University of Kentucky UKnowledge Literature in General English Language and Literature 2014 The Shriek of Silence: A Phenomenology of the Holocaust Novel David Patterson Oklahoma State University Click here to let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Thanks to the University of Kentucky Libraries and the University Press of Kentucky, this book is freely available to current faculty, students, and staff at the University of Kentucky. Find other University of Kentucky Books at uknowledge.uky.edu/upk. For more information, please contact UKnowledge at [email protected]. Recommended Citation Patterson, David, "The Shriek of Silence: A Phenomenology of the Holocaust Novel" (2014). Literature in General. 3. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_literature_in_general/3 THE SHRIEK OF SILENCE This page intentionally left blank THE OFSILENCE APhenomenology of the Holocaust Novel DAVID PATTERSON THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY Copyright © 1992 by The University Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine College, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Club, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. Editorial and Sales Offices: Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Patterson, David, 1948- The shriek of silence : a phenomenology of the Holocaust novel / David Patterson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8131-6013-9 1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in literature. 2. Jewish fiction-History and criticism. I. Title. PN56.H55P38 1992 809' .93358-dc20 91-17269 This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. § Contents Prologue / 1 1 Theoretical Background / 3 2 The Word in Exile / 29 3 The Death of the Father / 54 4 The Death of the Child / 77 5 The Splitting of the Self / 98 6 The Resurrection of the Self / 123 7 The Implication of the Reader / 145 Epilogue / 168 Works Cited / 170 Index / 177 This page intentionally left blank For MiriaIll and Rachel and, with deepest love and gratitude, for Illy wife, Gerri This page intentionally left blank Prologue "And it came to pass in those days that terror denied all languages and frontiers" (Wiesel, Six Days 5). For those were days invaded by night, the days of the reign of the Kingdom of Night. They are days that haunt and harrow all subsequent days, words, and deeds, cutting through the frontiers of language and meaning that might once have divided light from darkness. Terror has undone time and with it that being that once inhabited the heart of human being, the being of the word. "There is no peace for'the darkened valleys," Amos Oz has said, "something is rising up in the night, something is mounting, gather­ ing, something is silently happening" (144). Something-davar-mah in the Hebrew text (153)-"some word" that is not a word, a sound that is not a sound, bursts forth between word andwordina shriekof silence. From this emerges the Holocaust novel. "It is true," Elie Wiesel once told me, commenting on the event of the novel's creation. "I descend ... somewhere." He, like the others addressed in these pages, beckons us to follow-to a place that is no place, where the word is swallowed up into words. It is a place where there is "no connection," to borrow a phrase from Martin Buber, "rather shriek, shriek, and in between them the abyss" (Daniel 86). By what method shall we proceed to such a place? How shall we under­ take such an investigation? Buber offers a suggestion: "Imagine that at some dreadful midnight you lie there, tormented by a waking dream: the bulwarks have crumbled and the abysses scream, andyou realize in the midst of this agony that life is still there and I must merely get through to it-but how? how? Thus feels man in the hours when he collects himself: overcome by horror, pondering, without direction" (1 and Thou llQ). Life is still there; the heart continues to beat when it should have come to a stop. Holding these novels in our hands attests to that. Yet in the text that we hold in our hands lurks the horror that threatens us, the exile thatimplicates us. The method, therefore, settles nothing. Indeed, it is unsettling in the extreme, and that is the point: to speak and break in the effort to respond to the testimony entrusted to us. For unless we are broken byourresponse to the voice and the event of the Holocaust novel, we can never open up to its outcry. Only by becoming such a wound do we gain even the tiniest access to these wounded ones. 2 THE SHRIEK OF SILENCE Itis from the midst ofa wound that Ka-tzetnik135633, for instance, writes, "I shootup from the launch-pile ofskeletonsinto the tempestof my own cry of Passion" (Shivitti 104)~ The outcry that arises from the skeletal remains of life and language constitutes the Holocaust novel and the voices that inhabit it. Aharon Appelfeld, for example, creates a character in Tzili: The Story of a Life who harbors the very outcry of which the novel is made. In an endeavor indicative of the author's own endeavor, the character struggles to articulate to his friends the pros­ pect of redemption. But no one listens to him. And so, "the whole night he sat and wailed. Through his wailing the history of his life emerged" (146). In a similar way Mordi bespeaks his author's effort to speak in The Chocolate Deal by Haim Gouri when he describes the days and nights that he spent hiding in a cellar: "I thought that periodically I'd shriek one day-long shriek which would earn me the title of Cham­ pion5hrieker" (56). The character, however, remains silent; yetitis just through his silence that the authors shriek makes itself heard. What, we ask, is the substance of that shriek? One more example, from Ka-tzetnik's Star of Ashes, will tell us. "Children," he writes, "push against their mothers belly, as if seeking to get inside once more. Theirscream, embryonic, unuttered, howls outoftheirmother's eyes" (53). Thus the author p~shes against the belly of life's origin, his shriekofsilence howling through the invisible eyes ofhis character. We read thewords, butwedo notsee those eyes; weencounterthesilence, but we do not hear the shriek. The task of this book is to make those eyes visible, to make that shriek heard. What, then, is curled up in this shriek that frames and infiltrates the novel? What do we now setout to hear, if we can find the courage? A passage from Elie Wiesel's Some­ where a Master may offer a response: 1/An appeal, an outcry to God on behalf of His desperate people and also on His behalf, an offering to night, to heaven, an offering made by wise old men and quiet children to mark the end oflanguage-a burning secretburied in silence" (201). 50we take up the pursuitof the secretand its fire and goinquestofthe silence and its shriek. 1 Theoretical Background "Let him who wants fervor not seek it on the mountain peaks," the Maggid of Mezeritch once said. "Rather let him stoop and search among the ashes" (see Wiesel, Souls 71). Since1945, however, the world has lived ona mountainof ashes-the ashes ofchildren, ashes of God's chosen, ashes of God Himself. The winds of Auschwitz have quite literally, quite graphically, scattered the people of the Covenant, and with them the Covenant itself, over the face of the earth. The people inhabit the soil that yields our bread; they haunt the air we breathe. I have heard at least one survivor declare that, when the breeze blows from a certain direction, she can still smell the odorthat oozed from the chimneys of the death camps. As Amost Lustig expressed it in his novel A Prayer for Katerina Horovitzova, These ashes would be indestructible and immutable, they would not burn up into nothingness because they themselves were remnants of fire.... No one living wouldeverbe able to escape them; these ashes wouldbecontainedinthe milk that will be drunk by babies yet unborn and in the breasts their mothers offer them. ... These ashes will be contained in the breath and expression of everyone ofus and thenext time anybodyasks whattheair hebreathesis made of, he will have to think about these ashes; they will be contained in books which haven't yet been writtenand will be found in the remotest regions of the earth where no human foot has ever trod; no one will be able to get rid of them, for they will be the fond, nagging ashes of the dead who died in innocence. [50-51] What the translator rendered as the"expression" ofeveryone ofus is in the original Czech pohled, which means "look, glance, sight, view"; the very image of the humanbeing is cast in these ashes. The phrase "have to think about" bears in the Czech text a stronger moral and existential injunction in the word povinen, suggesting duty, obligation, compul­ sion (41). Failing to answer to these ashes would mean falling short of human being. Hearing such testimony, one cannot help but recall the outcry raised by Nelly Sachs: "0the chimneys ... And Israel's bodyas smoke through the air!" (3). Thus was the light unto the nations consumed. Or is it hidden among the ashes? Indeed, it is among the ashes that the authors before us seek what was lost. 4 THE SHRIEK OF SILENCE What, exactly, was lost? Elie Wiesel has one response to this ques­ tion.