Art Spiegelman, Nicole Krauss, Daniel Mendelsohn
“Who Shall Bear Witness for the Witness?”1
Beginning in the late 1800s, European Jews fled pogroms and then Nazi persecutions, often taking refuge in the Americas, more particularly the United States. Even before the Second World War, Jewish American writers were among the greatest voices of American literature, with their works grounded in urban American settings, yet suffused with ancestral Yiddish ambience. Grace Paley famously acknowledged her own strong Yiddish roots, as did Amy Bloom, vividly recalling at the Village Voice her grandparents who had been immersed in the New York Yiddish culture, enhanced by the mythical Goldfaden Theater, as described in her captivating novel Away.2
The postwar literature of the Holocaust arose from the urgency to fill the void left by the six million annihilated European Jews and its few stunned survivors. In fact, it took two generations of children and grandchildren to rescue these stories from oblivion. They would be read as survivor narratives of an unprecedented historical cataclysm, and equally important, as attempts to reclaim their individual voices from silence. This literature often takes the form of a journey in search of traces, witnesses and/or memories that bring back the singularity of “the unutterable dismal”3 of these once-buried lives.
Gwen Edelman
A New York editor and writer, Gwen Edelman lived in Paris for many years, playing an active role in the life of the Village Voice by introducing authors and even starting a small literary magazine Listen, destined to enlarge the readership and audience of our bookstore.
She is the author of the novels War Story4 and The Train to Warsaw,5 each with two central characters whose lives are marked by the Holocaust. Both works of fiction open with a train journey that transports its passengers physically and mentally back to their pasts. Edelman presented War Story at the Village Voice on September 20, 2001. Her protagonist Kitty is on her way to Amsterdam for the funeral of Joseph, the man she was once passionately involved with. Sitting in the train, she goes over the drama of their love affair, beginning with a chance meeting in a New York bookshop.
Kitty, a young writer, had immediately fallen in love with the older and successful European playwright. Yet her deep devotion could not begin to repair the tormented past of Joseph who, as a young man, had been constantly on the run, hiding from the Gestapo in Vienna and then Amsterdam. Carrying inside “the never-healed scars from his youth,” his adult life has been one of wandering from place to place, as well as a flight from any kind of emotional attachment.
Through Kitty’s explorations of their complex relationship, Edelman draws the searing portrait of a man locked in a deadly past and living in the stories he carries in his head: “They are his house, his four walls, his ark . . . though he wrote his plays in English, the Austrian-born writer claimed that ‘he only exists in his own language with its words and sounds,’ a way for him to express the raw feeling of having been expelled from his native land and language,” Edelman said.
“Fifty, sixty years after the Holocaust, survivors had not forgotten nor gotten over it,” Edelman said, “and it changed the way they saw the world: everything was refracted through their own experience of the war. Everything in their lives was turned upside down, inside out.”6
On April 20, 2007, Edelman invited her London-based friend, the writer Gitta Sereny, to come to the Village Voice to discuss her own work, Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder,* a classic of Holocaust literature. Edelman prefaced this book as “an examination of conscience through a series of historical interviews Sereny had conducted with Franz Stangl, the Austrian SS commandant of the extermination camps of Sobibor and Treblinka, who, in 1970, was tried and found guilty of co-responsibility for the slaughter of nine hundred thousand people.”
Spending a total of seventy hours face-to-face with Stangl in his German prison cell, the author explained that she had tried “to probe the mind of this man who prided himself on having been a perfectionist in his job and a good family man, the two spheres of his life hermetically separated.” A few days after her last session with him, Stangl died of a heart attack.
Sereny’s interviews once again raise the baffling question that has beset generations since this dire time: How can a human being become the instrument of such overwhelming evil?
Cynthia Ozick
The name of Cynthia Ozick immediately summons up “The Shawl,” her short story published in The New Yorker in 1980, one of the most visually shattering and unforgettable narratives of the Holocaust in American literature. A Nazi guard has just spotted a fifteen-month-old baby who has gotten loose from the shawl pressed against her mother’s breast inside a large coat. Snatching the young child, he hurls her against the electrified barbed wire of the camp in full view of the mother, rendered helpless as she obsessively sucks on her now emptied shawl so as not to scream herself.
Cynthia Ozick was at the Village Voice on September 29, 1988, to launch her new book, The Messiah of Stockholm,7 a novel in memory of the Polish Jewish writer and artist Bruno Schulz shot dead in the street of Drohobycz* in 1942 by a Gestapo officer. His act was not haphazard, but premeditated, also referred to by Philip Roth in his novella The Prague Orgy (1985).
Accompanied by her husband, Ozick entered the bookstore, looking somewhat shy and disoriented, but my first impression soon disappeared, given the alertness and curiosity in her eyes, magnified by a pair of large, round glasses. Her curly, graying hair pointed to middle age, but her voice was young and melodious.
“The idea of this book,” she said in her introduction, “came up during a short stay in Sweden, where it was rumored that Bruno Schulz’s presumably lost manuscript had surfaced. Nobody had seen it, nobody knew the content, but according to the myth, Schulz had died leaving behind an unpublished document, now seemingly afloat in Stockholm.”
Ozick spoke of being “astounded” by the news, but nothing had followed. She was eager to be back home at her desk imagining this manuscript, though aware that she should not attempt “to recreate it.” “Nevertheless, one night,” she said, “it came to me that I was going to do it.” And to do so, she had to invent a character called Lars, Schulz’s alleged son, adopted in his childhood by a Swede.
Ozick read the surreal passage in which Bruno Schulz’s manuscript has been recovered and is now in the hands of this imagined boy. Under his scrutiny of “inky markings—infinitely minute drawings and signs of an unknown alphabet,” the unreadable book of loose, battered sheets of paper turns into a “phantasmagorical Drohobycz, invaded by a debauchery of tiny monsters and frantic idols pressed around their Messiah.”
Suddenly thrust into a vortex of strong winds, the hay-stuffed Messiah collapses, and while disintegrating, hurls into the air a frail bird, a strand of dried hay in its beak that will spark an inferno of destruction: “The human beings are gone; the idols are gone while this small, beating bird born of an organism called ‘the Messiah’ dies wailing . . .”
Q: “This stunningly visual and spectacular passage you’ve just read, isn’t it a description of the apocalypse?”
Ozick: “I do not know how this story came about with its description of the perfect book and the destruction of the organism, the Messiah. It’s strange writing, but it is not automatic writing since the story has a source though I could say that it wrote itself. It just came out. The rationalization afterward of the book, it seems to me, is the Nazi invasion into Galicia and into Europe, the Nazis as the ultimate idols.”
Q: “Why did you choose Stockholm as the locus of your novel?”
Ozick: “The Messiah is the story of an orphan, Lars, whose parents have disappeared in the Holocaust, but he has been saved by a Swede who adopts him. He has no origins, he is free to invent whatever he likes, and he invents himself a father, and this father is Bruno Schulz. It is a fable with the obsessive theme of the father running throughout the book, a theme familiar to Bruno Schulz himself and, of course, to Kafka.
Now, what about Stockholm? Sweden remains a society that is somehow normal, that is free of the usual troubles of mankind, those of oppressors and oppressed. Lars’s family history is a blank page, but he is the carrier of Europe in its dual realities, that of the oppressor and of the oppressed. He is the expression of the true reality of the planet which is hurt, wounding, wounded, a horror. To imagine himself, he has to invent himself. No, his obsession does not make him crazy, but what it reveals is the reality of Europe which is war.”
Q: “Speaking of the history of Europe, how do you feel in Paris?”
Ozick: “I am here in Europe, in Paris, and every moment I spend in this city, I’m constantly reminded of and confronted in my mind with what took place here in the 1940s, and I would even say that it’s more real to me than today’s Paris. This, I know, is quite unpleasant to acknowledge, but I cannot get it out of my head. It’s personal.”
Q: “When your books come out in German translation, you must be invited to speak about them. How do you feel there?”
Ozick: “I do not go to Germany. I do, however, admit that Germany is a democratic state and that people are filled with goodwill. And I take it at face value, but I don’t take every invitation as atonement. I will say that my not going is my personal memorial. I’m not irrational here; it’s personal.
My parents were pharmacists, and in the ’30s, they refused to buy Bayer aspirin. . . . The Germans have been inviting me over and over again; they want Jewish writers to come to Germany, to live in Germany. They are truly and deeply interested in Jewish writers. However, I cannot be and will not be a surrogate for the dead writers. You cannot make exchanges.”
The South African writer Nadine Gordimer, future Nobel Prize in Literature recipient (1991), was sitting in the second row of the audience, along with Olivier Cohen, Ozick’s French publisher, her Franco-American literary agent Michelle Lapautre, American novelist Diane Johnson, and Parisian-Canadian writer Mavis Gallant.
Addressing Gordimer in a voice betraying great emotion, Ozick solemnly declared, “Tonight, here in France in this bookshop, I am speaking in the presence of Nadine Gordimer. I never dreamed that one day I would be talking in her presence. I’m embarrassed. I don’t know how you will take it, Nadine Gordimer, and I apologize in advance, but all my life I saw you as the fulfillment of Anne Frank. Had she survived, she would be in some way who you are, accomplishing what you do.”
A woman in the audience broke this silence, apologizing for her question. “A letdown, for sure, after your moving declaration to Nadine Gordimer, but I feel much humor in your work, it’s almost woven into the drama . . .”
Ozick: “I’m not conscious of having a sense of humor. I notice that sometimes, when I read something which I consider very dry and serious, people laugh, but humor comes out by accident, and therefore, I cannot count it as humor. This being said, I’ve always dreamed of being a humorous writer, and if I were reincarnated into a writer I particularly love, I certainly would not choose James nor Proust, but Gilbert and Sullivan.”8
Concluding her talk, Cynthia Ozick wondered who were the people sitting in front of her: “Could someone tell me his or her life story so I would know?” Spontaneous laughter and deafening applause were her only answer.
Almost twenty years later, I received a note from Mavis Gallant who recalled that evening with our renowned guest author whom she described as “so solemn to meet and so funny to read, as if she were twins.”9
Art Spiegelman
Defying the usual codes of coherence between content and form, Art Spiegelman made a tragic subject, his parents’ experience of the Holocaust, into a comic book, a genre considered as entertainment and so not suitable to portray Nazi death camps, let alone its characters symbolized as animals: the mice are Jews, the cats are Germans, and the pigs, Polish collaborators.
Spiegelman was at the Village Voice on June 2, 2009, to speak about his graphic novel, the international bestseller Maus.10 His project had come into being with the desire to know more about his parents, he told us. During World War II, they had been wandering through Poland, their native country, hiding from the Gestapo. Both were eventually interned in Auschwitz, survived the death camp, and were exiled in Sweden before ending up in the United States with Art, their little boy.
When he was twenty years old, tragedy struck again with his mother’s suicide. Art felt that he had to tell their story, but fascinated since childhood by comics, he deemed he had to do so visually. When visiting his father one day, Art showed him a sketch from his drawings. Pointing to a character, his father blurted out, “Well, that guy, I buried that guy.”
Spiegelman stayed five days with him, recording his recollections filled with a multitude of such details. “I was astonished,” he admitted, “because I remembered how in the past he had reacted with, ‘Oh, nobody wants to hear such stories.’” Their talk became the interview that led to Maus.
Q: “Working on Maus, what came first? The narrative or the visual?”
Spiegelman: “I had to find a visual strategy, staying close to raw sketches, but bringing them into high focus. One important source for me was the drawings that survived the camps; some artists had survived while others had been killed, but all their drawings had that urgency in them which is there in the foreground of Maus.”
Q: “The voice of a writer is his style. Where is yours? In the narrative or in the drawing?”
Spiegelman: “You look at comics, and you’re always looking at one’s handwriting, a very fine, illuminated handwriting that tells you so much about the voice of the person you’re looking at. Comics are a high condensation. They are a writing that may have more to do with poetry than prose.”
Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman, June 2, 2009. Village Voice Bookshop archive.
Another kind of “condensation” in style is the caricature. Françoise Mouly, the French-native art director of The New Yorker and wife of Spiegelman, then talked about the magazine’s famous caricatures and the original artwork of its covers. Both had been essential elements in conveying the horror of 9/11. The September 24, 2001 issue, the first one after the attack, was fittingly released with its all-black cover and only the black shadows of the towers in the background.
Three years later, Spiegelman remembered 9/11 with the cover of his new comics In the Shadow of No Towers, again all black, highlighted in the middle by a colorful strip of bodies spinning in the air. These comic characters whirl about like unearthed ghosts, haunting the site of the twin towers, riddled by all that had happened before.
Nicole Krauss
“This is all my writing is about: how to recreate what has been destroyed or lost. I write to go home.”
–nicole krauss, Village Voice reading, April 27, 2011.
Both novels Nicole Krauss presented at the Village Voice are journeys of two different objects invested with the lives and memories of writers and their books, gone astray during World War II. In The History of Love,11 Krauss describes the worldwide peregrinations of a manuscript entrusted by its author to his friend as he abandons his Polish village, a shtetl soon to be destroyed by the Nazis. Migrating from one continent to another and passing through different hands, new languages, and new authors, this manuscript resurfaces and is finally returned to Leo, its original author, now an aged survivor of the Holocaust living in New York, who dies soon after recovering it. However, the very fact of its existence manages to give meaning to his former life and authorship to him as a writer.
Much later, Krauss was at the Village Voice on April 27, 2011, to speak about her most recent novel Great House,12 also a journey across continents, this time of a writing desk allegedly owned by the celebrated Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, shot dead by the supporters of General Franco in August 1936. We follow the desk’s wanderings over the years through a number of countries and the lives of the various people who owned it at one time or another; among them are a Chilean poet, disappeared during Pinochet’s reign of terror, as well as an author in New York City who writes fourteen of her novels on it.
Half a century later, the desk ends up in storage in the city and is recovered by the surviving son of its original owner, once a historian in Budapest. In 1941 he and his family had been forcefully deported while their home was ransacked and its antique desk stolen too. After looking for it for so many years, this son comes to realize that its value does not lie in its physical existence, but in its rich, albeit tortuous memory.
A beautiful young woman, reserved and composed, Krauss opened her reading by thanking her French translator who was in the audience, highlighting the fact that all the transformative experiences she had had as a reader had come to her thanks to translations.
“When I start a book,” she went on, “I never know where it’s going, so the book is a continuing surprise. I think of it as a house. First, I need a doorknob, then a door, and then I fill it up from inside to finally bring in my characters.”
Someone in the audience remarked that a house was a fixed structure, not leaving much room for the imagination.
Krauss: “Home is a confusing subject. Of course, a house is always imperfect, and when I start writing a novel, I know that it will have failures, like any house. Yet that house is home. It has something hugely liberating, especially given the kind of background I come from with its geography of displacements, accidental events, a home that felt incredibly elusive.”
Q: “Your title Great House doesn’t evoke books at all. Why did you choose it to speak about writing?”
Krauss: “The title Great House is an echo of the name of the school of Rabbi ben Zakkai. After the destruction of the Temple in ancient Jerusalem, he exhorted his pupils to transform their sacred loss into prayers consigned in a book they could carry under their arm. That house, the Temple, is moveable. You recreate your lost home not with bricks, but with words. This is all my writing is about: how to recreate what has been destroyed or lost.”
Krauss then read the excerpt of the heart-rending interior dialogue that an aging Israeli, Aaron, imagines with his son who has flown from London to Jerusalem to attend his mother’s funeral. A retired judge, Aaron is confronting his own death, revisiting in his head the rift between himself and this son and their mutual failings toward each other. More importantly, he is meditating on loss and recovery.
Q: “There are several voices of old people in your writings. You’re young. Why this interest in such voices?”
Krauss: “It took many pages for me to understand where that voice came from. It began for me from a place where I felt lost, a place from which I had to create a lot of material to be able to go on. And that material is voices, but it is strange to realize that the voice of this old man is not mine, far from it. Yet it is one that is close and intimate to me. At this stage of my life, at the exact opposite end of the life of this man, I’ve nevertheless reached an understanding of things that I feel are incredibly personal to me.”
Q: “You said at the beginning that, when you start a new book, you never know where you’re going, but there must be a spark that sets you to write. What is it?”
Krauss: “I always saw my novels as being the houses for my voices. However, as I said, I write from a place of uncertainty, doubt, from a place where I do not know the answers. I write to go home.”13
Daniel Mendelsohn
Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million14 is a personal and unique evocation of the Holocaust through a five-hundred-page breathtaking narrative of his odyssey to Eastern Europe, and, in fact, around the world to find out what happened to six members of his family in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II. The book made such an impression on me that I immediately set about inviting the author to present it at the Village Voice. Thanks to his American publisher’s representative, within an hour Mendelsohn was on the phone, and by pure chance, he was going to be in Paris the following week to visit friends. We decided on the date of January 23, 2007.
A contributor to the New York Review of Books, he is also a scholar in the classical studies who teaches at Bard College.15 An engaging figure whose charismatic presence seemed to come from his eloquence, he opened his reading by stressing that knowingly he was not writing a history book, was not even interested in one: he was not a historian, his book was about how “families tell stories, narratives that they develop over time, becoming for subsequent generations the scripts of their lives . . .”
In fact, Mendelsohn is a born storyteller whose talent runs in the family, perhaps inherited from his maternal grandfather who, as an adult, had immigrated to the US from his native Bolechov in Poland, now Bolekhiv in Ukraine. His ingenious tales had enchanted Daniel’s childhood, even though, as it turned out, they were completely romanticized.
“He would go to the grocery store for a quart of milk and come back like Odysseus to Ithaca, saying ‘Guess what, you’ll never know what happened there,’ and I would sit completely mesmerized by yet another story. Not until I was fourteen years old did I realize that, of course, there was nothing at all there; he had transformed each minute little thing into a great tale.”
The one narrative his grandfather never told him, though, was that of his brother who had been killed by the Nazis, along with his wife Ester and their four daughters. “My grandfather wouldn’t talk about it. It was like a ‘black hole’ in the history of the family. When he died, the mysterious wallet he had carried with him every day of his life revealed its secrets—letters from this brother Schmiel, dated 1939 and begging for money, help, affidavits, all the stuff that gave a tragic quality to this object.”
Daniel Mendelsohn at the Village Voice Bookshop, January 23, 2007. © Flavio Toma
Mendelsohn was twenty when this discovery took place, and it “lingered in his mind over years,” he told us. It was only when the Eastern world opened up that it became possible to go to that part of Europe. “How soon we forget that there was an Iron Curtain! I couldn’t have written this book without the help of Mikhail Gorbachev!” [laughter]
Once in Bolechov, Mendelsohn and his brother Matt, a photographer, were able to get in contact with a few survivors who were still alive in 2003. He described the book as “a sort of a crazy travelogue, at least as the main narrative of my tracking down these people who might remember my family.” He explained that the book was not about his family alone; its scope was to use “the microcosmic family event as a window to apprehend a much vaster one.”
“But the rhetorical problem with the Holocaust was its size: when we say six million, it’s both a totally meaningful and totally meaningless expression. I can’t even imagine what six thousand would be or even six hundred. This is why the crucial thing for me was getting people’s individual stories firsthand, with their immediacy, and this is why I did not read books, did not become a scholar of the Holocaust.”
Through a series of uncanny coincidences, this “immediacy” Mendelsohn was looking for came from a woman who recalled a girlhood memory:
“She and her mother lived in that last house leading to the cemetery where people were shot and thrown into mass graves. During one of those roundups, or aktions, the sound of the machine guns firing at people went on for so long, hours and hours, that her mother—they knew what was happening—took out of a closet an old sewing machine, the kind you run with a treadle and, of course, the squeaking of the treadle drowned out the sound of those machine guns.
“This is the story I will never forget because it brought it all home. It is the detail that makes the story, the detail all writers are obsessed with. Of course, we understand abstractly all these things, but it is such a detail that lodges events like this one in the mind.”
That night, James Lord was part of the audience.* He asked: “I was very impressed by your book and by the passages in which you created a relation between excerpts from the Torah with events during your quest . . . I wonder if you would comment on whether the Garden of Eden before the expulsion has any particular meaning for Jewish literature.”
Mendelsohn: “Well, throughout the book, there are texts of analysis of Genesis. I was trying to understand what might have happened between my grandfather and his brother Schmiel who kept sending these desperate letters. We are unable to know since my grandfather’s letters to his brother went up in flames. I needed a text that would help me sort out those things between brothers. I just wanted to ponder over something that was painful and Jewish. And, while I was working on this, my search ended with a great discovery: we were actually taken to the place in Bolechov where Uncle Schmiel died with his family, saw exactly what had happened—they had been shot, and where it was. It was an apple tree in a garden.
At that point, I had already taken my decision on these Biblical passages and had been reading the Book of Genesis for six months with a Hebrew dictionary. Now that I had a tree at the end, the Tree of Knowledge, I needed to start with a tree, even symbolized, that would have the resonance of the Tree of Life at the beginning.”
Q: “Abraham is another Biblical figure in your book. What does he stand for?”
Mendelsohn: “Abraham is this crazy Jew, like me, going all over places and not even knowing where he is going. The reason I go back a lot to Abraham is, first of all, because Abraham was the name of my grandfather who, like him, was a wanderer and a liar. Also, the Old Testament illuminates the stories of the six million lost.”
Q: “This book The Lost—a search for lost time—summons up Proust who opens your book with an epigraph from a sentence in The Captive.”*
Mendelsohn: “There are two things here: first, the book is a reconstruction of lost time and you think of Proust; even more important is what Proust tells us all throughout his In Search of Lost Time: the recovery of a memory happens by pure accident. There are two references hanging over The Lost, one verbal and the other one visual, and they both seem important in a book that is trying to retrieve the past: Proust’s fantasy of a recovery of the past by accident, and Sebald’s photographs which intimate the tragic vision of the past.”16