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DAILY SHVITZ
Vonnegut, the Non-Jewish Writer, Dies |
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 by Monica Osborne, April 12, 2007 |
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Kurt Vonnegut, called one of America's best writers by the likes of Graham Greene, John Irving, and Tom Wolfe, died last night -- apparently due to complications from brain injuries sustained during a recent fall. You can read about it in the Times. Some of his best-known works include Cat's Cradle (1963), The Sirens of Titan (1959), Slaughterhouse Five (1969), and Breakfast of Champions (1973). Vonnegut was one of those lucky writers whose work made into both mainstream and academic venues -- I actually read my first Vonnegut book as an undergrad in a class called Metafiction, and was surprised to learn that even some of my non-college-bound friends had also read Vonnegut and thought Slaughterhouse Five was rad.
I was planning to go hear him read and give a talk on April 27 here in Indiana -- at Butler University in Indianapolis, Vonnegut's home town. Vonnegut is one of Indiana's claims to fame. I'm living in Indiana right now (very temporarily), and one thing I've noticed is that people here are fiercely loyal to anyone from the state. They also go nuts if they're in a bar and Tom Petty's "Mary Jane's Last Dance" song starts to play (First verse: "She grew up in an Indiana town / Had a good lookin' momma who never was around / But she grew up tall and she grew up right / With them Indiana boys on an Indiana night"). It's no joke -- I was once in a campus bar called Harry's Chocolate Shop, and though it was packed with wall-to-wall people, when that song came on every single person in there (excluding me) jumped to their feet and began singing the lyrics. I feared they might riot. Or that there would be a stoning of people not from Indiana. So I joined in.
My point being: Indiana loves Vonnegut, so it's a sad day here.
Germans On Bad Chemicals: A similar image appears in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five.
But I learned something new about an hour ago. In talking to a friend of mine who is a scholar of Jewish-American and other literatures, I got into a conversation about Slaughterhouse Five, which is really about Vonnegut's own experience with the WWII Dresden bombing. My friend said he has always been slightly bothered by the book -- that it feels slightly anti-Semitic, though not in any overt way (anti-Semitic because it completely ignores the Holocaust, and focuses only on other WWII events, which does feel a bit strange). "But Vonnegut was Jewish, wasn't he?" I asked. No. Apparently he was not. This whole time I thought Vonnegut was a Jewish writer who didn't write about Jewish things -- like Joseph Heller (good friend of Vonnegut) or Norman Mailer or Paul Auster or Nathaniel West. The reason I thought this: a good friend of mine, who also happens to be a fairly well-known novelist in the Jewish-American literary world, told me so!
So was Vonnegut anti-Semitic? I don't know. I don't think so, but I do find the omission of the Holocaust in Slaughterhouse to be kind of creepy. Then again, in looking back at Breakfast of Champions a few minutes ago, a picture of a flag with a swastika on it caught my eye. Above the flag, Vonnegut writes:
Dwayne certainly wasn't alone, as far as having bad chemicals inside of him was concerned. He had plenty of company throughout all history. In his own lifetime, for instance, the people in a country called Germany were so full of bad chemicals for a while that they actually built factories whose only purpose was to kill people by the millions. The people were delivered by railroad trains. When the Germans were full of bad chemicals, their flag looked like this:
Of course, on the next page Vonnegut includes a picture of today's German flag, and writes: "Here is what their flag looked like after they got well again." But the last part of this section is my favorite -- Vonnegut writes about the "cheap and durable [German] automobile" that became popular all over the world after the war (the Volkswagen Beetle). He includes a drawing of the beetle insect, and writes underneath it: "The mechanical beetle was made by Germans. The real beetle was made by the Creator of the Universe." Pretty profound, don't you think, particularly in the wake of Nazi Germany's efforts to play God . . .
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Monica recently finished her dissertation -- "The Midrashic Impulse: Reading in the Face of the Shoah" -- and is now a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish American Literature at UCLA. She has written for Studies in American Jewish Literature, More... |
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Anonymous
Wasn't Slaughterhouse 5 based on Vonnegut's personal experiences? I always figured that the Holocaust was missing from the novel because Vonnegut himself didn't personally see it.
Anonymous
He didn't write about internment camps or Hiroshima, either. Guess Vonnegut also hated the Japanese. Man, what a racist. Good thing he's dead.
Anonymous
Not all writing about WWII has to mention the Holocaust.
Monica Osborne
Anonymous comment 1 -- Yep, it's definitely based on Vonnegut's own experience, and is an amazing piece of work. I think the question is whether someone who writes about WWII has a moral or ethical responsibility to, at least in passing, include the Holocaust. Doesn't make someone anti-Semitic, but it's just an interesting choice on the part of Vonnegut. And, I think the excerpt quoted above from Breakfast is telling in terms of whether or not Vonnegut is anti-Semitic.
Anonymous comment 2 -- Actually, he did write about Hiroshima, in many instances. You should try reading Vonnegut -- one of my favorite writers. And you really shouldn't say such dreadful things about people who are recently deceased.
Anonymous comment 3 -- True. It's just kind of strange that an entire book about WWII makes no mention of it. Interesting, that's all. Kind of seems like it would be relevant, but maybe not.
Anonymous
"I think the question is whether someone who writes about WWII has a moral or ethical responsibility to, at least in passing, include the Holocaust."
If the work is claiming to be a comprehensive historical study of WW2, then certainly. But we're talking about a work of *fiction*. Fiction tells the specific story of specific characters--not the world's story. Plenty of others have written about various aspects of the war without addressing the Holocaust. Why? Because novelists generally don't include things "in passing" out of ethical obligation. They explore in depth what falls within the scope of the story they're telling. Omission, at least in fiction, isn't denial. Anyway, if he included it only "in passing", wouldn't that have been worse?
-Anon the 4th.
Tod Goldberg
I don't believe anyone has any ethical responsibility in fiction -- be it based on personal experience or not. Vonnegut was a prisoner of war and doubtlessly suffered his own holocaust -- I think the book shows that clearly enough -- as that experience colored all of his works, even prior to Slaughterhouse and including a great many of his essays. Characters in fiction aren't precise manifestations of real life and so the issue of the ethics of the author shouldn't even come into play. People so often confuse authors with their fictional creations and ascribe real world politics on creations of the imagination. Just like Vonnegut didn't need to write about the Holocaust in his work, I don't need to make every character I create an angry, cynical, midlist Jewish author.
DSW
I think Monica's question is a valid one and it does seem a bit odd that part of Slaughterhouse is set in Nazi Germany and no mention of the Holocaust is made. However, its important to note that Vonnegut wasn't Jewish, had no direct exposure to the Holocaust or its victims (at least at that time), and witnessed one of the greatest acts of intense violence ever perpetrated by his own country. Slaughterhouse was in part a narrative of his own experiences in WWII, but that's only a very limited part of the book and I think it would have been inauthentic of him to write about the Holocaust precisely because parts of Slaughterhouse mirrored his life so closely.
In response to Tod, I disagree with you about ethics in fiction - additionally, I think its evident from his many writings that Vonnegut believed in ethics in fiction. But this is another debate entirely.
Anonymous
Thank you. God. Thank you.
Recursive Prophet
Wow. I thought he was Jewish for sure also, and I'm still not completely convinced.
In the name of full disclosure I should state it would seem the Ashkenazim are
somehow connected with my ‘karass.’ They
are so disproportionately found among my all time favorite writers (Asimov,
Auster, Mailer, Roth, Djerasi, Heller, Liss to name just a few) that when I
discover a new writer that really stands out I tend to make assumptions. Even when
the pen name is as Christianized as say, Daniel Price, (“Slick”) I usually
suspect they are Jewish and am usually right.
I don’t know anything about Kurt’s genealogy, but long before the Third
Reich Jews in Eastern Europe were converting to escape
persecution. I never for a moment assumed he was any more of the Jewish faith
than Asimov or Dawkins. His DNA is another matter.
If you look at the incredible percentage of Nobel winners etc. that can
clearly trace their heritage to this mysterious tribe, compared to their small
fraction of world population, does in not seem probable that many were smart
enough to toss the skull cap several generations back and blend in? Perhaps
through the Genome Project we will eventually know a lot more.
Sorry about how this came out, but haven't a clue how to correct the formatting. I visit a lot of sites, and have NEVER encountered a problem like this. Given my view you can imagine my dismay that this of all sites would have such a discombobulated setup. I doubt if I'll post again. -Arpie