohn 247). Various versions and stories exist about the Holocaust and if the reader learns one thing from Foer’s novel, it is that not one of these stories or versions tells the entire truth. This unsettling fact can be explained as a second characteristic of third-generation writing, namely the fact that grandchildren of survivors, to a greater extent than children of survivors, “grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth” (Hirsch, Family Frames 23). Being constantly aware of the fact that eye witnesses of the Holocaust are slowly disappearing, the third generation is confronted with the fact that in no time only texts will be available (Codde, 2009). Texts to testify of human suffering, to recount their family’s history, to try to fill the void that the Holocaust left behind.
POSTMEMORIAL INVENTION
As mentioned earlier, Jonathan Safran Foer takes the act of postmemorial invention further than Art Spiegelman does. I understand postmemorial invention as defined by Marianne Hirsch: “a powerful and very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation” (Family Frames 22). In Maus, Spiegelman made his story out of a combination of his father’s testimony and historical research, but nonetheless in the way that he imagined the events. As a result, past and present are intertwined all the time. Foer, on the other hand, based on the fact that his grandfather came from a town called Trachimbrod which was destroyed during the war, invents an entire family history. His family lineage appears to be filled with traumatic and tragic events: Brod’s birth, her rape, Yankel’s death, the Kolker who gets a saw wedged in his head, and ultimately, the Holocaust. As Menachem Feuer notes in an article about Everything Is Illuminated: “*i+t is worth noting here that each link in this line of Slouchers marks another meditation on trauma, loss, perversion, and broken love, which Jonathan no doubt inherits” (39). Especially this last part, “which Jonathan no doubt
21 McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge, 1989. 49 inherits,” is of importance. The way Jonathan narrates the story seems to confirm this. The main events are brought down to Brod’s birth and the Holocaust. Throughout the narrative there are constant references to the initial trauma from which Brod was born. This event is memorialized during the annual Trachimday festivities when the accident is re-enacted. It is also on Trachimday that the Nazis invade the shtetl. Feuer notes that
[t]his allegory [of the origin] no doubt denotes a beginning born of trauma, wherein the subject of the trauma is floating in fragments. And if we look at this as a reflection of its author, it could imply that not just his lineage, but his task as a writer begins after the disaster: his role is to take fragments, in the form of words, representations, and memories of the past, and bring them together into a narrative (albeit a fragmented one). (37-8)
Although the Holocaust events are mentioned later on in the novel, the birth of Brod could be seen as a kind of symbol of the Holocaust: it affected all citizens of Trachimbrod, it is an event memorialized every year and it is an important constituent of identity for later generations of Jonathan’s family (especially his grandfather and Jonathan himself) since it is mentioned over and over again, even after almost two centuries have passed. In this way, Foer emphasizes the influence of the past on the present. He creates the sense of a circular, mythical time as opposed to historical time. A way of doing this is by linking dates and events in his titles, for example “A Parade, a Death, a Proposition, 1804-1969,” or “The Dial, 1941- 1804-1941” and the last chapter “The Beginning of the World often Comes, 1942-1791,” which, as mentioned earlier, takes us back to 1791. The titles of the different chapters are meandering across the pages, thus, as Dr. Codde pointed out in his class, visualizing a flow of time and opposing the straight, linear titles of Alex’s chapters.
The idea of cyclical time recurs in different scenes. For example, in The Book of Recurrent Dreams, there is a dream that goes as follows:
The dream that we are our fathers. I walked to the Brod [!!], without knowing why, and looked into my reflection in the water. I couldn’t look away. What was the image that pulled me in after it? What was it that I loved? And then I recognized it. So simple. In the water I was my father’s face, and that face saw the face of its father, and so on, and so on, reflecting backward to the beginning of time, to the face of God, in whose image we were created. (41)
It is no coincidence that the reflection is seen in the river Brod from which Jonathan’s very great- grandmother originates. 50
Further, when Yankel dies and Brod makes love to the Kolker for the first time, “her belly lit up like a firefly’s bulb” (98). The next scene, in the year 1969, relates Jonathan’s mother and grandmother watching the landing on the moon. It is suggested that the light of Brod’s belly – and the light caused by the collective orgy in which the shtetl subsequently engages – is seen from the moon by Neil Armstrong. But more important in this scene is when Jonathan writes that:
*s+he *Jonathan’s grandmother+ puts her hand on my mother’s hand and feels her own blood flow through the veins, and the blood of my grandfather (who died only five weeks after coming to the States, just half a year after my mother was born), and my mother’s blood, and my blood, and the blood of my children and grandchildren. (98)
In this way the author stresses a strong connection between generations, not only past generations but especially future ones. Foer implicitly says that just while he had not expected to write about the Jews or the Holocaust, it is something that is omnipresent, something offspring of survivors cannot hide from. He cannot, and nor will his children or his grandchildren. A continuity is suggested and most importantly, an imperative to remember.
The importance of memory is stressed throughout the novel; all Trachimbroders engage in remembering. As a scene in the beginning already announces: “*t+he what, Didl said, is not so important, but that we should remember. It is the act of remembering, the process of remembrance, the recognition of our past” (36). Foer appears to state that although his generation does not have an easy access to the past, it is nevertheless important to keep remembering. With his novel, he shows that ‘remembering’ can take various forms, even that of mythical invention. As Efraim Sicher points out: “’*a+bsent memory’ might be a trope for much writing that is impelled by the violent eradication of a past culture or of an entire generation, so that ‘invention replaces recall’” (“The Future” 64). This evolution from recall to invention is often a point of critique in discussions on Holocaust literature. For example, one of the negative reviews of Everything Is Illuminated reads: “*t+he generation that witnessed it [the holocaust] and, to a certain extent, the generation that came directly afterward have treated it as a real, solid, ugly fact of all our lives. To Foer, born more than thirty years after Auschwitz, it is merely the unremembered past, ripe for reinvention and reinterpretation by the artist” (Allen; my emphasis).
As generations pass, the task of remembering the Holocaust will ultimately remain in the hands of those who can only rely on history, testimonies and other texts. Just because of this absence of the real event, postmemorial invention is a way of coping with an ‘unlived’ burden.
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HISTORICAL DISTANCE AND ETHICAL CONCERNS
This fourth characteristic may be the most important, namely the fact that Foer, because of his increased historical distance to the facts, is able to reflect on the Holocaust in a ‘healthier’ way. He is not stuck in too deeply wrought personal troubles (as was the case with Art in Maus) but is able to foreground ethical questions concerning guilt and responsibility. As Efraim Sicher points out: “The perpetrator just beneath the skin of the victim and the proximity of collaboration and complicity are persistent themes in post-Holocaust writing by those who were not ‘there’” (“The Burden” 71). In Everything Is Illuminated, the character contemplating his guilt is Alex. Towards the end of the novel, Alex discovers the secrets his grandfather has lived with all the time. When the Nazis came to his village, they lined up all inhabitants (as happened in Trachimbrod) and asked them to point out the Jews. In order to save himself, as well as his wife and child, from the Nazis, Alex’s grandfather pointed out his Jewish friend Herschel. As mentioned before, this is narrated by Alex in a stream of consciousness that ends as follows:
. . . he said these things to us and Jonathan where do we go now what do we do with what we know Grandfather said that I am I but this could not be the truth is that I also pointedatHerschel and I also said heisaJew and I will tell you that you also pointedatHerschel and you also said heisaJew and more than that Grandfather also pointedatme and said heisaJew and you also pointedathim and said heisaJew and your grandmother and Little Igor and we all pointedateachother so what is it he should have done hewouldhavebeenafooltodoanythingelse but it is forgivable what he did canheeverbeforgiven for his finger for whathisfingerdid for whathepointedto and didnotpointto for whathetouchedinhislife and whathedidnottouch he is stillguilty I am Iam Iam IamI?) (252; my emphasis)
Alex feels guilty for what his grandfather has done; this is represented by the traumatic retelling of the events in the form of a stream of consciousness. In his letters, Alex asks Jonathan several times to forgive not only his grandfather but also himself. He constantly stresses the fact that his grandfather “is a good person, alive in a bad time” (145). Also when reflecting on Brod’s fate: “I have been very dispirited for Brod. She is a good person in a bad world” (103). And when he comes to narrating his grandfather’s testimony, the conversation goes like this: “’I am not a bad person,’ he *Alex’s
52 grandfather] said. ‘I am a good person who has lived in a bad time.’ ‘I know this,’ I *Alex+ said. (Even if you were a bad person, I would still know that you are a good person)” (227). He wants Jonathan to forgive him through his writing, wants him to use the power of fiction to alter events: “[g]randfather interrogates me about you every day. He desires to know if you forgive him for the things he told you about the war, and about Herschel. (You could alter it, Jonathan. For him, not for me. Your novel is now verging on the war. It is possible) . . . I beseech you to forgive us, and to make us better than we are. Make us good” (145). His plea for forgiveness is present throughout his letters: “*p+lease be truthful, but also please be benevolent, please” (26), “as always, I ask for your forgiveness” (55), and finally, just before the last part of his story where he recounts his grandfather’s testimony, “*f+or the first time in my life, I told my father exactly what I thought, as I will now tell you, for the first time, exactly what I think. As with him, I ask for your forgiveness” (242).
Contrary to what might be expected, the reader is forced to empathize more with Alex than with Jonathan. Mostly because of the fact that Alex’s voice is more present throughout the novel, in his letters and in the story he tells, but also because Alex is made, in the words of Dr. Codde, the “moral centre” of the book. The reader never really gets to know Jonathan’s reaction to the confession of Alex’s grandfather, and no sign is given that Jonathan answers Alex’s pleas for forgiveness. Even in the end, as Marion Spies notes, “forgiveness for Nazi murderers is implicitly denied by the grandfather’s taking of his own life” (258). Ending the novel with the grandfather’s suicide note makes Jonathan’s silence even more obvious. The reader learns how for the Holocaust survivor, who was forced to make an immoral decision, the past is unbearable. But why should it still be for his grandson? Alex vents his frustration by saying that “*e+verything is the way it is because everything was the way it was. Sometimes I feel ensnared in this, as if no matter what I do, what will come has already been fixed” (145). Froma Zeitlin on the contrary, writes that “now in the third generation ‘afterward’ represents liberation and not a guilty bondage to the terrible past” (31). This is precisely what Foer wants to question: does Alex still have to feel guilty? And does Jonathan have the right to not forgive after all these years? Foer stimulates critical reflection on the aftermath of the Holocaust, on the consequences for offspring of survivors, by making the perpetrator’s descendent the moral centre of the novel. The reader is tempted to choose his side but history seems to demand otherwise.
The reader is left to make a decision of his own since once again Foer provides no clear answers, he only raises more questions. On the other hand, that may be all that is left for the later generations; questions without answers.
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VI. CONCLUSION
In this concluding chapter, it is my aim to look back and reflect on what I have read and discussed above in order to try to formulate an answer to the question of particularities in the writing of third generation Jewish-American novelists in the light of the second generation. Next to these literary characteristics, it is my main concern to discuss how the Holocaust trauma – which, as is known, clearly lives on in a certain way in the second generation – is dealt with in the third generation, and if it is after all still possible to speak of a trauma as such. I would like to come to my conclusion by first exploring three themes I was confronted with time and time again; in Maus and Everything Is Illuminated as well as in the secondary literature I read. I want to mention these themes because I think that as they are increasingly present when comparing the second with the third generation. I therefore would like to argue for the fact that, while the trauma clearly diminishes and even disappears – it is almost impossible to say that Jonathan Safran Foer is traumatized as such – other concerns get more attention. In contrast to Spiegelman, Foer as a member of the next generation has found a way to part from a too personal involvement. He is still struggling with important issues linked to the Holocaust legacy, which for a great part fall under the themes I will elaborate on, and still feels very closely connected to the Holocaust (as his postmemorial invention proves), but clearly does not experience the existential difficulties and traumatic memories Spiegelman has. Foer is able, in Dr. Codde’s words, to deal with the Holocaust in a ‘healthier’ way. The way in which below discussed issues are dealt with – memory, (Jewish) identity and the postmodern – further testify to this statement.
HISTORY, MEMORY AND POSTMEMORY
Jews Have Six Senses. Touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing . . . memory. While Gentiles experience and process the world through the traditional senses, and use memory only as a second-order means of interpreting events, for Jews memory is no less primary than the prick of a pin, or its silver glimmer, or the taste of the blood it pulls from the finger. The Jew is pricked by a pin and remembers other pins. It is only by tracing the pinprick back to other pinpricks . . . that the Jew is able to know why it hurts. When a Jew encounters a pin, he asks: What does it remember like? (Foer 199)
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The last few decades, a general fascination and even obsession with the past could be discerned. Evidence is to be found in numerous films, plays and books that deal with the recent and distant past, both factual and mythical. Also outside of art or historical discourse, there is an increased interest in documenting every single event. As Pierre Nora notes in his text Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Mémoire: “*n]o society has ever produced archives as deliberately as our own, not only by volume, not only by new technical means of reproduction and preservation, but also by its superstitious esteem, by its veneration of the trace” (13). By doing this, we create a certainty for ourselves, we attempt to get a grasp on the past and help define “what we are in the light of what we are no longer” (Nora 18). The act of clinging on to the past could be linked to the postmodern individual’s search for ‘master narratives’ since “we now live in an era in which legitimizing ‘master narratives are in crisis and in decline” (Butler 13). Master narrative in this sense would refer to a certain ideology or religion, e.g. Marxism or Christianity, that upholds certain values to live by and explains social and existential questions. Holding on to something like this has however become more impossible due to an increased intellectuality and cultural and political plurality in the contemporary globalized world. It seems to be a natural reaction then, that people search for these narratives in the past; this would explain the endless writing, re-writing and adapting of history, especially in art. Linked to this is the importance of memory which provides, as opposed to history, a very personal access to the past and therefore a much more valuable one for the individual. As Nora states: “*m+emory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history *on the other hand+ is a representation of the past” (8). It is exactly in this fact that the strength of the third generation lies. Because of their temporal distance to the Holocaust or its survivors, their grandparents, they have no direct access to it through memory. An historical approach however, would be too distancing since they still feel very personally connected to the events. Therefore postmemory, as I have shown earlier, offers the ideal solution. In the words of Marianne Hirsch, “*f+ull or empty, postmemory seeks connection. It creates where it cannot recover. It imagines where it cannot recall” (“The Generation” 664). Thus, while Spiegelman did possess his own (traumatic) memories, he used them in combination with historical research and his father’s testimony in order to reconstruct the events of the Holocaust. He therefore put his own existential doubts in the shadow of his father’s experiences. The difference with Foer is very clear; the historical events and the act of reconstruction are out of his reach or simply do not provide a satisfying approach. Engaging in postmemorial invention and creating his own story of something he was so clearly not a part of, offers a much bigger consolation than digging into history and being confronted every time again that he was not there and that he can never know.
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IDENTITY ISSUES: HOW THE HOLOCAUST DEFINES YIDDISHKEIT
A second theme I want to discuss is that of identity and Jewish identity in particular. The issue of identity is present in both Maus and Everything Is Illuminated but in a very different way. Spiegelman struggles with his identity in a traumatic way; he has a troubled relation with his father, blames himself for the death of his mother, always had to compete with his dead brother and feels very helpless not having experienced what his parents did and therefore never being able to fully ‘know’. Spiegelman’s main concern is giving himself a place and identity within his own family. As Berger mentions, “*c+hildren of survivors also understand themselves and their connection to the Jewish tradition in terms of their parent’s Holocaust experience” (3). Foer on the other hand, although he clearly writes about his family too, does not engage in such a personal narrative. He touches upon the issue of identity in a more ethical way. As I have mentioned in my discussion of his novel, Foer focuses on the question of guilt concerning the later generations (in the Trachimbrod-narrative told by Alex) as well as what it entails to be a Jew (esp. in the mythical storyline). Menachem Feuer, in his article on Everything Is Illuminated, concludes that “*t+his fluid revision of the past is an exposure of Jonathan Safran Foer’s deepest fantasies and fears with respect to his identity and his history” (36). It could be said that struggling with identity as being part of and finding a place in the Jewish culture and tradition in a post-Holocaust age, is one of the main concerns of contemporary Jewish novelists. As Froma Zeitlin states:
There are a number of reasons why writing about the Holocaust has so gripped the modern imagination – of author, critic and reader alike. But one cogent reason may be that by its very definition the genocidal project of the Holocaust decreed a collective destiny for every individual Jew, who could no longer lay claim to any other identity except that of a Jew and whose right to existence, without exception, was revoked. (36)
Consequences for Jewish faith after the war were twofold; on the one hand there was a turning away from the past and from religion, a sense of having lost faith in God, since what god would have let this happen? On the other hand, there was an even stronger clinging on to faith just because of the evil that was overcome at the end of the war and in order to pay tribute to the dead. Alain Finkielkraut, in his book The Imaginary Jew tries to look for an alternative way for Jews to relate to their religion and its burdened past: “Finkielkraut’s project is . . . both critical and redemptive: to shatter the illusory plenitude of postwar Jewish postures while redeeming the richness of Jewish heritage from the triviality of a media-saturated age” (ix). For those who were born after the
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Holocaust, the crisis of faith could be considered to be even stronger because of “*t+he generational difference between Jews growing up in the postwar era and their predecessors in the heroic, antifascist struggle” (Finkielkraut xi). In Everything Is Illuminated, more than in Maus, we see how Foer is struggling with this issue of Jewish identity in the way he stages his character Jonathan and his relation with Alex, as well as in his narrative about the history of the Jewish shtetl Trachimbrod.
“THE POST-HOLOCAUST CONDITION”
Putting the so-called “postmodern condition”, after the book with the same name by Jean- François Lyotard, on the same level as the doubts and concerns offspring of survivors experience, is something I have repeatedly come across in my reading. Like Efraim Sicher says, “our concept of the human condition has been badly shaken, and it should not be surprising that postmodernism refers to the Holocaust as theme and argument for the loss of meaning, loss of faith, and loss of humanity” (“The Holocaust” 305). It would certainly be a good explanation for the success of Jewish-American novels of the second and third generation since they testify of a search for identity, a search within a religion, a tradition and a family, and feel the need to write their individual history, to look for oneself in the light of past events. The postmodern individual in general seeks the same certainties, be it not in relation to an enormous event like the Holocaust. In the words of Finkielkraut: “everyone looks for the meaning that contemporary life so cruelly lacks” (39). The danger however, of levelling post-Holocaust with the postmodern – as Dr. Codde also pointed out in class – is trivialization, by stating that every human being is a victim because of the historical time in which we live in, since the postmodern discourse “has created a culture in which many were encouraged to see themselves as victims” (Butler 59). Everyone today is a ‘survivor’ in some sense of the word.
It is clear nevertheless that Jonathan Safran Foer is embedded in a strong tradition of the postmodern novel when it comes to his use of language (and pointing out the failure of it) and narrative techniques. He plays with the idea that there is no general truth available, there are no explanatory metanarratives, as I mentioned above. Every story that attempts to explain history is “just another form of fiction” (Butler 15). As I pointed out in my discussion, different versions of one story, mediation and invention or adaptation of so-called truths is certainly something Foer loves playing with in his novel. Therefore, it can definitely be said that Foer is indebted to postmodern theories and tradition when it comes to expressing his own post-Holocaust doubts.
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THIRD-GENERATION TRAUMA?
I have discussed above themes to help me reach an answer to the question whether it is still possible to speak of trauma when it comes to the third generation of Jewish-American Holocaust survivors. Everything Is Illuminated is definitely a trauma novel, since it narrates traumatic experiences represented in a language that reflects the trauma itself. For example, the stream of consciousness in which Alex tells what his grandfather has done; both the grandfather’s trauma as Alex’s trauma is reflected in this passage, since the narrative technique shows that these experiences are not yet worked through, by Alex nor by his grandfather. However, it can not be concluded after reading the novel that the author is suffering from trauma or that this is the primary reason for writing. He does definitely have doubts and issues he raises in his book, viz. concerning the above paragraphs, but he does not have the need, unlike Spiegelman – although he also stages himself as a character and novelist – to write in a too personally involved manner. My conclusion therefore would be that the trauma has made place for other, more general concerns, which were already present in Maus but were less urgent for Spiegelman to deal with since his personal troubles gained priority and disabled him to see the bigger picture – which does not make his work any less good of course, but only results in a very different approach to the Holocaust. Later generations – the second, third, and probably also the next – keep answering to the impetus ‘to never forget’, to remember and keep telling the story, be it (in the case of the third generation) merely a story, a very personal story, and put the Holocaust and all its consequences – which are obviously still felt – up for discussion. The void of the Holocaust, of the past that they have not experienced but that has influenced their family to a great extent, keeps fascinating, keeps fueling the imagination and keeps raising questions. Therefore, in Saul Friedländer’s words, “*w+orking through may ultimately signify, in Maurice Blanchot’s words, ‘to keep watch over absent meaning’”22. Since, although they themselves may not experience the trauma as such, the third generation is still telling the story of the Holocaust survivors which inevitably also has become their own story. In a way they therefore keep working through although they are not traumatized themselves, since they continue putting the traumatic events into a narrative.
22 Friedländer, Saul. “Trauma, Transference, and ‘Working Through’ in Writing the History of the Shoah.” History and Memory 4 (Spring-Summer 1992): 41. Quoted in Young, “The Holocaust” 669. 58
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VII. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allen, Brooke. “Everything Is Illuminated.” Atlantic Monthly 289.4 (April 2002): 141-42. Behlman, Lee. “The Escapist: Fantasy, Folklore, and the Pleasure of the Comic Book in Recent Jewish America Holocaust Fiction.” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 22.3 (2004): 56-71. Berger, Alan L. Children of Job: American Second-Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Bernard, Sarah. “A Fan’s Notes.” New York 35.12 (8 April 2002): 34. 15 Feb. 2009
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---. Interview with Hans Bouman. “Ongeloofbaar grappig.” De Volkskrant (27 Sept. 2002). 30 March 2009
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Horowitz, Sara R. “Auto/Biography and Fiction after Auschwitz.” Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory after Auschwitz. Ed. Efraim Sicher. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998. 276-94. Kohn, Robert E. “Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated.” Explicator 65.4 (2007): 245-47. Korb, Scott M. “Illuminations.” American Book Review 24.3 (March/April 2003): 12. LaCapra, Dominick. History and Memory After Auschwitz. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1998. ---. “Trauma Studies: Its Critics and Vicissitudes.” In: Lacapra, Dominick. History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory. Ithaca (N.Y.): Cornell UP, 2004. 106-43. Laub, Dori. “Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening.” In: Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub, eds. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge, 1992. 57-74. ---. “Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle.” In: Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore (Md.): John Hopkins UP, 2004.. 61-75. Mendelsohn, Daniel. “Boy of Wonders.” New York 35.13 (15 April 2002): 102. 15 Feb. 2009
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---. “The Future of the Past. Countermemory and Postmemory in Contemporary American Post- Holocaust Narratives.” History and Memory 12.2 (2001): 56-91. ---. “In the Shadow of History: Second Generation Writers and Artists and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in Israel and America.” Judaism 47.2 (1998): 169-186. Spiegelman, Art. The Complete Maus. A Survivor’s Tale. London: Penguin Books, 2003. Spies, Marion. “Recent directions in Holocaust Writing.” Religion and the Arts 8.2 (June 2004): 244- 59. van Alphen, Ernst. “Second-Generation Testimony, Transmission of Trauma, and Postmemory.” Poetics Today 27.2 (2006): 473-88. Wardi, Dina. Memorial Candles: Children of the Holocaust. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Young, James E. Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. 1988. ---. “Between History and Memory.” History and Memory 9.1 (1997): 47-59. ---. “The Holocaust as Vicarious Past: Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the Afterimages of History.” Critical Inquiry 24.3 (1998): 666-99. Zeitlin, Froma I. “The Vicarious Witness. Belated Memory and Authorial Presence in Recent Holocaust Literature.” History and Memory 10.2 (1998): 5-41.
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VIII. ILLUSTRATIONS
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