The Resonance Dust

Edward Alexander THE RESONANCE DUST Essays on Holocaust Literature and Jewish Fate $15.00 THE RESONANCE OF DUST Essays on Holocaust Literature and Jewish Fate By Edward Alexander In 1948, when awareness of the Holocaust, the systematic destruction by the Nazis of the Jews of Europe, began to penetrate the literary world, Lionell Trilling predicted that no work of literature could possibly fathom the enormity of the crime perpet rated and the suffering endured. "Before what we now know," he wrote, "the mind stops; the great psychological fact of our time which we all observe with baffled wonder and shame is that there is no possi ble way of responding to Belsen and Buchenwald." Trilling was writing shortly after the end of the Second World War, and however true his denial of the possibility of responding to the fact of genocide was at that time, it no longer seems an accurate description of our situation with respect to the Holocaust. For after a prolonged silence on the subject, a substantial body of literature has come into being: novels, poems, memoirs, histories, diaries, and biographies. But what Trilling really meant to say, of course, was not that there is no possible way, but that there is no adequate way, of responding to the murder of millions of people for the sole "crime" of having been born — to the spectacle, enacted in full view of much of the world, of a genocidal campaign that taxed the human and material resources of the German people for over six years, until its murder ous work was completed or interrupted by invading armies. In The Resonance of Dust, Edward Alex ander proposes that the touchstone of ade quacy in literature on the Holocaust should be the recognition that the tragedy of the Jewish people is something more than a "theme" for poems and stories, a peg on which to hang reflections on the capacity of (Continued on back flap) The Resonance of Dust Edward Alexander THE RESONANCE OF DUST Essays on Holocaust Literature And Jewish Fate Ohio State University Press: Columbus QuotationsfromMr. Sammler's Planet, by Saul Bellow, are copyright © 1969,1970 by Saul Bellow. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin, Inc. Quotations from "My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner," by Chaim Grade, in A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, edited by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, are copyright 1953 by The Viking Press Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin Inc. Quotations from "God of My Forefathers," "Nightsong," "My Brother Refugee," and "Dead Men Don't Praise God" arefromThe Selected Poems of Jacob Glatstein (October House, 1972), copyright© 1972 by Ruth Whitman, and are reprinted by permission of October House. Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint selectionsfromThe Seeker and Other Poems, by Nelly Sachs. Translated from the German by Ruth and Matthew Mead and Michael Hamburger. Copyright © 1970 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. From O the Chimneys, by Nelly Sachs. Translated from the German by Michael Hamburger, Christopher Holme, Ruth and Matthew Mead, and Michael Roloff. Copyright © 1967 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc. Selections from A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry, edited by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, are copyright © 1969 by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg. Reprinted by permission of Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Publishers. Copyright © 1979 by the Ohio State University Press All Rights Reserved. Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Alexander, Edward. The Resonance of dust. Bibliography: p. Includes index. I. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in literature—Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Israeli literature (Hebrew)—History and criticism—Addresses, essays, lectures. 3. American literature—Jewish authors—History and criticism—Addresses, essays, lectures. 4. Yiddish Literature—History and criticism—Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Title. PN56.3.J4A4 809'.933 79-15515 ISBN 0-8142-0303-5 for Leah miB>p ' P TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Preface xi chapter 1 The Incredibility of the Holocaust 3 chapter 2 Holocaust and Rebirth: Moshe Flinker, Nelly Sachs, and Abba Kovner 31 chapter 3 Between Diaspora and Zion: Israeli Holocaust Fiction 73 chapter 4 The Holocaust in American Jewish Fiction: A Slow Awakening 121 chapter 5 The Destruction and Resurrection of the Jews in the Fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer 149 chapter 6 Saul Bellow: A Jewish Farewell to the Enlightenment 171 chapter 7 The Holocaust and the God of Israel 195 chapter 8 A Dialogue of the Mind with Itself: Chaim Grade's Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner 233 Selected Bibliography 249 Index 253 acknowledgements In the course of writing this book, I have incurred many debts. Primary among them are my debts to the two scholars who were the earliest (and are still among the best) critics of that body of writing called "Literature of the Holocaust": Marie Syrkin and Irving Howe. To Robert Alter and Alvin Rosenfeld I am also greatly indebted for their many essays on Jewish writing in general and Holocaust literature in particular. From the writing of Cynthia Ozick and the conversation of Robert Loewenberg, I have received guidance that may even innocently reach into local tones of thought. For help and suggestions of various kinds, I would like to thank Yehuda Bauer, Wayne Booth, Bruce Borrus, Hillel Daleski, Frederick Garber, Donald Kartiganer, Shirley Kaufman, Abba Kovner, Deborah Lipstadt, David Mesher, Asher Zelig Milbauer, and the staff of Yad Vashem. For their support of my work in the form of fellowships and grants, I am indebted to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, and the Agnes Anderson Fund of the University of Washington. To the secretarial staff of the Department of English at the University of Washington and especially to Jane Cornell, who is at once typist and editor, I am indebted for typing much of the manuscript. Several of the essays in this book originally appeared in Judaism and Midstream magazines, and I am grateful to their editors for permission to use them here. IX Preface Lionel Trilling once suggested that a primary reason for the apparent decline of the novel as a form of art was the fact that ever since Hitler's destruction of European Jewry the task of revealing and articulating man's depravity, an activity that had been a chief occupation of the human mind for four hundred years, had been rendered un necessary: Society's resistance to the discovery of depravity has ceased; now everyone knows that Thackeray was wrong, Swift right. The world and the soul have split open of themselves and are all agape for our revolted inspection. The simple eye of the camera shows us, at Belsen and Buchenwald, horrors that quite surpass Swift's powers, a vision of life turned back to its corrupted elements more literal and fantastic than that which Montaigne ascribed to organized society. A characteristic activity of mind is therefore no longer needed. Indeed, before what we now know the mind stops; the great psychological fact of our time which we all observe with baffled wonder and shame is that there is no possible way of responding to Belsen and Buchenwald. The activity of mind fails before the incom municability of man's suffering.1 Trilling was writing in 1948, shortly after the war; and however true his denial of the possibility of responding to the fact of genocide was at that time, it no longer seems an accurate description of our situation with respect to the Holocaust. After a lengthy silence on the subject, a substantial body of literature dealing with the Holocaust has come into being: novels, poems, memoirs, histories, diaries, biographies. Not all of these responses, to be sure, are admirable or even worthy of the label "activity of mind." Many of them, including one or two used in this volume for purposes of xi XII Preface illustration and comparison, even make one wish that the famous doctrine of "silence" regarding the Holocaust had been observed rather than written about so abundantly. Some of our historians and biographers have so taken to heart Oscar Wilde's doctrine that "the one duty we owe to history is to re-write it"2 that they have created what amounts to a Hitler hagiography.3 In fact, this enterprise has become a kind of right-wing equivalent to the left-wing historians' "revisionist" view of Stalin as a gruff but kindly fellow driven to excesses by the intransigence of Harry Tru man. At the present time, Europe is being swept by a "Hitler-welle," a tidal wave of literature, subliterature, and films devoted not merely to de-demonizing Hitler but to making him into an object of hero worship. Indeed, to mini mize or altogether to deny the Holocaust has now become, along with "anti-Zionism," the main business of those who wallow in the filth of antisemitism.4 But of course what Trilling really meant to say was not that there is no possible, but that there is no adequate, way of responding to the spectacle, enacted in full view of much of the world, of a genocidal campaign that had engaged the human and material resources of the German people for over six years, until its murderous work had been completed or else interrupted by invading armies. When Matthew Arnold, whose great modern disciple Trilling was, demand ed "adequacy" of literature in his Oxford University lecture of 1857 "On the Modern Element in Literature"5 he wanted a literature that could give to his contemporaries an intellectual deliverance from their doubts and confusions by providing them with the complete intelligence of their historical situation. For Arnold modern experience seemed so disordered and intractable that he doubted the ability of the literary imagination to assimilate it and give it coherence.

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