FEATURE
Nothing Is Illuminated |
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| Jewish fiction writers must let go of the Holocaust | |
 by Hal Niedzviecki, December 19, 2006 |
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I’m tired of the Holocaust—the great tragedy Jews devour like a falafel plate after the Yom Kippur fast. I recently declared a personal moratorium on Holocaust movies, museums, and memoirs. The Pianist: didn’t see it. The new version of Elie Weisel’s Night: didn’t read it. The controversial Holocaust memorial in Berlin? I’ll pass.
In school I read Anne Frank, watched filmstrips full of emaciated men and women in dirty striped pajamas, and stumbled upon a Polish book with a grey cover filled with pictures of heaps of dead bodies. It was enough. I know what happened.
But I can’t seem to avoid the Holocaust. It plagues the books I read, the New Jew hipster salon conversations I’ve been lured into—it even seeps into my own writing. Its presence lingers in every word written by Jews in the last 50 years. Younger Jewish writers inevitably put their own morbid twist on, say,
Imperative or Compulsion?: From the US Holocaust Memorial in DC the classic coming-of-age story of a weird girl or boy shipped off to summer camp. In the New Jew version, awkward adolescence and its cruelties have a potent backdrop: a camp-wide game in which the kids must find a way to escape deportation from the Jewish ghetto to the death camps. (Ellen Umansky’s story “How to Make it to the Promised Land,” in the anthology Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction from the Edge, depicts such a scenario. I read the story with fascination; in my own novel, I include a scenario, based on my summer camp experiences, in which campers must sneak into British-controlled Palestine or be deported back to Europe and certain death.)
After 1945, the German critic Theodor Adorno wondered: Can there be poetry after the Holocaust? In the context of a new wave of youngish Jewish writers, the question is this: Can there be Jewish writing after the Holocaust that isn’t about the Holocaust?
“He was called to the Torah, and before reciting the blessing he reached into his tallis bag, removed the silencer, aimed it at his temple, and pulled the trigger. A Jewish brain shot out from his head and splattered all over the unscrolled sheepskin as though the synagogue had just hosted its first animal sacrifice.” So begins Thane Rosenbaum’s Golems of Gotham, a book that epitomizes the awkward sub-genre of Jewish literature we might call “Holocaust Style.” Here is New Jewish writing that evokes the time of the Holocaust but does not attempt to realistically portray what life was like during that era. With this approach, Rosenbaum and others attempt to avoid glamorizing the Holocaust via nostalgia, by showing us how such events continue to temper and infect the present day. Holocaust Style tends to mix, as Rosenbaum’s book does, modern, gritty, urban activities with nostalgic magical Yiddishisms. It’s a perfect recipe for self-reflexive postmodern new-Jew “edge.”
It’s not that the works in the genre of Holocaust Style are failures. Many of them are surprisingly beautiful. Joseph Skibell, for instance, in his book A Blessing on the Moon, tells the story of Chaim Skibelski, who enters this book with a bullet to the head, having played his part in a vicious pogrom. Skibelski lives on. After his rabbi turns into a crow, he ends up wandering through a fractured landscape that’s part Talmud, part Burroughs, part Chagall, looking for a way to help his fellow Jews assume their rightful place in the World to Come.
Skibell’s capacity for creating wonderment and humor amidst the tragedy of a bloodstained Eastern Europe remains a hallmark of the New Jewish writer’s approach to the Holocaust. Foremost among those books is Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated. Again, we have a first novel about the events of the Holocaust steeped in self-referential longing and improbable magic. Skibell has his forebear-narrator Skibelski; Foer has himself as storyteller. Neither author shies away from being irreverent and salacious, even within the context of the Holocaust. While Skibelski is aroused by a sickly Polish girl whose family has occupied what used to be his house, Foer’s great-grandfather pleasures the shtetl’s virgins and old women. Life goes on before, during, and after, as our New Jewish writers lustily describe.
These Holocaust Style books and others like them (such as, I freely admit, sections of my own novel) emerge from a Jewish society that is groping for a new identity in the middle. We now have the luxury of stopping to contemplate what has happened and how our starved, ugly past can be reconciled with our bloated, privileged present. This is the hallmark of Holocaust Style writing: middle-class characters who evoke the familiar theme of “finding yourself,” with all the guilt and befuddlement that accompany the endless search through the tragic history of the Jews’ victimization. These reflections on the Holocaust and its meaning are less about remembering what happened, and more about our collective desire to give purpose to individuals living in the feckless present day. We assume, audaciously, that we can make up for our survival by somehow making peace with the past. Optimistic and opportunistic, the shtetl ghost and the latter-day peasant link arms and shimmy across the ashes in a dance of reconciliation choreographed by the smart-ass young writer with an MFA and a keenly developed nose for saleable nostalgia.
Why is a new generation of Jewish writers so obsessed with the Holocaust? Because the Holocaust is the only unique unifying symbol we have. In an era of fractious sects, cults, values, and politics, at a time when articulating what it is to be Jewish is as complicated as figuring out how to daven in space, the Holocaust provides writers with a particular voice and an identity. But in the process, we hide from our own reality as unthreatened middle-class Jews. By obsessing on the tragic past, from Passover to the Holocaust, we infuse our uninspired present day with a tragic vitality that it doesn’t deserve.
In the anthology Who We Are: On Being (and Not Being) a Jewish American Writer, Thane Rosenbaum contributes an essay in which he both defends his approach to writing about contemporary Jewish life and nicely defines Holocaust Style: “I am a post-Holocaust novelist, which means that I rely on my imagination—my capacity to reinvent worlds and reveal emotional truths—in order to speak to the Holocaust and its aftermath, one generation removed from Auschwitz. I don’t write about the years 1939 to 1945… Instead I focus on the looming dark shadow of the Holocaust as a continuing, implacable event; how it, inexorably, is still with us.”
My interpretation of Rosenbaum’s statement goes like this: We shall not give up the Holocaust. We shall insist that it is still with us, because that will give our writing depth and resonance. But in clinging to the Holocaust, what are we missing? What would, say, the great Philip Roth be writing about if he had not returned to the mid-part of the 20th century to imagine an antisemitic U.S. President with Hitler sympathies?
Looking at my own inadvertent Holocaust Style writings, I can see that they emerge from a source of deep yearning and a place too carefully considered for comfort. In the new Jewish writing, the Holocaust is both our natural birthright and that which we have to make us more “other” in an age when “otherness” earns book deals and talk-show appearances. We use the Holocaust to imbue ourselves with identity, to beat off the specter of assimilated averageness. In the process, we rely on familiar tropes, often failing to fully grapple with the state of the world and the reality of contemporary Jewish life.
Sometimes, we use the Holocaust because we have to—because the Skibelskis and Niedzvieckis are calling us from the grave. But sometimes we use the Holocaust because it’s all we have left to give our Judaism nobility. It’s the grisly birthright that makes us better than the rest of the aspirants in creative writing class. They have their racism, sexism, environmentalism, Catholicism, veganism, alcoholism, and we—triumphant survivor Jews who didn’t actually have to survive anything—we have that dark horror which can never be trumped.
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Hal Niedzviecki is the author of The Program, Ditch, and Hello, I’m Special: How Individuality Became The New Conformity. |
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Anonymous
It's the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen. I am hearing more about it than ever before, and almost all of it is from people who are "tired of the Holocaust" or sick of "Israel using the Holocaust as an excuse", etc.
The thing is that it just doesn't happen so much. Most people I know don't talk about the Holocaust. Israeli officials don't put out press release or do news clips saying that, well, we had to fire on the Qassam launch sites, because of the Holocaust.
If you really, truly, are sick of the Holocaust then, for god's sake, enough about it already. Move on, Hal.
Anonymous
We would all love to forget the holocaust and move on. Just like we would all love to eat till we burst, never exercise, smoke or drink and manage somehow to still live healthy forever. Of course, thats not reality. The reality is we have obligations. We owe people something. Being reminded on occasion about 10 million people who were killed is hardly a disaster in our lives. Grow up. The whole point of Judaism is about putting it and its people above oneself. You claim to be tired of hearing and reading about the holocaust, but the reality is youre probably just tired of the basic tenant of communitarianism. Individualist Americana has claimed another victim. Jewish Destrudo
Anonymous
From the time that the second Temple was destroyed forward, the entirety of Jewics culture in the diaspora, with the grand exception of the Reform and Progressive momvements, was completely obsessed with the Chorban Habayit Sheni, the Destruction of the Second Temple. It is the event that most shaped the Jewish community culturally and religiously. It was a theological dilemma, a cultural dilemma, and the rebuilding of the Temple was every Jew's desire. The Temple was not simply a religious edifice, but a government complex. Business, culture, government and agriculture all revolved around the Temple. It was a symbol not just of God, but of Jewish sovereignty.
During the last century, the Temple was rebuilt in the form of Medinat Yisrael, the State of Israel. A new tragedy has become the defining event for us. The Holocaust means a lot. It represents destruction of whatever near-sovereignty we enjoyed in parts of Europe, loss of life, loss of language (it is responsible for the near death of Yiddish), and loss of culture. This is our new Chorban Habayit and to claim that it needs de-emphasizing is insane.
What it does need is to be taught with care. In the life-support version of Jewish education we have in the US, the Holocaust is beaten like a dead horse. 6 million dead horses. It need no de-emphasizing and to the claim that one is tired of it is a sad by-product of the Holocaust taught in a simple-minded fashion. Why do we only learn about loss of life? Where is the death of culture? These together deepen the tragedy and make it real
Anonymous
I'm pretty sure Thane Rosenbaum is the child of Holocaust survivors, which though not as difficult as being a survivor was for many people no cake walk. So to write -- "My interpretation of Rosenbaum’s statement goes like this: We shall not give up the Holocaust. We shall insist that it is still with us, because that will give our writing depth and resonance." -- is pretty insensitive. Maybe Hal Niedzviecki has written about the Holocaust to give his writing depth, but there are people in this world who are actually still haunted by the genocide. Do I agree that American Jewry is a bit too Holocaust-obsessed? Sure. But let's have some perspective here. This flip analysis hardly advances thought on this issue and is certainly unfair to writers like Rosenbaum whose souls do bear the marks of the Holocaust -- if indirectly so.
Anonymous
Given events in Iran last week.
Umm. Seriously, I do understand frustration that we often define ourselves through tragedy. And if one decides to avoid such pieces I do understand. But I think that it is not as if there is a saturation point. It certainly is not as if we have magically learned the lesson on avoiding genocie: See Serbia, Rwanda, Sudan, etc...We often take for granted (we being people who are well-read, reasonably well-educated, etc...) just how little most people are actually aware of. And I'm saying this as a history professor...
Michael Nehora
If anything, the instances of genocide in Serbia, Rwanda, and Sudan, as well as the increasingly vocal and well-funded Holocaust deniers, mandate that we Jews more than ever must keep the Holocaust in the forefront of human consciousness. Doing so won't guarantee the prevention of further genocide, of course, but it may well reduce the loss of life and culture.
Joey Kurtzman
History professor,
How many more Holocaust memorials will it take before the UN passes a chapter 7 resolution requiring the Khartoum government to end the Darfur genocide? I would think that one unavoidable lesson of the past decade is that people and nations can obsessively commemorate past genocides without feeling particularly exercised by current ones. Lamenting past catastrophes is easy, stopping current ones is hard. Whatever the value of mourning the Holocaust, it serves no prophylactic purpose worth speaking of. At this point it's just silly to pretend otherwise.
Joey
Anonymous
Joey,
I agree entirely. I suppose I overspoke (umm, or something?) in my previous post. I do agree that there isn't a direct correlation between memorials and action, or even memory and action. Honestly, the pessimist in me (whom I fight constantly) says that given how little most folk care or are informed, that such things really are doomed to occur over and over and over again. I just don't want to be nearly that pessimistic.
I do think, however, that the answer is more exposure rather than less. Students of mine (freshman at a fairly good NYC college) were truly awe struck at seeing images from Japanese internment camps, POW camps in Andersonville during the Civil War, or child laborers in coal mines in the early 20th century. Will these images have changed their overall perception of American history? Difficult to say definitively. I suppose what I am getting at is that the power of images in educating and informing is fairly stark (have you noticed the utter dearth of images coming from Iraq, the Sudan, etc...).
Anonymous
Are you attempting to coin a new term with "Holocaust Style"? If so it feels more than a bit ignorant. For at least the past decade, in the literary world and beyond, what you are referring to has already been labeled and defined as Post-Holocaust Literature. You may consider reading up on the genre as a whole, including the fairly large body of scholarly work that has been done on it. The narratives of Second Generation (children of survivors) writers, like Thane Rosenbaum and David Grossman among others, have also garnered the attention of scholars working in psychoanalytic criticism and trauma theory. Attempting to call it "Holocaust Style" trivializes the content and suggest that there's some sort of mimicry or bizarre obsession involved with the construction of these texts. What your comments seem to ignore is the fact that, like it or not, the Holocaust happened, and it now colors everything we say and do, particularly for those in the Jewish world -- it's a legacy of loss and destruction that we're stuck with, and to suggest that we should cease speaking/writing about it is like a slap in the face to those who died in it, lived through it, or have family members who experienced it. But considering that you are fed up with actual images and stories from the camps, I would think you would be able to appreciate the Post-Holocaust narratives of people like Rosenbaum who show us the after-effects of the Holocaust without relying on standard images of corpses and gas chambers.
Elisa
...it's just so "hal"! by which i mean intellectually half-assed but just well-written enough to seem otherwise. well, okay, maybe a little upset: addressing the holocaust directly and addressing how the holocaust is addressed are two quite distinct gears for fiction. and, appropriately, the latter is what recent fiction has most sought to engage, with often fascinating results. (the umansky story is a perfect example of how this is done right.) No one would argue that the holocaust is, in today's world, a primary source. that the holocaust is an obsession of american jews (and, btw, germans!) often to the detriment of forward movement on vital moral/political issues (darfur, much? palestinians, anyone?) is hardly a revelation. that it still must be negotiated, however, because it is a historical fact (fuck you, Ahmadinejad!), can and does continue to provide wonderful fodder for writers interested in global politics, history, identity, and reality, period.
and p.s., i don't care how removed you and i might be from the events of 1939-45; if one's parents/grandparents are survivors, that's some heavy, ever-present shit.
also, again, a marked lack of bibliographical backup characterizes this piece -- though i dig the anthologies as much as the next jew. some vital contemporary holo-caustic writers ignored: shira nayman, melvin jules bukiet, daniel mendelsohn, shalom auslander, rachel kadish, amir gutfreund. (and yes, i think i just coined the term "holo-caustic"!)
love.
Michael Nehora
Maus is arguably the most well-known and widely-read example of second-generation Holocaust literature.
Adam Shprintzen
Holo-caustic actually made me snarf.
Ladies, stand back, I'm taken!
Ok, a few points. First...there was a whole generation of writers whose experiences, world view, etc...were all shaped by the outbreak of World War I, the defining even of their generation. Has anyone ever begrudged Hemmingway for this reason? And ever since WWII, the Holocaust has been the defining event, both for Jews and non-Jews. So in a sense it would be disingenuous to pretend that such a thing does not help mold our collective conciousness. In just the same way it would be diingenuous for the children of Mexican immigrants to not have their parents' experiences as part of their conciousness, I think the same holds true for post-shoah generations. It is inescapable for better or worse.
Anonymous
One single tragic event in my life does not define who I am. But without this event, who am I? Do I move on and forget that it has happened, or do I continue to let it haunt my thoughts? This is not just my story, it is an entire nations. If I do not remind myself and others, it will happen again. Lest we never forget.
Anonymous
whas;What's the argument here again? We're too obsessed with the holocaust, especially because we ourselves were not in the holocaust, although holocaust writing is pretty good (including yours) but its sortoff unfair as a topic because it is, admittedly, the most difficult subject to tackle and therefore inherently "sublime"...? I think your wrong, although Adorno was right about the obsenity of art in the aftermath of the Shoah. Whether you like it or not the life of the Jew living in the aftermath of the the holocaust is one of constant coping. I think about it everyday and am grateful to any writer who can help.
Elisa
why is this shite still up?? the beauty of daily is that hal can only terrorize us with his lack of depth for 24 hours!
Steve Swartz
You recently declared a personal moratorium on Holocaust literature and movies? You won't see The Pianist? Did they make a sequel? I thought that came out about three or four years ago, before Adrian Brody got an SUV and started hitting on Hallie Berry. I agree with some of the other posts - not quite sure why you're writing this if you've sworn off writing about this. A little too Ted Haggardish for me. As for your thesis that the Holocaust is somehow thwarting Jewish cultural identity, or highlighting the lack of a distinctly American Jewish identity, hmmm...I don't know. Aren't Jews allowed to write about whatever captures their imagination? It seems that you have this one set view of what the Holocaust was and what it means. I for one learn new things all the time about those years. My wife is from Belarus. I taught senior Russians for years, and the stories I heard and continue to hear are stories I haven't read or seen anywhere. I think your essay betrays a kind of New Jew meanness, a kind of New Jew assumption that we were all raised the same way, played the same games at summer camp, read the same books and saw the same movies. And I'm really not sure what point you were hoping to impart, other than you are a rather cold and churlish person who, Garbo-like, would prefer to be left alone.
Anonymous
Even if you get Hal's piece down, a thousand new Hals will rise to take his place!
Elisa
pretty please?
Joey Kurtzman
Down in about 20 min!
Joey
Anonymous
it wasnt very long ago that it happened. many decendants still suffer from their parents pain.people who are hollocaust survivos they have kids and those kids are usually quite messed up from it. its quite insensitive to say you've heard enough. i've heard enough about women who are getting raped i've heard enough about pollution.. i thin its okay to poke fun and laugh at our religion just as blacks call eachother n*ggers but its also important to not let this happen again as it could easily happen again and then your grandchildren would be online telling everyone how they've heard enough. AMEN!
Anonymous
Whether we like it or not, the holocaust affected us all, as jews.
My grandparents who suffered during that time are a reminder for me of that, and I still haven't sat down to talk to my grandfather about his experiences during that horrific era!
You can say that you've had enough of the holocaust, but you exaggerate when you say there is no jewish writing that does not involve the holocaust.
In Israel alone dozens if not hundreds of books come out every year and the great majority do not talk about the holocaust.
You might not like hearing about the holocaust, but it's part of our jewishness, same as Purim, Passover and Hannukah!
If we were still writing the Torah, we'd have seen a new scroll in it, called: The scroll of Hitler or the scroll of the Sho'a.
It's OK for you to say you've seen enough and know enough, but we need to have as much information about it as we can, so that in the future, when those few who survived are gone and cannot serve as our witnesses anymore will not have their legacy forgotten, and that NO ONE can deny the horrors our people (and quite a few others aswell) have suffered!
I loved the Pianist, I LOVED Everything is Illuminated and I think that they're important stories.
You're entitled to your views, but don't try and impose them on others...
Anonymous
After working for 20 years in the forensic criminal justice system I decided to spend the rest of my career studying the Holocaust and all of the genocides since 1900. I did develop a course on genocide at my university and plan to obtain funding to conduct more research on the Holocaust and other genocides. Unfortunately, history repeats itself again, and again, and again. After 3 solid years of study I still feel like a beginning student. I hope I can encourage my students to continue to study genocide after the course is over and to encourage my colleagues to consider studying genocide. My field (criminal justice) has totally neglected this topic and this is not acceptable.
Karen S.
Hal's article articulated issues and widened my perspective on the current state of Jewish literature. What is Jewish identity in 2008 if you are not orthodox? How do we incorporate our past, present, and future? I'm still thinking about this. Good article!
Deracinated Cosmopolitan
There was just a suggestion here, but a tantalizing suggestion, of the terrible, misguided, inauthentic vanity in searching for abiding meaning in one's bloodlines. Suppose at the end of Everything Is Illuminated, our protagonist discovers that he was adopted, and this history he has been searching to unearth turns out to have had nothing to do with him. If he goes on believing it, because he likes how his imagined connection to the story makes him feel, what would be the difference? The story of your germline is not your story -- unless you choose to make it so. Of course, that line of thinking may be too much of a rebuke to the idea of ancestral religion itself. So maybe the issue isn't whether Jewish writers can or should stop writing about the Holocaust, but whether they can or should stop writing as Jews.
Anonymous
Swap and The Organ Grinder and the Monkey. Both will have you laughing out loud about the Jewish hero in each one.
Yitzhak
Hal:
My gut reaction to your blog was one of total distaste. And, I bet you can tell who really reads your postings or "Ready-Fire-Aim" spitting back ad nausea their codependent ravings. So, I read the whole thing. It is an impressive piece, wryly done. Your posting is a great testimony to two tenants: 1. Most people read with eyes only and do not process the information (in the English Majors' or Psychologists'---maybe Psychiatrists' and Philosophers' as well kind of way); and 2. In other words to quote Peter, Paul and Mary:
The Radio Won't Play It
Unless I Lay It
Between the Lines
Regarding the contextual setting of your blog, reader either gets it or doesn't get it.
Thanks for the posting and again for what it is worth, VERY WELL DONE A+.
Sincerely,
Yitzhak---a real Jewish Cowboy somewhere on a working ranch in North Texas
Yitzhak
I am not smart enough to answer question on my own so I humbly offer this quote (of a quote with my inserts in brackets) from the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch:
"Be bold as a leopard, light as an eagle, swift as a deer and strong as a lion to the will of your Father [or Mother]in heaven."
This passage has layered meanings. Again, as I am no way smart enough to teach, I will leave your continuing search in your hands and brains.
Sincerely,
Yitzhak---a real Jewish Cowboy somewhere on a working ranch in North Texas
shit of david
the holocaust never happed . HITLER WAS A SENSITIVE MAN. THE HOAXACAUST IS A LIE. only 300,000 max died
sociologist
After avoiding discussion or study of the Holocaust for a good 20 years as a sociology teacher i had a sudden change and decided to add it to many of my courses. I discuss it in all of my courses and will continue to as I learn more. I have no idea why I did not start briniging it into the classroom earlier.
Barbara Finkelstein
You kids today. Even genocide is so yesterday.