A DISTANCE FROM THE HOLOCAUST Resistance to the Holocaust Phillip Lopate hen I was small, a few years after World War II had ended, my mother would drag me around Brooklyn to visit some of the newly arrived refugees; they were a novelty. We would sit in somebody?s kitchen, and she would talk with these women for hours (usually in Yiddish, which I didn?t understand) to ?nd out what it was like. After we left, she would say in a hushed voice, ?Did you see the number on her arm? She was in a concentration camp!" I didn?t understand why my mother was so thrilled, almost erotically excited, when she spoke these words, but her melodramatic demand that I be impressed started to annoy me. I had only to hear about those lurid arm numbers to experience an obstinater neutral reac- tion and begin digging in my heels. Maybe I was picking up some of her own ambivalence; beneath my mother?s sympathetic sighs, I sensed a little distaste for these victims. Years later, she confessed that when the camp survivors first started coming into her candy store, they were the most dif?cult customers to please; they had? and here she paused, realizing how insensitive her ap- praisal might sound, given their tragic backgrounds?a ?chip on their shoulders.? Actually, I was touched by her honesty. Just because someone has suffered a lot doesn?t mean you have to like them?that has always been my motto. I used to go into a neighborhood hardware store run by a concentra- tion camp survivor with thick wire-framed glasses whom I did like but whose superior bitterness gave all trans- actions an air of mistrust. Once I heard this proprietor say, after he had thrown a custOmer out of his store: ?What can he do, kill me? I already died in Auschwitz.? This advantage of the living dead over the rest of us seemed unfair. But I am getting ahead of myself. I want to return to that moment when my mother and I were leaving some poor woman?s kitchen and I froze up at the demand for Phillip Lopate is [lie author of the novel The Rug Merchant (Viking Press, 1987) and a member ofrbe NY. Film Festival selection committee. His new book of essays, Against Joie de Vivre, will appear in May of 1989 (Poseidon Press). This essay was commissioned for Testimony: Contemporary Writers Make the Holocaust Personal, edited lay David Rosen- berg, to be published in the fall of 1989 by Times Books, a division of Random House, Inc. my compassionate awe. Let me try to explain by way of anecdote. I once heard of a very liberal Jewish couple whose child would scream whenever she saw a Black person. The parents were distressed that their little girl might be learning racist attitudes from somewhere, so they went to a child therapist and asked his advice. After questioning the little girl alone and learning nothing, the doctor suggested that he go on an outing with the family so that he might observe them in an everyday setting. As they were walking along the street, he noticed that, whenever a Black person approached, the mother would unconsciously tighten the grip on her daughter?s hand and the girl would, naturally, cry out. In my case, whenever my mother uttered those magic words, ?She was in a concentration camp!" the music on our emo- tional soundtrack got turned up so loud that I went resolutely numb. Maybe this is the seed of that puzzling resistance I have felt toward the Holocaust all my life. Before I give the wrong impression, let me interject that I am not one of those revisionist nuts who denies that the Nazis Systematically exterminated millions of Jews. On the contrary, I?m convinced that they com- mitted an enormous and unforgivable evil. I don?t know what more I can say about it other than that I am deeply sorry it happened. I would feel presumptuous adding my two cents of literary grief, or working myself into an empathic lather through the mechanics of writerly imagination. I was not there; I am not the one who should be listened to in this matter; I cannot bear witness. It is not my intent to speak at all about the atrocities of the Nazi era, only about the rhetorical, cultural, political, and religious uses to which the disaster has been put since then. Of these, at least, I do have some experience. When I was growing up, we never spoke of a Holo- caust; we said ?concentration camps? or ?gas chambers,? ?six million Jews, what the Nazis did.? It might seem an improvement over these awkward phrases to use a single, streamlined term. And yet putting a label on that phenomenal range of suffering serves to restrict, to conventionalize, to tame. As soon as the term ?the Holocaust? entered common circulation, around the midsixties, it made me uncomfortable. It had a self- important, strutting air, a vulgarly neologistic ring com- bined with a self-conscious archaic sound, straining as 3! 55 it did for a Miltonic biblical solemnity that brought to mind such quaint cousins as Armageddon, Behemoth, and Leviathan. Then, too, one instantly saw that the term was part. of a polemic and that it sounded more comfortable in cer- tain speakers? mouths than in Others; the Holocaustians used it like a club to smash back their opponents. Historian Lucy S. Davidowicz states, ?The Holocaust is the term that Jews themselves have chosen to describe their fate during World War I would amend that to say ?some Jews? or ?official Jewry?; in any case, it is one of those public relations substitutions, like African- American for Black or iizn?tde for the Palestinian up ris~ ing, which one ethnic group tries to compel the rest of the world to use as a token of_political respect. In my own mind I continue to distinguish, ever so between the disaster visited on the Jews and ?the Holo- causr." Sometimes it almost seems that ?the Holocaust? is a corporation headed by Elie \Wiesel, who defends his patents with articles in the Arts and Leisure section of the Sunday Times. The Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem is like at Disneyland perk devoted to Jewz's/a szz??erz?g. ?Shoah? has the same problems as ?Holocaust,? only in Hebrew. Both ?Shoah? and ?the Holocaust? share the same self-dramatizing theological ambition to portray the historic suffering of the Jews during World War II as a sort of cosmic storm rending the heavens. What disturbs me ?nally is the exclusivity of the singular usage, the Holocaust, which seems to cut the event off from all others, and to diminish, if not demean, the mass slaughters of other peOples~or, for that matter, previous tragedies in Jewish history. But more on these topics later. We need to consider first the struggle for control of the Holocaust analogy. All my life, the reductio ed z?tler argument has been applied to almost every controversy, to the detriment of serious discussion. If it is not always clear what constitutes moral action, it is certain that advocates of each controversial path can be accused of starting a slide that will lead straight to Hitler. Euthanasia? Smacks of the Third Reich. Abortion? Fed- eral payments make it ?possible for genocidal programs as were pracriced in Nazi Germany,? according to Senator Orrin Hatch. Letting the Ku Klux Klan march? An invitation to \?(leimar chaos. Forbidding the march? Censorship; as bad as Goebbels. The Devil can quote scripture and the Holocaust, it would appear. We see in the Middle East today how both Israelis and Palestinians 56 TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 3 compare the other side to Nazis. The Hitler/Holocaust analogy dead-ends all intelligent discourse by intruding a stridently shrill note that forces the mind to withdraw. To challenge that demagogic mine?eld of pure self- righteousness from an ironic distance almost ensures being misunderstood. The image of the Holocaust is too overbearing, too hot to tolerate subtle distinctions. In its life as a rhetorical figure, the Holocaust is a bully. he Holocaust analogy has the curious double property of being both amazingly plastic?able to be applied to almost any issue?and fantas- tically rigid, since we are constantly being told that the Holocaust is incomparable, in a class by itself, sui generis, not to be mixed up with other human problems or diluted by foreign subStances. hen President Jimmy Carter made a speech com- memorating all those liquidated by the Nazis, which he put at a ?gure of eleven million, the eminent Holo- causr scholar Yehuda Bauer accused Carter and his adviser Simon \?Uiesenthal of trying to ?de-Judaize? the Holocaust. ?The Wiesenthal-Carter definition appears to reflect a certain paradoxical ?envy' on the part of non-Jewish groups directed at the Jewish experience of the Holocaust. This itself would appear to be an un- conscious reflection of anti-Semitic attitudes,? warned Bauer. In other words, the Holocaust musr be seen as ?Jew-killing,? pure and simple. We Jews own the Holo- caust; all orhers get your cotton-picking hands off. ?How dare they equate our using napalm in Vietnam or even dropping the bomb on Hiroshima with the Holocaust?? one often hears. The underlying sense is: ?How dare they equate anything with the Holocaust?? The Holocaust is a jealous God; thou shalt draw no parallels to it. The problem is that drawng parallels and analogies is an incorrigibly natural human activity. I too ?nd it deeply offensive and distasteful when flippant compari- sons to Nazi genocide are made; but, on the other hand, it does not seem unreasonable to regard the Holocaust as the outer limit of a coutinuum of state- sanctioned cruelty, other points along whose spectrum might include the French torture of Algerians, Idi Amin?s liquidations, My Lai and other Vietnam massacres, the slaughter of the Armenians, Pol . .. I realize I may be appearing to blur important distinctions among a genocide, a massacre, and other horrors; but I am not asserting that any of these atrocities was as bad as the Holocaust (whatever that means) ?only that the human stuff, the decisions and brutal enactments that followed, may have had much in common. I find it curious for people to speak of the murder of six million Jews as a ?mysrery? and the murder of several million Cambodians as perhaps a more run-of?the-mill, open~and-shut affair. ?an; The truth is, unfortunately, that there are few things less mysterious and unique in the history of the world than genocide. It is true that the Holocaust was singular in its hideous anti-Semitism, which made the mere fact of being a Jew grounds for death. But as the historian Irving Louis Horowitz argues in his essay ?The Exclusivity of Collec- tive Death?: To emphasize diStinctions between peoples by arguing for the uniqueness of anti-Semitism is a profound mistake; it reduces any possibility of a uni?ed political and human poswre on the meaning of genocide or the . Insistence upon separatism, that the crime was Jewish existence and that this makes the Jewish situation different frOm any other slaughter, whatever its roots, contains a dangerous element of mySti?cation. A good deal of suspicion and touchiness reside around this issue of maintaining the Holocaust's privileged status in the pantheon of genocides. It is not enough that the Holocaust was dreadful; it must be seen as uniquely dreadful. Indeed, the catastrophe of the Jews under Hitler is sometimes spoken of as an event so special as to break the back of history in two. ?Holocaust stands alone in time as an aberration within hisrory,? states Menachem Rosensaft. And Elie Wiesel writes that ?the universe of concentration camps, by its design, lies outside if not beyond hiStory. Its vocabulary belongs to it alone.? What surprises me is the degree to which such an apocalyptic, religious-mythological reading of his- torical events has come to be accepted by the culture at large?unless people are just paying lip service to the charms of an intimidating rhetoric. In attempting, for instance, to resolve the recent ?his- torian?s dispute? in Germany, President Richard von Weizsacker declared: ?Auschwitz remains unique. It was perpetrated by Germans in the name of Germany. This truth is immutable and will not be forgotten.? The New Yorle Tz?mer? reporter, Serge Schmemann, goes on to note (October 22, 1988): Speaking to a congress of West German historians in Bamberg, Mr. von Weizsacker rejected the at- tempts by some historians to compare the systematic murder of Jews in Nazi Germany to mass killings elsewhere?like those in Cambodia under Pol Pot or in Stalin?s purges?or to seek external explana- tions for it. Such approaches have been assailed by other historians as attempts to frame the German crime in ?relative? terms. Mr. von Weizsacker has been praised for his integrity and statesmanship in this matter. And yet I can?t help thinking that he has also engaged in a certain amount of magically placating incantatory language: unique, immutable, antirelative, never to be forgotten. I wOuld have thought that placing a historical occurrence, criminal or not, in a relative perspective was the job of competent historians. Not that history-writing itself is ever value-free or objective; but attempting to situate an era in a larger context still seems closer to normal historical methods than expecting historians to believe there is such a thing as an absolute historical event or an absolute evil. There seems to be a fear that if we admit there are similarities between the Nazis? war against the Jews and other genocidal atrocities, we will be letting the Germans off the hook. On the contrary, we will be placing them on the same hook with other heinous criminals. And we will be asserting that the forces in history and human nature that brought about the death camps are nor necessarily a fluke, so be on guard. Yehuda Bauer has astutely observed that [i]f what happened to the Jews was unique, then it took place outside of history, it becomes a mysterious event, an upside down miracle, so to speak, an event of religious signi?cance in the sense that it is not man?made as that term is normally understood. . . . If what happens to the Jews is unique, then by de?nition it doesn?t concern us, beyond our pity and commiseration for the victims. If the Holocaust is not a universal problem, then why should a public school system in Philadelphia, New York or Timbuktu teach it? 1Well, the answer is that there is no unique- ness, not even of a unique event. Anything that happens once, can happen again: nor quite in the same way, perhaps, but in an equivalent form. Let us look at some of the cold ?gures on genocide in this century. According to Roger W. Smith, in Genocide and the Modem: Age, Turkey destroyed the lives of a million or more Armenians; Nazi Germany destroyed 6 million Jews, but it is often forgotten that it went on to murder other groups as well, so that a reasonable estimate for the total number of victims, apart frOm war deaths, is 16 million; PakiStan slaughtered 3 million Bengalis; Cambodia brought about the death of 3 million persons; and the Soviet Union ?rst deStroyed 20 million peasants in the 1930s and then went on to take hundreds of thousands of other lives in the 19405 with its assaults on various nationality groups suspected of disloyalty. These numbers may be somewhat high. Barbara Harff, who provides both lower and upper estimates in the same book, rounds out the picture with other twentieth- century genocides: Nigeria?s extermination of two to three million Ibos; the Indonesian slaughter of supposed RESISTANCE TO THE HOLOCAUST 57 Communists, 200,000-500,000; the Indonesian action in East Timor, 60000-100000; Idi Amin?s murder of fellow Ugandans, 500,000; the Tutsis? massacre ofHutus in Burundi, 100,000-200,000; the Sudanese against the Southern Sudanese, 500,000; and so on. The position that the Jewish Holocaust was unique tends to rest on the following arguments: (1) scale?the largest number of deaths extracted from one single group; (2) technology~the mechanization of death fac- tories; (3) bureaucracy?the involvement of the state apparatus at previously unheard-of levels; (4) intent? the express purpose being to annihilate every last Jew. Thus it is argued that although Hitler killed many, many Poles, he still intended to use the majority of Poles as slave laborers. Many scholars counter that it was Hitler?s goal also to eliminate the entire population; others dispute this claim. The fact that one?s group was not targeted for extermination in toto is a serious distinction but hardly much consolation to the Gypsies, homosexuals, radicals, Poles, Slavs, and others whom the Nazis did wipe out. Alan Rosenberg asserts that the uniqueness of the Holocaust lies above all in ?the Nazi abuse of science and technology, the application of bureaucratic tech- niques, principles of managerial ef?ciency and ?cost- bene?t? analysis." This assessment, with its obvious implications for the present, dovetails with Theodor Adorno?s and Max Horkheimer?s philosophical argument that the systematic, orderly, ?Germanic,? if you will, manner in which the killings were carried out shows the ultimately debased heritage of Western Enlighten- ment reason. Certainly much of our abiding fascination with the Holocaust rests on its dystopian, nightmarish use of rational, mechanized procedures. But I wonder how much of the importance we ascribe to these factors represents the narcissistic preoccupations of our Western technological society. Does it really matter so much if millions are gassed according to Eichmann?s timetables, rather than slowly, crudely starved to death, as in Stalin?s regime, or marched around by ragged teenage Khmer Rouge soldiers and then beheaded or clubbed? Does 58 TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 3 the family mourning the loved one hacked to pieces by a spontaneous mob of Indonesian vigilantes care that much about abuses of science and technology? Does neatness count, ?nally, so damn much? It is hard to escape the conclusion that, to us in North America, those piles of other victims are not as signi?cant as Jewish corpses. Is it simply because they are Third World people?black, brown, yellow-skinned? Or if white, then not Western European, therefore too ?marginal? to elicit our empathy? How much is social class itself a factor? In so many books and movies about the Holocaust, I sense that I am being asked to feel a particular pathos in the rounding up of gentle, scholarly, middle-class, civilized people who are then packed into cattle cars, as though the liquidation of illiterate peasants would not be as poignant. The now- familiar newsreel shot of Asian populations fleeing a slaughter with their meager possessions in handcarts still reads to us as a catastrophe involving ?masses,? while the images of Jews lined up in their fedoras and overcoats tug at our hearts precisely because we see them as a line of individuals. And our very notion of indi? viduality is historically connected with the middle class; on top of that, Jews have often stood for individuality in modern culture, by virtue of their outsider status and commitment to mind and artistic cultivation. I am by no means saying that all the Jews who died in the camps were bourgeois; but I am suggesting that, since the bulk of the narratives focus on middle-class victims swept up in the slaughter, the murder of European Jews plays on our sympathies so much more profoundly than does the annihilation of Bengalis, East Timorese, or Ibos. ?What?s wrong with you?? I hear certain Jewish readers ask. ?Are you not closer to your own dead than to those others? It?s understandable for Blacks to care more about slavery than the Holocaust, or Armenians to mourn their massacred more than ours. But why do you, a Jew, insist 0n speaking as if these others mattered the same as our own flesh and blood killed in the gas chambers?? I don?t know; I must be lacking in tribal feeling. When it comes to mass murder, I can see no difference between their casualties and ours. hat we must continue to come to terms with the Holocaust is obvious. The question is: What form will these commemorations take? And addressed to whom? And who will be allowed to speak? And what is the permissible range of discourse? There exists at present the urgent sense that we must keep up the pressure of commemorating the Holocaust to counteract the poisons of the extremist ?revisionist? historians, such as Robert Faurisson. To be truthful, I don?t believe that the Paurissons and their ilk deny that a mass extermination of Jews ever took place, threaten the world?s perception of history. They are the lunatic fringe, which we will always have with us. It makes sense to be vigilant about them, but nor so paranoid as to exaggerate their real persuasional powers. As for the more moderate revisionist historians, such as Andreas Hillgruber, who has tried to link the collapse of the eastern from with the death camps? greater activity, or to propose that many German soldiers were heroically doing their duty, their views may set our teeth on edge with their insensitive tone, or alarm us with their useful- ness to the far right; but the greater threat they pose to the purity of our outrage is that some of what they say could hold a grain of truth. Is it reasonable to deny that some German soldiers in \World War may have been decent men victimized by the situation? Are we to divide the guilt by battalions? determine, as many are wont to do, that an ordinary German foot soldier may not have been entirely vicious, but that anyone in the SS Was a sadistic criminal? I can well imagine a kid who didn?t know better getting swept up in the mood of the day and joining the SS out of idealism. (One may scoff at the seeming oxymoron, Nazi idealist, yet every political movement generates its youthful idealists.) .I know of no event in recent years that has so united educated people in incredulous disgust as President Reagan?s visit to the military cemetery in Bitburg, Germany. At the time, glad to heap scorn on a president I despised, I heartily joined the chorus, though with a slight inner uneasiness that I was too cowardly to express. Now, thinking it over, I would say that it may not have been such a dastardly thing for the visiting president of a victorious nation to lay a wreath on the tomb of his defeated enemy?s soldiers. The gesture contains a certain old-fashioned Homeric nobility. But don?t you under- staad? There were 55 troops hariea? in that cemetery! Reagan was ?signaling? to the nee-Fascists that is forgiven. Yes, yes, I remember that argument. To be fair to Reagan, he has also made tributes to the Holocaust. So what was really being objected to was appearances. \We could not allow any reconciliation to appear to cloud the distinction between radical good and radical evil, even if it was perfectly obvious to all of us that Reagan was not condoning nazism. The Holocaust has become a public issue around which we Jews must Save Face, must spot anti-Semitism and decry it even when we know that the substance underneath is rather different. A similar reaction occmred recently when the Speaker of the West German parliament, Philipp Jenninger, made a speech in which he tried to show how the Germans were taken in by Hitler. He attempted to recreate the of the typical German fascinated by Hitler?s air of success, but his irony was misunderstood?in some cases intentionally so by his political opponents? and he was forced to resign. Jenninger, a longtime sup- porter of Israel, was taken to task for saying honest things at the wrong time, and speci?cally for quoting from Nazi speeches and reports without systematic and repudiating interruption. Yer how is it possible to understand this complex historical phenomenon without reexamining the Nazi point of view? What sort of intellectual grasp can we get on a historical situation if it is presented only from the standpoint of the victims? The role of chief victim a?ora?s as am edge, a sort Ofprz'viiegeal nation status a: the moral hoaor rail, such as the one that Native American Indians have eajbyedfor some time The ?sensitivity? quotient operating around the Holo- caust has begun to preclude any public discourse that goes beyond expressions of mourning and remorse. And even within this constricted discourse, how greedily we watch for signs of imbalance. \Vill the pope single out suf?ciently the tragedy of the Jews in his remarks about World War If not, the Jewish organizations are quick to get on his case. There is something so testy, so vain, so diva-like about this insistence that we always get top billing in any rite of mourning. Must every of?cial statement that does not mention the Jews first among the dead be treated as an ominous Sign of forget- ting? Even if it were true that a certain resentment against the Jews, an incipient form of anti-Semitism, were lurking behind these of?cial wordings or omissions, all our monitoring and suspicious rebuttal only leaves the impression of a Jewish lobby seeking to control, like a puppeteer, the language of politicians and popes. \Vhenever I see in the newspaper a story about the opening of yet another memorial or museum dedicated to the Holocaust, c0mplete with photograph of dis- tinguished backers surrounding a cornerstone or archi- tectural model, my stomach gets nervous. What I need to separate out for myself is how much of this discom?t derives from legitimate doubts and how much of it is simply the old fear of making ourselves too visible, drawing too much attention to Jewish things in a world that will never be anything but anti-Semitic. I would like to think, naturally, that there is more to it than cowardice. All right, then, what could possibly be wrong with a Holocaust memorial? Let me start with an obtuse response: I just don?t get why both New York and \Washington, DC, should have RESISTANCE TO THE HOLOCAUST 59 to have Holocaust memorial museums. Or why every major city in the United States seems to be commemo- rating this European tragedy in some way or another. An Israeli poet on a reading tour through the States was taken into the basement of a synagogue in Ohio and proudly shown the congregations memorial to the six million dead: a torch meant to remain eternally lit. The poet muttered under his breath: ?Short/3 In Israel they can joke about these matters. Holocaust monuments seem to me primarily a sign of ethnic muscle flexing, a sign that this or that Jewish community in, say, St. Louis or Seattle has the ?nancial or political clout to erect such a tribute. the past, monuments commemorated victories and glory; they were a striving for immortality in the eyes of the polth. But with the very survival of the planet in doubt, and in light of our disenchantment with the whole ideal of glory after Vietnam and Water- gate, a patriotic equestrian monument raised at this moment would seem embarrassing. Myself, I can easily live without more cannons and generals on pedestals. On the other hand, the dethroning of glory has brought about a tendency to erect monuments to shame and his- torical nightmare. These monuments have the tendency to make the visitor feel bad, while at the same time retaining a decorously remote and abstract air?all the more so when they are removed geographically from the ground of pain. Auschwitz is one thing: the historical preservation of the death camps 1'22 sits; makes perfect sense. But it is quite another to allocate the bottom part of a new luxury apartment tower in Lower Man? hattan for a Holocaust museum, for which the developer will receive the usual tax abatement. Snobbish as this may sound, I view museums primarily as places for the exhibition and contemplation of inter- esting objects. Institutions like Yad Vashem (the Holo- caust Heroes and Museum) and the Museum of the Diaspora in Israel?which have few artifacts, consisting mainly of slide shows, blown-up photographs, and accompanying wall texts?are, in my view, essentially propaganda factories, designed to manipulate the visitor through a precise emotional experience. They are like the Tunnel of Horrors or a Disneyland park devoted to Jewish suffering. The success of the exhibit depends entirely on entering the museum in a properly pre? programmed state and allowing one?s buttons to be pushed. A woman I know, the child of camp survivors, had grown up with tales of Hitler and Buchenwald at every meal. Finally she got to visit Yad Vashem. She was so bursting with presold emotion, so ready to be wiped out by the experience, that, shortly after entering, she saw a lampshade and thought, ?Oh my God, that could 60 TIKKUN VOL. 4, N0. 3 be my Uncle Morty!? and ran in tears from the museum. Her companion caught up with her to try to calm her down. ?But Hilda,? he said, ?those lampshades are part of the exhibit showing a typical jewish scholar?s study before the Holocaust even began.? In my own visit to Yad Vashem I was part of a group ofjewish American academics who thought it so ?heavy? that I didn?t dare open my mouth. Some of the exhibits were undeniably interesting, but it was not an over- whelming experience for me. Rather, I was disturbed by what seemed a theatrically partisan misuse of his- torical methods. I also found it hard to summon to mind the six million dead in the face of such ennobling strain. The grounds were a sort of monument park filled with sentimental-expressionist statuary. Our tour guide explained that the steel pillar symbolized a smoke- stack as well as a ladder of transcendence. All this artistic-symbolism talk reminded me of the remark of an Israeli friend: ?If bad sculpture could-be turned into food, then Israel could feed the world.? Yad Vashem?s memorial hall did have a bleak archi? tectural elegance of stone and concrete; but the fire (another ?eternal flame?) was upstaged by an ugly black organic relief, symbolizing charred bones, I suppose. Someone in my group produced a mimeographed poem, which we read aloud: In the presence of eyes which witnessed the slaughter, which saw the oppression the heart could nor bear I have taken an oath: to remember it all, to remember, not once to forget! In the presence of the flame a symbol of the slaughter . .. in the presence of the flame a symbol of eternal memory . .. in the presence of the flame which we kindle in our souls we join our sancti?ed six million. Why did the poem have to be so bad? It is at this level of kitsch doggerel that I start to rebel. ill the above seem the ravings of a finicky aesrhete? I apologize. But remember that it an aesthetic problem we are talking about, this attempt to make an effective presentation of a massive event. The dead of Auschwitz are not buried in Yad Vashem; believe me, I am not in- sulting their memories. Yacl Vashem is the product of us the living, and as such it is subject to our dispassionate scrutiny and criticism. To project religious awe onto this recently built tourist attraction is idolatry, pure and simple. In a brilliant essay called ?The Kitsch of Israel,? Al?nun . _v -. .. -- -.J Tl which appeared in the New Yka Review of Books, Avishai Margalit wrote: Israel?s shrine of kitsch is not, as may have been expected, the Wailing Wall, but a place that should have been furthest away from any trace of kitsch: Yad Vashem, the memorial for the Holocaust. A ?children?s room? has been dedicated there recently, a pitch-dark room with tape-recorded voices of children crying out in Yiddish, ?Ma/7m, Tare.? . . . The real signi?cance of this room is not in its commemoration of the single most horrible event in the history of mankind?the systematic murder of two million children, Jewish and Gypsies, for being what they were and not for anything they had done. The children?s room, rather, is meant to deliver a message to the visiting foreign Statesman, who is rushed to Yad Vashem even before he has had time to leave off his luggage at his horel, that all of us here in Israel are these children and that Hitler- Arafat is after us. This is the message for internal consumption as well. Talking of the PLO in the same tone as one talks of Auschwitz is an important element in turning the Holocaust into kitsch. Another method of Holocaust remembrance takes the form of educational instruction in grade school. The pedagogic problem I have with these Holocausr study units is that they are usually parachuted into the classroom with very little connection to anything else in the curriculum. As someone who worked in elementary and secondary schools for twelve years, I?ve had many Occasions to see how the latest concession to each ethnic lobbying group?be it Puerto Rican Week, Black History Month, or Holocaust Week?is greeted by the Students as a gimmick, not to be taken seriously. I remember the day that the local Holocaust curriculum specialisr came into a fourth-grade classroom at PS. 75 and in her sweet, solemn voice began describing the horrors of a concentration camp. The children listened with resentful politeness, distracted not necessarily because the subject matter was unsuitable for their age group, but because any subject matter introduced in so arti?cial a manner, with so little relation to their other studies, would be treated as an intrusion. I realize it may be asking a lot, but we should be attempting to teach the Holocaust within a broader context, as part of an invigorated, general strengthening ofhistorical studies. \Why isolate Hitler completely from Bismarck, Kaiser Wilhelm, Adenauer, Stalin? \Vhy teach children about Buchenwald and not other genocides? The Holocaust becomes their ?rst, sometimes their exclusive, of?cial school instruction on death and evil. Of course, kids daily see war and gore on the six o'clock news; but in school we seem to want them to encounter the horrors of mass killing solely through presentations about the fate of the Jews. It is almost as if we Jews wanted to monopolize suffering, to appropriate death as our own. But, as Irving Louis Horowitz points out, while Judaism as a way of life is special, there is no ?special nature of Jewish dying. Dying is a universal property of many peoples, cultures, and nations.? I cannot help but see this extermination pride as another variant of the Covenant: this time the Chosen PeOple have been chosen for extraordinary suffering. As such the Holocaust seems simply another opportunity for Jewish chauvinism. ?Secularization,? Hannah Arendt has written, engendered a very real Jewish chauvinism, if by chauvinism we understand the perverted national~ ism in which (in the words of Chesterton) ?the individual himself is the thing to be worshipped; the individual is his own ideal and even his own idol.? 1From now on, the old concept of chosenness was no longer the essence of Judaism; it was instead the essence of Jewishness. There are other reasons besides chauvinism why Jews might be loath to surrender the role of chief victim. It affords us an edge, a sort of privileged nation status in the moral honor roll, such as the one that Native Ameri- can Indians have enjoyed for some time. Following Hitler?s defeat, we Jews had a short grace period in world opinion, pitied as we were and valued as an endangered species. Given the world?s tendency to dis- tort and demonize Jews in the past, it would almost seem as though there were no middle ground: either continue to ?ght for persecuted, good-victim status, or else watch the pendulum swing the opposite way to where we would be regarded as exceptionally wicked. But in my opinion there must be a middle ground, and it is worth ?ghting for. In the meantime, is it not possible for us to have a little more compassion for the other victimized peoples of this century and not insist quite so much that our wounds bleed more ?ercely? heodor Adorno once made an intentionally provocative statement to the effect that one can?t have poetry after Auschwitz. Much as I respect Adorno?s writing, I have to ask: \Why not? Are we to infer, regarding all the beautiful poetry that has been written since 1945, that these postwar poets were insensitive to some higher tact? Alexander Kluge, the German ?lmmaker, has explained what Adorno really meant by this remark: any art from now on that does not take Auschwitz into account will not be worthy as art. This is one of those large, intimidating pronounce- ments to which one gives assent in public while secretly thinking: huh? Art is a vast arena; must it all and RESISTANCE TO THE HOLOCAUST 61 always come to terms with the death camps, important as they are? How hoggish, this Holocaust, to insist on putting its stamp on all creative activity. On the other hand, teams have been written arguing that you can?t make art out of the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel once declared: ?Art and Auschwitz are antitheti- cal.? Many people nod their heads gravely at this, but is it true either? Perhaps they would like to believe that there is some preserve, some domain that ought to be protected from the artist?s greedy hands. Actually, a whole body of splendid art about the tragedy of the jews under the Nazis has been made. One thinks right away of Primo Levi?s books, the poems of Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs, Tadeusz Kantor?s theatrical pieces, ?lms like Resnais?s Night and Fog, Ophuls?s The Sorrow and the Pity and Hotel Terminus, Losey?s Mister Klein, Corti?s trilogy Where To Ami Bach. . . . Maybe not a lot, true, but then not much great art came out of the debacle of World War I. We should not forget that 99 percent of all art~making attempts are failures, regardless of subject matter. It has also been argued that the enormity of the Nazis? crimes against the jews calls for an aesthetic approach of an entirely different order than the tradi- tional mimetic response. This seems to me nothing more than a polemic in favor of certain avant-garde or antinaturalist techniques, hitched arbitrarily to the Holocaust. Yes, Paul Celan?s abstract poems 62 TIKKUN VOL. 4, NO. 3 are powerful approaches to the concentration camps, but so are Primo Levi?s direct, lucid accounts. I would not like to think that every stage piece about the Holo- caust must perforce follow the stripped, ritualized strategies of Grotowski?s or Kantor?s theatrical works? effective as these may be by themselves?out of some deluded idea that a straight naturalistic approach would desecrate the six milliou dead. Art has its own laws, and even so devasrating an event as the Holocaust may not signi?cantly change them. For all its virtues, Claude Lanzmann?s Shoah?s longueurs, repetitions, and lack of sympathy are not exonerated, no matter what its apologists may argue, by the serious- ness of the subject matter, as though an audience must be put through over eight hours of an exhaustingly uneven movie to convince it of the reality of the Holo- caust. A tighter film would have accomplished the same and been a stronger work of art. Lanzmann might reply that he is indifferent to the claims of art compared to the claims of the Holocaust. Unfortunately you can?t play and not play the game of art at the same time. What is usually meant by the statement that the Holocaust is unsuitable for artisric treatment is that it is too vast and terrible to be used merely as a metaphor or backdrop. Certainly I undersrand the impatience of serious people with the parade of shallow movie melo- dramas and television dOCudramas that invoke the milieu of Nazi Germany as a sort of narrative frisson. Indeed, where would the contemporary European art film be without the Holocaust? As a plot device it is second only to in?delity. For the fractured European ?lm market, the trauma ofWorld War II is perhaps the only unifying historical experience to which narratives can appeal commercially. Yet the mediocrity of such ?prestige? movies as Truffaut?s The Last Metro, Visconti?s The Damned, Zanussi?s Somewhere in the Night, Malle?s Laeomhe, Lucien, De Sica?s The Garden of the Fi?zi- Commit, Szabo?s Herzussert, among others, illustrates the degree to which?even for talented Nazi terror has ossi?ed into a stale genre, a ritualized parade of costumes and sentimental conventions, utterly lacking in the authentic texture of personally observed detail. Now we have the Third Reich as dress-up: all those red flags with swastikas, those jeeps and jackboots suddenly flashing in key-lit night scenes, the tinkle of broken glass?accoutrements that seem considerably less menacing in technicolor than they used to in black and white. we have endless variations of the Caharet plot, as characters ?ounder in frivolous, ?decadent? sexual confusion before the evil Nazis announce them- selves at midpoint and restore order and narrative sus- pense in one blow. The Gestapo represents the principle of Fate rescuing the story from its aimlessness?a screen- writer?s best friend. The Jewish protagonists at ?rst are pulled unknowingly into that funnel of history, and then gradually learn that there is something larger than their personal discontents. Meanwhile, the Christian characters sort themselves into betrayers and noble selfless neighbors, thanks to the litmus test of the Holo- caust plot, and the audience readies itself for that last purgative scene, the lineup before the trains. . . . Still, to enumerate the clich?s is not to agree with the viewpoint that no art can be made about the Holo~ cau5t. Quite the contrary: it is only to demand that the artist go beyond a sentimental, generic approach to the subject and ?nd a more complex, detailed, personal, and original path. I have an ex-student, Bella, whose father was always trying to get her to see Resnais?s Night and Fog, an admittedly ?ne film about the death camps. Her father believed that we must all deal in one way or another with the Holocaust, and his way, as be?t an educated man, was to read as many books and see as many films on the subject as possible. This approach he urged on his daughter. But Bella did not want to see Night and Fog. As a child she had had many phobias, and, even after she had outgrown them, there was something about the way her father talked up the ?lm that made her leery. He would try to get her to meet him at the movie theater where it was showing. He kept saying, ?But you owe it to them to see it.? Them: the ghosts, the six million. Bella refused. Since that time she has moved to Israel and is leading, in her own way, a good Jewish life. \Vhat are our obligations to them? Whatever they may be, no living person can tell us. hile I read books and see movies about the Holocaust, I do it more out of a sense of curiosity and desire to learn about history than out of a religious debt to the victims. I am not convinced that learning history means trying to put oneself emotionally through the experience?or blaming oneself if one is not feeling enough. I am trying to put my finger on a problem regarding empathy. A Jewish educator recently wrote that we must find a way to make our young people ?feel more anguishingly the memory of our dead.? But the effort to project oneself into the Holocausr past, to "undergo" for a few minutes what others have suffered in the transport trains and the camps, to take that anguish into oneself, seems, except in rare cases, foredoomed. That way generally lies tourism and self-pity. It is hard enough in to retrieve affectively one?s own past, one?s actual memories; to expect to relive invented memories with emotion seems overly demand- ing or gimmicky, like those Black history courses that made the students crawl along the floor ?chained? to each orher to give them an existential feel for conditions in the hold of a slave ship. False knowledge. Borrowed mysticism. By blackmail- ing ourselves into thinking that we must put ourselves through a taste of Auschwitz, we are imitating uncon- sciously the Christian mystics who tried to experience in their own flesh the torments of Christ on the cross. But this has never been part of the Jewish religiou, this gluttony for empathic suffering. Though Jewish rabbis and sages have been killed for their faith, and their deaths recorded and passed down, Judaism has fought shy in the past of esrablishing a hagiography based on Why are we doing it now? Does it really matter mz'Zhom are gassed by rather than marched around by Khmer Rouge soldiers and their beheaded? Does heathen cozmt so damn much? In certain ways, the Jewish American sacramentalizing of the Holocaust seems an unconscious borrowing of Christian theology. That one tragic event should be viewed as standing outside, above history, and that its uniqueness musr be defended and proclaimed, seems very much like the Passion of Christ. Indeed, in a recent book, The Crucz?xz?orz of the Jews, the Christian theologian Franklin H. Littell has argued that the true Cruci?xion was the Holocaust, not the death of Jesus on the cross, and that the subsequent establishment of the State of Israel was the resurrection. Littell asks: ?\Was Jesus a false Messiah? Is the Jewish people, after all and in spite of two millennia of Christian calumny, the true Suffering Servant promised in Isaiah?? And John Cardinal O?Connor of New York writes: ?To say to the Jews, ?Forget the Holocaust,? is to say to Christians, ?Forget the Cruci?xion.? There is a sacra- mentality about the Holocaust for Jews all around the world. It constitutes a mystery, by de?nition beyond their understanding?and ours.? Complimentary as all this may sound, it worries me because it shows how easily Judaism can be Christianized??or at least co- opted into a Christian vocabulary-?by mythologizing the Holocaust experience. The theological uses to which the Holocaust has been put by an assimilated Jewish American community are so diverse that the Holocaust has begun to replace the Bible as the new text that we must interpret. There is the danger that the ?glamor? of the Holocaust will RESISTANCE TO THE HOLOCAUST 63 eclipse traditional religious practice in the eyes of American Jewry?that, in effect, the Holocaust will swallow up Judaism. In the vacuum where God used to be, we are putting the Holocaust. I first began to notice the usurpation of the traditional Passover service by Holocaust worship at a large com- munal seder in Houston, about 1982. Though rewritings of the Haggadah were nothing new to me (in the late sixties, the Vietcong were compared to the Jews in Egypt trying to throw off their oppressors), the intro- duction of references to the Holocausr in every second or third prayer seemed to have a different funcrion. For many of the peOple at that seder in Texas, the Holocaust was the heart of their faith; it was what touched them mosr deeply about being Jewish. The religion itself the prayers, the commentaries, the rituals, the centuries of accumulated wisdom and tradition?had shriveled to a sort of marginally necessary preamble for this negative miracle. The table conversation turned to accounts of pilgrimages to Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz, package tours organized by United Jewish Appeal. The ancient Jewish religion was all but forgot- ten beside the lure of the concentration camp universe. The importance of the Holocaust for such assimilated Jews must be considered within the broader framework of the erosion of Jewish group memory in the modern period. By group or ?collective? memory, I mean simply all the customs, rituals, ceremonies, folkways, readab- kez't, cuisine, historical events, and so on that used to be the common inheritance of every Jew. The desperation to hold onto the Holocaust is informed by this larger decay. Underneath these anxious injunctions never to forget, what I hear is: must never forget the Holo- caust because we?re rapidly forgetting everything else.? first glance it seemed to me a paradox that Jews, ostensibly the historically minded people par excellence, should be so resistant to placing the Holocaust in a comparative historical context. But then I came across an illuminating little book by the historian Yosef Yerushalmi, Zak/301': Jews/9 History and Jewish Memory, which argues that antihistorical currents are nothing new within Jewry. The oft-repeated injunc- tion to ?remember? is nor the same as urging a historical perspective. ?Not only is Israel under no obligation what~ ever to remember the entire past,? Yerushalmi writes, ?but its principle of selection is unique unto itself. It is above all God?s acts of intervention in history, and man?s re5ponses to them, be they positive or negative, that must be recalled." Yerushalmi points out that for nearly fifteen centuries after the death ofJosephus, during that talmudic period so fertile for commentary about the patterns and mean- ing of the Bible, there were no Jewish historians. The 64 TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 3 rabbis felt it unnecessary and perhaps even impious to keep contemporary historical records (except for sketchy rabbinic genealogies) precisely because the Bible was already ?sacred history.? A brief flurry of Jewish history-writing occurred in the sixteenth century, touched off in part by the need to understand the cata- strophic expulsion of Jews from Spain and Portugal. But these chronicles were not as scienti?c as Christian histories of the same era; they had elements of mes- sianism and followed a somewhat apocalyptic approach, examining the pasr for signs and prophecies of a coming redemption. Even this limited historical activity was submerged at the end of the sixteenth century by the greater appeal of Lurianic Kabbala, which offered Jews, in Yerushalmi?s words, a unique interpretation of history that lay beyond history .. . an awesome metahisrorical of a pronounced gnostic character. That declared that all evil, including the historical evil that is Jewish exile, had its roots before history began, before the Garden of Eden was planted, before our world existed, in a primal tragic flaw that occurred at the very creation of the cosmos itself. In the modern era, of course, a plethora of Jewish histories and historians came into being; but the new objective methods of analysis have been on a collision course with providential history. ?To the degree that this historiography is indeed ?modern? and deserves to be taken seriously,? Yerushalmi writes, ?it must at least functionally repudiate? two cardinal assumptions of traditional Judaism: ?the belief that divine providence is not only an ultimate but an active causal factor in Jewish history, and the related belief in the uniqueness of Jewish history itself.? Forgive this digression; it actually has a point. Our response to the Holocaust must be seen within this broader framework of the ancient Jewish ambivalence toward a historical outlook, which threatens the religious one. The hostility toward anything that questions the uniqueness of the Holocaust can now be seen as part of a deeper tendency to view all of Jewish history as unique, to read that history selectively and use it only insofar as it promotes a redemptive script. Thus, the Holocaust?s ?mystery? must be asserted over and over, in the same way as was the ?mystery? of Jewish survival through the ages, in order to yield the single explanation that God ?wants? the Jewish people to live and is protecting them. Being a secular, fallen Jew with a taste for rationalism and history, I cannot help but regard such providential interpretations as mumbo jumbo. Against them I would place the cool, cautionary wis- dom of Spinoza about his own people: ?As for their continuance so long after dispersion and the loss of -..