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The Future of the Past

Countermemory and Postmemory in Contemporary

A m erican Post-H olocau st N arratives

EFRAIM SICHER

R em em ber the Futu re, Im agine the Past Carlos Fuentes

AN AMERICAN HOLOCAUST

Collective memory cannot be divorced from its construction in culture.

As the Broadway version of The Diary of Anne Frank did so pheno-

menally, plays, novels and movies generate cultural perceptions in ways

that are particularly problematic and that stimulate further media

reworking of the memory, which may produce stronger images th an

documentary presentation of facts and testimony by witnesses, educators

and historians. In the U nited States the H olocaust entered popular

culture as an American experience, first through the TV miniseries

H olocaust (1978) and more recently in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List

(1993), which gave t he definitive ph oto -realism tou ch to a H ollywood

story of the morally ambiguous but can-do hero who pits his wits against

absolute evil.1 The same year, the H olocaust became accessible in the

N ational H olocaust Museum in Washington D C alongside the nation’s

oth er museums and mon uments.

2

The question behind what is frequent-ly called the “Americanization of the H olocaust” is what shapes t he

memory when it has become a cultural artifact with tenuous relevance to

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th e histo rical events.3

What are the implications for the writing of history

when the past is perceived as a confused myth within conflicting

discourses? “Witnessing throu gh the imagination” has been seen as a

legitimate way for t hose who were not th ere to approach the H olocaust,4

but what happens when it can only be understood in an effort of the

imagination?

The no vels, plays and m emoirs discussed in this essay illustrate these

burning issues with material which is often disturbing for its provocative

or shocking use of H olocaust memory. These are texts by seriouscontemporary authors who cannot be lightly accused of trivializing the

H olocaust. Among them are children of survivors who are mot ivated t o

promote remembrance as well as to combat revisionist denial and whose

narratives are to be understood as formative in their own search for

ident ity. Yet the growing legitimacy of fiction that claims to represent

the H olocaust and its aftermath must make us examine t he consequences

of hypermediated cultural constructions of the past for identity and

histo rical truth . What Marianne H irsch calls “po stm emory” resurfaces as

a revenant in the post-H olocaust generation, “a powerful and very

particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object

or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imagina-

tive investment and creation.”5

James You ng has described postm emory

as a representation of generational distance from history, a “vicariouspast” which the po st-H olocaust generation can only access throu gh the

imagination.6

If there will soon be few left with personal experience of

the H olocaust, it is h igh time to ask what kind of memory is being

handed down and what kind of post-H olocaust Jewish identity it is

helping to create. Are we moving toward a working-through of the past

or a sick obsession locked in compulsive repetition?

At the end of the twentieth centu ry there was a surge of H olocaust

memo ry, partly because o f new evidence of complicity in N azi genocide

by Vichy France (highlighted by the Barbie, Touvier and Papon trials)

and claims for restitution of the victims’ assets (gold, safe deposits,

insurance policies, art collections) or compensation for slave-labor from

large industrial corporations. Amid th e collapse of t ot alitarian ideologies,

delegitimization of the nation-state and skepticism toward the politicaluse of the past, the close of the millennium coincided with retrospective

anniversaries (particularly of Kristallnacht in 1988, the Warsaw Ghetto

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Efraim Sicher

uprising in 1993 and the liberation of the camps in 1995), and then

came the fin de siècle itself, with its apocalyptic fixation on calamity and

death.7 The reopening of old wounds, half a century after the end of

World War II, should have awakened national consciences to a full, if

painful, accounting and to a reexamination of the historical record, yet

public amnesia has not ended nor have racist attacks and new genocides

been prevented, despite the media splash of D avid Irving’s libel case

against Deborah Lipstadt or Pope John Paul’s conciliatory statements on

the Church’s silence du ring the H olocaust. Resentment at the burden of guilt (Europe’s “bad debt” to the Jews)

8and neo-N azi denial of the gas

chambers, as well as attempts in Germany and elsewhere to “n ormalize”

the past, are just some of the factors in the tendency to relativize the

H olocaust, while official “remembrance” which respectfully memorializes

the victims in words and stone can itself be a form of closure that

attempts to be done with the past and repress it in its very inscription.9

Appropriation of the H olocaust for all kinds of agendas means it is now

likely the H olocaust will be met as a trivialized tro pe, as a representation

of a m emory or as a memory of a memory in a twilight museum culture

of simulacra and hypertext.10

Perhaps it says something about American

culture if it takes films like Schindler’s List to awaken conscience and

consciou sness of the H olocaust and if box-office success can acquire th e

necessary notoriety to do it.Th e H olocaust h as indisput ably become an ubiquitous presence in

American culture. The fact that what this means is disputed so heatedly

shows how much H olocaust memory is embedded in American ident ity

politics and how much it is affected by the shaping of popular culture,

rather than the historical record. If there is a pattern in the shaping of

the memory as the H olocaust passes ou t of a lived experience and

recedes into history, it soun ds more like a survivalist creed in a post-

modern world of sex and violence than the legacy of the survivors who

had somehow maintained their human dignity and preserved a Jewish

identity.11

This seems to be the bottom line of After (1996), a novel by

Melvin Jules Bukiet, a child of survivors who takes up the story left off

by the surviving witnesses—what came after liberation of the camps by

the Americans. What came after is a postmodern free-for-all that makesnonsense of any moral or spiritual redemption and presents the post-

H olocaust world as a chaos devoid of law in which all moral and person al

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identity is lost. The contemporary writer is conscious of living “after” in

a post-historical situation in which the values of civilization have been

exposed as savage by the shrunken heads of Buchenwald, and the writer

must exclaim with Con rad’s M arlowe “ O h, the horror!” at the daily

atrocity concealed by the façade of Western culture. We recall that at the

end of Civilization and Its Discontents Freud expressed concern about

the rise of Thanatos, against the background of the rise of Nazism

around 1931, which seemed to him to question any confidence in the

victory of Eros, though it is an open question whether the Nazi genocideis to be understood as exceptional, a hiccup in normalcy, or routine

barbarism which exists cheek by jowl with high culture.12

THE INVENTION OF MEMORY

Th e cult status of the H olocaust might allay fears that t he m emory of the

event is fading, but the more unpalatable implication is that the

H olocaust has a “future.” The H olocaust has produced an excess in

collective memory, a weighting that cannot be objectively balanced,

regardless of quantitative knowledge of the event or available informa-

tion. The historian Charles Maier has complained of a “surfeit of

memo ry,” which h e attributes to new ways of constructing ethn icity andcollective identity in the United States that are based on a universalized

claim to recognition of suffering.13

Th e invention of memo ry, of course, is characteristic of an American

search for a heritage to bolster common values in a diverse multicul-

turism, as well as to recoup the nation’s founding fathers’ lost ideals of

liberty and human rights and to assuage guilt for African slavery or

persecution of N ative Americans, thou gh it is also a symptom of the

revision of the past to serve the different needs of various groups wishing

to adapt national and personal origins to changing political and global

paradigms. In the anonymous concrete jungles of industrial urban

societies, the past is often a product of the heritage industry that feeds

on a nostalgia for a lost pastoral innocence of nature and community.14

The past can be pliable and adaptable, fluid and opaque, polysemous anddeconstructed, but it has achieved an importance which has shifted from

remembrance of time to memorialization in sites of memory.15

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Efraim Sicher

No nation can have a future without acknowledgment of its origins

and development or without some understanding of its past, but there

is no clear division between th e pub lic and private narratives of formative

events when the collective identity inscribed in the rituals and texts of

memorialization is scorched by family or person al memory. Th e person al

story and the national are interconnected. The annual reading of the

Passover H aggadah, for example, has t raditionally been elaborated by

later histo rical narratives which internalize the redemptive message o f the

Exodus for the participants, whether it is the Ro man persecutions (in thetale of the rabbis seated in their Passover feast at Bnei Brak), the

Destruction of the Temple (the mourning rite of eating a boiled egg),

exile and persecutions through the ages (former customs of leaving an

empty chair for Soviet or Syrian Jews) or the H olocaust (the reading of

testimony such as the ad hoc prayer over bread in Bergen-Belsen,

Passover 1 942). Post-H olocaust H aggadahs supplement the rich overlay

of commentary with allusions in graphics or photographs, in addition to

“alternative” readings, to the H olocaust and to parallels with other

genocides or racial discrimination, as well as with the contemporary

redemption of the Jewish people in the State of Israel. The personal

meaning of these h istorical experiences is built into the H aggadah text

and accompanying rituals with its reenactment of historical events in the

interactive mode of questions and answers, while the family framework of the Passover feast underscores the absence of missing memb ers at the

reunion and gives occasion for reminiscences and the intergenerational

transmission of memories, which forges a link in the chain of the

redemptive n arrative of the H aggadah. Significant ly, Bukiet ridicules any

idea of redemption in After when he describes a mock seder in the

liberated camps, whereas Thane Rosenbaum, in the title story of his

collection Elijah Visible (1996), satirizes the cultural attrition of

assimilated American Jews for whom the seder has no meaning until the

son of Holocaust survivors forces on them the figure of the Holocaust

from their European past, a visible Elijah who reminds them who they

are.

It is in narrative that memory is inscribed. The Biblical obligation

to tell the story of the exodu s from bon dage as a cond ition of cont inuityhas proved stronger than public memorials and official discourse,

especially when the visible ruins of an ancient culture stand as mut e

60




archaeological artifacts or museum exhibits, and sites of memory have

been neglected, destroyed or altered. The vanishing of a vibrant East

European past has, however, given new impetus in recent years to the

need for surrogate memory space and we have seen the erection of

num erous memorials and museums, while the kaddish-sayers and children

of survivors function as walking matsevot (gravestones), carriers of

memo ry in commu nal gatherings and lecture halls.16

Some communities

have gone so far as to incorporate into the confirmation ceremony of

bar/ bat-mitzvah th e adoption by the child o f a H olocaust victim, so thatH olocaust memory becomes part of a Jewish coming-of-age ritual, an

initiation into a religion of death and destruction rather than into a faith

of redemption.17

For Jews since the Destruction of the Temple the remembrance of

destruction has been woven into the ritual practices and memorialization

in home and synagogue (the miniature Temple). Yet increasingly

remembrance has been marked by pilgrimage to graves or the sites of

destruction themselves. Since around 198 9, a “recovery” has become

possible of lost Jewish spaces, and they are being marketed on a tourist

itinerary from Toledo to Prague, from Worms to Auschwitz. American

Jews, too, had to come to terms with their past as the need for the

preservation of testimony became a matter of urgency with the passing

of the generation of survivors. Furthermore, the general fad for oralhistory and its sponsorship by academic or communal institutions

concerned with the documentary record of immigration and the location

of the Jews in the American “melting pot”—now more a multi-ethnic

casserole than the cauldron in which identity was dissolved—inevitably

focuses on the H olocaust survivors and reinscribes their East European

Jewish past within American Jewish identity.

“M anagement” of the collective past is parodied in Erica Jong’s

novel, In vent ing Mem ory (1997), a randy comedy typical of countless

family sagas which reclaim a past of pogroms and suicidal refugees. It

turns out it is not so easy to decide whether the American Jewish

experience is something to celebrate or whether Judaism is a gift of

suffering. Should one be optimistic about prospects for survival in the

twenty-first century or doubtful if there will be a future for Jewish life inview of the ever-present dangers of anti-Semitism and assimilation?

Pessimists might see America as a narrow parenthesis in a long history of

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Efraim Sicher

persecution and pogroms. In either case, Jewish identity has become

significant in ways it was not a few decades ago, and it can no longer be

defined in terms of community or even family (despite the half-remem-

bered Yiddish proverbs and advice passed down by deceased grand-

mothers).

The coun termemory of Jong’s “inventing memory” tries to enable

identity in ways that challenge communal hegemony of the past. What

Jong does is to replace the traditional American Jewish immigrant with

an image of the radical rebel, an imaginary feminist the American Jewishimmigrant novelist Anzia Yezierska would n ever h ave dreamed of. She is

a nymphomaniac virago—the “bad Jewish girl” of contemporary

fiction—who dwells in the high circles of anarchists and modernists

among the intellectual élite of Parisian bohemia. H obnobbing with James

Joyce, Edith Wharton and H enry Miller, she is driven by a comb ination

of erotic desire and envy of anti-Semitic WASPish America—the very

envy that, in Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, drives Alex Portnoy’s

libido as well as his self-hatred!18

The urge to remember, to possess the

past and be possessed by it, to belong to a time and place, can be

destructive if the H olocaust is t he defining moment of personal and

collective memory, and Jong knows there is no easy balance with the

opposite tendency to forget and live unburdened by the memory of

un bearable horro r, which would be an un forgivable victo ry for H itler, asshe herself has remarked.

19

It is the H olocaust above all that has revived the long-term

collective memory and made a search for Jewish identity attractive when

ethn icity is politically correct.20

A H olocaust fits into an American

ident ity that is multicultural without seeming to embrace a single ident ity

and that is not particularistic in its universal application of Jewish ideals

of to lerance and toleration. Th ere is, alongside authentic ident ity rooted

in Judaism and practice of its living tradition, a tendency to internalize

the status of victim and create an alternate Jewishness out of a legacy of

suffering, a sort of sacred witnessing to the martyrdom of the six million

which motivates a commitment to human rights causes and a search for

spirituality in the New Age. It is perhaps the very comfort of contempo-

rary America that promotes the thought that had one been there, inEurope, one would also have been a victim—were not German Jews

acculturated and emancipated when disaster overtook them? This

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thought may puncture the complacent illusion of safety more than a few

gun shots in Chicago, the shooting of Jewish kindergarten children in Los

Angeles or the burning of a San Diego synagogue, just to cite some

examples of white supremacist militancy in 1999.

The agenda, notes a recent commentator, is being set by the

postwar baby-boomers in the wake o f the rediscovery of eth nic root s and

a feeling of security in a national collective identity afforded by affluence

and belonging.21

Th e eno rmous impact of radical student activism in the

era of the civil rights movement and the growth of marginalized pressuregroups, along with the collective t rauma of the Vietnam veterans and the

pub lic attention accorded homosexuals, victims of child abuse and other

disadvantaged minorities who have “come out of the closet,” have

boosted the efforts of Elie Wiesel and other survivors to transform the

status of victim from humiliated degradation to moral leadership and an

almost heroic pride, and this in a macho society that worships prowess

and success.22 Th e children of survivors and memb ers of th eir generation

who feel they have b een tou ched by the H olocaust trauma have entered

a pub lic competition of victimhood, and, in his controversial book on the

topic, Peter Novick explains that this, rather than new-found religious

faith or various forms of nontraditional identity, is why Jews identified

so much in the 1990s with the Holocaust.23

IMAGINING THE HOLOCAUST

What distinguishes n arratives of the aftereffects of the H olocaust from

narratives of rape victims, domestic or child abuse and war casualties,

including witnesses of atrocities, is, first, the total uprooting from

community and familiar landscapes and, second, the compulsive return

to the past in order to recover both a personal and ethnic identity that

has been wiped out together with the memory of the trauma. For many

there are neither graves nor any family photographs of the dead.

Children hidden in the H olocaust may have been too young to

remember their original families and identities. Mourning work becomes

well-nigh impossible, while the psychological scars of the trauma leavetheir mark on the next generation.

24

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Efraim Sicher

The destruction of an East European Jewish world one never knew

creates a void in collective identity which demands to be filled, for the

memory of the post-H olocaust generation is of not having a memory.

The transmission of the repressed past leaves a hole in memory or an

absent memo ry, la m ém oire trouée in the memorable phrase of the

second-generation French author H enri Raczymow,25

for it is a memory

of that blank which forms the lacuna between before and after . T h e

unmentionable taboo of the H olocaust is a blank because it was a

memory of no knowledge that was handed down to him. Raczymowbelieves he has no right to speak of what he did not experience, but the

m ém oire trouée forms such an abyss in his consciousness that its

psychological burden forces him to write. Raczymow regards his writing

as diasporic in the sense that much writing is a form of exile, but it is, to

borrow from an essay about children of survivors by Nadine Fresco, “la

diaspora des cendres.”26

In the D iaspora of Ashes, the impossible att empt

to track down the roots of identity forces him to embark on an

imaginary journey to the destroyed and vanished past of Poland, along

the endless railway tracks of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, in order to

recreate the void that Raczymow conceives of as necessary for creation,

akin to the cabalistic notion of tsimtsum .27

“Absent memory” might be a trope for much writing that is

impelled by the violent eradication of a past culture or of an entiregeneration, so that “invention replaces recall.”

28H owever, children of

survivors who grew up hearing their parents’ memories of their birth-

place might equally sense an exilic diaspora in an imagined but far from

empty memo ry that for them constitut es a viable Jewish ident ity.29

Such

an ethnicity can identify with the memory of loss and suffering in ways

that preclude exclusivity, for example by identification with marginalized

racial groups and victims of discrimination or harassment .30

Since the

trauma has not been witnessed personally, it can be documented at most

in photographs, historical documents and oral or written testimony (of

which there has been a veritable flood, though surely a fraction of what

has been lost), so that their own “belated stories” have been evacuated

by the traumatized lives of others which cannot be fully understood yet

have shaped those who come after indirectly and relentlessly as anunspoken presence.

31

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As M aurice H albwachs wrote in his pioneering study of collective

memory before he too fell victim to the camps, it is in communities and

families that memory is determined; once the family has disappeared,

only th e names of the dead remain and social pressure silences their

remembrance.32 O n the other hand, as Yael Zerubavel has shown,

countermemory by individuals or marginalized groups may reshape

national or communal ident ity and put changing political and ideological

agendas in tension with the public commemorative narrative.33

The

collective remembrance of the six million has been enabled only when ithas been possible to inscribe the memory into national or group

identities, but this has come about because of shifts in the construction

of identity in general and of Jewish identity in particular within the

American nation, as well as because of the decline of organized Jewish

commun al identity (mostly due to high rates of assimilation and exogamy

but also as a result of alternative Jewish lifestyles). With the passing of

the years, moral identification with the victim and the heritage of

suffering have remained about the only means of identity of the

“imaginary Jew” portrayed by Alain Finkielkraut, who speaks from

experience when he criticizes his generation for living in a “novelistic

space” of what they imagine to be the vanished East European past of

their parents.34

In the American context, then, one might take heed of thedistinction made by Saul Friedländer, speaking of the limitations of

historians when grappling with a mythicized past and a repressed trauma

such as the H olocaust, between comm on memo ry, which blocks out the

past or brings it to closure, and deep memory, which lingers on in the

background, a persistent reminder of what Primo Levi called the

“memory of offense”: “Any attempt at building a coherent self founders

on the intractable return of the repressed and recurring deep memory.”35

Citing Art Spiegelman’s Maus, in which the second-generation artist tries

to recover the past from his father, Friedländer asks whether, when all

the survivors have passed away and there will be no further personal

testimony, the H olocaust will continue to defy any attempt to give it

meaning.

In the debates over writing about t he H olocaust, many scholars andcritics have agreed that it is precisely fiction that can overcome the

historiographical impasse that flounders on th e unrepresentability of what

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Efraim Sicher

Friedländer and others argue is a “limit-event.”36

In the few lines

devoted to the H olocaust in his seminal study of Jewish historical

memo ry, Yerushalmi wrote that h e h ad “ no doubt whatever its image is

being shaped not at the historian’s anvil, but in the novelist’s crucible.”37

It is literature that has at least since the Romantics enabled the ethical

mom ent which compels reader response to pain and suffering, which

summons the imaginative empathy of affinity with the Other. Memory,

which can be preserved only by being encoded in narratives whose

meaning will endure, requires a narrating consciousness who makes senseout of the confusion of history and makes the reader imagine being there;

in making this point, the Yale critic Geoffrey H artman quot es John

H ersey, auth or of a fictional accoun t of t he Warsaw Ghett o, The Wall

(1950): “Imagination would not serve; only memory could serve. To

salvage anything that would be worthy of the subject, I had to invent a

memory.”38

This invention of a personal memory, a remembering

persona, is based on facts and documents, but only their fictional

narrativization into poetic form could help the reader imagine a true

experience not one’s own and especially one a galaxy removed on planet

Auschwitz.

Many children of H olocaust survivors and their contemporaries have

turned to fiction and memoir writing as part of their coming to terms

with the “unmasterable past” in order to create narratives of personal andcollective identity. The best-known texts, David Grossman’s See Under:

Love (19 86; English 1989) and Spiegelman’s Maus (198 6), have become

signatures for second-generation awareness and identity, althou gh

Grossman is not himself a son of survivors and despite the problematic

status of Maus between autobiography and testimony, comic book and

memoir.39

The children of survivors are in any case a heterogeneous

group, and it is debatable whether they share a common pathology.

Th ane Rosenbaum has posited the variety of second-generation responses

in Elijah Visible that ranges from denial to overidentification in different

experiences of a post-H olocaust American Adam. Th e behavior of Adam

Posner in “Cattle-Car Complex,” for example, is so determined by his

H olocaust complex that he interprets being trapped inside a stalled

elevator as a H olocaust situation, while in “Romancing the YohrzeitLight,” Adam the artist gives hedonistic preference to a luscious Aryan

blonde over mourning work and the meaning of the past. Common to

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all these stories about second-generation Adams is the barrier of

communication between them and t heir parents which makes their legacy

of suffering, as Andrew Furman observes, not a memory but something

that must be imagined, not an identity but a search for one.40

The

“children of trauma,” as Rosenbaum calls them in his novel Second H an d

Smoke (1999), are nonetheless not free to choose their destiny because

th ey are “ survivors of survivors” already shaped, bred and maimed by the

H olocaust, defined by the damage which has made their families

dysfunctional.

41

They must always return to the primary wound. Rosen-baum’s story of Duncan Katz, named like the author for Scottish royalty,

is a sto ry of inbred parano iac insecurities which tu rn everyth ing in his life

into traumatic aftereffects of the H olocaust. Trained by his mother to be

a Jewish Rambo, he avenges his parent s in violent rage. Jewish empo wer-

ment in America does not, however, ease the pain, and he blows his job

as a public prosecutor in the Office of Special Investigations, charged

with indicting N azi war criminals hiding under assumed ident ities as U S

citizens. There seems no way out of the self-destructive cycle until he

meets his half-brother in Poland, who represents the other half of the

second-generation personality, a yoga guru and (symbolically) keeper of

Warsaw’s Jewish cemetery, who teaches him tranqu illity and peace of

mind as an effective tool for coming to terms with the world and with

his Jewish identity.N arratives of traumatic memory b y children of H olocaust survivors

do not necessarily cont ain material that is clinically neurotic, but the

second and th ird generations may feel affected if on ly by association with

the lives of the survivors and with their stories which become part of

their own conscious awareness of the world around them. Novels, films

and plays by second-generation writers, notwithstanding the absence of

autobiographical experience, portray sympt oms similar to compulsive

repetition of an obsessive fascination with H olocaust-related traumatic

material in ways th at do not always distinguish between transgenerational

transferal of Post-Traumatic Stress D isorder (PTSD ) and a t ransposition

of the survivors’ story in an imaginary ident ification with the H olocaust

past. When, agon izing o ver his attempt to understand the H olocaust and

his relationship with his father, Art declares in Maus that he is not obsessed by the H olocaust, he confesses t hat as a kid he fantasized

Zyklon B was coming out of the shower instead of water and had

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Efraim Sicher

nightmares about SS men taking away the Jewish kids in class; in a way,

he wishes he had been in Auschwitz because his lack of knowledge

divides him from his parents and makes him feel guilty he had such an

easy life.42

The identification is consciously made, and it is an identifica-

tion with a universal archetype of suffering, as well as an acting out of

the role of the survivor or of the rescue of a family member (as Art does

in Maus).43

Drama and film are a case in point because they perform roles and

act out dilemmas. Like some installation art and museum exhibits, theviewer is placed within the space of the Holocaust and forced into an

imaginative identification with the victims or survivors. The enactment

and performance of memory are attempts to reincarnate or resurrect the

past in the present, whether the here-and-nowness of testimony in

Lanzmann’s Shoah or the controversial attempt to issue visitors to the U S

N ational H olocaust Museum in Washington D C with the identity cards

of victims.44 Spiegelman’s Maus is another kind of visualized performance

that also mediates witness testimony through a “middle voice.” Th ese are

“modes of enactment—even reanimation—through which the self, the

‘ego’ of the ‘one who was not there’ now takes on a leading role as an

active presence.”45

Such mediation of immediacy has all the urgency of the belatedness

of “vicarious witnessing” which makes the viewer or reader a witness of events that have not been personally experienced and are now in danger

of being “revised” out of history or “normalized” into a neutral and

sanitized past.46

Worse, the survivors may be labeled according to

expectations of courage and heroism, a stereotyping that H ank

Greenspan, a psychologist and son of survivors, has countered in his

staging of survivor testimony, Remnants (1992), in an attempt to make

us not only hear survivor testimony but also to listen, to “bear witness”

without reliving their nightmares and to think through the meaning of

their “legacy.”47

Another attempt to reflect on the meaning of survival

is Sybille Pearson’s U nfin ished Stories (1992) in which a Jewish family

faces the revelation of the price of their grandfather’s survival. The

revelation of a repressed past is at the center of Arye Shaw’s off-

Broadway The Gathering (1999), one of the first successful plays to puton stage the dynamics of the transmission of memory from the survivor

to the grandchildren without stereotyping the H olocaust victim as a

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crazy old eccentric wrapped up in silence (as in Cynth ia O zick’s The

Shawl and her play based on it, Blue Light, 1994). The Gathering is set

against the background of the Bitburg affair, a botched attempt at

reconciliation between President Reagan and the Ch ancellor of West

Germany in a cemetery where Waffen SS officers were bu ried, an incident

th at became a catalyst for renewed debate over H olocaust memory.48

The

survivor’s son is required to attend if he does not want to wreck his

career working for the President’s Office, and his accommodation with

Realpolitik is a willful act of forgetting, of not dealing with the traumasof the past. H owever, his father, the survivor, almost sabotages the

historic meeting by mounting a private protest together with his

grandson, with whom he has secretly flown to Germany. This is the bar-

mitzvah boy’s unconventional confirmation ceremony, and his recitation

of th e prayer for t he dead becomes more m eaningful than the recitation

from the Torah which he was supposed to be preparing. The old man

has been modeling a bust of Mohammed Ali, symbol of strength and

power, but he fails pathetically to wrestle with his own hate unt il his

encounter at Bitburg with a West German sentry who makes him

understand that his enemy is also human and also capable of empathy.

Altho ugh the resolution of complex issues of hate and reconciliation

is contrived for the stage, the play makes an honest effort to symbolically

act out the undesirability of both self-enclosure in the shell of the pastand repression of the past in forgetting. In the cathartic moment of

encounter with an enemy who is not mythical but human and real, the

survivor confesses secrets about his H olocaust past and works through his

guilt at the abandonment of his lost family. The working-through

confronts silence and repression within the family and, in the context of

the American stage, respond s to H olocaust denial, a m otivation and a

theme of Ozick’s Blue Light, a play that places the issue at the center of

its gravitational and aesthetic integrity.

THE RESCUE OF MEMORY

When there are blanks in the family photo album, gaps in the extendedor close family and no graves, th e second generation easily identifies with

the survivor who was “cheated out of his parents’ death.”49

As Wiesel has

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Efraim Sicher

remarked, stories cannot revive the dead, but they can rescue them from

oblivion: “The enemy wanted to create a society purged of their

presence, and I have brought some of them back.” 50 The Jewish writers

of the second generation are in effect attempting a rescue of memory,

and in the return to a past which they have not experienced they are

reconstructing their biographies and life histories in narratives of identity

which can then be transmitted to the next generation. Their return

journey, real or imagined, confronts the past in order to do the necessary

mourning for working-through, but it also counteracts silence in orderto start anew in knowledge of a real past. In order to achieve a reabsorp-

tion of their own selves into the socializing body which was perceived as

having rejected or denied their existence, they must re-member

themselves into a past that is fragmented and can be recovered only by

painstaking research or in the imagination.

The search for a “usable past” which requires sites o f memory

(Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire) has led to the reinvention of the shtetl

and has ensured t he popu larity of documentary reconstruction of th e life

of a destroyed community before and during the Holocaust (such as

Theo Richmond’s 1996 Konin or Yaffa Eliach’s 199 8 chronicle of

Eishyshok/ Eisiskes, There Once Was a World , as well as her Tower of

Faces at the US National Holocaust Museum and her planned recon-

structed shtetl at Rishon-le-Zion, Israel). Memoir writing has been afavorite way of building a bridge to the past and to the lost community

of the parents’ memory and it bridges the relationship with the father or

mother, as in Maus, H elen Epstein’s Where She Came From (1997) or

Michael Skakun’s On Burning Ground (1999).51

But there are also

entirely invented memo ries, like M. J. Bukiet’s Tales of an Imaginary

Childhood (1992), Rebecca Goldstein’s Mazal (1995) and Joseph

Skibell’s A Blessing on the Moon (1997). It is as if, like so many

contemporary stories of lost childhoods or lost countries, identity needs

to be anchored in a time and place, a country of the mind which reclaims

as one’s own the past that has been violated or erased. In the case of the

H olocaust, however, the violence is so unbearable and erasure is so

complete that the archaeology of the past has to be excavated, as in the

central metaphor of Canadian poet Anne Michaels’ award-winning firstnovel, Fugitive Pieces (1996), in order to reconstitute anything resem-

bling a human identity.52

70




For some of those claiming a native or ethnic past, the experience

of H olocaust survivors provides an inspirational model, but when

collective memory gets hijacked by the media and submerged in a

D isneyworld culture, genocides and atrocities become trivialized and

deflated to the extent that they are emptied of meaning.53 There is an

additional danger that these invented memories could end up as

simulacra whose content is adjustable to whatever cause adopts the

H olocaust for its instrumental ends, as has happened in the case of the

political agenda of left-wing critics of Israel’s treatment of PalestinianArabs or th e claims of African Americans, resentful at th e con stant media

attention to Jewish suffering, that Black slavery was an injustice which

dwarfs the Jewish experience.54

All th ese examples, h owever, address a need to remember a past on e

never knew in order to know who one is. Debbie Filler, a comedienne

from New Zealand, uses laughter to cope with the inevitable repulsion

at unbearable horrors in a film of her one-woman act Punch Me in the

Stomach (USA, 1997), in which she impersonates her father in a visit to

Auschwitz, yet by the end of the film she has adopted so many roles that

we do not know whether she has a real identity of her own. A very

different example of a narrative of identity form ation is H elen Fremont ’s

A fter Long Silence (1999), in which she tells the story of her upbringing

as a Catho lic in America, o nly to discover her parents were Jewish victimsof the Holocaust in Poland who had continued to conceal their true

identity after emigrating to America. In both cases, the story is a rescue

of the parents’ memory and an attempt to tell the untold stories of the

H olocaust which the victims would not or could not tell themselves.

The return to the past is very much not a return “ho me” for m any

survivors, though it can close a circle in a coming to terms with a past

that often had to be sacrificed to the exigencies of survival, while for

their children it can be a discovery of a lost past that suddenly intrudes

into th eir present lives. In Julie Salamon’s The N et of Dream s: A Fam ily’s

Search for a R ightful Place (1996), the link in the generational chain is

forged by the visit to Poland, when Salamon goes back with her survivor

parents to Auschwitz-Birkenau in order to know what she had not

experienced. For the survivor mother, the return proves she was there,that she wasn’t “nothing”; for the daughter it is a journey to discover

her m other and her silent father. T he fact t hat the crucial encounter with

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Efraim Sicher

th e past comes with participation in Spielberg’s filming of Schindler’s List

at Plaszow illustrates once more how the second generation acts out the

experiences of the victims in a performance of th e past. Th e ident ification

can lead to transference through internalization of photographic images

which mediate a belated witnessing,55 and the story is dictated by after-

images of the H olocaust which supply what testimon y cannot tell. Th ese

after-images fill the silence left by the father’s death, a bereavement that

bequeaths a final silence and a real experience of loss.

The death of a parent can serve as the catalyst in retelling the storyof origins through the rereading of a collective past, as Nancy K. Miller

does in her autob iographical reading of texts by other auth ors, including

Spiegelman’s Maus, which readjusts personal history and collective

identity to a H olocaust past the family never had.56

Th e collective

memory becomes significant in a story of loss of the East European

Jewish past and the newly discovered threat of anti-Semitism. Acknowl-

edgment of that existential threat comes in place of its previous denial in

th e adoption of false identities (for example M iller’s self-identification as

an American in France). Ch eryl Sucher does someth ing similar in her

novel The R escue of Mem ory (1997) when she tells the story of a

daughter of H olocaust survivors who is a movie scriptwriter and

producer acting out her different selves. Rachel has an affair with an

Irishman in London but comes back to Jewishness and a Jewish partnerin N ew York (a “ Jewish” space), where she begins to work thro ugh both

her Oedipal desires and her failure to cope with death and with her dying

mother. The two incidents in the novel, in which she recalls breaking

glass jars and being injured by the shards or injuring her mother, are

clear projections of guilt for her impotence in face of the family’s fate

and symbolize her paralysis by the wound bleeding within her body and

psyche, but also make her aware of the further hurt she is causing her

family. H er I rish lover, for example, was un mentionable, because for her

father surviving the H olocaust would be defeated by the daughter’s

marrying a no n-Jew. Being Jewish m eans to acknowledge t he H olocaust,

which Rachel defines as a tikkun olam —a cosmic repair to be brought

about by remembering that of which one has no memory and, in loud

negation of Ultra-Orthodox Jewish commitment to ritual observance, topause out of compassion for suffering (with Christian overtones of the

meek inheriting the earth). So ingrained into her dysfunctional family is

72




the H olocaust experience, so determinant is th eir ident ity as survivors,

that Rachel comments about her fiancé’s family that they are still good

Jews despite their being several-generation Americans!

The father’s photographs of weddings after the liberation of the

camps are mute testimony to the loss of family and community, the

“family frames” discussed by M arianne H irsch, and they function as an

iconic divider of before (shtetl marriages) and after (smart American

clothes). They are, however, a double exposure, like the photographs of

the parents in Spiegelman’s Maus, which record the second-generationchild’s status of not being there and not knowing her origins as a

“memorial candle” but which also form the link with her own wedding

(a biological continuum) in the ghostly emptiness haunted by her dead

mother and by the Holocaust dead.

Alongside the father’s photo albums, the reels of home movies

display the visual narrative of the gaps in the family, and their transcript,

together with the taped message from the mother which closes the novel,

are performances of testimon y as well as impersonations o f th e survivor ’s

voice (like D ebbie Filler’s), from which gradually Rachel’s own voice

emerges. The films are stored in the clothes closet, a container of

memory, where Rachel hides in an enactment of adopting or “trying on”

different out er selves (t he cloth es of family members): “Alone in the

damp closet reeking of mothballs and old Super 8 reels, I sat in the dark staring at the assembled images, saddened by the thought that I would

never know my father or Uncle Irving [a fellow survivor and surrogate

relative] during the time of the fox-hunters.”57

H iding from the

unbearable burden of the unknowable past, she seeks a protective shell

from her inherited fears of the past which she carries within her. When

she makes love with her fiancé in the closet, where the secret images of

the past are kept, Rachel discovers a knowledge of her family, at once

historical and carnal, as the hidden photos in her father’s sealskin

briefcase merge with the screen memory of her parents’ marriage and

with her own sexual desires.

The claimed security of the closet is a refuge from the secrets she

has been denying, like the significance of the food hoarded by her Nana

in containers in the kitchen which tempted her to break her diet as ateenager (another link between secrets of the body and of the past); in

another instance of trying to contain the traumatic past and to shut out

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Efraim Sicher

the pain of loss she locks herself in a trailer when her aunt Tsenye dies.

Sucher’s first-person narrator feels that she is experiencing the bombard-

ment of World War II in the form of emotional manipulation by the

survivor’s claim to superior knowledge of how to survive, which (again,

as in Maus) the child is never allowed to forget. The more Rachel is

urged by her father to make it as an American, the more she is playing

his script of the afterlife of Auschwitz and failing to cope with the

crippling psychosomatic effects of anxiety attacks.

Rachel is a scriptwriter, and Sucher’s novel reads like a scenario of someone acting a script while trying to make it her own and turning the

afterimages of the H olocaust into a remembrance that will contain

memory, in the sense of both preservation and containment. Photo-

graphs are here images of the past, but at the same time the compelling

present of her filmwriting exorcises t he displaced survivors who have

invaded her dreams and the nightmare of her father’s daily recitation of

H olocaust stories. She works through her moth er’s slow death from

latent effects of the camps and her father’s pain by rewriting her father

as a hero in a better world called “America.”58

The device of the film-

script or the taping of testimony compels the narrating of an unknown

story, just as in Maus the tape recorder is used by the son to force his

father to tell the story, but it also takes over the story as a recorded

message after the parents’ death which reveals the narrator’s origins andidentity as a child of the Holocaust. The posthumous message of the

survivors is a rescue of memo ry in its recovery of a personal story and it

allows a transmutation of loss into a more meaningful life-affirming joy

in recognition of the love the survivor parents were unable to show when

alive. Yet while it constitut es a remembering that resists forgett ing and

denial, the “rescue of memory” does not actually recover historical

knowledge of the event but may in fact distort its meaning and

perpetuate cultural transformations of the memory.

THE RIVERS OF HISTORY

Another kind of rescued memory is the fictional memoir of growing upamong H olocaust survivors in a poetical first novel by Aryeh Lev

Stollman, The Far Euphrates (1997). This is a tale of growing up Jewish

74




in Windsor, O ntario, just across the water from Detroit, but with a

difference. The return to the past is a journey to the horrors of Europe

via the far Euphrates, in the footsteps of a grandfather’s adventure and

a father’s more scholarly exploration. It is a journey to the prehistory of

the Jewish people, before Abraham received the revelation of monothe-

ism and entered into the covenant with G-d which began the long

voyage of the Jews th rough exile. Th e pagan cults of Mesopo tamia have

a fascinating hold on Alexander-Aryeh’s father, a rabbi who lives entirely

in the four cubits of books and cuneiform languages and who shares apenchant for sacred trees with Cynthia Ozick’s Pagan Rabbi rather than

with O rthodoxy. “O ur forefathers,” his father tells him, “strangely

enough,—and this I believe is the real root of mankind’s problem—

originally came not from Kana’an, not from an earthly Jerusalem, but

from the far Euphrates with its source in Eden, from an impossibly

remote and primordial home.”59

This itinerary traces to the expulsion

from Eden the root cause of the cosmic disaster, thus bypassing the

redemptive narratives of Exodus and Sinai. Life is a long search for

meaning in the Divine pattern, accompanied in exile by the Shekhinah

which, as the Lubavitcher Rebbe explains later in the novel, is the female

emanation of G-d that takes part in our suffering and joy.

H is mot her t hinks the boy’s strange behavior shou ld be treated by

psychiatrists, and the boy comes to feel guilty for his mother’s repeatedmiscarriages, understanding that he is in some way a “punishment”

inflicted on her. From early childhood Alexander has thought of himself

as a survivor, as the fetus who kept open the womb’s trapdoor. There is,

however, another transferred sense in which he is a survivor, and one

which is apparent only below the surface and at the end of the novel,

when he finally grows up into adulthood and mortality. His mother’s

closest friends in Windsor are Berenice and her husband, the Cantor

(who is invariably referred to by this title). The Cantor and his sibling

H annalore are Mengele t wins, and Berenice has chosen Alexander t o be

both the surrogate child she can never have and the one to whom she

reveals the terrible secret about them. Time and again during the novel

secrets are revealed when a car brakes to a halt in mid-journey, as if

revelation must take place on a public highway and not in the recessesof some private chamber or on an isolated Mount Sinai. It is as if life

itself must brake to a halt in the shadow of Auschwitz.

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Efraim Sicher

What happens, though he is unaware of it at the time, is that the

boy takes on the role of the H olocaust victims when he turns sixteen. H e

celebrates his birthday according to the lunar Jewish calendar, and when

he returns home from the party Berenice and the Cantor have made for

him, he symbolically stops the sun by sewing together t he curtains in his

bedroom and locking himself up in solitude for a year. In that year he

studies himself and the world, in imitation of the act of tsimtsum, the

cabalistic notion of the Divine Presence’s withdrawal into itself. Like the

other cabalistic symbols in the novel, the application of the term isquestionable and sacrilegious. But in his own autistic withdrawal,

Alexander discovers homosexual yearnings and explores arcane knowl-

edge in his father’s boo ks. Th e rejection of his parents’ love and the t otal

isolation come to a head with the Cantor’s fatal illness. The death of the

Cantor forces him to come to terms with death and also to separate

himself from the unnamed corpses which are an unspeakable and

undiscussable presence at home, whether the insane uncle whom his

mother refused to mourn or the H olocaust past which his paternal

grandparents have denied by going back to live in Germany.

Th e boy is burdened with the shadow of Auschwitz even before this

revelation, however. Apart from Jews, Gypsies too were subject to

medical experimentation by the Nazis. Anxious about her strange boy,

Alexander’s mother takes him to a Gypsy fortune-teller, MademoiselleDee-Dee, a deformed camp survivor in a weird luxurious mansion. The

visit is surrept itiou s, since fortu ne telling is hardly appro ved of by Jewish

law, but it finds an incredible parallel later in the novel, when Alexan-

der’s father takes him to see the Lubavitcher Rebbe, the late Rabbi

Menachem Mendel Schneersohn. Both are seers and both meetings

prove turning points in the boy’s life in unexpected ways. After meeting

the Gypsy woman, Alexander’s ear-drum bursts, though this proves to

be an act of healing; o n the airplane return ing from the Rebbe, however,

the membrane in the same ear breaks, resulting in loss of balance and the

sensation of falling, as if the plane was going out of control and crashing.

The Rebbe’s parting warning to take care of his ears proves prophetic,

but is overshadowed by the apocalyptic scenes of riots in burning

Detroit, so that the world is revisioned in a historical perspective that isno less cataclysmic than in Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces. This is a

76




history made personal by the rupture of the auditory organ, a symbolic

rupture that grants a sense of loss and insight.

Th e story of growing up in a qu iet Canadian suburb barely conceals

th e distu rbing symb olism below th e tight skin o f th e narrative. Alexander

has learnt from his father that according to cabala the world was created

with letters of the H ebrew alphabet, yet his storytelling suggests that

letters can be agents of both creation and destruction. As he emerges

from his autistic cocoon, a self-imposed imprisonment in his room,

refusing to commu nicate except through furtive requ ests for book titles,his view becomes one of a violent world sown with destruction. This

sounds like an overdetermined fatalism inimical to the spirit of authentic

Judaism, but nevertheless it is the conclusion drawn from family and

collective experience. Alexander has learnt th at being Jewish m eans being

marked for death, in the sign of circumcision and the degendering

mutilation of H annalore. H annalore always wore a cross to hide Jewish

identity, safe in the fabulous never-never world of wealthy Americans like

the Fords. At the same time the cross is the burden of suffering and guilt

th at every Jewish child is bo rn into. T his oddly reductionist identification

imposed by the mark of the H olocaust which cond emned children for

their very birth makes Alexander too both a survivor and a bearer of a

legacy which bears witness to a suffering he never experienced.

There is, however, a further pattern of compulsive repetition. At thefuneral of the Cantor, he is wearing around his neck a sapphire which is

bequeathed to him by another deformed creature, Marla, who dies in

hospital. Marla is not Jewish but is brought to the synagogue on Rosh

H ashanah, t he Jews’ season of repentance and judgm ent, b y her eccentric

wealthy moth er. She hopes t he Jewish G-d will bring them luck (as

Alexander ’s moth er believed in Gypsy fort un e) and will save her daught er

as H e saved the Jews. Marla is a precocious spoiled child drawn to

Alexander, whom she dubs Mrs. Lot because he seems frozen to the spot

in a physical and emotional paralysis. H is angelic act of khesed —a

kindness that will “protect” him all his life—in visiting the dying girl is

rewarded with the sapphire which turns out to have originated from

H olocaust victims who sough t to buy their way to rescue and freedom .

The part of Marla’s family in rescuing Jews is never satisfactorilyexplained, but the sapphire peeping out from Alexander’s shirt is clearly

meant to signify the bequest of more than a jewel from a dead child. The

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Efraim Sicher

Lubavitcher Rebbe, too, notices the sapphire and compares it to one

Abraham wore around his neck, which he claims had healing powers.

This seems to make Alexander into an angel, though a flawed one

because he does not prevent his own deafness, and suggests that healing

(tikkun) is in the hands of inspired individuals regardless of their merits.

As a narrative of self-definition, The Far Euphrates takes us on a

journey far beyond the confines of a childhood in a safe Canadian

suburb, into the mystery of Jewish history. The journey begins in the

perilous land of the two rivers, Mesopotamia, and reaches through theunfathomable trauma of the Holocaust experienced by the twins from

Strasbourg to the narrator’s own staking out in life at college in

Montreal. Strasbourg is a city situated on a river shaped like a kiss, and

Montreal is another city split over a river’s flow but not in a kiss, which

suggests a closure rather than a climax to the journey from the Euphra-

tes. The twins, as Jews from Alsace, are gifted in several tongues, and

Alexander has inherited his father’s gift of deciphering strange tongues

to delve through his own mind and body into th is apocalyptic revelation.

H is words present a d istorted view of history and Judaism, but one that

touches the open wound in a necessary though impossible touch of

healing (like the perforation of the eardrum which is blessing and curse,

healing and wounding). That the author is an interventionist radiologist

is without doubt no coincidence when his narrator confronts themalignant tumor of Jewish history b ut also addresses t he irresolvable

question of why children suffer.

REPEATING HISTORY

It is common in historical thinking to look for parallels in order to

understand the present trend of events and their significance within

future projections; yet the H olocaust looms so large that it cripples any

political or social thinking which tries to place it within a temporal or

conceptual framework. H abermas asks whether there might be a

“collective repetition compulsion” which, for example, affected German

politics and policy during the Gulf War, caught between, on the onehand, the inevitable parallel of H itler and Saddam H ussein’s attack o n

Israel and, on the oth er, ideological repugnance at American military

78




aggression, mixed with culpability for supplying Iraq with mass destruc-

tion capability.60

The recurrence of history is an ancient belief, yet the

very act (or delusion) of freeing oneself from the past by denying the

“lessons” of history may lead to a repetition of history, as George

Santayana warned, while interpretive analogies of a repeated past might

be ineffective or counterproductive in their subordination to metanarra-

tives and ideologies.61

H isto ry, it mu st be realized, gets written as an interpretive narrative

with several problems of hermeneutics and ontology common toliterature, and one might welcome the trend to collect testimony and let

the participants in history speak, were it not for the often manipulative

cultural context in which the collected memories are selected, antholo-

gized, marketed and read. O ral history has nonetheless shifted the

perspective on the past to that of the witnesses, a people’s war that tells

of vastly different experiences on a day-to-day basis, each a fragment of

something larger and incomprehensible but which can never be told in

its totality and which is impervious to the moral judgment of some

master narrative. Oral testimony restores modes of remembrance which

Vera Schwarcz finds are shared by the culture of memory in Judaism and

Ch inese “endurance” during repression of traumatic history,62

and it

gives precedence to an autobiographical narrative of lived experience, a

traumatic sto ry of what it was like to face the H olocaust, as Judith Millerputs it , “one by one by one.”

63H owever, aside from the empirical

question of factual accuracy and the difficulty of corroborative verifica-

tion, the orality of survivor testimony remains problematic because the

witnesses often speak to the third generation or to an indirect audience,

such as the reading pub lic, so that the second generation which bears the

psychic wounds of transmitted trauma must work through the memory

indirectly, as strangers to their own story.

The writings of the “second generation” reclaim a voice in that

story and a place in history, yet they do not do so without guilt and

anger, not least because of the parents’ silence. Twice in Maus, Art

accuses his parents of murdering him: first, after his mother’s suicide

when Art accuses his dead mother of leaving him with guilt for his

youthful revolt, as well as for what H itler did to her, and again when h isfather destroys her diary. In both instances, the parents have denied him

their testimony. Children of survivors are afraid of desecrating the

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Efraim Sicher

memory because to subject private pain to public gaze is to revictimize

the victims and to subject them to the pathos and empathy for an

imaged object of atrocity, an image that aestheticizes horror in its

acknowledgment.64

Throughout Maus, Spiegelman emphasizes the artist’s

concern with the ethics of turning his father into art, most blatantly in

the scene of the artist contemplating the dead corpses while a film crew

“shoots” him, and we are made to wonder whether he is not reinforcing

Nazi stereotypes of the Jew.65

Moreover, by reawakening the traumatic

past or exposing ghosts in the family cupboard, there is a fear of hurtingparents who have tried to put the past behind them and who may fear

for control of the memory, who may fear they are losing “their” story.

Guilt is also felt for the betrayal of dead parents when they are seen

in the unflattering candor of memory, while the natural tendency to self-

recrimination in mourning work conflicts with the autob iographical

narrator’s pledge to frank candor. Violence and reparation of post-

H olocaust mourning are therefore inseparable in N ancy K. Miller’s

autobiographical reading of Maus.66

Like any testimony, however, the

telling of the story entails a reformation of self that challenges personal

and collective identity: who I am depends on what is remembered and

by whom, as well as on the moral relativity of the subject position, which

has shifted in postmod ernist constructions of alterity, ethicity and

judgment.67

By contrast, postmemory recognizes its problematicmediation (as in the frames-within-frames in Maus) and its generational

distance in a model of cultural transmission that resists the oblivion of

history or t he revisionist erasure of th e past. It does this by accommodat-

ing a personal connection with collective trauma in order to complete

the mourning work of the parents and to give the imagined past a real

significance in their lives in full realization of the ultimate impossibility

of representation of the trauma.68

The problem of the perpetrators’ attempt to falsify memory is not

the same as the victims’ unwillingness to remember or tell their story,

wrote Primo Levi,69

but nor is the memory of the survivors the memory

of their children; neither come unprocessed by the cultural norms of the

time of narration. The story of the second generation usually includes the

story of transmission, which is also the story of their link in thegenealogical chain as they in turn pass on the n arrative t o th eir children.

In common with many postmodernist texts, second-generation narrative

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draws attention to the fragmentation of the self, t o the relativity of truth,

to the fluidity of memo ry and to the impo ssibility of ever fully knowing.

The art of Art Spiegelman constantly foregrounds its preoccupation with

artifice and historicity when it draws attent ion to the impossibility of

telling the story, an impossibility which has to be represented (for

example in the references to the technical possibilities of drawing scenes

in the camps).

What t hese examples of second-generation writing have in common

is the breakdown of any generic boundary between fiction and autobiog-raphy. N arrative recreates different identities and acts o ut in fant asy form

repressed stories which test the freedom or dependence of the individual

vis-à-vis the past but also, in the writing of the memoir, form a relation-

ship with the parent. It is, argues Cathy Caruth, in its endless impact on

the present that the trauma acquires a meaning it could not have at the

time of the event and it is in the retrospective reliving of the effects of

PTSD that history is enabled.70 This view of history has been challenged

by D ominick LaCapra and Saul Friedländer, among others;71

contrary to

the conventional wisdom that historical events are usually remembered

immediately after their occurrence and then fade into oblivion,72

it is a

view which relates not referentially to the immediate effects of the

traumatic event but to the interpretive shaping of memory through the

imagination . Seen differently, H olocaust trauma is a latent N achträglich-keit that reinvents t he past in the writing of histo ry.

73Either way, history

is not being construed as the chronicling of events in their diachronic

happening, in the delusion of an objectivity free of interpretation and

rhetoricity.

All narratives of past events require emplotment to tell their story

and therefore are subject to interpretive judgment of their truth value.74

No historical moment can be recorded in a pure perception of the

unadulterated “event” devoid of interpretive perspectives of “ after”; t he

historical experience is invariably filtered through the prism of the

narrator’s psychological, cultural, linguistic and social constructions which

may also change over time. Most readers, nevertheless, would feel there

are substantive differences in the kinds of truth-claims in “history” and

“literature,” even if they would agree that both read meaning back intothe past. Yet fictional accoun ts cannot always be easily distinguished from

documentary or autobiographical memoirs, whether in a novel by an

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Efraim Sicher

actual survivor, Jerzy Kosinski’s Paint ed Bird, or in Binjamin Wilko-

mirski’s Fragments, which uses H olocaust memory to create a past and

an identity for the auth or. Roberto Benigni’s film Life Is Beautiful is

another recent example of the deliberate blurring of imagination and

historicity. Moreover, numerous works of pulp fiction based on actual

H olocaust experiences appropriate histo ry for fictional purposes and may

devalue the general credibility of narratives about the H olocaust. For

example, Sherri Szeman’s The Kommandant’s Mistress (199 3) describes

in pornographic detail the intimate moments of a Jewish woman’s sexualenslavement to a Nazi officer, a deliberate breaking of taboo that gives

voice to the silenced victimization of women in the camps, which is

authenticated by a bibliography, but which effectively eroticizes the

Jewish victim in a sexual fantasy reminiscent of Liliana Cavani’s film

N ight Porter (1974). D. M. Thomas’s White Hotel (which plagiarizes

Anatoli Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar ) and Spielberg’s film adaptation of

Thomas Kenneally’s Schindler’s List are in different ways problematic

instances of the mixing of fact and fiction not least because they elide the

slippery line between veracity and fantasy, which twists even further the

already hypermediated and distorted image of the H olocaust in the

public mind.75

These examples demonstrate the difficulty of establishing

facticity in narratives that reimagine the past of the self, especially when

survival meant the concealment or falsification of identity, while“contested memory” in a postmodern culture of multiple truths and

ideologies enhances the appearance of legitimacy in a fabricated or false

witnessing to collective memory (as distinct from mere invention).76

The distinction between “history” and its narrative reconstruction

(whether fictional or “autobiographical”) is fragile indeed. Gaps are not

always filled by legal or historical documents, as Vera Schwarcz found

when she searched for evidence of her own biological and psychological

identity as a child born “afterward.”77

H istory and memory may be

working in opposite directions here, if not against each other. Indeed,

the filling in of gaps in memory, which for Freud in “Remembering,

Repeating, and Working through” was a necessary liberation from

unconscious and passive repetition in the working-through of the

forgotten or repressed past, may possibly reinforce repetition of actingout traumatic events.

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The cultural promot ion of “secondary witnessing” of the H olocaust

past has become common enough for sociologist Zygmunt Bauman to

challenge the remembrance of the H olocaust by th e self-styled “second

generation” because it seems to him to usurp t he real suffering of the six

million and to elevate those who were not there into a legitimate

victimhood.78

The protest against what some see as a distortion of

H olocaust m emory by forcing on the next generation of Jews a sick and

morbid obsession is amplified in a grotesque pastiche by the American

Jewish autho r Tova Reich, entitled “T he Third Generation.” In thisshort sto ry published in a respectable American magazine, th e H olocaust

is represented by a father and son business “H olocaust Conn ections

In c.” which has patently failed to conn ect with N echama, the “H olocaust

Princess” who has been reared as a “living memorial candle” but who has

cut herself off from her Jewish family by joining the Carmelite convent

adjacent to Auschwitz.79

H er vow of silence is a “right to choo se” that

translates her father’s inculcation of the message to Never Forget into a

conversion that is bot h worship o f the legacy of the victims and abortion

of generational continuity, abdication of identity in the name of memory.

Reich does not mince words in the mother’s labeling of the “second

generation” as bogus hangers-on and self-appointed proxies for the

survivors, yet her caricature of the rebellious Jephta’s daughter, a latter-

day Iphigenia, presents what she evidently sees as the ultimate failure of American Jewry to cope with H olocaust trauma because its cynically

commercial and dishonest exploitation of H olocaust survival must

logically lead to the martyrdom cult of Catholicism and to masochistic

devotion to the dead, a perversion of Chagall’s “White C rucifixion” into

an icon of H olocaust remembrance.

The mass trauma of the destruction of European Jewry brings into

tension the relations between individual and collective identity which are

no longer clear-cut when the political boundaries of nation and

individual are breaking down and globalization has made inroads into

personal ident ity. Jewish ident ity in particular has to be revised when

diaspora is legitimized in politically correct and post-Zionist discourse

and when an exilic extraterritoriality characterizes the writer (a further

reason to reinvent the nomadic Jewish O ther as a viable future, forexample in R. J. Kitaj’s “D iasporist Manifesto ” and Philip Roth ’s parodic

Operation Shylock ). Nor is consensus to be sought when no single

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Efraim Sicher

coherent narrative has emerged either of the Holocaust as a historical

process or of its cultural meaning.80

In any case, second -generation

writing, like much postmodernist fiction, is breaking away from all master

narratives to focus on personal memo ry. T he q uest for ident ity within the

fluidity of memory, however, itself forms a narrative of self-definition and

is the beginning of coming to terms with the past in ways that are

meaningful for the future. T here is thu s both awesome respon sibility and

ironic ambivalence in imagining the past in order to remember the

future. There can indeed be no future without the past, but, whenremembrance relies on imagination to give it meaning, one must be

aware of the risks that are involved.

N OTES

1. O n Spielberg’s film, see Yosefa Loshitzky, ed., Spielberg’s H olocau st: Criti cal

Perspectives on Schindler’s List (Bloomington, 1997); Miriam H ansen,

“Schindler’s List is not Shoah: The Second Commandment, Popular Modernism,

and Public Memory,” Critical Inquiry 22 (1996): 292–313; and Geoffrey H.

Hartman, The Longest Shadow: In the A ft erm ath of the H olocau st (Bloomington,

1996).

2. See James E. Young, The Textu re of Mem ory: H olocaust Mem orials and

Meaning (New H aven, 1988).

3. See Alvin H . Rosenfeld, “The Americanization of the H olocaust,”

Commentary 99, no. 6 (1995): 36–37. See also Hilene Flanzbaum, ed., The

A m ericanization of the H olocaust (Baltimore, 1 999). For some tent ative remarks

on the American culture industry’s “discovery” of the H olocaust, see Saul

Friedländer, “Afterword: The Shoah between Memo ry and H istory,” in Efraim

Sicher, ed., Breaking C rystal: W riting and Mem ory after A uschwitz (U rbana and

Chicago, 1998), 349–51; and his earlier study of the cultural construct of the

H olocaust in popu lar culture in America and Germany, R eflections of N azism : A n

Essay on Kitsch and Death, trans. Th omas Weyr (N ew York, 198 4).

4. Norma Rosen first used the phrase in “The Holocaust and the American-

Jewish Novelist,” Midstream 20, no. 8 (1974): 54–62; republished in her

A ccident s of I nfl uence: W ritin g as a W om an and a Jew in A m erica (Albany, N Y,

1992). It has been taken up by Lillian S. Kremer, W itn ess through the Im agina-

tion: Jewish A m erican H olocau st Lit erat ure (Detroit, 1989), a reading of ten

American Jewish novelists (including the Yiddish writer I. B. Singer and the

European philosopher George Steiner but excluding Philip Roth).

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5. Marianne H irsch, Fam ily Frames: Photography, N arrative, and Postm em ory

(Cambridge, MA, 1997), 22.

6. James E. Young, A t Memory’s Edge: A fter-Im ages of the H olocaust inContem porary A rt and A rchitectu re (New H aven, 2000), 1–2.

7. See Kirby Farrell, Post-Traumatic Culture: Injury and Interpretation in the

N ineties (Baltimore, 1998); Susan Rubin Suleiman, “Reflections on Memory at

the Millennium,” Comparative Literature 51, no. 3 (1999): v–xiii.

8. Jean-François Lyot ard, H eidegger and “the jews”, trans. Andreas Michel and

Mark S. Roberts (Minneapolis, 1990), 75–76.

9. Ibid., 28.

10. Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena,

trans. James Benedict (London and New York, 1993); Andreas H uyssen,

Twilight Mem ories: Marking Tim e in a Cu lture of A m nesia (N ew York, 199 5).

11. Michael Goldberg, in W hy Should Jews Survive? Lookin g Past the H olocau st

toward a Jewish Fut ure (New York, 1996), has argued that the story of t he

H olocaust has falsified the Jewish narrative of exile and redemption into a cult

of survival and assimilated it to an American civic religion devoid of the original

beliefs of Judaism.

12. See George Steiner, Language an d Silence: Essays, 1958–1966 (Harmonds-

worth, 1969); and Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the H olocaust (Ithaca,

1989 ); m ore recently Geoffrey H . H artman, in The Fateful Question of Culture

(N ew York, 1 997 ), has discussed the implications of t he H olocaust for not ions

of culture and concluded that there is not a simple opposition between culture

and genocide but that poetry might speak even more than before to a need for

a compassionate memory of traumatic loss.

13. Charles S. Maier, “A Surfeit of Memory? Reflections on H istory,

Melancholy and D enial,” H istory & Memory 5, no. 2 (Fall/ Winter 1993):

136–51.

14. David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, 1985). O n

the political use of cultural property, see J. E. Tunbridge and G. J. Ashworth,

Dissonan t H eritage: The Man agem ent of the Past as a R esource in Confl ict

(Chichester, 1996).

15. See Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,”

R epresentat ions, no. 26 (1989): 7–25. Nora’s essay, which served as the

introduction to a multivolume anthology on French historical memory, had an

enormous impact on American scholarship, in which “m emory” was instru-

mentalized and politicized in a public debate over Freudian transference,

postmodernism and a remystification of “remembering” in identity politics. See

Kerman Lee Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory in H istorical D iscourse,”

R epresentat ions, no. 69 (2000): 127–50.

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Efraim Sicher

1 6. T he Memorbuch, memorial dedication of ritual objects and poetic

martyrology have over the centu ries been given ritual space within the syna-

gogue, and in a development of traditional inscripted memory, AmericanO rthodox synagogues have given space t o remembrance of t he H olocaust, as in

the foyer of Young Israel of Great N eck, NY.

17. Yosef Gorny has argued that t he H olocaust has been sacralized into a new

civic religion centered on the U S H olocaust Memo rial Museum in Washington,

DC. See his Between A uschwitz an d Jeru salem (in H ebrew) (Tel Aviv, 199 8),

19–21, and the chapter on “Holocaust Theology,” 70–101.

18. In a public address at Ben-Gurion University, 12 April 1999, Erica Jong

explained that the fictional Sarah was a female transformation of her atheist

grandfather. This would suggest a remarkable back-shadowing of history in the

reenactment of the grandfather’s role through the prism of post-H olocaust

Jewish and feminist consciousness.

19. Karen Alkalay-Gut, “A Bad Jewish Girl in a Place Like This: An Interview

with Erica Jong,” Jeru salem R eview 2 (1997–1998): 162–74.

20. H owever, the H olocaust is not the only strand in the patchwork of Jewish

identity described in Jonathan Boyarin, Storm from Paradise: The Politics of Jewish

Memory (Minneapolis, 1992). Boyarin notes that, in addition to the loss of

community and tradition, American Jews’ imagined loss of a national collective

is itself a construct (7).

21. H ilene Flanzbaum, “ Introduction: The Americanization of the H olocaust,”

in idem, ed., The A m ericanization of the H olocau st, 1–17.

22. For a controversial critique of the phenomenon, see Norman Finkelstein,

The Holocaust Industry (N ew York, 200 0).

23. Peter Novick, The H olocaust in A m erican Life (Boston, 1999), 190.

24. See H elen Epstein, Children of the H olocau st: Conversations with Sons an d

Daughters of Survivors (New York, 1988); Aaron H ass, In the Shadow of the

H olocau st: The Second Generation (London, 1991).

25. H enri Raczymow, “Memory Shot through with H oles,” Yale French

Studies 85 (1994): 102–103.

26. English version: “Remembering the Unknown,” International R eview of

Psycho-A nalysis 11 (1984): 417–27.

27. Raczymow, “M emory Shot through with H oles,” 103–104.

28. Suleiman, “Reflections on Memory at the Millennium,” xi.

29. Marianne Hirsch, Fam ily Fram es, 244–45.

30. An example of such identification is H irsch’s sponsorship of a Bolivian

child inspired by that country’s shelter of her family from the H olocaust and

mo tivated by a desire t o fill the gaps in her family album (H irsch, Fam ily Fram es,

142); paradoxically, this was an act of moral response to images of American

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bombing of Iraqi children during the Gulf War, which ignored the deliberate

targeting of Jewish children by Iraqi rockets in Tel Aviv.

31. Hirsch speaks of family photographs, which are not documents of deathbut make a personal connection with the loss of the dead, an act of continuity.

H irsch labels such family photographs “ leftovers” (Fam ily Frames, 23), which is

remotely similar to the “shayros” from the H asidic rebbe’s t able grabbed by

fervent disciples; after the H olocaust such “leftovers” of memory must be

rescued, as Pearl Gluck does in her film Divan (USA, 1998) about the recovery

of a rebbe’s sofa from H ungary, a fragment of a vanished life, a spark of ho liness

(kedushah) that has to be raised from the ultimate state of impurity (tumah).

32. Maurice H albwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser

(Chicago, 1992), 73–74.

33. Yael Z erubavel, R ecovered R oots: Collective Memory an d the Making of

Israeli N ational Tradit ion (Chicago, 1995).

34. Alain Finkielkraut, Le Juif imaginaire (Paris, 1980).

35. Saul Friedländer, “Trauma, Transference and ‘Working t hrough’ in Writing

the History of the Shoah,” H istory & Memory 4, no. 1 (Spring/ Summer 1992):

41. See Primo Levi, “The Memory of Offense,” in Geoffrey H. Hartman, ed.,

Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective (Bloomington, 1986), 130–37.

36. See Saul Friedländer, ed., Probing the Lim its of R epresentat ion: N azism and

the “Final Solution” (Cambridge, MA, 1992).

37. Yosef H ayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish H istory and Jewish Mem ory

(Seattle, 1982), 98.

38. “To Invent a Memory,” lecture at Baltimore H ebrew U niversity, 1983,

quot ed in Geoffrey H . H artman, “Pub lic M emory and Modern Experience,” in

his A C rit ic’s Journey: Lit erary R eflections, 1958–1998 (New Haven, 1999), 270.

39. For a broad survey of the phenomenon, see E fraim Sicher, “T he Burden

of M emory: The Writing of the Post-H olocaust Generation,” in Sicher, ed.,

Breakin g Crystal, 19–88; Alan Berger, Children of Job: A m erican Second-

Generati on W it nesses to the H olocau st (Albany, NY, 1 997). O n the psychology of

the second generation, see Dina Wardi, Mem orial Can dles: Children of the

H olocau st (London, 1 992); Ilany Kogan, The Cry of Mu te Children: A Psychoana-

lytic Perspective of the Second Generation of the H olocau st (London, 1995).

40. Andrew Furman, “ In heriting t he H olocaust: Jewish American Fiction and

the Double-Bind of the Second-Generation Survivor,” in Flanzbaum, ed., The

A m ericanization of the H olocau st, 83–101.

41. Thane Rosenbaum, Second H an d Smoke: A N ovel (N ew York, 19 99), 2–3.

42. Art Speigelman, Mau s, A Survivor’s Tale II: A nd H ere My Troubles Began

(H armondsworth, 1 992), 16.

43. Ibid., 14.

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Efraim Sicher

44. O n the performance of H olocaust representation in the museum, see

Vivian M. Patrarka, “ Situating H istory and Difference: The Performance of t he

Term H olocau st in Public Discourse,” in Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin,eds., Jews an d Other Differences: The N ew Jewish C ultu ral Studies (Minneapolis,

1996), 54–78.

45. Froma Zeitlin, “The Vicarious Witness: Belated Memory and Authorial

Presence in Recent Holocaust Literature,” H istory & Mem ory 10, no. 2 (Fall

1998): 6.

46. Ibid., 5 –42.

47. H ank Greenspan, “T he Power and Limits of the Metaphor o f Survivors’

Testimony,” in Claude Schumacher, ed., Staging the Holocaust: The Shoah in

Drama and Performance (Cambridge, 1998), 27–39.

48. See H artman, ed., Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective.

49. Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions, trans. Rosemarie Waldrop

(Middletown, CT, 1983), 247.

50. Elie Wiesel, From the Kingdom of Memory (N ew York, 19 90), 20.

51. Janet Burstein analyzes the narrative strategy in Where She Came From to

explain how the past is made real in order to separate from the mother’s

fractured personality and ragged storytelling. See her “Traumatic Memory and

American Jewish Writers: O ne Generation after t he H olocaust,” Modern Jewish

Studies 11 (1999): 190–91. Burstein argues that the writing of memoirs and

fiction undertakes the cultural work necessary for collective memory by imagining

the pain of loss, but does not engage critically with the issue of the shape or

content of the memory.

52. On Fugitive Pieces, see Efraim Sicher, “ In the Shadow of H istory: Second

Generation Writers and Artists and the Shaping of H olocaust Memo ry in Israel

and America,” Judaism : A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life & Thought 47, no.

2 (1998): 169–85. Examples of narratives which claim a lost ethnicity or country

include Keith B. Richburg, Out of A merica: A Black Man Confronts A frica

(1998); Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban: A N ovel (1992); Gustavo Pirez

Firmat, N ext Year in C uba: A Cu bano’s Com ing-of-A ge in A m erica (1995); Amy

Tan, The H undred Secret Senses (1995); and J. Nozipo Maraire, Zenzele: A Lett er

for My Dau ghter (1996 ). The itinerary o f the Jewish literary imagination in

America invariably journeys to Eastern Europe and the shadow of th e H olocaust,

as in David Roskies, A Bridge of Longing: The Lost A rt of Y iddish Storytelling

(Cambridge, MA, 1996). Vera Schwarcz confesses in her comparative study of

Jewish and Chinese memories of culture, Bridge across Broken Tim e: Chinese and

Jewish Cultural Memory (New Haven, 1998), that her work on China was a

“detour” in her own search for identity, which she comes back to in that book

via Jewish refugees in Shangh ai and her native Transylvanian Cluj. Similarly,

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Jonathan Boyarin came back to Jewish practice and redefined his professional as

well as personal identity after fieldwork in Paris with H olocaust survivors (Storm

from Paradise, xii–xv).53. A point made by Michel-Rolph Trouillot in his study of his native H aitian

identity, Silencin g the Past: Power an d the Produ ction of H istory (Boston, 1995).

54 . See Walter Benn Michaels, “‘You Who N ever Was There’: Slavery and th e

New H istoricism, Deconstruction and the H olocaust,” N arrative 4 , n o . 1

(1996): 1–16; E mily Budick, “ Acknowledging the H olocaust in Contempo rary

American Fiction and Criticism,” in Sicher, ed., Breaking Crystal, 332–34. The

H olocaust has also been conscripted as a d escription of what some historians

have alleged to be the genocide of Native Americans in David E. Stannard, A n

A m erican H olocau st: Colum bus an d the Conquest of the N ew W orld (N ew York,

1992); it has also been borrowed by the anti-abortion campaign and employed

as a general allegory of pain and injustice. Sylvia Plath’s poetry is one example of

the H olocaust metaphor for personal pain, while Emily Prager’s Eve’s Tattoo

(1991) parodies the adopt ion of the H olocaust t o prick American conscience and

expose the fluidity of identity, as well as rewriting the history of Nazism as a

victimization of women.

55. See Hirsch, Family Frames; Andrea Liss, Trespassin g through Shadows:

Mem ory, Photography, an d the H olocau st (Minneapolis, 1998).

56. Nancy K. Miller, Bequest an d Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent’s Death (New

York, 1996).

57. Cheryl Pearl Sucher, The R escue of Mem ory: A N ovel (N ew York, 199 7),

8.

58. Ibid., 25.

59. Aryeh Lev Stollman, The Far Euphrates (N ew York, 19 97), 163.

60 Jürgen Habermas, The Past as Future, trans. Max Pensky (Lincoln, NE,

1994), 67.

61. See Michael André Bernstein, Foregone C onclusions: A gain st A pocalyptic

H istory (Berkeley, 1994); on the recurrence of history in H erder and other

philosophies of history, see Gordon Graham, The Shape of the Past (Oxford,

199 7); and on the changing perceptions of the past as they affect the futu re, see

Reinhart Koselleck, Fut ures Past: On the Sem antics of H istorical Tim e, trans.

Keith Tribe (Cambridge MA, 1985); Jacques Le Goff, H istory and Mem ory,

trans. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman (N ew York, 19 92). For a critique of

the issues and terminology of the “memory” debate in theories of history, see

Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory in H istorical Discourse,” 127 –50.

62. Schwarcz, Bridge across Broken Time.

63. Judith Miller, One, by One, by One: Facing the H olocaust (N ew York,

1990).

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Efraim Sicher

64. As Adorno feared in his modifications of his earlier dictum that poetry after

Auschwitz would be barbaric; see Theodor W. Adorno , N egative Dialectics, trans.

E. B. Ashton (N ew York, 1 973), 362–63, and “ Engagement,” in his N otes to Literature, trans. Shierry W. Nicholsen (New York, 1992), 2:87. See Liss,

Trespassing through Shadows.

65. Art Spiegelman Mau s: A Survivor’s Tale I: My Father Bleeds H istory

(H armondsworth, 1 987), 131.

66. Miller, Bequest and Betrayal, 97–125.

67. See Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in

Literature, Psychoan alysis, and H istory (N ew York, 1992); Edith Wyschogrod, A n

Ethics of R em embering: H istory, H eterology, an d the N am eless Others (Chicago,

1998).

68. H irsch, Family Frames; Liss, Trespassin g through Shadows; Young, A t

Memory’s Edge, 12–41.

69. Levi, “The Memory of Offense,” 131.

70. Cathy Caruth, U nclaimed Experience: Traum a, N arrative, and H istory

(Baltimore, 1996), 7–8, 11.

71. See Friedländer, “Trauma, Transference and ‘Working through’”; and

Dominick Lacapra, H istory an d Mem ory after A uschwitz (Ithaca, 1998).

72. Novick’s example for this of World War I (The H olocaust in A m erican Life,

1) is questionable: Paschendale and the Battle of th e Somm e were still very much

in the public mind at the end of th e twentieth century in Britain (especially

around November 11 and other anniversary dates) and became symbols of

antiwar sentiment du ring the Vietnam and nuclear bomb protests (most famou sly

in Oh! What a Lovely War!— another example of memory as cultural property

and political construction). The Imperial War Museum in London has not only

not lost its appeal but has devolved into an antiwar museum and has incorporat-

ed a permanent exhibition on the H olocaust. In America, Civil War battlefields

are popular and environmentalists have insisted on the pristine preservation of

Gettysburg, bringing about the demolition of an observation tower which spoilt

the historic landscape.

73. Michael S. Roth, The Ironist’s Cage: Memory, Trauma, and the Construc-

tion of H istory (N ew York, 199 5).

74. See H ayden White, “H istorical Emplotment and th e Problem of Truth in

H istorical Representation,” in his Figural R ealism : Studies in the Mim esis Effect

(Baltimore, 1999), 27–42; and also idem, Metahistory: T he H istorical Imagina-

tion in N ineteenth-Cent ury Europe (Baltimore, 1973), and Tropics of Discourse:

Essays in Cu ltural Cri ticism (Baltimore, 1978). Keith Windschuttle objects that

White’s application of literary theory to history has reduced history writing to a

trope, but does not explain how one might avoid a confusion of past events with

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their ideological and cultural construction in narrative. See his The Killing of

H istory: H ow Literary Cri tics and Social Theorists A re Mu rdering Our Past (New

York, 1997 ), 231–42. In the American debate over the writing of h istory, itshould be said, th e failure to rescue Eu ropean Jewry or the collapse of Enlight en-

ment values are minor issues compared with treatment of Native Americans and

Blacks or the fate of liberalism and the “end of history.”

75. On the scandal of fictionalization of the Holocaust in these and other

texts, see Sue Vice, H olocau st Fiction (London, 2000).

76. Suleiman, “ Reflections on M emory at the Millennium” : vii. In R eading the

H olocau st (Cambridge, 1999), Inga Clendinnen has pointed to similar problems

of confusing historicity with truth in her discussion of inaccuracies in testimony

of H olocaust witnesses. Th e questionable facticity of testimony is not unique t o

the H olocaust but is also an issue in Latin American testimony of atrocity.

Suleiman’s example is Rigoberto Menchu’s Testim onio: I, R igoberto Menchu,

which claims to be a true experience of Guatemalan peasantry; see also Suleiman,

“Problems of Memo ry in Recent H olocaust Memo irs: Wilkomirski/ Wiesel,”

Poetics Today 21, no. 3 (2000), at press.

77. Schwarcz, Bridge across Broken Time, 164–68.

78. Zygmunt Bauman, “T he H olocaust’s Life as a Ghost,” Tikkun 13, no. 4

(1998): 33–38.

79. Tova Reich, “The Third Generation,” Atlantic Monthly (Mar. 2000):

87–98.

80. As Saul Friedländer reiterates, “Afterword: The Shoah between Memory

and H istory,” 345–57. See also the essays in Alvin H . Rosenfeld, ed., Thinking

about the H olocaust: A fter H alf a Centu ry (Bloomington, 1997).

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