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Bearing Witness
Bearing Witness
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AlanL. Berger
The Shoah refuses to disappear. Memories of the monstrous evil unleashed by this fiery cataclysm of history continue to plague its survivors,
to vex the religious imagination, and to defy the notion of innocence.
This "wound in the order of being," as Martin Buber termed the Holocaust, does not heal. Its effects are seen most profoundly in literary reflections of the Kingdom of Night written by the witnessing generation
whose works testify to the sense of cosmic upheaval and covenantal
challenge illuminated by the flames of Auschwitz. Indeed, Elie Wiesel
has observed that what the survivors "took away from our tales and from
our burning houses in European history was the fire."' This literary
"fire" illuminates the witnessing generation's determination to tell the
tale and, in so doing, to both educate and warn future generations. Consequently, how, and by whom, the Shoah's legacy is assumed touches a
multiplicity of concerns: covenantal, historical, literary, and psychological. As the drama of Holocaust literature unfolds, an international literary
second generation has begun to transmit the Shoah'smemory with a compelling moral, existential, and religious urgency. Unlike the witnessing
generation, however, the second generation lacks direct access to the
Holocaust. Thus, their writings weave their parent's memories with their
own imagination. The resulting tapestry portrays the Holocaust's profound effect on questions of post-Auschwitz Jewish identity and authenticity.
In what follows I discuss the distinction between witnessing and
bearing witness, and then investigate the relationship of the symbolism
of second generation Holocaust literature to what has recently been
termed the "Second Life of Holocaust Imagery." Wiesel's novel The Fifth
Son is briefly examined as a transitional work between the first and second
generations.2 Next, an analysis of selected examples of American second
*An earlier version of this paper was presented at "Remembering for the Future: The
Impact of the Holocaust on the Contemporary World." International Scholars' Conference
held in Oxford, 10-13 July, 1988.
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The task of bearing witness is a normative element of Jewish existence. Scripturally sanctioned, see especially Joel (1:3), witness bearing
has become integral to living one's life as a covenanted Jew. In the case of
second generation Holocaust literature, this act becomes a moral and
theological imperative. The survivors are slowly disappearing and the
solemn task of transmitting their legacy is being assumed by the second
generation. The literature being written by survivors' children comprises
a unique genre in its reaction to their parents' tragedy. This literature is
in fact one response to Yehuda Bauer's observation that the "crucial
problem is how to anchor the Holocaust in the historical consciousness of
the generations that follow it."8
Second generation Holocaust writers occupy a distinctive position. Despite their various orientations to Judaism and other differentiating
factors, as children they were all "witnesses to their parents' ongoing survival."9 Consequently, while not having personally experienced the
Shoah, these "second generation survivors" constitute the group of nonwitnessing American Jews most intimately familiar with its continuing
effects. Their parents' Holocaust experience indelibly stamped the survivors both with certain assumptions concerning society and with the
need to maintain those coping strategies which enabled them to survive
the Holocaust.10Second generation Holocaust writing is simultaneously
a recapitulation of the parents' experience and a telling of how the Shoah
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making the Holocaust into a metaphor and hence too "literary"and trivial.
In fact, the literary quality of second generation writings is not a primary
concern. Rather it is their psychological and theological quests for
authentic Jewish identity which make of them crucial barometers of the
post-Auschwitz American Jewish future.
These writings reflect constant exposure to various dimensions of
what Robert Jay Lifton terms the "death imprint." This imprint manifests itself in psychological states which have significant theological resonance. Psychologically, one notes the presence of depression and severe
anxiety, a tendency toward psychosomatic illness, and the long-term
effects of torture and starvation on survivor parents. Moreover, survivor
parents' child-raising skills are deeply effected by their own experiences
of death and deprivation. Wiesel has underscored one of the many paradoxes engendered by the Shoah in observing that what children of survivors need to understand is "that the real children of the Holocaust are
their parents."'8
The theological implication of these works is more subtle, but no less
powerful. Although specifically describing the survivor parents in his
observation that this is the generation which knows most intensely that
"destruction can take place, that the sea will not be split for them, that the
divine has self-limited, and they have additional responsibilities,"19Irving
Greenberg's words apply equally to the second generation. Despite this
knowledge, second generation authors want consciously to be Jews and,
by this decision, carry on the messianic task of quarreling with God even
while awaiting Messiah. This is a type of practical theology expressed by
actions, e.g., living a Jewish life, rather than explicit theological formulation. It is, moreover, attests Greenberg, the appropriate "theological language for this time, more appropriate than those who go on speaking as
if God were visible and fully performing under the previous terms of the
covenant."20
the responsibility
of your
parents was solely towards the dead; yours will be towards us."21In fact,
the effect of the Holocaust on parenting skills is portrayed in many of
these works as distorting intergenerational communication; survivor
parents, because of their Holocaust experiences, embrace values which
clash with American culture. This frequently results in a "significant
contradiction between their (children's) public and private worlds."22Yet,
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Wiesel's The FifthSon boldly departs from his earlier works by imagining
how a child of survivors is transformed by tales of the Holocaust. Dedicated to his own son, and to all children of survivors, the novel is a distillation of Wiesel's literary theology as it emerges in the Tamiroff family.
Rachel and Reuven Tamiroff are survivors living in New York with
Ariel, their second born only child. Ariel is enveloped by his father's
silence, worries about his mother's increasing withdrawal, and is a fascinated auditor of Holocaust tales told by Bontchek, a survivor friend of
his father. The novel reverses Wiesel's long held literary pattern by
attempting to imagine what it would have been like for a witness to grow
up as a child of survivors. Ritually, the tale occurs during Passover,
reminding us of Cohen's argument: a time which intensely focuses Jewish
identity across the generations by commemorating the orienting event of
Exodus, and by its demand that the covenant be renewed. More recently,
there has emerged a liturgical addition to the Passover seder. "The Fifth
Child," a haunting prayer recited on behalf of the one who cannot ask,
represents the million and a half Jewish children murdered in the Shoah.23
Ariel becomes "fully Jewish" by assuming his parents' Holocaust legacy.
Ariel, whose father rarely spoke to him of the Holocaust and whose
mother was institutionalized, undergoes several stages in his quest for
post-Holocaust Jewish identity. Initially, he hears and is transformed by
Bontchek's tales. Subsequently, Ariel spends much time in the library
reading about the Shoah. He travels to Germany in order to kill the Nazi
responsible for murdering the European Ariel. Once at his destination,
however, the American Ariel does not murder, but rather, condemns the
Nazi. The novel concludes with the American Ariel, by now a professor,
teaching his students of the Shoah.
Wiesel's novel establishes several important principles for second
generation literature. First, the novel's appearance legitimizes this genre.
Wiesel, the best known and most widely read witnessing writer, now
contends that the next generation must bear witness. Next, Wiesel tells
not only of the Shoah but of its survivors' continuing survival. Survivors
continued to be ignored and humiliated after the war. Yet, these same
survivors are shown establishing new lives in a foreign culture. In addition, he casts children of survivors in a pedagogical role despite fully
acknowleding the vast gulf separating survivors from their children and
both of them from American nonwitnesses. Wiesel's theology is expressed
in the novel's argument against vengeance and for bearing witness.
Alan Berger
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Memory and not violence will be the Jewish companion and means by
which Messiah is awaited.24Finally, the Holocaust, no less than Passover,
becomes the point of entry into Jewish history and identity for Wiesel's
child of survivors.
Among the many contemporary examples of second generation witnessing, I have chosen for discussion here Art Spiegelman's Maus,25
Barbara Finkelstein's SummerLong-a-Coming,26
and selected short stories
of Lev Raphael. Biographically, these authors represent a diverse group.
Spiegelman is a professional cartoonist and the editor of Raw magazine.
Finkelstein is a free lance writer, and Raphael is a professor at Michigan
State University. Their works illustrate the various ways in which the
second generation has accepted the survivors' Holocaust legacy.
Mausis unquestionably the most controversial and bold of the second
generation writings. In terms of genre it is simultaneously autobiography,
biography, comic book for adults, documentary, novel, and psychosocial
history. The book's novelty is visible in terms of the figures which are
drawn as mice (Jews), cats (Nazis), and pigs (Poles). One brief segment,
dealing with his mother's suicide, depicts human faces and figures.
Spiegelman tells several stories in Maus. On one level it is the tale of his
parents' (Vladek and Anja) pre-war, Holocaust, and post-war lives. The
reader is mentally invited to compare the carefree marriage and parenting of the pre-war Spiegelmans with their post-war career as parents.27It
is, however, also the story of Spiegelman's own deeply troubled relationship to himself, to Judaism, and to his father. Spiegelman, born in Stockholm in 1947, was raised in a home where the Holocaust, while not
openly discussed, was "part of the brooding atmosphere of our house."28
An enlarged photograph of his brother Richieu, a Holocaust victim, was
prominently displayed, although he was rarely spoken of.29
The hovering presence of the Holocaust in the lives of its survivors
is made manifest by the text's interweaving of Holocaust past and American present. This motive is underscored from the outset where, in the
untitled foreword to Maus,Spiegelman relates the following incident. As
a ten-year old boy living in Rego Park, he has been abandoned by friends
after a roller skating fall. Crying, he told his father what happened. Vladek
responded saying: "Friends? Your Friends? If you lock them together in
a room with no food for a week . . . Then you could see what it is,
Friends!" (p. 5). This statement, communicated in Vladek's unmistakably refugee cadenced English, reveals both his Holocaust experiences
and the survivor's continuing mistrust of the social world. The psychic
lives of Vladek and Anja have been completely shattered by the Holo-
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her mother "scared" her. The young teenager confides that frequently
before falling asleep she mentally "rolled her (mother) into a tiny ball
and threw her across time and the ocean into the Poland of 1942 .. ."
(p. 234). She understands neither why her parents spend hours arguing
over the chronology of the War, nor why "history wasn't finished abusing"
the Szuster family.
Rukhl and Yankl, on the other hand, teach their daughters to daven
(pray), and the parents continue to commemorate the Holocaust by
lighting yahrzeit candles (in memory of the dead). Whereas for Spiegelman, a portrait of his murdered brother became a central Holocaust
icon, for Finkelstein it is the omnipresent yahrzeit candle. She has
Brantzche observe:
We had a cabinet full of empty yurtsaht (sic) glasses, enough to hold
dozens of drinks at a banquet. To me, yurtsaht(sic) represented yet another Jewish holiday whose celebration was whimsical and whose meaning was indecipherable. I would not have been surprised to learn that
no one else on earth knew a thing about this candle, and assumed that
my father had designed a new holiday to remind us that we were Jews
(p. 133).
The yahrzeit candle is a silent yet omnipresent Holocaust icon.
Brantzche also is told things that children of nonwitnesses never hear.
Scraps of conversation reveal the horrors of the past and their continuing
hold on the present. In conversation with her father, for example, she
hears the following:
"Twenty-eight years ago today, the Nazis gassed my mother and four
sisters," Papa said. He set down the coffee cup. I thought how in a movie
Papa's hands would have trembled, but in real life they were steady.
"And?"I asked.
Papa looked me in the eye. "There is no and," he said. He rubbed the
stumpy thumb against his cheek (p. 134).
Finkelstein is telling the reader that literature written by children of
survivors, because of the intensely personal nature of their exposure to
the Holocaust experiences of their parents, makes a unique statement
about the Shoah's continuing effects.
The two sisters are consumed by a desire to know how their parents
survived. Reluctant to discuss their experiences in any systematic or direct way, the elder Szusters do, nevertheless, provide clues to the obliterated past. In addition to the father's laconic comments, Mrs. Szuster
tells the girls a parable, on Shabbat (Saturday) about parents rescuing
children who have been eaten by a bear. To appease her daughters' curiosity, however, the mother shows them old photographs. These photos
of murdered relatives, along with the endless yahrzeit candles and the
occasional parental references to their own losses, form part of the canon
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Yankl concludes this portion of his testimony with the direct assertion
that "My mother and father were Jews and I don't know how to be
anything else" (p. 182). This assertion bears striking similarity to the epigraph in Wiesel's A Jew Today where he records the saying of Dodye
Feig, his grandfather: "You are Jewish, your task is to remain Jewish.
The rest is up to God."36
Brantzche's Jewish identity derives from two sources; her own perceptions, and specifically through her status as a daughter of Holocaust
survivors. Unlike Spiegelman, she appears firm in her Jewish identity.
Secretly following her older brother to a carnival, for example, she sees
him posing for a picture together with a member of the local KKK who
lets out a rebel yell. Mentally comparing this yell and the carnival to the
Szuster farm, Brantzche observes that the yell "balyhoos subjugation of
the loser, congratulates foreclosure of conscience, elevates immediate
expression, and is a triumph of all that is unsympathetic and godless in a
human being" (108). Against the chaos of the carnival, there stands the
order and dignity of the Szuster farm where conscience, contemplation,
and deliberation are the pillars of Jewish being in the world. Brantzche
at this point is obviously Jewish, but has not yet fully assumed her identity
as a daughter of survivors.
Finkelstein's Brantzche begins to comprehend her Holocaust legacy
when she reflects on her sister's traumatic death. It is only after experiencing this trauma that Brantzche can begin to fathom the meaning of
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sumptions of Jewish existence have, however, been challenged in an unprecedented way. The theological position of the second generation
reflects a chastening, or, more accurately, a recognition that the divine is
increasingly concealed. The survivor parents either accept or reject covenantal faith, but all have been indelibly seared by the Shoah's flames.
There are, moreover, no grandparents to help teach the intricacies of
trodding the covenantal path. The second generation's lack of overt
reference to God should not, however, be equated with either indifference
or rejection. This literature reflects, rather, the wisdom of Greenberg's
observation concerning the voluntary covenant. Those who voluntarily
embrace the covenant by voluntarily living a Jewish life express an "affirmation of God's presence."41This generation's writings constitute a
new stage in affirming the divine. These works utilize, although in a
largely unselfconscious way, Greenberg's theological yardstick of the increasing hiddenness of the divine. Consequently, contemporary covenantal affirmations must always be made against the ominous background
of the Holocaust, and the painful complex of memories of growing up in
a home which reflected in a variety of ways the Shoah's continuing impact. Authors of this literature quarrel with, while remaining within,
Judaism. Second generation novels are, therefore not merely literature,
but comprise a powerful theological statement. They continue to examine
questions of Jewish identity and covenantal concerns at a time when many
other allegedly Jewish novels do not. Second generation writings reflect,
therefore, not only the fact that the Holocaust happened, but that its
effects continue to be felt, and that all subsequent Jewish affirmation
must be illumined by the Shoah'sflames.
SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY
NOTES
1. Elie Wiesel, "Talking and Writing and Keeping Silent," in The German
ChurchStruggleand the Holocaust,edited by F. H. Littell and H. G. Locke (Detroit,
1974), p. 269.
2. Elie Wiesel, The Fifth Son (New York, 1985). For a full discussion of this
text as a Holocaust novel see A. L. Berger, Crisisand Covenant:The Holocaustin
AmericanJewishFiction(Albany, 1985), pp. 68-79.
3. See my earlier study "Memory and Meaning," in Methodologyin theAcademic
Teaching of the Holocaust, edited by Z. Garber, A. L. Berger, and R. Libowitz
(Lantham [MD], 1988), pp. 171-189. For a penetrating study of this theme in
French second generation literature see the work of Ellen S. Fine, "New Kinds of
Witnesses: French Post-Holocaust Writers," in Holocaust Studies Annual, Volume III, edited by S. Pinsker and J. Fischel (Greenwood [Florida], 1985),
pp. 121-136.
61
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L. Braham (Boulder:
Jewish Theodicy,"
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viding an insider's view of the conflict between European Orthodoxy and American Judaism. For further analysis of this novel see A. L. Berger, "Memory and
Meaning: The Holocaust in Second Generation Literature," pp. 177-179.
38. Lev Raphael, "The Tanteh," Jewish Currents(March, 1986), pp. 17-20.
Among Raphael's Holocaust writings the following are especially significant in
illuminating the complexity of the second generation's relationship to the Shoah:
"Mysterious Obsession," BaltimoreJewish Times(April 27, 1984), pp. 76-82;"Roy's
Jewish Problem," Commentary,Vol. 80, No. 3 (September, 1985), pp. 62-66; "Such
a Deal," Midstream,Vol. 33, No. 7 (Aug/Sept., 1987), pp. 15-18; and "Reunion,"
HadassahMagazine,(January, 1988), pp. 20-23.
39. Lev Raphael, "Listening to the Silence," BaltimoreJewishTimes(February8,
1975), pp. 66-69.
40. Certain second generation biographies of survivor parents represent the
triumph of hope over despair, while revealing a warm and healthy survivor
parent-child relationship. See, for example Michael Kornblit, Until WeMeetAgain
(New York, 1983), and the articles by David Lee Preston, "A Bird in the Wind,"
The PhiladelphiaInquirerMagazine(May 8, 1983),pp. 12-16and 28-30;and "Journey
To My Father's Holocaust," The PhiladelphiaInquirerMagazine(April 21, 1985),
pp. 20-27.
41. Greenberg, op. cit., p. 21.