Faculteit Letteren en Wijsbegeerte
Ayla De Greve
Holocaust Representation in Third-Generation Literary Non-fiction: Postmemory in Daniel Mendelsohn‘s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million and Edmund De Waal‘s The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance
Paper submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master in de Taal- en Letterkunde Nederlands – Engels
2013
Supervisor: Dr. Stijn Vervaet Department Literature
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Stijn Vervaet, my research supervisor, for his guidance, encouragements and constructive critiques of this work. I would also like to thank him for recommending the two beautiful novels that are discussed in this paper.
Furthermore, I am grateful to Prof. Dr. Philippe Codde, for arousing my interest in the subject of third-generation Holocaust literature during his course ‗Contemporary American Literature‘.
Finally, special thanks are extended to my parents for their support and encouragement throughout my study.
Abstract
This paper deals with Marianne Hirsch‘s concept of postmemory in the context of the Holocaust. Postmemory describes the relationship that the generation after bears to the traumatic experiences that preceded their births, but which were transmitted to them deeply and affectively. This essay focuses on this relationship in the third generation, where postmemory can be seen as an obsession with the inaccessible past of the ancestors. Focusing on non-fictional literature, this paper elucidates how postmemory has influenced the representation of the Holocaust in The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn and The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance by Edmund De Waal. The novels by these third-generation writers both examine the family history of the authors in the context of the Holocaust. By means of a close reading, this paper examines several aspects related to postmemory in both novels.
Table of contents
1. Introduction ...... 1
2. Postmemory ...... 3
2.1 What is postmemory? ...... 3
2.2 The generation after ...... 4
2.3 The first generation ...... 6
2.4 The second generation ...... 8
2.5 The third generation ...... 12
3. Postmemory in Daniel Mendelsohn‘s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million and Edmund De Waal‘s The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance ……………………………….... 15
3.1 About the novels ……………………………………………………………….... 15
3.1.1 Daniel Mendelsohn – The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million ……… 15
3.1.2 Edmund De Waal – The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance 17
3.2 Quest …………………………………………………………………………….. 19
3.2.1 Daniel Mendelsohn – The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million ……… 19
3.2.2 Edmund De Waal – The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance 24
3.3 Communicative and cultural memory …………………………………………... 25
3.4 The influence of postmemory on identity ………………………………………. 28
3.4.1 Daniel Mendelsohn – The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million ……… 28
3.4.2 Edmund De Waal – The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance 32
3.5 Representation of postmemorial aspects ………..……………………………… 34
3.5.1 Mediation ……………………………………………………………… 34
3.5.2 Received history ………………………………………………………. 37
3.5.3 Storytelling ……………………………………………………………. 42
3.6 Perpetrators and victims ………………………………………………………… 45
3.6.1 Survivor‘s guilt ……………………………………………………….. 45
3.6.2 Identity of the perpetrator ……………………………………………. 47
3.6.3 The grey zone ………………………………………………………… 50
3.7 The role of photographs in Daniel Mendelsohn‘s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million ………………………………………………………………………………. 52
3.7.1 The effects of photographs on Daniel Mendelsohn …………………… 52
3.7.2 The effects of photographs on the survivors ……..…………………… 55
3.7.3 The effects of photographs on the readers ……………………………. 57
3.8 References to myth in Daniel Mendelsohn‘s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million ...... …………………………. 58
3.9 Testimonial objects in De Waal‘s The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance ………………………………………………………………………….. 62
4. Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………….. 66
1. Introduction
[T]he Holocaust wasn‘t something that simply happened, but is an event that‘s still happening. – Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
The Holocaust took place over sixty years ago, yet in a way it is still happening. Marianne Hirsch states that ―[t]hese events happened in the past, but their effects continue into the present‖ (2012: 5). The more this tragedy recedes from us in time, the more our preoccupation with it increases, it seems (Hoffman 2004: ix). Not only is the Holocaust still an important topic in literature and scholarly work, but also in daily life, the effects of the Shoah can still be palpable. This is the case especially for those who have a ―sense of living connection‖ to the event (xv). Hence, not only the survivors, but also their descendants, who have a living connection to the Holocaust through their parents and grandparents, can be affected by the Holocaust. Indeed, many scholars like Sicher, Hoffman, Schwab and Hirsch have established that ―[a]long with stories, behaviors, and symptoms, parents do transmit to their children aspects of their relationship to places and objects from the past‖ (Hirsch 2012: 213). Thus, as Schwab points out, ―[t]he legacies of violence not only haunt the actual victims but also are passed on through the generations‖ (2010: 1). In this paper, we will focus particularly on members of the third generation, whose grandparents lived during the Holocaust and whose lives and work seem to be affected by this.
Since the generation of survivors is starting to pass away, the third generation is highly concerned with preserving their stories. As De Waal points out, ―I am the wrong generation to let it go‖ (2010: 348). Descendants of survivors tend to want to preserve their relatives‘ stories not only to ensure that the Holocaust will not be forgotten, but also to discover and safeguard their own family story, to which they are closely connected. Hirsch describes this close connection to the trauma of their grandparents as ‗postmemory‘. Through stories, behaviours or images, the experiences of the Holocaust were transmitted to them so affectively, ―as to seem to constitute memories in their own right‖ (Hirsch 2012: 5). Writers of the generations after are thus not only concerned with representing their ancestors‘ stories to preserve them, but also with their personal involvement, the way in which the stories were transmitted to them and the way they represent the stories towards the next generations. While Hirsch applied the concept of postmemory on the second generation, Codde and others argue
1 that it is also suitable for the third generation. Codde states that ―[p]ostmemory is an obsession with the opaque and inaccessible past of one‘s parents or grandparents‖ (2009: 64). For third-generation writers Daniel Mendelsohn and Edmund De Waal, this ‗obsession‘ has resulted in a non-fictional novel about their family history. In this paper we will discuss how the issue of postmemory has influenced respectively The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million and The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance.
In the first chapter on postmemory, we will define and discuss Marianne Hirsch‘s influential concept of postmemory thoroughly. Afterwards, we will briefly discuss how ‗the generation after‘ became important in scholarly work and we will consider some typical characteristics of the first, second and third generation of Holocaust survivors. In the next chapter, we indulge in a close reading of Mendelsohn‘s The Lost and De Waal‘s The Hare with Amber Eyes. We will analyse how postmemory plays an important role in these non-fictional novels. Firstly, we describe the content of the novels and illuminate why they are considered works of postmemory and thus the subject of this paper. Next, we will argue that both novels are quests, which has an influence on their structure and we will briefly discuss which difficulties the authors came across during the quests. Further on, we examine the difference between cultural and communicative memory and how this is relevant for the novels. After that, the influence of postmemory on the identities of the authors is explored. Subsequently, we deal with the representation of three significant aspects of third-generation writing, which are the issues of mediation and received history, and the way of storytelling. Afterwards, the connection between perpetrator and victim is investigated, by focussing on survivor‘s guilt, the identity of the perpetrator and the grey zone in both books. This is followed by a discussion of the role of photographs in Mendelsohn‘s novel. Their impact on the author himself, on the survivors he interviews and the possible effects on the reader will be central. Next, we will discuss how and why Mendelsohn often refers to myths throughout his story. Finally, we will discuss what testimonial objects are and how they are relevant in De Waal‘s story.
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2. Postmemory
2.1 What is postmemory?
Survivors who lived through massive traumatic events can transmit their memories to the following generations, even if these descendants were not there to witness the events. The descendants can connect so intensely to the previous generation that they deem that connection as a form of memory (Hirsch 2012: 3). Marianne Hirsch named this phenomenon ‗postmemory‘ and defines it as follows:
―Postmemory‖ describes the relationship that the ―generation after‖ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before—to experiences they ―remember‖ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right (5)
Thus, for descendants of survivors, the powerful distressing experiences of the parental generation can be identified as memories of their own, even though these events preceded their births. By growing up with the stories of atrocity lived by their parents, children can adopt this trauma as their own. Dominick LaCapra‘s notion of ‗empathic unsettlement‘ can clarify this further. According to LaCapra, a desirable response to traumatic stories is to be empathically unsettled. Hereby, the hearer identifies with the victim enough to reach an affective response but at the same time realises that these events happened to the speaker and not to oneself. Thus, one‘s response to this victim‘s traumatic experience is empathic and unsettling in its own right but it does not lead to a vicarious experience (LaCapra 2001: 102- 104). LaCapra remarks that empathic unsettlement may take different forms, ―it may at times result in secondary or muted trauma as well as objectionable self-dramatization in someone responding to the experience of victims‖ (102). An example of what LaCapra calls a ‗vicarious‘ experience, whereby the distinction between the victim and the self is completely blurred due to a total pathological identification is the well-known Wilkomirski case (LaCapra 2004: 125). Benjamin Wilkomirski identified with the Holocaust victims so deeply, that it led to a vicarious experience whereby he believed to be a Holocaust survivor himself. These vicarious experiences are rather exceptional, the majority of the descendants of survivors realise that they did not literally experience the Holocaust themselves. They tend to experience what LaCapra calls a virtual experience.
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Logically, the virtual experience of trauma, captured by the term ‗empathic unsettlement‘, is greater when the traumatic events happened to someone in the family, especially the parents. When the protagonist is someone close and familiar like a parent, the empathy the hearer feels is expected to be much deeper. Transmission of memory and even trauma thus occurs more likely within a family rather than between strangers.
Empathic unsettlement can only happen when a testimony is given. As Gabriele Schwab points out, that is not the only way that transmission of trauma can occur. Precisely the absence of testimony, the silence that surrounds the traumatic experiences can express and transmit trauma (Schwab 2010: 4).
Traumatic silences and gaps in language are […] ambivalent attempts to conceal. But indirectly, they express trauma otherwise shrouded in secrecy or relegated to the unconscious. […] It is the children or descendants, Abraham insists, who will be haunted by what is buried in this tomb, even if they do not know of its existence or contents and even if the history that produced the ghost is shrouded in silence. (4)
As with empathic unsettlement, the transmission is more likely to happen within a family. The secrecy is more palpable to members of the family than to outsiders and ―[o]ften the tomb is a familial one, organized around family secrets shared by parents and grandparents but fearfully guarded from the children. It is through the unconscious transmission of disavowed familial dynamics that one generation affects another generation‘s unconscious‖ (4).
2.2 The generation after
The ‗generation after‘ acquired scholarly attention with the founding texts of Helen Epstein and Nadine Fresco (Van Alphen 2006: 476). In respectively Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors and ‗Remembering the Unknown‘, ―the parents/children relationship is not qualified in terms of continuity‖ (476). On the contrary, ―these two ―founding‖ texts by Epstein and Fresco assess the dynamics between survivors of the Holocaust and their children as one which utterly fails to establish continuity between generations‖ (478). Epstein compares the so-called transmitted trauma of the descendants with a phantom pain of a hand they never had; they feel the pain of something that was not
4 there in the first place. Amnesia takes the place of memory, according to Epstein, ―the only memory there is is that one remembers nothing‖ (478).
Epstein‘s metaphor of the phantom pain reminds us of the notion of ‗transferred loss‘ introduced by Eva Hoffman (2004: 73). Members of the second generation can experience an absence in their life, the absence of people they never knew because they died before they had the chance to know them. This feeling of absence can be transferred into a feeling of loss. The image of phantom pain that Epstein introduced is linked to this; they experience the pain of losing someone they have never even known. While this notion is very adequate, the idea that the only memory of the generation after is ―that one remembers nothing‖ seems inaccurate. Hirsch explains that postmemory is a form of memory:
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. […] Postmemory—often obsessive and relentless—need not be absent or evacuated: it is as full and as empty, certainly as constructed, as memory itself. (2002: 22)
This is why Nadine Fresco‘s terms ―absent memory‖ and ―hole of memory‖ seem unsuitable to Hirsch. The term ‗postmemory‘ seems more apt in this account.
‗Postmemory‘ contains an inherent paradox however: how can an experience of a traumatic event be stored in the memory of someone who was born ‗post‘ or after the event itself? The prefix ‗post‘ could indicate that we are beyond memory and thus purely in history. Hirsch explains it as follows:
Postmemory is distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection. […] 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. (22)
Abiding by Hirsch, we will continue using the term ‗postmemory‘. The concept describes the relationship that the ‗generation after‘ bears to the trauma of the first generation (Hirsch 2012: 5). Therefore, we will discuss some characteristics of the first generation of survivors.
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2.3 The first generation
Generally speaking, the first generation encompasses the actual survivors of the Holocaust, those who literally lived through the event. However, it is difficult to define these survivors in one category since there are many different ways to have lived through the Holocaust. It is remarkable that in the standard four-volume Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, published by The Holocaust Remembrance Authority Yad Vashem, no definition of ‗a survivor‘ is given (Bar- On 1998: 100). Dan Bar-On proposes the following definition:
From a legal-historical point of view, a Holocaust survivor can be defined as anyone who lived under Nazi occupation during World War II and who was threatened by the policy of the ―Final Solution‖ but managed to stay alive. (100)
Dan Bar-On acknowledges that there are many problems with this definition. The definition is easily applicable on survivors of the concentration camps and ghettos, Bar-On states; indeed their lives were clearly threatened by the policy of the ‗Final Solution‘. The definition stays valid when talking about the Jews and other targets who managed to stay hidden from the Nazis and lived through the Holocaust underground. However, they undoubtedly experienced the Holocaust in a completely different way than the camp survivors did. The value of the definition dwindles somewhat when we discuss those who escaped from territory subjugated by the Nazis in time to safer places. By leaving their homes and dear ones behind they suffered enormously but in a completely different way than those who survived a concentration camp or had to hide for their lives for years. By studying interviews with these emigrants, Bar-On noticed that many of them felt like their trauma was illegitimate because they had not suffered like the ―real‖ survivors (100). Furthermore, Bar-On also wonders whether we should distinguish adults from children in this definition. Important to consider as well is that many people felt that their being labelled as a Holocaust survivor stigmatised them (100). ―Who decides who is a Holocaust survivor? Is it a socially imposed or a self- determined process? Is it a historical fact or a psychological reconstruction?‖ (100). Thus, it is difficult to find an all-embracing definition of the first generation.
Although the ‗first generation‘ encompasses all these different kinds of survivors, we may treat them as one group based on the similarities they share as well. Firstly, Dan Bar-On and his students discovered that emigrants who left Europe between 1935 and 1937 who lost family members in the Holocaust, show similar long-term psychological effects from those
6 who survived the Holocaust in Europe (100). One of the most significant symptoms they are presented with is ‗survivor guilt‘. Many members of the first generation feel guilty simply for having survived the Holocaust while around six million others did not. This sense of guilt is even greater for survivors who belong to the so-called ‗grey zone‘, ―where the two camps of masters and servants both diverge and converge‖ (Levi 1988: 42). Primo Levi appoints different groups of people to this grey zone. Firstly, the extra sense of guilt was minimal for prisoners who carried out tertiary functions which were innocuous, useful and rarely violent (44). The question of guilt and judgement becomes more tentative then for those who occupied commanding positions like Kapos, the often Jewish helpers of the Nazis who were partially in command (45). Finally, an extreme case in the grey zone is represented by the Sonderkommandos, ―the group of prisoners entrusted with running the crematoria‖, the survivor‘s guilt tends to be immense with the few who managed to survive this (50). Primo Levi was himself a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp and he has reflected a lot on his own survivor‘s guilt in his book I sommersi e i salvati (1986), translated as The Drowned and the Saved. His death in 1987 was presumably an act of suicide, possibly induced by the consequences of his traumatic experiences, such as his survivor‘s guilt. A fictional example is presented in Jonathan Safran Foer‘s novel Everything is Illuminated. Alex‘s grandfather appointed his best friend Herschel as a Jew in order to save himself and his family. Because of his involvement and subsequent survivor‘s guilt, he does not manage to talk about this for years and eventually commits suicide. The involvement in these horrible acts and vice versa the attempts of helping people respectively increases or decreases the survivor‘s guilt. We will illustrate this further in the discussion of perpetrators and victims in the novels by De Waal and Mendelsohn.
A second similarity between Holocaust survivors of the first generation is that they tend to have difficulties in testifying about their experiences. Scholars agree that testifying is an important part of the healing-process. Verbalising the event is a big step in ‗working-through‘, the overcoming of the post-traumatic effects, according to LaCapra (2004: 121-122). Similarly, ―[p]sychodynamic psychiatry has always attached crucial importance to the capacity to reproduce [traumatic] memories in words and to integrate them in the totality of experience, i.e., to narrative memory‖ (Van der Kolk & Van der Hart 1995: 167). In other words, ―survivors did not only need to survive so that they could tell their stories; they also needed to tell their stories in order to survive‖, as Dori Laub said (1995: 63). Laub claims that
7 the Holocaust is ―an event without a witness‖ since the psychological structure of the event is inherently incomprehensible and deceptive (65). ―The testimony is […] the process by which the narrator (the survivor) reclaims his position as a witness‖ (70). Important as testifying is to complete the process of survival after liberation, it tends to be a challenging act for survivors.
[Janet determined that] existing meaning schemes may be entirely unable to accommodate frightening experiences, which causes the memory of these experiences to be stored differently and not be available for retrieval under ordinary conditions: it becomes dissociated from conscious awareness and voluntary control. […] [F]ragments of these unintegrated experiences may later manifest recollections […]. (Van der Kolk & Van der Hart 1995: 160)
This means that traumatic memories often present themselves as very literal fragments which come back to the survivor without being consciously recalled. Thus, for the survivor, it is difficult to create a coherent story out of this. Furthermore it is hard to know whether these memories are accurate. For example, Dori Laub tells the story of an eyewitness of the Auschwitz uprising, where prisoners managed to blow up one of the crematoria. The woman told a vibrant story about four chimneys suddenly going up in flames. She misinterpreted the number of chimneys because it was an unimaginable occurrence which had made a huge impact on her (Laub 1992: 59). Even if the survivor manages to create a coherent story out of the experiences, there is another reason why testifying is anything but self-evident. Survivors often experience the feeling of belonging to some kind of ‗secret order‘ that is sworn to silence (Laub 1995: 67). They still feel like they have no right to protest or talk about the events because unconsciously they have accepted their role as ―subhumans‖ that the Nazi regime impelled on them (67). Thus, these reasons potentially combined with surivor‘s guilt, make it very complicated to testify about the Holocaust for members of the first generation.
2.4 The second generation
Similar to the first generation, there is no univocal definition of ‗the second generation‘. Self- evidently, the second generation is the one that comes after the first generation but this is a rather meaningless definition. Firstly, it is unmanageable to install temporal and local borders or set limits between the different circumstances that should position these different generations, as we have already encountered when discussing ‗the first generation‘. Should we incorporate the children of refugees or only the offspring of camp survivors? These
8 unclear boundaries between the first and second generation or between the ages, the locations or situations of the survivors have led to the creation of complicated structures like the ―1.5 generation‖ introduced by Susan Suleiman. By the 1.5 generation, she means ―child survivors of the Holocaust, too young to have had an adult understanding of what was happening to them, but old enough to have been there during the Nazi persecution of Jews‖ (Suleiman 2002: 277). Thus, there are no clear criteria to decide who belongs to the second generation.
Secondly, it is hard to designate the children of survivors—who have grown up under very different circumstances, in different countries and cultures—as one coherent group (Hoffman 2004: 28). Hoffman sees the second generation as an ―imagined community‖, which, rather than being based on geography or circumstance, is based on ―sets of meanings, symbols and even literary fictions‖ that they have in common (28). Hoffman argues that the second generation is united by their location to the Holocaust, by their parents‘ past and the deep impact it had on them (28-29). They are equally united by the obligations they feel towards the past and the conclusions that could be drawn for the future (29). Therefore, she calls the second generation a ―hinge generation‖ between experience and memory of the Holocaust, ―in which received, transferred knowledge of events is transmuted into history, or into myth‖ (xv). This hinge generation can discuss the Shoah with ―a sense of a living connection‖ (xv).
Efraim Sicher argues that the generation contemporaneous with the children of survivors can ―share many of [the] psychological, ideological, and theological concerns‖ with those people whose parents actually lived through the Holocaust (1998: 7). Sicher defines ‗the second generation‘ in this broadest view: he starts out from George Steiner‘s self-definition as ―a kind of survivor‖ and incorporates
[…] all who write ―after‖ in order to survey a wide—but not exhaustive—range of themes and issues in the context of both the particular problems of the generation of the children of survivors and the broader issue of writing identity after Auschwitz. (7)
With ‗the second generation‘, Sicher thus refers to the members of the generation which was born around the same time as the survivors‘ children, who are concerned with the aftereffects of the Holocaust.
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Without absolving the interests and concerns that many members of the second generation according to Sicher might have in the Holocaust, some particular symptoms of distress tend to be shared solely by actual children of Holocaust survivors.1 These symptoms can be generated by either the compulsive talking of the parents or precisely by their extreme silence about the Shoah.
Firstly, because of their parents‘ (unresolved) trauma, children of Holocaust survivors risk growing up in a rather dysfunctional family. Parents are supposed to provide a safe and loving environment for their children, but since Holocaust survivors tend to have little stability themselves, they could have a hard time conveying a sense of security. This can proceed into two possible directions, the parents are either overprotective towards the children or they are unable to love them profoundly, in fear of losing them.2 The second-generation painter Mindy Weisel for example has noted that she struggled for recognition from her parents, ―who seemed to have established a real and psychic distance from her during her childhood because of their inability to cope with survival and loss‖ (Feinstein 1998: 240). Parents who survived the Holocaust also risk suffering from ‗Chronic Complaint Disorder‘.3 In this case, the parent overly complains about what seem to be trivial matters to the child. For example in the characteristic second-generation story Maus, Art Spiegelman describes how his father Vladek used to serve him the same food again and again until Art would finally eat it or starve (Spiegelman 2003: 45). Because of the deprivation they suffered, the parents can have unreasonably strong reactions to wasting anything. Furthermore, survivors are inclined to see everything from a Holocaust perspective. The problems of the child are always belittled because they are nothing compared to the Holocaust. The beginning of Spiegelman‘s Maus illustrates this. Art was being bullied by his friends and instead of comforting his son, Vladek compares this little incident to the Holocaust, which is always worse than anything that could happen to Art (5-6). Accordingly, what Art says to his therapist in the story is equally true: no matter what the child achieves, surviving the Holocaust is always considered to be superior (204).
1 ―Not all children of survivors are psychically damaged, and some second-generation biographies of survivor parents represent the triumph of hope over despair, while revealing a warm and healthy parent-child relationship. But all of them have been touched deeply by the Holocaust‖ (Berger, 1998: 270). 2 This information originates from Philippe Codde‘s course ‗Contemporary American Literature‘, Ghent University, 19 October 2012. 3 This information originates from Philippe Codde‘s course ‗Contemporary American Literature‘, Ghent University, 19 October 2012. 10
A second symptom of distress is that children tend to over-identify with their parents and risk incorporating their trauma in their own lives. LaCapra states that people are often empathically unsettled by listening to a Holocaust testimony, as we have already discussed (2001: 102-104). A child, who grows up listening to traumatic experiences that happened to a parent, tends to become greatly affected by this. The child is inclined to identify with the parent, which leads to a virtual experience or it may even lead to a vicarious experience. In this case, one unconsciously identifies so deeply with the victim that it may lead to confusion about one‘s own participation in the event (LaCapra 2004: 125). In this case, the trauma is in a way transferred from parent to child.
In addition, parents who survived the Shoah can treat their child as a memorial candle. This concept of Dina Wardi describes ―children of survivors who are designated to continue the name of a dead relative—an ancient Judaic tradition—and who function as the family‘s scapegoat, on whom the parents unload their needs and conflicts‖ (quoted in Sicher 1998: 24). These children who fulfil the role of memorial candles are seen as a way to commemorate relatives who did not survive the Holocaust. This puts an enormous burden on the children; they are inclined to feel like they have to be successful since they still have the chance to do so, unlike their namesake. Furthermore, their identity seems never fully their own, their relatives always associate them with the one who passed away.
Finally, children of Holocaust survivors can become obsessed with their family history because their parents refused or were unable to tell them anything. ―These [are] the sons and daughters of silence, who were denied knowledge and therefore memory of their family‖ (24). Their own personal history gets suppressed by this. All they have are the well-known generic images of the Holocaust, but they do not know which images belong to their families specifically. They can imagine their parents going through horrendous events but they never know any specifics. Bar-On states that ―untold stories often pass more powerfully from generation to generation than stories that are discussible‖ (1998: 99). The second generation needs these stories to become discussible in order to live with the past. Also, as we have seen before, the second generation is the generation ―in which received, transferred knowledge of events is transmuted into history, or into myth‖ (Hoffman 2004: xv). Therefore, the
11 communication gap between the survivors and their children needs to be bridged so that the stories can be transmitted to future generations.
2.5 The third generation
The third generation is different from the first and second generation since it becomes increasingly problematic to use the terms ‗trauma‘ or ‗transmitted trauma‘.4
[Bar-On notes that] the survivor‘s fears of being unable to build a normal life for their children after what they had been through diminished when the third generation grew up. Now the survivors had enough evidence that they, their children and their children‘s children were ―normal‖. (1998: 99)
Since we can no longer speak of transmission of trauma for the third generation, Codde suggests that Marianne Hirsch‘s concept of postmemory is more productive in this respect (2009: 64). The term was originally introduced to describe the traumatic memory of the second generation but is actually equally or even more suitable to discuss the situation of the third generation. ―Postmemory is an obsession with the opaque and inaccessible past of one‘s parents or grandparents‖, which is exactly what we notice in many third-generation descendants (64). In the third generation, the psychopathological condition of transgenerational trauma is transmogrified into a creative interest in the traumatic histories of the previous generation (64). Thus, many third-generation writers are fanatically interested in knowing and writing about the Holocaust.
There seems to be an interdependent relationship between the first and the third generation. On the one hand, the third generation is deeply influenced by the first. Because the parents and grandparents (especially the emigrants) have more or less managed to complete a working-through process, this is the first generation to be liberated from the need to become ―normal‖ (Bar-On 1998: 109). The liberation from the trauma of their ancestors, allows the third generation to ask questions and talk about the Holocaust in an openly manner. On the other hand, the first generation is highly affected by the third generation as well. With the appearance of a hopeful and interested generation, ―the need to talk, to give evidence that
4 As with the first and second generation, it is difficult to define who belongs to the third generation. As a broad guideline, we will include the grandchildren of every survivor, whether they survived in the camps, ghettos, due to hiding or by emigrating right before or during the war. 12 would be passed on to future generations, became greater than the need to maintain the silence‖ (99). Their grandchildren can bring a sense of hope back into the family of survivors, which stimulates the grandparents to communicate about their experiences (109).
The realisation that the generation of eyewitnesses is gradually disappearing impels the third generation to preserve their grandparents‘ stories. However, by the time the third generation started studying the Holocaust, the event had been over for approximately fifty years. This engenders some difficulties to study the event accurately. Firstly, the eyewitnesses are elderly by now and they have never discussed their experiences ever since they occurred half a century ago. This could easily thwart their memories of the events. Secondly, the third generation is always confronted with the issues of mediation and received history. When studying the Holocaust, there is always a mediating distance between the researchers and the actual event. The historical documents they use always offer a version of reality as construed by another, they ―provide only narrative interpretations of the past‖ (Codde 2009: 64). The description of the Holocaust of third-generation writers is thus always based on an interpretation of the event. Accordingly, writers and readers should be aware that they can never give an objective account. A literal representation of the Holocaust is also hindered by the idea of ‗received history‘. This is a concept of James Young that describes that the writer‘s relationship to the story always has an influence on the representation of the story (1997: 21). Consequently, a third-generation story about the Holocaust is always also a story about telling a story about the Holocaust. We will see this clearly in Mendelsohn, who shows to be very self-aware that his story is an example of ‗received history‘.
In order to represent the Holocaust in spite of these difficulties, third-generation writers use some creative techniques. Firstly, they often use intertextual references to myths, fairy tales or other well-known stories to imaginatively approach and represent an otherwise unknowable and/or irrepresentable past (Codde 2009: 73). When the testimonies prove to be inadequate to provide all the information, several third-generation writers use their imagination to fill in the gaps. They refer to well-known stories that can help to convey the message the writer wants to give. Judy Budnitz for example frequently refers to fairy tales in her novel If I Told You Once. Similarly, Mendelsohn uses intertextual references to the Torah, we will discuss this later. Secondly, the third generation often tries to bypass the mediating instance that prevents them
13 from knowing the past as much as possible. As a result, a popular form of representation is the structure of the quest, in which the authors tell a story of detection, a story of how they try to attain as much information as possible.5 Although the time and the extent of the event prevent them from ever completely knowing the past, they show that they do everything they can to know what can still be discovered. Both Mendelsohn‘s and De Waal‘s novels can be considered as quests.
5 Recent examples of non-fictional quests are the novels by De Waal and Mendelsohn, and Nancy Miller‘s What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past. The structure of the quest is also popular in fictional novels, for example Jonathan Safran Foer‘s Everything is Illuminated or Nicole Krauss‘ The History of Love. 14
3. Postmemory in Daniel Mendelsohn‘s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million and Edmund De Waal‘s The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance
3.1 About the novels
3.1.1 Daniel Mendelsohn - The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
Daniel Mendelsohn is an award-winning writer, critic and translator who was born on Long Island and educated at the University of Virginia and at Princeton.6 His international bestseller The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, first published by HarperCollins in 2006, won many honours including the National Books Critics Circle Award, the National Jewish Book Award in the United States and the Prix Médicis in France. So far, it has been published in over fifteen languages. The novel is a remarkably original epic; part memoir, part reportage, part mystery, and part scholarly detective work.
The Lost: a Search for Six of Six Million tells the story of a man, Daniel Mendelsohn, who grew up in the United States of America with his three brothers and sister. His grandfather, Abraham Jäger, immigrated to the United States from the small town of Bolechow in Eastern Europe, not long before the Second World War. Daniel occasionally found himself surrounded by elderly relatives he barely knew and who spoke in the same accent as his grandfather did. They spoke English but when Daniel and his peers were not allowed to understand a punch line of a joke for example, they switched to Yiddish, a language the youngsters did not understand. These relatives did not only have this language of ‗the Old Country‘ in common, they also shared the pain of an unmentionable subject in the family. They were haunted by the disappearance of six relatives during the Holocaust; Abraham‘s brother Shmiel Jäger, his wife Ester and their four children. All that Daniel knew about them growing up is that they were ―killed by the Nazis‖. Decades later, Daniel Mendelsohn discovers several desperate letters from Shmiel to his brother Abraham written right before and during the Holocaust. Spurred by this discovery and tantalised by the fragmentary tales of their betrayal, Mendelsohn sets out to uncover what happened to these lost relatives. He embarks on a journey searching every remaining eyewitness to his relatives‘ fates. This quest leads him to dozens of countries on four different continents. Together with his brother
6 All the biographical and professional information about Daniel Mendelsohn was found on his website www.danielmendelsohn.com 15
Matthew, he tracks down a lot of ex-Bolechowers who all have their own stories to tell. Gradually, he finds out more information about his own relatives as well. But combining all these rather vague or even contradictory memories about his family into a coherent story turns out to be a challenging job. While describing this quest, the novel also focuses on the difficulties of knowing the past, the relationships between brothers and it connects the story with passages from the Torah.
Daniel Mendelsohn‘s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million can be considered a work of postmemory. Mendelsohn ‗remembers‘ the experiences of his ancestors by means of the stories, images and behaviour among which he grew up, as in Hirsch‘s definition of postmemory (2012: 5). His grandfather Abraham Jäger used to tell a lot of stories, which triggered Mendelsohn‘s interest in the family history. Especially because his grandfather was such a storyteller, it is remarkable that the story of how Shmiel and his family passed away is incessantly kept under wraps. As we have discussed, ―untold stories often pass more powerfully from generation to generation than stories that are discussible‖ (Bar-On 1998: 99). This seems to be the case in Mendelsohn‘s story. Adding to Mendelsohn‘s personal involvement is the fact that he seems to have been perceived as a memorial candle for Shmiel by his elderly relatives. The opening sentence of the novel hints at this: ―Some time ago, when I was six or seven or eight years old, it would occasionally happen that I‘d walk into a room and certain people would begin to cry‖ (Mendelsohn 2008: 3). Further on in the novel, it is explained why they cry.
Oh, he looks so much like Shmiel! And then they would start crying, or exclaiming softly and rocking back and forth with their pink sweaters or windbreakers shaking around their loose shoulders, and there would then begin a good deal of rapid-fire Yiddish from which I was, then, excluded. (6)
Daniel Mendelsohn is not named after this lost relative, which is part of Dina Wardi‘s definition of a ‗memorial candle‘, but he very much reminds his elder relatives of Shmiel Jäger (Sicher 1998: 24). Therefore, he can be considered to be a memorial candle. This passage clearly shows how Mendelsohn was personally involved in the traumatic memories but at the same time excluded from the actual trauma. Regrettably, Abraham Jäger committed suicide before his grandson could ask him the right questions and many of his contemporaries passed away before this quest started as well. This is the start of what could be called an
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―obsession with the opaque and inaccessible past‖ of his family‘s connection to the Holocaust, which is how Codde describes postmemory (2009: 64).
3.1.2 Edmund De Waal – The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance
Edmund de Waal is one of the world‘s leading artists working in ceramics today, who lives and works in London.7 His large-scale installations of porcelain vessels are what he is best known for in ceramics. De Waal has exhibited his work in many different venues, including the Waddesdon Manor, the Victoria & Albert Museum, Tate Britain and MIMA. Evidently, Edmund De Waal is also known as an author. His novel The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance was published in 2010 by Chatto & Windus and has become an international bestseller ever since. It has won many literary prizes, including the Costa Biography Award, the Galaxy New Writer of the Year Book Award and the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize. The novel has been translated in over twenty languages so far.
Edmund De Waal has inherited a collection of 264 netsuke. Netsuke are small, portable objects designed by Japanese craftsmen to be used as toggles for kimono, which became collector‘s items. De Waal‘s netsuke provide the framework of The Hare with Amber Eyes. This particular collection was purchased by Charles Ephrussi, De Waal‘s great-great- grandfather during the wave of japonisme in fin-de-siècle Paris. Triggered by these small objects and interested in his family history, De Waal traces back to whom in his family these netsuke used to belong. Thus, the ascent and decline of the Jewish dynasty of the Ephrussi family forms the background of this rich story. This biography of his family leads De Waal to a journey through twentieth-century history. As said, Charles Ephrussi bought the netsuke at the end of the nineteenth century. The first of the rooms that the netsuke were displayed in was Charles‘ study. As the third son of bank-owner Leon Ephrussi, Charles had time and money to collect art. Accordingly, the netsuke were accompanied by impressionist paintings of Renoir and Degas. These painters and other close acquaintances of Charles Ephrussi like Marcel Proust visited this study regularly. The narrative then moves from Paris to Vienna, when Charles sends the netsuke as a wedding present to his cousin Viktor von Ephrussi. They are placed in the dressing-room of his wife Emmy, De Waal‘s great-grandmother. The
7 All biographical and professional information about Edmund De Waal was found on his website www.edmunddewaal.com. 17 children grow up playing with the netsuke on the carpet of their mother‘s dressing-room. Their father Viktor von Ephrussi, the new bank-owner of the Ephrussi bank, lives with his family in a vast palace on the Ringstrasse in Vienna. This is the setting of the horrors of the Anschluss for the Ephrussi family and other Jews living in Vienna. The Second World War forces them move away, leaving them scattered all over the world. Nothing remained of their once legendary wealth, except for some paintings, books and photographs. Thanks to Anna, Emmy‘s maid, also the netsuke were saved and given back to the Ephrussi family. Forced to work for the Nazis in the Palais Ephrussi, she managed to smuggle them little by little out of the dressing-room and hid them under her mattress. Thus, they eventually wound up with Edmund De Waal‘s great-uncle Iggie—Ignace von Ephrussi—in Tokyo in the 1970s. They were proudly displayed in their original home-country until Iggie passed away and the netsuke finally ended up in London with Edmund De Waal.
Edmund De Waal‘s The Hare with Amber Eyes contains clear aspects of postmemory. His grandmother moved to the United Kingdom before the Second World War and his great- grandparents left Vienna during the Holocaust. De Waal can be considered third or even fourth generation, in any case a generation of postmemory. His sense of obligation to write his family history is very characteristic of the third generation.
Owning the netsuke—inheriting them all—means I have been handed a responsibility to them and to the people who have owned them. I am unclear and discomfited of where the parameters of this responsibility might lie. (De Waal 2010: 13)
De Waal knew the netsuke had participated in his family‘s stories of which he only knew the outlines. He feels the obligation to tell the story of the owners of the netsuke, whose voices are lost by now.
I was anxious because what I'd been given with these netsuke was far, far more interesting than a generic set of anecdotes. I'd been given objects with memories. I'd been given part of a story, a few echoes, a sense of untold narratives. And this challenge: anecdotalise this odd collection for the rest of your life. Or work it out. (De Waal 2010)
De Waal decided to work it out. His thirst for knowing sends him on a quest to discover what the netsuke have witnessed in his family. In the novel, De Waal focuses more on the story he
18 discovered than on the way he gained access to this story. However, the novel offers us some reasons to state that De Waal‘s quest has turned into a healthy obsession. For example, he mentions how he spent late nights looking through Elisabeth‘s literature or how he read Anti- Semite books for months to learn more about the period. We also know he must have travelled quite often to visit the family houses in order to find more information. This is one of the reasons why The Hare with Amber Eyes can be considered a work of postmemory. Another reason is that Edmund De Waal is personally involved in the story as well. Especially when he describes his great-uncle Iggie, De Waal gets emotionally involved. Unlike with Charles Ephrussi, who he never knew, the author cannot distance himself from the apartment of his close family. He cannot inventory it objectively, since the room reminds him of his beloved great-uncle (De Waal 2010: 334). This personal involvement is an important aspect of postmemory as well.
3.2 Quest
3.2.1 Daniel Mendelsohn - The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
In The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, Daniel Mendelsohn describes his quest to discover what happened to his great-uncle Shmiel, his wife Ester and their four children. His quest starts out right after his bar mitzvah as a profound interest in his family history but it soon evolves into an obsession about what happened to these six deceased family members.
Naturally, I‘d always been curious: How could I not, I whose face reminded certain people of someone long dead? But the fervent interest in Jewish genealogy, which became a hobby and, much later, almost an obsession, began on that April day. […] I thereafter devoted hours and weeks and years to researching my family tree […]. The only gap, the only irritating lacuna, was Shmiel and his family, the lost ones about whom there were no facts […], no dates […], no anecdotes or stories to tell. (Mendelsohn 2008: 38; 39; 42)
This quest determines the structure of the novel. Firstly, Mendelsohn starts to write letters to his family members with questions about the past:
I would write to these old relatives […] and sometimes the replies frustrated and confused me. […] But more often, these elderly people were gratified […] and they answered me eagerly and told me whatever they knew in reply to my questions. (39)
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The next step of the quest was writing to many institutions to gain very precise information. Later on, this information could be found by internet searches on genealogy websites. Finally, his quest led him to travel, ―over the course of a year, to a dozen cities from Sydney to Copenhagen to Beer Sheva, to embark on airplanes and ferries and trains […]; to go, in the end, to Bolechow itself‖ (41). The reader is included in every step of the way. Every expectation, discovery or disappointment and the corresponding emotions are shared with the reader. The structure of the novel includes the reader in the quest, as if the reader is discovering the past together with the author.
Discovering the past in this quest is hindered by many difficulties. Firstly, although Mendelsohn‘s grandfather told a lot of stories, he never revealed what he knew about the fate of Shmiel and his family. This seems contradictory; the story of what happened to Shmiel and his family is the most powerful of all, yet it is covered in silence. Untold stories, as Bar-On states, pass more powerfully from one generation to the next (1998: 99). The paradox is that there is no actual story to pass on; Shmiel and his family are lost, even in the stories.
My grandfather told me all these stories, all these things, but he never talked about his brother and sister-in-law and the four girls who, to me, seemed not so much dead as lost, vanished not only from the world but—even more terrible to me—from my grandfather‘s stories. Which is why, out of all this history, all these people, the ones I knew the least about were the six who were murdered, who had, it seemed to me then, the most stunning story of all, the one most worthy to be told. But on this subject, my loquacious grandpa remained silent, and his silence, unusual and tense, irradiated the subject of Shmiel and his family, making them unmentionable and therefore, unknowable. (Mendelsohn 2008: 15)
By leaving their story untold, Shmiel and his family are not just dead but also lost, as Mendelsohn puts it. This is comparable to Art Spiegelman‘s reaction in Maus when he discovers his father burned his mother‘s notebooks. By burning the notebooks out of grief, Vladek unintentionally made sure Anja‘s story remained untold. Art blames him of murdering his mother, since now she is not only dead but also completely lost (Spiegelman 2003: 161). Keeping silent about a story is not the same as burning someone‘s diaries, so Mendelsohn does not blame his grandfather as Art blames his father, but he intends to make the story mentionable and therefore knowable. His quest for the truth could be seen as a way to bring
20 the lost ones back, to give them a second chance, not in life but in his narrative. The idea that the author wants to save the six lost ones through narrative is implicated in the novel, for example:
My fantasy is that the sudden warming of this serious-looking girl makes an impression on Mrs. Begley of 1938—she is herself a serious and deeply shrewd woman—and because of that impression, Mrs. Begley will remember her, remember the murdered girl Lorka Jäger, remember her so many years later and in that way will help me rescue her. (Mendelsohn 2008: 46)
Mendelsohn says that he wants to rescue Lorka. Of course he cannot revive her literally, but he can tell her story, thus preventing that she completely vanishes. By telling the stories of the Holocaust victims, one can ensure that the Nazis‘ goal to exterminate the Jews completely will never be reached. Their memory will be passed on to the next generation through their stories.
A second difficulty is the temporal distance between the Holocaust and the time Mendelsohn begins his quest. When Mendelsohn started searching for information, many years had passed since the Holocaust. Unfortunately, many eyewitnesses had passed away since then. Even starting just a decade earlier could have made a difference, as Mendelsohn puts it: ―These questions led me, at first, to write letters to the relatives who were, in 1973, still alive—a number that was already far smaller than it had been six or seven or eight years earlier, when I‘d go with my family to Miami Beach‖ (39). This is a frustrating aspect of the quest. Much more information could have been known but is lost in time. Mendelsohn describes this as follows:
I‘m pleased with what I know, but now I think much more about everything I could have known, which was so much more than anything I can learn now and which is gone forever. […] [Y]ou need the information that people you once knew always had to give to you, if only you‘d asked. But by the time you think to ask, it‘s too late. (73)
Time is not only a problem because it makes people pass away, it also corrodes the memories of the still-living survivors. The account of an event that happened roughly sixty years ago is bound to contain some gaps. A lot of specific details get lost because time has erased them from the memory.
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Thirdly, the quest to collect information about the lost relatives is toughened because of a spatial distance between Mendelsohn and the interviewees. Mendelsohn wants to interview the remaining surviving Jews from Bolechow who might have known Shmiel and his family. Many of these survivors survived precisely because they moved away from Bolechow. From the few Jews who survived while staying in Bolechow, many moved away during or after the war as well. As a result, the people whom Mendelsohn wants to talk to are scattered throughout Europe and America. Since their stories are too personal to discuss over the phone and they are conveyed much more powerfully in person, Mendelsohn had to travel around the globe to execute this quest. This evolves into a labyrinth course, in which he travels ―to Australia and Prague and Vienna and Tel Aviv and Kfar Saba and Beer Sheva and Vilnius and Riga, and then Tel Aviv again and Kfar Saba again and Beer Sheva again, to Haifa and Jerusalem and Stockholm and, finally, those two days in Copenhagen‖ (72). On a practical note, this travelling costs a lot of time and money. Additionally, it is tiring on an emotional level as well. Often when Daniel Mendelsohn sets out on a journey to meet a surviving Bolechower, he seems both excited and nervous, both hopeful and stressed. In the following excerpt, we see how tense the journeys could be for Mendelsohn.
I was extremely tense. Once again, […], the idea of proximity to someone from the place and time I was interested in was almost too tantalizing, too powerful, to bear: my leg was shaking as I sat in Susannah‘s car and watched Manhattan drop behind us. […] I was, once again, prey to fantasies so intense, […] [that] I didn‘t trust myself to speak. […] But in the end there wasn‘t that much talking to be done. (67)
The long journeys are travelled in uncertainty: will he discover something useful about his family? Or will this long travel teach us nothing more and keep Mendelsohn at the same distance from his relatives? This uncertainty is frustrating and discouraging when the outcome is negative.
A final difficulty in the quest is that there are no or very few actual witnesses of some events. Mendelsohn explains that there was a ―physical distance […] at the time it was all happening, a spatial difference between where the survivors were and where our lost were‖ (2008: 435). The victims‘ surviving acquaintances cannot know all the details, because if they were there to witness the event, they would not have survived either. Jack Grünschlag clarifies this to Mendelsohn:
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Jack told us about the cross that was cut into the rabbi‘s chest, a thing he cannot have witnessed. (I had asked him, during that conversation, how he knew for sure that Ruchele had perished in this particular Aktion. Had he seen her being taken? I stupidly questioned. He laughed grimly. If I would have seen her, I would have been dead too! So how did he know? Because afterwards, he said, a little impatiently, she was missing.) (207)
Dori Laub states that the Holocaust is ―an event without a witness‖ (1995: 65). One of the reasons that make the Holocaust an event without a witness is that the victims who witnessed it all did not survive to testify about their experiences. Thus, as Rigney mentions, ―some events were never ‗registered‘ and are irrevocably lost; in other cases we only know that something occurred, but can never know the details‖ (2005: 21). This applies to Mendelsohn‘s knowledge about Ruchele‘s death. Through documents and stories of hearsay, Mendelsohn knows that during the first German Aktion, Jews were treated horrendously in the Dom Katolicki for thirty-six hours. Afterwards, the Jews who were still alive, were shot one by one. Mendelsohn knows that Ruchele was present in the Dom Katolicki, but he does not know the details of what specifically happened to her. The details of the story are lost forever, because no one present, who knew Ruchele, survived this event.
It is possible […] that the sixteen-year old Ruchele was killed there, as we know some people were. It is, indeed, possible that she was the naked girl on the stage, with whom the rabbi, his eyes running blood, was forced to dance, or forced to lie on top of. […] Then again, if she survived those thirty-six hours, as some did not […] she was taken to Taniawa –whether she walked the few kilometers or was put in a truck, it is impossible to know […]. (Mendelsohn 2008: 210)
This passage goes on for a while, there are many more terrible options that could have happened to her. As Mendelsohn correctly repeats several times: ―it is impossible to know‖ (210). The same speculation is going on when Mendelsohn describes what happened to Bronia, the youngest daughter. She perished in the second Aktion, in which 2500 people were gathered, ―weeping, screaming, terrified‖, to wait for the cattle car (234).
For instance, maybe Bronia was one of the ninety-six Jews whom the boastful Ukranian single-handedly killed during that time, most of whom, as we know, were children. Maybe this girl was thrown from an upper story onto the pavement below; maybe she was spun round and round by a Ukranian […] But maybe not. Maybe,
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somehow, [she] survived the gathering process. In which case, we know, they would have been marched […] to get up into the cattle car. (234-235)
Again, every Jew in the street at that time would have been killed. Those who did survive, perpetrators or bystander, probably do not know the details of the event because of its enormous, chaotic and terrifying nature. As with Ruchele, the details of Bronia‘s death remain unknown.
3.2.2 Edmund De Waal – The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance
Edmund De Waal embarked on a quest to learn more about the history of his collection of netsuke. He researched to whom in his family they used to belong, what the role of these netsuke was and moreover, what his ancestors were like and what they experienced. The result of this quest is his novel, The Hare with the Amber Eyes, which answers these questions. It is not as obvious to determine The Hare with Amber Eyes as a quest as it is for Mendelsohn‘s novel. Whereas The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million is a description of a quest which includes the readers, De Waal‘s story is a result of a quest. It tells the story as De Waal has individually discovered it, without including the readers in the process of detection. However, De Waal does often refer to his own quest throughout the novel. For example, he mentions where he found his grandmother‘s wedding notice: ―I find their wedding notice in the archives of the Adler Society in Vienna‖ (De Waal 2010: 223). De Waal also mentions the travels he made to find information, we get descriptions of his ancestors‘ cities and houses as they were at the moment De Waal visited them. He also lets us in about where and when he found certain bits of information. For example:
I spent my last morning of this visit in the records of the Vienna Jewish community next to the synagogue off Judengasse. There are police nearby. In the latest elections the far right has just won a third of the popular vote, and no one knows if the synagogue is a target. There have been so many threats that I must pass through a complex security system. Finally inside, I watch as the archivist pulls out the folio records, one striped volume after another, and lays them on the lectern. Each birth and marriage and death, each conversion, the whole of Jewish Vienna faithfully recorded. (153)
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De Waal often explains where and when he discovered something. Accordingly, he describes travels he made in order to find information about his ancestors. But unlike Mendelsohn, he only refers to his quest in the context of a discovery; hardly ever does he refer to a journey or an effort made in vain. Assuming that De Waal came across some disappointments during the quest, the reader is completely left out of this. We are presented with a coherent story with only references to how this story was discovered.
3.3 Communicative and cultural memory
Maurice Halbwachs introduced the influential concept of ‗a mémoire collective‘ or ‗collective memory‘ in La mémoire collective, amongst other works. Halbwachs stated that ―[t]here is no possible memory outside those frames of reference which human beings, living in society, employ in order to secure their recollections and revert to them‖ (quoted in Assmann 2003: 163). This means that although an individual is the only one to have the recollections, they are always collectively shaped (163). Only through communication and interaction within the scope of a social group can recollections be formed (155). Without discussing this concept in depth, we abide by Halbwachs and Assmann that memory is collectively shaped. Still, there are different types of remembrance within this collective memory.
Jan Assmann distinguishes ‗communicative memory‘ from ‗cultural memory‘ (1995: 126). Firstly, communicative memory ―includes those varieties of collective memory that are based exclusively on everyday communication‖ (126). Marianne Hirsch explains the concept further:
Communicative memory is ―biographical‖ and ―factual‖ and is located within a generation of contemporaries who witness an event as adults and who can pass on their bodily and affective connection to that event to their descendants. (2012: 32)
In the context of the Holocaust, this means that survivors tell their stories (or fragments of the stories) to the next generations. In the normal succession of generations, this communicative memory can be transmitted across three or four generations (32). The second type of memory is cultural memory. Communicative memory is characterised by its proximity to the everyday, whereas cultural memory is categorised precisely by its distance to the everyday (Assmann 1995: 128-129). As the bearers of the communicative memory enter old age, they increasingly wish to institutionalise their memory to preserve their stories and make them available to a
25 wider audience, for example in archives or books (Hirsch 2012: 32). Cultural memory describes thus these institutionalised and archival relics and stories that a society has left as reminders of the past after the eyewitnesses and other participants of the event have passed away (Rigney 2005: 14). It is ―maintained through cultural formation (texts, rites, monuments) and institutional communication (recitation, practice, observance)‖ (Assmann 1995: 129).
The distinction between communicative and cultural memory is not always clear in Mendelsohn‘s and De Waal‘s novels. Both authors embark on their quests triggered by the communicative memories they heard from their relatives. In Mendelsohn‘s novel, we know that most of the information he discovers about his relatives, he acquires through the stories of the survivors, hence, through the transmission of communicative memory. He also relies on cultural memory as he uses the archives to find information about Bolechow or about exact dates of events. He relies on and reinvestigates the cultural memory of the Torah as well, as he discusses several myths out of the Hebrew Bible. Accordingly, De Waal relies on both communicative and cultural memories in his novel. He is less open about where he attains the information about his family than Mendelsohn is, but we know that his Uncle Iggie has told him many stories and that he owns some diaries of his grandmother. Thus, communicative memories were transmitted to them. He also relies on cultural memory, as we know he spent a lot of time in archives and reading published works about Anti-Semitism. Remarkable in his story is that cultural memories about his relatives are transmitted not only through archival accounts but also through the mediums of fictional prose and art. For example, Charles Ephrussi served as model for one of Proust‘s characters and he was depicted in Renoir‘s painting Luncheon of the Boating Party. Likewise, Ignace Ephrussi is portrayed as a rich jeweller in in Joseph Roth‘s novel Das Spinnennetz, translated as The Spider’s Web.
Everyone had an easy life, says Theodor, the young and bitter Gentile protagonist, employed by the family as a tutor, ‗the Efrussis the easiest of all… Pictures in gold frames hung in the hall and a footman in green and gold livery bowed as he escorted you in.‘ (De Waal 2010: 151)
De Waal also reinvestigates cultural memory as he often discusses the general political and social situation of the regions and times he is examining. Both novels are thus written
26 accounts of a combination of communicative and cultural memories, in which the communicative memories seem to predominate.
By writing and publishing these novels, these communicative memories were made available for a wide audience, so now they are being read and discussed, and they circulate in the media culture. This means that the novels can be viewed as media of cultural memory (Erll 2010: 395). The relevance of this can be explained with an example of Mendelsohn‘s novel. Meg Grossbard did not want Mendelsohn to write about her stories, because ―[s]he knew that the minute she allowed [him] to start telling her stories, they would become [his] stories‖ (Mendelsohn 2010: 252). Meg Grossbard prohibited that her stories would be published in the novel, thus preventing her communicative memories from turning into cultural memories. Consequently, her stories will not be remembered after she and the ones she told them to have passed away. By publishing their novels, Mendelsohn and De Waal prevent this from happening to their stories. They allow their stories to be read, appropriated and discussed by their readers. As a result, they have brought their communicative memories into cultural memory through the medium of literary non-fiction, thus saving them from oblivion. Thus, we can argue that the novels are in the transit zone between communicative and cultural memory.
By bringing these personal works into cultural memory, the authors not only preserve their stories but also contribute to how the Holocaust will be remembered when all participants will have disappeared. By enabling their personal stories to become cultural memories, Mendelsohn and De Waal create an opportunity for people without communicative memories about the Holocaust, who have to rely on cultural memories, to become more engaged in the remembrance of this traumatic event. As Hirsch puts it:
Postmemorial work […] strives to reactivate and re-embody more distant political and cultural memorial structures by reinvesting them with resonant individual and familial forms of mediation and aesthetic expression. (2012: 33)
Their novels make the cultural memory of the Holocaust more personal by reinvesting it with communicative memories. Their works thus make a small contribution to the Holocaust being remembered in a personal way. For example, the title The Lost: A Search for Six of Six
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Million illustrates that the story is indeed about six relatives, but that these can also be seen as a pars pro toto for all the people who lost their life in the Holocaust. When relating the personal story of six Jews, it is implied that all six million Holocaust victims have a personal story like this. Accordingly, De Waal represents the downfall of the Jewish population in the twentieth century in a personal way. While recounting the story of the Ephrussi‘s, De Waal is also telling the Jewish history from the fin-de-siècle until the end of the twentieth century. By telling the rise and fall of one Jewish dynasty, he metaphorically recounts the rise and fall of the Jewish population in western-Europe in general in a way the readers can relate to it.
3.4 The influence of postmemory on identity
3.4.1 Daniel Mendelsohn – The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
We have already established that Daniel Mendelsohn was perceived by his relatives as a memorial candle for Shmiel. Dina Wardi claims that ―[t]he emotional need of the ‗memorial candles‘ to compensate their parents for what they lost comes at the cost of the development of an independent self‖ (1992: 156). Dina Wardi refers to memorial candles of the second generation who were specifically named after a lost relative. Since Daniel Mendelsohn is a member of the third generation and only a memorial candle to elderly relatives whom he barely saw, claiming that he has no independent self would be overstated. However, his identity could undoubtedly have been influenced by this, since his identity was never fully his own with these relatives. His peculiar relationship to the generation before and his postmemorial work seems to have influenced his identity in at least two different ways.
Firstly, Mendelsohn‘s identity is influenced by his lost relatives. Obviously, his quest to find out what happened to them, which lasted for years, must have affected him. The devoted searching, the anxiety, the disappointments and the discoveries most likely influenced his identity. We see the impact that the quest had on Mendelsohn clearly in his breakdown when he finds someone who can actually tell him what happened to Shmiel and Frydka. His strong reaction shows that his identity is strongly affected by his lost relatives and his quest to find them.
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[…] she describes me, at the moment when Prokopiv uttered the name Szedlakowa, as having melted. And it‘s true that something snapped in me at that moment. I simply sank down and squatted there in the dust of the street and started to cry. (Mendelsohn 2008: 477)
Also, the narrator seems to identify with Shmiel Jäger to a certain extent. He shows he feels a lot of empathy for his great-uncle and what he went through. His fixation on and his empathy for Shmiel, makes Mendelsohn somewhat identify with him. This is most obvious when Mendelsohn discovers the small basement that Shmiel was hiding in.
As I‘ve mentioned, I have a deathly fear of enclosed places, but couldn‘t and wouldn‘t bring myself to mention it now, under these circumstances. I thought of the cattle car at the Holocaust Museum. Maybe Shmiel had been claustrophobic as I, I thought. (482)
Marianne Hirsch says that ―embodied journeys of return, corporeal encounters with place, do have the capacity to create sparks of connection that activate remembrance and thus reactivate the trauma of loss‖ (2012: 212). Likewise, Mendelsohn‘s encounter with the place where Shmiel and Frydka were hidden creates a moment of close connection. In this moment, memory seems to be transmitted from generation to generation.
However, Mendelsohn is only virtually experiencing what Shmiel went through, he is aware that the identification is not real. It is clear that Mendelsohn is a member of the third generation. As Bar-On states, ―[t]he third generation of immigrants is known to be the first one relatively liberated from the experience of migration (of the first generation) and from the reaction to it (of the second generation)‖ (1998: 109). Less than being affected by the trauma of their ancestors, the third generation seems to be affected by their compulsive interest in their trauma. This seems to be the case with Mendelsohn and he clearly understands that Shmiel‘s trauma is not his.
[…] their experience was specific to them and not me, as I stood in this most specific of places I knew that I was standing in the place where they had died, where the life that I would never know had gone out of the bodies I had never seen, and precisely because I had never known or seen them I was reminded the more forcefully that they had been specific people with specific deaths, and those lives and deaths belonged to
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them, not me, no matter how gripping the story that may be told about them. (Mendelsohn 2008: 502)
As much as Mendelsohn wants to know his lost relatives and know how they were killed, he realises that he can never achieve this. He explains beautifully that his identity is his own, and that he can never adopt someone else‘s, even though he might wish so at times.
[…] time passes, things change, a grandson cannot be his grandfather, for all that he may try; because we can never be other than ourselves, imprisoned by our time and place and circumstances. However much we want to learn, to know, we can only ever see things with our own eyes and hear with our own ears […]. (482)
Hirsch‘s statement that ―[t]he impossibility of return is intensified is descendants who were never there earlier return to the sites of trauma‖ is relevant here (2012: 213). At the exact moment that Mendelsohn discovers what he has been searching for years, during his ―attempt to reclaim some form of memory or connection‖ to his relatives, the ―irreparability of the breach‖ becomes evident (213).
Secondly, Mendelsohn‘s relationship to Judaism and to the life and traditions of the ‗Old Country‘ seems to have affected his identity as well. Mendelsohn‘s grandfather emigrated to the United States of America right before the Second World War. According to Bar-On his generation is still very much affected by this emigration (1998: 109). The separation of the home country, the missing of the people who are left behind, the language barrier, the new customs and traditions make assimilation difficult for them. The generation of Daniel Mendelsohn‘s mother is still influenced by this (109). The third generation, to which Mendelsohn himself belongs, is the first to be liberated from the effects of this emigration (109). His generation has become completely assimilated to the new country. Mendelsohn as well, he seems distanced from the customs of the Old Country. For example, he does no longer speak the native tongue of his grandfather.
[…] Jews of the sort who were likely to lapse, when sharing prized bits of gossip or coming to the long-delayed endings of stories or to the punch lines of jokes, into Yiddish; which of course had the effect of rendering climaxes, the points, of these stories and jokes incomprehensible to those of us who were young. (Mendelsohn 2008: 3)
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Likewise, his assimilation into the new country resulted in the fact that Mendelsohn is also distanced from the Orthodox Judaism of his grandfather.
Sometimes, when he was finished, he‘d say to us, I put in a good word for you, since you’re only Reform. My grandfather was an Orthodox Jew of the old school, and it was for his sake, more than anything else, that we had any religion at all […]. (11)
This illustrates that Mendelsohn does not have the strong connection that his grandfather used to have with Judaism.
Bar-On states that the third generation is the first one to be relatively liberated from the experience of migration and the reaction to it (1998: 109). However, Mendelsohn seems not to be completely liberated. He seems to be attracted by the customs of the Old Country when these are presented to him. For example, he is interested in the food of the Bolechow, as his grandfather must have eaten it:
I grinned and nodded. OK, I said, let‘s cook. Malcia took me into the kitchen so I could watch. […] Still, I‘d been raised in a certain kind of home, and I knew what to do. I sat down at the table and ate. It was delicious. Malcia beamed. It’s a real Bolechower dish! she said. (Mendelsohn 2008: 333)
Just like the third generation tends to be extremely interested in the Holocaust in a theoretical manner, Mendelsohn seems to be attracted by Judaism and the Torah in an academic way. His connection to Judaism is no longer self-evident and obedient as it was for his grandfather, but Mendelsohn‘s approach is analytical and theoretical. In his novel, Mendelsohn discusses several passages of the Torah. He analyses passages with a retrospective view on the Holocaust. The focus is often on the ideological messages in the Torah and Mendelsohn even implicitly associates some excerpts with the ideology of Nazism and Anti-Semitism. This profound interest shows the impact of the Old Country of Bolechow and the influence of Judaism on Mendelsohn‘s identity. We will this discuss these passages from the Torah further when discussing the references to myths in The Lost.
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3.4.2 Edmund De Waal – The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance
Firstly, De Waal‘s identity is influenced by inheriting the netsuke. He feels responsible to tell the story of his family, a quest which must have affected his life a great deal. He tells the story of his ancestors who were all wealthy and well-known. If the Second World War and the Holocaust would not have happened, Edmund De Waal‘s life would probably be completely different. The narrator does not show the reader how he feels about this. However, the impact of discovering the story of the netsuke during the Second World War does show us how it has affected him.
I knew the story. I didn‘t feel the story until my third visit to Vienna, when I was standing in the courtyard of the Palais with a man from the offices of Casino Austria who asked me if I wanted to see the secret floor. (De Waal 2010: 280)
Edmund De Waal reveals that his novel about his netsuke and family can partly be about himself as well. Thus he confirms that his ancestors had an influence on his identity.
I tell Sasha why we‘ve come, that I‘m writing a book about—I stumble to a halt. I no longer know if this book is about my family, or memory, or myself, or is still a book about small Japanese things. (342)
Secondly, several of the relatives whom Edmund De Waal talks about seem to have struggled with their Jewish identity. At least outwardly, they adjusted their identity to the changing climate. For example, Anti-Semitism started to rise in the 1880s and the Jews and even the Ephrussi family in particular became a target. For example, Drumont, the editor of a daily Anti-Semitic newspaper, claimed that Jews were not truly French but Jewish and accused them of speculating with real French money. ―Drumont‘s ridicule […] became vicious and anger when he thought of his patrimony soiled by the Ephrussi and their friends‖ (92). As a result, Charles Ephrussi changed his identity from outwardly Jewish to essentially French.
And I began to realise that Charles‘s new taste for Empire paintings and furniture as he approached his mid-forties was more than just a way of creating an ensemble in which to live. It was also a claim on an essential Frenchness, on belonging somewhere properly. […] Empire is not le gout Rothschild, not Jewish. It is French. (99)
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In contrast, Ignace Ephrussi‘s outward identity is Jewish. In spite of Anti-Semitism in Vienna, he shows his Gentile neighbours that he is a Jew:
It is beautifully done. It is a long-lasting, covert way of staking a claim for who you are. The ballroom is the only place in a Jewish household—however grand, and however rich you might be—that your Gentile neighbours would ever see socially. This is the only Jewish painting on the whole of the Ringstrasse. Here on Zionstrasse is a little bit of Zion. (125)
Ignace Ephrussi‘s son Victor and his family had assimilated to Vienna completely according to De Waal:
I realise that I do not understand what it means to be part of an assimilated, acculturated Jewish family. I simply don‘t understand. I know what they didn‘t do: they never went to synagogue, but their births and marriages are recorded here by the Rabbinate […] [and Viktor] gave money to Jewish charities. (151-152)
They are Jewish but they are just as much Austrian. Viktor Ephrussi is even patriotic and supports the Austrian government financially:
He is generous and patriotic in his financial support. He buys lots of government War Bonds. Then he buys some more. Though he is advised by Gutmann and other friends at the Wiener Club to move his money to Switzerland, as they are doing, he will not do so. It would be unpatriotic. (192-193)
Edmund De Waal is not a Jew, he was raised in the Anglican Church. Thus, he is not interested in Judaism as a religion. We see this in the novel as well, as his focus is never on religious aspects. However, his identity seems affected by Judaism. He is not interested in the religion itself, but he is affected by his Jewish background and the knowledge of what has been done to his relatives because of their religion. His relatives were assimilated, were even supporting the Austrian regime, but still they were considered Jews and had no rights because of this. His month-long reading about Anti-Semitism and the knowledge of the consequences for his relatives, and indirectly for him, seems to have had an impact on him.
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3.5 Representation of postmemorial aspects
3.5.1 Mediation
Writers of the postgeneration who want to represent aspects of the Holocaust are always confronted with the issue of mediation.8 James Young refers to Foucault‘s idea that ―every record of history, even the archival, is also a representation and thus subject to all of a culture's mediating forces‖ (quoted in Young 1997: 41). Since the members of the postgeneration have not lived through the event themselves, they are forced to rely on the representation of others. There is always a mediating instance that has already interpreted the event or experience before a third-generation writer can. Thus, a third-generation representation of the Holocaust is always also a representation of a representation of the Holocaust. This mediation keeps the postgeneration at an unbridgeable distance from the actual event. The event can never be fully reached by the postgeneration and this is an important and influential notion in the depiction thereof. Especially in quests, where the upset is to grasp the actual event, these mediating instances can be frustrating. Mendelsohn and De Waal represent this problem of mediation in their quests, both explicitly and implicitly.
Firstly, Mendelsohn interviews several Holocaust survivors. While telling their stories, these witnesses are mediating instances towards Mendelsohn. By testifying, by turning the event into a describable story, they are also automatically interpreting the actual event. The distinction between Mendelsohn who cannot reach the actual event and the survivors who have experienced it, is implicitly but repeatedly illustrated through the language use. It is represented in the accent that almost all of the testifiers share.
They all spoke with a particular accent, one with which I was familiar because it was the accent that haunted, faintly but perceptibly, my grandfather‘s speech: […] there was a telltale ripeness, a plummy quality to certain words that were ripe with r‘s, and l‘s, words like darling or wonderful, a certain way of biting into the t‘s and th‘s in words like terrible and (a word my grandfather, who liked to tell stories, often used) truth. It’s de troott! he would say. […] dollink, I vuz dehre, I rrammembah, and I’m tellink you, it’s de troott. (Mendelsohn 2008: 5-6)
8 The issue of mediation is relevant for the retrospective depiction of any historical event, not just the Holocaust. 34
While this is only audible and would normally not be detected in written language, Mendelsohn often repeats certain words to draw attention to how they were pronounced. For example:
―He said to me, It met every evening. It was in groups of ages, so I was in a group of boys my age, and she was in a group of girls her age. He pronounced girls as ―GEH- earls‖. (199)
Another example:
What was it? Why people elder than I, smarter than I, more educated than I didn‘t survive, but I survived? Surwived. (390)
These remarks about the pronunciation not only contribute to the authenticity of the story but they also remind us that Mendelsohn, and by extension, the readers as well, are excluded from this group who experienced the actual event. We will never know the story like they do, there will always be a mediating instance between us and the true event.
Secondly, this issue of mediation, of relying on someone else‘s interpretation, is implicitly represented in the translations of the testimonies. Mendelsohn often has to wait for someone to translate the stories while they are being told. He occasionally incorporates these translations in the novel. For example:
Anyway, as Shumek was now saying to Shlomo, the Jewish police were themselves hardly indispensible. Und vuss hut zey getin? Zey hutten zi alle geloysht. And what did they do? They liquidated them all. It was in this context that Shlomo asked about the fates of two such policemen whom he‘d known. They were speaking rapidly, and I didn‘t catch the names. Er is oykh geloysht geveyn? Shlomo asked. He was also liquidated? (327)
Again, this not only contributes to the authenticity but this also reveals another mediating instance. We do not receive the story immediately from the teller but we have to rely on the translator who mediates between the story being told and the listener. In this particular excerpt, we even see how information can get lost due to the mediation, Mendelsohn could not catch the names and Shlomo does not mention them in the translation.
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Mendelsohn also explicitly comments on the relation between the story being told and the waiting for the translation.
The tension between the intimacy of her gesture and the strangeness of having to wait for Shlomo to translate struck me, at that moment, as significant: it seemed like a symbol for everything I was feeling that day –the strangeness at having to process, all at once, impossible distances of time and language and memory, together with the immediacy and vividness of the small but moving fragments I was hearing, just then, about my long-dead relatives. (302)
Mendelsohn comments here on the strangeness of hearing vivid stories about people who lived in a different time and place. The act of translation can symbolise this. The translated version of an utterance can be vivid and very similar to the actual utterance, but it is still never exactly the same because it remains an interpretation. Similarly, the account of an event can be graphic and realistic but it can never fully express the actual event, since it is an interpretation of it.
Thirdly, occasionally the language use implicitly refers to the issue of mediation and the frustration that it causes. Several times, Mendelsohn uses very long sentences bulked with information. These are rather hard to process for the reader, which has a mediating effect itself. For example, the following excerpt is only a fragment of a sentence that runs for an entire page.
All I think I can say, now, with any degree of certainty, is that […] the lives of […] Samuel Jäger, […] a man who wrote a certain number of letters between January and December 1939, a woman who was very warm, very friendly, a forty-seven-year-old father of four girls, […] a young girl who was still very much a baby, to whom a seventy-eight-year-old man living in Sydney, Australia, will recall that he once said Hallo, Bronia! over a fence […]; an uncle, aunt, and cousin […], these lives, and many other things that were true about them but which now can also never be known, came to an end. (240-241)
This page-long sentence bulks with vague information about the lost relatives and about their relatives and acquaintances, who helped Mendelsohn in his quest. This overwhelming sentence contains a lot of words but it actually does not say much about who Shmiel, Ester
36 and the children really were. It has a frustrating effect, all this information from all these different sources never truly bring us to the actual truth. These mediated stories and documents can never make us fully capture the essence of their personalities and of the moments they passed away.
Finally, as Edmund De Waal is a third-generation writer, he was bound to come across issues of mediation in his quest. As we have discussed, De Waal does not focus on the quest in his novel, the reader is not really included in the process of discovering information. Consequently, neither does De Waal regularly refer to issues of mediation. However, implicitly, the narrator comments metaphorically on how the past seems unreachable.
And then I drop my glasses and one of the arms fractures near the joint, so that I have to pinch them together to see anything at all. I am in Vienna, 400 yards across a small park from the front door to Freud‘s apartment, outside my paternal family house, and I cannot see clearly. Bring on the symbolism, I mutter, as I hold my glasses up to try and see this pink monolith; prove to me that this bit of my journey is going to be difficult. (De Waal 2010: 112)
De Waal is literally seeing things unclear since his glasses are broken and he comments on the symbolism of this. We could read this as a metaphor for him not being able to see or know the past to its full extent. He listened to stories and he read many books and documents about the events but these are interpretations of the actual event. De Waal seems to realise that he can never fully see the past as it actually was.
3.5.2 Received history
‗Received history‘ is a concept of James Young that describes a narrow kind of history-telling (1997: 21).
[Received history is a] double-stranded narrative that tells a survivor-historian's story and my own relationship to it. Such a narrative would chart not just the life of the survivor-historian itself but also the measurable effect of the tellings—both his telling and mine—on my own life's story. (21)
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Young means that we cannot disconnect the past from the present. Historians have long tried to ignore the present while discussing the past. Young argues that the reasons for talking about the past in the present are relevant to the historical story, since we tell it in retrospect (42). Therefore, he argues, we should ―introduce a little introspection into our acts of retrospection, to make the reasons we remember and historicize part of the historical record‖ (42). Every history is received in some manner and the writer‘s reception of the event has an influence on the representation. For example, De Waal has read many books on Anti- Semitism and the way he received this information had an influence on his novel. His reception had an influence on what information was included or left out, on the focus on certain details or on the formulation of passages. As every description of history is received history, Young argues that historians could incorporate their own voice, thus making ―the listeners' and readers' responses to history a part of that history's record‖ (42).
Daniel Mendelsohn‘s novel can be seen as received history. The narrator often includes how he received a story. Firstly, he mentions the emotions and the thoughts he had after hearing a story and often he even processes the story in relation to his own life. For example:
He said, For being frum, my mother was killed! And Itzhak Jäger did a thing that was against the religion completely! So God saved him, he sent him away to Palestina! You understand? I understood. I thought of my grandfather, years earlier, saying about another meal of unkosher meat, But is life is at stake, God forgives! (Mendelsohn 2008: 310)
The representation of this particular story is definitely influenced by Mendelsohn‘s reception. If it were received for example by a kosher Orthodox Jew who, just like Shlomo, lost relatives because they were practicing their religion in public, it would probably be represented with more attention to the injustice of this story. Mendelsohn understands Shlomo‘s feelings but his personal life, his grandfather‘s words and the fact that his great-uncle Itzhak survived, prevent him from representing the story in complete accordance with Shlomo‘s viewpoint.
A second way that Mendelsohn‘s reception of the story is included in the novel can be found in the repetition of the phrase ―killed by the Nazis‖. This is the first thing that Mendelsohn learned about Shmiel, Ester and the four children. The reception of these words has affected
38 him strongly and has influenced the representation of the story. Throughout the novel, these words are repeated several times. Some examples:
Of this Shmiel, of course, I knew something: my grandfather‘s oldest brother, who with his wife and four beautiful daughters had been killed by the Nazis during the war. Shmiel. Killed by the Nazis. (7)
I felt awkward about bringing it up, this dreadful thing that had happened to Shmiel, to his very own brother. Killed by the Nazis. (8)
[…] so used was I to knowing about what had eventually become of the beautiful young man in the picture, so inured had I become to the phrase killed by the Nazis. (71)
It was in red Magic Marker that he had added the words that I‘d always remembered: KILLED BY THE NAZIS IN WORLD WAR 2. (73)
Killed by the Nazis—yes, but by whom exactly? (112)
These are only a few examples of the many repetitions of these words throughout the novel. This representation of the phrase indicates how Mendelsohn received the words himself. The constant repetition suggests that Mendelsohn is haunted by these words, and by extension, it has a haunting effect on the reader. The continual return of these words in their exactness is similar to the return of traumatic memories, as Pierre Janet has proposed:
[Janet] proposed that traumatic recall remains insistent and unchanged to the precise extent that it has never, from the beginning, been fully integrated into understanding. The trauma is the confrontation with an event that, in its unexpectedness or horror, cannot be placed within the schemes of prior knowledge—that cannot, as George Bataille says, become a matter of ―intelligence‖—and thus continually returns, in its exactness, at a later time. (Caruth 1995: 153)
A traumatic event often transmits into traumatic memory, rather than a narrative memory. One of the differences is that a traumatic memory cannot be recalled consciously, it can appear suddenly in all of its literality (153). Although the phrase ―killed by the Nazis‖ is not a strong traumatic memory like most actual Holocaust memories are, because of its literal and regular repetition it does appear like a traumatic memory. This illustrates how Mendelsohn‘s reception of this piece of information has influenced the representation of the novel.
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Furthermore, Mendelsohn confronts his readers literally with the issue of received history. He explicitly explains how the mind, personality and situation of the storyteller influence the story that is being told.
I realized that what Alena had told me that night could be read as a kind of fable about the eternal conflict between what happened and the story of what happened, a fable that hints at the inevitable triumph of the storyteller even as it warns of the dangers inherent in that triumph. To become a story, the details of what happened to the grandmother, what happened in real time, in real history, to a real person, would have to be subordinated to the overall outline that already existed, for whatever idiosyncratic reasons of personality and preference and taste, in the mind of her granddaughter […]. (Mendelsohn 2008: 437)
This excerpt shows us that Mendelsohn realises that his novel is also a story of received history. His novel tells us not only the story of what happened to his relatives, it tells inevitably also the story about how this tale was shaped, by Mendelsohn himself. Thus, it is a received history; a story about a story about the Holocaust, and Mendelsohn is very much aware of this.
Finally, as we have already established, De Waal is less open about his quest than Mendelsohn is. As a result, he does hardly discuss the issue of mediation, and nor does he elaborate on the idea of received history. However, De Waal‘s reception of the story definitely had an influence on its representation. His personal vision affected the story he is telling, he often projects his own ideas and emotions on the content. For example:
Charles is free to do what he wants. I want to think this because he was the youngest son and the third son and, as in all good children‘s stories, it is always the third son who gets to leave home and go adventuring – pure projection, as I am a third son. But I suspect that the family know this boy is not cut out for the life of the Bourse. His uncles Michel and Maurice have moved to Paris: perhaps there were enough sons for the offices of Ephrussi et Cie […]. (De Waal 2010: 32)
His reception of stories and images triggers De Waal‘s imagination and he indulges in postmemorial invention. In the following excerpt for example, De Waal has no way of
40 knowing whether the brothers got along, but his reception of the house makes him speculate about it:
It is a huge house, but the three brothers must have met every day on those black-and- gold winding stairs, or heard each other as the noise of the carriage being readied in the courtyard echoed from the glazed canopy. Or encountered friends going past their door on the way up to an apartment above. They must have developed a way of not seeing each other, and not hearing each other, too: to live so close to your family takes some doing, I think, reflecting on my own brothers. They must have got on well. (23)
There is no way of knowing if this is true, as this is De Waal‘s own projection on the room. His reception of the house has an influence on the story he tells, thus, his work is also a work of received history.
In the previous two citations, De Waal explicitly says that this is his imagination and thus only speculation. However, in the rest of the novel, De Waal engages in more postmemorial invention without remarking this. Daniel Mendelsohn also uses his imagination sometimes, but he always explicitly mentions that this is speculation and part of his reception of the story. De Waal does not focus on the received history, he speculates without notifying the reader about it. For example:
The great glass case of beautiful things has a particular difficulty for Viktor, as it comes from Paris, and he doesn‘t want it sitting and reminding him of an elsewhere, another life. The thing is that Viktor and Emmy are not quite sure about Charles‘s gift. They are wonderful, these little carvings, funny and intricate, and it is obvious that his favourite cousin Charles has been exceedingly generous. But the malachite-and-gilt clock and the pair of globes from cousins in Berlin, and the Madonna, can be placed straight away—salon, library, dining room—and this great vitrine cannot. It is too odd and complicated, and it is also rather large. (139)
How does De Waal know that Viktor does not want to be reminded of Paris? Do Emmy and Charles agree that the netsuke are ‗wonderful‘ and ‗funny and intricate‘ or is this Edmund De Waal‘s opinion projected on them? De Waal presents this like the truth, but it is probably a postmemorial invention since it cannot be verified. The author does not only reflect or describe but creates part of the story, like Hayden White states:
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For the writer who writes-himself, writing becomes itself the means of comprehension, not a mirror of something independent, but an act and a commitment—a doing or making rather than a reflection or description. (White 1992: 48)
Since De Waal‘s reception influences the story, The Hare with Amber Eyes is a received history, but it is often not presented as such.
3.5.3 Storytelling
We have seen that the communicative memory is transmitted across three or four generations (Hirsch 2012: 32). The third generation is thus one of the last where the Holocaust is still actively and personally remembered. As we have discussed, the novels of Mendelsohn and De Waal are in the transit zone between communicative and cultural memory and could contribute to the way in which the Holocaust will be remembered. Therefore, according to Sicher, ―the way the story is told, the issue of narrativity itself […] 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‖ (1998: 13). Accordingly, Mendelsohn and De Waal both reflect on their way of storytelling in the novels.
Storytelling is a central motive in Mendelsohn‘s The Lost. The way stories are told seems to intrigue Mendelsohn, most likely because his grandfather was a unique storyteller.
When my grandfather told a story […] he wouldn‘t do anything so obvious as to start from the beginning and end at the end; instead, he told it in vast circling loops, so that each incident, each character he mentioned […] had its own mini-history, a story within a story, a narrative inside a narrative […]. (Mendelsohn 2008: 32)
Unlike his grandfather‘s stories, Mendelsohn‘s story does start at the beginning and end at the end, at least when he is talking about the quest. But the novel is not just about the quest, it contains different levels of storytelling. The story of Shmiel and his family is a story within a story, it is this story that is being searched in the story of the quest. Besides these two levels there are also the tales that the surviving Bolechowers tell Mendelsohn. In these stories, Shmiel and his family are only secondary characters. Finally, the novel also contains detached reflections on the Torah, which we will discuss later. 42
Mendelsohn sets out to tell his family‘s story, ―to impose an order on a chaos of facts by assembling them into a story that has a beginning, a middle, and an end‖ (38). As his quest prolongs, he becomes not just the guardian of his own family‘s story, but of many other family stories. He realises that he has an important role in representing the stories.
Here again, it occurred to me, was the unique problem that faces my generation […]; a problem that will face no other generation in history. We are just close enough to those who were there that we feel an obligation to the facts as we know them; but we are also just far enough away, at this point, to worry about our own role in the transmission of those facts, now that the people to whom those facts happened have mostly slipped away. (433)
The unhappy and grave content of the stories demand a careful representation with respect for the tellers and their wishes. Because the minute Mendelsohn writes them down, they become his stories and thus his responsibility to present them considerately. We see how important the storytellers can be in Meg Grossbard‘s reaction. She tells Mendelsohn her story but she is unwilling to let him appropriate them. Mendelsohn of course respects this decision.
Both she and I knew […] that she would never write a book of her own, but despite my frustration […], I understood perfectly what she was afraid of, why she wouldn‘t let her tales enter my book. She knew that the minute she allowed me to start telling her stories, they would become my stories. So I can‘t tell you what she said during our interview. (252)
Hirsch also raises this question of storytelling: ―How can we best carry their stories forward, without appropriating them, without unduly calling attention to ourselves, and without, in turn, having our own stories displaced by them?‖ (2012: 2). Third-generation writers constantly have to look for a balance between the survivors‘ stories and their own.
Near the end, Mendelsohn realises that the essence of his relatives can never be completely captured in a story.
[…] I was reminded the more forcefully that they had been specific people with specific deaths, and those lives and deaths belonged to them, not me, no matter how gripping the story that may be told about them. There is so much that will always be impossible to know, but we do know that they were, once, themselves, specific, the
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subjects of their own lives and deaths, and not simply puppets to be manipulated for the purposes of a good story, for the memoirs and magical-realist novels and movies. There will be time enough for that, once I and everyone who ever knew everyone who ever knew them dies; since as we know, everything, in the end, gets lost. (Mendelsohn 2008: 502)
At the same time he knows that once the past is no longer remembered, history will set in and all that will be left of his relatives is a story, until also this will get lost (Assmann 2003: 155).
De Waal as well is concerned with how to tell his family story. At one point, he explicitly asks himself ―How can I write about this time?‖ (De Waal 2010: 248). He understands the importance of the way the stories are told, as the following excerpt illustrates:
The problem is that I am in the wrong century to burn things. I am the wrong generation to let it go. […] If others can be so careful over things that are so important, then I must be careful over these objects and their stories. I must get it right, go back and check it again, walk it again. […] It is how you tell their stories that matters. (348)
Just like Mendelsohn, De Waal says that he is concerned with the specifics of his relatives‘ lives. He does not want to manipulate the facts to create a fascinating and nostalgic story.
I know that my family are Jewish, of course, and I know they were staggeringly rich, but I really don‘t want to get into the sepia sage business, writing up some elegiac Mitteleuropa narrative of loss. And I certainly don‘t want to turn Iggie into an old great-uncle in his study, a figure like Bruce Chatwin‘s Utz, handing over the family story, telling me: Go, be careful. It could write itself, I think, this kind of story. A few stitched-together wistful anecdotes, more about the Orient-Express, of course, a bit of wandering round Prague or somewhere equally photogenic, some clippings from Google on ballrooms in the Belle Epoque. It would come out as nostalgic. And thin. (15)
Since third-generations writers have a significant influence on how the stories are transmitted to the next generations, the way of storytelling is an important aspect in a postmemorial narrative. Both Mendelsohn and De Waal are concerned with this issue in their novels.
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3.6 Perpetrators and victims
3.6.1 Survivor‘s guilt
As we have discussed, many survivors are confronted with a sense of guilt for surviving while so many others did not make it. The following excerpt shows what survivor‘s guilt is and how difficult it is to live with. Shlomo wonders why he survived and eventually, he found two reasons:
You know, I think… I think, what was the reason for my survival. What was it? Why people elder than I, smarter than I, more educated that I didn‘t survive, but I survived? Shlomo took a deep breath and then said, more slowly: I think it is two reasons: one, that I take my revenge. And the second is to tell, to tell whoever wants to hear the story of what happened. […] For years, he said, I believed that this life was not real life – that I would look up and there would be my family. I didn’t want to bring children into this world. (Mendelsohn 2008: 390)
Anna had the same difficulties after the war. She openly talks about her needs to see a psychiatrist for years. Moreover, she is convinced that everyone who survived is mentally troubled in some way.
She said that her husband used to say that whoever came through the Holocaust and says that he is completely normal, he‘s lying. It‘s not true. […] She says for years she‘s under treatment for psychiatrist, Shlomo said. Her children know that they grow up in a home which is not a happy home. You know, in a sad home, the parents cannot be happy, because they have this background. […] I was struck again by the fact that all of the people I‘d talked to last time and who had shared with me, then, so many stories, so many facts, were now suddenly offering, for the first time, these acknowledgements of their struggles with mental anguish, with fear and panic and anxiety. (391)
Mendelsohn is struck by these people discussing their mental problems from the war because his grandfather never did this. Abraham Jäger kept quiet about Shmiel‘s fate and his feelings about this. Bar-On discovered that the ―willingness [of emigrants who lost family in the Holocaust] to discuss their feelings and what had happened to their families depended mainly on the extent to which they had succeeded in helping some of those who stayed behind before they perished‖ (1998: 100-101). The grandfather‘s unwillingness to talk could indicate that he
45 feels like he has not done enough to help his brother. Accordingly, Abraham Jäger seems to consider his own behaviour of not helping his brother as morally questionable, which means that he could consider himself as belonging to the grey zone. If this is the case, this could increase his survivor‘s guilt, he survived while his brother did not, and moreover, he did not try hard enough to prevent this. His unfortunate suicide could then also be seen in line with this hypothesis.
We cannot know whether Abraham Jäger considered himself to be part of the grey zone, but we notice that Mendelsohn definitely implies that he might belong to this grey zone throughout the novel. His great-uncle Shmiel wrote several letters to his relatives, to ask them for help. In the letters, it looks as if his grandfather did not actively help Shmiel and Mendelsohn is appalled by this impression. For example: ―It is in these later letters that Shmiel‘s tone becomes panicked. […] I’ve now written to you so many times dear Aby… It is difficult to miss the tone of reproof in that last line‖ (99).
In the following excerpt Mendelsohn projects his own life on his ancestors‘ situation and seems to believe that Abraham Jäger failed his brother Shmiel.
For a long time after I first saw this, I couldn‘t stop thinking of this sentence: Why had Shmiel allowed himself to dream this hopeful dream, and why had it vanished? Who had given him false hope? I think about this a lot, knowing as I do how brothers, for reasons that no archival document can ever illuminate, can fail each other. (60-61)
Although he understands from his own experience that brothers can fail each other, Mendelsohn seems to blame his grandfather somewhat for not helping his brother more.
I realize, on rereading these letters, that what makes them so uncannily moving is the second person address. Every letter, after all, is addressed to a ―you‖—―I bid you farewell and kiss you from the bottom of my heart,‖ is Shmiel‘s favorite valediction— and because of this it is difficult, […] not to feel implicated, not to feel vaguely responsible. (98)
This excerpt could implicate an element of critique towards his grandfather. If even Daniel Mendelsohn, who never even knew Shmiel, feels implicated and responsible to help Shmiel when reading the letters, then why did his own brother fail to provide the help he needed?
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This idea of betrayal worries Mendelsohn and he seems to place his grandfather in the grey zone and blame him somewhat for failing his brother. The following excerpt implies this:
In all of the stories I used to hear about how Shmiel and his family died, there was the terrible crime, the terrible betrayal: maybe the wicked neighbor, maybe the unfaithful Polish maid. But none of these betrayals worried me as much as did the possibility of one that was far worse. […] I have read these letters many times, and I worry now whether enough had been done for them. Really done, I mean. (101)
Mendelsohn never explicitly says that the blames his grandfather somewhat, but is implied in fragments like the above.
Also De Waal focuses on survivor‘s guilt. He seems ashamed of his wondrous story of how his collection of netsuke survived the war, when he compares it to the six million people who did not survive. De Waal shows some symptoms of survivor‘s guilt himself.
Here, in this house, I am wrong-footed. The survival of the netsuke in Anna‘s pocket, in her mattress, is an affront. I cannot bear for it to slip into symbolism. Why should they have got through this war in a hiding-place, when so many hidden people did not? I can‘t make people and places and things fit together any more. These stories unravel me. (De Waal 2010: 283)
As he is a third-generation writer and not a survivor himself, he is not haunted by this survivor‘s guilt. But still, he seems to feel discomfited with the idea that they are still here while so many people are not.
3.6.2 Identity of the perpetrator
At first, Mendelsohn seems interested in the identity of the perpetrator. He is not only concerned with the identity of the betrayer of his relatives, but also with the nationalities of the perpetrators. In the testimonies he hears, the Ukranians are often presented as being the vilest. For example, from an early age, Mendelsohn heard his grandfather depict the Ukrainians as being ‗the worst‘:
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The Germans were bad, my grandfather used to tell me, describing—from what authority, from what sources, from what hearsay I do not and cannot know—what happened to Bolechow‘s Jews during World War II. The Poles were worse. But the Ukrainians were the worst of all. (Mendelsohn 2008: 99)
Also Meg Grossbard saw the Ukrainians as being the worst.
You begged to fall into the hands of the Germans, […] believe me. The Germans had what they called the mercy bullet, the Gnadekugel […] but the Ukrainians would shoot you in the stomach, and it would be maybe forty-eight hours before you died. A horrible, slow death. (235)
Mendelsohn also finds out that the Ukrainians helped the Germans with identifying the Jews. The local Ukrainians went with the Germans officers and pointed out in which houses a Jew lived, thus pointing out which of their neighbours would be killed. Being a member of the third generation and not being persecuted himself, Mendelsohn only reports these facts and does not explicitly judge the perpetrator. Hoffmann indicates that it is not the role of the postgeneration to blame or forgive the perpetrators, since they ―have not been the direct object of persecution‖ (2004: 126). However, after hearing all this about the Ukrainians, we notice that Mendelsohn cannot stay completely objective about them. Especially his grandfather‘s statement seems to have affected his perception of Ukrainians. For example:
A month before I went to Ukraine with my own siblings, I stood in the stifling lobby of the Ukrainian consulate on East Forty-ninth Street in New York, waiting for a visa, and as I stood there I would look around at the people standing next to me, who were all talking animatedly and often exasperatedly in Ukrainian to each other, yelling at the solitary officer behind the bulletproof glass, and the line the Ukrainians were the worst would go through my head, over and over, acquiring its own rhythm. (Mendelsohn, 2008: 99)
In the Ukraine, the siblings meet Alex, a young Ukrainian who escorts American Jews around the old shtetls of Eastern Europe. Mendelsohn tells us that they were all clearly thinking the same thing: “some Ukranians aren’t so bad‖ (118). This illustrates that they all shared the same prejudice towards the Ukrainians, they presumed that the Ukrainians are bad. Intuitively, they have adopted their grandfather‘s perception of the Ukrainians.
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Nevertheless, the identity of the perpetrator is not as clear as it so far seemed for Mendelsohn. To some, the Germans are the worst perpetrators, to others the Poles or the Ukrainians. Some Jews can even be considered to be perpetrators, we will discuss this in a moment. To others like Mr. Grossbard, the French are the ones they could never forgive.
So there was the Ukrainians, Mr. Grossbard said. […] Now the Germans did quite badly by my family, you know. I nodded. The wife killed, the child killed. But in my family, he went on, the ones we never could forgive were the French. […] Yes, he said, the French. […] You know, my father never did get over the Dreyfuss Affair. (256)
Mendelsohn cannot determine which nationality was most guilty. Neither does he discover the identity of the betrayer of his relatives.
I thought of all the survivors I‘d talked to, nearly all of whom had been hidden by Ukrainians. […] For some strange reason, people had, in fact continued helping. When Alex, of his own accord, asked Stepan whether he knew stories of people who had turned in Jews to the authorities, Stepan said, I don‘t know people like that. There were good people and there were bad people. I listened and thought, Yes. There were Szymanski and Szedlak; and there were the pitchforks, there was the neighbor who betrayed them. When all is said and done, it was as simple, and as mysterious as that. (466-467)
In the end, Mendelsohn relinquishes his search for the identity of the perpetrator. Finding someone to blame has become less important than finding these lives to remember.
[…] the hunt for the guilty party was, I felt by that point, almost a different story. […] If anything, I was less interested in the identity of the betrayer than I was, now, in the personality of this Mrs. Szedlak. For the saviors were, in their way, as inexplicable and mysterious to me as the betrayers. (490)
Subsequently, the identity of the perpetrator is not always clear in De Waal‘s The Hare with Amber Eyes either. The role of Austria in the war is unclear, ―the two camps of masters and servants both diverge and converge‖ (Levi 1988: 36). This is Primo Levi‘s definition of the grey zone. Austria could be considered a victim because of the coerced Anschluss, but we see
49 in De Waal‘s novel that many Austrians tortured the Jews afterwards and appropriated their property. Austria is thus on the borderline between victim and perpetrator, in the grey zone.
There were 185,000 Jews in Austria at the time of the Anschluss. Of these only 4,500 returned; 65,459 Austrian Jews had been killed. Nobody was called to account. The new democratic Austrian Republic established after the war gave an amnesty to 90 per cent of members of the Nazi Party in 1948, and to the SS and Gestapo by 1957. (De Waal 2010: 284)
After the war, the property of Jews largely stayed appropriated by the Austrians, very little was restored to its rightful owners.
‗All quite openly, publicly and legally‘ were words that Elisabeth was to hear repeated back to her. She discovered that, on the list of priorities in a shattered society, the restitution of property to those from whom it had been sequestered came near the bottom. Many of those who had appropriated Jewish property were now respected citizens of the new Austrian Republic. This was also a government that rejected reparations, because in their view Austria had been an occupied country between 1938 and 1945: Austria had become the ‗first victim‘ rather than an agent in war. (285)
De Waal‘s opinion seems rather clear from this excerpt. Throughout the novel, he only represents Jews as being the victims and Austrians as being the perpetrators. The fact that he puts the phrase ‗first victim‘ between quotation marks shows that this is a quote and certainly not his own opinion. The narrator implies that in his opinion, the Austrians were perpetrators instead of victims.
3.6.3 The grey zone
Primo Levi introduced the concept of the grey zone in his work The Drowned and the Saved (1988) in which he discusses the situation in the concentration camp. As discussed, the grey zone indicates the moral area where ―the two camps of masters and servants both diverge and converge‖ (Levi 1989: 42). We are not discussing the Lagers here, but we will use this influential concept on victims who indulged in morally questionable behaviour. As Primo Levi has already suggested, there are different gradations in the grey zone, ranging from those for whom coercion was of the highest degree and the active role in violence was minimal to those for whom coercion was minimal and who played an active role in the violence (44-45).
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For example, if Abraham Jäger did not try to help his brother, we would consider this morally questionable behaviour and place him in the grey zone. He was not pressured into doing so, but he definitely did not play an active role in the violence towards his brother. His position in the grey zone is for instance not comparable to that of the so-called Jewish Police. Members of the Jewish Police helped the Germans with gathering the Jews. Shlomo describes it as follows:
They came, they took you away, if you had any money you gave them money, the led you away. They believed that everybody else will be killed, but they will be left. […] Some of them volunteered, and some of them were forced. (Mendelsohn 2008: 392- 393)
The question of judgement becomes tentative when discussing a high level of collaboration like this Jewish police in grey zone. Primo Levi explicitly asks not to judge members of the grey zone:
Certainly, the greatest responsibility lies with the system, the very structure of the totalitarian state; the concurrent guilt on the part of individual big and small collaborators (never likeable, never transparent!) is always difficult to evaluate. […] The condition of the offended does not exclude culpability, which is often objectively serious, but I know of no human tribunal to which one could delegate the judgement. (1988: 44)
Mendelsohn addresses the question of judgement profoundly in his novel. It seems like the fear of judgement is still an issue decades after the war. Meg Grossbard‘s brother was a member of the Jewish police and she seems to feel guilty for it. ―She had been terrified that we‘d judge him. No, I thought: Terrified that we‘d judge her‖ (Mendelsohn 2008: 388). That is one of the reasons why she refuses to talk about it, according to Mendelsohn. Yet Mendelsohn makes it very clear that he does not judge:
I‘m not judging! I judge no one, I said. And it was true. Because it is impossible to know certain things, because I will never experience the pressures that people experienced during the war years, the unimaginable choices that had to be made, because of all this, I refuse to judge. […] I want to emphasize my business is not judging. I judge no one. (386)
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Mendelsohn sustains Primo Levi‘s wish in this excerpt. However, we have already remarked that Mendelsohn seems to struggle not to judge his grandfather‘s behaviour. He rightly does not judge Meg Grossbard‘s brother. He imagines himself in his position and admits that he might react in the same way:
What I wanted to say was this: that if I thought I could save my new wife, and myself, by being in the Jewish police, by enjoying whatever tawdry perquisites they received in return for being the ones who rounded up their fellow Jews, would I do it? Yes, I might. (393)
He does not judge because he realises he might respond in the same way. But when he discusses Shmiel‘s letters, he implies that he would not respond in the same way that his grandfather seems to have done. He mentions that it is hard not to feel implicated and responsible when reading the letters, thus implicitly blaming his grandfather for not feeling as responsible as Mendelsohn himself probably would have felt.
Mendelsohn mentions several times that it is often easier to be ―cruel to those with whom we are truly intimate, the ones we know too well‖ (386). Similarly, it seems, it is easier for him to judge the one he was close to, his grandfather, compared to the ones he did not know personally.
3.7 The role of photographs in Daniel Mendelsohn‘s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
3.7.1 The effects of photographs on Daniel Mendelsohn
Firstly, Mendelsohn owns several photographs of Shmiel, Ester and the four children, which his grandfather and other relatives gave him for the family album. Together with the short fragments he heard about his lost relatives, these photographs triggered his curiosity towards them. Especially the earliest known photograph of Shmiel, in his Austrian army uniform next to another man, initiated his interest in the matter for two reasons.9 The first one is that Mendelsohn remembered the inscription that his grandfather had written on the back of the picture: ―Uncle Shmiel, in the Austrian Army, Killed by the Nazis‖ (Mendelsohn 2008: 71). As we have already discussed, this phrase had an important impact on Daniel Mendelsohn. Seeing this phrase on an image of the person who was killed, and written in his grandfather‘s handwriting, intensified this impact. The second reason is engendered by the other man in the
9 This particular photograph is included in the novel on page 75. 52 photograph. At first, this unknown man makes Mendelsohn think about the past and how easily people can be forgotten:
[I]t would occur to me how easy it is for someone to become lost, forever unknown. There, after all, was Shmiel […]; and yet just next to him was this other man about whom nothing could ever be known, as good, it seemed to me as I looked at the picture, as if he‘d never been born. (72)
Later, Mendelsohn sees the picture again and discovers that there is more about the inscription than he remembered. The full inscription says: ―Herman Ehrlich and Samuel Jaeger in the Austrian Army, 1916. Killed by the Nazis in World War 2‖ (73). His mother clarifies: ―Oh Daniel, she said, You knew him! Herman Ehrlich. Herman the Barber!‖ (73).
At the moment when my mother said Herman the Barber I realized I could be wrong, that traces of those six might still remain in the world, somewhere. So it was a kind of guilt, as much as curiosity; guilt, as much as a desire to know what had really happened to them in whatever detail still remained to be known, that ultimately moved me to go back. (73)
The discovery of the identity of the unknown man and consequently the realisation that traces of the lost ones might still remain in the world, encourage Mendelsohn to embark on his quest.
Secondly, the photographs that Mendelsohn has of his deceased relatives can make him more personally connected to them. In the photographs, he can see for himself that he does in fact look like Samuel Jäger, which brings them a little closer together.
[…] I first felt that I had to know whatever it was possible to know about Shmiel, about the man with whom I shared a certain curve of brow and line of jaw, and for that reason had once made people cry […]. (72)
As Hirsh states, ―family photos, and the familial aspects of postmemory would tend to diminish distance, bridge separation, and facilitate identification and affiliation‖ (2012: 38). The photographs also make him more personally attached because Mendelsohn notices how important they are to his mother and grandfather:
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For years I knew this picture through a photocopy I had made in high school: my mother kept the original, which had come from her father‘s precious album, along with others like it, in a sealed plastic baggie in a carton stored in a closed cabinet in our basement. (Mendelsohn 2008: 70)
Since his grandfather and mother are so attached to these photographs of a man who looks like him, Mendelsohn himself gets more attached to Shmiel and his family through their photographs.
Finally, the photographs offer Mendelsohn a material link to the past. Both Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes have established that photographs evoke ―a double moment of historical awareness; of being both in the present and in the past‖ (Dant & Gilloch 2002: 5). It enables the viewers in the present to look into the past. Similarly, Marianne Hirsch argues that photographs provide an integral link for the postgeneration, ―who in their desire for memory and knowledge are left to track the traces of what was there and no longer is‖ (2012: 110- 111). The photographs ―materialize‖ memory (111). For example, when Mendelsohn describes the earliest known photograph of Shmiel, he underscores that the photograph materialises how the memory of Shmiel‘s appearance was conveyed to him. Without the photographs, he would not have a materialised memory of Shmiel‘s appearance.
In this picture Shmiel is remarkably handsome, as we have all been told he was: ripe jaw, full lips, even features, the beautiful hollows in his eyes, deep-set, blue… well, I know they were blue, even if this picture can‘t tell us that. (Mendelsohn 2008: 69)
Barthes also attributes the idea of ‗ça-a-été‘ or the ‗having-been-there‘ to photographs. On the one hand, photographs have ―as Barthes would say, evidential force‖, they prove that the subjects in the picture have existed, that they have been there (Hirsch 2012: 110). On the other hand, the photographs can simultaneously give ―a stab of awareness that what is present and visible in the photograph is irretrievably lost in the past‖ (Dant & Gilloch 2002: 5). Therefore, photographs can be extremely frustrating to the postgeneration. ―The still picture captures, refers to, an instant in time that, when we look at the picture, is over, irrecoverable‖ (Hirsch 2012: 111). ―They affirm the past‘s existence and, in their flat two-dimensionality, they signal its unbridgeable distance‖ (Hirsch 2002: 23). Thus, photographs can have a double effect on Mendelsohn. They bring him closer to the lost relatives, but they also remind him that the distance between him and subjects in the photographs is unbridgeable.
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3.7.2 The effects of photographs on the survivors
Mendelsohn often shows the photographs of Shmiel and his family to the survivors he interviews. His goal is to trigger memories by means of the photographs.
I have some pictures to show you, I said to Anna. To trigger her memories, I‘d brought my folder of old family photographs, the ones I‘d brought to Sydney, too. (Mendelsohn 2008: 297)
In some cases, this worked and the survivors indeed started talking after seeing the pictures. As Hirsch states, ―[t]he fragmentariness and the two-dimensional flatness of the photographic image (…) make it especially open to narrative elaboration and embroidery, and to symbolization‖ (2012: 38). In this example as well, the sight of the beautiful Frydka triggers Anna to start talking.
This is Frydka with Malka Grossbard and Pepci Diamant. Anna immediately pointed to Meg‘s face and, like someone taking a winning trick in a card game, gathered up the picture and said, Malka! Then she said, Frydka var zeyer sheyn – zeyer sheyn! […] I want to tell you a fact, Anna said, looking at this picture of the fourteen-year-old Frydka, and she started talking. (Mendelsohn 2008: 298)
Another possible effect of the photographs on the survivors is concerned with Barthes‘ idea of ‗ça-a-été‘ (Dant & Gilloch 2002: 5). As said, on the one hand, they prove that these subjects existed and thus have an ―evidential force‖ (Hirsch 2012: 110). For example, Boris Goldsmith believes there were only three daughters. The photographs prove otherwise.
Boris looked surprised. He had three girls, he said. I just remember three girls. Well, I said, there were four, but—I don‘t think there were four. I don‘t think so… Boris picked up the picture of Shmiel, Ester and Bronia, which by then had circled the table and come his place. I picked up some other photos and, leaning across the table, pointed. Lorka, Frydka, Ruchele, and Bronia, I said. (Mendelsohn 2008: 188-189)
On the other hand, the photographs can remind the survivors that the people depicted in them are irretrievably lost in the past (Dant & Gilloch 2002: 5). We discussed that to the postgeneration, this could have a frustrating effect. To the first generation however, to whom the people in the pictures were friends or family, seeing their faces again after sixty years
55 seems to mainly provoke a sense of melancholy and grief. For example, the photographs have this effect on Meg Grossbard, according to Mendelsohn:
[…] Matt asked her to hold a photograph of her old friend Frydka as he shot her portrait, and just as the shutter clicked some memory washed over her and, as the final picture, which you will never see, clearly shows, she closed her eyes in grief, so that the picture that resulted shows the seamed face of an elegant if diminutive woman who is holding, in her immaculately manicured hand, a snapshot of a dreamy-looking, self- serious young girl whose eyes are wide open, although of course it is the old woman‘s eyes who are open, now, while those of the girl closed forever sixty years ago. (Mendelsohn 2008: 260)
While talking to Meg Grossbard, Mendelsohn discovers another possible effect these photographs might have on the survivors. Some of the witnesses he interviews have survived ―with literally nothing but themselves‖ and have not seen photographs of their lost friends in over sixty years (182). The photographs could summon a feeling of injustice to the survivors. Not only are they reminded that there friends died undeservedly, but also do they know that they have no photographs left of their relatives, while this American who did not even know them has a family archive.
How stupid, how insensitive I had been. At the moment Mrs. Grossbard said That was her parents, I realized that she wasn‘t merely confirming the identity of the people in the photograph; I realized that what she was saying, in a way, was that she was laying eyes on faces she hadn‘t seen […] in sixty years. I imagined that it must seem unfair to her to have this young American man intervene in her life, suddenly, fanning out photographs of people he never knew […] when she had no photographs of her own parents to look at. (182)
Mendelsohn sees the paradox in this situation: these people were rich in memories but have no keepsakes, whereas he has many keepsakes but no memories to go with them (182).
A final effect that these photographs can have on the survivors in The Lost, is presented by the reaction of Anna towards the images of Lorka, Ruchele and Bronia:
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The children, I don‘t recognise them anymore. I pointed out Lorka to her with my finger. […] She said, I don‘t think this is Lorka. She said she sees Lorka in her mind, and this is not Lorka. (304-305)
Mendelsohn does not explicitly prove her wrong, but we are still inclined to believe that the girl in the photograph is in fact Lorka. Anna has not seen Lorka‘s face in over sixty years. Chances are that in those years she has formed an image in her head that has diverted from reality. This reaction makes us think about the role of photographs in our lives and the way we take images for granted. Mendelsohn also discusses this issue.
How casually we rely on photographs, really; how lazy we have become because of them. What does your mother look like? someone will want to know; and you‘ll say, Wait, I‘ll show you, and run to the drawer or an album and say, Here she is. But what if you had no photographs of your mother, or anyone in your family—indeed, even of yourself before a certain age? How would you explain what she, they, you, looked like? (182)
Mendelsohn notices that we think of photographs as self-evident and understands how difficult his request to describe his lost relatives is to the survivors.
3.7.3 The effects of photographs on the readers
Two kinds of photographs are included in the novel. Firstly, some of the photographs of Shmiel, Ester and the four girls that Mendelsohn shows the interviewees are included in the novel.10 Secondly, Daniel Mendelsohn‘s brother, Matthew Mendelsohn, is a photographer who joined his brother on many trips. He took beautiful pictures of every survivor they interviewed. ―I heard the distinctive and by now familiar noise of the shutter on Matt‘s camera opening and closing: not so much a click as a k-shonck‖ (Mendelsohn 2008: 258). The novel also exhibits several photographs that Matt Mendelsohn took of these surviving and testifying Bolechowers.11 These two categories of photographs could have different effects on the readers.
10 Examples of the photographs of Shmiel, Ester and their four daughters can be found on pages 75, 194, 213 and 305. 11 Examples of the photographs of the testifying survivors can be found on pages 127, 129, 143, 181, 259, 360, 376, 382, 389, 430, 445 and 452. 57
Firstly, the photographs of Mendelsohn‘s lost relatives can personalise the story for the readers. By seeing the faces of the victims, the readers tend to empathise more with them. According to Hirsch, ―the photos can bridge the gap between viewers who are personally connected to the event and those who are not. They can expand the postmemorial circle‖ (2002: 251). Just like the photographs materialise the memory for Mendelsohn, who only knows their appearances through photographs as well, the pictures materialise the story for the readers.
Secondly, the pictures of the survivors that are included in the novel can have two paradoxical effects. On the one hand, they can again personalise the story for the readers. The photographs connect a story to an individual, to a person we can see and with whom we can empathise. One the other hand, the multitude of photographs can have the exact opposite effect. Since so many stories are told and so many photographs are included, it can be difficult for the reader to remember which story belonged to which individual. The multitude of information can make the stories and the faces indistinct from each other. As Hirsch states, they ―serve less to individualize then to generalize: in the photographs‘ multiplicity, the names become anonymous and generic‖ (2002: 254). Thus, the photographs, which individualise each distinct story, can eventually end up having a generalising effect on the reader. But this does not undermine the strength of the stories, on the contrary. The multitude of names, photographs and stories the readers saw and read, can remind us that there are countless stories like these to be told. The novel then achieves what its title has predicted. It is not just a story about the six relatives, it is not even just a story about the survivors of Bolechow, but it is also a story about the six million stories left untold.
3.8 References to myth in Daniel Mendelsohn‘s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
As we have already briefly discussed, myths and fairy tales often appear in fictional novels by third-generation authors to fill in unknowable aspects of the past (Codde 2009: 64). Codde explains that ―[m]yth and fairy tales provide the third generation with a means to imaginatively approach and represent an otherwise unknowable and/or irrepresentable past‖ (73). Fictional authors like Foer and Budnitz incorporate these myths into the main story, they ―take the imaginative leap implied by the concept of postmemory […] to fill in the blanks left by their absent history‖ (64). Since Mendelsohn is a non-fictional author, he cannot do this.
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However, Mendelsohn also often refers to myths, especially the ones from the Torah, but he uses them in a different way than writers of prose fiction do.
Mendelsohn occasionally refers to Homer‘s Odyssee and Vergil‘s Aeneid, but the most important myths he draws upon are definitely the ones from the Torah. Throughout the novel, several passages are included in italics in which he discusses five ‗parashas‘ of the Hebrew Bible. Mendelsohn draws upon the work of the biblical commentators Rashi and Friedman, and adds his own ideas as well. The five parashas that he discusses, also structure his novel. The Lost is divided into five parts, all named after a particular parashah that is thematically somewhat related to the content of the part: Bereishit, Cain and Abel, Noach, Lech Lecha and Vayeira. Besides slightly imparting the readers in the stories of the Torah, these references contribute to the novel in the following three ways.
Firstly, the references to myths create parallel stories which mirror elements of the central plot. The highest level of the novel, that of the quest itself, is for example symbolised by the different interpretations that Rashi and Friedman often formulate on the same excerpt. Mostly, there is no way of knowing which analysis is correct. This mirrors the central story in that the interviewees often have different versions of the same event, just like Mendelsohn‘s elder relatives had different opinions on events as well. For example:
These elderly Jews tended to interrupt one another a lot […], cutting off one another‘s stories to make corrections, remind one another what had really happened at this or that vahnderfoll or (more likely) tahrrible time […]. (Mendelsohn 2008: 6)
Just like we cannot know whether Rashi or Friedman is correct, we cannot always know which version of the event happened in reality. Another symbolical comment on the difficulties of the quest is provided by one of the references to the Odyssee. Mendelsohn‘s comment on how Odysseus‘ travels could be adventurous and surprising implicitly refers to his own travels.
For anyone who‘s travelled extensively knows that, although you may think you know what you‘re looking for and where you‘re going when you first set out, what you learn along the way is often quite surprising. (267)
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Just like Odysseus was surprised by what he came across during his travels, Mendelsohn is often surprised by what he encounters. As he set out, he did not expect to hear all these astonishing stories and discover what he did, not only about his lost relatives, but also about himself and his family. A final example to show that the references mirror the quest is that an ancient scribe forgot to write a certain line in the Torah and ―because he was, after all, only human (and we know what lapses human memory is prey to), […] that one line […] was irretrievably lost‖ (122). Here Mendelsohn mirrors the fact that in the story of his family, certain elements get irretrievable lost because of lapses in the human memory.
The references to myths also reflect upon the storyline on Mendelsohn‘s family. For example, the discussion of the myth of Cain and Abel refers to three different troublesome relationships between siblings in The Lost: Abraham and Shmiel Jäger, Daniel and Matt Mendelsohn and metaphorically, Ukranians and Jews. In the myth, Cain kills his brother Abel for no particular reason but envy and resentment. Of course Abraham Jäger does not kill his brother and neither does Daniel Mendelsohn kills his, but they both seem to have hurt and failed them. Abraham Jäger has failed his brother by not helping him enough to escape Bolechow, as we have discussed. Daniel Mendelsohn often admits that he had a troubled relationship with his younger brother Matt. He hurt his brother physically by breaking his arm when they were younger and he notes that he knows ―how brothers, for reasons that no archival document can ever illuminate, can fail each other‖ (61). ―Cain‘s failure as a brother‖ mirrors these difficult relationships between the brothers in the story. Metaphorically, Ukranians and Jews were also siblings who lived closely together. Mendelsohn explicitly links this relationship which turned into hatred and murder to the myth of Cain and Abel.
I think of how resentful Cain is – of how envious certain farmers must be of those others who, although born on the same soil, the same country, seem to be luckier […]. I think of how the natural tension between siblings, between those who grow up in close quarters and know one another too well, can be exacerbated by these economic resentments and envies. […] And I think of other kinds of siblings, too, those who grew up in close quarters and know another too well, some forced to work the land, the others, seemingly luckier, more blessed, able to wander here and there with their (seemingly) ever-increasing wealth. I think, naturally, of Ukrainians and Jews. (109)
Sibling rivalry is an important theme in The Lost and the myth of Cain and Abel mirrors this theme. Other examples of mirror stories to the central plot include a reference to Abram and his family who had to flee out of Egypt, their ―homeland from which they are forced to flee 60 during a time of crisis‖, which mirrors the story of the Jägers who emigrated from Bolechow (313). A final example is the ark of Noah, which is compared to the hiding-places of Jews during the Holocaust. ―In these modern-day arks, too, the humans were utterly helpless, […] passive inhabitants of darkened spaces from which, eventually, they too would emerge, like Noah, like Moses, blinking into the light‖ (243).
Secondly, these references to myths in non-fiction create the opportunity to comment indirectly on moral implications related to the Holocaust and present these issues as understandable. For example, Mendelsohn questions the justice in the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. No valid reason is given as to why these cities have to be destroyed:
[T]he condemned don‘t seem to have been informed of the charges against them— charges that, at least in the text that we have, are neither named nor, indeed, ever proved, which is worrisome when the accused is an entire population. (468)
This passage shows a clear parallel with the situation of the Jews in the Holocaust and the injustice of the mass-murder. Obviously, this prosecution was absolutely immoral, and the novel does not question this. But the issue of Sodom and Gomorrah raises other questions, about the issue of responsibility and the guilt of the perpetrator.
Even if there were fewer than then good Sodomites—even if, let‘s say, there were only one righteous person in the whole vast metropolis—wouldn‘t it be unjust to kill him along with the guilty? Or even this: As long as there is one good inhabitant of the country of the wicked, can we say that the entire nation is guilty? (469)
Through the myth of Sodom and Gomorrah, Mendelsohn here reflects upon the question of the guilt of the perpetrating nation. Should we condemn all Germans for initiating the Holocaust? Should we blame all the Ukrainians for suppressing the Jews? Mendelsohn does not explicitly ask these questions associated with the Holocaust, but they are implicated in the myth. He does not answer the questions either, but the fact that he raises them in the first place, seems to be a warning that we should try not to blame all inhabitants of the perpetrating countries.
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Finally, the references to myths in Mendelsohn‘s non-fiction prose are also used to universalise the story in two ways. Firstly, by referring to well-known stories with universal themes like justice, the relationships between siblings or knowledge, which are also important themes in Mendelsohn‘s story, the novel becomes more understandable and people can more easily identify with the themes. It can also makes the readers realise that the Holocaust, while an exceptional and horrendous historical fact, can to some extent be associated with very universal themes. It can make the readers be aware of what humans are capable of doing to each other. Secondly, it universalises the story of the Jäger family. Friedman observes that the Torah focuses on Abram and his family since ―often it is the small things, rather than the big picture, that the mind can comfortably grasp: that, for instance, it is naturally more appealing to readers to absorb the meaning of a vast historical event through the story of a single family‖ (ibid., 18). This mirrors exactly what Mendelsohn is doing in his novel. He focuses on a single family, but through the myths he connects their story to the entire Holocaust, thus making it universal. Through the six lost relatives, he actually refers to six million lost ones.
3.9 Testimonial objects in Edmund De Waal‘s The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance
Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer define ‗testimonial objects‘ as ―images, objects and memorabilia from the past [that are] ―points of memory‖ – points of intersection between past and present, memory and postmemory, personal remembrance and cultural recall‖ (2006: 358). We consider De Waal‘s collection of netsuke to be testimonial objects. They are indeed points of intersection between past and present, since they are presently in De Waal‘s possession and he knows to whom they belonged and, more or less, what happened to them in the past. They are also points of intersection between memory and postmemory, as the definition says. To De Waal‘s great-uncle Iggie, the netsuke are objects of memory, as they are able to remind him of his family and his life in Vienna before the Anschluss. To De Waal, they are objects of postmemory. He has no literal memories of his relatives‘ past, but their experiences and in extension their relationships to the netsuke ―were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right‖ (Hirsch 2012: 5). For him, the netsuke instigate ―an obsession with the opaque and inaccessible past‖ of his ancestors (Codde 2009: 64). Finally, they are also points of intersection between personal remembrance and cultural recall. On the hand they are objects of personal remembrance, they remind the members of the Ephrussi family of their family history. On the other hand, they 62 are also objects of cultural recall. They prove for example the cultural taste of ‗japonisme‘ in fin-de-siècle Paris, when Charles Ephrussi bought these Japanese netsuke.
These testimonial objects play an important role in De Waal‘s The Hare with Amber Eyes. Hirsch mentions that ―testimonial objects‖ […] [can] structure plots of return: they can embody memory and thus trigger affect shared across generations‖ (2012: 206). This is precisely the role that the netsuke play in The Hare with Amber Eyes, the historical path of the netsuke structures De Waal‘s quest and consequently the novel. Furthermore, ―material remnants can serve as testimonial objects enabling us to focus crucial questions both about the past itself and about how the past comes down to us in the present‖ (Hirsch & Spitzer 2006: 355). The netsuke serve both purposes in the novel. They enable De Waal to ask questions about the past, as they lead him to his ancestors throughout the novel. He follows the netsuke‘s travels and thoroughly studies the situation in their home cities and the lives of their owners. For example:
In March 1899, Charles‘ generous wedding gift [i.e. the netsuke] for Viktor and Emmy is carefully crated up and taken from the avenue d‘Iéna, leaving the golden carpet, the Empire fauteuils and the Moreaus. It travels across Europe and is delivered to the Palais Ephrussi in Vienna, on the corner of the Ringstrasse and the Schottengasse. It is time to stop walking with Charles and reading about Parisian interiors, and start reading Die Neue Freie Presse and concentrating on Viennese street life at the turn of the century. (De Waal 2010: 111)
The transmission of the netsuke also raises some questions about how the past comes down to us, in the novel. De Waal addresses the issue of transmission early in the novel.
There is no easy story in legacy. What is remembered and what is forgotten? There can be a chain of forgetting, the rubbing away of previous ownership as much as the slow accretion of stories. What is being passed on to me with all these small Japanese objects? (17)
The testimonial objects, the netsuke, teach us some things about the past. Firstly, they ―authenticate the past; they trigger memories and connect them […] to a particular place and time. They also help to recall shared experiences and fleeting friendships‖ (Hirsch & Spitzer
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2006: 367). The fact that the netsuke managed to maintain in the Ephrussi family and end up with Edmund De Waal, authenticates the actions of Anna, the maid who saved the netsuke from the Gestapo.
So I would slip three of four of the little figures from the Baroness‘s dressing-room, the little toys you played with when you were children—you remember—and I put them into the pocket of my apron whenever I was passing, and I took them to my room. I hid them in the mattress of my bed. (De Waal 2010: 278)
If it weren‘t for Anna, the netsuke would have disappeared like most other possessions of the Ephrussis. The netsuke authenticate this event simply by being with De Waal in the present. Secondly, the fact that Anna saved the netsuke shows that she was unwilling to be completely governed by the Gestapo. Saving these small objects was an act of resistance against the powerful regime. According to Hirsch and Spitzer, there is a ―deep connection between miniaturization, confinement, and power. The miniature offers the powerless the fantasy of hiding, of escape, and of a victory over the powerful jailors.‖ (2006: 375-376). Taking and hiding the netsuke must have felt like a victory to Anna. In financial value, these small objects did not make much of a difference compared to what the Ephrussis lost, but in the present, it has symbolical value. It shows us that Anna, the subordinated maid, was not willing to surrender completely and that she believed that times would change again. Thus, the collection of netsuke is a ―testament to a faith in the future – to a time yet to come when [these events] will be recalled. It is thus an expression of reassurance – of a will to survive‖ (367).
The testimonial object can show us some things about Edmund De Waal‘s position as well. As Assmann says, ―though objects and places do not themselves carry qualities of past lives, they do hold whatever we ourselves project onto them or invest them with‖ (quoted in Hirsch 2012: 211). De Waal receives the netsuke and is triggered by them to embark on a quest to discover his family‘s history. This may mean that he always wanted to know his roots, and projected this need on the objects, using them as a guide to explore his history. By giving the netsuke an important role in his life, De Waal ―reconnect[s] some of the disparate parts of [his] life [and] find[s] continuity with a severed past‖ (215). He enables some part of his family‘s legacy to remain in the family, not to be admired or safeguarded but to create a perpetuation to the family story. The ending of the novel illustrates this.
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This last vitrine I think will be a good place for the netsuke. It is next to the piano, and unlocked so that the children can open the door if they wish to. (…) A rat, curled up asleep, has been pushed to the front. I open the glass door and pick it up. I slip it into my pocket, put the dog on the lead and leave for work. I have pots to make. The netsuke begin again. (De Waal 2010: 351)
In the end, De Waal‘s focus is no longer on the past but on the future, thus creating a sense of continuity.
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4. Conclusion
Forgetfulness leads to exile while remembrance is the secret of redemption. - The Ba‘al Shem Tov
The impact of a family legacy, shaped by a traumatic event like the Holocaust, can continue unto the third generation. Many scholars like Bar-On, Sicher, Hirsch or Hoffman have established that ―[t]he grandchildren of survivors are still deeply affected by their elders‘ experiences, memories, accounts‖ (Hoffman 2004: 185). The relationship that ―the generation after‖ bears to their ancestors‘ trauma, is described by Hirsch‘s concept of postmemory (2012: 5). The experiences of the generations before were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories of their own (5). Codde argues that postmemory manifests itself in the third generation as ―an obsession with the opaque and inaccessible past of one‘s parents or grandparents‖ (2009: 64). At the same time, the third generation can feel responsible for exploring their family‘s traumatic past, since the generation of actual witnesses is starting to pass away. The combination of the obsession with the past and the sense of responsibility to transmit the memory of the Holocaust to following generations, has urged many third-generation survivors to investigate their past. For third-generation writers Daniel Mendelsohn and Edmund De Waal, this has led respectively to their novels The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million and The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance. In this paper, we have discussed how postmemory has influenced these non-fictional literary novels.
After having given an overview of what postmemory is and having discussed some typical characteristics of the first, second and third generation, we indulged in a close reading of the two novels. We have established that they are both works of postmemory on the basis of their relationship towards their ancestors‘ trauma of the Holocaust. This postmemorial relationship caused them to embark on a quest to discover their family story. We have noticed that Mendelsohn includes his readers in every step of this quest, while De Waal focuses more on the results of his quest. In Mendelsohn‘s quest, we have identified the silence of his grandfather, the temporal distance, the spatial distance and the lack of witnesses as the biggest difficulties to overcome. Then, we have discussed the communicative and cultural memory in both novels and we have established that they are in the transit zone between both forms of memory. The novels consequently also contribute to making the remembrance of the Holocaust in the future more personal. Afterwards, we have clarified how postmemory seems
66 to have had an influence on the authors‘ identities. Mendelsohn was perceived as a memorial candle, we have established that this increases the possibility of his identity being influenced by postmemory. We have discussed how his relationship towards his lost relatives and towards Judaism and the traditions of the Old Country, seems to have affected his identity. De Waal too seems to be influenced by postmemory, especially by the responsibility he feels towards his ancestors‘ story. Next, the representation of certain significant postmemorial aspects was looked at. The issue of mediation has an important role in these quests, the fact that the third-generation writers always had to rely on interpretations of others, is represented in several ways. Especially Mendelsohn focuses on this issue and often refers to it both explicitly and implicitly. Also the idea of received history, the notion that the authors‘ reception of the story influences its representation, is relevant in the novels. We have discussed in which way we notice that reception influences Mendelsohn‘s novel and we have noticed that Mendelsohn makes his readers aware that his novel is an example of received history. De Waal‘s reception of the story has also influenced his novel, in that he sometimes indulges in postmemorial invention. Unlike Mendelsohn, he does not alert his readers on this fact much. A final aspect of representation we have discussed is the way of storytelling. As the third-generation writers are the guardians of their family stories, we have discussed how both Mendelsohn and De Waal are concerned with how to tell these stories. Subsequently, we have focused on the postmemorial representations of the perpetrators and the victims in the novels. Firstly, we have identified the survivor‘s guilt in some of Mendelsohn‘s interviewees. We have noticed how Mendelsohn implicitly seems to think of his grandfather‘s survivor‘s guilt as valid, as he does not understand why he did not try to help his brother more. De Waal seems to feel guilty himself for his netsuke being saved while so many people were killed. Then, we have discussed the identity of the perpetrator and the viewpoints of the authors towards them. We ended with a discussion of the grey zone and Mendelsohn‘s attitude towards it. Afterwards, we have examined the role of photographs in The Lost. We have noticed that the pictures of Mendelsohn‘s relatives seem to have different effects on Mendelsohn himself, his interviewees and the readers. Furthermore, we have discovered that the photographs of the survivors can have a double effect on the readers: they both individualise and generalise the stories. Subsequently, we have discovered that Mendelsohn‘s references to the myths of the Torah create a parallel plot of the central storyline, that they enable Mendelsohn to comment on moral implications and that they universalise his story. Finally, we have identified the netsuke as testimonial objects in De Waal‘s novel, which both teach us about the past and about De Waal himself in the present.
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Daniel Mendelsohn‘s The Lost and Edmund De Waal‘s The Hare with Amber Eyes are both written as a result of their authors‘ relationship to their families‘ traumatic past. On the one hand, it has cultural value, since it prevents these stories from being forgotten. On the other hand, it also has personal value for the authors. These third-generation writers can hardly be called traumatised anymore, but as we have seen, their personal and intellectual project can be described as an obsession with the obscure and unreachable past of their grandparents (Codde 2009: 64). By unraveling and writing down this past, or at least everything there can still be known about it now, their obsession seems in some extent dissolved. The final words of both novels illustrate this. De Waal starts his story in the past and ends it in the present. His final words in The Hare with Amber Eyes are words of continuity, of looking towards the future instead of the past:
A rat, curled up asleep, has been pushed to the front. I open the glass and pick it up. I slip it into my pocket, put the dog on the lead and leave for work. I have pots to make. The netsuke begin again. (De Waal 2010: 351)
Mendelsohn‘s final words in The Lost signify two symbolical meanings. For years, Mendelsohn was constantly looking back at the past, obsessing over what happened exactly. When in the end, he finds out everything there is to know, he plans to literally look back at Bolechow while driving away. However, he is distracted and is too late to look back. One the one hand this is a metaphor for him being too late to see Bolechow, to know the story of his relatives. On the other hand, this also signifies that he is done looking back at Bolechow now and that, like he says, he is ‗leaving it forever‘:
I told myself that I‘d look through the back window and stare at the little town as it receded, because I wanted to be able to remember not only what the place looked like when you were arriving there, but what it looked like when you were leaving it forever. […] [W]e all started talking at once, telling the remarkable story of what we had found and where we had walked, and by the time I remembered to turn around and take that one last look, we had traveled too far, and Bolechow had slipped out of sight. (Mendelsohn 2008: 503)
Thus, by writing their family stories, Mendelsohn and De Waal prevent them from going into exile and at the same time, they redeem their own obsession with the subject, just like the Ba‘al Shem Tov has taught.
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