In Piotr Rawicz’s powerful novel Blood from the Sky, the narrator-protagonist, Boris, is urged to take up “the vocation to be witness” to the murder of the Jewish people of Europe. But when, having survived the carnage, he turns to the task of testimony, he finds that the “I” who lived in the town and endured prison and torture hardly exists in the man who puts pen to paper. “When a whirlwind comes along,” he cynically concludes, “one must make the most of it, exploit it, start writing at once, lying at once.” Indeed, after the Holocaust, “the ‘literary manner’ is an obscenity by definition.”
The difficulty that even Holocaust survivors face in testifying to, or representing in a literary imitation, an unprecedented abomination does not seem to have troubled more than a few of the twenty-seven contributors to David Rosenberg’s egregiously titled Testimony: Contemporary Writers Make the Holocaust Personal.1 This book testifies to nothing so much as Rawicz’s acrid definition of the literature that tries to “personalize” the Holocaust as “the art, occasionally remunerative, of rummaging in vomit.” Indeed, one uneasy contributor (Gordon Lish) confesses, “Yes, I am being paid for this.… If it looks as if anyone is possibly ashamed of this, then just chalk it up to strictly looks” (415). The title Testimony, in its pretentious appropriation of an idea that has acquired historical and moral resonance for Jews, was offensive enough when I began reading the unrevised proofs of the book in unadorned paper covers. But only when the finished product arrived, lavishly illustrated on dust jacket, title page, and chapter openers, with details from Curtain for the Torah Ark (Italy, 1643–44), did the full horror of the book’s blasphemous vulgarity reveal itself.2
The Torah ark curtain proclaims that this testimony has an almost sacred quality, intended to call to mind Exodus 25:16: “And thou shalt put into the ark the testimony which I shall give thee.” But what we actually find in this five-hundred-page monument to egoism is (with a few exceptions) much closer to the profane than to the sacred, much more akin to the advertiser who offers “to personalize your paper towels” than to the moral heroism of which Hannah Arendt wrote when she referred to the testimony of “one man [who] will always be left alive to tell the story.” The common reader’s most frequent reaction to the responses given by Rosenberg’s twenty-seven contributors to his questions about how their lives and writing careers have been shaped by the Holocaust will be: “Who cares?” Who cares about the failed marriages of Anne Roiphe or Alfred Kazin, or the Ashanti circumcision of Leslie Fiedler’s grandson? Who cares that Leonard Michaels’s “life was a mess” (ll) when he heard Arendt give a lecture, or that Daphne Merkin was hospitalized at age eight for psychiatric observation because she thought of her father (a German Jew) as “a Nazi manqué” (18), and of her mother as Ilse Koch? Who cares that “God became the God of the Holocaust” for Anne Roiphe in “the year of my puberty” (135), or that she thinks she married a non-Jew because of the Holocaust? Who cares that Fiedler resents people who “wrongly” assume that he is a Jew (which he is)?
Worse still than the mawkish, self-pitying, licentious equations between their Lilliputian “personal” disturbances and the torture and murder of European Jewry are the “ideas” of these literary scribblers. Here ignorance and arrogance are in full flower. Most exploded fictions about the Holocaust—ranging from the notion that not only Jews but also Poles, Communists, and homosexuals were chosen by the Nazis for total annihilation, to the imbecilic description (by Phillip Lopate) of the majority of the Jewish victims as “religious peasants” (293), to the tale about body fat being reduced into soap—are dredged up repeatedly, apparently to the satisfaction of the book’s editor. Contempt for Israel is rife among most of these writers; and, despite the fact that Israel is the only country in the world whose neighbors (with the highly unpredictable exception of Egypt) have for many decades denied its right to exist, many of Rosenberg’s testifiers see another Holocaust in prospect for virtually every group except the Jews. Several “worry” about Latin America or the omnipresent “Palestinians”; and E. M. Broner’s uncurbed benevolence embraces nothing less than “the earth … in mortal danger” (279). Conjectural speculation about how Zionism might “grow into a fanatical passion” (thus Geoffrey Hartman, [431]) like the nationalism that laid waste European Jewry is more in evidence than simple respect for the Jews who actually died. One hopes that Daphne Merkin’s tongue will cling to the roof of her mouth next time she feels the itch to mock “overweight Jewish women standing before open pits, covering their pubes with their hands” (18).
Rosenberg reports that the working title for Testimony was Sheltered Lives. Alan Lelchuk, in one of the few good essays in the book, modestly explains what this means: “Over here, in America, a small Jewish boy was following the Dodgers and listening to ‘The Shadow’ and ‘The Green Hornet’ and playing boxball on the sidewalk, while, over there, in Europe, the game was the killing of Jews. Such was history” (254). The book’s most riveting (and learned) essay, by Susanne Schlotelburg, rejects Testimony’s premise by arguing that “to ensure remembrance the Holocaust would have to be made transpersonal rather than personal,” and that those who are not bound by akedah or brith are no more likely to remember the Holocaust than the Crusades (353). Most of the book’s contributors, however, remain just as sheltered from the Holocaust now as their predecessors (and sometimes they themselves) were in the 1940s. Thus Leslie Fiedler, like some curious insect preserved in amber from the pre-Holocaust (or pre-Dreyfus) period, holds forth about how his “love of all humanity, including those who have long persecuted us,” leads him to urge Jews “to cease to exist in their chosenness for the sake of a united mankind” (229). It never occurs to Fiedler that, as Emil Fackenheim has written, after the Holocaust a commitment to Jewish survival is precisely “a testimony to life against death on behalf of all mankind.”3
Outdoing even Fiedler in his mercifulness toward “those who have long persecuted us” and (no easy task) far outdoing all other contributors in the gross, the flagrant, the blatant, is the tooth-baring Phillip Lopate. Lopate seethes with hatred and rage—not against the Nazis (in fact, he speculates on the “youthful idealism” of the SS and praises President Reagan’s laying a wreath on the SS tombs at Bitburg as a gesture of “old-fashioned Homeric nobility” [294]), but against the Jews. These include the middle-class victims, “lined up in their fedoras and overcoats” (293); his own mother, who was “erotically excited” by blue numbers on the arms of survivors; and those he derides as “Holocaustians” (287), including Yehuda Bauer, Elie Wiesel, and the late Lucy Dawidowicz.
Too obtuse to understand that the uniqueness of the Holocaust consists neither in the number of Jews killed nor in the degree of individual suffering but in the fact that Hitler’s was a war against the Jews, that Jews occupied the central place in his mental universe, that Jews alone were singled out for total destruction, and that European Jewish civilization was totally destroyed, Lopate keeps flailing away at Jewish “chauvinism” (299), Jewish “ethnic muscle-flexing” (296), Jewish “tribal smugness,” Jewish “pushiness” (307), and Jewish lack of compassion “for the other victimized peoples of this century” (300). He recommends as ultimate wisdom on memorializing the victims of the Holocaust a passage from Avishai Margalit’s “brilliant essay” (298) in the New York Review of Books, on “The Kitsch of Israel.” In this passage Margalit heaped scorn on the “children’s room” at Yad Vashem with its “tape-recorded voices of children crying out in Yiddish, ‘Mame, Tate.’” Any visitor to Yad Vashem knows that there is no “children’s room” or taped children’s voices there. There is a memorial to the murdered children and a tape-recorded voice that reads their names. Apparently, Lopate’s “aesthetic” sense of the fitness of things is more offended by Jewish mourning than by Jewish lying.
Lopate’s description of the very word holocaust as a Jewish conspiracy in which “one ethnic group tries to compel the rest of the world” to follow its political program, his voracious munching on the “grain of truth” in “the more moderate revisionist historians” (294), and his allegation that Jews have been able to “own the Holocaust” only because of political clout (“There are many more Jews in the United States than there are Ibos or Bengalis” [293]) bring him perilously close to the position of the neo-Nazis. “Before I give the wrong impression,” he nervously announces, “let me interject that I am not one of those revisionist nuts who deny that the Nazis … exterminated millions of Jews” (286). Lopate might have added that, despite appearances to the contrary, his essay could hardly be called antisemitic since it originally appeared in a Jewish magazine called Tikkun, of which, in fact, he was then the literary editor.
The reason why so many of the essays in this volume are egocentric, mean-spirited, and vulgar is not far to seek. Most of these American Jewish writers are people for whom the post-Enlightenment emancipation formula—“Be a man in the street and a Jew in your tent”—seems perfectly natural. Having accepted the disfiguring privatization of Jewish self-definition, they feel no shame in “making personal” a loss that was sustained by the whole Jewish people. When the Yiddish poet Jacob Glatstein, who was also safe in America while European Jewry was being murdered, wrote that “just as we all stood together / at the giving of the Torah, / so did we all die together at Lublin,” he immersed himself in the vast ocean of Jewish civilization. When the contributors to Testimony speculate about how the Holocaust has affected their sex life or their politics, they are navigating an enclosed basin.
When first reading this wretched book, I learned of the death of Dorothea Krook, Israel’s most distinguished literary critic, winner of the Israel Prize for her Elements of Tragedy, and one of the country’s great, vibrant characters. Doris (as her friends called her) also had a “personal” relation to the Holocaust, but it was expressed in the desire to do something for the Jewish people rather than to contemplate herself. I remember how, many years ago, she came to my office in the Tel Aviv English Department carrying a large shopping bag that held a large manuscript. “I want,” she said, “to talk about something not literary, something that has preyed on my mind ever since the end of the Second World War.” This “something” was the question: “What can I do to redeem those who were killed in Europe, to heal this terrible wound in our people?” Doris had already done more in this direction than all the contributors to Testimony: she had resigned her position at Cambridge University to go on aliyah to Israel in 1960. But she had long brooded over and, in her last years, immersed herself in a scheme (elaborately articulated in the manuscript) for a “great aliyah” whose motive power would be an appeal to young Jews in America to secure the Jewish future by viewing themselves as “replacements” for those murdered in Europe.
One has only to read Testimony to see how wildly Doris overestimated the idealism of American Jewry, and how quixotic, even mad, her scheme was. Yet it is worth remembering that it was from a still more mad and quixotic scheme that Herzl’s Jewish state arose—and that from the egocentric contemplation of Jewish navels nothing has, can, or will come.
1.Testimony: Contemporary Writers Make the Holocaust Personal (New York: Random House, 1989). Subsequent references to this work will be cited in parentheses in the text.
2.In fairness, it should be noted that, in one particular, the book’s final version is an improvement on the bound proofs. The latter contain Phillip Lopate’s most memorable words about the Holocaust: “I am deeply sorry it happened.” Although this classic utterance would have given new meaning to the idea of the banality of evil, Rosenberg and Lopate chose to sacrifice it in the final version of the book.
3.Emil L. Fackenheim, The Jewish Return into History (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 54.