A Critical Approach to the Holocaust Short Story

THE COLLAPSE OF TIME, HOME, AND RELATIONSHIPS:

A CRITICAL APPROACH TO THE HOLOCAUST SHORT STORY

Mary Catherine Mueller

APPROVED BY SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE:

. Dr. David A. Patterson, Chair

. Dr. Zsuzsanna Ozsváth

. Dr. Nils Roemer

. Dr. Rainer Schulte

Mary Catherine Mueller

To my family

In memory of my father, Clem In honor of my mother, Pamela

THE COLLAPSE OF TIME, HOME, AND RELATIONSHIPS:

A CRITICAL APPROACH TO THE HOLOCAUST SHORT STORY

MARY CATHERINE MUELLER, BA, MA

DISSERTATION

Presented to the Faculty of

The University of Texas at Dallas

in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements

for the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN

HUMANITITES – STUDIES IN LITERATURE

THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT DALLAS

May 2018 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; His mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is Thy faithfulness.” – Lamentations 3:22-23

To my professors: I am grateful for each one of you whom I have had the pleasure of learning from and working with throughout my academic journey. I am also thankful for the financial assistance that I received throughout my graduate and doctoral studies; I would not have been able to complete my doctoral studies without financial support in the form of research grants, travel grants, Teaching Assistantships, the Mike Jacobs Fellowship in Holocaust Studies, and

Research Assistantships.

To my Dissertation Committee: My doctoral research and dissertation writing would not have been possible without the guidance and encouragement of my Dissertation Committee – specifically my Chair, Dr. David Patterson. Thank you, Dr. Patterson, for your profound insights, encouraging feedback, and continuous guidance whilst I was researching and writing my dissertation. I will always appreciate the time I spent learning from you. Thank you, Dr.

Zsuzsanna Ozsváth, for your wisdom, mentorship, and friendship. I will always remember our conversations about literature, ideas, and research that we shared while drinking a cup of the

“most incredible espresso in the world!” Thank you, Dr. Nils Roemer, for your leadership and generosity. As you serve as the Director of the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies, I wish to thank you for the financial assistance that I received in the form of research grants, travel grants, and a Research Assistant, for which I was able to continue my doctoral work. I will always appreciate my time at the Ackerman Center and my time learning from and working with you,

Dr. Patterson, and Dr. Ozsváth. In addition to the financial and academic support that I received from the those affiliated with the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies, I wish to thank Dr.

Rainer Schulte, Director of the Center for Translation Studies. Thank you, Dr. Schulte, for your kindness and generosity. I will always be grateful that our paths crossed, and that I was able to work with you as a Research Assistant for the Center for Translation Studies. Finally, I wish to thank each member of my Committee for your patience and understanding when I had to take a break from my dissertation writing to help care for my mother, Pamela, who was in the hospital for over five months battling lymphoma. Your kindness was profound.

To my family and friends: I thank God for you and appreciate you more than words can express.

I would not be here today without the steadfast love, prayer, and encouragement of my mother,

Pamela, and my seven siblings: Tiffany, Bert, Caroline, Juliana, John, Grace, and Matthew.

To my parents: I am also especially grateful for your love and how you instilled in me a love of learning. Mother, I am thankful for the daily example both you and Daddy set for us in how you treated each other and everyone – whether friend or stranger – with love, kindness, and care.

While my father is not here to read this or see me graduate due to losing his battle with stage four inoperable pancreatic cancer almost 10 years ago, I am thankful for having had such a kind, righteous, and wise father, whose unwavering love for the Lord Jesus Christ and for us set an example of walking with God and loving others (Proverbs 20:7).

I am thankful for the opportunity of this unique path that the Lord has led me on to study the

Holocaust throughout my doctoral work, and I am thankful for each person I have met along the way: survivors of the Holocaust, scholars, mentors, peers, colleagues, and friends. Now, as I teach about this topic to my students, I do so in the hopes of encouraging them to always strive to

see the significance of every life, and to always seek to do what is right, what is true, and what is good.

Lastly, I would like to thank every person battling cancer – especially, those fighting pancreatic cancer and lymphoma. You are heroes. This is for you. Thank you.

March 2018

vii THE COLLAPSE OF TIME, HOME, AND RELATIONSHIPS:

A CRITICAL APPROACH TO THE HOLOCAUST SHORT STORY

Mary Catherine Mueller, PhD The University of Texas at Dallas, 2018

ABSTRACT

Supervising Professor: Dr. David A. Patterson

In my dissertation I investigate the various horror scenes of the Holocaust seen through the eyes of the short story. Clearly, the genre of the short story is distinctly different from a novel or a novella. The latter two genres allow the author to engage in extensive descriptions of characters and situations. The element of time and size allows the novelist to describe character developments and objects in great detail. However, the short story must recreate the explosiveness of the moment. In that sense, the short story writer replaces detailed descriptions by the invention of striking tensions in character juxtapositions and unusual images and metaphors. It is the explosiveness of the moment that recreates the horrifying emotional reactions of the reader. The short story lives on the dissonant confrontation of words, images, and sounds.

Thus, it might be said that the short story comes closer to the portrayal of the horrifying pictures of the Holocaust than the novel. The chapters of my dissertation explore the different techniques that short story writers have used to bring the reader closer to the experiences of the daily life in the concentration camps. The main themes that underlie the various chapters of my work deal

viii with the collapse of human relationships, the collapse of the home and the dying of time in the monotony and angst of surrounding death chambers. All of a sudden, man loses an identity and becomes an anti-man who lives in an anti-world. The image for that anti-man gains presence through the character of Muselmann, who has lost all human energy and collapses on the ground in a physical state reminiscent of a person bowing over praying. All of the short stories that I have chosen lead the reader into a never-ending inferno whose doors all open to the death chamber. In each of these stories, as the writers display an enormous creativity in the objects and situations, they have chosen to come closer to an expression of the unending horror that probably cannot fully be expressed through the power of words.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………………………………...v

ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………………………….viii

INTRODUCTION: THE COLLAPSE OF TIME………………………….……………………..1

CHAPTER I: THE FEATURES OF THE HOLOCAUST SHORT STORY…………………...12

CHAPTER II: THE COLLAPSE OF SILENCE: THE ROLE OF SILENCE IN IDA FINK’S SHORT STORIES……………………………………………………………………………….41

CHAPTER III: THE COLLAPSE OF MAN – AND THEN MAN CREATED THE ANTI-MAN: THE ROLE OF THE MUSSELMAN FIGURE IN SELECT SHORT STORIES FROM TADEUSZ BOROWSKI’S THIS WAY FOR THE GAS, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN………...73

CHAPTER IV: THE COLLAPSE OF RELATIONSHIPS AND HOME: THE NAZI ASSAULT ON RELATIONSHIPS, FAMILY, AND HOME AS PORTRAYED IN TWO YIDDISH HOLOCAUST SHORT STORIES……………………………………………………………..108

CHAPTER V: THE COLLAPSE OF MOTHERHOOD AS SEEN IN CYNTHIA OZICK’S SHORT STORY: “THE SHAWL” …………………………………………………………….142

CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………………170

BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………………....174

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH…………………………………………………………………...186

CURRICULUM VITAE………………………………………………………...……………...188

INTRODUCTION

THE COLLAPSE OF TIME

“For two long years [those who went to the crematorium] trod through me, their eyes penetrating mine. And time there, on planet Auschwitz, was not like time here. Each moment there revolved around the cogwheels of a different time-sphere. Hell-years last longer than light- years.”1 – Ka-Tzetnik 135633, Shivitti: A Vision

Like testimonies piecing together the horror and enormity of a crime, Holocaust short stories individually convey a defining aspect of the Nazis’ assault on the soul – the collapse of time and unraveling of human relations. In these short stories, the collapse of time is connected with the collapse of the yet-to-be that constitutes meaningful human relationships. To be in a relationship is to be there for the sake of another, which opens up a response yet to be offered, a task yet to be engaged. In the short story, we see this collapse of time in the form of the explosiveness of a moment, which portrays wherever the relationship to another, for the sake of another, is crushed by oppressive hands of hate and death that yielded the Holocaust and “Planet

Auschwitz.” When addressing the short story, Michael Kardos writes: “There must always be a necessary relationship between a story’s form and its meaning, because a story’s form is part of what creates meaning.”2 While some scholars address these authors and their stories, they tend to approach these stories by situating them in conjunction with other literary genres, rather than as their own genre. Even though there are thousands of Holocaust short stories that address the collapse of time and relationships, this genre is one of the least researched in Holocaust literature.

This lack of critical response to Holocaust short stories must be addressed because the various

1 Ka-tzetnik, Ka-tzetnik 135633, Shivitti: A Vision, trans. Eliyah De-Nur and Lisa Herman (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), xi. 2 Michael Kardos, The Art and Craft of Fiction: A Writer's Guide (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2013), 103.

representations of the Holocaust captured in the short story form are crucial to our understanding of the Shoah. The tight time frame of the Holocaust short story accentuates its testimonial aspect, which in turn, draws the readers into the text as witness to what they have encountered. Clearly, the genre of the short story is distinctly different from a novel or a novella. The latter two genres allow the author to engage in extensive descriptions of characters and situations. The element of time and size allows the novelist to describe character developments and objects in great detail.

However, the short story must recreate the explosiveness of the moment. In that sense, the short story writer replaces detailed descriptions by the invention of striking tensions in character juxtapositions and unusual images and metaphors. It is the explosiveness of the moment that recreates the horrifying emotional reactions of the reader. The short story lives on the dissonant confrontation of words, images, and sounds.

In the following chapters, I shall show how the narrowly focused structure of the short story makes this implication of the reader more immediate and more intense, as compared to the longer, more elaborate forms of Holocaust literature. Thus, it might be said that the short story comes closer to the portrayal of the horrifying pictures of the Holocaust than the novel.

Consequently, the reader undergoes a more abrupt collision with the collapse of time and meaning, which characterizes the human relationships that came under assault at the hands of the

Nazis. The main themes that underlie the various chapters of my work deal with the collapse of human relationships, the collapse of the home and the dying of time in the monotony and angst of surrounding death chambers. All of a sudden, man loses an identity and becomes an anti-man who lives in an anti-world. The image for that anti-man gains presence through the character of

Muselmann, who has lost all human energy and collapses on the ground in a physical state of

reminiscent of a person bowing over praying. I shall demonstrate this aspect of the Holocaust short story through an examination of the works of authors such as: Ida Fink, Tadeusz Borowski,

Rokhl Korn, Frume Halpern, and Cynthia Ozick. In Fink’s stories, I will focus on the internal, psychological impact of the assault on the family structure; in my examination of Borowski’s stories I will move to the external aspect of the “anti-world” (life amid the Holocaust) and its most characteristic inhabitant, the Muselmann; in the Yiddish short stories written by Rokhl

Korn and Frume Halpern, I highlight the extent to which the home and the family structure came under assault under Nazi rule; and in Cynthia Ozick’s stories, I consider the narrative’s portrayal of the collapse of motherhood in Auschwitz. This absence of motherhood, as portrayed in

Ozick’s story, is indicative of the collapse of time, which renders human relationships impossible.

My first chapter will serve as an introduction to the general features of the short story, the unique features of the Holocaust short story, and the reason why one cannot approach reading a short story about the Holocaust the same way one would approach reading a novel, poem, or memoir about the Holocaust. In texts like Jerome Stern’s Making Shapely Fiction or Gilda

Pacheco and Kari Meyers’ The Telling and the Tale: an Introductory Guide to Short, Creative

Prose, literary critics address the various definitions of the “short story.” Consequently, how one can define the “short story” elicits many different answers. When considering the short story, definitions like Norman Friedman’s a “short fictional narrative in prose,”3 or Flannery

O’Connor’s “The short story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way”4 comes to mind. However, while many scholars approach defining the short story as Friedman did, I will

3 Kari Meyers and Gilda Pacheco, The Telling and the Tale: an Introductory Guide to Short, Creative Prose (San José, C.R.: University of Costa Rica Press, 2006), 28. 4 Ibid., 28.

build upon O’Connor’s definition by adding that not only do Holocaust short stories attempt to say what cannot be said, but that their very form reflects the fragmented, broken life of the characters, as these stories capture the moment when death and hate engulfed reality. Therefore, unlike the longer structure of novels, or varied structures of poems or essays, the short story form lends itself to inserting the reader immediately into a narrative that focuses on a particular moment– revealing aspects of the “anti-world” of its character(s) through concise, yet fully developed narrative structures. In studies written by Lawrence Langer, Edward Alexander, Alvin

H. Rosenfeld, or Sidra Ezrahi, scholars have approached Holocaust literary texts and genres through different lenses; nevertheless, one genre missing from their examination is the short story. Scholars of Holocaust literature have not situated their criticism of Holocaust short stories in relation to the stories’ genre, but rather have situated it in relation to the stories’ narrative prose or characterization. Consequently, for one to approach analyzing Holocaust short stories without acknowledging the genre and structure of these stories somewhat teeters on the edges of diminishing the authors’ chosen art form and misconstruing the meaning and purpose of these narratives. Unlike larger literary works that entail sub-plots and utilize their length to gradually knit together a narrative of atrocity, I will address how the literary form of the short story offers an instant glimpse into the lives of its characters by inserting the reader into the world of the story – where the narratives focus on a moment in the characters’ experience of unraveling life as they knew it.

When considering the various forms of these stories, Jerome Stern writes, “The shapes

[various genres] of fiction inspire by presenting ways to embody your experiences, memories, and imaginings. Some of these shapes are particularly suited to the creating of individual scenes,

short stories, or single chapters.”5 Here, the “shape” of the short form lends itself to amplify the various theme(s) inculcated in its narrative. The uniqueness of the short story form lies in its ability to contribute to the literary canon through the microscopic worlds it weaves for its readers.

However, I will address how Holocaust short stories are unique in how they tend to focus on a particular moment capturing the collapsing of time, the rupturing of presuppositions, the crumbling of the world (life before the Holocaust) into the “anti-world,” and the tearing apart of relationships. I will highlight how the form of this genre magnifies this collapsing and tearing apart of worlds and relations through its concise narratives.

The second chapter of my dissertation will examine Ida Fink’s short story collection, A

Scrap of Time and Other Stories, with an emphasis on her utilizing the simplicity of the short story form to reveal a “moment” of the “anti-world” in which the internal family relationships break down. Although most scholars, such as Marek Wilczynski,6 merely address Fink’s work in terms of her ability to weave the notion of memory into her narratives or make note of the internalized language of her prose or her use of “paradoxes,” the tearing apart of family relationships in Fink’s stories has not been examined. For example, in Fink’s “The Key Game,” a boy rehearses finding a “lost” key, in order for his father to hide if or when the Nazis come to their door. This story captures an aspect of the “anti-world” for the reader that demonstrates the tearing of meaning from expression and language. In Fink’s stories, the reader sees various fragmented facets of the Holocaust and comes to understand that this is a “world in which a child

5 Jerome Stern, Making Shapely Fiction (New York: Norton, 1991), 3. 6 Marek Wilczynski, "Trusting the Words: Paradoxes of Ida Fink," Modern Language Studies 24, no. 4 (1994): 25-38.

is forced across the threshold of danger and impending death;”7 it is a world in which language and expression between parent and child are devoid of meaning. Fink’s “Aryan Papers” captures another layer of this inverted world, depicting how a girl trades her virginity for false papers in the hopes that these documents would save her and her mother’s life. The structure of this genre enables the reader to immediately see this perversion of justice, mockery of language, and appropriating of humanity that occurs when one fails to see the value of each life. In addition to the two aforementioned stories, I will address how in her other stories, Fink captures the psychological strains and emotional toils facing individuals (parent(s) and child(ren)) through centering her stories on a particular moment in time.

Moving from the internal, psychological struggles captured in Fink’s narrative, the third chapter of my dissertation will address Tadeusz Borowski’s collection of stories, This Way For the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. It will concentrate on Borowski’s use of the short story form and his dark diction, stark images, and concrete details to capture a world where time is suspended between death and life, as portrayed in the external, physical dissolving of relationships. In

Borowski’s tales, this collapse of humanity and human relationship is represented in the

“Muselmann.” Although scholars like Rosenfled,8 James Young,9 Langer,10 and Ezrahi11 have noted how the language and descriptions of Borowski’s narratives emulate the language and

7 Dorota Glowacka, Disappearing Trances: Holocaust Testimonials, Ethics, and Aesthetics (Seattle, Washington: University of Washington Press, 2012), 156. 8 Alvin H. Rosenfeld, A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980), 72-75. 9 James Edward Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988): 104-106. 10 Lawrence L. Langer, Versions of Survival: The Holocaust and the Human Spirit (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982). 11 Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, By Words Alone (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 55.

world of Auschwitz, they do not address the confining form of Borowski’s art, mirroring the

“anti-world” of Auschwitz. In tandem with Borowski’s attention to the tight, consistent form of these stories, the figure of the “Muselmann” appears again and again in this collection of short stories embodying what Ezrahi calls “concentrationary realism.”12 The “Muselmann” is the epitome of the faceless, expressionless product of the Nazi machine during the “anti-world.” Yet, at the same time, the Muselmann figure is the visage of a person caught between life and death.

In Borowski’s “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” the Muselmann figures are dehumanized and depicted as insects hiding from light.13 In his other stories, such as “The

Supper” or “A True Story,” Borowski has the narrator refer to those around him, who have almost succumbed to death, as “Muslimized”14 or “like a ‘Muslim,’”15 to capture this state of life-death in the “anti-world.” Those in the camps understand that “‘Muslim’ was the camp name for a prisoner who had been destroyed physically and spiritually, and who had neither the strength nor the will to go on living – a man ripe for the gas chamber.”16 In these stories we see how in the “anti-world,” the expressionless faces found on the Muselmanns serve as traces of the time before, where “to love” was commanded, rather than when “to kill” was commanded.

The fourth chapter considers the collapse of the home as seen in two Holocaust Yiddish short stories. By focusing on a close analytical reading of Rokhl Korn’s short story “The End of the Road” (1957) and Frume Haplern’s short story “Dog Blood” (1963), my fourth chapter examines the role of the Nazis’ assault on the home, relationships, family, and memory as

12 Ibid., 49-66. 13 Tadeusz Borowski, The Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 32. 14 Ibid., 156. 15 Ibid., 158. 16 Ibid., 32.

portrayed in two Yiddish Holocaust short stories. These short stories lend themselves as literary accounts, literary witnesses of life during the anti-world; life forging the framework for which

Auschwitz-Birkenau and every other Nazi occupied ghetto and camp would stand. More specifically, with their parallel settings, these two short stories, which were originally written in

Yiddish (a language that was almost completely eradicated during the Holocaust in the mass murder of the Yiddish-speaking population of Europe), portray the extent to which the Nazis sought to destroy the home and family structure of the Jewish people of Europe.

In conjunction with Fink’s attention to the psychological strains facing individuals, and in tandem with Borowski’s stark images of the physical breakdowns, and Korn and Halpern’s accounts of the destruction of the home, Cynthia Ozick’s short story, “The Shawl” will be the focus of the fifth chapter of my dissertation. In this chapter, I will address how Ozick portrays the impossibility of motherhood in the “anti-world.” Ozick provides her readers with a glimpse into a world leading to a moment when a mother (Rosa) witnesses her child’s murder; yet, rather than crying out for her child, Rosa is frozen in the collapsing of time and the feeling that constitutes the “anti-world” – a place where to feel or act was a reason to be killed.17 Writing about Ozick’s fiction, Lawrence Friedman briefly addresses how Rosa is caught in a “hellish present;”18 however, the majority of his analysis, in tandem with the works of Victor

Strandberg19 and Sanford Pinsker,20 highlights Ozick’s various aesthetics and religious allusions

17 Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 10. 18 Lawrence S. Friedman, Understanding Cynthia Ozick (University of South Carolina Press, 1991), 17. 19 Victor H Strandberg, Greek Mind-Jewish Soul: The Conflicted Art of Cynthia Ozick (Madison: The University of Wisconsin press, 1994). 20 Sanford Pinsker, The Uncompromising Fictions of Cynthia Ozick (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986).

in her work, rather than addressing her use of the short story form, or her survivor’s inability to foster the mother-child relationship within the anti-world.

Authors writing about the Holocaust choose this literary medium to sound their voice as a form of testimony, and in doing so, account for the time the world collapsed into an “anti-world.”

Holocaust scholar Steven Jacobs addresses the role of the artist when he writes, “Among those

Shoah artists, both those who survived and those who did not, were those who chose to put their talents and skills to best use by recording what they were seeing and experiencing, no matter how painful, no matter how horrific.”21 Jacobs reiterates what several scholars of Holocaust literature have noted: to write about the Holocaust is to write as one who is bearing witness to the atrocity, as one who is testifying and speaking for the silent ones – the millions whose voices will never speak, testify, nor bear witness. This notion of writing as testimony is a notion that traces back to the Judeo-Christian traditions that are rooted in the early biblical writings and addressed in the accompanying commentaries. Yet, in addition to stories serving as a means for sounding a testimony, literary critics of the short story, like William Saroyan22 and Susan

Lohafer,23 further highlight this idea of how those who read short stories are more than merely readers, but rather embody “listeners” and, I will add, witnesses of that of which they are reading.

Therefore, alongside the writer who bears witness, the reader bears witness upon reading short stories about the Holocaust. Regarding this idea of the reader as witness, Holocaust

21 Steven L. Jacobs, In Search of Yesterday: The Holocaust and the Quest for Meaning (Lanham: University Press of America, 2006), 151. 22 William Saroyan, “International Symposium,” 62. 23 Susan Lohafer, Coming to Terms with the Short Story (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), 8.

survivor Elie Wiesel noted, “To listen to a witness is to become one,”24 and how “For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.”25 It is through the act of reading (hearing of the atrocities that took place during the Holocaust) that one in turn becomes a witness of what they have learned. One way we see the reader assume a role beyond merely reading is through a particular rhetorical device. Within the Holocaust short stories is the rhetorical device of dramatic irony, which enables Holocaust stories to directly insert the readers into the narrative by weaving them into a story where they know the ending and where they are able to assume what might happen to the characters before the characters do (whether liquidation or ghettoization is about to occur, if the train will lead for Auschwitz, or if their food rations will decrease.). However, what makes this rhetorical tool of dramatic irony unique to the Holocaust short story is not only how the brevity of this form accentuates this device, but also how the implication imposed on the reader by the author: to know, share, and in turn, tell (relate) that “story” by also bearing witness.

Through these stories and various “moments” captured in their narratives, the reader sees how the “anti-world” is a place where fathers do not recognize their children, where a potato holds more value than a life, where neighbor turns on neighbor, and where both God and supposed civilized humanity are silent when millions are being murdered. While David Hirsch,26 Lawrence

Langer,27 and other writers address this various ways of Holocaust literature’s implication of the reader, they do not consider the unique ways the short story genre adds to this implication of the reader.

24 Pat Morrison, “Elie Wiesel, History's Witness,” Los Angeles Times, April 23, 2013. 25 Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Hill and Wang Publishing, 2006), xv. 26 David H. Hirsch, The Deconstruction of Literature The Deconstruction of Literature: Criticism after Auschwitz (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1991). 27 Lawrence L. Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975).

All of the short stories that I have chosen lead the reader into a never-ending inferno whose doors all open to the death chamber. In each of these stories, the writers display an enormous creativity in the objects and situations they have chosen to come closer to an expression of the unending horror that probably cannot fully be expressed through the power of words. Through my analysis of Holocaust short stories, I aim to highlight how these works written in the short story form capture the moment of tension, crisis, utter silence, and the tearing apart of relationships (fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, neighbors, and lovers). Through this genre’s form, authors of these stories give the readers a glimpse into a world where death is celebrated, commanded, and carried out; or, perhaps better, these authors tear an opening into the fabric of an “anti-world,” in which even death is not death. They focus on the destruction of relationships. They center on a moment when the world of the story collapses under the assaults by man, rather than flourishes by the uniting of humanity, so that time itself comes undone.

Lastly, they tend to engage in a narrative testimony of the characters’ death, rather than their lives, which in turn, may implicate the reader to remember the people and places from which these stories arise. I hope that my dissertation will contribute to the on-going conversation about

Holocaust literature by highlighting the unique features of this genre; I hope to address how these stories create the intensity of the experience of the Holocaust in that they highlight various moments capturing the collapsing of relationships among family, friends, neighbors, and future generations.

CHAPTER I

THE FEATURES OF THE HOLOCAUST SHORT STORY

“All of us walk around naked. The delousing is finally over, and our striped suits are back from the tanks of Cyclone B solution, an efficient killer of lice in clothing and of men in gas chambers.” – Tadeuz Borowski, “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen”

This critical approach to Holocaust short stories will both address the distinct features of the Holocaust short story, and introduce three key themes woven throughout Holocaust short stories: the collapse of time, the anti-world, and the assault on relationships. The tight time frame of the Holocaust short story accentuates its testimonial aspect, which in turn draws the readers into the text as witnesses to what they have encountered by the inculcation of the aforementioned three themes into each narrative. Holocaust short stories convey the characters’ experience with the collapse of time revealed in the unraveling of human relationships that takes place in the anti- world – life in the midst of the Holocaust. This collapse of time is a defining feature of what makes the anti-world anti-: for it is a world outside of the space-time reality of life outside the concentrationary28 universe, or what many survivors, such as Ka-Tzetnik 135633, called: “planet

Auschwitz.”29 The “ruina temporis,” the Latin phrase for the catastrophe, destruction, or collapse of time, is the moment when all preconceived notions or reality of life before the anti-world come tête-à-tête with the newfound reality of life in the midst of the Shoah; a world in which hate is praised, death is commanded, and a human being deemed other human being unworthy of life. Holocaust short stories capture this collapse of time and the anti-world through their literary

28 Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, By Words Alone (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 49- 66. 29 Ka-tzetnik 135633, xvii.

depictions of the unraveling of human relationships and crumbling of any presumptions of life before Hitler. In these short stories, the collapse of time is connected with the collapse of the yet- to-be that constitutes meaningful human relationships. The collapse of time manifests itself in the collapse of relationships in the anti-world. To be in a relationship is to be there for the sake of another, which opens up a response yet to be offered, a task yet to be engaged; however, in the midst of the atrocities of the anti-world, not only does time cease to move on a positive trajectory toward a “future,” but so too do any presuppositions of seemingly normal relations. In the anti- world, parents ceased to be parents and neighbors began to be enemies. In the Holocaust short story, we see this collapse of time in the assault on relationships – wherever the relationship to another for the sake of another is crushed by oppressive hands of hate and death that yielded the

Holocaust. These narratives capture a focused look into the anti-world wherever there is the utterance of “kill thy neighbor,” or the building of a ghetto wall, the running of a camp, in the tattooing of a number on an arm, or the tearing apart of the family by Nazism and hate – that which fueled the Holocaust. However, before further defining the three themes woven throughout Holocaust short stories, and before proceeding in addressing the genre and features of the Holocaust short story, we must consider what scholars and writers have said about the short story genre in general, as well as the significance of the story in Jewish tradition.

The significance of the storyteller and stories in Judaic-Christian tradition is echoed throughout time in forms of narratives shaped by questions. For centuries, every year Jewish people have gathered around their tables to observer the Passover Seder. According to tradition, the youngest at the table will ask: “How does this night differ from all other nights?”

Throughout the course of the Passover meal, families will read from the Jewish text, the

Haggadah (literally Hebrew for “telling”), and re-tell the story of their escape and exodus from slavery in Egypt; this story will answer the child’s question of why this night differs from all others. Regarding the Jewish tradition of storytelling, the scholar David Booth highlights the importance “storytelling” plays in Holocaust literature and narratives, as well. When considering

Holocaust survivor, writer, philosopher, and storyteller Elie Wiesel, Booth notes that “Wiesel turn[ed] to storytelling as a way of finding meaning in the modern world. This conception of storytelling as a meaningful act comes from Hasidism’s conception of storytelling as a religious act, as well as from earlier Midrashic traditions.”30 Moreover, storytelling is considered central to the life of the soul – to memory. Regarding the latter point, both Wiesel31 as well as Primo Levi32 have noted how the Holocaust was a war against memory – memory of life before planet

Auschwitz; memory of a life and a time where relationships bloomed rather than crumbled. It is through storytelling that man learns of the relationships between fellow man; it is through storytelling that man accounts for and witnesses about that which they have learned, seen, and experienced; it is through storytelling that memory can take shape and form. Consequently,

Booth’s theory of storytelling as a religious act is found in analyzing the various figures that appear in works by Wiesel, as well as in other Holocaust narratives. With this tradition in mind, one recognizes that the art of storytelling stems from the centuries-old oral traditions to the innate and almost habitual everyday utterances formed when one responds to a simple “What is

30 David Booth, "The Role of the Storyteller-Sholem Aleichem and Elie Wiesel," Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought 167.42 [3] (1993), 304. 31 Elie Wiesel, Evil and Exile (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 155. 32 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Summit Books, 1988), 31.

your name? Who are you? Where are you from? What have you done with your brother?”

Storytelling is part of the fabric of humanity.

Storytelling in the Judaic-Christian tradition is deeply rooted in even the early accounts of the creation of man in the first book of the Bible. Nevertheless, the accounts of the origin of creation and mankind do not merely serve as the building blocks for the narrative of humanity, but rather, these accounts serve as the first inquiries regarding man’s responsibility and relationship to God and fellow man. For example, one of the first questions the devil posed to man in the Bible was: “did God actually say…”33 Whereas, one of the first few questions God posed to the children of man in the Bible was: “Where is Able your brother? […] What have you done? The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground.”34 These questions

(though asked by different sources) stem from the same source of inquiry, and that inquiry is about relationships – man’s relationship to God, and man’s relationship to man. Keeping in tandem with Judaic-Christian tradition, since the dawning of time, man has struggled with his brother, for there has been enmity among relationships. In the 20th century, this enmity was manifest in the fighting and passing of laws, building of walls, and rising of smoke from gas chambers, as man killed their fellow man in the name of “pure race.” The Hebrew for bread

(lehem) and a battle, war (milhama) share the same root (l-h-m).35 Some religious scholars believe that these two very different ideas stem from the same root because both the giving of one’s bread to another and fighting in the hand-to-hand combat of war with one another are actions of a relationship between two people – sharing in life or sharing in death. This belief in

33 Gn. 3:1 ESV 34 Gn. 4:9-10 ESV 35 Joseph Lowin. “A Hebrew Lesson (l-h-m),” Jewish Heritage Online Magazine. Accessed April 24, 2016, http://jhom.com/topics/bread/hebrew.html.

reality and the sharing of bread, the sharing of stories, and the sharing of relationships came to a halt for millions of Jews during the Holocaust – a time of mass death. In the Holocaust, the murderers took away the bread – the source of life: meaning, memory, and relationships – from the Jewish people who were not at war with their murderers; nevertheless, their murderers waged a war against their very soul and memory, which robbed them of their stories: their lives. For the

Holocaust was a war against human relationship, for in planet Auschwitz, as Elie Wiesel writes in Night, “In this place, there is no such thing as father, brother, friend. Each of us lives and dies alone.”36 In the 20th century, man once again was faced with the questions: Did God really say,

“Thou shalt not kill?”37 Do the voices and the blood of our six million brothers and sisters cry out to God? For authors of Holocaust short stories, to write a narrative about that which took place in Europe from 1933-1945 is an attempt to give a voice to the millions murdered and killed by their brothers. To write and read is to witness and tell of “that which happened”38 during the anti-world; it is a response to restore the relationship, the soul, extinguished in the obliteration of bread – that is, life.

Holocaust short stories capture the Nazis’ assault on humanity and destruction of relationships. The structure and shape of a story is the genre most akin to one’s daily experiences.

One tells stories and listens to others’ stories because stories are a characteristic of humanity.

When one tells a story, one tends to focus on a particular moment or experience. Hence, to have a story is to have an experience – whether seemingly insightful or insignificant – to share with

36 Elie Wiesel, Night, trans. Marion Wiesel (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 110. 37 Ex. 20:13 KJV 38 Paul Celan, and Felstiner, John. Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan (1st ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), 395.

another person. In the sharing of this story, the storyteller enters into a relationship with his listener or reader. To tell a story is to participate in the narrative of humanity through testimonial accounts of life. Nevertheless, even though the experiences and moments captured in stories tend to shape and inform humanity of various aspects of life, when it comes to the Holocaust short story, scholars and readers alike still seem to ask: Why should we read Holocaust short stories?

And how can a few pages of a short story illuminate the reader about something as atrocious and unfathomable as the Holocaust? These questions, amongst many others, serve as the impetus for writing this critical examination of the Holocaust short story. Subsequently, in the following chapters, the gravity of this critical approach to Holocaust short stories will unfold for the reader.

Furthermore, both the significance that the Holocaust short story plays in broadening our understanding of the Shoah, and why the Holocaust short story should be read and included in the conversation about the Holocaust and Holocaust literature, will be illuminated.

The history of the short story is as multifaceted as the genre’s definitions. Consequently, for the purpose of this discussion, one of Europe’s greatest writers, Johann Wolfgang von

Goethe’s definition of the short novella serves as the springboard for the analysis of the on-going debate surrounding the short story narrative, which namely address the short story’s brevity in length as its major defining feature. Goethe’s definition of the novella aids in shaping the definition of the short story – especially as his definition situates itself as a fixture in the literary genre canon. On January 29, 1827, Goethe, penned a letter to his friend, Johann Peter Eckermann, where Goethe sought to define the novella (short story). In his letter, Goethe characterized the

novella (the short story) as “an unheard-of event” 39 Since Goethe’s characterization of the short story, scholars and writers alike have sought ways to also define and characterize the short story.

Although Goethe’s definition aims at distinguishing fact from the makings of interesting fiction, when considering his definition with regards to Holocaust fiction, one can also expand his definition to thinking morally about a topic or an unheard of event. Nevertheless, although the novella is not the same as the short story, Goethe’s characterization of a novella’s telling of “an unheard of event” seems appropriate when considering how Holocaust short stories seek to capture (and witness) in their narratives an unheard of event – mass death, gas chambers,

Auschwitz, and more – rather than merely relying on the typical defining feature of the short story – its short, concise narrative.

Adding their voices to Goethe’s, from Franz Kafka to Walter Benjamin to Norman

Friedman, writers have attempted to both define the literary short story genre and pinpoint the mark its narrative holds in conjunction with the topography of other (longer) literary genres. For instance, regarding 20th-century German Jewish philosopher, Walter Benjamin’s understanding of the short story genre, literary scholar Carolin Duttlinger notes how, for Benjamin, “short prose fosters a much-needed sensitivity for ‘austere, delicate face-less things.’”40 Nevertheless, although the inquiries surrounding the defining and shaping of the short story are vast, the majority of them reiterate the structuralism debate of the short story; namely, they tend to focus on how even though the crafts of a short story might be manifold, the ruling factor of its genre is the brevity of the narrative’s length. Such attention to the structure and length of the short story

39 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations of Goethe with Johann Peter Eckermann (New York: Da Capo Press), 163. 40 Carolin Duttlinger, The Cambridge Introduction to Franz Kafka (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013), 23.

is found in the critical work, such as Brander Matthews’ 1901 Philosophy of the Short-story.

Regarding the short story, Matthews sates, “The difference between a Novel and a Novelet is one of length only: a Novelet is a brief Novel.”41 Furthermore, in texts like Jerome Stern’s Making

Shapely Fiction or Gilda Pacheco and Kari Meyers’ The Telling and the Tale: an Introductory

Guide to Short, Creative Prose, literary critics address the various definitions of the short story in the past century, many of which tend to again focus on the length of the story.

Consequently, when moving away from merely noting its length, how one can define the

“short story” elicits many different answers. For instance, in her article “The Short Story: The

Long and the Short of It,” Mary Louise Pratt succinctly compiles what she calls the eight major

“Propositions” (or components) of the short story. As a literary scholar whose work was shaped by an in-depth consideration of the assertions and assumptions other scholars have voiced regarding the short story genre, Pratt’s “propositions” serve as the catalyst for our discussion of the features and hallmarks of the Holocaust short story. Thus, basing her “propositions” of the short story on what writers and scholars have asserted regarding the short story genre, Pratt moves beyond solely noting circular arguments surrounding the structure of the genre, and instead maintains that there are other key aspects to the short story, as well.42 While also drawing upon other characterizations of the short story genre, Pratt succinctly addresses the core aspects of the short story genre, which is why her eight propositions serve as a reference point for addressing how the Holocaust short story is similar and different from other short stories. By weaving through Pratt’s various “propositions” of the short story, the similarities and differences

41 Brander Matthews, Philosophy of the Short-story (needs info, 1901), 15. 42 Mary Louise Pratt, “The Short Story: The Long and the Short of It” In The New Short Story Theories (Athens: Ohio UP, 1994), 91-113.

of the Holocaust short story with its contemporary counterparts will be noted. Furthermore, by building upon Pratt’s assertions, how the Holocaust short story is distinct from other short stories, the uniqueness of the Holocaust short story and the role it plays in contributing to the larger literary canon of Holocaust literature, will also come to light.

The short story is an ever-present narrative in twentieth and twenty-first century literature.

That being said, after 1945, the Holocaust short story created a ripple effect for this genre. M.L.

Pratt begins her discussion of the short story by stating, “Proposition 1. The novel tells a life, the short story tells a fragment of a life. One of the most consistently found narrative structures in the short story is the one called the ‘moment-of-truth’. Moment of truth stories focus on a single point of crisis in the life of a central character, a crisis which provokes some basic realization that will change the character’s life forever.”43 Pratt argues that the short story rests on this

“moment-of-truth.” This moment might be considered akin to the short stories of James Joyce’s characters’ moments of epiphany, or Flannery O’Connor’s characters’ moments of awakening.

Holocaust short stories also have this moment-of-truth; however, this moment is not solely a spiritual or ethereal awakening, but rather it is found in the moment the character(s) enter into the anti-world. This anti-world is a world yielded by moments of death rather than moments of life. How entering into the anti-world looks like, and what that experience or moment is will be addressed in the following chapters.

The thing: Building upon what she calls a moment-of-truth, Pratt proceeds to claim, in her second proposition: “The short story deals with a single thing, the novel with many things.”44

Here, her claim is aesthetic in that the “thing” to which she is referring is about the genre and its

43 Ibid., 182. 44 Ibid., 184.

specific focus; whereas, in the Holocaust short story, this “thing” is often thematic – in that each story hinges on a moment for which the author reveals, for the reader, a key theme about the anti-world. This proposition is found in Holocaust short stories when the protagonists are faced with a newfound reality that the life they once knew – the life of order, decency, humanity – ceases to exist in tandem with “the thing” – Auschwitz, gas chambers, mass shootings, fake papers, hiding of children from the hands of death. The “thing” in Holocaust short stories is the metaphysical struggle for life and civility in a civilized society propagating death. Although

Holocaust short stories differ in their content, they all tend to capture the collapse of time and the anti-world for their readers. In this sense, the Holocaust short story differs from other short stories, in that other short stories may focus on a sole moment or thing; whereas, Holocaust stories, though they differ in their perspectives, all tend to focus on the same thing: a life and an environment where a thing like Auschwitz was created and implemented for mass murder.

Pratt’s third and fourth propositions address the partiality of the short story. Regarding this lack of wholeness, she claims: “Proposition 3: The short story is a sample, the novel is the whole hog”45 and “Proposition 4. The novel is a whole text, the short story is not.”46 She goes on to claim about her third proposition that it “refers to the tendency for short stories to present themselves, usually through their titles, as samples or examples of some larger general category.”47 In the context of the Holocaust short story, on one hand, Pratt is right in that these short stories can be considered as samples or examples of the larger narrative of atrocity found in other Holocaust literary genres. Nevertheless, on the other hand, Pratt’s propositions about

45 Ibid., 185. 46 Ibid., 186. 47 Ibid., 185.

novels being whole and short stories being a sample cannot be applied to the Holocaust short story, because to have what some might consider a “sampling” of the anti-world or Auschwitz in a few pages of a story is to have the whole. Meaning, that where other short stories may be found wanting when it comes to addressing larger concerns, themes, topics, character growth, or plot development, when considering the Holocaust short stories, authors capture a moment of atrocity that, although it might seem like a “sample” because of its length, is instead, a poignant and pointed reflection of the vehement degree to which man suffered from the hands of their fellow men. In other words, where Pratt and other scholars view the novel as the “whole text” or a complete narrative as a result of its length, such specifications seem irrelevant when applied to

Holocaust short stories, for their short narratives and condensed structure immediately insert their reader into a whole text that effectively captures in its subject matter, the collapsing moments of life and relationships in the anti-world. The Holocaust was a time of shattering comprehension – it was a time where pieces of the whole could never come back together. In this sense, the Holocaust short story provides a glimpse into that whole, yet it is a glimpse into the whole of the catastrophic concentrationary universe.

Pratt moves on to her fifth point, where she addresses the short story and subject matter.

Pratt writes, “the short story is often the genre used to introduce new (and possibly stigmatized subject matters into the literary arena.”48 This assertion about the short story serving as a springboard from which authors launch their new subject matter into the world is especially true when considering Holocaust short stories and the role they have played in introducing countries and generations to the moment when an individual or family is thrust into the horrors of Hitler's

48 Ibid., 187.

Europe. Pratt adds to this idea when she claims: “In other parts of the world we similarly find the short story being used to introduce new regions or groups into an established national literature, or into an emerging national literature…”49 Yes, other literary genres introduce the scope and gravity of the Holocaust to their readers, but as will be noted in the forthcoming paragraphs and chapters, the short story has an accessibility to it that other genres do not have; consequently, there is a testimonial nature found in the short story that uniquely lures its readers into its short narrative in addressing the Holocaust in a way that reaches a broad readership. Another way in which we see Pratt’s fifth proposition in the Holocaust short story is in her claim that this genre introduces an “emerging national literature” to readers. This idea is supported in the collective work of Holocaust survivors and authors of all nationalities who, regardless of whether they chose to write in their mother tongue or in their newfound language, chose to write about a subject and crime that was so atrocious, so absurd, so foreign, and so horrific that a word was created to name it in 1944: genocide. We also see how authors like Ida Fink chose to live in

Israel and volunteer by listening to and transcribing the testimonies of those who survived the

Holocaust, which, in turn, inspired her to write her own short stories comprising Scrap of Time and Other Stories. For like Fink’s stories, we see how “the short story cycle sometimes is used to convey a particular social perspective too.”50 Authors of Holocaust short stories utilize this genre and its features to illuminate for their readers the trepidations and terrors facing individuals entering into and living in the anti-world. Unlike other national literatures like British, French,

Polish, Russian, and Italian literatures, the Holocaust short story has no place in a national literature – for, in a way, the Holocaust undermines any notion of a national literature, and

49 Ibid., 187. 50 Ibid., 188.

instead, becomes a literature marked by nations, a literature birthed into existence from the pains of death; a literature without a nation, a land, a home, and a language – nevertheless, it is a literature seeking to be read by all nationalities and all traditions.

Pratt acknowledges the testimonial and traditional aspects of the short story in her sixth proposition: the “Orality”51 of the short story. Rather than merely alluding to the oral tradition from which the short story stems, by “orality” Pratt refers to the short story’s “consistent trend in

[…] ranging from the incorporation of oral-colloquial speech forms in the language of narration.”52 We see this proposition in Holocaust short stories when the authors embed the language of Auschwitz or the anti-world into their narratives. Furthermore, this incorporating of various speech forms and narratives is seen in Holocaust short stories when authors use their narratives as a way to introduce their readers to the language of Auschwitz – the language of the anti-world. In addition to this, these short stories echo the language from Jewish life and Jewish religion regarding man’s responsibility to and relationship with one another – especially man’s relationship within the family structure. Not only does the Holocaust short story spring from the

“orality” of its narratives as a way to immediately insert its readers into the narratives of

Auschwitz, but it also springs its readers into the language that witnesses about the perpetrator or, as Pratt calls, the oppressor: “The tradition of orality in the short story has special significance in cultures where literacy is not the norm, or where the standard literary language is that of an oppressor.”53 Here we see how Pratt’s sixth proposition applies to the Holocaust short story in that these authors contributed to a newfound tradition of literature of atrocity – literature of the

51 Ibid., 189. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., 190.

Holocaust. Nevertheless, we also see how Holocaust short stories differ from merely consisting of the language of the oppressor. In the Holocaust short story, we see the act of an author choosing to write a narrative that breaks away from the narrative of the oppressor and, instead, provides the reader with a narrative that accounts for the acts of the oppressor in the language of a victim.

Moving from orality and language to narrative traditions and craft, Pratt’s seventh and eighth propositions about the short story are applicable to the Holocaust short story as well. In her seventh proposition, “Narrative Traditions,” Pratt echoes what I have previously mentioned about the tradition of the short story genre, while she also adds that the short story genre’s struggles for validity when compared with the “older narrative traditions”54 of the novel. She then proceeds to her final proposition about the short story (“Craft versus art”), noting how “one of the most intriguing aspects of the short story’s generic status is the widespread tendency for it to be viewed as a (skill-based) craft rather than a (creativity-based) art.”55 Pratt further discusses how the short story is often seen as craft rather than art. Moving past the “craft rather than art” short story debate, as noted in the previous passages comparing and contrasting Pratt’s propositions of the short story with the Holocaust short story, one can see that although the

Holocaust short story shares many similarities to other short stories in general, there are, nevertheless, distinct features of the Holocaust short story, namely: place, time, and theme, which will be addressed later. These features are the result of the ethical demands of history, which, with regard to the Holocaust short story, take the issue of genre beyond the distinctions of craft and art.

54 Ibid., 191. 55 Ibid.

Therefore, when considering the short story, features like M.L. Pratt’s and definitions like

Norman Friedman’s a “short fictional narrative in prose,”56 or Flannery O’Connor’s “The short story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way”57 comes to mind. However, while many scholars approach defining the short story like Friedman, when addressing

Holocaust short stories, I build upon O’Connor’s and Goethe’s definitions by adding that not only do Holocaust short stories attempt to “say what cannot be said” and address an “unheard of event,” but that their very fragmented yet concise form also highlights three defining features of the Holocaust short story for their readers: the collapse of time, the anti-world, and the assault on relationships. Although other Holocaust literary genres contain variations of these three features, the Holocaust short story form tends to amplify collapsing of time into the anti-world through its fragmented yet focused narrative. This collapsing of time is seen in Holocaust short stories where the tearing apart of relationships and the shattering of reality and life before 1933 crumbled into an anti-world – an unheard of event that would later be known as the Holocaust.

Holocaust short stories are not merely brief narratives or short novels, but rather they are structured narratives that capture the moment when death and hate engulfed reality to form the anti-world. They are narratives which capture the moment when all presuppositions of life and relationships moving on a positive trajectory toward the future seem to warp, as time ceases to more toward a future, and instead, collapses into a world consumed by death and haunted by the realties of what once was. Therefore, unlike the longer structure of novels or varied structures of poems or essays, the Holocaust short story form lends itself to inserting the reader immediately

56 Kari Meyers and Gilda Pacheco, The Telling and the Tale: an Introductory Guide to Short, Creative Prose (San José, C.R.: University of Costa Rica Press, 2006), 28. 57 Ibid., 28.

into a narrative that focuses on a particular moment – revealing aspects of the collapse of time and the anti-world of its character(s) through concise, yet fully developed narrative structures. In studies written by Lawrence Langer, Edward Alexander, Alvin H. Rosenfeld, or Sidra Ezrahi, scholars have approached Holocaust literary texts and genres through different lenses; nevertheless, one genre missing from their examination is the short story. Unlike larger literary works that entail sub-plots and utilize their length to gradually knit together a narrative of atrocity, I will address how the literary form of the short story offers an instant glimpse into the lives of its characters by inserting the reader into the world of the story – where the narratives focus on a moment in the characters’ experience of life as they knew it to be unraveling.

Furthermore, when addressing the short story genre, Michael Kardos writes: “there must always be a necessary relationship between a story’s form and its meaning, because a story’s form is part of what creates meaning.”58 Kardos’ point addresses this notion of form (of the short story) and its relationship to meaning – meaning that becomes apparent when the act of writing takes pace within said form. When reflecting on this notion in light of the Holocaust short story,

Kardos’ claim seems especially fitting when considering the form of the Holocaust short story, and how that form lends itself to the very act of writing and storytelling. This is tightly woven with the “meaning” and testimonial aspect of Holocaust literature, rather than a meaning stemming solely from the genre’s form. When building upon Kardos’ assertion of form and meaning to including both meaning of structure and meaning of content, this notion applies to the analysis of Holocaust short stories in that these short narratives render themselves as meaningful testimonial accounts of atrocity or of life on planet Auschwitz. Yet this “necessary

58 Michael Kardos, The Art and Craft of Fiction: A Writer's Guide (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2013), 103.

relationship between a story’s form and its meaning,” is amplified in the Holocaust short story in its the concise, accessible narratives, which immediately insert the reader into a world devoid of comprehensible meaning – the anti-world. Here, the meaning is not in the story’s form, but rather the meaning is found in the margins and in the whitespace between the words of the narrative, for the meaning is found in the void, it is found in the authors’ attempts to give sound to the silence of a camp when the last child is hanged59, or give voice to a young girl who silently takes false Aryan papers purchased with her innocence.60 While some scholars address Holocaust authors and their stories, they tend to approach these stories by situating them in conjunction with other literary genres, rather than as their own genre. Even though there are thousands of

Holocaust short stories that address the collapse of time and relationships, this genre is one of the least researched in Holocaust literature. This lack of critical response to Holocaust short stories must be addressed because the various representations of the Holocaust captured in the short story form are crucial to our understanding of the Shoah.

Moving from the structural features of the short story and the Holocaust short story genre, we shall now direct our analysis toward the three essential thematic concepts rooted in Holocaust short story narratives – particularly as seen in the writings of Ida Fink, Tadeuz Borowski, Rokhl

Korn, Frume Haplern, and Cynthia Ozick. These three concepts capture the essential way the

Holocaust short story contributes to the greater Holocaust literary canon, and aids in highlighting what victims faced during the Holocaust. These themes are: the anti-world, the collapse of time, and the assault on relationships. Building upon what has already been addressed regarding these

59 Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 64-65. 60 Ida Fink, “Aryan Papers” in A Scrap of Time and Other Stories (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1983), 68.

ideas, the Holocaust short story inserts its readers into various degrees of the anti-world. The

Anti-world is the life during Hitler, Nazism, Nuremburg Laws, ghettos, hidings, Aryan papers,

Stars of David, tattoos, camps, crematoriums. Short stories lend themselves to reflecting the anti- world in that the short narratives immediately insert the reader into a scene or a moment encapsulating this world. This height and depth of the degrees and layers of the anti-world becomes evident for readers when they read stories that hinge, not on a moment of time, but rather on a moment of the collapse of time. The collapse of time seems contradictory in and of itself; nevertheless, the anti-world – all that comprised the Holocaust – was itself a contradiction of any presuppositions one might have had of a cultured, civilized society.

Instinctively, one often thinks of time in terms of scientific measurements or constants. In the late 1600s, Sir Isaac Newton’s discoveries of theoretical physics and mathematics assert scientific reason concerning time and space. In 1687, Newton defined time as an “absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equally without relation to anything external.”61 Various scholars have also noted the different approaches to the discussion of time. For instance, in Futures Past On the Semantics of Historical Time, Reinhart Koselleck explores the concept of historical time in relation to Modernity (the late eighteenth century through World War I). In his work, The Culture of Time & Space: 1980-1918, Stephen Kern considers the nature of time, culture, and technology as perceived in late nineteenth and twentieth century by various philosophers, scientists, and humanists. Kern addresses how philosophers like Kant rejected this idea of time in the absolute sense for which Newton claims.

61 Stephen Kern, The culture of time and space: 1880-1918 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2003), 11.

Kern writes: “In The Critique of Pure Reason (1781) Immanuel Kant rejected the Newtonian theory of absolute, objective time (because it could not possibly be experienced) and maintained that time was a subjective form or foundation of all experience. But even thought it was subjective, it was also universal – the same for everybody.”62 Often, human beings have a relative understanding of time, meaning that one can only comprehend time when measuring it in modes of distance (e.g. miles to the moon, meters to the post office, minutes in an hour, seconds in a minute), or when we consider time to be a metaphysical constant continuing forward on a positive trajectory into the future. This scientific notion of time resurfaced in the early 1900s, with Albert Einstein building upon Newton’s scientific and mathematical theories, when he further enlightens the world on the notion of time in his mathematical theories regarding relativity, gravity, and space. With the dawn of the new century was the dawn of a new theory of time. As Kern notes:

With the special theory of relativity in 1905 Einstein calculated how time in one reference system moving away at a constant velocity appears to slow down when viewed from another system at rest relative to it, and in his general theory of relativity of 1916 he extended the theory to that of the time change of accelerated bodies. Since every bit of matter in the universe generates a gravitational force and since gravity is equivalent to acceleration, he concluded that ‘every reference body has its own particular time.’63

Consequently, when one thinks of time, one tends to naturally think of the future or of a counting or measuring of something – some thing, some reality, some hope in the forward and beyond. Or one thinks systems and galaxies in motion toward, beyond, or in the midst of black holes and voids of the stratospheres. Yet while most of the scientific and mathematical world was enthralled by Einstein’s theory of time and relativity, in the small corner of Saransk, Russia,

62 Ibid., 11. 63 Ibid., 19.

twentieth century literary philosopher Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin sought to apply this notion of time to literary studies, which he introduced in his essay: “Forms of time and of the

Chronotope in the Novel.”64 Bakhtin wrote this essay in order to address what he calls the

“chronotope” – or space-time – a term he coins to describe the novel’s literary representation of time and of the temporal and special relationships portrayed in the novel. Bakhtin maintains that when regarding the novel, time is not bound, constrained, or adherent to any presuppositions of time in the scientific sense, but rather it uniquely molds to the shape of the narrative for which it is describing. Or as one scholar notes, “Chronotopic analysis thus seeks to address literary history at a very fundamental level; it mediates between historically created and thus changing conceptions of time and space, and their realization in the underlying narratives of literary texts.”65 Drawing from the writings of Goethe and Kant,66 Bakhtin’s philosophy of literary time and space is a twentieth-century attempt to address and challenge the scientific understanding of time when applied to literary theory. Regarding this notion he states:

In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible, likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope. The chronotope in literature has an intrinsic generic significance. It can even be said that it is precisely the chronotope that defines genre and generic distinctions, for in literature the primary category in the chronotope is time. The chronotope as a formally constitutive category determines to a significant degree the image of man in literature as well. The image of man is always intrinsically chronotopic.67

64 Makhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, the Dialogic Imagination (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84-258. 65 Simon Dentith, "Chronotope". The Literary Encyclopedia. 18 July 2001, accessed August 31, 2016, http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=187. 66 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (New York: Penguin, 2007). 67 Bakhtin, 84-85.

Where Bakhtin seeks to define space-time in relation to the novel, the following analysis seeks to define collapse of time in relation to the Holocaust short story. When one thinks the collapse of time in the short story, one must move beyond the scientific definitions of time that are shaped by physics or mathematics, and instead look to the metaphysical and even theological definitions of time. Like gravity causing an object to collapse due to gravitational pull of its mass, time in the the anti-world collapses onto itself. Time in the anti-world is not that of a mathematical formula, but rather it is like a melting timepiece depicted in Salvador Dalí’s Surrealist painting,

“The Persistence of Memory.” Holocaust short stories tend to directly insert the reader into the anti-world by focusing on a moment or scene where the character(s) undergo the collapsing of time that entails the assault on memory in the form of the crumbling of human relationships as a result of the Nazis’ assault on humanity, which is the third theme that is woven throughout

Holocaust short stories. Again, Holocaust survivor and author Ka-Tzetnik 135633 addresses memory and time “on planet Auschwitz” in his forward to Shivitti, when he says, “For two long years they [those who went to the crematorium] trod through me, their eyes penetrating mine.

And time there, on planet Auschwitz, was not like time here. Each moment there revolved around the cogwheels of a different time-sphere. Hell-years last longer than light-years.”68 As we will discuss in the following chapters, time in the anti-world fell into the realm of “Hell-years” rather than “light-years” – time collapsed into itself rather than unfolded into future space, and the Holocaust short story provides a glimpse into this particular hellish world.

The uniqueness of the short story form lies in its ability to contribute to the literary canon through the microscopic worlds it weaves for its readers. However, the Holocaust short stories

68 Ka-tzetnik, xi.

are unique in their tendency to focus on a particular moment capturing the collapsing of time, the rupturing of presuppositions, the crumbling of the world (life before the Holocaust) into the anti- world, and the tearing apart of relationships. The following chapters will highlight how the form of this genre magnifies this collapsing and tearing apart of worlds and relationships through the concise narratives of Ida Fink, Tadeuz Borowski, Rokhl Korn, Frume Halpern, and Cynthia

Ozick. Also, the reader will see how the narrowly focused structure of the short story implicates the reader to bear witness through its more immediate narratives, as compared to the longer, more elaborate forms of Holocaust literature. Thus the reader undergoes a more abrupt collision with the collapse of time and meaning, which go into the human relationships that came under assault at the hands of the Nazis. Addressing three themes demonstrate this definitive aspect of the Holocaust short story through an examination of the works of three authors. In Fink’s stories,

I will focus on the internal, psychological impact of the assault on the family structure; in my examination of Borowski’s stories, I will move to the external aspect of the “anti-world” (life amid the Holocaust) and its most characteristic inhabitant, the Muselmann; and in Cynthia

Ozick’s stories, I shift to the aftermath of the Holocaust and the individual who is alone, unable to “leave” Auschwitz, due to the psychological and emotional impossibility of returning to a world “after Auschwitz.” This absence of the “after,” as portrayed in Ozick’s stories, is indicative of the collapse of time, which renders human relationship impossible.

I begin this discussion of these three themes in Holocaust short stories by examining three stories from Ida Fink’s short story collection, A Scrap of Time and Other Stories, with an emphasis on her utilizing the simplicity of the short story form to reveal a “moment” of the “anti- world” in which the internal family relationships break down. Although most scholars, such as

Marek Wilczynski,69 merely address Fink’s work in terms of her ability to weave the notion of memory into her narratives or make note of the internalized language of her prose or her use of

“paradoxes,” the tearing apart of family relationships in Fink’s stories has not been examined.

For example, in Fink’s “The Key Game,” a boy rehearses finding a “lost” key in order for his father to hide if or when the Nazis come to their door. This story captures an aspect of the “anti- world” for the reader that demonstrates the tearing of meaning from expression and language. In

Fink’s stories, the reader sees various fragmented facets of the Holocaust and comes to understand that this is a “world in which a child is forced across the threshold of danger and impending death;”70 it is a world in which language and expression between parent and child are devoid of meaning. Fink’s “Aryan Papers” captures another layer of this inverted world, depicting how a girl trades her virginity for false papers in the hopes that these documents would save her and her mother’s life. The structure of this genre enables the reader to immediately see this perversion of justice, mockery of language, and appropriating of humanity that occurs when one fails to see the value of each life. In addition to the two aforementioned stories, I highlight how in her other story “A Scrap of Time” Fink captures the psychological strains and emotional toils facing individuals (parent(s) and child(ren)) through centering her stories on a particular moment in time – even a “scrap” of time. I continue this line of reasoning when I consider how this similar collapse of home and relationships is also portrayed in two Yiddish Holocaust short stories: “The End of the Road” by Rokhl Korn, and “Dog Blood” by Frume Halpern.

69 Marek Wilczynski, "Trusting the Words: Paradoxes of Ida Fink," Modern Language Studies 24, no. 4 (1994): 25-38. 70 Dorota Glowacka, Disappearing Trances: Holocaust Testimonials, Ethics, and Aesthetics (Seattle, Washington: University of Washington Press, 2012), 156.

Moving from the internal, psychological struggles captured in Fink’s, Korn’s, and

Halpern’s narratives, I will address Tadeusz Borowski’s collection of stories, This Way For the

Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. It will concentrate on Borowski’s use of the short story form, and his dark diction, stark images, and concrete details to capture a world where time is suspended between death and life, as portrayed in the external, physical dissolving of relationships. In

Borowski’s tales, this collapse of humanity and human relationship is represented in the

“Muselmann.” Although scholars like Rosenfled,71 James Young,72 Langer,73 and Ezrahi74 have noted how the language and descriptions of Borowski’s narratives emulate the language and world of Auschwitz, they do not address the confining form of Borowski’s art, mirroring the

“anti-world” of Auschwitz. In tandem with Borowski’s attention to the tight, consistent form of these stories, the figure of the “Muselmann” appears again and again in this collection of short stories embodying what Ezrahi calls “concentrationary realism.”75 The Muselmann is the epitome of the faceless, expressionless, and cruel product of the Nazi machine during the “anti- world.” Yet, at the same time, the Muselmann figure is the visage of a person caught between life and death. In Borowski’s “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” the Muselmann figures are dehumanized and depicted as insects hiding from light.76 In his other stories, such as

“The Supper” or “A True Story,” Borowski has the narrator refer to those around him, who have

71 Alvin H. Rosenfeld, A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980), 72-75. 72 James Edward Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988): 104-106. 73 Lawrence L. Langer, Versions of Survival: The Holocaust and the Human Spirit (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982). 74 Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, By Words Alone (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 55. 75 Ibid., 49-66. 76 Tadeusz Borowski, The Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 32.

almost succumbed to death, as “Muslimized”77 or “like a ‘Muslim,’”78 to capture this state of life-death in the “anti-world.” Those in the camps understand that “‘Muslim’ was the camp name for a prisoner who had been destroyed physically and spiritually, and who had neither the strength nor the will to go on living – a man ripe for the gas chamber.”79 In these stories we see how in the “anti-world,” the expressionless faces found on the Muselmanns serve as traces of the time before, where “to love” was commanded, rather than when “to kill” was commanded.

In conjunction with Fink’s attention to the psychological strains facing individuals, and in tandem with Borowski’s stark images of the physical breakdowns, Cynthia Ozick’s short stories

“The Shawl,” from The Shawl will be noted. I will address how Ozick portrays the impossibility of motherhood in the camps through her depiction of the collapsing of relationships between mother and daughter in the “anti-world.” In this short story, Ozick provides her readers with a glimpse into a world leading to a moment when a mother (Rosa) witnesses her child’s murder; yet, rather than crying out for her child, Rosa is frozen in the collapsing of time and the feeling that constitutes the “anti-world” – a place where to feel or act was a reason to be killed.80 Writing about Ozick’s fiction, Lawrence Friedman briefly addresses how Rosa is caught in a “hellish present;”81 however, the majority of his analysis, in tandem with the works of Victor

Strandberg82 and Sanford Pinsker,83 highlights Ozick’s various aesthetics and religious allusions

77 Ibid., 156. 78 Ibid., 158. 79 Ibid., 32. 80 Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 10. 81 Lawrence S. Friedman, Understanding Cynthia Ozick (University of South Carolina Press, 1991), 17. 82 Victor H. Strandberg, Greek Mind-Jewish Soul: The Conflicted Art of Cynthia Ozick (Madison: The University of Wisconsin press, 1994).

in her work, rather than addressing her use of the short story form, or her survivor’s inability to leave the “anti-world.” In my analysis of the second part of this story, which focuses on Rosa’s life in America after the war, I will address how the reader is introduced to the various ways the victim never truly leaves the “anti-world.”

Finally, I will address the relationship between the writer and readers of Holocaust short stories. Authors writing about the Holocaust choose this literary medium to sound their voice as a form of testimony, and in doing so, account for the time the world collapsed into an “anti- world.” Holocaust scholar Steven Jacobs addresses the role of the artist when he writes, “Among those Shoah artists, both those who survived and those who did not, were those who chose to put their talents and skills to best use by recording what they were seeing and experiencing, no matter how painful, no matter how horrific.”84 Jacobs reiterates what several scholars of

Holocaust literature have noted: to write about the Holocaust is to write as one who is bearing witness to the atrocity, as one who is testifying and speaking for the silent ones – the millions whose voices will never speak, testify, nor bear witness. This notion of writing as testimony is a notion that traces back to the Judeo-Christian traditions that are rooted in the early biblical writings and addressed in the accompanying commentaries. In the Jewish tradition, there is a history of writing chronicles in response to catastrophe and even during catastrophe; this approach is seen in the First and Second book of Chronicles in the Bible. According to Jewish tradition, this writing (chronicling of history) assumes an aspect of testimony inasmuch as it sees something meaningful at stake in the history to which it responds. This tradition of writing and

83 Sanford Pinsker, The Uncompromising Fictions of Cynthia Ozick (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986). 84 Steven L. Jacobs, In Search of Yesterday: The Holocaust and the Quest for Meaning (Lanham: University Press of America, 2006), 151.

chronicling about experiences and events, philosophies and phenomena continued throughout the centuries. In the early twentieth century, Walter Benjamin further addresses the role of the chronicler of history in his Theses on the Philosophy of History. Rather than approaching history and engaging the past from the skewed view of the victor, in his third thesis, Benjamin urges the

“historian” to view himself rather as a “chronicler.” For “a chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history.”85 In the same way as

Benjamin sees the historian, authors of Holocaust short stories take on the task of writing about that which happened in hopes that it would never be regarded as lost for history.

Alongside the writer who bears witness, the reader bears witness upon reading short stories about the Holocaust. Within the Holocaust short stories is the rhetorical device of dramatic irony, which enables Holocaust stories to directly insert the readers into the narrative by weaving them into a story where they know the ending and where they are able to assume what might happen to the characters before the characters do (whether liquidation or ghettoization is about to occur, if the train will leave for Auschwitz, or if their food rations will decrease). In many ways, the reader approaches the text with the knowledge and the context of history, therefore enabling them to anticipate the end, which also adds, in some instances, tension and suspense to the reading. However, what makes this rhetorical tool of dramatic irony unique to the

Holocaust short story is not only how the brevity of this form accentuates this device, but also how the implication imposed on the reader by the author is to know, share, and in turn, tell

85 Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 254.

(relate) that “story” by also bearing witness. Through these stories and various “moments” captured in their narratives, the reader sees how the “anti-world” is a place where fathers do not recognize their children, where a potato holds more value than a life, where neighbor turns on neighbor, and where both God and supposed civilized humanity are silent when millions are being murdered. While David Hirsch,86 Lawrence Langer,87 and other writers address the various ways of Holocaust literature’s implication of the reader, they do not consider the unique ways the short story genre adds to this implication of the reader.

Through this critical analysis of Holocaust short stories, I aim to highlight how these texts written in the short story form capture the moment of tension, crisis, utter silence, and the tearing apart of relationships (fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, neighbors, and lovers). Through this genre’s form, authors of these stories give the readers a glimpse into a world where death is celebrated, commanded, and carried out; or, perhaps better, these authors tear an opening into the fabric of an “anti-world,” in which even death is not death. The short stories focus on the destruction of relationships. They center on a moment when the world of the story collapses under the assaults by man, rather than flourishes by the uniting of humanity, so that time itself comes undone. Lastly, they tend to engage in a narrative testimony of the characters’ death, rather than their lives, which in turn, may implicate the reader to remember the people and places from which these stories arise. The aim of the following chapters is to join the on-going conversation about Holocaust literature by highlighting the unique features of this genre – and how these stories aid in our understanding of the Holocaust, in that they highlight the various

86 David H. Hirsch, The Deconstruction of Literature The Deconstruction of Literature: Criticism after Auschwitz (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1991). 87 Lawrence L. Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975).

moments capturing the tearing apart of relations between family, friends, neighbors, and future generations.

CHAPTER II

THE COLLAPSE OF SILENCE:

THE ROLE OF SILENCE IN IDA FINK’S SHORT STORIES

“Who’s the girl?” he asked, entering the room. “Oh, just a whore.” “I thought she was a virgin,” he said, surprised. “Pale, teary-eyed, shaky…” “Since when can’t virgins be whores?” “You’re quite a philosopher,” the other man said, and they both burst out laughing. – Ida Fink, “Aryan Papers”

Silence. There is the silence filling outer space – soundless galaxies, moons, stars. There is the silence that filled the earth before God said, “Let there be light.”88 There is the silence filling the Intensive Care Unit of a hospital when the machines generating the constant cacophony of beeping alarming machines turn off. A sheet floating in the air, resting on stillness.

Time of death called, silence. …Then there is a silence against time, against presuppositions of normalcy, decency, honor, life – it is a silence created by man against man. It is a silence filling the winds when man said, “Let there be ash,” and the cries and voices and hopes and lives of millions were murdered during the atrocities that occurred during the Holocaust.

Polish-born writer, Ida (Landau) Fink and her younger sister escaped from the confines of the Zbarazh ghetto in 1942 after acquiring false identity papers.89 Though Fink’s short stories are brief in length, the narratives and motifs she constructs copiously capture, for her readers, the collapse of time and relationships in the anti-world. Specifically, Fink’s use of silence echoes the psychological collapse of relationships that occurred during the Holocaust. The force behind the

88 Gen. 1:3 KJV 89 Jackie Metzger, “Ida Fink: Biography,” YadVashem.org, accessed March 21, 2016, http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/education/educational_materials/selected_readings.asp#2.

building of systematic anti-Semitic laws, ghetto walls, and gas chambers was an ideological hatred that reached into the ethical, philosophical, physical, and spiritual realms of reality for those living during the Holocaust. By weaving the motif of silence into her narratives, in each of the following three short stories, which serve as the springboards for our analysis, Fink introduces the reader to various dimensions of the collapsing of time. In “Jean-Christophe,” the protagonist is serving in a labor unit laying the tracks for a train – all the time wondering if she will live to finish the book she is reading: Jean-Christophe; in “The Key Game,” a family waits for the time the Nazis will ring their doorbell to take them to their death, while playing the Key

Game with their son; in “Aryan Papers,” a girl waits for the Nazi with whom she will exchange her innocence in order to obtain fake Aryan Papers. In reading Fink’s work, one notes how, “in such narratives, spatial relationships typically overshadow the temporal relationships with which they are fused, since time is ruptured, fragmented, frozen, annulled. For the narrators of such texts, time is dead.”90 Therefore, silence is not merely a poetic pause or a moment of rest in the over-arching narrative’s song of atrocity, but rather it is the motif of silence in Fink’s short stories that purposefully resonates the collapsing of time and relationships during the anti-world.

In her writings, silence fills the space of unspoken terror when meaning is torn from language – as language becomes the instrument of speaking death and destruction instead of life and hope.

The first story to appear in Ida Fink’s collection is “A Scrap of Time.” As the title indicates, Fink, like so many who experienced the Holocaust – the anti-world – came to quickly understand that time itself seemed to have collapsed under the pressures of mass humiliation, mass exodus, mass death. Fink writes, “‘I want to talk about a certain time not measured in

90 Ruth Ginsburg. "Ida Fink's Scraps and Traces: Forms of Space and the Chronotope of Trauma Narratives." Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 4.2 (2006), 212.

months and years […] Today, digging around in the ruins of memory, I found it fresh and untouched by forgetfulness. This time was measured not in months but in a word – we no longer said ‘in the beautiful month of May,’ but ‘after the first ‘action,’ or the second, or right before the third.’”91 Regarding this notion of time which Fink addresses, Marek Wilczynsk notes, “Fink makes clear at the very beginning of her enterprise, what happened to Jews disrupted the very foundation of the genre of narrative – the underlying continuity of time.”92 In other words,

Wilczynsk also emphasizes how Fink’s choice to write in the short story genre, like so many authors, was a conscious choice – a narrative choice that seems to best mirror the fragmented, yet wholly horrific experience of life during the Holocaust. In addition to Fink’s stories (e.g. “A

Scrap of Time” and “Traces”) that wrestle with this notion of time and memory, in her other stories, which will be discussed later, the reader sees how in the anti-world, relationships are also under assault, and this is seen in the characters’ inability to express language – to communicate with one another. This inability to express language is heard in the motif of silence that she weaves throughout her narratives. Again, Wilczynsk notes, “In most ‘scraps’ silence prevails, yet in time ‘measured in a word’ speech also has its roles to play. The scarcity of spoken words is compensated by a variety of languages used by Fink’s characters: Polish, Yiddish, German,

Ukrainian, and even French. […] Words are often a matter of lie and death: German kills;

Yiddish and Polish are the jeremiad of the victims; Ukrainian derides; and French – it kills just as well, suddenly turned into a snare. Fink, who used to be a student of music, exploits linguistic

91 Ida Fink, “A Scrap of time,” in A Scrap of Time and Other Stories (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1983), 3. 92 Marek Wilczynski, "Trusting the Words: Paradoxes of Ida Fink." Modern Language Studies 24.4 (1994): 28.

polyphony to orchestrate delusions, ironies, and unpredictable twists of fate.”93 In Fink’s stories, silence precedes the breaking of relationships in the anti-world. Where language ceases to be heard, the name ceases to be called, one thus ceases to respond to and recognize their fellow brother. Consequently, this silence can be seen as a form of confusion – an inability to communicate, and in turn, respond to one another. It is reminiscent of the story of the Tower of

Babel and the Confusion of tongues found in the Bible, where language and human relation collapsed.94 As seen both in this story from Genesis, as well as in Fink’s stories, where language is confused, so too is the very notion of a human being and human beings’ role in relationships.

This relation between confusion of language and the confusion of the notion of a human being is found in the confusion and the inability for one to understand another when talking or relating.

This inability to relate, and therefore, listen and hear another speak, is seen in the motif of silence that is woven throughout these Holocaust short stories.

Ida Fink’s own experiences during the Holocaust, as well as the stories of friends, relatives, and strangers, not only shaped her writing, but also were the catalyst for which she sought to remember and give voice to the atrocities of the past by writing of them for the present and future. Upon considering the scope of her short narratives comprising A Scrap of Time and

Other Stories, Holocaust literary scholar, Myrna Goldenberg notes, “Each story is a slice of very specific life under the Nazi occupation of Poland from September 1939 to the Displaced Persons camps established in 1945.”95 When asked about her writing in an interview, Fink replied: “I write mainly about what I lived through. I belong to the so-called writers of the first generation

93 Ibid., 31. 94 Gn. 11:3-9 ESV 95 Myrna Goldenberg, "`From a world beyond': Women in the Holocaust," Feminist Studies 22.3 (Fall 1996), 683. 667.

after the Holocaust. […] One poet told me, that is not the way to write about the occupation. He said it’s as if I opened a window and left open only a small gap, through which I look at the world. And then I wrote about what I saw, in a quiet voice, a whisper. […] Despite his advice, I did not stop writing this way. I couldn’t write any other way.”96 Fink employs the short story genre by creating narratives, which consist of “scraps of time,” stagnate sounds of silence, and moments of quietness in the midst of clanging cacophony of chaos that comprised the anti-world.

In tandem with utilizing the short story genre to best capture her various literary representations of the Holocaust for her readers, Arun Kumar Pokhrel notes in his article regarding Fink’s writing that “Ida Fink’s stories contain the traditional sense of story-telling. They have certain narrative structures and an evolving plot to follow. By employing traditional narrative structure,

Fink portrays a sudden tragedy of family doom. Importantly, she also uses the stream of consciousness to demonstrate the flux of temporal experience. Often Fink’s stories, bewildered and paranoiac voices spell out the inescapability of impending disaster. Inner actions of characters such as hope for survival, lamentation for the loss of family life, contemplation of life and death, remembering and refusal to remember are associated with the outer events of Nazi atrocities.”97 As Pokhrel stresses, Fink’s traditional sense of story-telling, when paired with the quiet whispering voice of her narrative, provides her readers with a short story collection, A

Scrap of Time, which unlikely sheds light on the horrors of the anti-world, through Fink’s motif of silence found in her stories. Fink’s writing, though brief and structurally adherent to the short

96 “Farewell Ida Fink,” Culture.pl, accessed February 12, 2016, http://culture.pl/en/event/farewell-ida-fink. 97 Arun Kumar Pokhrel, “Representations of Time and Memory in Holocaust Literature: A Comparison of Charlotte Delbo’s Days and Memory and Ida Fink’s Selected Stories” in Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry 4.8 (2009), 33.

story genre’s features, cannot be so easily described, for within each Holocaust short narrative,

Fink weaves traces of terror, moments of memory, and hints of horror known as the anti-world for the reader. Though each of her narratives is multifaceted in artistic and structural creative techniques, we will discuss the motif of silence Fink weaves throughout her narratives, for this motif amplifies the themes of collapsing of time and the collapse of relationships that are key themes found in the fabric of the Holocaust short story.

Through the cognitive narration and the actions of the characters in the short stories,

“Jean-Christophe,” “The Key Game,” and “Aryan Papers,” Fink creates a dialogue of silence. It is in the thoughts and moments of silence, created in each story, that she captures the psychological strains plaguing all those who live in the tormenting moments of wondering in the anti-world – moments of wondering if they or those around them are to live another second, hour, day, week. There are two types of silence which Fink creates in her short stories and these silences are amplified in the story’s narrative structure. There is the silence that is described by the narrator of each story and there is the silence that speaks through the actions or inactions of the characters. Furthermore, this dialogue of silence speaks to the collapsing of relationships that occurred in the anti-world. Though this dialogue of silence streams throughout each of the short stories in the collection A Scrap of Time and Other Stories, we will focus on the three short stories mentioned above. The dialogue of silence is a tool that Fink uses to shape her fiction for all generations of readers: those who lived and survived the horrific years of the Holocaust, and those who have been told the tales, those who have read the history books and those who have observed the evidence. As many Holocaust scholars have noted, the strains and challenges facing those who are attempting to teach the events of the Holocaust to the ‘next generation’ lie in the

challenge to make the past as tangible as the present, for the sake of seeking some deeper understanding, yet not for the sake of merely “knowing what the Holocaust was like.” There is a looming fear among scholars and historians that between the survivors and the readers of the next generations, the sharp pains and reality of the events of the Holocaust might lose their edge and their piercing truth. It is with this haunting fear that many historians approach the challenge of discussing the Holocaust by soaking the student with data, dates, and debates – crafting a skeleton-like creation of the events tracing and following the Holocaust. However, it is with the aid of well-crafted Holocaust fiction, like Fink’s short stories, that those who did not live to see the horrors of the Holocaust, but were rather born years or decades later, are able to attempt to understand the horrendous reality which plagued those persecuted and murdered during the

1930s and 1940s. Where historians have created a skeleton-like structure of data, such as dates and names for people to learn of the events of the Holocaust, it is through the creation of silent dialogues and other literary techniques that Ida Fink has created a DNA-like identity of the

Holocaust for her readers. When addressing her artistic style, one reader noted:

The great tragic art of Ida Fink requires memory, fragments slowly assembled into a whole. More than other kinds of literature, the resulting form of fiction naturally rejects certain themes, manners of writing, pathos and the revelation of the narrating person. It is not just a matter of modesty. It is a poetics of asceticism, of abstinence. The stories are sparely and severely constructed. The story resides in a fragile balance. It maneuvers through the accepted poetics of the short story. The extroverted toughness, the incorporation into time and space, the emphasis on tragic gaiety during the plague [what I call the anti-world], the surprise or sublime transcendence of the ending, even originality – all these must be carefully, repeatedly weighted. Indeed, it might be argued that these are not really short stories or scraps of autobiography, but sketches of events caught in the magnetic force of the plague.98

98 Dan Tsalka. “The Tragic Art of Ida Fink,” Haaretz. Accessed April 3, 2016, http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/books/the-tragic-art-of-ida-fink-1.130733.

These sketches of the plague, or what I call the anti-world, are what make a Holocaust short story differ from all other short stories. Fink, like so many other Holocaust authors, writes narratives attesting to death rather than life. She writes stories where her characters’ epiphanies are not enlightened moments of revelation of ideas, but rather are moments of revelations of death. In her fiction, she captures the collapse of time and the assault on relationships through depicting survivors’ hiding and fighting to live and the psychological, emotional, and spiritual essence of those who were murdered, as well as those who survived the Holocaust.

In her story, “Jean-Christophe” Fink creates a dialogue of silence that is between those who are “safe,” those momentarily out of harm’s way, and those who are “unsafe,” those exposed to the unimaginable realties of the ghettos and camps. This story is an example of the multifaceted aspect of how silence speaks not to those who hear nothingness, but rather to those who hear silence. In “Jean-Christophe,” Fink creates an atmosphere of tranquility and beauty that is marred by the pains and torment of silence. As a group of Jews are working and waiting in the woods surrounded by life – blossoming buds and flowing fields – they are aware that just down the tracks and near the village, carts are being loaded with people to kill. Thus, Fink creates a dichotomy in the silence. There is the silence of those waiting in the woods – those alive, and the silence of those loaded in the carts being taken to camps and gas chambers – those riding to their death. The characters in this story are few and uncomplicated. There is the

Aufseherin who is in charge of this group. She is described as a young woman who “was pretty

[…] she used to sleep with the clerks in the district office, and now she slept with the Germans, but she was a good girl – she only slept with them, that’s all […] It was obvious she was

sensitive.”99 The remaining characters are those who are silently listening for the coming train – their coming death:

In the day of action in town she was tactful enough not to ask why we weren’t working, why our shovels and hoes lay under the tree. She sat at the edge of the clearing with her back to us. We were lying on the grass, not saying a word, waiting for the thundering of the train, because then we would know it was all over – though not, of course, who was on the train, who had been take and who had been speared.100

The narrator then goes on to note, for a second time, “we lay on the grass, not saying a word, as if our voice could have drowned out the thundering of the train, which would pass near the edge of the forest, not far from where we were working.”101 The dialogue of silence for the narrator is a conversation between those being gathered into the trains and those not digging in the woods, those not saying a word. The conversation of silence continues through the woods and down the train tracks: “five or maybe eight kilometers outside of town, mid the silence of the trees…” the

“oldest girl kept putting her ear to the ground.”102 Fink captures, in this action of the girl placing her ear to the ground, a sense of urgency, of questioning, of looming fear for what is to come for all those waiting in silence: “It was silent in the forest. There were no birds, but the smell of trees and flowers was magnificent.”103 Through passages like the above, Fink creates an almost revolting juxtaposition of an abandoned woods of all creatures, most likely because of the sounds of nefarious shooting and the sounds of death – with the “magnificent” and almost regal, pure, innocent, smell of trees and flowers: living things. This lack of sounds from nature echoes the

99 Ida Fink, Jean-Christophe,” in A Scrap of Time and Other Stories (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1983), 31. 100 Ibid., 32. 101 Ibid. 102 Ibid. 103 Ibid.

collapsing time, for the very natural order and response of sound (creatures in their habituates) is displaced and silenced by all that is occurring around them. The narrator proceeds to state:

We couldn’t hear anything. There was nothing to hear. The silence was horrifying because we knew that there was shooting going on and people screaming and crying, that it was a slaughterhouse out there. But here there were bluebells, hazelwood, daisies, and other flowers, very pretty, very colorful. That was what was so horrifying – just as horrifying as waiting for the thundering of the train, as horrifying as wondering whom they had taken.104

The above passage highlights the contrast between the silence and the noise they do not hear; the silence is precisely the silence of the noise they do not hear, and for the narrator, the juxtaposition of beauty and all the living creation with the silence of those awaiting death was:

“horrifying.” The “silence” – the inability to speak, shout, denounce, name, state the prohibition against life that was happening around them, down the road, in this anti-world “was horrifying.”

In this silent, horrifying moment, the collapsing environment of the Holocaust blooms to reveal the contradictory nature and reality of the anti-world – a place where the beauty of wildflowers and noiseless surroundings is horrific, and mass murder of parents and children is expected, normal. Here, silence becomes the sound of the anti-world; for it is a silence whose ripple-effect transcends nature, the natural world, to even the heavenly supposed silence of God, as alluded to in the scene depicting a boy being hanged in Elie Wiesel’s Night. Through the silence of the narrator and the silence of the living, Fink sculpts the psychological terrors tantalizing those who wonder whether or not their friends, family or they themselves will be the next murder victims.

She writes, “All of us were aware that every passing minute brought the train’s thunder nearer, that any moment now we would hear death riding down the tracks. One girl cried ‘Mama!’ and

104 Ibid.

then other voices cried ‘Mama!’ because there was an echo in the woods.”105 For the narrator, death is riding towards her. She knows that like the young girl’s “Mama,” anyone of them could, and very well might be, the next name echoed in the woods. Similar to Fink’s scene, the power of the one calling out for Mama only to be met with silence, is also mentioned in Sara Nomberg-

Przytyk’s memoir, True Tales from a Grotesque Land: Auschwitz. Nomberg-Przytyk’s accounts,

Suddenly, the stillness was broken by the screaming of children, as if a single scream had been torn out of hundreds of mouths, a single scream of fear and unusual pain, a scream repeated a thousand times in the single word, “Mama,” a scream that increased in intensity every second, enveloping the whole camp every inmate. Our lips parted without our being conscious of what we were doing, and a scream of despair tore out of our throats, growing louder all the time. […] Finally, our screaming stopped. On the block we could still hear the screams of the children who were being murdered, then only sighs, and at the end everything was enveloped in death and silence.106

This silence in both Fink and Nomberg-Przytyk’s accounts follow the assault on the human relationships, the assault on spoken language that is underscored by the word “Mama” – often a child’s first word, a word that cries out of the most fundamental relationship – that of motherhood. Fink ends this short story with a circular device in her writing. The very last lines of this story are almost identical to those lines that appear near the beginning of the story: “the oldest one of us knelt down and placed her ear to the earth. But the earth was still silent.”107

Unlike the earlier account of this action of the eldest in the woods listening to the tracks, the

“earth” was silent, not merely the “woods.” Here we see how silence transcends from the silence of the speaking world, to the silence of the earthly and heavenly world – the silence of the supernal mother, the feminine presence of the Holy One – the Shekhinah – the one who first

105 Ibid., 33. 106 Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 81-82. 107 Ibid., 34.

utters our name with love, the one who goes into exile and dwells with the children of Israel, is silent, which echoes the horror of said silence. The Shekhinah – the female aspect of God, the feminine Divine Presence that is inculcated and quite prevalent in various Jewish and Kabalistic teachings, is associated with the matriarch figure of the home. With this unresponsiveness to a child’s call for Mama, Fink attests to the one of the greatest assaults on relationships in the

Holocaust – that against mother and child. The dialogue of silence Fink creates in “Jean-

Christophe” is not merely a conversation between those silently waiting in the woods and those silently being murdered in the town, but it is a dialogue of silence between the earth and the victims – victims whose names, remains, and deaths would echo in the wind all around the world for years to come: “The girl who had been crying began sobbing still louder. It wasn’t weeping anymore, it was lamentation.”108 This “lamentation” is a lamentation of a girl’s soul not over the loss of community or commodity, but of familyhood – of the one who replies, “yes,” and

“coming” when their name was called: Mama! With the inclusion of this motif of silence into her short stories, the reader sees how silence becomes one of the cries in the inverted world of horror, destruction, and death: the anti-world.

In addition to the silence of motherhood in nature, Fink provides a glimpse into the anti- world where silence of motherhood in the home is also heard. Fink transitions the dialogue of silence from the silence of narration and her characters’ thoughts to the physical silence of her characters’ actions, which do the speaking rather than her using the words of the characters’ conversations. This silence is the silence that is heard in the anti-world, when all preconceived notions of acceptable actions and motions no longer are voiced or heard. On one hand, Fink’s

108 Ibid.

short stories – “The Key Game” and “Aryan Papers” – highlight the motif of silence in

Holocaust short stories, but on the other hand, they also shed light on how the collapse of time and relationships in the anti-world was an atrocity that began with a philosophical, moral, psychological assault on the face and soul of the victim, before it was a physical assault. For the boundaries of the anti-world extend beyond the barbed wire walls of ghettoes and camps.

Therefore, upon both a close reading of the motif of silence, and a reading of Emmanuel

Lévinas’ philosophical notions applied to her narratives, in the remainder of this chapter we will focus of Fink’s two stories “The Key Game” and “Aryan Papers,” and how relationships between parent and child came under assault and collapsed. Writing in a post-Holocaust world, the events and realties of the Shoah109 shaped, challenged, changed, and impacted several writers of the 20th century – specifically, the writer and philosopher, Emmanuel Lévinas. Found in the core of Nazi ideology was the assault on the soul of the Other – the Jew. This very assault was rooted in the Nazis’ appropriating and possessing of the Jews as merely objects, things, and faceless beings. Emmanuel Lévinas’ philosophy of the face-to-face encounter with the Other reinforces this emphasis on silence and the crumbling of relationships seen in Fink’s two stories, as this philosophy sheds light on the internal collapsing of relationships in the anti-world.

The fuel of the Nazi ideological machine was to render the Other – the Jew – faceless, expressionless, commandmentless, and insignificant. Consequently, as we consider the Fink’s two short stories, we will address to what extent are Lévinas’ and various religious concepts rooted in Judaism surrounding the face-to-face encounter are evident in these Holocaust short

109 “The biblical word Shoah (which has been used to mean “destruction” since the Middle Ages) became the standard Hebrew term for the murder of European Jewry as early as the early 1940s” (YadVashem.org).

stories, and in what ways does the face summon the Other in the midst of a world where the command to “Love thy neighbor” is replaced with the command: “Kill thy neighbor.” The face of the Other is what summons one to answer, hineni – “Here I am,” when asked, “Where are you?” Yet, how can one answer the call of the Other when the Other is rendered faceless? How can the expression of the face summon one into relation with the Other when it is considered a crime to view the Other as fully human? Just as God spoke the world and man into being, thus creating the relation between the heavenly Divine and the earthly created, in these Holocaust stories, it is through language of the face, through saying that which is not said or thematized, that enables the Other to speak of what he has witnessed (the face of the Other).

Yet before proceeding, we must ask: Why should we, readers of Holocaust short stories, consider various philosophical or religious readings of these Holocaust short stories? The philosophical ideas, like Lévinas’, found woven throughout these short narratives, also stem from

Judaism and Judaic teachings and traditions. Thus, these notions highlight the extent to which the

Nazis’ grip of hate and murder reached – family structure and the structure of neighbors and communities – namely, the a assault on relationships, which was an assault on the soul. This assault on the soul entails an undermining of biblical teaching concerning the dearness of the other human being, the commandment to love thy neighbor, and the prohibition against murder.

Again, this notion traces back to the very root of Judaic-Christian tradition regarding man’s responsibility toward and for fellow man. As mentioned in the previous chapter, the very first question God posed to man in the Bible is an ethical question about the human-to-human relation, posed by the Infinite One toward the face. It is a question for the face to summon a response toward the Other – the face of one’s brother: “Then the Lord said to Cain, ‘Where is Abel your

brother?’ He said, ‘I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?’ And He said, ‘What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground.’”110 For Lévinas, this responsibility for and the relationship to the Other, this demand to answer, “Here I am for you,” is the very root for which the discussion of ethics grows throughout his writings. To see the face of the Other is to hear the command, “Thou Shalt Not Kill,”111 to hear the voice of the Other when they cry, Ayeka!? – “Where are you?” and to respond: Hineni! Regarding this command,

Lévinas writes, “The Other is the only being that one can be tempted to kill. This temptation to murder and this impossibility of murder constitute the very vision of the face. To see a face is already to hear ‘You shall not kill’ and to hear ‘You shall not kill’ is to hear ‘Social justice’. […]

‘You shall not kill’ is therefore not just a simple rule of conduct; it appears as the principle of discourse itself and of spiritual life.”112 For Lévinas, the command of “You shall not kill” is synonymous with social justice; yet, during the Holocaust, when this command is burned, destroyed, or deemed illegal, then any sense of “social justice” is replaced by injustice and murder. To murder is to murder that which the Divine created; therefore, by erasing this command from a society, one (the Nazis) attempts to erase all that represents the Divine (the

Torah and all those who study, believe, and follow it). Consequently, one notes how the prohibition against murder that is found in the Torah, issues from the face, just as the Word – and in turn, language – issues from the face. The Torah is the text considered the most fundamental to Judaism and Jewish identify, yet in the anti-world, a place spoken into existence by a man who declared his word law, rather than God’s Word as law – the assault on the face comes with

110 Gen. 4:9-10 111 Exod. 20:13 112 Lévinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, 9.

the collapse of the Word and the undoing of the prohibition (the commandment) against murder.

By setting out to annihilate the Jews, the Nazis set out to annihilate Judaism and the Torah, which commands this prohibition against murder. Thus, Holocaust literature, like Fink’s stories, sets out to restore this fundamental Jewish teaching and testimony by attesting in its narratives about that which happens when the face of the Other is sought to be erased and eradicated, and when silence becomes the sound of horror.

When reading these short stories, the immediate reaction and result of such an attempt of the Nazis to render the Jew as “the other” is evident for the reader of these narratives because the genre’s structure does not delay in describing and capturing this dehumanizing of Jews’ faces during the Holocaust. Scholar David A. Patterson addresses the Nazi assault on the face of the

Jew (and what the Jew represents) when he writes: “Judaism represents a view of God, a world, and humanity that is diametrically opposed to the Nazi Weltanschauung […] If the Nazis are to be Nazis, then they have to eliminate the notion of a higher, divine image within the human being that places upon each of us an infinite responsibility for the other human being.”113 As

Patterson notes, the Nazi assault against the Jews was one rooted in erasing the face of the Jew by their erasing the human relation with the Divine. Consequently, when addressing the role of responding to a higher relation to the Other, by one’s responding: “hineni,” plays in Lévinas’ ethical response, Jonathan Ryan notes, “Whether in the case of Abraham (Gen 22:1) or Isaiah

(Isa 6:8), Lévinas finds in the response hineni an ‘obedience to the glory of the Infinite that orders me to the other’ (OB 146). Without seeking to comprehend the other, hineni embodies an

113 Patterson, “The Nazi Assault on the Jewish Soul through the Murder of the Jewish Mother” (Different Horrors / Same Hell: Gender and the Holocaust. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013), 164.

ethical response that makes me ‘available to the neediness (and especially the suffering) of the other person…without reservation.’”114 As Ryan claims, for Lévinas, the face of the Other demands a response – an ethical response, and a holy response to that which the Divine created.

However, as developed throughout his writings, Lévinas sees the face as that which serves as the prohibition against murder, embodies the ethical response of “Here I am,” while also demanding the response of “for you,” at the same time. When caught in the skewed anti-world of the

Holocaust, where death was more common than life, every ethical response for the Other, whether that response was a minuscule act or a fleeting glance, ushers one into a face-to-face encounter and reminds one of their relation to their brother: the Other. This relation came under attack during the Holocaust, and narratives such as Fink’s, echo the attack for her readers, which is seen in her portrayal of the crumbling of relationships (inversion of parent and child roles) and language (the role of silence instead language as a means of communication).

In her short stories, “The Key Game” and “Aryan Papers,” Fink paints the psychological fears, frustrations, and feelings the characters experience as they live life teetering on the edge of the abyss to death. In the “The Key Game,” a mother, father and thee-year-old son rehearse a

“game” where the “chubby, blue-eyed” child pretends to find a key, while his father attempts to hide – escape, if necessary. The title alone causes one to pause and consider the significance of the word key and game. One on hand, “key” could refer not only to the noun – the key the locks and unlocks a door – but also, an adjective – any crucial, important aspect of something. When considering the latter use, one reads the “key” as the most essential, important, and defining features of the “game”. At first, this game seems to shout of the daily fears families lived with,

114 Jonathan Ryan, “Like Bread from One’s Mouth: Emmanuel Lévinas and Reading Scripture with the Other” (Pacifica 21, no. 3 (October 2008): 285-306), 294.

fears of capture, fears of death, yet the true “game,” the key game is played in the silent actions of the mother, child, and father during the “rehearsing” of the game – the silent actions of a mother who is helpless when it comes to protecting her child. In this sense, game also takes on a new meaning, as well. A game? A reality? Life in the anti-world was as unpredictable as a casting of lots. Like a murky layer of water between the surface and the depth, the silent, unspoken, actions of the characters in “The Key Game” reveal the underlying threats and fears of people, parents, children, and families who were hiding and waiting during the Holocaust. An example of the silent dialogue of actions is in the dichotomy of the boy’s actions before the game and his actions during the game. This dialogue of silence between the boy and the reader is introduced by the narrator who states: “The boy sat erect, his back straight, his eyes fixed on his father, but it was obvious that he was so sleepy he could barely sit up.”115 Fink captures, in this story, the stolen innocence of children during the Holocaust. In this story we see the very assault on the relationships within the family structure. We see how in the anti-world children assumed the role of protector, and parents assumed the role of dependents. The boy, though young, is fully aware of the consequences of the actions surrounding him – his family’s having fled their previous apartments, his father’s necessity of hiding quickly and his mother’s urgency for excellence. Thus, the tired three-year-old “sits erect,” looks alert, is ready to begin rehearsing

“the key game.” The narrator traces the energetic, regimentally rehearsed and executed actions of the boy while he’s playing the game:

At the sound of his mother’s lips, the boy jumped up from his chair and ran to the front door, which was separated from the main room by a narrow strip of corridor. ‘Who’s there?’ he asked…‘ I’ll open up in a minute, I’m just looking for the keys,’ the child

115 Ida Fink, “The Key Game” in A Scrap of Time and Other Stories (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1983), 35.

called out. Then he ran back to the main room, making a lot of noise with his feet. He ran in circles around the table, pulled out one of the sideboard drawers, and slammed it shut.116

In the above passage, the silent dialogue of the boy continues to be voiced, as he plays the game with precise steps and memorized excuses such as, “Just a minute, I can’t find them” that he shouts to the imaginary solider waiting at the door, and “I found them!’ he shouted triumphantly,” as if he truly had found the lost key, the key that would enable the enemy to invade his home. In this place, a child was not a child, a “game” was not a game, and a home was not a home, for in this anti-world, the enemy has already invaded their dwelling place the moment the “key game” needed to be invented.

Nevertheless, it is the silent actions of the mother that follow her mimic of a “ding-dong” that is “quite a soft, lovely bell”117 that captures the psychological and emotional tensions seeping from her silent actions, which attests to the collapsing of the mother-child relationship. With her lips the mother plays the melodious music of a doorbell, with her lips she promises: “We’ll play the key game just one more time, only today,”118 with her lips she praises the game well-played by her three-year-old son, “Shut the door, darling’ the woman said softly. “‘You were perfect.

You really were,’” yet, it is with her actions that she silently cries for freedom, for her son’s innocence to play a game of triviality rather than survival, it is with her actions that she silently discusses life and death with her son and husband. When the boy rehearses his line, “Who’s there?,”119 the narrator reveals the true dialogue between the mother and son: “The woman, who alone had remained in her chair, clenched her eyes shut as if she were feeling a sudden, sharp

116 Ibid., 36. 117 Ibid. 118 Ibid. 119 Ibid., 36, 37.

pain.”120 Sitting still, as if she were invisible, non-existent, not home, the mother cannot help but clench her eyes shut when she hears the words that her son executes to perfection. It is through the silent dialogue of the mother’s actions that Fink freezes the reader in this world where, to the enemy, one’s life was as trivial as a game, as meaningless as a child’s toy, as useless as a pawn without a chess-set.

However, in this game the narrator does not merely capture the silent dialogue voiced through the actions of the boy but through the father, as well. Through this game – a small child acting as protector and defender of the home and father – Fink depicts, for the reader, the father who is no longer a father, for the meaning of the word father seems to have been torn away from the word in this world. The father’s eyes are bloodshot, seemingly a simple observation that speaks volumes of the painfully long hours parents endured for days, weeks, moths, years (if lucky), waiting – listening for those who might be approaching their door to ring the door bell.

They are the eyes of a man whose sleep has been robbed by horror. His words are scarce, yet sharp, and his actions, absent yet present. For the child, the object of the game was to delay finding the key while persuading the ‘person’ on the other side of the door, that in earnest, the lost key is being hunted. For the parents, the object of the game is survival and is time (life), rather than death. Fink traces the object of the game toward the end of the story, when the acting is replaced with reality:

Every evening she repeated the same words, and every evening he [the boy] stared at the closed bathroom door. At last it creaked. The Man was pale and his clothes were streaked with lime and dust. He stood on the threshold and blinked in that funny way. ‘Well? How did it go?’ she asked.

120 Ibid., 36.

‘I still need more time. He has to look for them longer. I slip in sideways all right, but then…it’s so tight in there that when I turn…And he’s got to make more noise – he should stamp his feet louder.121

Though this portion of the story captures the dialogue between the mother and father, the silence lurking between the ellipses portrays the frustration fuming through the father’s mind, as he knows that child is listening to every word uttered from his lips, while his wife is listening to the pauses in his speech. His silent sentences supply his cries for: more time, more time, more time.

‘Say something to him,’ the woman whispered. ‘You did a good job, little one, a good job,’ he said mechanically. ‘That’s right,’ the woman said, ‘you’re really doing a wonderful job, darling – and you’re not little at all. You act just like a grown-up, don’t you? And you do know that if someone should really ring the doorbell someday when Mama is at work, everything will depend on you? Isn’t that right? And what will you say when they ask you about your parents?’ ‘Mama’s at work.’ ‘And Papa?’ He was silent. ‘And Papa?’ the man screamed in terror. The child turned pale. ‘And Papa?’ the man repeated more calmly. ‘He’s dead,’ the child answered and threw himself at his father, who was standing right beside him, blinking his eyes in that funny way, but who was already long dead to the people who would really ring the bell.122

This moment inserts the reader into the instant times crumbles, for in this moment, a child no long lives or acts as a child (with a sense of innocence and a naiveté about life, the world, his surroundings), but instead, he acts with a broken understanding of his broken reality that he is assuming the role of protector, guardian, father. In this last portion of the story, Fink weaves the silent dialogue into a tapestry that portrays a family functioning in fear. The son fearing failing his father and the father fearing failing his family – the only thing he has remaining in life. This

121 Ibid., 36. 122 Ibid., 38.

scene presents the inversion of life and death when meaning is torn from the word; where words once uttered life, and where language once spoke of love – in the anti-world, even the spoken word is robbed of meaning, and all that is left is silence and utterances of dodging and delaying death.

Like the “The Key Game,” Fink’s short story, “Aryan Papers” illustrates her ability to stitch a dialogue of silence throughout her characters’ actions, as well as into the spaces of time that carry the plot of the story. In “Aryan Papers,” the narrator accounts the destroying of innocence through the silent dialogue that the girl voices in her actions of trading her virginity for false Aryan papers for herself and her family. In this story, we see how the literature of the

Holocaust lends itself to educating its readers about the horror of the anti-world, where merely examining historical documents would fall short. Furthermore, this act of a young girl trading her virginity for false papers is another way the reader sees relationships come under assault during the Holocaust; namely, the anti-world was a place that fostered the stealing and trading of innocence – even the most intimate kind of innocence. For in the assault on the good, there is a radical assault on innocence itself. Regarding this topic, Myrna Goldenberg writes, “Prior to being murdered in Einsatzgruppen actions, single girls and young women were often raped, despite the fact that the 1935 Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor prohibited intercourse between Aryans and Jews.”123 Fink addresses this horrific reality in her story, bringing to light an evil often overlooked in the history books and accessible through testimonial accounts and literary responses to the Holocaust.

123 Myrna Goldenberg, “Lessons Learned from Gentle Heroism: Women’s Holocaust Narratives,” Annals of The American Academy of Political & Social Science 548 (1996), 84.

“Aryan Papers” is another example of how Fink links the psychological with the physical, the innocent with the corrupt, the fake with the real, and the silent with the spoken. Again, the motif of silence speaks to the assault on relationships, which is seen in the inability to speak or communicate in the anti-world. In this story, Fink immediately creates an atmosphere where the silent dialogue of the girl is echoed through her chaotic, loud surroundings: “The girl arrived first and sat down in the back of the room near the bar. Loud conversations, the clinking of glasses…”124 The narrator begins this story by creating a dichotomy between the environment of the bar with the psychological environment of the girl, “the shouts from the kitchen hurt her ears; but when she shut her eyes, it sounded almost like the ocean.”125 Instead of a voice, there is noise; instead of a word there is a din. Yet, though the contrast of the two environments is seen for the reader, the silent dialogue of the girl is revealed through her actions, like forgetting her handkerchief, “in her anxiety she had forgotten her handkerchief.” Or other silent moments when her anatomy betrays her false-confidence: “When he entered, her legs began to tremble and she had to press her heels against the floor to steady herself,” and later when “her legs were still trembling as if she had just walked miles; she couldn’t make them stay still.”126 Her trembling legs signifying the shifting ground, the shifting reality, and the shaking foundation of who she is

– an embodiment of innocence. Also, the moment when her eyes truly saw the monster waiting for his prey, “He was tall, well built, with a suntanned face…he was good-looking. He was in his forties. He was nicely dressed, with a tasteful, conservative tie. When he picked up the glass she

124 Ida Fink, “Aryan Papers” in A Scrap of Time and Other Stories (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1983), 63. 125 Ibid., 63. 126 Ibid., 64.

noticed that his finer nails were dirty.”127 The narrator continues to pepper moments of silent dialogue through the thoughts and actions of the man and the girl between forced verbal conversing:

She was afraid that she would pass out; she felt weak, fist hot, then cold. She wanted to get everything over with as quickly as possible. ‘Do you have it ready, sir? I brought the money…’ ‘What’s this ‘sir’ business? We’ve already clinked glasses and you still call me sir! You’re really something! Yes, I have everything ready. Signed and sealed. No cheating – the seals, the birth certificate – alles in Ordnung! Waiter, the check!’128

In the above passage, Fink captures the frivolity of the man’s concern with the girl’s situation. In essentially the same breath, he speaks of the papers and the check, as if they were of the same significance, as if they hold the same weight of freedom.

As the story “Aryan Papers” proceeds, the spoken dialogue dwindles as the silent dialogue develops: “He took her arm and she thought that it would be nice to have someone who would take her by the arm. Anyone but him.”129 In this moment, though no dialogue is spoken,

Fink utilizes the girl’s silent narration to shout for the readers the harsh reality several women, girls, and families were forced to accept in hopes of living another day, week, or year. The majority of the spoken dialogue in this story is through the man, such as the following: “For a sixteen-year-old you’re definitely too thin and too short. But I like thin girls. I don’t like fat on women. I knew you were my type the day you came to work. And I knew right away what you were. Who made those papers for you? What a lousy job. With mine you could walk through fire.

Even with eyes like yours. How much did your mother give him?”130 This turning the word over

127 Ibid., 64. 128 Ibid. 129 Ibid., 65. 130 Ibid.

to the service of violence tears meaning from the spoken word and imposes silence on the girl.

Nevertheless, though he speaks, the silent dialogue that is not spoken reveals the necessity of the girl’s situation. When the man states, “I knew what you were” rather than, “I knew you were a

Jew,” or his later line when he states, “I like to help people,” rather than, ‘I’ll help you – no price,”131 Fink fossilizes the deep-rooted triviality that some people’s lives (like this girl’s and her family’s) became to others (like this man). As the story progresses, the silent dialogue of actions reveals the man and the girl to be the player and the pawn: “‘But we don’t have any more money

– really. The money I’ve brought for you is all we have.’ He steered her through a gate and up to the third floor. The stairs were filthy and stank of urine. ‘That means you want to leave tomorrow.’ And he added, ‘Send me your address and I’ll come to see you; I’ve taken a liking to you.’”132 In the preceding passage, Fink depicts the man “steering” the girl, as one would steer cattle, through human excrement, infested allies and stairwells. However, the truly disgusting reality is when the man utters the phrase, “I’ll come to see you; I’ve taken a liking to you,” for which the girl responds with silence. She does not speak or even whisper a reply, and in this moment, Fink leaves the readers with the response of wonder, wonder of how often a situation like this (the girl’s) was “visited” again and again and again, till the war was over? till the girl died? till her family was betrayed? Thus, like the girl being “steered,” Fink steers and directs her readers (those alive) toward this account as a means of a testimony to and exposure of this evil – the appropriating of innocence and life – that thrived and bloomed in the anti-world. In the room, the girl only states a few words; nevertheless, the thoughts and actions of her silent dialogue narrates the moment of surrender, loss, and blackmail plaguing her life:

131 Ibid. 132 Ibid.

‘Please give me the documents, sir, I’ll get the money out right away,’ she said. ‘Sir? When you go to bed with someone, he’s not a sir! Put your money away, we have time.’ It probably doesn’t take long, she thought. I’m not afraid of anything. Mama will be happy when I bring the papers. I should have done it a week ago. We would already be in Warsaw. I was stupid. He’s even nice, he was always nice to me at work, and he could have informed. ‘Don’t just stand there, little one,’ He sat down on the bed and took off his shoes… ‘I’ll turn off the light,’ she said. She heard his laughter and she felt flushed.

An hour later there was a knock at the door.133

Again, Fink’s use of Mama exposes this assault not just as an assault on innocence, but as an assault on the child, which is a defining feature of the anti-world. According to Judaic-Christian teachings, children are a gift from God to mankind and through the blessing of a child, man and woman are able to participate in divine creation. It is through children that mankind’s legacy continues. It is for children that wisdom is passed on and traditions are taught. Yet, the anti- world is a place where even the innocence of an unborn child holds a threat punishable by death, for inside Hitler’s ghettos and camps, “Mama” is a cry and a thought met by silence. The above passage provides the reader with a contrast between the verbal dialogue and the silent dialogue.

The man appears comfortable, at ease, accustomed to such situations; whereas the girl is mocked and laughed at by the man, and though she barely speaks, her mind is streaming with justifications, excuses – anything to keep her mind off her present state. The silent dialogue that

Fink creates is captured between the two lines, “She heard his laughter and she felt flushed” and

“An hour later there was a knock at the door.” Once again, it is silence that allows the reader to discuss, through reading the story, the desperation of the girl’s actions to save herself and her

133 Ibid., 67.

family. As “Aryan Papers” ends, the girl is literally silent. Only the man speaks, “You’ll be a terrific woman someday.”134 Yet, Fink does not end the story with this chilling line that captures the injustice of the situation, but instead she has the man exchange dialogue with another man knocking at the door:

“Who’s the girl?’ he [the other man] asked, entering the room. ‘Oh, just a whore.’ ‘I thought she was a virgin,’ he said, surprised. ‘Pale teary-eyed, shaky…’ ‘Since when can’t virgins be whores?’ ‘You’re quite a philosopher,’ the other man said, and they both burst our laughing.”135

Fink ends this story with the men laughing, ricocheting the laughter of the man earlier in the story when the girl turned off the light. This motif of laughter only strengthens the silent dialogue, which carries the story. As the men laugh, the silence coming from the room, the silence of the girl, resounds for all those who were forced into such situations and predicaments as the girl in this story represents.

Thus, by crafting this short story, Fink creates, in “Aryan Papers,” a narrative of survival, a story of situations, another story in which silence helps tell the story of the collapsing of relationships found in the erasure of faces, identities, and humanity that occurred during the anti- world. Yet this silence is not merely a physical silence of the unspoken word, but it is also a silence that lends itself in highlighting, for the reader, the metaphysical and even spiritual assault on the relationship that occurred during the anti-world. This motif of silence echoes the collapsing of relationships in the anti-world, which is akin to erasing the “face” and the identity of the victim (the “Other”) by the enemy (the Nazis). Consequently, upon discussing the role of

134 Ibid. 135 Ibid., 68.

silence in Fink’s stories, one must note the systematic rendering of the Jew (or “Other”) as faceless – identity-less, valuable-less – by the Nazis. In addition to the role silence plays in these narratives, these three stories also attest to the ways in which relationships (among parent and child, husband and wife, neighbor and neighbor) were under assault during the Holocaust.

When considering Holocaust literature, the questions of what does it mean to gaze at the

Other, how does the gaze yield to relation, and how do that gaze and relation manifest themselves when caught in midst of the anti-world – the Shoah, are often asked. In Ida Fink’s stories, “The Key Game,” and “Aryan Papers,” the characters’ use of language reflects the tearing of meaning from language. In “The Key Game,” a small three-year-old boy rehearses finding a supposed “lost” key, in order for his father to hide if or when the Nazis come knocking on their door. This story captures an aspect of the anti-world, an aspect that demonstrates the tearing of meaning from expression and language.

In this story, “The Key Game,” the language is rehearsed, it is not genuine, it is not a response to the face of the Other, but it is a forced utterance in fear for the sake of the Other:

He [the husband] didn’t answer because he was not sure if this really would be the last rehearsal. They were still two or three minutes off. He stood up and walked towards the bathroom door. Then the woman called out softly, “Ding-dong..” She was imitating the doorbell and she did it beautifully. […] At the sound of chimes ringing so musically from his mother’s lips, the boy jumped up from his chair and ran to the front door […] “I’ll open up in a minute, I’m just looking for the keys,” the child called out. Then he ran back to the main room, making a lot of noise with his feet. He ran in circles around the table, pulled out one of the sideboard drawers, and slammed it shut.136

From the sound of his mother’s voice, to the chaotic commotion the boy makes in the apartment, the expressions of the characters are ones that are learned and mimicked, rather than expressions

136 Fink, A Scrape of Time, 36.

that are a result of the relation between the face-to-face encounter. This anti-world is a “world in which a child is forced across the threshold of danger and impending death” and it is a world in which language and expression are devoid of meaning.137 In tandem with the backward meaning of language and expression in these stories, the characters’ rhetoric reveals the injustice of the anti-world. Lévinas writes, “We call justice this face to face approach, in conversation [… for] justice consists in recognizing the Other as master,” yet, in the anti-world – a place where the victims are rendered faceless – the notion of justice is a skewed reality, shaped by propaganda and implemented by hate.138

In her story, “Aryan Papers,” Ida Fink captures this perversion of justice, the mockery of language, and the appropriating and possessing of humanity that occurs when one fails to see the face of their brother. In this story, a young virginal girl meets with a guard to exchange her virginity for a set of Aryan papers for herself and her family. In the anti-world, the concept of the perpetrator abdicating his ego – his self-interest – for the sake of another – his fellow human being, his brother – is a threat to the very injustice that fuels the Nazi machine:

“Who’s the girl?” he asked, entering the room. “Oh, just a whore.” “I thought she was a virgin,” he said, surprised. “Pale, teary-eyed, shaky…” “Since when can’t virgins be whores?” “You’re quite the philosopher,” the other man said, and they both burst out laughing.139

However, in the very act of substituting herself for the sake of another (her family), the girl in this story stands as a very contradiction to the laws and language of Nazism. Here, she stands as the substitute for others, which recalls for her, while in the grips of this anti-world, the trace of

137 Glowacka, Disappearing Traces, 156. 138 Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 71-72. 139 Fink, 67-68.

the face, and the hint of the expression. Through the thought of her mother (the memory of the face of the Other, to use a Lévinasian concept), the girl’s act of substitution ensues: “It probably doesn’t take long, she thought. I’m not afraid of anything. Mama will be happy when I bring the papers. I should have done it a week ago. We would already be in Warsaw. I was stupid.”140 Here, the memory of the girl’s mother is what serves in calling forth the face of the Other for the girl.

Regarding this motif of the memory of the mother, which is woven throughout Holocaust literature, Patterson notes, “Thus the memory of the mother re-establishes a bond not only between mother and child but also between word and meaning.”141 With this bond, the girl acts as a substitution for the Other. Although the majority of the language and dialogue in this story is that of the guard’s, it is met with contrasting silence of the girl who remains faceless to him, and therefore, she remains something to him to possess, according to Lévinas: “What one gives, what one takes reduces itself to the phenomenon, discovered and open to the grasp, carrying on an existence which is suspended in possession – whereas the presentation of the face puts me into relation with being.”142 The contrast of these two characters lies in that in her silence, the girl answers the call for-the-Other by saying, with her actions, “Here I am for the sake of you.” She is responding to that which “commands [her] and ordains [her] to the other.”143 Here, in this act of substitution, she is not merely usurping the place of the Other (her family), but instead, she is taking the place of the Other for the Other. In this moment of substitution, the girl in this story both answers for the Other, and responds to the Other, concurrently. In “Aryan Papers,” the girl’s action is one that is a response to the face of the Other for-the-Other. “To substitute oneself,”

140 Ibid., 66. 141 Patterson, 169. 142 Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 212. 143 Lévinas, Otherwise Than Being, 11.

Lévinas explains, “does not amount to putting oneself in the place of the other man in order to feel what he feels… Rather, substitution entails bringing comfort by associating ourselves with the essential weakness and finitude of the other; it is to bear his weight while sacrificing one’s interestedness and complacency-in-being, which then turn into responsibility for the other…The in-itself of a being persisting in its being is surpassed in the gratuity of being outside-of-oneself, for the other, in the act of sacrifice or the possibility of sacrifice, in holiness.”144 Consequnetly, through her act of substitution, this girl transcends the enclosed walls of the anti-world, breaks through the barbwire-like rhetoric of Nazi injustice, and answers the cry of the Other by responding to seeing their face(s).

Therefore, upon considering her three stories, “Jean-Christophe,” “The Key Game” and

“Aryan Papers,” Fink’s creation of a silent dialogue between the characters’ narrations and their lack of verbal dialogue among each other attests to the collapsing of meaning and language that precedes the collapsing of relationships within the anti-world. It is in this silent dialogue that

Fink captures the trepidations and sufferings of those who were forced to wonder if they might survive the hour, the day, the week or the year. It is in her silence that Fink allows fiction to echo its place in Holocaust studies, for it is through stories like the ones discussed in this chapter that enable future generations to imagine the inhumanity which accompanied the dates, names, and historical figures of the years 1941-1945 in Europe. A Holocaust literature scholar, Alvin

Rosenfeld, once wrote: "Those writers who have attempted to compose fiction about the

Holocaust have been faced with a new kind of problem, one that defies the traditional as well as the more experimental modes of narrative representation. For when fact itself surpasses fiction,

144 Emmanuel Lévinas, Is it Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Lévinas, ed. Jill Robbins (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 228.

what is there left for the novel and short story to do."145 Yes, like Rosenfeld argues, capturing the horrendous, dehumanizing atrocities that occurred during the rise of the Third Reich, the Nazi reign, and throughout every second of the Holocaust, seems not merely daunting, but impossible, for many writers of fiction. Authors of Holocaust short stories, like Ida Fink, seem to refute and redefine the role fiction can and should play in studying the Holocaust. Furthermore, Fink’s stories testify to the various ways relationships came under assault during the Holocaust: the crumbling of time and relationships (children acting as protective guardians), and the assault on language and communication (the inability to speak or communicate with one another, and silence filling voids of incomprehension). In tandem with ways the themes and motifs addressed in Fink’s short stories contribute to the Holocaust literary canon, the following chapter will address how the portrayal of the “Muselmann” in select stories in Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen also depict the collapse of time and assault on relationships, which embodied the epitome of the anti-world; a place where the only constant was man caught between life and death.

145 Alvin H. Rosenfeld, A Double Dying, Reflections on Holocaust Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 65.

CHAPTER III

THE COLLAPSE OF MAN – AND THEN MAN CREATED THE ANTI-MAN:

THE ROLE OF THE MUSSELMAN FIGURE IN SELECT SHORT STORIES FROM

TADEUSZ BOROWSKI’S THIS WAY FOR THE GAS, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN

Muselmann, Musselman, Muselman, Moselm, Muselmänner…whether spelled or spoken in Slavic languages or Romance languages, the essence of the word is the same: a human once made in the image of God for life, now made in the image of man for death. In the Nazis’ very creation of the Muselmann, they ushered in a collapsing of time and an undoing of creation, of life. Where Ida Fink’s short story narratives shed light on the collapse of language and relationships through the motif of silence, Tadeusz Borowski’s short story narratives shed light on the collapse of time and humanity during the Holocaust through the motif of the Muselmann – the Nazi-created anti-man of the anti-world. On January 20, 1942, fifteen high-ranking officers of Adolf Hitler’s regime met for a conference at a villa in Wannsee – a pristine suburb of Berlin,

Germany.146 Among the various things discussed, the answer to the “Final solution of the Jewish

Question” was posed.147 That answer was: erasure – erasure of the traditions, teachings, and faces of millions of Jewish people all over Europe and the world; that answer was death – death in the form of systematic State-sponsored murdering of all European Jewry. As the systematic murder of the European Jewry was already underway since the invasion of the Soviet territories

146 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Introduction to the Holocaust.” Holocaust Encyclopedia. www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005143. Accessed on March 4, 2017. 147 Lillian Goldman Law Library. “Wannsee Protocol, January 20, 1942.” The Avalon Project Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/wannsee.asp. Accessed on February 10, 2017.

on June 22, 1941, what soon followed this meeting was the murder of over six million European

Jews in cities, streets, woods, villages, ghettos, death marches, and death camps across Nazi- occupied Europe. What occurred during the years of the Holocaust was an undoing of society, culture, and humanity; it was a man-created monstrous world governed by hate, brutality, and death; it was the anti-world inhabited by parents and children, lovers and peers, officers and

Moselms or Muselmanns (“prisoners who had lost the will to live”148). A witness to such horror is a man whom some people called: Communist, Polish, Prisoner, or “119 198.”149 119 198 – not a name, but an itemization of a human being that forever left a mark on the author, poet, and man

– Tadeusz Borowski, one of the greatest Polish authors of the twentieth century. Tadeusz

Borowski’s experience during the Holocaust, namely his witnessing of an anti-world inhabited by the anti-man (Muselmann), forever altered his view of life and death. In “The January

Offensive,” Borowski plainly notes to those inquiring about life in the camps:

We told them with much relish all about our difficult, patient, concentration-camp existence which had taught us that the whole world is really like the concentration camp; the weak work for the strong, and if they have no strength or will to work – then steal, or let them die. The world is ruled by neither justice nor morality; crime is not punished nor virtue rewarded, one is forgotten as quickly as the other. The world is ruled by power and power is obtained with money. To work is senseless, because money cannot be obtained through work but through exploitation of others.150

Before Hitler’s rise to power in Europe, Borowski was part of seemingly uneventful surroundings, yet throughout the course of the war, he would enter into a suffocating reality

148 Tadeusz Borowski, “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman,” in This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 22. 149 Timothy E. Pytell, “Shame and Beyond Shame,” New German Critique no. 117 (2012): 159. 150 Borowski, “The January Offensive,” in This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 168.

where “concentration camp existence” hung in the balance of death and horror – a reality that haunted him until he took his life on June 26, 1951:

Borowski was born on 12 November 1922 in the Ukrainian town of Zhytomyr as the son of ethnic Poles. Both parents separately survived several gulags. In 1932, the family was repatriated to Poland in exchange for communist prisoners. After the outbreak of war in 1939, the 17-year-old high-school student studied Polish and English literature at conspiratorial university course and worked as a night watchman for a builders’ merchant. During this period, he wrote many poems and prose pieces for the underground press.

Borowski was arrested on 24 February 1943 and spent two months in the notorious Pawiak prison. From his barred window, he was able to observe the uprising of the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. His fiancée Maria Rundo, the love of his life, was also arrested, just before him. The two of them were taken to Auschwitz at the end of April 1943, separately of course. His tattooed camp number was 119 198 and he survived pneumonia thanks to the help of fellow Poles. They were both fortunate in that a short time before their arrival, gassings of non-Jews (except for gypsies) had ceased. On 12 August 1944, Borowski was transferred to the Dautmergen-Natzweiler concentration camp near Stuttgart, and then in early January 1945 to Dachau-Allach, where he was liberated by the U.S. Army on 1 May.151

Not only did Borowski “live” during the Holocaust, but he came to age and was educated in a time of an un-doing, un-educating, un-living of all preconceived notions of reality, decency, and humanity. Consequently, with his harsh, raw – ironic at times – yet constantly unyieldingly honest portrayal of the grotesque absurd reality of life in Auschwitz (life in the anti-world),

Borowski’s Holocaust short stories not only witness to his readers the horrors of the Holocaust, but they also highlight the epitome of the Death Camps – the Nazi-made creation of the anti-man.

This anti-man is a man caught in the very collapse of time, a prisoner suspended between life and death: the Muselmann. The following discourse will focus on stories of Borowski’s that address this anti-man, for this man-created (by the Nazis’) creature – the Muselmann – embodies the

151 Arno Lustiger. “Who was Tadeusz Borowski? Pole, concentration camp inmate, truth fanatic, Communist, cultural attache, suicide: a brief life in the 20th century.” Signandsight.com: Let’s Talk European. February 15, 2007, http://www.signandsight.com/features/1206.html.

essence of the collapsing of relationships and time that occurs during the Holocaust. Yet, before discussing the anti-man of the anti-world, the inimitable narrative style of Borowski’s Holocaust short stories must be noted, for such style of his short story prose echoes for the readers the silencing of humanity that he witnessed – such as his witnessing of the image of the Muselmann.

The narrative style of Borowski’s “Auschwitz Stories” may elicit an array of literary characterizations. For instance, when considering Borowski’s short story writing, literary scholar

Chris Power states: “In Borowski’s stories atrocity is piled upon atrocity, in frank dispassionate prose […] His stropped back style, although not as extreme as that of Hemingway, whom he read avidly, is crafted just as sedulously. His metaphors reflect the reality of the camp, as with ‘the empty pavement the glistened like a wet leather strap’, and equal care is applied to structure.”152

Moving from Power’s observations of Borowski’s raw style, in Ruth Franklin’s “The Writing

Dead,” she addresses how his narrative style lends itself to resonate with larger thematic tones:

“This [Borowski’s] Auschwitz, in contrast to the myths that sprang up immediately in the war’s aftermath, is not a place of martyrdom or heroism. [… and] All of this is recounted in a chillingly unsentimental and brazenly nihilistic voice that emphasizes its own detachment from the horrors that it records.”153 Other scholars, like Timothy E. Pytell, in his article “Shame and Beyond

Shame,” usher away from categories of “-isms” and note how Borowski’s “voice is a constellation”154 – a constellation, which I might add, orbits Planet Auschwitz. Again addressing

152 Chris Power, “A Brief Survey of the Short Story Part 35: Tadeusz Borowski.” The Guardian.com. August 25, 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/aug/25/brief-survey- short-story-tadeusz-borowski. 153 Ruth Franklin, “The Writing Dead.” New Republic 237, no. 6 (2007): 41. 154 Pytell, 161.

his style and use of language as a form of storytelling and witnessing, in his article “Tadeusz

Borowski: Implicating Prose,” Tony McKibbin writes:

To comment on the Holocaust is to be implicated in it; to try to speak of it is to push beyond the limits of the language readily available to us […] Borowski’s very writing seems to find a way out of the impasse by creating what could be called an implicative prose, a prose style that seeks neither the sentimental nor the pitying, but the robust and pragmatic, a language, perhaps that reflects not the drowned but the saved, a language that takes into account the sort of arguments by made by Ranciere and Levi. […] Borowski finds a style that is both implicative and descriptive, that both acknowledges how a survivor survives and also finds the language to explain the nature of that survival. The tone absorbs the paratactic but isn’t quite confined by it […]155

Regardless how one attempts to characterize his literary craft, and uniqueness of the narrative

“voice” of testimony that Borowski speaks through his Holocaust short stories is singularly distinct. The implicative nature of Borowski’s writing is found in his relating for the reader the undoing of the human being in the form of the Muselmann, and therefore, causing the reader to consider his or her understanding of the meaning or value of a human being.

Literary analyst Tony McKibbin further addresses this distinguished tone voiced in

Borowski’s narratives when he claims: “what he wanted to do was make his language pragmatically survivalist and also, more strangely, horrible poetic, as if determined to produce metaphors and similes out of the camps that were new, capable of reflecting the casual terror of the experience, and one’s sense of implications in relation to the events. This combination of paratactic simplicity, linguistic neologisms and distinctive metaphors and similes, makes

Borowski’s work not ‘merely’ testament but literature.156” What McKibbin alludes to as “work not ‘merely’ testament but literature” is what Jan Kott also mentions in the introduction to the

155 Tony McKibbin, “Tadeusz Borowski: Implicating Prose.” Tonymckibbin.com. January 12, 2017, http://tonymckibbin.com/non-fiction/tadeusz-borowski. 156 Ibid.

short story collection, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. However, Kott, like many

Holocaust scholars (including myself), note that Holocaust literature is both literature and testimony. The testimonial aspect of this literature, in a way, is connected to its implicative nature, in that the reader assumes the role of listener and witness to such atrocities described in the prose. When writing of the atrocities that comprised the Holocaust (the Shoah and the anti- world), one takes to the pen as both a witness and an author – the one crafting, composing, and categorizing the extent to which they witnessed the sufferings and horrors of those around them in the form of atrocity literature or Holocaust literature. Kott writes: “Borowski’s Auschwitz stories, however, are not only a masterpiece of Polish – and of world – literature. Among the tens of thousands of pages written about the holocaust and the death camps, Borowski’s slender book continues to occupy, for more than a quarter century now, a place apart. The book is one of the cruelest of testimonies to what men did to men, and a pitiless verdict that anything can be done to a human being.”157 With his selection of literary genre – the short story – Borowski inserts his readers into the anti-world, as he testifies in his literary prose about the horrors of his experience in the Holocaust, horrors of mundane, mandatory, and murderous everyday existence through focusing on particular moments for the reader. This is why the short story, and not the novel, is what is precisely called for here, for the Holocaust short story genre’s characteristics enable the author to focus on a moment of the crumbling of time – a moment of testimony. Concomitant with others, Isabel Wollaston who also notes the testimonial language of Holocaust literature in her article “‘What Can – and Cannot – Be Said’: Religious Language After the Holocaust.”

Wollaston writes, “Building upon Primo Levi’s reference to such testimony as the ‘stories of a

157 Jan Kott, introduction to This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 12.

new Bible’, the literary critic, David Roskies, suggests that these ‘stories’ assume the status of

‘sacred texts’. The importance attached to testimony reflects the conviction that the Holocaust, or l’universe concentrationnaire, represents ‘a universe apart, totally cut off’. Those outside – the non-survivors – depend on the ‘soul-seared writings of those who were there’ to gain access, however partial, to the experience of the Holocaust. Thus, the testimony of the victim and survivors is essential, for they alone can bear witness to the ‘experience of extermination’.”158

What Roskies touches on in this passage regarding the uniqueness of the Holocaust survivor bearing witness to that which they, and they alone, have experienced, serves as one of the hallmarks of the autobiographical traces found in Borowski’s short story narratives. Furthermore,

Borowski’s style and choice of the short story genre is what enables the reader to see the typical shadow-figure of the Muselmann come into the spotlight.

Borowski’s writing style transcends that of literary techniques and craft to that of literary testimony rooted in autobiographical experiences, which yield to a bearing witness to the extent man is capable of destroying fellow man. Building upon this notion, in their collaborative work,

“A Discovery of Tragedys (the Incomplete Account of Tadeusz Borowski),” Andrzej Wirth and

Adam Czerniawski assert:

Borowski’s work, in its artistically climactic moments, has become an expression of a will to give witness to the unbelievable truth about the fate which man has prepared for man in the twentieth century. In cherishing this noble desire Borowski is not unique in world literature. The Uniqueness of his position lies in that his writing does in fact witness to this truth. […] He was able to depict tragedy outside the classical laws of tragedy without alternative, without choice, without competing values. […] He also had the courage to formulate a principle that once a certain limit of inhumanity is passed, the

158 Isabel Wollaston, “‘What can – and Cannot – Be Said’: Religious Language After the Holocaust,” Literature and Theology 6, no. 1 (1992): 48.

differentiation between tormentor and victim becomes fluid. ‘Murder feeds on murder’ is the substance of this formula.159

This “truth” that transcends mere literary devices is that which enables many readers to learn, whilst reading Borowski’s stories, the truth that attests to the collapsing world of the anti-world – more specifically, the collapsing of humanity that is portrayed in Borowski’s “Musselman” characters. Borowski’s experiences in the camps directly influenced and shaped his writings, and these experiences are most clearly seen in his detached third-person narration and the scenes depicting the Muselmann. Regarding this anti-world for which Borowski’s writing account of,

Holocaust literary scholar, Theofanis Verinakis claims, “Tadeusz Borowski worked in one of these special camps and his account bears witness not only to the barbaric conditions of the camps, but also the projection and internalization of hatred. […] Hate and hatred are not natural or innate. They must be cultivated and brought into being, similarly like our minds and civilizations. […] Borowski’s [writings] demonstrates that not only did the camps produce hatred, but Borowski has both become hatred and the camp. He finds solace and refuge in the camp that has robbed him of his humanity.”160 Here Verinakis hints at the inverted norms of the anti-world

– manners and expectations forged by degradation rather than respect, hate rather than love.

Verinakis goes on to address the stripping away of humanity that occurred during the anti-world that “Both accounts by Levi [The Drowned and the Saved] and Borowski [This Way for the Gas] convey the power of the camps by demonstrating that the distinction between victim and executioner is stripped of its magnitude. Not only were the camps able to reduce humanity to a

159 Andrzej Wirth and Adam Czerniawski, “A Discovery of Tragedy (the Incomplete Account of Tadeusz Borowski),” The Polish Review 12, no. 3 (1967): 52. 160 Theofanis Verinakis. The (un)Civilizing Holocaust: From the Colony to the Lager," Social Identities 14, no. 1 (2008): 58, 59.

liter of soup, a blanket, or a pair of shoes with thick soles, but they were also forced the inmates to be responsible for their own demise.”161 Both above passages of Verinakis’ highlight the various dimensions of the Nazis’ dehumanization process of their victims. Moreover, even though Verinakis and other scholars insightfully address various aspects of the narrative descriptions of his Auschwitz stories, when considering Borowski’s writings in the context of the short story, we must address his inclusion of the Nazis’ created anti-man – the Muselmann – and how this figure who embodied the collapsing of time in the anti-world is woven throughout his stories.

And then man created the anti-man. What a “Muselmann” is has been attempted to be defined by scholars as a “sub-language [term] of the death camps […] for someone wasted away and close to dying,”162 to “a term of unknown and debatable origin but widely used to denote

‘emancipated walking corpses’ […and] those prisoners who were physically and psychologically worn out, those who surrendered their will to live.”163 The survivors, the witnesses to this anti- man, to this product yet genesis of the anti-world describe the “Muselmann” in various ways from Wolfgang Sofsky’s personal account that “Basically, the difference is minimal anyhow.

We’re skeletons that are still moving; they’re skeletons that are already immobile. But there’s even a third category: the one who lies stretched out, unable to move, but still breathing slightly,”164 to the more cautionary description like that of Primo Levi who states, “one hesitates

161 Ibid., 60. 162 McKibbin, “Tadeusz Borowski Implicating Prose.” 163 Myrna Goldenberg, “Lessons Learned from Gentle Heroism: Women's Holocaust Narratives,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 548 (1996): 87. 164 Wolfgang Sofsky and William Templer, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp. (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997): 328.

to call them living,”165 to finally survivors such as Bruno Bettelheim or Jean Amery’s who describe them as “walking corpses.”166 From the assertions written by scholars, to the accounts recollected by survivors, one draws the conclusions that the “Muselmann” embodies the epitome of Nazi thinking and ideology. The Muselmann is the destruction of a who, as the Muselmann is a turning over or transformation of a who into a what. The Muselmann represents the quintessence of the dehumanizing of man in the Nazis’ anti-world – the anti-man of the anti- world. The question of Who is the Muselmann? is addressed throughout Holocaust literary texts, such as Borowski’s Auschwitz short stories, for these stories and narratives bear witness to not merely that which happened but also to whom it happened. In the “Muselmann” figure, we see a man suspended between life and death, a man not quite complete yet not quite a shadow, a man rising into existence only under the weight of the collapsing of time, relationships, meaning, world, we see the anthropomorphism of the native inhabitants of Auschwitz.

Whether reading memoirs, biographies, essays, novels, poems, or short stories, allusions to this Nazi-created anti-man (or the “Muselmann”) are often lurking in the margins or lying in the shadow of the ink – for the Muselmann embodied the extent to which man sought to undo and dehumanize their fellow man. The Muselmann is the man created by the Nazis, born into the anti-world formed by the Nazis – Planet Auschwitz. Isabel Wollaston also notes the presence of the Muselmann in Holocaust texts when she writes, “The experience of the Muselmänner is inaccessible, in that there is ‘no story’, or there is a story but one that is beyond the experience of

165 Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz and the Reawakening: Two Memoirs, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Summit Books. 1986): 90. 166 Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor pm Auschwitz and Its Realities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1980): 9.; Bruno Bettelheim, Surviving and Other Essays, (New York: Knopf, 1979): 106.

the survivor. Thus, a mimetic approach to the Holocaust can only reach a certain point: the

‘naked reality’ of the camps, as typified by Muselmänner, is beyond that point.”167 This ‘naked reality’ of the camps is the Muselmänner – a walking mass of atoms whose shape once held the form of a man is now merely like a remnant, hint, or shadow of a man. In his The Harvest of

Hate, Léon Poliakov writes how Muselmann “moved like automatons; once stopped, they were capable of no further movement. They fell prostrated on the ground; nothing mattered any more to them. Their bodies blocked the passageway. You could step right on them and they would not draw back their arms or legs an inch. No protest, no cry of pain came from their half-opened mouth. And yet they were still alive…”168 What once were considered men walking, are now considered by the Nazis, the perpetrators, as objects in motion – objects whose existence is somehow accounted for solely because they echo laws of physics as objects in motion, hollow objects filling empty space. Souls? Thoughts? Memories? Often, such abstractions of humanity were seen to have no value – no traces of worth – in the form of the anti-man, for this “body” is seen as a shape inhabiting space, rather than a person – a father, son, mother, daughter, neighbor, friend – a living being. Regarding this anti-man, Primo Levi wrote, “All the mussulmans who finished in the gas chambers have the same story, or more exactly, have no story; they followed the slope down to the bottom, like streams that run down to the sea.”169 He goes on to say that

“the Muselmänner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who march and labour in silence, the

167 Wolaston, 51. 168 Léon Poliakov, Harvest of hate: the Nazi program for the destruction of the Jews of Europe (New York: Holocaust Library, 1979): 222. 169 Primo Levi, If This Is a Man (New York: Orion Press, 1959), 103.

divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.”170 Yet, in Borowski’s Holocaust short story, this visage of what once was considered a man is not hidden in asides or footnotes, but rather is plainly, starkly placed into the narration for the reader. For, the Holocaust short story captures for its readers the collapse of time, and this collapsing and crumbling of reality is crescendo in the silent collapsing of humanity in the image of the hunched-over, bowed-down, “backbone of the camp,”

Muselmann; the anti-man suspended in a living-dying state-sponsored anti-world: Auschwitz-

Birkenau. The Muselmann is not just the victim of starvation, brutality, exhaustion, exposure, and more. His very soul has come under a radical assault. He has lost his religion, his home, his name, his identify, his family – as he is given over to a radical isolation and a radical meaninglessness. They are silent and nameless.

Before discussing the transformation the Nazis’ wrought on turning men and women into anti-men and anti-women – the human beings who take the form of the “Muselmann” in camps – we must address the process by which the Nazis’ rendered their fellow human beings face-less, form-less, and eventually, life-less. One particular philosopher, whose theoretical notions are applicable in addressing the transformation that occurred in the camps when man morphed into

Muselmann, is Emmanuel Lévinas.

The events and realties of the Shoah171 shaped, challenged, changed, and impacted several writers of the post-Holocaust twentieth century – specifically, the writer and philosopher,

170 Ibid., 103. 171 “The biblical word Shoah (which has been used to mean “destruction” since the Middle Ages) became the standard Hebrew term for the murder of European Jewry as early as the early

Emmanuel Lévinas, and his notions regarding seeing the Face of the Other. Found in the core of

Nazi ideology was the assault on the life of the Other – the Jew. This very assault was rooted in the Nazis’ appropriating and possessing of the Jews as worms, insects, objects, things, and faceless beings. The fuel of the Nazi ideological machine was to render the Other – the Jew – faceless, expressionless, commandment-less, and insignificant. Consequently, when considering the placement of the “Muselmann” in Borowski’s short narratives, one might ask: To what extent are Lévinas’ notions surrounding the face-to-face encounter evident in Holocaust short stories, and in what ways does the face summon the Other in the midst of a world where the command to

“Love thy neighbor,” and the command to answer, “Here I am,” when called by the Other, is replaced with the command: “kill thy neighbor”? Moreover, I will address what it means to approach the face of the Other, as well as what it means to depart and erase the face of the Other, during the Shoah or in the midst of the anti-world, again – a world where any assumptions about humanity, rooted in living in a civilized world during the twentieth century, are inverted and distorted.

The face of the Other is what summons one to answer, hineni – “Here I am,” when asked,

“Where are you?” Yet, how can one answer the call of the Other when the Other is rendered faceless, like the “Muselmann?” How can the expression of the face summon one into relation with the Other when it is considered a crime to view the Other as fully human? Just as God spoke the world and man into being, thus creating the relation between the heavenly Divine and

1940s” “The Holocaust: Definition and Preliminary Discussion,” Yad Vashem – the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, last Modified January 12, 2018, http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/holocaust/resource_center/gates/0-2_en.html.

the earthly created, in these Holocaust stories, it is through language of the face, through saying that which is not said or thematized, that enables the Other to speak of what he has witnessed

(the face of the Other). Therefore, through the use of particular Holocaust short stories, I examine how, when in midst of the Shoah, the anti-world, the face summons the Other, who in turn, through relation in face-to-face encounters, summon the memory, the justice, and the language of the Other, as well. Yet, the namelessness of the Muselmann must be noted, for having neither name nor memory, he or she cannot respond to the call of “Where are you?”

When addressing the role of the Muselmann in the short story, where characters normally have names, the namelessness of the Muselmann figure is even more pronounced for the reader. Here the “character” is precisely the silent, nameless one – embodying the new image and likeness of the silent Nameless One.

The Holocaust was a time when men deemed other men as racially inferior, sub-human, and therefore, deserving of complete eradication from society and life. Lévinas sees this assault against man as an assault against Him who created him – the Divine. As Lévinas notes in his essay, “‘Between Two Worlds’ (the Way of Franz Rosenzweig),” the relationship between God and word, God and man, and man and man is key to seeing the face of the Other. For Lévinas, within the ethical (the relation between the face and the Other), lies the presence of God Himself.

Without God, there would be no ethical command of the Word: “You shall not kill.” Without man, there would be no ethical demand of the response: “Here I am…for you.” Or, as Lévinas writes regarding Rosenzweig’s philosophy: “Religion, before being a confession, is the very pulsation of life in which God enters into a relationship with Man, and Man with the Word. […]

The love of God for ipseity is, ipso facto, a commandment to love. […] the response to the love

of God for Man is the love of my neighbor.”172 To love the Other is to respond to the face of the

Other; however, loving the Other is only possible when one sees the face of the Other. As both

Rosenzweig and Lévinas note, the encounter with the face of the Other is what yields to

Revelation and enables one to enter into this Revelation via their face-to-face relationship with the Other.173 In her book, Lévinas and the Crisis of Humanism, Claire Elise Katz further highlights Lévinas’ direct association of the ethical relation with the Other to that of the Other with the Divine, when she writes: “To approach the Other with the idea that the Other comes before me is, for Lévinas, the quintessential movement of transcendence and of being in contact with the divine. Ethics, as Lévinas defines it, is religion – and here he distinguishes religion from spirituality, which can shift from the human to the non-human.”174 As Katz notes, the direct correlation between the Other and the Divine seems rather obvious. Or as Lévinas asserts, “The attributes of God are given not in the indicative, but in the impetrative. The knowledge of God comes to us like a commandment, like a Mitzvah. To know God is to know what must be done.”175 However, one must then ask, in what ways can the Other exist in the anti-world – a world where God is silent, where the Word is deemed illegal, and where the face of the Other, according to Nazi law, elicits the response of “Kill,” rather than “Love?” Whether in the anti- world or not, Lévinas sees a “dimension of the divine” in each face of a human being: “The dimension of the divine opens forth from the human face. A relation with the Transcendent free from all captivation by the Transcendent is a social relation […] His very epiphany consists in

172 Lévinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, 191. 173 Ibid., 190-195. 174 Katz, Lévinas and the Crisis of Humanism, 134. 175 Lévinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, 17.

soliciting us by his destitution in the face of the Stranger, the widow, and the orphan.”176 The

Other exists in the anti-world when one realizes that the Other is the face of the neighbor, the widow, and the orphan – and their cry is heard in the sound of the fellow prisoners’ voice calling out: “Where are you?” In the Shoah, the Other is heard in the voice of the “half-naked man,” in

Borowski’s story, “A Visit,” who was “drenched in sweat, who fell on the loading ramp out of the cattle car in which no air was left […and who] staggered up to a stranger, and putting his arms around him whispered: ‘Brother, brother…’”177 The implication here is that the Muselmann is not only the result of starvation, humiliation, etc.; beyond that, he or she is the outcome of a radical assault on God – the One Whose Image all mankind bears.

During the Holocaust, the Nazis’ assault on the face of the Other is through their defacing the Jews by their possessing of the Jews’ identities (rendering them nameless in the camps), their homes (rendering them homeless), and their families (rendering them without community).

Various moments capturing the realities of what this assault on the face of the Other looked like during the anti-world is woven throughout the four selected Holocaust short stories. From the burning of the Torah scrolls to the burning of human beings, the heart of the Nazi assault against their “neighbors” or “brothers” lies in their erasing the face of the Other and deeming the Other sub-human, insignificant – faceless. David Patterson also addresses this in his chapter, “The

Muselmann and the Matter of Human Being,” when he writes:

The Nazis’ transformation of man into Muselmann is a singular phenomenon that constitutes the singularity of the Holocaust, and it makes the Holocaust decisive for all humanity. The Muselmann is not merely the calculated outcome of torture, exposure, and deprivation. Far more than the victim of starvation and brutality, the Muselmann is the

176 Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 78. 177 Borowski, “A Visit,” in This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 174.

Jew whose very existence was deemed criminal, whose prayers were regarded as an act of sedition, whose holy days were subject to desecration. He is the Jew for whom marriage and childbirth were forbidden, for whom schooling was a crime, for whom there was no protection under the law. He is the Jew both widowed and orphaned, forced to witness the murder of his family, and rendered “ferociously alone” before being rendered ferociously faceless.178

These “ferociously faceless” beings are beings whose expression and face no longer summon a response from their brothers. To see the face of a human being is to acknowledge the sanctity of the living, breathing collection of atoms known as “man.” According to the philosophies purported by Lévinas, to see the face of the Other is to be summoned by the Other, called by the

Other’s expression, which, in turn, allows one to enter into relation with the Other:

…the epiphany of the face qua face opens humanity. The face in its nakedness as a face presents to me the destitution of the poor one and the stranger; but this poverty and exile which appeal to my powers, address me, do not deliver themselves over to these powers as givens, remain the expression of the face […] The presence of the face, the infinity of the other, is a destituteness, a presence of the third party (that is, of the whole of humanity which looks at us), and a command that commands commanding. 179

Through expression, the face calls out to the Other. Yet, how can the face “call” the Other, when the face is rendered faceless? For Lévinas, the ethical is a call by the Other, which interrupts and disrupts the identity and ego of the one, as the Other calls to be answered.180 In this disruption, this call by the Other is answered in the moment of transcendence; the moment of putting the

Other before oneself is a response to the Other’s expression. This response to the expression of the face is in the brief, mundane utterance of “after you,” (a phrase, a gesture which never happens in the anti-world) or in the moment, when “seeing” the Other transcends into “gazing” at the Other. However, in the Shoah, in the midst of the anti-world, where all presuppositions of

178 David Patterson, Open Wounds: The Crisis of Jewish Thought in the Aftermath of the Holocaust, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012): 149-150. 179 Lévinas, Totality and Infinite, 213. 180 Ibid., 42-43.

common decency, all “norms” of a “civilized society” are shattered upon the implementing of

Nuremburg Laws, the demarcation of ghettos, or the building of Auschwitz – the call of the

Other seems silenced, as the face of the Other is rendered expressionless. Regarding the expression of the face, in Totality and Infinity, Lévinas writes:

The face is a living presence; it is expression. The Life of expression consists in undoing the form in which the extent, exposed as a theme, is thereby dissimulated. The face speaks. The manifestation of the face is already discourse. […] To present oneself by signifying is to speak. This presence, affirmed in the presence of the image as the focus of the gaze that is fixed on you, is said. […] The eyes break thought the mask – the language of the eyes, impossible to dissemble. The eye does not shine; it speaks.181

As Lévinas notes, the eye – the gaze – is what speaks and what summons the face to the Other.

Not only is the Muselmann rendered faceless; rather, he or she is rendered blind and deaf to the face of the other. Here lies the collapse of humanity in the anti-man that is the Muselmann.

When considering Holocaust short stories, the questions are often raised: what does it mean to gaze at the Other; how does the gaze yield to relation; and how does that gaze and relation manifest itself when caught in midst of the anti-world – the Shoah? For Tadeusz

Borowski, this moment of “gazing” and seeing the face of the Other is found in his story, “This

Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.” In this story, seeing the Other is a moment that seems rather brief and fleeting, while extended and unprecedented for the inverted, morphed laws and customs of the anti-world. In this scene, the narrator is given the task of clearing the train cars of the infants and adults who died during their transport. His life is spared in the moment that he recognizes the gaze and face of the Other – the grey-haired woman who summons him into relation. While the Muselmann is not specifically in this scene, the scene nonetheless reveals how to read the Muselmann – namely, as the figure whose eyes and gaze the reader and other

181 Ibid., 66.

character will never meet, the figure whose namelessness calls out to his or her reader to respond:

‘Take them, for God’s sake!’ I explode as the woman runs from me in horror, covering their eyes. The name of God sounds strangely pointless, since the woman and the infants will go on the trucks, every one of them, without exception. We all know what this means, and we look at each other with hate and horror. ‘What, you don’t want to take them?’ asks the pock-marked S.S. man with a note of surprise and reproach in his voice, and reaches for his revolver. ‘You mustn’t shoot, I’ll carry them.’ A tall, grey-haired woman takes the little corpses out of my hands and for an instant gazes straight into my eyes. ‘My poor boy,’ she whispers and smiles at me. Then she walks away, staggering along the path.182

As the above passage notes, even in the midst of the anti-world, if only for an instant, the gaze, the eyes – the summons by the face of the Other to enter into a face-to-face relation is not wholly abandoned; it is merely foreign to a place where the face of the Other is most often seen in the face of the dead brother or neighbor.183 Yet, this “gaze” is what enables the face to see the Other as their brother. Here, in this story, this “gaze” allows for the face to transcend the customs and rules of the anti-world, and enter into a relation with the Other. Upon responding to her gaze, the woman’s utterance of the “My poor boy” to the narrator ushers as she lifts the burden on death

(the “little corpses”) from his hands, reflecting the extent to which relationships crumbled in the pitiless pit of death known as Auschwitz.

In addition to the various motifs found in Holocaust literature of “closing one’s eyes” or

“looking away” from the horrors of the realties occurring in front of them, or seeing death rather than life, the figure of the Muselmann appears throughout Borowski’s Holocaust short stories.

182 Tadeusz Borowski, “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” in This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 40. 183 Ibid., 45.

The various theological traces of what and who the Muselmann embodies is noted by Emil L.

Fackenheim, when he addresses to what extent the divine image of man comes under assault during the Holocaust. Fackenheim writes, “The diving image in man can be destroyed. No more threatening proof to this effect can be found than the so-called Muselmann in the Nazi death camp.”184 David Patterson builds upon this notion in his book, Open Wounds: The Crisis of

Jewish Thought in the Aftermath of Auschwitz, by asserting: “Far more than an emaciated human being, the Muselmann is the manifestation of the evil that is ultimate, incarnate in a creature in whom prayer has been silenced and whose death is no longer death.”185 Whether considering the philosophical or theological implications regarding how to perceive, view, understand, and reckon with the Muselmann, what must be noted is that the “Muselmann” is the epitome of the faceless, expressionless product of the Nazi machine during the anti-world. Yet, at the same time, the “Muselmann” is the visage of the human being who is caught between life and death; he or she is the very product of collapsed relationships, languages, and time that form the anti- world. Thus, the Muselmann finds a place in the “Auschwitz Stories,” for every story about

Auschwitz inadvertently or purposefully is a story about the Muselmann – the Bedouins of Planet

Auschwitz.

In Holocaust literature, the “Muselmann” on one hand, embodies the memory of the

Other, the trace of the face, and the hint of the relation of man, while on the other hand, embodies the unfamiliar, the unknown, the unrecognizable anti-man of the death camps.

Borowski refers to the “Moselems” in several of his stories about Auschwitz. In “This Way For

184 Emil L. Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of Future Jewish Thought, (New York: Schocken Books, 1982): 100. 185 David Patterson, Open Wounds: The Crisis of Jewish Thought in the Aftermath of Auschwitz, 144.

the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” the “Muselmann” figures are dehumanized and almost depicted as insects hiding from light: “Just as we finish our snack, there is a sudden commotion at the door. The Muslims scurry in fright to the safety of their bunks, a messenger runs into the Block

Elder’s shack.”186 In his other stories, such as “The Supper” or “A True Story,” Borowski has the narrator refer to those around him who have almost completely succumbed to death as

“Muslimized” or “like a ‘Muslim’” to capture this state of life-death in the anti-world.187 To be seen ‘like a Muslim’ in the anti-world was to be seen not as a man, not as a human, but rather as a faceless fading form of atoms. Like the brief moment of seeing the face of the Other in the form of a woman uttering “Don’t shoot,” in the anti-world, the faceless faces and expressionless expressions found on the “Muselmann” serve as traces of who the Other is, and of the time

(before the anti-world) where “to love” the other was commanded, rather than, “to kill” is commanded. The problem of making the Muselmann into a character in a story is the absence of his or her description, for he or she is a being who neither sees nor speaks yet moves seamlessly undetected toward death each moment in the anti-world.

To see the face of the Other is to enter into a relation. When face-to-face with the Other, one is summoned to commandment and one is commanded to stand against the rhetoric and injustice and strive for justice.188 Just as the Nazis failed to renounce their rhetoric (language of propaganda and their hate speech), they failed to see the face of the Other in the form of the face of their neighbor – the Jews. Through rhetoric and language of injustice, one is demonized. In the same way, though language of justice one is humanized. One is summoned, through the

186 Ibid., 32. 187 Ibid., 156, 158. 188 Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 70.

language of the face – through the eyes that gaze and seem to speak rather than merely see – to respond to the command, and therefore, enter into relation with the Other. The language of the face and how the eyes gaze upon the Other serves in summoning the face to hear the speaking and calling out of the Other, yet, in the Muselmann there is an obliteration of the word of language, as his or her face – gaze – is erased in the anti-world. For Lévinas, the expression of speaking and the meaning of language can only follow the expression of seeing the face of the

Other. Lévinas writes: “language is possible only when speaking precisely renounces this function of being action and returns to its essence of being expression.”189 In his discussion about meaning and language, Lévinas writes:

The primordial essence of language is to be sought not in the corporeal operations that discloses it to me and to others and, in the recourse to language, builds up a thought, but in the presentation of meaning. […] Meaning is the face of the Other, and all recourse to words takes place already within the primordial face to face of language. […] That “something” we call signification arises in being with language because the essence of language is the relation with the Other.190

Upon reading his passages regarding language and meaning, the meaning of language stems from seeing the face of the Other, and therefore, entering into the face-to-face relation with the

Other. The power that lies in meaning of language in the face-to-face encounter is exactly the epiphany and revelation of the narrator in “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” when the face of the stranger becomes the face of the Other. For the narrator, the tall, grey-haired woman speaks, “Don’t shoot,” and in that brief transcending ethical moment in the midst of an ethical-less world, he enters into relation with the Other. Nevertheless, where Borowski accounts of the narrator’s newfound encounter with his fellow inmate and fellow human being, the lack of

189 Ibid., 202. 190 Ibid., 206-207.

said encounter with the Muselmann figure further amplifies this notion of the Muselmann as a figure seen more so as an anti-man than a man – a reality created and fostered by laws and expectations of the anti-world.

However, a shift in the narrative occurs when the reader encounters the silent, faceless

Muselmann. Rather than an audible silence that Fink weaves throughout her writing, Borowski’s writings reflect the chaotic sounds of meaninglessness – when language which once uttered led to thinking, conversing, relating – now uttered only leading to confusion, chaos, and death.

Borowski inserts his readers into this inverted world with his title short story: “This Way to the

Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.” With its title and first story, Borowski’s short story collection invites the reader into this anti-world. With a phrase graced with civility and spoken with a manner of deportment, the reader is invited into the gas chamber. With a phrase, Borowski ushers the reader into a world where meaning is torn from language. Furthermore, this phrase ushers the reader into the anti-world; a world where luggage and shoes hold more value than human beings; a world where rules, regulations, and orders are created, implemented, and spoken for the sole purpose of defacing souls, erasing life, forgetting humanity; a world where man becomes an anti-man. Regarding this physiological metamorphosis of humanity that occurs in the Auschwitz, Giorgio Agamben writes, “this biological image is immediately accompanied by another image, which by contrast seems to contain the true sense of the matter. The

Muselmann is not only or not so much a limit between life and death; rather, he marks the threshold between the human and the inhuman.”191 This “threshold” marked by the Muselmann is the threshold over which one steps when entering Planet Auschwitz. It is the threshold one

191 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, (New York: Zone Books, 2002): 55.

passes over as they are greeted: “This way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman,” by their seemingly neighborly Nazi. Yet, before the greeting is ever uttered, all meaning from language has disintegrated in the flames of hate and death, which illuminates Auschwitz.

Immediately following the greeting of “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” found in the title, the reader is inserted into the anti-world, where all identity, humanity, decency is stripped away and replaced with humiliation, degradation, and death. With this title, Borowski introduces the greeting of the anti-world – a greeting that is the opposite of a greeting between one human being to another, and instead is a greeting ushering in death. The story begins: “All of us walk around naked. The Delousing is finally over, and our striped suits are back from the tanks of Cyclone B solution, an efficient killer of lice in clothing and of men in gas chambers.”192 With this opening following the title of the story, Borowski begins ushering his reading into an environment where men are only greeted as men upon their arrival for death.

Borowski’s use of the short story genre allows for him to succinctly, starkly introduce his reader to the process of the collapsing of relationships within the concentration camps, by which man becomes the Muselmann of Auschwitz. This process for which Borowski accounts of the anti- man is simple, subtle, and successful: there is tearing of meaning from spoken language, as noted in the title; there is an undoing of modesty and the sanctity for which it is represented in relationships (husband and wife, parent and child, stranger and neighbor), as seen in the narrator’s objective voice accounting of the nakedness of those around him; there is the tearing of individuality from humanity, as seen in the erasing of names with numbers, individuality with masses. We see the process of rupturing man into the anti-man continue on a path that leads to

192 Tadeusz Borowski, “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” in This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 29.

the closing door of the gas chambers, where Nazis merely see themselves as simply carrying out the order to eradicate pests, not of people, with a pestilent killing agent.

The process of dehumanizing and the collapsing of relationships in the anti-world begins with humiliation – the erasing of one’s name, the shaving of one’s hair, the removing of one’s clothes. In her memoir, Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land, Sara Nomberg-Przytyk attests to this initiating, dehumanizing humiliation forced upon all those who entered Auschwitz:

“Zugangi [a Yiddish term used by Nazi Officers for] – the new prisoners who did not know how to ‘organize’ – did not know how or where to hide; they made themselves absurd trying to defend their human dignity.”193 Regarding this early phase of humiliation in the form of the tearing away of modesty from one’s being as another means of erasing identity (taking away names, clothing, hair – personal identity), Nomberg-Przytyk writes:

The shearing of the sheep had started, and with scissors so dull that they tore bunches of hair out of our heads. There was one big difference between us and sheep, however. The sheep bleated as they were being shorn, but we stood there in silence with tears streaming down our cheeks. “Spread your legs,” yelled the blokowa. And the body hair was shorn too. All of this took place very quickly, to the accompaniment of shouts and blows, which fell thickly on our head and shoulders. We ceased to exist as thinking, feeling entities. We were not allowed any modesty in front of these strange men. We were nothing more than objects on which they performed their duties, non-sentient things that they could examine from all angles. It did not bother them that cutting hair close to the skin with dull scissors was excruciatingly painful. It did not bother them that we were women and that without our hair we felt totally humiliated. Once again, we were sitting on the benches, naked, the hair on our heads, what was left of it, cut in layers, all of us hunched over from the cold. I was looking for acquaintances among those transformed figures, and truly, I did not recognize anybody. […] In a few hours we were robbed of everything that had been ours personally. We were shown that here in Auschwitz we were just numbers, without faces or souls.194

193 Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985): 13. 194 Ibid., 14, 15.

Nomberg-Przytyk’s harrowing narrative accounts to the dehumanizing process by which the transformation of the anti-man in the horrific realities of the anti-world starts.

Building upon this reality, the objective voice of Borowski’s narrator in “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” weaves the motif of nakedness into the story as way to echo, for the reader, the second phase toward ushering victims into the visage of the Muselmann. This first phase of stripping away of clothing and tearing away of modesty is the means by which the

Nazis sought to humiliate, dehumanize, and ultimately erase individual identity away from all those who stepped off the trains and walked into Auschwitz. Within the first paragraph, this motif is introduced: “All of us walk around naked. […] But all the same time, all of us walk around naked […] All day, thousands of naked men shuffle up and down the roads, cluster around the squares, or lie against the walls and on the top of roofs. […] Twenty-eight thousand women have been stripped naked and driven out of the barracks.”195 Although this motif woven throughout the narration of the short story, it is with the first sentence that Borowski inserts the reader into this process of dehumanization from man toward Muselmann: “All of us walk around naked.”196 Yet the emphasis on this statement is not on the naked, but rather, it is on the first word: all. Like the state of every child born into the world, all those born into the anti-world are naked. Nevertheless, their state is not one determined by natural order; instead, it is one commanded by an unnatural, inversion of presuppositions of life, decency, and order – it is a birthing-like process into Auschwitz, where one lives each moment for moving toward death not life. This ubiquitous exposing of humanity that served as the first steps toward ushering victims into the rules that governed this anti-world, stripped away, for the victims, any preconceived

195 Ibid., 29. 196 Ibid.

beliefs regarding modesty and how one viewed the role of nakedness in relationships. The second and third sentences of this short story capture the theme of the collapsing of time in the death camp – when human beings cease to live life according to an internal linear trajectory toward life, and instead, begin to alternate in an environment where an individual teeters in time and space on an inverted chasm where death dictates the future: “The delousing is finally over, and our striped suits are back from the tanks of Cyclone B solution, an efficient killer of lice in clothing and of men in gas chambers.”197 Here the narrator introduces the reader to the reality of the anti-world – a place where vermin, pests, lice and human beings are the same. In this place, the face of the Other is complete erased, the significance of a victim’s life is not merely irrelevant, but inconceivable and treasonous to Nazi thinking. Furthermore, it is a world where one man’s reasoning and scientific discoveries are solely discovered and implemented to terminate, eradicate, and erase another man’s existence, life, and memory. Later in the story, the narrator leads the reader to the figure that embodies the collapsing of relationships in this anti- world – the Muselmann: “Just as we finish our snack, there is a sudden commotion at the door.

The Muslims scurry in fright to the safety of their bunks, a messenger runs into the Block Elder’s shack. The Elder, his face solemn, steps out at once.”198 Traces of this figure appear in several of

Borowski’s other stories, as well. For instance, in “The Supper,” the Muselmann represents the extent to which the Nazis sought to dehumanize their fellow man, by creating an environment and reality in which man would turn on man, man would even feed on man in the hopes of

“surviving” another moment the horrific state of Auschwitz. This story recounts of a moment where a group of Russian prisoners were executed for being “Communists,” which also carried

197 Ibid. 198 Ibid., 32.

the charge of not allowing any of the other prisoners to have their supper that evening. The story ends with the narrator’s account: “No sooner was the greying, sunburned Kommandant out of sight than the silent crowd, pressing forward more and more persistently, burst into a shrieking roar, and fell in an avalanche on the blood-spattered pavement, swarming over it noisily. […] I had been standing some distance away from the place of execution so I could not reach the road.

But the following day, when we were again driven out to work, a ‘Muslimized’ Jew from Estonia who was helping me haul steel bars tried to convince me all day that human brains are, in fact, so tender you can eat them absolutely raw.”199 Borowski, again, brings the Muselmann of

Auschwitz into the spotlight when he ends the short story, “The Supper,” with the narrator pondering the words of a Muslimized Jew. In this creation of the anti-man that is Muslimized

Jew, the Nazis attempt to eradicate the face, image, identity, and humanity of the Jewish victims.

This very idea posed by the anti-man in the short story, “The Supper,” reflects the undoing and the erasing of humanity and the sanctity of life for which the roads of the Holocaust were paved, and on which the walls and fences of Auschwitz stood. Where the title of this story might connote fellowship – the breaking of bread between family, friends, even strangers before the Holocaust, in the context of Borowski’s narrative, this “supper” is a supper of the anti-world

– a supper in which the characters share in suffering rather than fellowship, and in death rather than nourishment. For in this final sentence, Borowski unfolds the three main layers of the anti- man: physical, spiritual, and suspension between life and death. As already discussed, the physical layer for which the Muselmann – the anti-man – succumbs is one of complete exhaustion, starvation, and eventually: death. However, the spiritual layer of the undoing of man

199 Tadeusz Borowski, “The Supper,” in This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 155, 156.

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into the anti-man is a camp mentality in which the Nazis’ forced their fellow brothers – human beings – to exist in such a reality where the thoughts of eating the brains of their murdered fellow prisoners for “supper” was deemed a rational action in the irrational confines of Auschwitz. Such an action stems from the prisoners’ hopes of living another moment, another second, another minute, and maybe, just maybe, another hour. Finally, we see the third phase of man suspended between falling into the category of Muselmann. Thus, what is significant is not the words uttered by this so-called “Muslimized Jew from Estonia,” but the contemplation of his words by the narrator. How the narrator responds after this conversation determines whether or not he seeps into Muselmann mentality, yet Borowski ends his short story without a response from the narrator, and thus, he then ends his story with this incomplete thought for the reader. In this final moment, the reader sees two men – the Muslimized anti-man and the yet-to-be Muslimized anti- man. Through this narration, through this final exchange, Borowski inserts his reader into a conversation between the man (narrator) and the what-once-was-a-man (Muselmann). Just like the narrator silently – passively, listening to the words of this fellow prisoner, the reader finds himself passively reading and listening to the same conversation. In this narrative moment,

Borowski brings to the forefront of the readers’ thoughts the often over-looked figure of the

Muselmann – the figure of the emotionally dehumanized, spiritually degraded, and physically disintegrated anti-man of the anti-world. Therefore, literature like Borowski’s short stories, serves as a vehicle for which the reader might enter into a conversation with the Muselmann, who, by definition, is incapable of conversation, and therefore: voiceless.

Borowski revisits this phase of the one being suspended between man and anti-man in his short story “A True Story.” The title of this story inserts the reader into the testimony of the

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narrative – for the title is a declaration of truth, and a declaration of testimony. This story is about the narrator, who is faced with the task of telling stories to entertain “Kapo Kawasniak.”

The narrator states that Kawasniak “hated all extravagant talks of the themes of romantic literature. But he would abandon himself with passion to any ridiculous, sentimental plot as long as I managed to convince him it was taken from my own life.”200 In this story, the narrator finds himself on the verge of Muselimizing, yet that which suspends him from succumbing to the collapsed figure of a man, the shell-like visage of humanity, is his relating a story – sharing, whether true or not, in the act of conversing and telling his story to someone. Or in the words of

Lévinasian thought, his face is seen by the Other (the Kapo) in the movement toward one another that occurs in the act of telling, relating a story. Before the narrator begins to share a story with the Kapo, Borowski begins, “A True Story,” by describing the narrator as one not merely teetering between life and death, but between man and the anti-man – the Muselmänner of

Auschwitz. The implication here is that the borderline Muselmann is the narrator, because the

Muselmann could never be a narrator of anything, since the Muselmann has no story, and therefore, no voice to tell nor relate his or her story with others. Borowski writes, “I felt certain I was going to die. I lay on bare straw mattress under a blanket that stank of the dried-up excrement and pus of my predecessors. I was so weak I could not even scratch myself or chase away the fleas. Enormous bedsores covered my hips, buttocks, and shoulders. My skin, stretched tightly over the bones, felt red and hot, as from fresh sunburn. Disgusted by my own body, I found relief in listening to the groans of others. At times I thought I would suffocate from

200 Tadeusz Borowski, “A True Story,” in This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, (New York: Penguin Books, 1976): 158.

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thirst.”201 The story begins with a call to death, not a call for action. For in the anti-world, time collapses and thinking is consumed by thoughts of death rather than thoughts of life, thoughts of regression rather than thoughts of progression. The shift in narration happens when the Kapo, who “felt a nostalgic longing for his Kommando working in the women’s section”202 was bored and was waiting for a sound of life from the narrator, for which the Kapo would say: “‘So at last you have had enough sleep,’ he would say angrily, barely able to hide his mounting impatience.

‘For heaven’s sake, go on with the story. What a goddam nuisance for a healthy man to be rotting in bed like a ‘Muslim’. Have you noticed, by the way, that it’s ages since we’ve had a selection?”203 In this passage, the reader sees two things about the anti-world: first, how effortlessly the thinking amongst all prisoners is centered on death – death of others, death that might happen (selections), death of self (a fever, a cold, typhus, starvation). Building upon this notion, in this moment the reader sees two things concerning the anti-man of Auschwitz: first, the process by which one turns into the anti-man is not a seamless effort, but rather it is a painful, disgusting, and horrific path created by the Nazi perpetrators, paved by shame, loneliness, isolation, and death. The narrator of this story is laying in open sores, human excrement, and the belly that is being filled is the belly of the louse or flea feeding upon his body. Yet, Borowski’s story does not shed light solely on this narrator’s situation, nor does it merely shed light on the

Kapo’s role in the anti-world, but rather nestled in the core of Borowski’s narrative is the story of the moment where one becomes the anti-man of the anti-world: the Muselmann. Here, Borowski does not portray for the reader a ghost-like creature, nor a surrealist, distorted, Picasso-like

201 Ibid., 157. 202 Ibid., 158. 203 Ibid., 157.

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image of a man; instead, he portrays a man that once was a lover, that once was a son, student, worker, pal, professional who now emerges from the puddle of his own bodily fluid to only either collapse further into this state “like a ‘Muslim’” or to resist, in the moment, and fight to live another moment more as a man – a living, breathing, relating man whose stories of life that once was lures him to the side of the abyss where he is seen by those around him, like this Kapo, as still a man, and for a few more moments, still worthy of bread and breath. Borowski ends this story with an instant of frustration from the Kapo, who recognizes that the story the narrator is telling him is not of the narrator’s own life, but it is about someone else’s in the camp. The Kapo

“rested comfortably against the pillow and kept bouncing the tomato from one hand to another.

‘You may have my coffee if you like; I’m not allowed to drink it anyway,’ he said after a short hesitation. ‘But don’t tell me anymore stories.’ He threw the tomato on my blanket, moved the coffee table closer to me, and tipping his head to one side watched in fascination as I glued my lips to the edge of the cup.”204 What might be read as a moment of mercy (the giving of coffee and a tomato to the narrator) is rather a moment reflecting an undoing of relationships that occurs in the anti-world. Storytelling and relating to one another before Auschwitz was a means of passing time, growing in one’s relationship with another, learning and conversing as a means of learning from and about others; however, in this moment, the relating comes to a halt – for upon realizing that the stories were not solely from his own life, the Kapo quickly comes to the realization that he no longer has a use for the narrator. This is the anti-world, this is the making of the Nazis’ Muselmann – the anti-man of Auschwitz – the once being, hint of a figure, shadow

204 Ibid., 160.

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of a human who no longer holds any value or use to those around him. Yet there is no longer a place in this anti-world for him, and often that is what pushes him over into the abyss of death.

In his short story, “The Visit,” Borowski, again, has his narrative account of the harrowing moments in the anti-world where both time and relationships collapsed, as man turns his fellow man into anti-man and then ash. “The Visit” begins in medias res – but instead of recounting the story of the hero’s short, but glorious life, Borowski, through this inverted epic- like structure, captures the story of a short but horrific, harrowing life of the anti-man and all men who journeyed into the depths of the anti-world: Auschwitz-Birkenau. The story begins, “I was walking though the night, the fifth in line. An orange flame from the burning human bodies flickered in the centre of the purple sky.”205 The narrative weaves the reader through past memories of the narrator, as he navigates through thoughts of his life whilst in the anti-world:

Yet, this narrator, who may have physically surfaced from the depths of the anti-world and walked out of Auschwitz, never truly left Auschwitz. This story is typical for Borowski in that he utilizes this short story genre and form to immediately insert the reader into the reality facing those who “survived” the anti-world, yet feel the burden and responsibility to tell others of that which happened to all those who did not survive: “And every one of the people who, because of eczema, phlegmon or typhoid fever, or simply because they were too emaciated, were taken to the gas chamber, begged the orderlies loading them into the crematorium trucks to remember what they saw. And to tell the truth about mankind to those who do not know it.”206 Moreover, in this story, Borowski illustrates the silencing of millions of voices and visits through the voice of

205 Tadeusz Borowski, “A Visit,” in This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 174. 206 Ibid., 175.

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his narrator. Although a survivor, the narrator is haunted by the voiceless visits of millions of his murdered brothers and sisters, which can be seen for the reader in the penultimate and final paragraphs of the story. Like a shadow lingering behind its source, the narrator (Borowski) – although a survivor – is like a shadow, always connected, always attached, whether closely or stretched across the universe, to Auschwitz and what and who he witnessed whilst there:

I sit in someone else’s room, among books that are not mine, and, as I write about the sky, and the men and women I have seen, I am troubled by one persistent thought – a that I have never been able to look at also at myself. A certain young poet, a symbolic-realist, says with a flippant sarcasm that I have a concentration-camp mentality. In a moment I shall put down my pen and, feeling home-sick for the people I saw then, I shall wonder which one of them I should visit today: the smothered man in the officer’s boots, now an electrical engineer employed by the city, or the owner of a prosperous bar, who once whispered to me: ‘Brother, brother…’207

The Muselmann is precisely the one who is no longer capable of whispering, “Brother” – there lies the obliteration of his human soul. This concentration-camp mentality to which Borowski alludes in the above passage is the shadow of Auschwitz that forever lingers behind all those who witnessed the atrocities of the Holocaust. Rather than turning to chapters and essays, it is within the first few paragraphs of Borowski’s short story that the reader learns about, through the narration, all the visits of the friends, neighbors, parents, siblings, lovers, and strangers that never happened and were prevented by the closing of the gas chamber doors. In his short stories,

Tadeusz Borowski does not merely write “about Auschwitz,” instead, he defines the anti-world – a place not merely created by man for man, but a place where the horrific replaces hope; where desecration replaces decency; where death replaces life; where time ceases to move forward toward future and where man ceases to respond to his brothers’ cries. In his short stories, he defines Auschwitz-Birkenau.

207 Ibid., 176.

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Similarly to Tadeusz Borowski’s writing of short stories as a form of witnessing about the Holocaust, Rokhl Korn’s short story “The End of the Road” and Frume Haplern’s short story

“Dog Blood,” also seek to also testify about that which happened during the Holocaust, by giving accounts of the collapsing of relationships by addressing the Nazis’ assault on the home and family.

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CHAPTER IV

THE COLLAPSE OF RELATIONSHIPS AND HOME: THE NAZI ASSAULT ON

RELATIONSHIPS, FAMILY, AND HOME AS PORTRAYED IN TWO YIDDISH

HOLOCAUST SHORT STORIES

“They figured it was less difficult for an old person to die. Maybe that was true when death came on its own, to your own bed. But going like this, bringing death your bundle of wornout bones. Shush! She wasn’t done with everything.” – Rokhl Korn, “The End of the Road”

By focusing on a close analytical reading of Rokhl Korn’s short story “The End of the

Road” (1957) and Frume Haplern’s short story “Dog Blood” (1963), the following chapter examines the role of the Nazis’ assault on the home, relationships, family, and memory as portrayed in two Yiddish Holocaust short stories.208 These two stories present an account of the moments the Nazis physically invaded the towns, communities, and homes of Jewish people in

Eastern Europe and the moments of memory following that invasion. Understanding this assault by the Nazis is key to understanding the distinctive features of the Holocaust short story, as illustrated by these two examples. For these short stories lend themselves as literary accounts, literary witnesses of life during the anti-world; life forging the framework for which Auschwitz-

Birkenau and every other Nazi occupied ghetto and camp would stand. More specifically, with their parallel settings, these two short stories, which were originally written in Yiddish (a language that was almost completely eradicated during the Holocaust in the mass murder of the

208 Also included in this chapter is an expert taken from my previous written work that was featured by The Curio Project: Mary Catherine Mueller. “The Wedding Dress.” TheCurioProject.com. http://www.thecurioproject.com/reflections/2016/6/8/the-wedding-dress (accessed June 8, 2016).

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Yiddish-speaking population of Europe), portray the extent to which the Nazis sought to destroy the home and family structure of the Jewish people of Europe.

Though coming from very different backgrounds, both authors, Rachel (Rokhl) Haring

Korn (1889-1982) and Frume Halpern (n.d. – 1966) moved to North America after the war, where they continued their writings about the Holocaust. Little is known about these authors; however, what is known is that they sought to write in an older language no longer familiar to people, yet in a newer genre form easily accessible and digestible for their readers. For Rokhl

Korn, writing in Yiddish was an escape from the horrors that occurred during the Holocaust in her mother tongue and land: Poland. Editors and translators, Linda Schermer Raphael and Marc

Lee Raphael, also address this linguistic and literary journey of Korn’s biography by noting that she was a young girl living in a poor, rural Galician village near Pikliski, Poland, where she lived among Jewish and Christian peasants and farmers. What we know about Korn is that she:

wrote poetry in Polish before switching to Yiddish, which she learned from her husband, and she published several volumes in Poland before World War II. Her postwar Yiddish poems rank with the finest produced in that language. […] Her first collection of Yiddish short stories appeared in Montreal in 1957, where she had settled in 1949. When the Nazis invaded Poland, she managed to flee to Uzbekistan (Soviet Union) with her youngest daughter. Her husband and most of her family were killed. After the war, she returned to Poland and resumed her literary career in Lodz, but eventually moved to Montreal (via Sweden) where she continued to write and publish poetry and stories.209

Though Korn’s and Halpern’s experiences that brought them to North America were very different, both authors’ short story narratives about home and family relationships serve as sounding-boards to the Yiddish-speaking people who were forever silenced by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Although Frume Halpern was already living in America during World War II, her

209 Linda Schermer Raphael and Marc Lee Raphael, “Rachel Haring Korn 1989—1982.” In When Night Fell: An Anthology of Holocaust Short Stories. Ed. Raphael, Linda Schermer, and Marc Lee Raphael, 191-198. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1999), 194.

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roots stretched across the Atlantic to bridge the political discussions from one transatlantic coast to another, as voiced in her writings. Regarding her biographical traces in her Yiddish writings, editor and translator Rhea Tregebov highlights:

Frume Halpern was born in 1888 and immigrated to the United States in 1905. She was known as a proletarian writer, because, like the protagonist in Blessed Hands, she worked as a masseuse, but also because her writing is informed by her commitment to left-wing political causes. The stories are also infused with a profound and nuanced psychological insight into the moral and ethical dilemmas her working-class protagonists experience. Although Halpern’s stories were published for over forty years in the left-wing daily newspaper Morgn frayhehy [Morning Freedom] and, in later years, in the literary quarterly Zamlungen [Collections], as well as in numerous anthologies, her first collection of short stories, Gebentshte hent [Blessed Hands], did not appear until 1963. Halpern was by then in her mid-seventies Gebentshte hent was published by a committee of prominent writers determined that Halpern’s work not “languish in newspapers,” as they noted in the preface to the book. Halpern died in New York in 1996 at the age of seventy-eight.210

Korn and Halpern’s paths leading to their short stories about the Holocaust differ much, as briefly addressed; however, where the narrative paths of these two stories come together is in each author’s similar portal of the anti-world for her readers. Both stories follow a moment inside the home of a family. For Korn’s “The End of the Road,” that moment occurs in a small

Galician village during the 1940s, when multiple generations of a family are gathered around a table, waiting for their death, as they internally and physically wrestle with the idea of who should sacrifice their life so that the rest may live. For Halpern’s “Dog Blood,” that moment occurs after the Holocaust, in a small apartment in New York City, where an elderly couple is visited by a “Guest,” and whose conversation quickly turns to the horrors they survived during the Holocaust, only to be met by the silence of the multiple generations of family who did not survive, yet whose faces echo the absence and silence of life after the Holocaust. Two stories –

210 Biography of Frume Halpern from Arguing with the Storm: Stories by Yiddish Women Writers, edited by Rhea Tregebov (Toronto: Sumach Press, 2007), 99.

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one takes place during the Holocaust, one after the Holocaust – yet both highlight the motif of silence, as well as emphasize the destruction the Nazis wrought on the home and family of victims across Europe – during and after the war.

The Yiddish language is like an ancient linguistic mosaic. Tracing as far back as the mid- thirteenth century, Yiddish is a language comprised with a piecing together and a blending of

Germanic, Hebraic, and Aramaic, as well as Slavic, and a few traces of Romanic languages.211 In the following centuries, Yiddish became a stronghold of the Jews across Europe:

During the Middle Ages, masses of speakers of the new Jewish vernacular then moved from Germany to Slavic territories, especially Poland […] the journey of the people and the language did not stop there. Some Yiddish speakers returned to Germany, Holland, or northern Italy because of pogroms, expulsions, or other anti-Jewish measures. Indeed, the golden age of Old Yiddish literature took place in northern Italy from 1474-1600. Then, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, millions of Jews fled from tsarist Russia […] Jews also left western Poland […] And these migrants and refugees spread Yiddish all over the earth […] Eventually, however, Yiddish lost its various strongholds. It was destroyed in Europe chiefly by the Nazi genocide and by the Soviet tyranny, and in the rest of the globe, by the mass linguistic and cultural assimilation of Jews…212

And just as varied as its traces across the globe, so too was the subject matter of Yiddish literary texts.213

Similarly to this blending of languages that form the Yiddish language, Korn’s and

Halpern’s stories depict a moment in time, where the reader sees a blending of generations within the setting of a home. The reader witnesses the literary account of the Nazis’ uprooting of the family tree that both weathered generations of persecution and generations of life.

Consequently, the focus of my analysis of these Yiddish Holocaust short stories is how they

211 Neugroschel, Joachim, “Introduction.” No Star Too Beautiful: Yiddish Stories from 1382 to the Present. Ed. Neugroschel, Joachim (New York; London: Norton, 2002), xiv. 212 Ibid., xiv. 213 Ibid., xvii.

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reveal the Nazis’ assault on the home, relationships, and the family in Korn’s “The End of the

Road” and Haplern’s “Dog Blood.” These two stories hinge on a moment – a common characteristic of Holocaust short stories. Stern writes about the moment (or ‘snapshot’) when he claims, “single moments – crises, revealing incidents, or epiphanies – make crisp, focused short stories.”214 Although both Korn and Haplern create the world of their story that rests on a particular moment, as Stern notes about a well-crafted story, like other Holocaust short stories, the hinging moment found in these two stories is not a moment of time, but rather a moment in the collapse of time, as seen in a moment portraying the collapse of a future. For Korn, the moment in “The End of the Road” surrounds a family’s decision about whether or not one of them should report for execution or if they should not choose, but rather to “let God decide” and all die. For Haplern, the moment is when a middle-aged couple has a visitor (the “Guest”) and tension builds on whether or not they are any better off in America than they were in Nazi occupied land. Another characteristic of Holocaust fiction, which appears in these two short stories, is the assault on the relation (the parent-child relation, husband-wife relation, and neighbor-friend relation), which is woven throughout the prose and narrative of these stories.

These two stories also represent two different, yet similar perspectives of the assault of the

“home” – the traditional, Judaic-Christian understanding of the home: the dwelling place of the family. Tracing back to the Hebrew Bible and Mount Sinai where Moses was given the Ten

Commandments, which are ten laws concerning the relation between man to God and man to man, the notion of dwelling in relation with each human is a sacred concept and holy command.

However, in the anti-world, the assault on the relation begins with the assault on the home and

214 Ibid., 48.

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the assault on the family. The word for marriage in Yiddish is “kiddushin,” which means

“holiness,” yet, when the community starts to crumble, as time serves to measure one’s death rather than one’s life, then all sense of holiness and human relation, which was found among marriages, amidst families, and around the home (the dwelling place), begins to crumble, disintegrate, and fade into the shadow and silence of the anti-world

Both Korn’s and Haplern’s short stories are well crafted and are rich with rhetorical elements and literary devices such as motifs, images, structure, and form, which aid in highlighting the theme of the collapse if time and relationships in these texts. When considering the prose and rhetorical tools both authors used to whittle their stories for the reader, Noah

Lukeman’s discussion on the necessity and power of prose in his book The First Five Pages: A

Writer’s Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile comes to mind. Lukeman writes:

There is a sound to prose; writing is not just about getting a story across, but also – if not mainly – about how you get there. Prose can be technically correct but rhythmically unpleasant. This is one of the distinctions between writing in general and writing as an art form. We’ve all encountered the ill-sounding sentence, most commonly found in the run- on. Technically it’s correct, but it just “sounds” wrong. Indeed, what I label sound may also be thought of as “rhythm.”215

In the above passage, Lukeman builds upon this notion of how prose, like a road, guides the reader through the pages of a text. Prose, whether jarring or smooth, is essential for any good, successful story. Lukeman’s observation applies to the literary translations of these two Yiddish short stories, for the narratives – though difficult in subject matter – are written in an accessible prose for the readers. Lukeman, like many other writers, distinguishes “writing in general and writing as an art form” based on the author’s prose of the text. It is while considering this notion

215 Noah Lukeman, The First Five Pages: A Writer's Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 41.

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of writing as an “art form” that causes one to appreciate the craft of the short story, the delicacy of the short story’s form, and the keen eye attributed to each detail inculcated in its text by the author. This attention for detail, from the macro details of its structural elements to the micro details of word choice or sentence structure, is another difference and uniqueness to the narrative and story found in the Holocaust short story genre that is not a pressing or necessary rhetorical element when considering the other literary forms of Holocaust fiction and writing. Another distinction between Holocaust literary forms and the literary form of Holocaust short story is that in these two tales, like in other Holocaust short stories, the “sound” of the chaos of the crumbling of the world juxtaposed with the rising of the anti-world found in these stories, underscores the profound “silence” these authors weave into their short tales (the silence of the family members gathered around the table in Korn’s story, and the silence of the wife in Halpern’s story), which capture how silence sweeps through the cities, streets, homes, and relations, as it announces the disintegration of human relation and, with it, human dwelling. It is in this anti-world found in

Holocaust short stories that the silence of the broken relations between husband and wife, parent and child, neighbor and stranger are all heard for the reader.

Another similarity of Korn and Halpern’s stories is that both short stories are written in

Yiddish. Like the act of telling their (those who lived during the Holocaust) story, the act of writing in Yiddish is both Korn’s and Halpern’s expression of their tradition and culture. In his book Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture the Yiddish linguist and scholar Jeffrey Shandler writes, “After the war, the sudden absence of Yiddish became, especially for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, a compelling metonym for the tragic loss of its speakers. This development invited some to make special efforts to restore the use of Yiddish as

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a gesture of rebuilding or memorization.”216 Korn and Halpern’s authorial choice to write in

Yiddish – a language that fell prey to the Nazi regime, which massacred nearly half the world’s population of Yiddish speakers – adds another unique element to the Holocaust short story. The language used to create the world of these two stories is the language of the voiceless: the dead.

In his book A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling David G. Roskies addresses Yiddish writers and their stories when he states, “With the apocalypse of World War I, the Bolshevik revolution, and the Ukrainian civil war, the rehabilitation of the lost folk was obsolete. The next generation of Yiddish writers resorted to storytelling both as an escape from the strictures of realism and as a response to the anarchic forces that history itself had unleashed.”217 As Roskies maintains, this urge and need to write in Yiddish was a common feeling among Holocaust survivors and writers of that generation. In many ways, the sound of these authors’ stories is always haunted by the silence of the murdered Yiddish speakers.

For Korn and Halpern, writing in Yiddish is not merely a response to the “anarchic forces” they lived through, but it is also a means by which they burden themselves in order to invoke the voices of those who suffered and died from the demoralizing, dehumanizing, and barbaric forces of the Nazis from 1933-1945. We see also this urge to tell the stories of the other Holocaust survivors and victims, as well. In his book, Five Biblical Portraits, Elie Wiesel discusses the burden of the story (telling it and writing it) and being the witness, when he writes: “And what are we doing, we writers, we witnesses, we Jews? For over three thousand years we have been repeating the same story – the story of a solitary prophet who would have given anything,

216 Jeffrey Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language & Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 18. 217 David G. Roskies, A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1995), 341.

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including his life, to be able to tell another kind of tale, one filled with joy and fervor rather than sorrow and anguish.”218 It is with the weight of being the storyteller and bearing the tale of

“sorrow and anguish” that Korn writes her short story “The End of the Road” and Haplern writes her short story “Dog Blood.”

Three characteristics of this inverted, upside-down world of the Holocaust governed by

Nazis are the unmitigated, constant and relentless breakdown of the Jewish peoples’ concept of home, meaning of human relationships, and the notion of family. Rokhl Korn’s “The End of the

Road” is a short work of fiction that tells – relates – a moment when a family’s life and world as they know it succumb to the assault of the Nazis and crumble into the anti-world perpetrated by the Nazi laws, decrees, and actions. “The End of the Road” takes place in the home of Hersh-

Layzer Sokol, where he, his wife, their children, and his mother are faced with the decision to have one family member from each household volunteer to die in place of their relatives; otherwise, the Nazis will take the whole household. In this story, the battlefield is not a trench but a kitchen; those fighting the enemy are not trained soldiers but children, women, parents, grandparents; and finally, the thoughts of each family member are thoughts of their deaths, not of their lives. This is a story of the anti-world. It is a story of a family, like millions of families during the Holocaust, whose lives changed in a moment – a moment when the enemy invaded their home. In “The End of the Road,” Korn provides for her readers, a scene and setting where the systematic disintegration of three generations (the grandmother, the parents, and the children) and their relation to each other dissolves throughout the course of her short story.

218 Elie Wiesel, Five Biblical Portraits (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 127.

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Korn’s story begins by introducing the reader to the father of the household, Hersh-

Layzer Sokol. In his book, Open Wounds, David Patterson addresses the assault on the father when he writes, “In the ontological assault on Jewish being, it is not enough simply to murder the father. The killing of his body must be preceded by the annihilation of his image, for in his image lies the Jewish tradition that the father symbolizes.”219 Building upon Patterson’s assertion,

I would also add that the father is not merely a shadow that resembles one who follows biblical teachings, but rather, he is the actual figure whose shadow of religious teachings covers all those in his home – his wife and children. Yet, here in this place, in this ghetto, and in this deteriorating form of a home, the father is no longer one who can follow, embody, and instruct the biblical command:

And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes. And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates as the father is left without answers for his family and he is left without a sense of which direction to turn.220

Instead, he is without answer; he is rendered as almost a shadow instead of a being. Both father and teacher have the same root in Hebrew (horeh and moreh); however, in this story, Korn creates for her readers, a world where the association between father and teacher is severed. We further see the severity of the breaking of the relation between father and child when we remember how the Talmud says a father (if he is a father) must teach his son three things: Torah,

219 David Patterson, Open Wounds: The Crisis of Jewish Thought in the Aftermath of the Holocaust, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012): 141. 220 Deut. 6:6-9 KJV

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a trade, and how to swim.221 Yet, here in the anti-world, the Torah that the father would teach is itself under assault; the son has no future, therefore no trade; and the father cannot show him how to “swim” in the deluge of atrocity that is rising all around them. In this story, Korn immediately inserts the reader into a moment when the family is locked inside their own home and awaiting the execution of either one individual from each home (if they so choose to volunteer), or the execution of all in the home (if they so choose to all volunteer). With her first sentence, the reader sees a world where the characters are forced to weigh the value of each life.

Here not only is this a world that is ordered by perverse notions of certain human beings having more value than others, but it is a world where each individual is motivated to remain silent when asked where is their brother,222 rather than risk their life by speaking for their relation and associating with the other. The father’s character triggers the cracking of this family and the home and the relationships between each member. Korn writes: “For a while, father and son gazed at one another. The son’s eyes asked, demanded to learn what the father knew and what would be kept secret from the others. The father’s head was stooped as if he himself bore the guilt for what was happening, the guilt for having married and brought children into the world, for now being unable to protect them.”223 In this moment, the father, through his silence and inaction speaks of the breaking of their world as they know it – the breaking of the family dynamic where his responsibilities as father and husband are not only no longer allowed, but considered a threatening act in this anti-world governed by death. Where a father once stood for

221 Kiddushin. “Kiddushin 29a The William Davidson Talmud.” sefaria.org. https://www.sefaria.org/Kiddushin.29a?lang=bi (accessed September 7, 2017). 222 Gen. 4:9 KJV 223 Rachel Haring Korn, “The End of the Road.” In No Star Too Beautiful: Yiddish Stories from 1382 to the Present. Ed. Neugroschel, Joachim, 634-641. (New York; London: Norton, 2002), 635.

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the teaching of the law, represented the wisdom of relating memory and tradition, and embodied truth of relation in life, he is now like all the rest of his household: silent, immovable.

In Korn’s story, the assault on relationship within the family is seen in the severing of the father’s relationship with his children through his interaction with his daughter, Mirl. Thus, we see how the father’s connection and the children’s connection to their parents and each other begins to unravel. This is also the moment when she turns to hate her father rather than love him.

In his book The Shriek of Silence, David Patterson highlights the power lurking in the anti-world where all sense of relation between father and child are distorted and destroyed: “Operating in the absence of the father, of course, may breed not only a longing for the father but also a rebellion against the father. As the bearer of the word, the father bears a promise; when the word is emptied of its meaning, the promise goes unfulfilled. The effort to regain the word of the father, who harbors the seminal seed of life, may take the form of a struggle with the father, to wrestle from him what death has swallowed up.”224 The very concept of the breaking of relation between father and child is one that not only prowls throughout this short story, but throughout testimonies and writings of the Holocaust, as well. In “The End of the Road,” we see the physical struggle of the father losing his place in his household. We see this in the instant where the child

(Mirl) assumes the responsibility of the father, when she decides to assume the role of protecting the family, speaking for the family, and leading the family:

Whether it was the gown or her tight, stubborn lips that made her look older, more adult, everyone felt that Mirl had grown a lot taller during those past few hours. “Go where? What are you talking about?” Her father went over to her with bulging, bloodshot eyes. “You know where! Goodbye everyone!” She was already at the door.

224 David Patterson, Shriek of Silence (Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 54.

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With a broad, wild jump, her father caught up with her and grabbed her sleeve […] They all gaped at the scene, but no one stirred, no one held back the father or assisted Mirl. Hersh-Layzer clutched his daughter with one hand while removing his belt with the other […] He finally gripped the belt and whirled it over Mirl’s head like a noose [….] Then, grabbing the loose end, he dragged Mirl like a hog-tied calf to the oak table […] For the first time in her life, Mirl hated her father…225

In the above scene, the assault on the relation is evident. By constructing an anti-world where the father is no longer able to pass on the “word” and “promise” of his teachings of the Law to his child, the Nazis created a foundation where the assault against the family was implemented from within. The father’s frustration and act of violence against his child is a direct consequence of the pressing reality of living and functioning in a place consumed by the thought of death. This is a place – or a non-place of the ghetto – where everything a Jew does to stay alive is illegal, as

Chaim Kaplan says in his diary: “Whatever we do, we do illegally; legally we don’t even have the right to exist.”226 In this story, the bond between father and daughter is fully severed in the moment when his actions of haste, violence, and struggle breed Mirl’s internal response of rejection and hate. In this moment, a father scurries in vain to protect his child’s innocence, only to realize that she “looked older, more adult…during those past few hours.” Here the father and child are both rendered the same and the relation and the role of the father is equated with the role of the child -- they are equally helpless to their present situation (a Nazi occupied environment).

Along with the assault on the father’s relationship to his family in “The End of the Road,”

Korn captures the assault on the child and his/her relationship in the family, as well. Again, although other short stories may write of childhood memories or the dealings and characteristics

225 Korn, 639-640. 226 Chaim A. Kaplan, Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan, trans. And ed. Abraham I. Katsh (New York: Collier, 1973), 332-33.

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of children, in Holocaust short stories, any stories about a child or children tend to be about their death – their spiritual, mental, or physical death – and not about their life. To see a glimpse of the unraveling of a culture, of a tradition, and of a teaching, one merely has to look at the child.

According to Jewish teachings, children represent and embody salvation.227 Children are the pure innocent vessel from and for which adults might draw near and learn. Or as Patterson writes in his book, Open Wounds, “While the mother and father signify an origin and a tradition, the child represents a future and a redemption, from which the present and past derive their meaning.”228

However, in this story, the traditional associations of the child are blurred, out-of-place, and foreign. In tandem with other Holocaust short stories, the children in Korn’s story do not stand for a hopeful present and do not hold a future. Korn introduces the reader to the children through an episode where they are “playing resettlement”:

“Mama, he’s hitting me!” Sorke burst into tears, feeling her mother’s protection. “Go away, Mama, go way right now!” the eight-year-old boy insisted, pulling over his little sister. “We’re playing resettlement, and there’s not a mother in resettlement. You have to obey the policeman. Since she didn’t want to give her baby up, she has to go with her baby. See? I’ve got my rifle.” He brandished his stick.229

Following the above passage, the mother (Beyle) instantly reacts in anger toward her children for playing the game, only to realize that these little vessels of innocence – these children who are her source of redemption – are as entangled as she is in this world formed by the webs of decrees and deaths. Through having the children “play resettlement,” Korn creates for her readers, a micro glimpse into the anti-world the characters inhabit. This world is a world where children eat in silence hoping to avoid the evil lurking outside their door. Yet at the same time, these children

227 Zohar, I, 1b. 228 Patterson, Open Wounds: The Crisis of Jewish Thought in the Aftermath of Auschwitz, 141. 229 Korn, 634.

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are falling prey to an environment and world where their childhood innocence is robbed from them the instant they understand that mothers and babies are shot, and when they believe that men carrying guns hold more power than the divine teachings of their fathers or the prayers uttered by their mothers. In this anti-world, this world paved by mass-shooting and extermination camps, “resettlement” really means “extermination.” In this sense, the children, who represent a life, meaning, and future, are playing extermination – death. Patterson addresses this assault on the children when he associates them with the face of God. He writes, “In a post-Holocaust world, that countenance [God’s] is the face that must be restored through a never-ending tikkun haolam, for the face of a child is where the assault on God and the wounding of creation takes place. And the Nazis knew it.”230 Here, in Korn’s story, we see the assault on the family – on the father, the mother, and the children. We see the displacement of spiritual concerns by the threat of physical concerns. Where we see the fracturing of the role of the father, and we see the severing of innocence from the mindset of the children, we also see the role of motherhood during the Holocaust come into light. With the breaking of the relations, we see the radical inversion of the world into the anti-world.

In tandem with the assault on and disintegration of the father’s relation among his family in Korn’s story is portrayed, so too is the assault on the relationship and role of the mother. From the earliest religious and exegetical texts, the trope of the mother is one that has surfaced and resurfaced throughout literature. When one specifically considers the role of the mother in

Jewish literature, motifs of Rachel weeping for her children or the matriarch figure representing the feminine Divine Presence of the Holy One (the Shekhinah) are all deemed pertinent. When

230 Patterson, Open Wounds, 199.

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discussing the role of the woman of the household, Patterson writes: “The woman of a household is called an akeret, a word that derives from ikar, which means “essence,” “basis,” “foundation,” and “origin”: the mother is all these things that define Torah. Once again, it is through the mother that we have the Torah. Bearing life into the world, she bears Torah into the world. For the Torah is life; it is the Ets Chayim, the ‘Tree of Life’ that sustains all of life.”231 Applying

Patterson’s assertion about the role of the woman of the household to Korn’s “The End of the

Road,” one notices the breakdown of the relations of the mother, which further supports this notion of the distortion growing from an anti-world fostered by those who usher in death (the

Nazis) versus those who usher in life (the mothers and fathers). The mother in this story is not one who embodies foundation, or who represents the basis for order, nor is she one who stands as the essence of Torah – of teaching and instruction. Instead, the readers are given a glimpse into a world where the essence of home is lost in the cage of a house. Korn begins this story with the household’s response to the decree: “By morning, the whole town had learned about the new

German decree. But in Hersh-Layzer Sokol’s household, they virtually pretended not to know about it. As on any other day, Beyle, his wife, put on the pot of grits and half-rotten potatoes, the ghetto’s rations, and punctually set the table for the entire family […] as if to fend off all the evil lurking beyond the door.”232 In this moment, the mother is trying to do all that she can to sustain the home as a home – to fend off evil; yet, in this struggle she is rendered weaker, helpless, and unable, for her efforts seem to be in vain when faced with the unrelenting onslaught of Nazi terror knocking on her door. Therefore, her identity as a mother – a teacher, protector, and vessel of life – begins to fade in this anti-world. As this passage notes, in this story, like in most

231 David Patterson, Open Wounds, 126. 232 Korn, 633.

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Holocaust short stories, the home was transformed into a holding cell for each family. And with each new decree, the responsibilities associated with the woman of the household and the mother seemed more and more like an idea versus a reality. Just as the father represents the source of memory and tradition, the mother represents the vessel Torah; however, in this anti-world, with each new decree, with each deportation, and with each death, the vessel, which the mother embodies, becomes slowly cracked until it is shattered completely.

In “The End of the Road,” the reader is given a glimpse into a shattered world where a man’s threat and decree against another serves as an impetus to severing the relations between the characters, as well as distinguishing the spiritual light and teachings of the “home.” When considering the setting of this Holocaust short story, the home, one must consider the Jewish motifs, tropes, and associations with the home. Just as a home has many sides, so too are there many sides and various associations synonymous with the home. However, when considering and analyzing this story, the home is the dwelling place for the family and “the home, which houses life within its walls, is symbolized by the woman, who also houses life within her womb.”233 The Shekhinah – the female aspect of God, the feminine Divine Presence that is inculcated and quite prevalent in various Jewish Kabalistic teachings, is associated with the matriarch figure of the home. Similarly to the assault on the relation of the mother, which was previously discussed, the assault on the home is an assault on the dwelling place of the mother

(the feminine association of the Holy One). As Ori Z. Soltes states, “this is the realm associated with the three uppermost heikhalot of merkavah literature. Above all, it is referred to as the

‘dwelling’ of God’s Shekhinah ‘aspect’ – that aspect of Godness that dwells among us even as

233 Patterson, Open Wounds, 127.

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God is so ungraspably beyond us.”234 Soltes’ commentary about the Shekhinah’s presence being associated among God’s people is one that echoes the notion of how God’s Presence “dwelt” among Moses and the Israelites, even when they were exiled in the wilderness. In this story, where the mother is, the divine presence of the Shekhinah dwells, too. However, the Word –

Torah – is central to the home and to the Divine Presence dwelling within the home. In this story, we see how the Word has been hushed through the mother’s and father’s silence and how they do not teach – tell and relate – Torah to their children. Patterson claims, “The Temple is the

House of the Shekhinah not because it is the site of rite and ritual but because it is the center attesting to the sanctity of human life, beginning with the children.”235 In this story, we see not a home of instruction and relating of Torah, but we see the parents (the source of teaching) sit, inactive and silent, waiting for death to knock on their door or for someone (the grandmother, in this case) to leave the home and dwelling place, and go alone to her death. Another characteristic of this anti-world and its assault on the home is seen in the moment where light comes into the home rather than light exiting from the home and enlightening the community. Korn writes, “The streak of light coming through the window kept shifting, shifting across the floor, until it reached her legs.”236 Although the Temple’s windows are designed to enable the light of the Torah to illuminate the community,237 in “The End of the Road,” the source of the Torah and wisdom – the relations of the mother and father – are shattered, severed, and extinguished, thus causing the

234 Ori Z. Soltes, Mysticism in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: Searching for Oneness (Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008), 119. 235 Patterson, Open Wounds, 135. 236 Korn, 640. 237 Midrash. “Midrash Tanchuma, Tetzaveh 6.” sefaria.org. https://www.sefaria.org/Kiddushin.29a?lang=bi (accessed September 7, 2017).

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darkening of a world where Torah is burned and tradition is scoffed to come into their home from the broken community, rather than allowing their home to illuminate the community. For families like the Hersh-Layzer Sokol family, a moment like receiving a decree by the Nazis on that autumn day in 1942 represented the end of the road for life as it once was. The very title of this story – “The End of the Road” – serves as a reminder, a reminder of life’s culminations and experiences leading to the end of the road; the title also serves as a hindrance, a roadblock stopping the trajectory of movement in life toward a future destination – toward a future: life. In its very title – “The End of the Road” – Korn introduces her reader to a predicament facing her characters (a predicament that was also facing millions of people). For like the family in this short story, and like the millions of families across Europe, one day they awoke to a day that would lead to the end of the road. One day, they awoke to the anti-world – a world where death knocks on doors, where death is discussed at dinner tables, where parents, children, and grandparents have nowhere else to go but the end of the road. With this title, Korn provides her readers a narrative that captures a moment when all previously held beliefs, understandings, hopes, and even memories of the world, now seemed to no longer exist in this newfound anti- world.

This assault on familial relationships carried out by the Nazis in the anti-world is further amplified in the inability for a family to be a family and relationships to be relationships, as portrayed in the in the inability for even one’s memory to exist in a world where the roads all seem to lead to Auschwitz. A memory is like a piece of glass intricately placed in the mosaic of life. Memory is powerful. A certain smell, a particular sound, a familiar touch, a childhood snack, or a random object – all hold the cognitive power to instantly flood an individual with memories

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of a particular moment in time. Yet concomitant with the power of one’s positive associations with a memory, there can also be negative associations with one’s memory of an object. For instance, before Auschwitz, a pile of shoes was merely a pile of shoes; whereas, after Auschwitz, those shoes were his first day in kindergarten, the last summer when she learned to jump rope, a mother’s shoes often worn on the Sabbath. Throughout the Holocaust, objects like the Yellow

Star of David sewn onto one’s sleeve, Aryan Papers clenched in one’s hand, striped prison uniforms folded on a bench, or pile of children’s shoes arriving on a train cart became either a death sentence or a life sentence. Objects and their corresponding memories became pieces of life before or life after Hitler, Nazis, Auschwitz. In relation to the Holocaust, when considering this idea of memory in conjunction with an object, one can either turn to the spoken or written testimonial accounts of survivors, or turn to the written narratives of Holocaust literature. One such literary account that inculcates an object and memory into its narrative is Korn’s “The End of the Road.”

As previously noted, this is a story that captures one of the Nazis’ greatest assaults: the assault on the family and on the memory of life before Hitler’s Nazism, Race Laws, and death camp. This story highlights, for the reader, the power an object has in sparking a memory for one particular character. In this story, the object (a wedding dress) unlocks the grandmother’s memory of life before the war, for the reader. This story takes place in the autumn of 1942, in a small Galician village, in a home where a family learns that the Nazis have decreed how “‘within two hours from now, each family has to hand over one member – do you understand? The family has to choose the victim themselves. They have to make the choice, otherwise the Germans’ll take everyone, the entire household, no exceptions. […] They were all stunned. But they weren’t

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surprised. […] The family members exchanged glances. Who? Who would go? Go to the place from which no one ever came back?”238 Caught in the claws of Nazi selection process, the three generations (the grandmother, the parents, and the children) of the Hersh-Lazar Sokol’s household sitting around a table are faced with the incomprehensible task of determining who would go – who would go to the place of no return? Who would go to die in order that the other family members’ deaths might be postponed for even one more day, or hour, or minute, or moment? Yet, in the midst of a moment in time where the systematic disintegration of three generations and their relationships to each other dissolves throughout the course of the narrative,

Korn unobtrusively brings an object into the narrative that ushers the reader back in time through the grandmother’s memory. This narrative reveals for the reader that this story is a story of a woman who, though she happens to be a grandmother, through her memory, is still very much the young woman who once fell in love, married, and had a family.

Before Korn introduces the grandmother’s thoughts to the reader, she crafts the narrative in such a way that the rhetoric, when addressing the grandmother, is of a distancing and dehumanizing tone. Like the other characters in the story who view the grandmother through distancing lens, the reader is introduced to a scene in which the characters are forced into an incomprehensible situation where they must weigh the value and need of each life – specifically, the life of the grandmother:

The father couldn’t go, that was clear. He was the provider, the breadwinner for the whole family. The mother, certainly couldn’t go. What would become of the smallest children without her? Lippe? What had he already gotten out of life in his twenty-four years, the last two darkened under Hitler’s reign? […] Was there no one who could go instead of him? What about the grandma? The old grandma? Lippe’s eyes, seeking his grandma, encountered his parents’ gaze above her head. They had stripped the leaves

238 Korn, 636.

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from her years the way falling autumn leaves expose the naked and vulnerable tree trunk. But no one dared to say what they were thinking, no one dared to say, “Go!” No one dared to take control of the few ragged years she had left. […] Their eyes dug into her so sharply that the old woman started dropping, her entire body pushed into her chair, as if she were vanishing from the surface, growing into the bit of floor beneath her, taking root there so that no one could pull it out from under her feet. At that instant, each person’s sense grew more acute, more alive. Each person’s thought were open for everyone else in these moments of intense spiritual strain. The grandma’s mind was the only one that stayed shut, just like her two half-extinguished eyes. She was locked up inside herself, warding off death. Suddenly she felt so alone, so lonely in the midst of her own family, next to her son, whom she had born raised. Her own flesh and blood. And his eyes were searching for her too, focusing on her. And that would enable her to defend herself against all of them, with her last ounce of strength. There was no one who would take her part, no one who would at least put up a wall around her, protect her with a warm gaze. That would have made it easier for her to draw the final balance. Dying is less arduous if you know you’ll be missed.”239

In the first part of the above passage, the characters’ thoughts regarding “Who would go?” reflect the unraveling of the fabric of family relationships that occurred under Nazi occupation. In addition, this passage captures the breakdown of family roles through the inability of parents to be parents (a father unable to protect his family), children to be children (sons and daughters attempting to assume the protective parental roles), grandparents to be grandparents (the ones who pass down their wisdom and teaching of life and traditions). More importantly, however, the latter part of this passage serves as a prelude to the rest of the story that inconspicuously hinges on the grandmother and her memories of her childhood and wedding. For the reader, the object that kindles the thoughts of the grandmother and breathes life into her memories of bygone moments of happiness, home, and hope – is her wedding dress that her granddaughter (Mirl) is wearing.

In the midst of this atrocious situation – choose one life or have all lives chosen – Korn gradually weaves her reader through the narrative that unveils the significance of the

239 Ibid., 637-638.

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grandmother’s memory when she thinks of her wedding and the dress she wore. In the final moments of her life, the grandmother’s thoughts are not of the future where she will go, how long she will live, what will happen to her family (for such thoughts can hardly exists in a world commanded by death and hate), but rather her thoughts are of the past and a time where she was seen by others. Korn writes,

They figured it was less difficult for an old person to die. Maybe that was true when death came on its own, to your own bed. But going like this, bringing death your bundle of wornout bones. Shush! She wasn’t done with everything. She had to look back at her life once more, from start to finish. The time when she had been a child with her mother. She too had once been a child, after all, like her son, like Beyle with Sorke. “Mama, mama,” she pleaded as she had done in her childhood […] Two large, heavy tears rolled down from under her closed lashes, fell into the mesh of wrinkles, and spread down the full length of her face.”240

Here, the reader sees how the grandmother’s memories drift to a realm where love and life were celebrated, where a mother could answer the call of a child, where families could sit around a table a speak of the future life not of future death, and where concern for the brother and other was taught and praised. In this very moment, the thoughts of her life before Nazi occupation serve as an unspoken protest against her captors – the very people stealing others’ memories by extinguishing the light of their lives. Nonetheless, Korn does not leave the reader in this moment, but she ushers the reader through the memory of the grandmother’s wedding day:

she recalled herself as later – a as ready fro a marriage. She had seen Duvid, her betrothed, only once, at the engagement ceremony, but all her girlish dreams were filled with his presence. When they had prepared her wedding garments, she stubbornly insisted on having the costliest fabrics, the iridescent blue silk with its rosy glow and the pink flowers woven into it. She wanted her intended to find her attractive. All these years, her wedding gown had been hanging in the closet until recently. She hadn’t let anyone touch it. Then, a few months ago, she had let them make it over for

240 Ibid., 638.

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Mirl. Because her granddaughter was her spit and image: when she looked at Mirl, she saw herself as she had been long ago.241

The narration moves away from the memory of the grandmother and back to the present moment, as the “clock struck sharply. Once, then twice.”242 Again, who will go? Will it be the father or

Lipe, whose lover is waiting for him to meet her? Will it be young Mirl who is wearing her grandmother’s wedding dress? As the tension in the room rises, the father attempts to protect his family even by means of forcing his daughter Mirl from leaving the house:

“I’m going.” They all turned their heads toward her. She stood in the iridescent blue-and-rosy dress, which had been made over from her grandma’s wedding gown. Mirl had forgotten to take it off […] “Go where? What are you talking about?” Her father went over to her with bulging, bloodshot eyes. “You know where! Goodbye everyone!” She was already at the door. With a broad, wild jump, her father caught up with her and grabbed her sleeve […] As Mirl tried to free herself from her father’s grip, they heard a loud swish, which sounded like a whip. The old, lengthened silk sleeve had ripped. They all gaped at the scene, but no one stirred, no one held back the father or assisted Mirl.”243

Like the tearing of a sleeve, in the above passage, the reader sees the tearing apart of any previously held presuppositions regarding a world and environment where parents could protect their children. Furthermore, in this moment, a father scurries in vain to protect his child’s innocence, only to realize that she “looked older, more adult…during those past few hours.”

Here the father and child are both rendered the same and the relation and the role of the father is equated with the role of the child – they are equally helpless to their present situation (a Nazi occupied environment). Yet, who will go? still silently lingers in the story. It is not Mirl the

241 Ibid., 638. 242 Ibid. 243 Ibid., 639.

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young, Mirl the bold, Mirl assuming the role of family protector, or Mirl wearing the “iridescent blue-and-rosy dress” that will go. No, Mirl will not go, but it is the one who, when she “looked at

Mirl, she saw herself as she had been long ago,” not just a stored away silk dress, or a vulnerable leafless tree trunk in autumn, or a bundle of worn-out bones. No, it was the young girl who remembered calling out, ‘Mama, mama’ when frightened as a child; it was the young bride who remembered wearing the silk dress on her wedding day; it was the mother who remembered cradling her baby son – the son, now grown and with his own family, whom she could protect once more by walking out the door: “Grandma’s chair was empty. They had all been so deeply absorbed in their own thoughts that no one had noticed her getting to her feet. Where was she?

When had she stolen out so softly that no one had heard her? It could only have been just minutes ago.”244 In a an act spurred by a memory, in a moment of fear frozen in time, the grandmother leaves the home and her family as a way of staying with them forever. A single death added to the tally of millions, Korn’s story unravels the extent to which the Nazis’ reach to tear away families from one another extended.

Written in 1957, Rachel Haring Korn’s short story, “The End of the Road” pieces together a narrative about a few hours in the life of a family living in a Nazi-occupied Galician village. Although this is a multifaceted story that addresses various themes found in Holocaust literature, one of its key aspects is the role of the grandmother and the memories of her life before death camps and liquidations. Through the grandmother’s memories of her wedding and early life, the reader is ushered back into a world that was paved by life, love, and future, which serves as a juxtaposition to the world paved by destruction, hate, and death – the Holocaust. If a

244 Ibid., 640.

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memory is like a piece of glass in the mosaic of life, then the objects that trigger memories like those that are found in Holocaust testimonies and narratives aid in piecing together the horrific accounts of the atrocities that swept across Europe from 1933-1945.245

Concurrent with the various themes and motifs which were woven throughout Rokhl

Korn’s short story “The End of the Road,” in Frume Halpern’s Holocaust short story “Dog Blood” the Nazis’ assault on relationships, home, and memory is inculcated into the narrative as well.

“Dog Blood” is a set in post-Holocaust New York City. This story follows a moment in the life of a couple (the Shtroms) who are visited by a guest. All that the reader knows about this guest is that he is a man who is “younger” than the “middle aged” couple, and is someone who also

“survived” Auschwitz. He is descried as: “an emaciated manikin with high cheekbones, was a lot younger than the Shtroms. He never removed his right hand from his pocket, while his left hand kept tugging at this throat as if to indicate that even though he was absorbed in his thoughts, he could hear what was being said.”246 What the reader knows about this guest is what he voices to the Shtroms, which is about his frustration with America, with the rich “philanthropists,” and what one can assume to be his frustrations with “life” – life beyond, after Auschwitz, for he like so many never truly left Auschwitz, but rather stands, breathes, and lives in the shadow of the anti-world. Both the Shtroms and the guest are survivors of the Holocaust; however, though they are alive and living in New York, Halpern’s narrative shows that the scope of the Nazis’ assault extends far beyond the camp and ghettos, as portrayed in the couple’s inability to communicate

245 Excerpt starting on page 20 is taken from my previous written work that was featured by The Curio Project: Mary Catherine Mueller. “The Wedding Dress.” TheCurioProject.com. http://www.thecurioproject.com/reflections/2016/6/8/the-wedding-dress (accessed June 8, 2016). 246 Frume Halpern, “Dog Blood” from Gebentshte Hent (Blessed Hands). In No Star Too Beautiful: Yiddish Stories from 1382 to the Present. Ed. Neugroschel, Joachim, 655-660. (New York; London: Norton, 2002), 657.

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with each other and the guest. In tandem with other post-Holocaust narratives, this story addresses survivors’ responses to the assault on their homes and the consequences of living through the anti-world. When addressing the life of survivors, Janet Hadda writes, “The

Holocaust was actively incorporated into their daily lives, making it an increasingly significant aspect of existence rather than the opposite.”247 What Hadda alludes to is present in the narrative of “Dog Blood.” Written in 1963, this story is a post-Holocaust tale that illustrates the scope of the Holocaust itself, reaching far beyond the confines of the camps and ghettos. Through words,

Halpern paints for her readers a picture that captures how time no longer functions on a linear trajectory for Holocaust survivors, but rather how it functions in a cyclical motion that constantly carries them back to a world where laws protected death, decrees commanded murder, neighbors turned on neighbor, and parents were as helpless as their children. Inserted in post-Holocaust

1950s New York, Halpern creates for her readers a story that captures a conversation between the Shtroms (“a husband and wife…way into a middle age”) and their guest (a man “with whom

[they] had wandered through the Holocaust years until he [the guest] managed to reach these shores”248). When considering the rhetorical tools implemented in forming this story, one cannot point to any specific moment of outward action or conflict; rather Halpern’s story hinges on the internal turmoil of the characters and the assumed guilt they carry because they survived what millions did not: the Holocaust. In this story, the survivors (the Shtroms and their guest) are rendered homeless; they have no dwelling place and are wanderers in a strange land: “Do you really believe that we were rescued by being dragged here? It’s all the same whether she sits on a

247 Janet Hadda, Passionate Women, Passive Men: Suicide in Yiddish Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 193. 248 Halpern, 656.

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chair or I trudge around. We’re still there! Over there our eyes were glued to the earth. Every grain of sand, every stone reminded us of something. And here? There’s nothing to look at…If we’d stayed there, we’d find some solace for the blood we lost, we’d have revenge and consolation.”249 This impossibility of liberation is a distinguishing feature of the Holocaust – a feature that also echoes throughout the Holocaust short story genre. Furthermore, in the above passage, the protagonist’s assertion of “We’re still there!” is a reality that faced Holocaust survivors all around the world. The Holocaust and its anti-world is like one’s shadow – at times it is miniscule and unnoticeable, at other times it is a large, distorted image of their faceless self.

Halpern addresses this assault on the home through this couple who no longer communicate with each other but rather “sit in silence” or “trudge” around alone. In this isolation, we see the collapse of the word. To speak is to relate to the other; yet, the other must be present, responsive.

David Patterson also addresses the problem of liberation in his chapter, “The Failure of

Liberation,” in his work Sun Turned to Darkness. Regarding liberation, the home, and silence,

Patterson writes: “Home, of course, is made of far more than bricks and furniture. Its essence lies in human relation; a human being liberated is a human being returned to human relation. The breakdown of this relation is just what underlies the failure of liberation and the alienation from the home. Very often this failure and alienation are revealed in the failure of the word, that is, in silence.”250 Patterson addresses how the collapse of home, relationships, and meaning (word) in the anti-world often remained collapsed “after” Auschwitz. In a sense, Halpern’s story serves as a response to that isolation and collapse of time, meaning, and relationships. In this story, we see

249 Halpern, 657. 250 David Patterson, Sun Turned to Darkness: Memory and Recovery in the Holocaust Memoir (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1988) 187.

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how the couple, like so many survivors, may have left Auschwitz, though the trauma, memories, and experiences of Auschwitz never left them. In the concentrationary universe, there were no couples, just as there were no fathers, no sons, no mothers, no daughters, no sisters, etc.

Without a dwelling place – a home – the relation between the husband and wife is strained and the sphere to which the Divine Presence would normally dwell is rendered non- existent. When he discusses post-Holocaust exile, David Patterson writes how “the horror of the post-Shoah exile is that it passes for a state of normality, yet it is a calm haunted by an underlying panic. Thus we seethe in a state of behalah which is “fright,” “panic,” or

“confusion.”251 This behalah, which Patter,son mentions, surfaces in the story in both the panic and fright of moving in a foreign land, yet mentally living in the past. This panic reveals itself through the confusion or lack of communication between the husband and wife. One characteristic of the Shekhinah is that she dwells in the Temple and dwells among her children.

According to midrash, when the children of Israel were exiled in the desert, the Shekhinah went with them. As it has been said, “the Temple is the House of the Shekhinah not because it is the site of rite and ritual but because it is the center attesting to the sanctity of human life, beginning with the children.”252 “Dog Blood” is a brief story where the readers are introduced to three adults. Although there are no children mentioned in the present action of the narration, there are nonetheless children present in the absence of the present action. What is rendered absent when children are rendered absent is the notion of a future – a continuation of life through the next generation. The Nazis systematically created these realms devoid of children, and so that aspect of the soul continues “after” Auschwitz. As the tension of the story rises with the guest and Mr.

251 Patterson, Open Wounds, 113. 252 Ibid., 135.

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Shimkhe Shtrom’s heated discussion about whether their life is better as survivors alone in

America rather than still together with their family and community murdered at Auschwitz, or alone yet rebuilding a life for themselves in Europe (as the guest ardently advocates). The protagonist (Shimkhe Shtrom’s) responds not with words, but with the silent wordless faces of photographs of loved ones:

He felt his wife’s mute eyes begging him to rest. He sat down on the sofa and again produced the old, worn wallet from his bread pocket. His wife’s hand reached out, and for the first time she stammered something: “Don’t!” When he slipped the wallet back into his pocket, she lowered her feeble hands. Suddenly, as if forgetting his wife and the guest, Shtrom stood up, hurried over to the small table at the window, yanked forth the wallet with both hands and started laying out photographs. In an orderly, unhurried manner, he placed them one by one on in straight lines, counting out four generations. He put young next to young, old next to old, calling them by name and title: rabbis, doctors, lawyers. There were radiantly smiling faces of bridal couples in wedding clothes, students clutching diplomas, playful children with joyous faces and defiant eyes. Clouds of smoke, clouds of colors hovered in front of Shtrom…Black, red…His eyes prickled, his ears buzzed…253

The significance of the image of the face on each photo echoes the Nazis’ assault on the face – on the humanity, the soul, that emanates from the face. In this story, even though the reader can assume the photos in the protagonist’s wallet are photos of dead children, again, there are no children present in the narrative. Without children, there is no one to teach, relate, guide, or instruct. It is through this representation of exile that the notion of the “home” is under assault.

The Shtroms are not caged inside the walls of a ghetto or camp, but like the “clouds of smoke” that hovered in front of Shrtom – invoking the smoke from the chimneys of Auschwitz, they are trapped in a world of their yesterday. The reader knows little about the three characters; however, of the lives of those in photos, the reader has a glimpse into a world of the past – children, diplomas, weddings, smiles – and this world of the past is as fading and tucked away as the

253 Halpern, 659.

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images on the paper. Unlike the memory of the grandmother in Korn’s “The End of the Road,” the memory consuming Shimkhe Shtrom is that of a recurring motif of yearning and death. The

Shtroms are caught in the panic, fear, and state of wondering – wondering why they left, why they survived, and why others did not or could not. Without a home, a dwelling, one is counted a wanderer and a stranger.

Accompanying that notion of homelessness is the lack of community and communication, which renders the characters alone. Uncertain as to why the Guest visited the Shtroms, the sources of conversation that only lead to discord seem to capture a tone of frustration and despair felt by the characters regarding their “new” life in America. As previously mentioned, one aspect of the breaking down of the community in “Dog Blood” is the lack of communication between the husband and wife. In her book, Janet Hadda discusses how “marriage is one of the covenantal obligations of Jewish existence.”254 However, when faced with the realties that accompany existence inside the walls of the Holocaust, all presuppositions about the traditional teachings of marriage, the conventions of marriage, and the notions of ‘covenantal obligation’ appear foreign and unattainable in the post-Holocaust, post-anti-world life. Alongside the silencing of communication is the absence of community. In this story, the couple is rendered incommunicative with each other – he wanders aimlessly and she sits in silence. Rather than breaking through the walls of the anti-world and finding haven and comfort in the walls of their newfound home, this story does not portray a couple existing in present, together in relation and community; but rather, it portrays two individuals living in the past and in the time where various forms of communication were silenced and where any sense of community crumbled to

254 Hadda, 2.

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ruins. This lack of communication represents the braking of the relation and the traces of the anti-world inserting itself into the post-Holocaust world. Halpern captures this in the ending of

“Dog Blood,” when she writes: “The tree shook and circled hastily as if trying to escape. Shtrom trembled to the rhythm of the small, parched branches, which reminded him of human hands that he had once seen sticking out of hills of soil. The guest said, ‘Goodnight.’ But the Shtroms didn’t hear him.”255 In this ending, the reader can see how without communication, one cannot relate to or teach one another. More importantly, the reader is given another glimpse into Shtroms’ memory. Like the photographs he carries in his wallet that remind him of those whose faces will never smile again, whose voices will never speak or respond when their name is called, this moment reflects how even in the movement of living nature and creation, Shtroms’ memory is that of the dead – the murdered. In this ending, it is revealed for the reader that for Shtrom – like for many survivors of the Holocaust – there is no “after Auschwitz,” for Auschwitz is the anti- world, and in the anti-world memory, relationships, all that “once was” comes under assault as time, communication, and life collapse. “Dog Blood” is a short story about the spiritual death of these survivors of the Holocaust. The story provides its readers a glimpse into the world of the exiled wanderer – one who is depicted as both homeless and people-less. “Dog Blood” is a story that adds to the Holocaust short story genre through its ability to insert the reader into the cavern of the survivors’ struggle to live in the present while daily haunted by the memory of the past.

Rather than merely narrating a tale of woe or poetically crafting prose that captures some scene or setting, both Rokhl Korn’s short story “The End of the Road” and Frume Haplern’s short story “Dog Blood” insert the reader into a literary world that captures the atrocities of life

255 Halpern, 660.

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during the Holocaust and during life after the Holocaust. Though they continue the tropes, characteristics, and motifs typically found in Holocaust literature, Korn and Halpern, like most authors of Holocaust short stories, distinguish themselves from the literary and rhetorical elements typically characteristic of the short story genre. As highlighted throughout this paper,

Holocaust short stories differ from all other short stories in multiple ways, particularly in that they actively engage the reader and writer to bear witness to the atrocities of Nazi occupied

Europe from 1933-1945 and the Nazis’ assault against humanity, against the community, against the family, and against the home. In addition to authors like Korn and Halpern, who chose to write about the Holocaust as a means of testifying about the Shoah, many “East European Jewish writers and artists, whether they lived through the Holocaust or not, tempered their personal desire to innovate with the collective need to commemorate.”256 Accompanying the desire to commemorate is the urge to write and to relate and tell the stories of life inside the Shoah – a place where time was inverted and one lived days counting death rather than life, a place where fathers were as helpless as their infants, a place where homes became holding cells, and a place where communication was replaced with silence. As David Roskies states, “Because of the

Holocaust, every teller of local traditions became a teller of exotic places.”257 For Yiddish writers of Holocaust stories like Korn and Halpern, these “exotic places” were in the kitchen of a multi- generational family struggling to decide who should die and who should not, or in the living room of an older couple striving to live in the present and ignore the voices of the silenced, murdered family, friends, and strangers of their past. For Korn and Halpern, through their writings, they tell of and give witness to the Nazis’ assault on the home, the relation, and the

256 Roskies, 310. 257 Ibid., 312.

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family. Through these two Yiddish Holocaust short stories, the reader is enabled to witness and to tell of these assaults and atrocities through their acts of reading and remembering. Korn and

Halpern write in order to bear witness; we read in order to remember, to teach, to instruct, and to tell of what happens when villages, towns, cities, and countries are driven to succeed by implementing death rather than cultivating life.

Alongside the short story narratives of Rokhl Korn and Frume Halpern, the following chapter will address how Cynthia Ozick’s short story, “The Shawl,” further highlights this motif of the Nazis’ destruction of the family by its focus on the relationship between a mother, daughter, and niece inside on the Holocaust camps. The anti-world is a world where fathers do not recognize their children, a world where a potato holds more value than a life, a world where neighbor turns on neighbor, and a world where humanity seems silent as millions are being murdered. In her narrative, Cynthia Ozick portrays how this is a place where mothers could not be mothers, and where an infant’s sound is as threatening as a battle cry from an enemy.

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CHAPTER V

THE COLLAPSE OF MOTHERHOOD AS SEEN IN CYNTHIA OZICK’S SHORT STORY:

“THE SHAWL”

“Yet she became an exile; she went into captivity; her infants were dashed in pieces at the head of every street; for her honored men lots were cast, and all her great men were bound in chains.” – Nahum 3:10

Through her depiction of the collapse of motherhood in the camps that is portrayed in

Rosa and Magda’s relationship, Cynthia Ozick’s Holocaust short story “The Shawl” sheds light on the extent to which the perpetrators’ contempt and hate for the victims manifested itself in the camps. Incubated within the racial decrees comprising the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 was the systematic assault against the Jewish people; namely, the prohibition against life in the form of pregnancy or procreation – a “crime” eventually deemed punishable by death. The thought of a

Jewish woman bringing life into the world – a life that the Nazis viewed as a “what” or “it,” and as a source of vile evil, another sub-human to be eradicated from the earth – was not merely a treasonous thought, but was a thought worthy of instantly exterminating. In the anti-world, a

Jew’s crime was existing, living in this world; thus, the most heinous of criminals was the Jewish mother who brought the Jew into this world.

Therefore, this hate-filled, contemptible, and vile view found itself etched into the Nazi law and ideology under the banner of the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German

Honour258 and Rassenschande259 (“racial shame” or “racial defilement” or “race pollution”).

258 Jeremy Noakes, and Geoffrey Pridham, Documents on Nazism 1919-1945 (NY: Viking Press, 1974), 463-467.

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Under these legal documents and newfound Nuremberg Laws, the systematic legality against marriage and family must be noted. According to Beverly Chalmers’ exhaustive research on abuse of women and their families, identities, and personhood under Nazi rule:

Two of the Nuremberg Laws adopted on 15 September 1935: the Rich Citizenship Law that removed German citizenship from Jews, and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour together with their 13 implementation ordinances issued between November 1935 and July 1943, were part of a series of racial-hygienic laws that prevented ‘contamination’ of ‘pure’ German blood. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour stipulated not only that the Jews were forbidden to marry or have sexual relations with ‘persons of German blood’ but also that marriage could not be contracted if ‘offspring likely to be prejudicial to the purity of German blood’ were likely to result.260

Furthermore, this “law forbade marriage between Germans and Jews and rendered any marriages concluded outside of Germany, in order to circumvent this law, to be invalid. Such couples were then regarded as having indulged in forbidden, extramarital Rassenschande.”261 Although these race and marriage Nuremberg Laws are often considered amongst scholars of the Holocaust as the catalyst for anti-Semitic measures, the violating of such laws by the Nazis and soldiers in the form of raping and impregnating of Jewish women throughout the war is often unaddressed for reasons varying from the humiliation of the victim, the forever silencing of the victim(s) when they were murdered, shame, guilt – survival guilt, and shame, to name a few.

One scholar notes how “sexual violation of Jewish women occurred to provide sexual entertainment, but also as a means of humiliating Jews and confirming their dehumanized stats,

259 “Nazi Court to Try First Foreign Jew for ‘rassenschande’.” Jewish Telegraphic Agency. November 3, 1935. Accessed January 5, 2018. https://www.jta.org/1935/11/03/archive/nazi-court-to- try-first-foreign-jew-for-rassenschande. 260 Beverley Chalmers, Birth, Sex, and Abuse: Women's Voices Under Nazi Rule (Grosvenor House Publishing Limited, 2015), 14. 261 Ibid., 14.

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not worthy, even, of sexual respect.”262 For “rape and sexual brutality, especially, but not only, when followed by murder, contributed considerably to the Nazi goal of humiliating all Jews and eliminating their reproductive function.”263 This sexual violence against Jewish women during the Third Reich is coming to light in the form of literary accounts, as well as recent scholarship, interviews, and archival research conducted by scholars like Beverly Chalmers’ Birth, Sex, and

Abuse: Women’s Voices Under Nazi Rule, and scholar Federica K. Clementi’s Holocaust

Mothers & Daughters: Family, History, and Trauma. These works amplify the thousands of accounts and survivors’ testimonies addressing the humiliating and dehumanizing intimate sexual violence against women (rape) by certain Nazis that occurred throughout all stages of

Nazi occupied Europe. In spite of laws, such as the Law for the Protection of German Blood and

German Honour and Rassenschande, sexual violence occurred by the perpetrators against female victims of all ages – regardless of age, religion, physique, health, etc..

Through examining the role of the mother in the short story, “The Shawl,” I will address an aspect of the anti-world, of the Holocaust, that is rarely discussed, or written about.

Furthermore, I will address to what extent we can learn about the collapse of time, relationships, and humanity that occurred during the Holocaust when confronted by this intimate, forceful hate to which so many people fell prey when in the anti-world. Cynthia Ozick’s “The Shawl” is a short story that sheds light on of one of the Nazis’ greatest, most intimate assaults on relationships and family that women faced during the Holocaust: rape and death. This assault against Rosa is seen in the absence of a father figure and in the absence of Rosa mentioning

262 Ibid., 210. 263 Ibid.

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Magda’s father, as well as in Stella’s observation of Magda’s resemblance to the guard, which will be addressed later in this chapter.

Originally published as a short story in the The New Yorker in 1980, Cynthia Ozick’s

“The Shawl” introduces the readers to a glimpse into the anti-world through the three characters:

Rosa, Magda, and Stella, and their time in a Holocaust concentration camp. Building upon the themes of the collapse of time and relationships in the anti-world, Ozick addresses through a powerful, pointed narrative, the cruelty that thousands of Jewish women suffered under the Nazi occupation. Born of Russian Jewish immigrant parents, Cynthia Ozick, a native New Yorker, first introduced her readers to Rosa’s, Magda’s, and Stella’s world when she wrote the short story, “The Shawl,” which is the short story comprising the first section, followed by the second story, “Rosa” (1983), which comprises the second section of the novella, The Shawl.264 In his work, Imagining the Holocaust: Representation, Responsibility, and Reading, Daniel R. Schwarz notes how these two stories “embody two aspects of Holocaust fiction: life within the horrors of the camps and the death marches, and the retrospective view of those events by a survivor whose life has been shaped for decades by the horrors of those events. The relationship between the two stories shows how memory imbues the present with a corrosive energy.”265 The two stories, though different in structure, time, and space, address the characteristic of Holocaust fiction – namely, Holocaust short stories. When considering Ozick’s personal literary influence on this topic, Schwarz claims: “By the 1980s, Ozick may have felt that the realistic tradition in

Holocaust fiction had somewhat played itself out, and Ozick is influenced by the parables and

264 Lawrence S. Friedman, Understanding Cynthia Ozick (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), 1. 265 Daniel R. Schwarz, Imagining the Holocaust (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999), 304.

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folktales of the Yiddish and rabbinic tradition of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Franz Kafka and perhaps the magic realism of South American writers like Gabriel García Márquez.”266 Building upon this literary tradition, Ozick adds her voice to the many voices of Holocaust literature.

However, well aware of the weight of this literary task, Ozick heeds the warnings of her tradition and her heritage, as well as that of scholars, authors, and survivors whilst taking to the short story genre to testify about “that which happened,”267 to use Paul Celan’s words, during the Holocaust to millions of women – the destruction of the family, motherhood, and innocence.

In his work, Understanding Cynthia Ozick, Friedman addresses Ozick’s concern with writing a story that falls under the umbrella of “Holocaust fiction,” as he notes her hesitation, while also asserting his analysis of her work as a work of Holocaust literature:

‘I worry very much’ said Ozick, ‘that the subject is corrupted by fiction and that fiction in general corrupts history.’ Like many postwar Jewish writers Ozick is torn between the fear of trivializing the Holocaust and the belief in the necessity of bearing witness to its enormities. Those enormities are crystallized in “the Shawl” when a German guard hurls Magda, Rosa’s starving baby onto the electrified fence of the concentration camp. That the story’s forced marches, numbing cold, constant hunger, excremental stench, random brutality, and innocent victims seem all too familiar testifies to the success of Jewish writers in preserving the Holocaust in the collective memory. In the story’s few pages cluster together the atrocities that will sear Rosa’s memory in the far longer sequel to “The Shawl.” Like that of so many death camp survivors, Rosa’s future identify will be fatally determined by what she has witnessed and endured “in a place without pity.”268

While Friedman attests to the characteristics of Holocaust literature that are woven throughout

Ozick’s narratives, when considering how her work applies to that of the Holocaust short story,

266 Ibid., 304. 267 Paul Celan, “Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen,” Collected Prose, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop (Riverdale-on-Hudson, New York, The Sheep Meadow Press, 1986, 1990), 34. 268 Friedman, 113-114.

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one must take into account the style of her writing, and the presence of key themes, motifs, and hallmarks of the Holocaust short story genre (which are addressed in my previous chapters).

As previously mentioned, Cynthia Ozick draws upon both her background and her religion when writing her fiction. However, in addition to this, her distinct narrative style, which weaves both religious undertones with her stark, pointed descriptive overtones, provides her readers with a short story – “The Shawl.” She tells a story about the Holocaust and the anti-world, a story that testifies about the collapse of relationships between mother and daughter that occurred throughout the Holocaust. “The Shawl” follows the life of three characters: Rosa, her infant, Magda, and her niece, Stella. This story builds to the moment when Rosa’s baby stumbles out of hiding (in the barracks where she often stayed nestled in her shawl) and is seen by a guard, who then quickly, calmly throws her onto the electric fence. Consistent with the hallmarks of

Holocaust short stories, the narrative of this short story attests to a moment during the Holocaust

– a moment when time, relationships, home, family, and hope all seem to collapse as Rosa’s baby (Magda) is suspended in the air to only land in the abyss of death and destruction. When considering the weight of the narrative, and the literary constructs by which Ozick successfully attests to this continuously dehumanizing moment in the anti-world, literary scholar Daniel R.

Schwarz emphasizes Ozick’s style, word choice, and genre choice. As he notes:

Use of nonhuman images to describe humans stresses the dehumanizing quality of the camps. Looking into Magda’s face through a gap in the shawl, Rosa sees ‘a squirrel in a nest’ (4). As if an animal, Stella is described twice as “ravenous” (1, 5). Rosa is reduced to an animal protecting her young. Her sacrifice and love give a human touch to her feelings. Magda makes her first sound after the shawl is lost; she howls in the square in the roll-call area […] Magda’s instinctive cry contrasts with the omniscient narrator’s elaborate prose about the lice and the rats and with her own prior silence. The brevity of the story intensifies its claustrophobic nature. The reader is in a world where the usual patters of thought – and life – are absent. Humans are reduced to silence, living

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with excrement, threatened with annihilation – this is the ontology of “The Shawl.” Ozick’s narrator creates an ontology in which the child’s death is inevitable.269

It is through the development of key themes in Ozick’s short story Schwarz asserts how the narrator of “The Shawl” creates an “ontology in which a child’s death is inevitable” becomes evident for the reader. Ozick captures a world in which it is a crime punishable by death to be a

Jewish mother; it is a crime punishable by death to be an unborn child of a Jewish woman.

Through the characters and an object (the shawl), Ozick’s short story depicts the collapse of relationships through a focused narrative highlighting the intimate assault on women – mothers, girls, and infants, which was rampant throughout the camps during Holocaust.

In the characterization of how Rosa views Stella, the reader sees the portrayal of the collapsing of relationships of the family unit; thereby, ushering in the emphasis on the individual rather than on the family. In the anti-world, the bond between relatives was severed, as the environment the Nazis’ created often forced one to constantly think of one’s self (the individual) rather than others, as a mode of survival. The Nazis sought to destroy the family and dehumanize the individual. Through the character of Stella (Rosa’s niece) the reader sees the collapse of relationships among relatives within the camps. The narrative descriptions and internal narration of Rosa regarding Stella portrays an aspect of the anti-world in which families and acquaintances became distant toward one another, as their relationships disintegrate within the toxic environment of the anti-world.

In many Holocaust stories’ accounts of the experiences of close relatives within the camps, and in the characters of Rosa and Stella (Rosa’s niece), the reader sees the detachment between the two family members expand throughout the pages of the short narrative, as Stella’s

269 Schwarz, 308.

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desire for Magda’s shawl (Rosa’s daughter) crescendos to the extent that she steals the object – an act that eventually leads to Magda’s death. When faced with the unimaginable responsibility of caring for a baby in the camp, Rosa not only fears the glances of the guards, but of fellow prisoners (even her own niece, Stella), who might bring harm toward Magda. One example of this is while on a march, Rosa observers Stella and imagines her thoughts of destruction toward

Magda: “On the road they raised one burden of a leg after another and studied Magda’s face.

‘Aryan,’ Stella said, in a voice grown as thin as a string; and Rosa thought how Stella gazed at

Magda like a young cannibal. And the time that Stella said ‘Aryan,’ it sounded to Rosa as if

Stella had really said ‘Let us devour her.’”270 As the narrative progresses, so too does this crumbling of bond and relationship between Rosa and her niece, for each step further into the anti-world, the threat of death (death of her infant, Magda) seems to loom larger. Magda is a miracle baby, with each moment, hour, and day she has survived, Rosa watched in wonder, yet waited in fear – fear of the guards, fear of death, fear of Magda to be heard or seen, fear of Stella:

But Magda lived to walk. She lived that long, but she did not walk very well, partly because she was only fifteen months old, and partly because the spindles of her legs could not hold up her fat belly. It was fat with air, full and round. Rosa gave almost all her food to Magda, Stella gave nothing; Stella was ravenous, a growing child herself, but not growing much. Stella did not menstruate. Rosa did not menstruate. Rosa was ravenous, but also not; she learned from Magda how to drink the taste of a finger in one’s mouth. They were in a place without pity, all pity was annihilated in Rosa, she looked at Stella’s bones without pity. She was sure that Stella was awaiting for Magda to die so she could put her teeth into the little thighs.271

The above passage reflects both the pressure life in the anti-world forced on relationships within families (aunt and niece), and also the relationship between mother and child. It also highlights the pressure the anti-world had on Stella – a pressure that leads to cannibalistic lust. In this

270 Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 5. 271 Ibid.

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moment, the narrative portrays Stella’s desire for food as an overwhelming notion that swallows the sanctity of life and the essence of a human being, as seen in the child, Magda. Additionally, regarding this moment among the three characters, in Cynthia Ozick’s Fiction: Tradition &

Invention, Elaine M. Kauvar addresses how “Rosa’s struggle to conceal Magda from the Nazis, which in turn increases the conflicts with a fourteen-year-old’s jealousy and makes more fierce the battle Rosa must wage to say alive. […] Stella’s relationships to Rosa is divulged in the

[above] story – the epitome of coldness, her envy the prelude to cannibalism.”272 Kauvar’s continues, “But it is Stella who studies the blueness of the baby’s eyes, gazes at the roundness of its face stares at the yellowness if its hair, and declares Magda an Aryan. In fact, Magda appears to be ‘one of their babies,’ the child, Ozick intimates, born of an S.S. officer in a concentration camp.”273 This allusion to Magda and the S.S. officer’s uncanny resemblance echoes the horror that Rosa endured – nine months before giving birth to Magda and before her entering the anti- world. Caught in this “place without pity,” the role of motherhood is very different from that of life before Auschwitz, life before the anti-world: the Holocaust.

While other Holocaust short stories also address this theme of the collapsing of relationships within families, “The Shawl” differs through the portrayal of a mother’s (Rosa) and her infant daughter’s (Magda) relationship inside the camp. One particular motif Ozick knits into the narrative to capture this collapsing of motherhood is the motif of Rosa’s nipples – now empty and unable to provide milk or nourishment for her daughter. Magda is only fifteen months of age, yet one who happens to look more like the Nazi “Aryan” guard than her mother. With this

272 Elaine M. Kauvar, Cynthia Ozick's Fiction: Tradition & Invention (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1993), 181. 273 Ibid., 181.

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characterization of Magda, the narration hints at a horrific reality that faced many women inside the camps – the collapsing of relationships in the form of prohibition against motherhood and pregnancy. This is seen in the appropriating of love, and the allusion to the intimate, contemptible, sexual violence of rape by the very men who would soon kill them and their unborn or born children, as it was the case, in the banning of births in the Nazi-occupied

Lithuanian Shavli ghetto in August 1942,274 or the compulsory abortion ordered issued throughout Theresienstadt in July 1943.275 In her memoir, Five Chimneys, Olga Lengyel recalls the horror women experienced in the women’s camp when they were placed in the position of killing newborns in order to save mothers:

As soon as a baby was delivered at the infirmary, mother and child were both sent to the gas chamber. That was the unrelenting decision of our masters. Only when the infant was not likely to survive or when it was a stillborn was the mother spared and allowed to return to her barrack. […] We five whose responsibility it was to bring these infants into the world – the world of Birkenau-Auschwitz –felt the burden of this monstrous conclusion which defied all human and moral law. […] And so, the Germans succeeded in making murderers of even us. To this day the picture of those murdered babies haunts me. Our own children had perished in the gas chambers and were cremated in Birkenau ovens, and we dispatched the lives of others before their first voices had left their tiny lungs. Often I sit and think what kind of fate would these little creatures, snuffed out on the threshold of life, have had? Who knows? Perhaps we killed a Pasteur, a Mozart, an Einstein. Even if those infants had been destined to live uneventful lives, our crimes were no less terrible. The only meager consolation is that by these murders we saved the mothers. Without our intervention they would have endured worse sufferings, for they would have been thrown into the crematory ovens while still alive. […] I marvel to what depths these Germans made us descend!276

274 Yitzhak Arad, Israel Gutman, and Abraham Margaliot. Documents on the Holocaust: Selected Sources on the Destruction of the Jews of Germany and Austria, Poland, and the Soviet Union. (Lincoln: Jerusalem: University of Nebraska Press; Yad Vashem, 1999), 450-453. 275 Lenore J Weitzman and Dalia Ofer, “Introduction,” in Women in the Holocaust, ed. Dalia Ofer and Lenore J Weitzman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 7. 276 Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys (First Academy Chicago ed., 1995) 113-114.

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Lengyel’s tragic account of an unimaginable reality facing mothers and their unborn children in the camps is also addressed in other memoirs, such as in Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After and in Sara Nomberg-Przytyk True Tales from a Grotesque Land: Auschwitz. Each of these texts reveals a piece of the shattering heartbreak that mothers (and those who were forced to implement Nazi policy and law in the camps, killing the babies of their fellow inmates for the sake of saving the mothers’ lives) endured in the anti-world.

Drawing upon this heartrending reality, Ozick’s story inserts her reader into a moment of time in the anti-world where a niece, a mother, and her infant are teetering between life and death, each moment and with each breath they take. They experience these moments all the while Magda continues to exist unbeknownst and unseen by the guards: “Stella, cold, cold, the coldness of hell. How they walked on the roads together, Rosa with Magda curled up between sore breasts, Magda would up in the shawl. Sometimes Stella carried Magda. Bet she was jealous of Magda. A thin girl of fourteen, too small, with thin breast of her own, Stella wanted to be wrapped in a shawl, hidden away, asleep, rocked by the march, an infant in arms. Magda took

Rosa’s nipple, and Rosa never stopped walking, a walking cradle.”277 The story opens with this image of a walking cradle and empty breasts; an image of homeless wanderings on death marches and empty nourishment. In this moment, if an undetected child survived the pregnancy to full-term, and if they were not terminated before then or shortly after, most likely their brief life – existence – would soon be extinguished along with the hope and life of both the child and the mother. Regarding this violence against women (and children), Beverley Chalmers also finds in her research that “rape of Jewish women has been reported in the major concentration camps

277 Ozick, 3.

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including Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Bergen-Belsen, and Ravensbrück. Rape of young

Jewish women by Ukrainian assistants occurred on the way to the gas in Treblinka. Rape also occurred in the barracks after admission to camps.”278 Chalmers goes on to state that “rape occurred, and Jewish women were not exempt despite the laws against Rassenschande. While sexual indulgence may have been the apparent motivation in many cases, such as when women were used for entertainment, the deeper intentions of humiliation, dehumanization, disrespect, and fear of the ‘Jewish enemy’, probably paid a considerable role in facilitating these events…”279 Through these two characters, Ozick’s short story adds to the voices of countless victims and survivors by attesting to the collapsing of the relationships – especially the collapse between mother and child within the camps. The narrator hints at the allusion of Stella possibly being the offspring of a guard: “[Rosa] looked into Magda’s face through a gap in the shawl: a squirrel in a nest, safe, no one could reach her inside the little house of the shawl’s windings. The face, very round, a pocket mirror of a face: but it was not Rosa’s bleak complexion, dark like cholera, it was another kind of face altogether, eyes blue as air, smooth feathers of hair nearly as yellow as the Star sewn into Rosa’s coat. You could think she was one of their babies.”280

Nevertheless, regardless of whom Magda came from, with this ambiguous description, this narrative sheds light on one of the gravest threats to the Nazi regime – the life of a Jewish child from the womb of a Jewish woman. The narrative captures how the very existence of Magda’s life, and thus, the bond Rosa shares with her is deemed a crime and punishable by death.

278 Chalmers, 223-224. 279 Ibid., 231. 280 Ozick, 4.

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Through Ozick’s concise, vivid diction depicting images of fragility and death, this story captures the collapse of relationships seen in the inversion of the role of motherhood that mothers and their child(ren) face throughout the anti-world. For the first paragraph of the story inserts the reader into the broken relationship between the three characters, as well as inserts the reader into their living hell – the place governed by death, not life, in which Rosa attempts to raise her child. The opening paragraph ends with images of starvation, images of emptiness, images of the frailty of life, and the strength of death: “There was not enough milk; sometimes

Magda sucked air; then she screamed. Stella was ravenous. Her knees were tumors on sticks, her elbows chicken bones.”281 This opening scene introduces the reader to both the stark language capturing images of death and the dismal tone that are woven throughout narrative. These literary devices and techniques amplify Ozick’s account of the anti-world – specifically, her account of the relationship between a mother and her child within the confines of the camp.

Furthermore, this opening sets up the juxtaposition between the two younger girls – the two

“relations” of Rosa – Magda, the infant, and Stella, the young girl, both of whom are constantly perceived by Rosa with images of death and destruction. The narrative casts this dark shadow across the two young figures to shape the constant murmur of hunger and the threat of death that so many adults and children faced in the ghettos and camps. In the midst of these characterizations and descriptions is the narration and characterization highlighting Rosa’s perception of Magda.

Rosa’s perception of Magda highlights the inversion and collapsing of the motherhood that women faced in the anti-world. Furthermore, this role that Rosa represents also amplifies

281 Ibid., 3.

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this theme of the collapsing of relationships and time that the Nazis’ death-filled environment fosters. Ozick’s narrative of motherhood within the camps depicts Rosa with delicate images of fragility, death, and destruction, rather than nourishment, hope, and life for her child: “Rosa did not feel hunger; she felt light, not like someone walking but like someone in a faint, in a trance, arrested in a fit, someone who is already a floating angel, alert and seeing everything, but in the air, not there, not touching the road. As if teetering on the tips of her fingernails.”282 Rosa is caught in the suspension between life and death, between mothering and grieving. On these roads, in this camp, Rosa experiences the collapse of time, when thoughts of her child are thoughts of her child’s future death rather than thoughts of a future life: “Rosa, floating, dreamed of giving

Magda away in one of the villages. She could leave the line for a minute and push Magda into the hands of any woman on the side of the road. But if she moved out of the line for half a second and pushed the shawl-bundle at a stranger, would the woman take it? She might be surprised, or afraid; she might drop the shawl, and Magda would fall out and strike her head and die.”283 As Rosa considers the possibility of “saving” Magda by giving her away, the thoughts of

Magda’s possible immediate death overshadow any thoughts of hope. This passage also reflects

Rosa’s detached language toward her child, when she references the infant with the neutral, detached “it” pronoun versus the personal pronoun “she.” Rosa refers to Magda as a “she” only when the thought of her dying invades her hopeful thought of giving her baby away – getting her out of this anti-world. In this moment, like every moment facing mothers and their child(ren), in the anti-world, Rosa’s attempts to “save” Magda seem to collapse under the reality of the constant threat of death of her child – death if a stranger decides to turn her in; death were a

282 Ibid., 4. 283 Ibid.

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guard to see or hear her; death if someone accidentally drops the bundled shawl not realizing it is a baby; death if she does not get a sip, taste, ounce of nourishment; death. Death was the future for unborn or born babies in the ghettos and camps during the Holocaust, and this “future” is the thoughts that consumed mothers like Rosa during the anti-world. A child’s growing life was not marked on the doorframe of a home, but rather was marked by the rations consumed and the rations not consumed within the camps.

Concomitant with the narrative’s description of the “Aryan” appearance of Magda, and the thin, emaciated appearance of “Stella,” Rosa’s physical description is that of a vapid mother, who is forced into an existence where the inability to nourish and raise a baby is the norm. Just as the reader sees the collapse of motherhood in Rosa’s inability to protect her child from the constant threat of death, the reader also sees the collapse of motherhood in the motif of Rosa’s nipples, reflecting the physical description of Rosa’s attempts of nursing and nourishing Magda:

Such a good child, she gave up screaming, and sucked now only for the taste of the drying nipple itself. The neat grip of the tiny gums. One mite of a tooth tip sticking up in the bottom gum, how shining, an elfin tombstone of white marble gleaming there. Without complaining, Magda relinquished Rosa’s teats, first the left, then the right; both were cracked, not a sniff of milk. The duct-crevice extinct, a dead volcano, blind eye, chill hole, so Magda took the corner of the shawl and milked it instead.284

Again, Ozick gently weaves vivid imagery of death (“elfin tombstone”) and destruction (“dead volcano”) into the narrative about Rosa’s lack of breast milk; and therefore, her lack of nourishment she can provide her breastfeeding child. This passage ushers in another aspect for which motherhood collapsed in the Holocaust – the inability for mothers to breastfeed their babies, and in turn, aid in their cognitive, emotional, and physical growth: “Rosa knew Magda was going to die very soon; she should have been dead already, but she had been buried away

284 Ibid.

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deep inside the magic shawl, mistaken there for the shivering mound of Rosa’s breasts; Rosa clung to the shawl as if it covered only herself. No one took it away from her. Magda was mute.

She never cried. Rosa hid her in the barracks, under the shawl, but she knew that one day someone would inform; or one day someone, not even Stella, would steal Magda eat her.”285

Caught within the recesses of Rosa’s mind is the constant tug-of-war between her thoughts of

Magda’s life and of Magda’s death. Again the reader sees this glimpse of what Primo Levi calls a death that is not death, as though Magda were the child Muselmann – teetering between life and death – something unheard of even in the anti-world, the place where the reader sees the collapsing of relationships between mother and child. Other ways in which Magda is seen as a

“child Muselmann” is in that she is born into the anti-world, and therefore, her entire existence – life – is that of one surrounded by death rather than life. Another way is in her inability to communicate with others – constantly silent and incommunicable with those around her, yet also constantly present, though overlooked or unnoticed by others, like the Muselmann figures. As

Magda survives each day, so too does the looming threat of her death in Rosa’s mind: “When

Magda began to walk Rosa knew that Magda was going to die very soon, something would happen. She was afraid to fall asleep; she slept with the weight of her thigh on Magda’s body; she was afraid she would smother Magda under her thigh. The weight of Rosa was becoming less and less’ Rosa and Stella were slowly turning into air.”286 Accompanying the movement of

Magda in the form of her learning to walk, the narrative ushers the reader toward the significance of the shawl.

285 Ibid., 6. 286 Ibid.

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Ozick’s narrative style further portrays for the reader the inversion and collapse of motherhood through her juxtaposition of Rosa with the object of the shawl – an object whose metaphor reaches into the realm of emotional, spiritual, and physical support. When considering

Ozick’s rendering of the moment of the Holocaust (motherhood) captured in this story, Daniel R.

Schwarz’s Imagining the Holocaust emphasizes how Ozick:

never uses the word ‘Jew,’ ‘Nazi,’ or ‘concentration’ paradoxically increases the story’s impact. The story’s focus is on a woman protecting her baby, the reader must make sense of what is happening – if it were a death march, as it at first seems, why the electrified fence unless they stop at a camp along the way? – and must give the tale historical context and setting. The story itself is a kind of skeleton, a miniature of the Holocaust. The story’s lack of sentimentality gives it its power. Rosa knows she can’t protect the baby, yet she is obsessed with trying; for her, Magda and the shawl become interchangeable. […] Rosa shows how the instinct for motherhood is all that remains.287

As Schwarz asserts, although Ozick’s short story is a concise narrative, the diction and images she weaves together seems to spin the reader to various images of atrocity – images of starvation, frailty, abuse, death, dehumanization, and more. Nevertheless, the one thread that consistently guides the reader through the harrowing tale is the ‘instinct of motherhood’ that Rosa embodies when she gives Magda the shawl. For both Rosa and Magda, the shawl was not just a shawl.

Referred to in the short story as the “magic shawl,” this object extends beyond physically enveloping the body of Magda to also representing various aspects of motherhood and life before the camps, before the anti-world…before the Holocaust.

Given the unimaginable responsibility of giving birth to a child in the camps, when the other inmates were killing babies to save mothers, as noted above, or giving life to a human being whom others deem only worthy of death, Rosa seems at moments, detached from Magda, yet in the swaddling of Magda in her shawl, Rosa attempts to provide her child a hint of a home,

287 Schwarz, 305.

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a glance at a gift, and a look at love. The reader is first introduced to the shawl as a dwelling place for Magda, a source of comfort and shelter: “She looked into Magda’s face through a gap in the shawl: a squirrel in a nest, safe, no one could reach her inside the little house of the shawl’s windings.”288 Where relationships collapse within the confines of the anti-world, through her wrapping Magda in the shawl, Rosa attempts to build a home, a refuge for her daughter. Yet, in this seemingly hopeful image, one must pause and note the dehumanizing undertone in that it is still an image of an animal’s – a rodent’s – nest and home. Nevertheless, Rosa sees the shawl as Magda’s home; thus, invoking the association of pregnancy (the dwelling place of a child within the mother) and the domestic sphere of the home (the dwelling place of a child outside of the womb). In Judaic-Christian traditions, the mother is often seen as the priest of the home, the source for which light and life emanates to the rest of the world. In this camp, Rosa has no home, and therefore, both she and Magda are rendered homeless. Yet, the metaphor of the shawl as

Magda’s home serves as a beacon of hope for Magda, and in a way, hope for Rosa, too.

Upon serving as the dwelling place, Rosa soon sees the shawl as the source for nourishment for Magda. Again, where the role of motherhood collapses in the anti-world when mothers, due to the starvation and (lack of) nutrition forced upon them by the Nazis and guards, could no longer provide breast milk or nourishment for their child, the shawl takes on the metaphor of being the source of food for Magda:

Without complaining, Magda relinquished Rosa’s teats, first the left, then the right; both were cracked, not a sniff of milk. The duct-crevice extinct, a dead volcano, blind eye, chill hole, so Magda took the corner of the shawl and milked it instead. She sucked and sucked, flooding the threads with wetness. The shawl’s good flavor, milk of linen.

288 Ozick, 4.

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It was a magic shawl, it could nourish an infant for three days and three nights. Magda did not die, she stayed alive, although very quiet. A peculiar smell, of cinnamon and almonds, lifted out of her mouth.289

Where the “magic shawl” is seen as powerfully, inexplicably providing both a sheltering home and bodily nourishment for Magda, in its similarities to a prayer shawl, it also serves in providing spiritual shelter and nourishment for Magda. When considering the title of this story and the religious allusions of the object of the shawl, Daniel R. Schwarz writes: “‘The Shawl’ is a play on the Hebrew term Shoah or Sho’ah, which literally means ‘desolation.’ […] for Rosa and even Stella and Magda the shawl is a pedestrian object transformed into a totem or fetish, a way of creating meaning in a time of terror. And the shawl recalls, too, the Jewish prayer shawl that honors the sacredness of life – here in the face of the Germans’ efforts to destroy the Jewish people.”290 In addition to the religious allusions invoked from the title of this short story, Ozick also claims, when she wrote to scholar Susanne Klingenstein, that the “The shawl is about – no, is symbolically, the Nazi murders.”291 As the shawl is symbolic of the Nazi mass murder of millions of Jewish people across Europe, Magda becomes symbolic of the children that were murdered and Rosa, symbolic of motherhood.

Magda is born into an anti-world – a place where the response to finding out one is with child is death, and if in some miraculous way, a child should live to full-term and birth, that child’s life would only be a few minutes long. Yet, she lives; she lives to fifteen months old, all the while nestled in her mother’s shawl, feeding on her mother’s shawl, learning from her

289 Ibid., 4, 5. 290 Schwarz, 307. 291 Susanne Klingenstein, “Destructive Intimacy: The Shoah between Mother and Daughters in Fictions by Cynthia Ozick, Norma Rose, and Rebecca Goldstein.” (Studies in American Jewish Literature 11:2, Fall 1992), 172.

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mother’s shawl. When considering the various metaphors of the shawl in this short story,

Holocaust literacy scholar Elaine M. Kauvar writes, “in ‘The Shawl’ Rosa owes her life to the shawl’s magic. And Magda, her saliva redolent of cinnamon and almond – part of the sacred anointing oil in Scripture and a biblical symbol of divine approval – becomes for Rosa a holy babe capable of being sustained for three days and three nights as if by magic.”292 In addition to

Kauvar’s noting of the religious significance of the shawl and the odors and tastes Ozick weaves into her narrative, in his work Crisis and Covenant: The Holocaust in American Jewish Fiction,

Alan L. Berger states:

The peculiar aroma of cinnamon and almonds, itself so out of place in the midst of death, corpses, and wind bearing the black ash from crematoria, evokes a quasimystical image of the besamin (spice) box. Jews sniff the besamin at the havadalah ceremony which marks the outgoing of the Sabbath, thereby sustaining themselves for the rigors and tribulations of the profane or ordinary days of the week. By utilizing the prayer shawl and spice box imagery, and paranormal phenomena usually associated with the mystical element of Judaism, Ozick’s tale conveys the message that the bleakness of the historical moment is not the final chapter in Jewish existence.293

Although both Kauvar and Berger address the religious undertones associated with the powerful flavors of the shawl, they fail to fully consider the significance of Rosa’s act as a mother-figure – in wrapping her child (the source of hope, light, and a future) in the very object symbolizing that which condemns them both to death: Judaism. With respect to the shawl’s association with a prayer shawl, one must note how in Judaism, the blessing said upon wrapping oneself in the shawl is actually wrapping oneself in tzitzit, or “fringes.” According to Judaic teachings, the word tzittzit has a numerical value of 600; therefore, one adds the 8 threads and 5 knots of the threads to get 613. The significance of the number 613 is in that it is the number of

292 Kauvar, 183. 293 Alan L. Berger, Crisis and Covenant: The Holocaust in American Jewish Fiction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), 54.

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commandments in the Torah. Thus, when one wraps in the prayer shawl, he or she wraps himself or herself in Torah, in the Light of God, where they recite in Hebrew: “Baruch atah adonai eloheinu melech ha'olam asher kid'shanu b'mitvotav v'tzivanu l'hitatef batzitzit.” This is translated as: Blessed are You, our God, Creator of time and space, who enriches our lives with holiness, commanding us to wrap ourselves in the tallit.294 The radical incongruity with the shawl in this short story is that it is worn in a place where time and space seem to crumble, where the God who created man in His image, and then said it is “good,” seems absent as man has attempted to usurp God by destroying man in his own image.

In Understanding Cynthia Ozick, Lawrence S. Friedman also notes how “most remarkable in the story, however, is the shawl itself – a symbol of life amidst the many symbols of death. […] Successively nourishing Magda, warming Stella, and saving Rosa, the magic shawl is a life preserver in a sea of death.”295 Like an invisible prayer a parent utters over the life of their child, by wrapping Magda in the shawl, Rosa clothes her in a garb of hope, a cloth of faith, and a garment of life. In an anti-world where time collapses as the concept of a future or a hope seems to crumble under the weightless burden of smoking chimneys and floating ash,

Rosa’s act of surrounding the shawl around Magda seems, like a prayer to God, to momentarily, even miraculously, to be an act of faith and life in a seemingly faithlessly and death-filled environment. As Magda grew, so too does her love and care for the shawl: “She guarded her shawl. No one could touch it; only Rosa could touch it. Stella was not allowed. The shawl was

Magda’s own baby, her pet, her little sister. She tangled herself up in it and sucked on one of the

294 Alfred J. Kolatch,The Second Jewish Book of Why, (NY: Jonathan David Publishers, 1989), and Rabbi Nina Beth Cardin, The Tapestry of Jewish Time (NJ: Behrman House, 2000). 295 Friedman, 114, 115.

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corners when she wanted to be very still.”296 In this passage, the significance is not merely in the anthropomorphism of Magda’s shawl in becoming an object of affection – like a pet or littler sister to her, but rather, it is in the ability for the shawl to quiet and “still” her. In this moment of quietness and stillness, Magda is safe, as she is unheard and unseen by the guards. Then, with the following sentence, the story’s tone shifts, as the shawl and all that it represents is usurped from

Magda; thus, causing her to die:

“Then Stella took the shawl away and made Magda die. Afterward Stella said: “I was cold.” And afterward she was always cold, always. […] Rosa saw that Stella’s heart was cold. Magda flopped onward with her little pencil legs scribbling this way and that, in search of the shawl; the pencils faltered at the barracks opening, where the light began. Rosa saw and pursued. But already Magda was in the square outside the barracks, in the jolly light. It was the roll-call arena. Every morning Rosa had to conceal Magda under the shawl against a wall of the barracks and go out and stand in the arena with Stella and hundreds of others, sometimes for hours, and Magda, deserted, was quiet under the shawl, sucking on her corner. Every day Magda was silent, and so she did not die. Rosa saw that today Magda was going to die […]

As this moment continues, the narrative surrounding Rosa’s inability to breastfeed Magda, due to malnutrition, resurfaces, as does her concern with Magda’s development:

Ever since the drying up of Rosa’s nipples, ever since Magda’s last scream on the road, Magda had been devoid of any syllable; Magda was a mute. Rosa believed that something had gone wrong with her vocal cords, with her windpipe, with the cave of her larynx; Magda was defective, without a voice; perhaps she was deaf; there might be something amiss with her intelligence; Magda was dumb. […] But now Magda’s mouth was spilling a long viscous rope of a clamor. “Maaaa–” It was the first noise Magda had ever sent out from her throat since the drying up of Rosa’s nipples. “Maaaa…aaa!”297

296 Ozick, 6. 297 Ozick, 6-7.

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The sound Magda makes when she slices the silence that she and Rosa have grown so accustomed too is not a sound voicing a cry for the shawl she is searching for; rather, it is a cry for Rosa – her Maaa-ma, her mother. In this moment of utterance in search for her lost shawl and all that such an object represents, Magda cries for her mother; thus, triggering the rupture of silence that had consumed both she and Rosa for almost fifteen months.

This breaking of silence between Rosa and Magda sounds the physical collapse of the relationship of motherhood for Rosa. As discussed in the previous chapters, the motif of silence often precedes the collapsing of relationships in these short story narratives; yet in this moment, silence is broken as the bond between mother and child is voiced for the reader. Rosa is overcome by “noise” from Magda, and torn as to how to respond, how to silence her daughter’s howling from the guard:

A tide of commands hammered in Rosa’s nipples: Fetch, get, bring! But she did not know which to go after first, Magda or the shawl. If she jumped out into the arena to snatch Magda up, the howling would not stop, because Magda would still not have the shawl; but if she ran back into the barracks to find the shawl, and if she found it, and if she came after Magda holding it and shaking it, then she would get Magda back, Magda would put the shawl in her mouth and turn dumb again.298

Rosa is torn – does she run after Magda? Does she rush for the shawl? In this moment, Rosa knows that silence is life. The silence that has so consumed her role as a mother and her relationship with her daughter is now the silence for which she yearns. Rosa finds Magda’s shawl – “Stella was heaped under it, asleep in her thin bones.”299 Without a word, without a change, without an utterance of anger, pity, or regret toward Stella, Rosa “tore the shawl free and

298 Ozick, 8. 299 Ibid.

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flew – she could fly, she was only air – into the arena”300 in search of Magda, her howling fifteen-month-old baby girl, for in an instant, in a moment, both time and her relationship with

Magda seem to suspend in a minuscule of hope, only to be interrupted by the familiar sound of the electricity inside the fence – the hum of the anti-world:

She stood for an instant at the margin of the arena. Sometimes the electricity inside the fence would seem to hum; even Stella said it was only an imagining, but Rosa heard real sounds in the wire: grainy sad voices. The father she was from the fence, the more clearly the voices crowded at her. The lamenting voices strummed so convincingly, so passionately, it was impossible to suspect them of being phantoms. The voices told her to hold up the shawl, height; the voices told her to shake it, to whip with it, to unfurl it like a flag. […] She was high up, elevated, riding someone’s shoulder. But the shoulder that carried Magda was not coming toward Rosa and the shawl, it was drifting away, the speck of Magda was moving more and more into the smoky distance. Above the shoulder a helmet glinted […] and a pair of black boots hurled themselves in the direction of the electrified fence.301

Rosa does not see her daughter learn to talk, or witnesses her learning to skip or run, nor does she experience the joy of hearing her giggle when playing with toys, or wrestle when waking up from an afternoon nap after lunch. Instead, Rosa sees her flutter in the air like a butterfly: “The electric voices began to chatter wildly. ‘Maamaa, maaamaaa,’ they all hummed together. How far Magda was from Rosa now, across the whole square, past a dozen barracks, all the way on the other side! […] All at once Magda was swimming through the air. The whole of Magda traveled through loftiness. She looked like a butterfly touching a silver vine.”302 But Magda was not a butterfly touching a silver vine, but rather, she was a baby being murdered in front of her mother.

300 Ibid. 301 Ibid., 9. 302 Ibid.

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This moment leading to Magda’s death captures the collapse of motherhood in the anti- world: the lulling of a baby’s cry in the form of killing, and forever silencing the sound, the utterance, the howl of “Mama.” Rosa sees; she sees Magda fly though the air. Rosa hears; she hears the “steel voices [that] went mad in their growling, urging Rosa to run and run to the spot where Magda had fallen from her flight against the fence,”303 yet Rosa does not move. And in many ways, she will never move from the spot, as told in the continuation story Rosa. She will never “leave” Auschwitz; she will never forget the sound of her child suckling on her empty nipples; she will never forget the sound of the electric fence; she will never forget the sound of her baby’s cry for “Maaa;” she will never forget the anti-world and the place and moment when she could not move toward the body of her baby for fear of death, death, death:

She only stood, because if she ran they would shoot, and if she tried to pick up the sticks of Magda’s body they would shoot, and if she let the wolf’s screech ascending now through the ladder of her skeleton break out, they would shoot; so she took Magda’s shawl and filled her own mouth with it, stuffed it in and stuffed it in, until she was swallowing up the wolf’s screech and tasting the cinnamon and almond depth of Magda’s saliva; and Rosa drank Magda’s shawl until it dried.304

This story ends with Rosa’s scream, followed by her immediately muffling her mouth with the shawl that once filled and protected Magda. Similar to this moment captured in “The Shawl,” in the chapter “A Living Torch” from her memoir, True Tales from a Grotesque Land: Auschwitz,

Sara Nomberg-Przytyk 305also accounts of the moment and the sound of utter heartbreak and horror when children cried “Mama” before they were murdered:

We were standing, as was our wont, in front of the block, watching the sky turn to a deeper red. All around us was quiet that night, because there was not transport. […]

303 Ibid., 10. 304 Ibid. 305 Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, Roslyn Hirsch, and Eli Pfefferkorn, Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 81-82.

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Suddenly, the stillness was broken by the screaming of children, as if a single scram had been torn out of hundreds of mouths, a single scream of fear and unusual pain, a scream repeated a thousand times in the single word, “Mama,” a scream that increased in intensity every second, enveloping the whole camp and every inmate. Our lips parted without our being conscious of what we were doing, and a scream of despair tore out of our throats, growing louder all the time. […] our screaming stopped. On the block we could still hear the screams of the children who were being murdered, then only sighs, and at the end everything was enveloped in death and silence.

Magda’s attempt to cry out for her mother, and Rosa’s scream echoes the millions of children whose cry for their Mamas before their deaths were met by their mothers’ shock, terror, screams of despair, and then silence. Throughout Judaic-Christian tradition, and as a theme inculcated throughout Scripture, Motherhood often illustrates the relationship between God and His people.306 However, in the anti-world, there is no place for tradition, and there is no room for a womb or a child or a mother, as portrayed in “The Shawl” through the relationship between Rosa and Magda. Furthermore, upon considering the various metaphors of the shawl, the reader sees how this is not merely cloth muting of her “wolf’s screech” of pain, sorrow, horror, and despair, but it represents her religion, traditions, and very existence for which she and her daughter (like the millions of other mothers and children) are sentenced to death. The milk of this shawl is like the “black milk” in Paul Celan’s “Todesfuge” poem – it is the milk that Magda would drink at daybreak, at sundown, at noon, in the morning, and at night; yet after her death, it becomes the milk that Rosa will also drink until her own death years following her time in Auschwitz and the anti-world.

Cynthia Ozick’s short story, “The Shawl,” captures one of the greatest assaults on relationships by the Nazis; it captures the collapsing of motherhood and childhood in the anti-

306 Martin H. Manser, Dictionary of Bible Themes: The Accessible and Comprehensive Tool for Topical Studies (London: Martin Manser, 2009).

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world. Through powerful, pointed imagery, and through her weaving the motif of nipples and breastfeeding with the metaphors associated with the shawl, this short story testifies about one of the darkest moments of the history of the Holocaust: the death of the child. Ozick illustrates the collapsing of relationships between mothers and their children (as seen in Rosa’s and Magda’s relationship) by giving these women and children the names: Rosa and Magda. As one scholar notes, “Ozick’s genius is to capture the tiny eye in the storm of history, to render a victim’s pain at the moment of crisis.”307 It is upon successfully utilizing the structure and hallmarks of the

Holocaust short story genre that Ozick’s “The Shawl” so masterfully reveals a moment of the

Holocaust for the reader. By focusing on a moment in the “tiny eye of the storm” of the

Holocaust, “The Shawl” attests to the collapsing of relationships that occurred during the

Holocaust – specifically, the collapsing of the role of motherhood which the Nazis appropriated from millions of victims who hope to be mothers, who were experiencing motherhood, and those for whom their role as mothers came to a halt with the death of their child(ren) – a lingering feeling from hell that they will forever carry close to the breast that once nourished and provided life for their baby (as seen in the continuation story “Rosa”). Ozick’s reticence to write about the

Holocaust is a notion many authors share; however, through her narrative, she gives voice to the countless numbers of women who were sexually assaulted throughout the camps. Through her narrative, she gives sound to the countless number of children born into and killed by the deadly atmosphere of Planet Auschwitz. Through her narrative, we hear the cries for “Mama” and we see the inability for those mothers to respond, protect, or defend their child.

307 Schwarz, 305.

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Upon the consideration of the various metaphors associated with the shawl, and through her depiction of the collapsing of motherhood in the anti-world, Cynthia Ozick’s “The Shawl” sheds light on the depth of which the atrocities of the Nazi anti-world reached: the destruction of motherhood. Found in the prose of her short story, Ozick gives a voice to the harrowing reality of what millions of mothers and women experienced during the Holocaust. Furthermore, through her powerful prose portraying the characters Rosa and Magda in “The Shawl,” Ozick inserts her readers into unimaginable moments capturing the collapsing of relationships as seen through the mother and daughter roles. Through weaving key themes and various motifs, such as silence, into their narratives, the authors of Holocaust short stories provide their readers a glimpse into

“Planet Auschwitz.” With each short story illustrating these key themes of the collapsing of time, home, and relationships, they capture in their narratives the undoing of humanity and mankind during the 20th century – the Holocaust.

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CONCLUSION

Upon our consideration of the features of the Holocaust short story in chapter one, we note how authors writing about the Holocaust choose this particular genre to sound their voice as a form of testimony, and in doing so, account for the time the world collapsed into an “anti- world.” One of the defining features of the Holocaust short story is that they tend to focus on a moment of the Holocaust – and this moment often captures the collapsing of time, relationships, and home. The chapters of this work all addressed different phases in which time, home, and relationships came under assault during the Holocaust. Through analyzing the motif in Ida Fink’s select short stories, Fink captures the collapse of relationships that occurred during the early stages of ghettoization during the war. Moving from the ghetto life to life in the camps, Tadeusz

Borowski’s select short stories highlight the collapse of time and humanity during the camps through the role of the Muselmann figure. In this figure, we see the anti-man of the anti-world, and we address the significance of this figure in Holocaust literature. In Chapter IV, I analyze how the collapse of the relationships and home, as portrayed in the two Yiddish short stories by

Rokhl Korn and Frume Haplern. These two stories weave both the motif of silence and the

Muselmann figure into their narratives. Lastly, in Chapter V, the collapse of motherhood is captured in Cynthia Ozick’s short story, “The Shawl.” This story depicts the collapsing of relationships that occurred throughout the camps in the severing of the physical bond between mother and daughter. This absence of motherhood is indicative of the collapse of time, which renders human relationship impossible in Auschwitz.

Holocaust scholar Steven Jacobs addresses the role of the artist when he writes, “Among those Shoah artists, both those who survived and those who did not, were those who chose to put

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their talents and skills to best use by recording what they were seeing and experiencing, no matter how painful, no matter how horrific.”308 Jacobs reiterates what several scholars of

However, what makes this rhetorical tool of dramatic irony unique to the Holocaust short story is not only how the brevity of this form accentuates this device, but also how the implication imposed on the reader by the author: to know, share, and in turn, tell (relate) that “story” by also bearing witness. Through these stories and various “moments” captured in their narratives, the reader sees how the “anti-world” is a place where fathers do not recognize their children, where a potato holds more value than a life, where neighbor turns on neighbor, and where both God and

308 Steven L. Jacobs, In Search of Yesterday: The Holocaust and the Quest for Meaning (Lanham: University Press of America, 2006), 151.

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supposed civilized humanity are silent when millions are being murdered. While David Hirsch,309

Lawrence Langer,310 and other writers address these various ways of Holocaust literature’s implication of the reader, they do not consider the unique ways the short story genre adds to this implication of the reader.

Through my analysis of Holocaust short stories, I highlight how these texts written in the short story form capture the moment of tension, crisis, utter silence, and the tearing apart of relationships (fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, neighbors, and lovers). Through this genre’s form, authors of these stories give the readers a glimpse into a world where death is celebrated, commanded, and carried out; or, perhaps better, these authors tear an opening into the fabric of an “anti-world,” in which even death is not death. They focus on the destruction of relationships.

They center on a moment when the world of the story collapses under the assaults by man, rather than flourishes by the uniting of humanity, so that time itself comes undone. Lastly, they tend to engage in a narrative testimony of the characters’ death, rather than their lives, which in turn, may assist the reader in remembering the people and places from which these stories arise. These stories aid in our understanding of the Holocaust, in that they highlight the various moments capturing the tearing apart of relations between family, friends, neighbors, and future generations.

Elie Wiesel once said, “For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.” For the authors addressed in the book, they bear witness through testifying about the Holocaust in their short stories. For readers of these short stories, as well as other Holocaust literary texts, we bear witness by learning about these atrocities that took place across Nazi-occupied Europe.

309 David H. Hirsch, The Deconstruction of Literature The Deconstruction of Literature: Criticism after Auschwitz (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1991). 310 Lawrence L. Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975).

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As Tadeusz Borowski wrote, “What a curious power words have.” Let us read, and in reading learn; let us learn, and in learning bear witness in the hope that nothing like the

Holocaust ever happens again.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Mary Catherine Mueller resides in Dallas, Texas, where she enjoys spending time with her family and friends. She is currently a Lecturer in English at Southern Methodist University, where she teaches Discernment and Discourse, Honors Ethics, and Holocaust Literature. In addition to her time spent at The University of Texas at Dallas working toward her PhD in

Humanities – Studies in Literature, she also earned undergraduate and gradate degrees from the same institution. Throughout her Master’s and Doctoral studies at UT Dallas, Mueller was a recipient of numerous academic fellowships and research grants, travel grants, the Mike Jacobs

Fellowship in Holocaust Studies, Teaching Assistantship with the School of Arts & Humanities, and Research Assistantships for both the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies and the Center for Translation Studies. Her research and writings focus on 18th-20th Century European

Literature; Transcontinental Cultural Studies; and the Representations of the Holocaust in Pop-

Culture, Society, and Literature. In addition to presenting her work across North America,

Mueller has also presented internationally at conferences in London and Jerusalem. Her recent work has appeared in Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, and she has a forthcoming publication in SUNY Press. As a professor, Mary Catherine Mueller hopes to introduce students to authors who may in time become their teachers, to ideas that may broaden their perspectives, and to discussions that may challenge or change their long-held presuppositions or help them solidify what it is that they believe. Mueller is very thankful for the unique path and opportunity the Lord has led her to studying the Holocaust throughout her doctoral work. Now, as she teaches about the Holocaust to her students, she does so in the hopes

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of encouraging them to always strive to see the significance of every life, and to always seek to do what is right, what is true, and what is good.

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CURRICULUM VITAE

Mary-Catherine Mueller

Southern Methodist University Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences Department of English Discernment and Discourse [email protected]

Education

• Doctor of Philosophy in Humanities – Major in Studies in Literature The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX March 2018

• Master of Arts in Humanities – Major in Studies in Literature The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX May 2012 o Thesis Portfolio Papers: “Shakespeare’s Veiled Warnings to the Elizabethan Crown as Seen in Richard II’s Act III, scene iv: the ‘Garden Scene’” “The Significance of the Four Prophet Figures in Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust Memoir, Night”

• Graduate Certificate in Holocaust Studies Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies at UT Dallas May 2011

• Bachelor of Arts in Literary Studies with a minor in Psychology The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX May 2009

Academic Awards, Scholarships, and Fellowships • Recipient of the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies Annual Scholars’ Conference Graduate Student Scholarship o Made possible by the Charles M. Shwarz Endowment in Holocaust Studies 2018 • Recipient of the Istvan and Zsuzsanna Ozsváth Research Fund 2017 Summer o The Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies, The University of Texas at Dallas • Recipient of a Research Assistantship, The University of Texas at Dallas o The Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies, UT Dallas 2015 – Present o Center for Translation Studies, UT Dallas 2016 Summer • Recipient of The Mike Jacobs Fellowship in Holocaust Studies – Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies, UT Dallas 2014 – 2016 • Graduate Student Support Award – Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies 2016 • School of Arts & Humanities Graduate Travel Grant 2016

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• Graduate Teaching Assistantship – School of Arts & Humanities, UT Dallas 2010 – 2015

Teaching Experience Southern Methodist University: • Lecturer in English, Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences Fall 2017 – Present o Discernment and Discourse Program § Courses: Discernment and Discourse, Literature of the Holocaust, Honors Ethics • Adjunct Instructor Fall 2014 – 2017 o Instructor of Discernment and Discourse: § Taught transferable skills related to university-level reading and writing Discernment and Discourse 1312 Fall 2014 – 2017 § Foundations for College Writing: Taught 12 sections Discernment and Discourse 1313: Spring 2015 – 2017 § Introduction to College Writing: Taught 7 sections

The University of Texas at Dallas: • Instructor of Rhetoric, University of Texas at Dallas 2012 – 2015 – Rhetoric and Writing Program, School of Arts & Humanities § Taught 10 sections § Taught transferable skills related to university-level reading and writing

• Graduate Teaching Assistant, University of Texas at Dallas 2012 – 2015 o Graded quizzes, essays, and essay exams: Humanities 3300.502; 3300.002: Reading and Writing Texts Spring – 2012 Humanities 3300.002; 501: Reading and Writing Texts Spring – 2011 Humanities 1301: Exploration of the Humanities Fall – 2011 History 1301: U.S. History Survey to Civil War Fall – 2010

Presentations and Publications Publications: • Mueller, Mary-Catherine. “The Role of the Prophet Figures in Elie Wiesel’s Night.” The Novels of Elie Wiesel, SUNY Press, 2018. • [Upcoming] Mueller, Mary-Catherine. “Meet Me in Tradition: The Role of the Mother and the Home in the Two Musicals Meet Me in St. Louis and Fiddler on the Roof” Sholem Aleykhem: New Perspectives in Comparative Context (Edited Volume), Universitas Press. • Mueller, Mary-Catherine. "The Ethics of Witnessing: The Holocaust in Polish Writers’ Diaries from Warsaw, 1939-1945 by Rachel Feldhay Brenner (review)." Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, vol. 33 no. 3, 2015, pp. 139-141. • Mueller, Mary-Catherine. “Is the Pen Mightier Than the #Hashtag: Teaching Holocaust Literature to Millennials.” Abstract Book. BAHS Conference 2016:The Presence of the Holocaust in society, politics and culture, c.1970 to 2015 UCL Centre for Holocaust Education (Summer 2016): 61.

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• Mueller, Mary-Catherine. “Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies: Ani Maamin, A Song Lost and Found Again by Elie Wiesel, “Chorus” translated into Latin by Mary Catherine Mueller and Amber Whitehead.” Facebook. September 27, 2016. [October 7, 2016.] Presentations: • “A Consideration of the Muselmann Figure in Select Short Stories from Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” at the 48th Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches. Dallas, TX. March 2018. • “The Role of Silence in Ida Fink’s Holocaust Short Stories,” at the 17th World Congress of Jewish Studies. Jerusalem, Israel. August 2017. • Invited Chairperson for the Panel: “World War II and the Holocaust in Literature and the Press,” at the 17th World Congress of Jewish Studies. Jerusalem, Israel. August 2017. • “Is the Pen Mightier than the #Hashtag: Teaching Holocaust Literature to Millennials,” at the British Association for Holocaust Studies International Conference. London, England. July 2016. • “The Significance of the Four Prophet Figures in Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust Memoir: Night,” at the 44th Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches. Los Angeles, CA. March 2014. • “Cloud: A Discussion of Assimilation in Jewish Film” at RAW: Research Art, Writing Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Symposium, University of Texas at Dallas. March 27, 2010.

Research Experience The University of Texas at Dallas • Research Assistant for the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies 2015–2017 o Researched and compiled bibliographies for various topics related to Holocaust studies o Created PowerPoint presentations for Holocaust lectures o Proof-read and edited articles before publication o Assisted in various events associated with the Ackerman Center § Einspruch Lecture Series § Jewish Refugees in Shanghai, 1933–1941 Exhibit • Housed in Edith O’Donnell Arts and Technology Building § Labyrinth of Lies Campus film screening with Q&A § Holocaust Poetry Translation Workshops § Campus-wide Poetry Reading for Holocaust Remember Day • Help select poems, transcribe poems for the program, and read poetry during the event • Summer Research Assistant for the Center for Translation Studies, UT Dallas 2016 o Created reading list for syllabus for Translation undergrad course o Created bibliographies for translation studies

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o Transcribed Translation Reviews to be used on an online database o Wrote three “Annotated Books Received” Reviews for the upcoming Translation Review • Spearheaded the Ackerman Center’s History Unfolded Group, which is a research endeavor created by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum § Research what local Texas Newspapers were reporting about the Holocaust from 1933-1945

Honors, Professional Memberships, and other Recognitions • The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi o Top 10 percent of seniors and graduate students. 2011– Present • Phi Alpha Theta – History Honor Society Alpha Mu Iota, the UT Dallas Chapter of Phi Alpha Theta 2011 – Present • Golden Key International Honor Society 2009 – Present • University of Texas at Dallas School of Arts & Humanities Dean’s List 2008, 2009 • Phi Theta Kappa – Honor Society 2005, 2006

Academic Research Interests • Holocaust Literature: Novels, Memoirs, Short Stories, and Poetry • Pedagogical Approaches to Teaching University-level Writing and Literature • 19th and 20th Century European and Transatlantic Literature and Cultural Studies • European Romanticism • Holocaust History and Representation in Society and Culture

Languages Studied • Spanish – proficient (passed UT Dallas A&H Language Proficiency Examination) • Latin, German – beginner

Professional and University Citizenship • Association for Jewish Studies – Active Member 2016 – Present • Modern Language Association – Active Member 2016 – Present • The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi – Active Member 2011 – Present • President and Founder of Voyage Tutoring (VoyageTutoring.com) 2012 – Present o Reading and Writing tutor and mentor § Students: Elementary – Continuing Education Adults • Reunion: The Dallas Review Assistant Editor 2015 – 2016 Assistant Reader Non-Fiction 2014 Assistant Non-Fiction Editor 2012 – 2013 • Volunteer Docent at the Dallas Holocaust Museum 2013 – 2015

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• Graduate Student Association – University of Texas at Dallas 2009 – Present Member • Graduate Christian Fellowship – University of Texas at Dallas 2009 – 2017 Member, Co-Leader • The Literary Studies Society – University of Texas at Dallas 2007 – 2009 Founding Member, Co-Leader

Contact Information • Email: [email protected] • Twitter: @MC_Mueller and @WhyTheHolocaust • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marycatherinemueller

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