by A Voice Still Heard- Selected Essays of Irving Howe (retail) (epub)
The Holocaust memoirist, as writer, is in a far less difficult position. True, he needs to order his materials in the rudimentary sense of minimal chronology and reportorial selectivity (though anything he honestly remembers could prove to be significant, even if not part of his own story). Insofar as he remains a memoirist, he is not obliged to interpret what he remembers. But the novelist, even if he supposes he is merely “telling a story,” must—precisely in order to tell a story—“make sense” of his materials, either through explicit theory or, what is better, absorbed assumptions. Otherwise, no matter how vivid his style or sincere his feelings, he will finally be at a loss. All he will then be able to do is to present a kind of “fictionalized memoir”—which means not to move very far beyond what the memoirist has already done.
To avoid this difficulty, some novelists have concentrated on those camps that were not just “corpse factories” and that allowed some faint simulacrum of human life; or, like Jorge Semprun in The Long Voyage, they have employed flashbacks of life before imprisonment, so as to allow for some of that interplay of character and extension of narrative that is essential to works of imaginative fiction. Once our focus is narrowed, however, to the death camps, the locale of what must be considered the essential Holocaust, the novelist’s difficulties come to seem awesome. For then, apart from the lack of cognitive structures, he has to face a number of problems that are specifically, narrowly literary.
The Holocaust is not, essentially, a dramatic subject. Much before, much after, and much surrounding the mass exterminations may be open to dramatic rendering. But the exterminations, in which thousands of dazed and broken people were sent up each day in smoke, hardly knowing and often barely able to respond to their fate, have little of drama in them. Terribleness yes; drama no.
Of those conflicts between wills, those inner clashes of belief and wrenchings of desire, those enactments of passion, all of which make up our sense of the dramatic, there can be little in the course of a fiction focused mainly on the mass exterminations. A heroic figure here, a memorable outcry there—that is possible. But those soon to be dead are already half or almost dead; the gas chambers merely finish the job begun in the ghettos and continued on the trains. The basic minimum of freedom to choose and act that is a central postulate of drama had been taken from the victims.
The extermination process was so “brilliantly” organized that the life, and thereby the moral energy upon which drama ultimately depends, had largely been snuffed out of the victims before they entered the gas chambers. Here, in the death camps, the pitiful margin of space that had been allowed the human enterprise in the concentration camps was negated. Nor was it exactly death that reigned; it was annihilation. What then can the novelist make of this—what great clash or subtle inference—that a Filip Mueller has not already shown?
If the death camps and mass exterminations allow little opening for the dramatic, they also give little space for the tragic in any traditional sense of that term. In classical tragedy man is defeated; in the Holocaust man is destroyed. In tragedy man struggles against forces that overwhelm him, struggles against both the gods and his own nature; and the downfall that follows may have an aspect of grandeur. This struggle allows for the possibility of an enlargement of character through the purgation of suffering, which in turn may bring a measure of understanding and a kind of peace. But except for some religious Jews who were persuaded that the Holocaust was a reenactment of the great tradition of Jewish martyrdom, or for some secular Jews who lived out their ethic by choosing to die in solidarity with their fellows, or for those inmates who undertook doomed rebellions, the Jews destroyed in the camps were not martyrs continuing along the ways of their forefathers. They died, probably most of them, not because they chose at all costs to remain Jews, but because the Nazis chose to believe that being Jewish was an unchangeable, irredeemable condition. They were victims of a destruction that for many of them had little or only a fragmentary meaning—few of the victims, it seems, could even grasp the idea of total annihilation, let alone regard it as an act of high martyrdom. All of this does not make their death less terrible; it makes their death more terrible.
So much so that it becomes an almost irresistible temptation for Holocaust writers, whether discursive or fictional, to search for some redemptive token, some cry of retribution, some balancing of judgment against history’s evil, some sign of ultimate spiritual triumph. It is as if, through the retrospect of language, they would lend a tragic aura. . . .
Many of the customary resources and conventions of the novel are unavailable to the writer dealing with the Holocaust. Small shifts in tone due to the surprises of freedom or caprice; the slow, rich development of character through testing and overcoming; the exertion of heroic energies by characters granted unexpectedly large opportunities; the slow emergence of moral flaws through an accumulation of seemingly trivial incidents; the withdrawal of characters into the recesses of their selves; the yielding of characters to large social impulses, movements, energies—these may not be entirely impossible in Holocaust fiction, but all must prove to be painfully limited. Even so apparently simple a matter as how a work of fiction is ended takes on a new and problematic aspect, for while a memoirist can just stop, the novelist must think in terms of resolutions and completions. But what, after having surrendered his characters to their fate, can he suppose those resolutions and completions to be? Finally, all such literary problems come down to the single inclusive problem of freedom. In the past even those writers most inclined to determinism or naturalism have grasped that to animate their narratives they must give at least a touch of freedom to their characters. And that, as his characters inexorably approach the ovens, is precisely what the Holocaust writer cannot do.
5
The Israeli critic Hannah Yaoz, reports Sidra Ezrahi, has “divided Holocaust fiction into historical and transhistorical modes—the first representing a mimetic approach which incorporates the events into the continuum of history and human experience, and the second transfiguring the events into a mythic reality where madness reigns and all historical loci are relinquished.” At least with regard to the Holocaust, the notion that there can be a “mythic reality” without “historical loci” seems to me dubious—for where then could the imagination find the materials for its act of “transfiguring”? Still, the division of Holocaust fiction proposed by the Israeli critic has some uses, if only to persuade us that finally both the writers who submit to and those who rebel against the historical mode must face pretty much the same problems.
The “mimetic approach” incorporating “events into the continuum of history” has been most strongly employed by the Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski in his collection of stories This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. Himself an Auschwitz survivor, Borowski writes in a cold, harsh, even coarse style, heavy with flaunted cynicism, and offering no reliefs of the heroic. Kapo Tadeusz, the narrator, works not only with but also on behalf of the death system. “Write,” he says, “that a portion of the sad fame of Auschwitz belongs to you as well.” The wretched truth is that here survival means the complete yielding of self.
Like Filip Mueller in his memoir, Borowski’s narrator admits that he lives because there is a steady flow of new “material” from the ghettos to the gas chambers. “It is true, others may be dying, but one is somehow still alive, one has enough food, enough strength to work. . . .” Let the transports stop and Kapo Tadeusz, together with the other members of “Canada” (the labor gang that unloads the transports), will be liquidated.
Kapo Tadeusz lives in a world where mass murder is normal: it is there, it works, and it manages very well without moral justifications. The tone of detachment, which in a naturalistic novel would signal moral revulsion from represented ugliness, has here become a condition of survival. To lapse into what we might regard as human feeling—and sometimes Kapo Tadeusz and his fellow-prisoners do that—is to risk not only the ordeal of memory but the loss of life: a pointles
s loss, without record or rebellion.
Borowski’s style conveys the rhythm of a hammering factuality, and in a way almost too complex to describe, one appreciates his absolute refusal to strike any note of redemptive nobility. Truthful and powerful as they are, Borowski’s stories seem very close to those relentless Holocaust memoirs that show that there need be no limit to dehumanization. And that is just the point; for truthful and powerful as they are, Borowski’s stories “work” mainly as testimony. Their authenticity makes us, I would say, all but indifferent to their status as art. We do not, perhaps cannot, read these stories as mediated fictions, imaginative versions of a human milieu in which men and women enter the usual range of relations. In Kapo Tadeusz’s barrack there is simply no space for that complex interplay of action, emotion, dream, ambivalence, generosity, envy, and love that forms the basis of Western literature. The usual norms of human conduct—except for flashes of memory threatening survival—do not operate here. “We are not evoking evil irresponsibly,” writes Borowski, “for we have now become part of it.” Nor does it really matter whether Borowski was drawing upon personal memories or “making up” some of his stories. Composed in the fumes of destruction, even the stories he might have “made up” are not actually “made up”: they are the substance of collective memory. Hier ist kein warum.
Inevitably, some Holocaust writers would try to escape from the vise of historical realism, and one of the most talented of these was the Ukrainian Jew Piotr Rawicz. Resting on a very thin narrative base, Rawicz’s novel Blood from the Sky is a sustained, almost heroic rebellion against the demands of narrative—though in the end those demands reassert themselves, even providing the strongest parts of this wantonly brilliant book. What starts out as a traditional story soon turns into expressionist phantasmagoria seeking to project imagistic tokens for the Holocaust, or at least for the hallucinations it induces in the minds of witnesses. The story, often pressed far into the background, centers on a rich, highly educated, aristocratic Jew named Boris who saves himself from the Nazis through his expert command of German and Ukrainian—also through a disinclination to indulge in noble gestures. Upon this fragile strand of narrative Rawicz hangs a series of vignettes, excoriations, prose and verse poems, and mordant reflections of varying quality. The most effective are the ones visibly tied to some historical event, as in a brief sketch of a Nazi commander who orders the transport from Boris’s town of all women named Goldberg because a woman of that name has infected him with a venereal disease. Symbolically freighted passages achieve their greatest force when they are also renderings of social reality, as in this description of a work party of prisoners sent by the Nazis to tear apart a Jewish cemetery:
The party was demolishing some old tombstones. The blind, deafening hammer blows were scattering the sacred characters from inscriptions half a millennium old, and composed in praise of some holy man. . . . An aleph would go flying off to the left, while a he carved on another piece of stone dropped to the right. A gimel would bite the dust and a nun follow in its wake. . . . Several examples of shin, a letter symbolizing the miraculous intervention of God, had just been smashed and trampled on by the hammers and feet of these moribund workmen.
And then, several sentences later: “Death—that of their fellow men, of the stones, of their own—had become unimportant to them; but hunger hadn’t.”
The strength of this passage rests upon a fusion of event described and symbol evoked, but that fusion is successfully achieved because the realistic description is immediately persuasive in its own right. Mimesis remains the foundation. When Rawicz, however, abandons story and character in his straining after constructs of language that will in some sense “parallel” the Holocaust theme, the prose cracks under an intolerable pressure. We become aware of an excess of tension between the narrative (pushed into the background but through its sheer horror still dominant) and the virtuosity of language (too often willed and literary). Rawicz’s outcroppings of expressionist rage and grief, no matter how graphic in their own right, can only seem puny when set against the events looming across the book.
Still, there are passages in which Rawicz succeeds in endowing his language with a kind of hallucinatory fury, and then it lures us into an autonomous realm of the horrifying and the absurd. But when that happens, virtuosity takes command, coming to seem self-sufficient, without fixed points of reference, as if floating off on its own. Losing the causal tie with the Holocaust that the writer evidently hopes to maintain, the language overflows as if a discharge of sheer nausea. At least with regard to Holocaust fiction, I would say that efforts to employ “transhistorical modes” or “mythic reality” are likely to collapse into the very “continuum of history” they seek to escape—or else to come loose from the grounds of their creation.
6
M ’ken nisht, literally, Yiddish for “one cannot”—so the Israeli writer Aharon Applefeld once explained why in his fictions about the Holocaust he did not try to represent it directly, always ending before or starting after the exterminations. He spoke with the intuitive shrewdness of the writer who knows when to stop—a precious gift. But his remark also conveyed a certain ambiguity, as if m ’ken nisht had a way of becoming m ’tur nisht, “one must not,” so that an acknowledgment of limit might serve as a warning of the forbidden.
In approaching the Holocaust, the canniest writers keep a distance. They know or sense that their subject cannot be met full-face. It must be taken on a tangent, with extreme wariness, through strategies of indirection and circuitous narratives that leave untouched the central horror—leave it untouched but always invoke or evoke it as hovering shadow. And this brings us to another of the ironies that recur in discussing this subject. We may begin with a suspicion that it is morally unseemly to submit Holocaust writings to fine critical discriminations, yet once we speak, as we must, about ways of approaching or apprehending this subject, we find ourselves going back to a fundamental concern of literary criticism, namely, how a writer validates his material.
Before. Aharon Applefeld’s Badenheim 1939 is a novella that at first glance contains little more than a series of banal incidents in a Jewish resort near Vienna at the start of World War II. Each trivial event brings with it a drift of anxiety. A character feels “haunted by a hidden fear, not her own.” Posters go up in the town: “The Air Is Fresher in Poland.” Guests in the hotel fear that “some alien spirit [has] descended.” A musician explains deportations of Jews as if he were the very spirit of the century: it is “Historical Necessity.” Applefeld keeps accumulating nervous detail; the writing flows seamlessly, enticingly, until one notices that the logic of this quiet narrative is a logic of hallucination and its quietness mounts into a thick cloud of foreboding. At the end, the guests are being packed into “four filthy freight cars”—but here Applefeld abruptly stops, as if recognizing a limit to the sovereignty of words. Nothing is said or shown of what is to follow; the narrative is as furtive as the history it evokes; the unspeakable is not to be named.
During. Pierre Gascar, a Frenchman, not Jewish, who was a POW during World War II, has written in his long story “The Seasons of the Dead” one of the very few masterpieces of Holocaust fiction. Again, no accounts of torture or portrayal of concentration camps or imaginings of the gas chambers. All is evoked obliquely, through a haze of fearfulness and disbelief. The narrator makes no effort to hide his Parisian sophistication, but what he sees as a prisoner sent to a remote camp in Poland breaks down his categories of thought and leaves him almost beyond speech.
Gascar’s narrator is assigned to a detail that takes care of a little cemetery molded with pick and shovel for French soldiers who have died: “We were a team of ghosts returning every morning to a green peaceful place, we were workers in death’s garden.” In a small way “death’s garden” is also life’s, for with solemn attentiveness the men who work there preserve the civilizing rituals of burial through which mankind has traditionally tried to give some dignity to death. Gr
adually signs of another kind of death assault these men, death cut off from either natural process or social ritual. The French prisoners working in their little graveyard cannot help seeing imprisoned Jews of a nearby village go about their wretched tasks. One morning they find “a man lying dead by the roadside on the way to the graveyard” who has “no distinguishing mark, save the armlet with the star of David”; and as they dig new graves for their French comrades, they discover “the arm of [a] corpse . . . pink . . . like certain roots.” Their cemetery, with its carefully “idealized dead,” is actually in “the middle of a charnel, a heap of corpses lying side by side. . . .” And then the trains come, with their stifled cries, “the human voice, hovering over the infinite expanse of suffering like a bird over the infinite sea.” As in Claude Lanzmann’s great film Shoah, the trains go back and forth, endlessly, in one direction filled with broken human creatures, and in the other empty. Death without coffins, without reasons, without rituals, without witnesses: the realization floods into the consciousness of the narrator and a few other prisoners. “Death can never appease this pain; this stream of black grief will flow forever”—so the narrator tells himself. No explanation follows, no consolation. There is only the enlarging grief of discovery, with the concluding sentence: “I went back to my dead”—both kinds, surely. And nothing else.
