from
The Boston
Review
Dec. 2001/Jan 2002 |
PICTURING "PARADISE":
THERESIENSTADT ADMISSION STAMP
from Benes, Mail Service
in the Ghetto Terezín; see note. 4
|
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1.
I entered the terrain of the Holocaust on a flat stretch of
New Jersey highway. As I tuned the radio through miles of static, the fuzz
cleared, and out poured the voice of a cello, an unearthly melody rising up out
of the silence like a curl of smoke between floorboards. The music was so
haunting that I had to pull over onto the shoulder of the road.
It was odd that I had never heard the piece. For the past
seven years I had been working on a novel about a broken-down former prodigy
cellist, the daughter of a Russian Jewish pianist whose career had been severed
by the war, and who had coped with the ache of his phantom limb by sculpting
his child into a world-class musician. In the decade since her parents'
accidental death, the narrator has been playing the cello silently, the bridge
muffled; as the book opens she finds herself unraveled, stranded abroad with no
resources, after the last person who knew of her past dies. The book tells the
story of how she emerges from her trauma via an affair with an Italian male
prostitute. Its spark was an understanding of a bond between two surface
opposites—she sexually and musically shut down, he a compulsive liar and
performer—who are each other's most impossible partner, and only hope.
In one sense I was writing what I knew, as I muddled my way
out of a damaging childhood without the life skills to make it as an adult.
Between dead-end jobs, evictions, and surgery on Medicaid, I lived in the old
Lincoln Center Music Library in Manhattan, where in one dingy booth or another
I was making my way through every recording of every piece in the cello
repertoire. Often it seemed that little more than the kerchief I tied over my
nose separated me from the alcohol-smelling bums with crumbs in their beards
who bookended me, swooning to Albinoni. Never any twentieth century for them.
Dissonance, one said, shuddering, as if the twentieth century were a horror
that only safe, housed people could afford to play with.
The way it worked was, you screwed the slip of paper with
your request into a canister that got sent down a little pneumatic tube to the
basement, where hundreds of thousands of records were stored. After a while,
anonymous hands held an LP up to a camera: if the title-label on the little
black-and-white TV in your booth seemed right, you clicked "Yes" and
the label began to rotate. Through headphones, the old recording would get its
chance to speak. On second hearing, I would try to write. The problem for my
narrator was learning to navigate the present equipped only with her father's
survival rules for the past. But the emotional questions—how to shed the
lessons of trauma, to have the courage to abandon the once useful
self-protections that later do you harm—were not ones I had answers to.
As time went on, I traced back over my story again and again, burying more and
more panic about how to finish. In the library, I could hardly ever bear to
consign an old recording back into oblivion. I had been listening, crawling my
way through the collection, for years.
Probably no writer has found a more powerful metaphor for
the stasis of trauma than Dante in The Inferno, where being damned means being
condemned to perpetually lapse backward, lapse not just in the Christian sense
of repeating the offending sin, but also in the psychic, chronological sense of
circling back, of doing laps. Though they forever revisit the past, and
envision the future, the residents of Hell repeatedly query Dante about what is
going on above ground. What better embodiment of trauma than a blindness to the
here-and-now? Like Dante's damned, I went over the wrong choices that had made
me—wrong parenting, wrong life decisions, wrong paragraphs and sentences
written—and I could clearly envision the reviews slamming the book. But
because what I was really writing was not what I knew but what I needed to know,
I could not feel my way in the present. I clicked "Yes" again.
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2.
In the car, after a faster movement, the announcer on the
radio named the piece as Gideon Klein's Trio for Strings. What followed made me
understand why I did not know it. Klein, like many other Czech Jewish musicians
of his generation, had been interned in a transit camp I had never heard of,
called Theresienstadt, established in the small, walled-in Czech garrison town
of Terezín.1
The Germans billed it as the "privileged" camp
where "half-Jews," WWI veterans, and famous actors and musicians were
sent. Klein's music was now being rereleased, along with the work of an entire
generation of post-Dvorak composers who had perished in the war. In this one
place, narrative and performance had been used by the Nazis to trap and kill
Jews, at the same time they had been defiantly used by the prisoners to save
their own physical and spiritual lives. The odds weren't good—of the
approximately 144,000 people in Theresienstadt, 88,000 were sent to death camps
like Auschwitz-Birkenau, and approximately 33,000 died as a result of
conditions in the ghetto—but you had a chance of surviving longer if you
could perform. The Council of Jewish Elders often put performers on their lists
of Prominenten, people who were protected from the transports. Musicians who
throughout the thirties had been prevented from working threw themselves into
activity with a zeal many had long since abandoned on the outside.
Theresienstadt had four working orchestras; in addition to symphonies and
original operas, hundreds of chamber and lieder concerts were performed, and
there were two cabarets: a stodgier German one for the older people, and a
Czech one for the young admirers of the avant-guard. According to one
historian, for most of the war Theresienstadt had the freest cultural life in
the occupied Europe.
Like a wake-up from amnesia, a life spread out before me. It
was at Theresienstadt that my narrator's father had survived by playing, there
that he had lost the use of his fingers, there that my narrator would return at
the end of the novel to burn her rare cello and exorcise her past. Of course,
my narrator could not escape her father's voice in her head, or trust others in
the present. She was trapped in her father's time, when the price of an error
was simply too high.
Though the sky was darkening, I did not start the car for a
very long time. Writing about the Holocaust, as a non-Jew, seemed a Pandora's
box. I had spent enough time paralyzed by depression; the Holocaust was a black
hole from which I was not at all sure my psyche would emerge intact. As for the
writing itself, I had never read Elie Wiesel's pronouncement about
Auschwitz—that only those who had lived it in the flesh could transform
their experience into knowledge—but it had seeped into my consciousness.2
After exhaustive research about instruments and performing, I had
gained confidence when a cellist I was interviewing began describing an
experience of performing in words nearly identical to a passage I'd written the
previous week. But unlike classical music, with its graying audiences, and its
practitioners who were unabashedly grateful for the interest, the Holocaust as
material seemed a frightening, guarded territory, a place you did not want to
get caught with the wrong past. That night, I dreamed I was trapped between
mile-long floor-to-ceiling stacks of old, dusty LPs in the twentieth-century
section of the basement. They were recordings of Nazi torture sessions, the
shrieks encoded as dissonance. On one of them, buried in a modernist trope, was
the passage that would signal how to find my way out.
You have to suspect anyone who isn't the child of a
survivor, going into the Shoah business. Fifteen years ago, the hero of Don
Delillo's White Noise, the founder of the field of Hitler studies, was
understood as an absurdist comic construction, a suburban dad who cashed in our
lurid obsession with this monumental misery and used it as a ticket to academic
upward mobility. Since then the field of Holocaust studies has burgeoned to the
degree that it is now a required history course in many high schools, a
department in some universities, and a museum on the Washington Mall. It is a
cataclysm so large that everyone can project onto it. In addition to the myriad
documentaries, museums, monuments, novels, plays, and musicals, the field of
"Holocaust Theology" is now offered as the discipline of the profound
ontological knowledge-state survivors have access to, based on their
experience. Where the Kabbalah stands for the mystery of light, Auschwitz comes
to stand for the so-called "mystery of darkness."
I spent a year trying not to know what I knew about my
narrator's past, to continue building my story in the present. But where the
construction was shoddy, more smoke seeped in. Over and over, I tried to plug
up the holes, to think up solutions that did not relate to the Holocaust,
because the more I thought about it, the worse an idea writing about the
Holocaust seemed. I had written a survivor father who, in trying to protect his
daughter, profoundly damages her ability to function, and a daughter whose
tangled guilt causes the death of someone in her charge. But when you are
condemned to write fiction, imaginative truths seep in, and once they do they
become embedded. One day you know them, not the way you piece together a dream,
but the way you know the place you grew up. In the scene I knew, my narrator
was trudging towards Terezín on a self-imposed march, intending to exorcise her
past and burn her rare cello in the crematorium. No matter how I tried to write
my way around that scene, to find a different ending for the book, I could not
come up with it. Finally, I gave in and began to read.
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3.
All deadly regimes rewrite history. But what immediately
struck me about the National Socialists was their intense engagement not just
with annihilating the past, but with fabricating an elaborate false reality.
Next to the leaden arguments the Russian, Chinese, or Cambodian revolutionaries
came up with, and the brutal chaos that followed, the Nazis' civil war against
the Jews was terrifyingly well scripted. Their sophisticated weaponry included
film, law, performance art, elaborate twisted historiography, and a rich
palette of Jewish religious symbols, all aspiring not just to power or
"equality" but to nation-as-art. As storytellers they were masterful,
their tales epic and mythic.
Who would have thought to use postmarks to tell a tale? Even
the tiny traces of the Nazis' annexation of Czechoslovakia reflect the intricate
ways they used story to seduce and invade, assimilate and then annihilate.
After Hitler took the Sudetenland—the bicultural horseshoe swath of
Bohemia and Moravia whose many ethnic Germans Hitler yearned to reunite with
the fatherland—the postmarks encapsulate the deadly narrative shifts in
miniature: first the bilingual Czech/German postmarks are absorbed into the
metonymic "Hitler/Chamberlain" cancel (whose two-day meeting sealed
the fate of Czechoslovakia without Czech approval or participation); then the
Czech town names disappear, assimilating the towns into the Reich; and then
German postmarks begin to state, "We are free!" and "We have
thrown off the yoke," effacing any possibility of another interpretation.
In the case of Theresienstadt, the Nazis published brochures
advertising property at a privileged resort town where Jews could resettle,
"Theresienbad," whose name alluded to the famous spas of Karlsbad and
Marienbad nearby. (Not a few wealthy families, attempting to secure a place for
themselves, handed over their fortunes to buy lake-front villas in this
lake-free town, and some arrived at the camp in evening dress.) Prisoners were
given specially printed Theresienstadt Monopoly-money for their labor, with
which they could "shop" in the stores for the possessions and clothes
that had been stripped from them upon entry.3 The Nazis set up a
Council of Jewish Elders, ostensibly giving prisoners a role in
self-determination. It was here that the film, Der Führer Schenkt den Juden eine
Stadt, "The Führer Gives the Jews a City," was made, with its shots
of Jews waving from their gardens on the floor of Terezín's old moat. Through
the lens of history the emaciated prisoners look barely capable of smiling, but
had the Nazi narrative prevailed, the same shot might now suggest weathered
pioneers determined to make a life under hardscrabble conditions. Even the
Theresienstadt admission stamp gave off a masterful lie, depicting an idyllic
pastoral scene, a river and road snaking back from lush foreground trees to low
hills scrimmed by a huge cumulus cloud.4
What was fascinating for my own tale of two performers was
the way the warring performance strategies mutated in response to each other.
To tidy the stage for a Red Cross inspection, the Nazis deported the deathly
ill patients in the infirmary, and charged other prisoners to lie between the
sheets and play the role of patient. To further the "paradise ghetto"
fiction, they attempted to co-opt the musical activity by forcing the prisoners
to prepare a concert. The prisoners countered by choosing the monumental Verdi
Requiem, intended as a requiem for the Reich. Even the report that narrated the
mise en scčne Hitler hoped to pull off seems to have been a piece of
performance art by inspectors who took in the reality, yet colluded with the
farce.
"Revisionism is an ancient practice," Pierre
Vidal-Naquet wrote, "but the revisionist crisis occurred in the West only
after the turning of the genocide into a spectacle, its transformation into
pure language."5 If rhetoric can precurse genocide, then it
makes sense that the title of Vidal-Naquet's book about revisionists, Assassins
of Memory, wrests a physical act of violence onto an abstract object via
catachresis, conflating truthtelling with preserving life, and rewriting with
killing.6 And it makes sense that there are those who would want
to keep storytelling on that subject off-limits to those who might do it wrong.
In the wake of the tidal wave of narrative abuse by the Nazis, and the subsequent
kitschy exploitation of Holocaust suffering by perpetrators and their cultural
inheritors, by non-survivors, by survivor-impersonators, and even by survivors
themselves, the act of narrating even a single detail of the Shoah seemed to
raise profound moral problems.
An article I came across by Naomi Seidman, a professor of
Jewish Culture at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, traces how Elie
Wiesel's 1956 Yiddish memoir, Un di velt hot geshvign, (And the World was
Silent), develops into his French and then English novel, Night.7
In the process of translation and revision, an existentialist
memoir that indicted the world's failure to respond to obscene crimes is
transformed into the revered masterpiece that assails God. As Seidman stated in
an interview with the Jewish Daily Forward, Wiesel "replaced an angry
survivoreager to get revenge and who sees life, writing, testimony as a
refutation of what the Nazis didwith a survivor haunted by death." The
title change seemed to encapsulate the transubstantiation of the Holocaust into
a theological event: the monumental crime the world failed to protest becomes
the ultimate existential condition of darkness. The overlay of mysticism Night
takes on is concentrated by the amplified themes of silence, which also dominate
the mountain of commentary on the book: God's silence in the face of evil, of
events so obscene as to become, literally, unspeakable, events that robbed the
murdered of speech. To this must be added one more type of silence. For if, as
Wiesel argues, Auschwitz is "as important as Sinai," then survivors
become not crime victims deserving justice, but prophets on the level of Moses,
to be met by the rest of us with silence and awe.
But the fundamental problem with sanctifying survivors is
that it plays into the way the Nazis spin-doctored their crimes with
Christianity's stock plot, that people or societies are made pure via
suffering. The prospect of injuring someone who has been abusively
misrepresented is abhorrent; at the same time, the first portal to
understanding an other is to try to empathetically project yourself into his or
her life. Taken to its logical conclusion, the premise of Holocaust theology
implies that no writer who is the beneficiary of a power differential ought
dare to imaginatively construct a member of a less powerful group, that Plath
ought not have written her poem, "Daddy," because it uses Nazi images
as analogies for a relationship between an American father and daughter, that
Tolstoy ought not have written Anna Karenina.8 But surely the
plain, ruthless, terrifying test of whether a white should be allowed to write
a novel about a black, whether a man can depict a woman, or a free American can
imagine a second-generation Jewish survivor, is whether the author does it
well, whether the author's understanding of the character convinces those he or
she purports to represent.9 Indeed, spending years writing about a
person you hold cultural power over can be some of the most laborious moral
work of all, the fundamental work of recognizing an "other." Tolstoy
intended to rain judgment upon the adulterous Anna, but his narrative revised
itself into empathy as he came to fully grasp how few options a thinking woman
in that society had.
In search of physical evidence, I travelled to Terezín. But
apart from the museum and a few Nazi street designations, the town looked like
the other run-down towns I had wandered through to get there. Still, all over
Europe, the battle for the story was still being waged. Sudeten Czechs were
still lobbying for German reparations, which had not yet been agreed to because
the descendants of the Sudeten Germans, a powerful Bavarian lobby, wanted the
Czechs first to apologize for the violent Czech expulsion of the Sudeten
Germans after the war. Handling the plastic slip over the Theresienstadt stamp
a Prague dealer tried to sell me, I shuddered at its pastoral peacefulness, at
touching this tiny artifact from the locus of evil—until my Czech friend,
an expert, rolled his eyes, clamped on my elbow, and led me out. It turned out
that the stamp is one of the most often faked pieces of Nazi memorabilia, that
what I was looking at was a crook's encounter with a color printer. I found
Naomi Seidman's careful scholarly analysis of Wiesel posted on a website of French
deniers as its banner of proof that Wiesel was a liar, the Holocaust a hoax. A
revisionist claimed Zyklon-B had never been used at Auschwitz, and sued
historian Deborah Lipstadt for assailing him. Then the case of Swiss writer
Binjamin Wilkomirski erupted.
Wilkomirski called his book, Fragments, a novelized memoir.
It had none of the daily grit, the petty happiness, the texture of inconsequent
life so evident in Imre Kertesz' brilliant account, Fateless. But it stood as a
haunting assemblage of incantatory shards about a boy in a camp, and was
powerful enough to be translated into nine languages. Wilkomirski's purported
personal history was soon assailed by a second-generation author who had
published a book about the same time that was widely ignored, and who resented
the attention Wilkomirski was getting. A battle ensued that exposed Wilkomirski
as a survivor impersonator, and generated comparisons with the case of Helen
Danville, the Australian writer who posed as Helen Demidenko to publish The Hand
That Signed the Papers, a novel that explained Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka
by imagining him as a Ukrainian Christian child whose family was burned alive
by Soviet commissars, who all just happened to be Jews.
Fragments was taken out of print, and Wilkomirski became a
symbol of moral turpitude and the World Jewish Conspiracy. He was said to have
made huge amounts of money—which the sales figures never
substantiated—on his hoax. But whether or not he exploited the Holocaust,
the man was tortured enough to be able to convey a boy's terrible odyssey in
the spare language of pain, and to write scenes I still remember years later.
Reading the book had brought back a recurrent dream I had as a child, not in
our family's worst moments but in the quiet spells between, of desperately
trying to crawl out from under our broken furniture to fly away as the sound of
Nazis marching got louder. One thing the sheer number of people still
processing the Holocaust tells us—the deniers resisting the inherited
guilt they cannot cope with, the traumatized survivor-impersonators who cannot
recognize a historical entity larger than their own pain, the historians
shoring up dams of facts against cultural and institutional mythologizing, the
German legislators who have made denying Auschwitz a crime, the Israeli
politicians, enacting policies that redefine the term post-traumatic-stress,
and the children of survivors (and of Nazis) working to invent lives in a void
of information—is that if the Holocaust can be used by anyone, it also
has the power to warp any vulnerable psyche that gets caught in its wake. |
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4.
At home, I began to watch oral histories on videotape. But
at the U.S. Memorial Holocaust Museum in Washington, a passing comment made by
a survivor in a cafeteria line made me understand how constrained the taped
narratives were by the interviewers' documentary agendas. I too had an agenda;
what I needed was life. I asked the Museum to send out a blind query, a letter
from me to all the Theresienstadt survivors they had on record, in which I
explained my project. If they were interested, survivors could write their name
and phone on a stamped postcard and mail it back.
As I waited for their return, a network of survivors
revealed itself around me. I learned that two elderly residents of my
forty-eight-unit building had been refugees who had lost their entire families.
An old friend offered the story of her survivor-uncle teaching her how you
crawl under a barbed wire fence (on your back, with your hands wrapped in rags,
to keep from getting cut). And the postcards began to pour in—amazingly,
I received nearly forty cards from all over the world. The generosity, the
willingness to dredge up old horrors, seemed extraordinary. A widower sent back
the card and denied knowing anything about his deceased wife's internment;
then, from another city, I received an anonymous package containing a xerox
copy of her hand-written Theresienstadt diary, complete with accounts of
exhausted trysts in the alcoves of Theresienstadt's walls.
Kertesz writes of the prisoners' greatest fear, that the
truth of history would not be told and recorded. Fifty years later, that
anxiety was palpable. After an interview with a woman in Denver, a therapist in
Buffalo who ran a survivor group that included the brother-in-law of the Denver
woman called the next morning at eight. Her client had heard that I was writing
about a Russian in Theresienstadt, she said, and wanted me to know that there
were no Russians in Theresienstadt. Flustered, I displayed what "credentials"
I could muster, explaining that as I'd written it, my narrator's father, who
was half Czech, had emigrated to Czechoslovakia in the thirties with his family
and been naturalized there; that I had located him in Theresienstadt because he
was a renowned pianist who had been picked up in Prague. She said, "I'll
get back to you," and the line went dead. I spent the rest of the day in
an uneasy sweat, as if waiting for airport security to check a suitcase whose
contents I suddenly could not vouch for. But I never heard from her again.
If I passed muster, my witnesses poured out their tales of
rape and murders, of disease and starvation and squalor, of casual aggression
and pointless humiliation, and of kindness and creativity amidst it all. If the
person was bitter I could join their energy, fueled by anger and by a vague
sense that I was performing tikkun by belatedly sharing their righteous
outrage. But stories told plainly and softly, by those who had shed their
carapace, induced a heavy, passive helplessness, a disgust at the inadequacy of
writing books that end up on sidewalk tables. When I stumbled on material that
sparked, the complacency evaporated. The feeling was always the same: the hairs
on the back of my neck would stand up as yet another horrible detail dropped
the floor out from under me, from under my notion of the inhumanity of which
human beings are capable. Then the rush of pathos was chilled by the writer
going to work, knowing I would use the detail. As the frisson faded, revulsion
set in.
For a while, the horror stories satisfied a desire I suppose
most traumatized people have, to have others confirm that the world is as bad
as you feel it is. But as the summer wore on, I went from one artists' colony
to another, slipping down a steep slope of depression from the cumulative
toxins my spirit was absorbing. Detached from friends and family and habit, I
spent long mornings in bed reading first-person narratives, while
simultaneously idly wondering whether it would hurt to drop a blowdryer in my
bathwater. Did my increasing revulsion towards the stories I was hearing signal
the smug denial of someone who can afford not to hear them? An alarm going off
in my psyche? Or a healthy discomfort with the realization that I was
vicariously feeding off others' misery? But in a way, isn't using other's
suffering what fiction writing is? Or does witnessing become use, and use
abuse, the minute the witness picks up a pen?10
Always, before, I had written my way out of despair. But the
fundamental evil of the Nazi's storytelling were the myths with which they
robbed their victims of their humanity and individuality. Ringing in my head
that summer was a line from Vico I have never forgotten, that every metaphor is
a little myth. I was standing in a burning building in the middle of minefield,
and I did not dare take a step.
Then I came across a remark in a book, that all of the
suicides the author had known had immersed themselves in the Holocaust for
months before their deaths, and caught my breath, forced to admit to myself
what the rope I had casually bought the week before, and tossed in the trunk of
my car, was for. The sheer fascination with how low humans could go gave way,
and my survival instinct, threatened by so much blackness, began to detach. My
listening changed. In the stories of survival, the concatenations of
"miracles" that concluded in an affirmation of the existence of a God
interested in saving one life only, in the attempts to salvage a theodicy from
the Holocaust in the founding of Israel, in the fables I was reading in Hasidic
Tales of the Holocaust—anecdotal proofs of God's omnipresent goodness
amidst the grim Nazi backdrop—I now heard happy endings that seemed as
absurdly upside-down as the motto Arbeit macht frei on the gates of
Auschwitz.11
From one day to the next I decided that, for me, the
Holocaust itself fell flat as fictional material. The dramatic structure seemed
all wrong. The Nazis hit victims like a deus ex machina out of a Greek play,
doling out terrible arbitrary fates that made character almost irrelevant. But
no matter how hard I tried to steer the interviews with survivors into the
present, from the Nazi evil, to how they coped with it, there I drew a blank.
The Holocaust completely overshadowed it. Whether or not they were
accurate—the work I was reading about the unreliability of memory was
undermining my ability to trust even simple statements—the stories I
heard were fixed and uninterruptable, like old recordings needing to be heard
to the end. By August, I was forgetting the phone appointments I had set up. I
saw little hope of completing my novel.
The last person I called was a woman whose father had been
the deputy mayor of a mid-size German city until he was deported. Like the
others, she had a tough-as-nails edge of bitterness; but though she was eager
to supply me with whatever details might be useful, she maintained a regal,
unsentimental posture.
"Na, ja," she said, in a thick accent, "It
wasn't that bad." Her father had died, she said, but he was sick. She had
sung in the children's choir. A few years after the war she returned to her
city, and they gave her a medal. Singing in the Theresienstadt choir had given
her an introduction to music she never otherwise would have received, she said.
Her biting, sardonic tone sliced the sentiment out of whatever she recounted,
and she made mincemeat of what she called "career survivors," the
people who published cookbooks of Theresienstadt recipes, and the like. In our
next conversation I asked about the meaning of being Jewish. "I am a
German," she replied. "Only the Nazis made me a Jew." "You
were never tempted to explore your religion?" I asked. "All what I
know of being Jewish is the Holocaust. Not the most inviting initiation."
She had visited Germany several times, so I asked if she had ever returned to
Theresienstadt. She told me a story of crawling around the crematorium there,
looking for its brand name, buried in the grass.
Though she was impeccably polite, her steady, assured tone
convinced me that my interest was lurid, my desire to explore Holocaust trauma
a waste of time. I wanted to thank her for driving the last nail in the coffin
of a dead-end book, but I was too ashamed to tell her that her time had been so
wasted. So as our last conversation wound down, I said that if I were ever to
publish, I would mention her in the acknowledgements.
For the first time, the conversation came to a dead stop.
"That, never," she finally said, her voice suddenly hard.
"Fine," I said, "but I'm curious, why not?"
My daughter was a cellist," she began.
In all the hours we had spoken—I had told her the plot
of my book—she had never mentioned children. Now a story nearly identical
my narrator's poured out. The gifted daughter was homeless, and mentally ill;
though she had some college education, she was now living on the street,
dragging her cello with her. For several years she had called only
occasionally. "It is nonsense," the mother said dismissively.
"She refuses to seek treatment because she knows what 'they' do to people
like her." If her daughter were to come upon her mother's name in a book,
my confidante was sure that her daughter would sue us both for having stolen
her life.
I hung up, stunned. I had been researching the Holocaust the
way children listen to the horror in the tales of the Brothers' Grimm: lured in
and chilled by somebody else's terror, happy to be safe. Now, by accident, I
had stumbled upon the edge of a clearing, the clearing my confidante had
circled around for twenty hours of conversation. It was the site of my original
questions, about how you choose the lessons of self-protection to take with you
from a catastrophe. Now the question took on an almost terrifying urgency. For
there seemed an almost inverse relationship between how far away my confidante
had pushed her trauma, the flatness of her non-story, and the frightening inner
life that had grown in her daughter. Now I had permission, not just because I
imagined that daughter to be the person I was writing for, but because not speaking,
the subject of my book and problem of its writing, could have consequences as
devastating as speech. After years of preparing, I wrote the end of my book in
four days. |
5.
In a way, all childhood can be seen as a version of
Stockholm Syndrome, the process by which a person who has been abducted comes
to sympathize with and take on the world view of his captors. The recognition
of utter dependency on an unreliable caretaker is too terrible to bear, and the
only way to adapt—to order one's universe—is to adopt the narrative
that makes such impossible conditions necessary. All parents have undigested
trauma—by Freud's definition, trauma is exactly that which cannot be
assembled into narrative form—that they keep from their children. But the
things they harp on, prohibit, or caution against cast shadows, like those in
Plato's cave, of a world that needs to be coped with. In the case of the second
post-Holocaust generation, the beast casting the shadows was huge. Often the
survivors' task—of protecting themselves from the trauma of the past,
while protecting their children from knowledge of it—was simply
impossible.
What does it mean to be a child of Job? Children who cannot
understand distant, unavailable parents try to connect by fantasizing into the void.
The psychological literature about the second generation abounds with young
children who starved themselves, who interned themselves in tiny spaces, who
reproduce the conditions of their parents' trauma, so as to come closer to
their parents and understand the reason for their suffering. The phenomenon,
which a psychoanalyst named Bergmann coined "concretisation," is
defined by psychoanalyst Ilany Kogan as the compelling unconscious need
children have to recreate and relive the parents' traumatic experiences, as if
these were their own stories.12 In Kogan's renowned account of
eight case studies of the children of survivors, The Cry of Mute Children,13
she documents second generation children of survivors who have themselves
operated on, destroy relationships, or accidentally kill their own children,
because they are living out—or fighting against—some imagined
scenario from their parents' lives. Reading Kogan, it was hard to know what was
the most disturbing aspect: that survivors could pass on the trauma of the
camps, even while trying to protect their children from it? The way the
second-generation children, trapped in their parents' time, could continue to
damage themselves and others? Or the Herculean task of the analyst, charged
with luring her patients back into the present?
More than anything else my book turned out to be about the
task of living after trauma, about accepting that there is no mastery of the
past, or another's experience, while also facing the stark ethical imperative
that is adulthood: to extricate ourselves from the warped narratives we inherit
in order to avoid doing damage to others in the present. I wrote my way out of
a past that was not my own by hurling myself back into its reality, in a
process not unlike that of the second-generation children Kogan describes. Did
I have the right to enter the survivors' territory, to try and renact the scene
of the crime? Imaginatively entering another's emotional world is the basis of
all fiction. But whether it is ethical depends on whether the writer also takes
on the job of the analyst—if that empathy yields not just a fusing, but a
blunt recognition of how different that other is.
In the history of story, the ways the Nazis mythologized
their demons, and disorted and obliterated their versions of events, stand as
the ur-caution of the damage narrating an other can do. The question of who has
permission to write another is irrelevant. Writers write themselves free of
what holds them captive. The trick is not to take captives in writing the story
that sets you free.
[++ end ++]
|
FOOTNOTES
1 Terezín was known mostly for its political prison, which
held Gavrilo Princip, who triggered World War I by assassinating the Hapsburg
heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
2 Wiesel, "Trivializing Memory," from his From the
Kingdom of Memory: Reminiscences (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 166.
3 These were leftovers; objects of any value were sent to
the Reich.
4 See Frantizek Benes, Mail Service in the Ghetto Terezín,
1941–1945 (Prague: Profil, 1996).
5 Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Assassins of Memory: Essays on the
Denial of the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).
6 I use "catachresis" in its Quintilian
interpretation, as a way to adapt existing terms where an appropriate term does
not exist.
7 Naomi Seidman, "Elie Wiesel and the Scandal of Jewish
Rage," Jewish Social Studies (Fall 1996): 1-21.
8 See James E. Young's probing discussion of Plath in
Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of
Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
9 A recent review assailed black novelist Colson Whitehead
for placing a heroine and not a hero at the center of his subtle, sharp
allegory on race. But surely the problem with The Intuitionist was not that
Whitehead dared to add gender to his cultural analysis, but that he didn't
explore it enough, did not recognize how different a female character actually
would be.
10 Hayden White discusses the problem in great depth in
"Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth," in Saul
Friedländer, Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final
Solution" (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
11 Yaffa Eliach, Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust (New
York:Vintage, 1998).
12 M.S. Bergmann, "Thoughts on the super-ego pathology
of survivors and their children", in M.S. Bergmann and M.E. Jucovy, eds.,
Generations of the Holocaust (New York: Basic Books, 1982), 287-311.
Originally Published in December 2001/January 2002 issue of
the Boston Review |