Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust 9781501730054

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FAMI'ASIES OF WII'MESSIMG

FAII,.ASIES 0F WI,.IIESSIIIG POSTWAR EFFORTS TO EXPERIENCE THE HOLOCAUST

GARY WEISSMAII

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright© 2004 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2004 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Weissman, Gary. Fantasies of witnessing: postwar efforts to experience the Holocaust I Gary Weissman. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o-8014-4253-2 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)-Historiography. 2. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)Influence. 3· Memory-Social aspects. I. Title. D8o4.348.W45 2004 940.53'18'072-dc22

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COM7EM7S

Acknowledgments Introduction: To Feel the Horror

xi 1

1

Reading Wiesel

28

2

The Holocaust Experience

89

3 Shoah Illustrated

140

Section 1. Steven Spielberg and the Sensitive Line

150

Section 2. Claude Lanzmann and the Ring of Fire

189

Conclusion: The Horror, The Horror

207

Notes

217

Bibliography

247

Index

261

It is hard to imagine a topic more likely than the Holocaust to

tap some unconscious source, with unpredictable results. Things do not turn out as planned. -Hans Kellner, '"Never Again' Is Now"

I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I

For Laura, fane, and Ken

ACHIIOWLEDGMEIIYS

If

his book, which has been part of my life in one form or another for many years, would not have been written without the support and guidance of Jane Gallop, who became intimately acquainted with my various strategies for impeding my own writing process. Jane's insightful readings of successive drafts have helped me recognize blind spots, reorganize my thinking, and produce better writing. All she has taught me about reading and writing has proven invaluable. I could not have asked for a better teacher or friend. Several scholars at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee have supported my work and offered valuable feedback. Lynne Joyrich and Patrice Petro have provided both intellectual sustenance and great friendship. I am grateful for Marianne Hirsch's generous support of my work. Joan Wolf's attentive reading of an early draft was of great help. Ruth Schwertfeger and Susan Rubin Suleiman kindly read portions of an early draft and offered useful feedback. As director of the Center for Twentieth Century Studies, Kathleen Woodward made UWM an intellectually stimulating setting. Dick Blau's friendship and generosity helped me maintain my interest in visual art while working in the humanities. I am indebted to two professors I encountered as an undergraduate at Brown University. George Landow treated me as if I were an intellectual before it ever occurred to me that I could be one. Mary Ann Doane's courses in critical theory and film studies introduced me to forms of critical think-

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ing I continue to use. Both have significantly influenced the path I have taken as a teacher and a writer. A number of people I have met through a shared interest in Holocaust studies have contributed to my thinking and provided great friendship. They include Pascale Bos, Beth Drenning, Michael Fountain, Pearl Gluck, Hank Greenspan, Jessie Labov, Neil Levi, Laurinda Stryker, Woytek Vrba, and Yasemin Yildiz. Richard Prystowsky kindly invited me to join a panel on the work of Lawrence Langer, thus introducing me to the world of Holocaust studies conferences and leading me to write an early version of chapter 2. Nancy Wood kindly supported my Fulbright Application and facilitated the publication of an earlier version of chapter 3 in the journal Media, Culture & Society. I am indebted to Michael Rothberg's attentive reading of this manuscript for Cornell University Press. His astute comments on the strengths and weaknesses of the work have proven extremely helpful. My respect for his smart and thoughtful scholarship makes his belief in my project especially meaningful. I also thank the unnamed reader whose report on my manuscript has helped me produce a better book, and Herman Rapaport, whose editorial suggestions have improved the final work. I am grateful for the

enthusiastic support of Catherine Rice, my editor at Cornell University Press. Her belief in this project from the start has been inspiring, and she has helped make the editorial process go as smoothly as possible. Teresa Jesionowski and Susan Barnett, also at Cornell University Press, have been exceedingly kind and helpful. Ken Jacobson has provided detailed feedback to several drafts of this book, as well as great moral support along the way. At times when I was too close to my work to see it clearly, he helped me recognize the value in what I was saying, while drawing my attention to areas that needed to be examined more thoroughly or expressed with greater clarity. Many ideas expressed in my work have taken shape through conversations I have had with Ken over the years. I am grateful for his generous friendship and expertise as a reader. My education and scholarship have received generous support from a number of institutions. I wish to thank the United States Department of Education for the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship that supported the early years of my graduate work, and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board for supporting my studies in England. A Steven Spielberg Stipend from the

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

xiii

Project Judaica Foundation enabled me to participate in the exceptional "NYU in Cracow" summer program at the Center for Jewish Culture. The Holocaust Educational Foundation enabled me to participate in its enriching Summer Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilization at Northwestern University. I treasure the loving support of my mother and my stepfather, Elaine and Hewitt Rubel. Their commitment to my education and abiding interest in my work have touched me deeply. The love and support of my grandmother, Diane Sokol, and my wonderful brothers and sisters-in-law, Joe, Vicki, Philip, Steve, and Rande Weissman, have sustained me over the years. My in-laws, Joe and Rose Micciche, have also touched me with their warmth and kindness. My friendship with Paul Fleming, who commented on portions of this work, has been an enduring source of intellectual enrichment and good humor. Producing a book is, in the end, mostly about sitting alone in a room and writing. There is no getting around that. But, luckily for me, that room has been in a home I share with my wife, Laura Micciche. I am grateful for her love, support, and good humor, and for the endurance she has shown (while steadily producing her own scholarship) in living with me while I have struggled to get writing done. Living with Laura provides me with the foundation of happiness that makes all the rest possible. GARY WEISSMAN

Greenville, North Carolina

FAMYASIES OF WIYMESSIMG

IM7RODUC710M To Feel the Horror

Some time ago I read a memoir by a Holocaust survivor that interwove the story of his wartime experiences with an account of a trip he had taken in 1974 from Cleveland to Caraseu, the Romanian village where he had spent his childhood, and from there to the four Nazi camps where he had suffered untold horrors during the war. The survivor, Martin Lax, did not make this trip alone but took his eighteen-year-old son with him. In reading the memoir Lax wrote two decades later with his son's assistance, I was struck most not by the father's horrifying Holocaust experiences but by his son's efforts to encounter them on this trip. Reading the memoir, I learned that the survivor's son Michael had long been waiting to visit a concentration camp. Like so many children of survivors, Michael felt that he had always known about the Holocaust. As a child he felt different from other children because of what he knew. He knew that his father's family had been taken to Auschwitz, that his father's parents and sister were killed there, and that his father had survived Auschwitz and other Nazi camps. And yet, even as a teenager Michael still knew almost nothing of the specifics of his father's experiences during the Holocaust. "Until now," writes Lax, referring to the moment he and his son stood at the gates of Mauthausen. "Now he had come hoping to be swallowed up by the camp, to experience what Mauthausen had been for me in 1944. He wanted to become a prisoner, to actually feel the horror I had felt." 1

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FANTASIES OF WITNESSING

From their arrival at Mauthausen, however, Michael's efforts to feel the horror were met with resistance. Unlike his father, who faced "the problem of how to avoid reliving the whole ordeal" (74), Michael wondered how he might experience any of it, when the Holocaust was no longer there to be seen. The memorialized Mauthausen camp appeared neither as his father remembered it nor as he had fantasized it would. Michael had visualized the camp shrouded in an appropriately damp chilly mist, under a cover of gray clouds. But on this summer day the blue sky was clear and bright, altogether too pretty. He was further disappointed by what remained of the camp: two neat rows of well-preserved low wooden buildings, a gravel walkway, and, where rows of barracks once stood, large empty spaces overgrown with grass and weeds. Entering one of theremaining barracks, he and his father found a musty-smelling, nearly empty room. Wooden bunks once filled this room; now only a few remained, exhibited behind a rope. "Michael tried to fill in the atmosphere for himself but couldn't," writes Lax (76). The survivor acted as tour guide for his son, commenting on all they encountered "from one end of the camp to the other" (77). At the same time, he realized that he had never seen the camp in its entirety before. In fact, the only parts he remembered were the camp's main gate and giant courtyard, areas he had known as a prisoner at Mauthausen. Lax had arrived there in a transport of Jews sent from Auschwitz. After being released from cattle cars and marched into the camp, the hundreds of prisoners had to undress, wade through a pool of disinfectant, and have their bodies shaven. Hungry, exhausted, and cold, they were then ordered to stand in the courtyard for the rest of the day. That night they were crowded into barracks. Early the next morning they were assigned numbers, given blueand-white striped uniforms and wooden shoes, and marched out of the camp to a waiting train. "I saw no dead people and heard of no gas chambers," writes Lax. "The tidy surface of Mauthausen gave no hint of what was going on there; its activities remained a total enigma to me" (77). Thirty years later he and his son would find this surface intact. "There was nothing about this tidy camp," writes Lax, "that could help [Michael] imagine it full of walking skeletons. It had the cold soul of a museum" (76). Indeed, part of the camp had been converted into a museum. Lax found it contained "pictures and descriptions [that] were inaccurate

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3

and gave a false impression of what it had been like to be there" (77). He and his son hurried through. Outside, Michael realized that the museum was partly housed in the camp's former gas chamber and crematoria. But here too reality fell short of his expectations. The crematoria's twin chimneys, which he had imagined would tower over the camp, were "thinner and shorter than in his fantasies." And he was dismayed by the gas chamber, which, with its shower heads and tile floor, looked smaller and more innocent than he had anticipated: "Clean and empty, it seemed to him like a reasonably pleasant communal shower" (78). Father and son continued their tour, following a path that took them to the notorious Mauthausen stone quarry where prisoners had carried heavy rocks up and down the one hundred and eighty-six steps of the Staircase of Death. Lax told his son how the emaciated prisoners would carry blocks of stone up these steps, and how German guards would push back the first man in a line of prisoners, sending them all tumbling down, one against the other, into the quarry. As they walked down the steps, Lax was angered to find that this "legendary scene of torment" had been altered to make it safer for tourists. "They must have evened these stairs out," he told Michael, explaining that, according to the stories of those who toiled here, the jagged staircase had been a struggle to climb (79). At the bottom of the steps they found the quarry so overgrown by trees and shrubs that, in this place where prisoners had been worked to death and randomly murdered, "nothing remained" (79). Still, the survivor and his son now had a better view of the surrounding cliffs, and soon spotted a plaque attached to the cliff wall above a stagnant pool of water. The plaque, inscribed in French, German, and Russian, identified this pool as "the lake of parachuters." Lax translated the inscription for his son, recounting how guards had thrown prisoners off the cliff into this pool a hundred feet below. The "parachuters" were those prisoners sent plummeting to their deaths. The notion that the SS took pleasure in throwing helpless prisoners off the cliff and pushing them down the stone staircase filled Michael with rage. As he walked back up the steps he thought about the vulnerability of the prisoners exposed to the brutality of their German guards. "Michael was suddenly able to picture all those men and boys, men like me, snuffed out senselessly," writes Lax (8o), leading me to gather that it was here, by

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the lake of parachuters in the Mauthausen quarry, that his son came closest to realizing his desire to experience what Mauthausen had been for his father in 1944, to feel the horror his father had felt. Recall, however, that his father had never actually set foot in the Mauthausen quarry, nor had he ever seen it-not until now, when visiting the site with his son. Thirty years before, in 1944, Lax had arrived at Mauthausen with a transport of Jews that was sent from Auschwitz and moved on to another camp the next day. His stay at Mauthausen was brief; only later would he hear terrible stories about its stone quarry from prisoners who had been there. More so than the specifics of Lax's wartime experiences and his prewar life in Caraseu (the village Lax set out to memorialize in his memoir), the account of his son's experience at Mauthausen has remained with me because it renders so explicit the nonwitness's desire "to become a prisoner, to actually feel the horror" -in short, to witness the Holocaust as if one were there. This desire is not Michael's alone, nor is it limited to those who are the children of Holocaust survivors. Rather, it is the unspoken desire of many people who have no direct experience of the Holocaust but are deeply interested in studying, remembering, and memorializing it. It is a desire to know what it was like to be there, in Nazi Europe; in hiding; at the sites of mass shootings; in the ghettos; in the cattle cars; in the concentration camps; in the death camps; in the gas chambers and crematoria. This desire can be satisfied only in fantasy, in fantasies of witnessing the Holocaust for oneself. This study looks at attempts to actualize these fantasies through exposure to sites or texts where the Holocaust may be vicariously experienced and thereby made "real" for readers, viewers, or visitors. It explores how these fantasies express a desire for the Holocaust to feel more real than it does today in American culture. What interests me most about the story of Michael's visit to Mauthausen is the great difficulty of satisfying such desire. As he tours the camp with his father, Michael is repeatedly disappointed by the absence of what was once there to be witnessed: the skeletal prisoners, the murderous guards, the open-mouthed corpses, the smoking chimneys. He had come to Mauthausen hoping to be "swallowed up by the camp," but finds that, three decades later, there is nothing left to overwhelm him with horror. Historian Raul Hilberg tells the story of how a carpenter, one of the few Jews to

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5

survive the Treblinka death camp, built a small scale model of Treblinka and displayed it in a kibbutz near Haifa. When the carpenter asked poet Abba Kovner, also a survivor of the Holocaust, what he thought of his work, Kovner replied that something was missing. "But what, asked the survivor. After all, the fence was in place, and so were the reception barracks, the S-shaped curve to the gas chambers, and the gas-building itself. What could have been missing? And Kovner replied: the horror was missing."2 This aspect at the core of the Holocaust was similarly missing in Mauthausen the day Michael and his father visited the camp. Despite his wish "to actually feel the horror," Michael did not feel horrified. Instead, he felt distanced from the actuality of what had occurred decades ago in the places where he stood. In response to this feeling, Michael's desire to experience what Mauthausen had been for his father in 1944 gave way to a more basic effort to feel, to experience something, whatever would enable him to overcome his sense of estrangement from the Holocaust past. Finally it was hearing stories of how prisoners suffered and died in the quarry, told at the very scene of the crime, that enabled him to come closest to something of the missing horror, however fleetingly. In retelling this story from Lax's memoir Caraseu: A Holocaust Remembrance, I am proposing that many of us, like Michael, are searching for ways to gain access to and "remember" the Holocaust that eludes us. This study examines efforts by persons who are nevertheless unlike Michael, the child of a survivor, in that they have no immediate, familial connection to the Holocaust. This group of "nonwitnesses" as I will call them-or "nonsurvivors" as they are often called in Holocaust scholarship, although this term might be taken to refer to the murdered six million-is largely but not exclusively Jewish; for instance, a great number of Christian scholars teach and write on the Holocaust. Included among the "nonwitnesses" are most of the individuals who produce educational, scholarly, literary, and artistic work related to the Holocaust today. Furthermore, as generational distance weakens familial links between survivors and their descendents, everyone who engages in efforts to realize or understand the lived reality of the Holocaust will be a nonwitness. Given this, an examination of such efforts made by nonsurvivors just decades after the war can provide us with a strong indication of what the future of Holocaust remembrance will look like.

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FANTASIES OF WITNESSING

In time, not only will the last living witnesses of the Holocaust pass away; so will all those who have known them as multifaceted living persons rather than as faces on screen, voices on tape, and narrator-protagonists in books. In her book Denying the Holocaust, Deborah Lipstadt warns that "the public, particularly the uneducated public, will be increasingly susceptible to Holocaust denial as survivors die." In order to illustrate "the dramatic difference between hearing a story directly from one who has experienced it and hearing it second- or third-hand," and thus what is lost when Holocaust survivors die, she tells a story about her cousins, whose father employed an elderly African American man who had been born a slave. Her cousins grew up hearing his stories and those told by his friends who had also been slaves. Because of this, Lipstadt writes, "for my cousins the Civil War and slavery are not events of the distant American past. They occupy primary places in the storehouse of their childhood memories." Lipstadt, by contrast, regards slavery and the Civil War as "part of nineteenth-century America"; while recognizing that they are "exceptionally important aspects of our nation's history," for her these "aspects" are distant, remote-not only past but in some sense passe. 3 As with the Civil War and slavery, "so too with the Holocaust," foresees Lipstadt: "Future generations will not hear the story from people who can say 'this is what happened to me. This is my story.' For them it will be part of the distant past and, consequently, more susceptible to revision and denial" (DH xiii). Here she identifies a real fear, one that has led to the construction of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington as "a physical container to preserve the memory of the Holocaust for all Americans" and to the creation of numerous video archives preserving Holocaust survivors' stories for future generations; Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation alone has accumulated over 50,000 videotaped testimonies. "Let's be honest," Sol Wieder, one of the survivors interviewed, told a New York Times reporter. "In 10, 15 years, there won't be one guy alive." 4 While future nonwitnesses will be unable to hear survivors tell their stories in person, videotaped survivor testimony will offer them a mediated approximation of that experience. 5 Still, there are significant problems with Lipstadt's notion that the "difference between hearing a story directly from one who has experienced it and hearing it second- or third-hand" accounts for whether an historical event like the Civil War or the Holocaust occupies a "primary place" in

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7

one's memory-and, by extension, in public memory-or is relegated to the distant past. Three points bear mentioning. First, most Americans, including Jews, know of the Holocaust not from listening directly to survivors but from watching television, seeing Hollywood movies, and reading popular books. 6 Second, if we recognize that for most Southerners the Civil War has more presence than the Holocaust, we will note that something other than temporal distance and access to living witnesses determines how people relate to history. This other, more decisive factor is the tendency to privilege and identify with those histories that resonate with one's own sense of identity. That is why it is hardly surprising that Lipstadt, an American Jew, should feel a personal relation to the Holocaust that goes missing in her attitude toward American slavery. 7 Third, the analogy she uses to convey the growing threat posed by Holocaust deniers does not, in fact, suggest that future generations will be more prone to denying the Holocaust. If the legacy of slavery offers any indication of how future generations will regard the Holocaust, it points to a different fate: not denial but disassociation. Americans do not deny that slavery is part of American history. At the same time, however, most know almost nothing about the histories of the Atlantic slave trade and plantation slavery in North America, and even less about the plight of ex-slaves and their children following the Civil War. While the fact of slavery is granted, a sense of its historical reality is largely absent from the consciousness of white America. Consequently, for most Americans the "peculiar institution" of slavery now seems amorphous, somewhat unreal, and largely irrelevant to the present. 8 Though Lipstadt voices concern that future generations will deny the Holocaust, the more realistic threat is that the American people, who are only two or three percent Jewish, will come to regard the Holocaust much as they do slaverygranting its facticity, even acknowledging its exceptional importance, but feeling no special commitment to commemorating or "witnessing" this part of the distant past. Put simply, with the passage of time the Holocaust may no longer occupy a primary place in our nation's public memory. Lipstadt imagines a future in which Holocaust deniers will operate no differently than they have in the past; the crucial difference is that the American public will have changed vis-a-vis the Holocaust. This suggests that underlying a concern with Holocaust denial is a more complicated distrust of the American public and its changeable interest in remembering

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the Holocaust. Fear of the deniers' impact on future generations is not only about the future, but reflects unease concerning the present state of American Holocaust remembrance. This unease was substantiated in 1993, when newspapers reported that, according to a survey conducted by the Roper Organization for the American Jewish Committee, 22 percent of adults and 20 percent of high school students surveyed believe that the Holocaust may never have happened. 9 Journalists, educators, and cultural commentators cited this finding to stress the importance of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the film Schindler's List, both of which opened in 1993, as well as Lipstadt's Denying the Holocaust, also published that year. A year later, The New York Times reported that "since the survey was published ... it has become widely accepted in public discourse, drawing shocked reaction from survivors of Nazi death camps and Jews in general, as well as anguished commentary from intellectuals and journalists." 10 However, as The New York Times went on to report, the survey's disturbing finding also proved to be erroneous due to a confusing, oddly phrased question: "Does it seem possible or does it seem impossible to you that the Nazi extermination of the Jews never happened?" In fact, when this question was reworded for a subsequent 1994 Roper poll (pollsters now asked, "Does it seem possible to you that the Nazi extermination of the Jews never happened, or do you feel certain that it happened?") the results were markedly different. Just 1 percent of those surveyed said it does seem possible that the Holocaust never happened, while 8 percent said they did not know and 91 percent said they feel certain that the Holocaust happened. 11 In retrospect, what may be most noteworthy about these surveys is that both results seem plausible. Certainly what the 1993 survey implied-that one in five Americans deny or at the very least doubt the Holocaustelicited much surprise. But given the bizarre wording of the survey question and the fact that only 992 adults and 506 high school students were polled, it is striking that only professional poll takers questioned the survey's validity and wide-ranging implications. 12 It appears that we are just as ready to believe that "most Americans have only the vaguest possible notion of what the Holocaust was about" as we are to believe in "the extraordinary success of Holocaust remembrance in America.'' 13 Many scholars identify 1978 as the year the American public became truly "Holocaust conscious." That year a planned Nazi march in Skokie, Illinois,

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home to many Holocaust survivors, drew national attention; Jimmy Carter established the President's Commission on the Holocaust, which would bring about the creation of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; books, conferences and courses on the Holocaust proliferated; and the Holocaust miniseries was seen by an estimated 120 million viewers nationwide over the four nights it aired on television. 14 The extraordinary success of the miniseries in particular has been taken to signify the moment Holocaust remembrance entered the American mainstream. 15 Since 1978, commentators assessing public knowledge of the Holocaust in the United States have asserted both that the American public has become surprisingly Holocaust conscious and that the American public remains surprisingly ignorant of the Holocaust. Commentary has similarly vacillated on the question of public interest in the Holocaust. On the one hand, the Holocaust is thought to be a highly marketable subject. Commentators seldom note this without repeating the adage "there's no business like Shoah business," which implies that the Holocaust is a perennial draw, just the thing for fund-raising, bringing in tourists, and attracting readers and viewers. On the other hand, this notion of "Shoah business" coexists with periodic warnings that the American, public is growing sick and tired of hearing about the Holocaust. This is seen, for example, in a 1980 article in The New York Times Magazine on the "explosion of Holocaust-related material" since the mid-1970s. The article concludes by noting that Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel, who "has been lecturing and writing on the need to remember and to confront the radical evil of Nazi genocide for 25 years," has come to wonder "whether a saturation point has been reached, whether mention of the Holocaust produces only apathy." 16 In an essay published a year later, Lipstadt remarks that even the "Jewish public-at-large" has started to feel "satiated," as "no longer is it rare for program committees and chairmen and women of Jewish organizations to reject suggestions for programs because they believe 'people have heard enough about the Holocaust; they're tired of it."117 In a 1989 essay, Joseph Berger, education editor of the New York Times and the son of Holocaust survivors, writes that he senses "a general jadedness, even a fatigue with the Holocaust. The subject is losing its ability to shock, to stir wonder, to wring tears. It has become too commonplace .... I can't prove it but I have a sense that newspaper editors and publishers are tiring of the subject, that the viewing public is also tiring of

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the subject." 18 And a 2003 article in the New York Times notes "definite signs of Holocaust fatigue," quoting a survivor who says, "Even I roll my eyes when I hear about another Holocaust documentary." The article reports that fund-raising for Holocaust-related projects and institutions has become a tough struggle, and notes critics' complaints that "the basic plot line of the Holocaust has become too familiar by now to permit genuinely original work." 19 Still, this same article observes that a vast number of Holocaust-related books are being published, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum receives millions of visitors each year, and independent filmmakers are having difficulty funding and distributing their work largely because the market is saturated with films documenting the Holocaust. Berger's sense, in 1989, that interest in the Holocaust was on the decline now appears misinformed; just four years later the extraordinary success of Schindler's List and the newly opened Holocaust Memorial Museum inspired the media to name 1993 "the Year of the Holocaust." 20 And yet, the remarkable success of museum and movie have not allayed the fears and uncertainties expressed by the many conflicting estimations of the public's knowledge of and interest in the Holocaust. Indeed, this popular success is even grounds for suspicion among scholars and critics who question the nature of public interest in the Holocaust and the quality of any portrayal of the Nazi era that has such wide appeal. "It is commonly asserted that anything that increases public awareness of the most extreme moment of 2oth-century history can only be a good thing," comments Philip Gourevitch in an article on the popularity of Schindler's List. "But awareness is a vague concept, not always synonymous with knowledge." 21 Public awareness stops the Holocaust from receding into the distant past, but with no guarantee that the Holocaust we "remember" is faithful to past reality. Scholars and survivors frequently speak of the unimaginable, unrepresentable nature of that reality, but in practice what can be represented of the Holocaust is often determined through a practical consideration of what is most suitable for a target audience, given a specific set of objectives. When representing the Holocaust, how much horror can be shown without repelling viewers? How much horror can be described without alienating readers? How horrific and bleak can the story be without turning

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audiences away? How Jewish can a depiction of the Holocaust be without losing the patronage of an overwhelmingly non-Jewish audience? These questions are not easily answered. This is amply shown in Preserving Memory, Edward T. Linenthal's fascinating account of the creation of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Not only did exhibition designers from the start have a "genuine fear that the museum might be too horrible, and that no one would come," but shortly before the museum's opening "a battle for the direction of the institution took place behind the scenes."22 This was a battle "between those who feared that the museum would appear 'too Jewish,' and attract only a Jewish audience, and those who feared that, in the attempt to sell itself to a wide audience, the inuseum would jettison its focus on the Holocaust and eventually become a museum of contemporary genocide" (257). These tensions, never fully resolved, are exhibited by the museum. Michael Berenbaum, who served as project director of the Holocaust Memorial Museum during its creation and later as president of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, has argued that as "study of the Holocaust passes out of the ghetto and into the mainstream of American culture" its reinterpretation is both necessary and inevitable. This "Americanization of the Holocaust," as Berenbaum calls it, involves making the Nazi persecution of the Jews more accessible and relevant for a broad American audience by using it as a means to teach fundamental American values. Berenbaum brought to the Holocaust Memorial Museum a pedagogy already present in public high schools, where, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, "instruction in the Holocaust had become an instrument for teaching the professed values of American society: democracy, pluralism, respect for differences, individual responsibility, freedom from prejudice, and an abhorrence of racism." 23 The intended audience for this approach is the non-Jewish population, imagined as the potential perpetrators and bystanders who must be taught about the Nazi genocide if" another Holocaust" is to be averted. Though Holocaust scholars and Jewish American critics tend to share a belief that non-Jews in particular must learn about the Nazi genocide, they are often highly critical of how the Holocaust has been Americanized in the effort to reach a popular audience. Criticisms are generally aimed at three aspects of this Americanization or popularization. While interconnected,

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these three aspects may be distinguished as trivializing, sweetening, and universalizing the Holocaust. Trivializing or cheapening the Holocaust involves treating the subject in ways that are judged inappropriate because they fail to honor the gravity or magnitude of the Nazi genocide. Commentators charge that the Holocaust is trivialized when it is depicted in a manner that strikes them as vulgar or crude; when it is relativized through allegedly inappropriate comparison with other events; when it is exploited for personal, political, or financial gain; and when its depiction does not serve an educational or memorial function, but is intended primarily to entertain. Sweetening or sugar-coating the Holocaust involves depicting it as a story with a happy ending, thereby denying its true horror. In order to appeal to as broad an audience as possible, many depictions of the Holocaust avoid telling too horrifying and too depressing a story by emphasizing such themes as survival, martyrdom, heroism, rescue, redemption, spiritual uplift, and the triumph of humanity over inhumanity. There is no shortage of scholarship and criticism condemning redemptive Holocaust narratives in no uncertain terms, but since the marketplace shapes how the Holocaust gets rendered for public consumption to a far greater extent than critical writings have and perhaps ever will, Holocaust stories with magical moments and happy endings continue to proliferate. The most complicated form of Americanization involves universalizing the Holocaust, which occurs when the historical specificity of the Nazi persecution of the Jews is compromised or neglected. This can take a number of forms. The Holocaust is universalized or "dejudaized" when the Jewishness of the victims is downplayed or disregarded, as is sometimes done to ensure that non-Jews and assimilated Jews will identify with the victims and care about their fate, rather than view them as strangers. Additionally, those who believe that "the Holocaust" should refer specifically to the Nazi program to exterminate European Jewry feel that the inclusion of other victim groups, such as Christian Poles, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, and homosexuals, threatens to dejudaize the Holocaust. 24 But most frequently, universalization occurs when the Holocaust is divested of its historical specificity in order to be valued as a symbol or archetype. This is the case when the Holocaust is evoked as a symbol of ultimate evil or ultimate suffering, or presented as "an extreme example of what could happen if the core values of American society were consistently abrogated." 25

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In his perceptive study of the Holocaust in American culture, Alan Mintz identifies universalization as "the most profound and pervasive mechanism by which the Holocaust was allowed entry into American culture." 26 As he explains, universalizing has both positive and negative consequences. It saves an event from becoming part of the distant past by investing it with moral significance transcending its historical moment; but it does so at the cost of removing the event from history, obscuring "the particular and what is troublingly un-universal about it" (1oo). This explains how the public may know that the Nazi extermination of the Jews happened and nevertheless have, as Lipstadt puts it, "an appalling American ignorance of the most basic facts of the Holocaust" (DH xii). Americans need not know much about the when, where, and why of the Holocaust in order to grasp its significance as a moral paradigm. Among the most notorious-and earliest-examples of the Americanization of the Holocaust is the last line an English-speaking, dejudaized Anne Frank delivers in Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett's 1955 stage play, The Diary of Anne Frank. Attacked for trivializing and sweetening the Holocaust with a universal message at odds with all that the Holocaust indicates about humankind, the line reads: "In spite of everything, I still believe that people are reallY: good at heart." Scholars have argued that this optimistic sentiment hides the reality of Frank's death at Bergen-Belsen behind the curtain of a comforting and timeless happy ending for Anne and audience alike. Yet Mintz, taking a more pragmatic approach, states that despite these objections to the play and its film adaptation, "it is indisputable that Goodrich and Hackett knew their audience and its threshold of revulsion and that they accomplished their goal with enormous success" (19). This goal, which is to reach as wide an audience as possible through a depiction of the Holocaust that avoids repelling audiences with too much horror, conflicts with the personal interests of those most invested in witnessing the Holocaust for themselves. Whereas Americanizing the Holocaust makes it more accessible to people who would otherwise have little or no interest in this history, the cheapening, sweetening, and universalizing that "Americanization" often entails frustrates those who want to feel the horror, to experience what living under Nazism was like for the victims. For these nonwitnesses, the problem is not that the Nazi genocide is "too horrible" or "too Jewish" a story, but that the "threshold of revulsion" is set at too great a distance from the Holocaust.

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Despite the Americanization of the Holocaust, argues Peter Novick in The Holocaust in American Life, "it's not clear that the Holocaust is an American collective memory in any worthwhile sense. One way that an historical occurrence becomes deeply embedded in collective consciousness is when it serves to define the group, remind people of 'who they are.' The Holocaust is simply too remote from the experience of Americans for it to perform that function." 27 Fantasies of Witnessing does not set out to measure the present quantity of Holocaust "memory" or consciousness in the United States, but to examine its quality by focusing on American scholars and critics-largely but not all Jewish-who, taken together, comprise a community or group in which "Holocaust consciousness" exists in concentrated form. Novick may be correct when he writes that the Holocaust is too remote from the experience of Americans to define them as a group and remind them of "who they are." Nevertheless, the scholars and critics who write about the Holocaust constitute a group united, at least, in their attempts to make the Holocaust feel less remote, attempts that are thoroughly documented in their many published writings on the subject. No doubt, I am interested in this group because it is where I locate myself, as someone working in the academic field of Holocaust studies who is not a child of Holocaust survivors. It is a telling irony that while I happen to be named after someone who died in the Holocaust, none of my living relatives knows anything about this distant relation. My mother tells me that while she was pregnant an aunt approached her with news of a relative who had died in the Holocaust, pointing out that, nearly two dozen years later, no one had been named after him. And so I came to be named after someone who perished in the Holocaust. No one can tell me with certainty his surname or where he lived, but someone died somewhere in the Holocaust, and I am named "in memory" of him. My name thus "bears witness" to the Nazi extermination of the Jews, but only in the most nebulous of ways. Such a nebulous connection to the Nazi genocide haunts many scholars and critics who write on the Holocaust. The desire to feel more connected to the Holocaust leads some Jewish Americans to regard themselves as Holocaust survivors, their rationale being that "Hitler meant to kill all Jews." 28 More typically, Jewish American scholars blur distinctions between the children of Holocaust survivors and nonsurvivors in general. An explicit but by no means unusual example can be found in a 1998 essay by

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scholar EllenS. Fine on what she calls "the post-Holocaust generation." After observing that the term second generation refers to the children of Holocaust survivors, Fine writes, "However, my use of the expression is more comprehensive, encompassing those born both during and after the war, including those who did not directly participate in the Holocaust but who have come to endure the psychic imprint of the trauma. They are designated as 'the post-Holocaust generation.' " 29 She then describes this group through the writings of French and American Jews born into survivor families. For instance, Fine quotes Menachem Z. Rosensaft, a founding member of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in the United States, who was himself born in the displaced persons camp of Bergen-Belsen in 1948. Rosensaft says of the survivors' children: "We are, I believe, unique in that, while we did not experience the Holocaust, we have a closer personal link to it than anyone other than our parents" (189). Never mind Rosensaft's sharp distinction between the children of survivors and anyone else born after the war; if Fine can cite his remark without reconsidering her expansion of the "second generation" category to include just about anybody, this is because Rosensaft makes clear what is to be gained by identifying oneself with the children of survivors: namely, a closeness to the Holocaust exceeded only by those who were there and survived. Another example of this sort appears in an engaging study of contemporary Jewish American writers by literary scholar Andrew Furman, following his discussion of a short story by Thane Rosenbaum, a secondgeneration writer. "Cattle Car Complex" depicts the plight of Adam Posner, whose parents had been "in the camps, transported there by rail, cattle cars, in fact." 30 The story portrays Posner's breakdown when, trapped in an elevator, he comes to believe he is in a cattle car en route to a death camp. Whereas Rosenbaum's story strikes me as a romantic fantasy staging the second-generation American Jew's transformation into full-fledged Holocaust victim, Furman presents it as a convincing argument for how present the Holocaust is in the lives of the survivors' children. Furman moves from the story to a consideration of the "legacy of Holocaust suffering" for American Jews in general. Here he quotes Julius Lester, who writes that from a black perspective "there is something jarring in hearing white-skinned Jews talk about suffering. No black denies that Jews

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suffered in Europe, but the Jewish experience in America has not been characterized by such suffering." Furman claims that Rosenbaum's short stories challenge Lester's view, "for although it is true that Jewish Americans no longer need endure the palpable suffering wrought by institutionalized anti-Semitism, Adam Posner ... nevertheless suffers from the horrors committed against his parents." 31 This is a peculiar argument, given not only that Posner, the son of Holocaust survivors, is inexplicably made to represent all Jewish Americans, but also that Posner is a fictional character. Perhaps a claim to "Holocaust suffering" offered through identification with Posner trumps such concerns. A last example of blurred distinctions-here between survivors, the children of survivors, and nonsurvivors-concerns "postmemory," a term introduced into Holocaust discourse by Marianne Hirsch and subsequently employed by many Holocaust scholars. A daughter of Auschwitz survivors, Hirsch appears to have conceived of the "powerful and very particular form of memory" she calls postmemory to reflect initially her own relationship to the Holocaust. 32 More specifically, postmemory is her response to "nonmemory" and "absent memory," terms that emphasize what some children of survivors feel to be missing or lacking in their relationship to the Holocaust survived by their parents: namely, a deeper knowledge of a past that "eludes and excludes" them. 33 Hirsch does not identify with this sense of absence. Having grown up hearing "daily accounts of a lost world," she feels instead its fragmented presence. Although she can only imagine what this world was like based on stories and family photographs, she believes that this "makes it no less present, no less vivid, and perhaps because of the constructed and deeply invested nature of memory itself, no less accurate" (FF 244). One can observe that what Hirsch and her parents remember is highly dissimilar, even while granting that memory is subjectively constructed and susceptible to distortion and imaginative elaboration. She remembers images and stories about her parents' experiences; they remember their own lived experiences, only parts of which take the form of stories that can be told. Hirsch writes that the experiences she and other children of survivors know through their parents' stories are "so powerful, so monumental, as to constitute memories in their own right." 34 Though what is meant here by "memories" is murky, Hirsch seems to be saying that the children relate so strongly to their parents' prewar and Holocaust stories that, in effect,

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they too have memories of living these experiences. But no degree of power or monumentality can transform one person's lived memories into another's. Hirsch appears to acknowledge this when she distinguishes between survivor memory and second-generation postmemory, stating that "postmemory is distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection" (FF 22). At the same time, however, this distinction is undermined by the notion that the difference between memory and postmemory is primarily one of distance rather than substance. For instance, Hirsch writes that memory is "more directly connected to the past" than postmemory, although postmemory, mediated through stories, images, and parent-child relations, has no direct connection to the past-not if memories "directly connected to the past" are rooted in the lived experience of that past, having been there in Nazi Europe (FF 22). In her 1979 autobiographical study of the second generation, titled Children of the Holocaust, Helen Epstein acknowledges that the children of survivors have no lived memory of Nazi persecution when she describes them as "possessed by a history they had never lived." 35 Hirsch, by contrast, suggests that a deep personal connection to the Holocaust is enough to transform its learned history into inherited, lived memory-a dubious proposition at best. But it is Epstein's language that seems unusual because it has become outdated. Her use of "history" has been displaced by "memory" and its many permutations, including "postmemory," "prosthetic memory," and the oxymoronic "vicarious memory," all of which suggest a closer, more personal, and immediate relationship to the Holocaust than that conveyed by history. 36 "Postmemory" may be valued for giving a name to the unique familial knowledge of the Holocaust that survivors' children attain by growing up with those who did live this history. Even this understanding of postmemory is tested, however, when Hirsch extends the term, making it applicable to anyone deeply interested in "remembering" the Holocaust. Detached from the experience of being raised by survivors, postmemory becomes an entity unto itself, a form of collective memory. 37 It is reconceived not as an "identity position," something possessed only by survivors' children, but as a "space of remembrance" ("PM" 8). This space might be a private setting, such as the home in which a survivor's child grows up, or a public setting like the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

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Recognizing that most of the American public knows little about the Holocaust, Hirsch writes that "the museum needs to elicit in its visitors an imaginary identification-the desire to know and to feel, the curiosity and passion that shape the postmemory of survivor children. At its best, it would include all of its visitors in the generation of postmemory" (FF 249). Here she effectively proposes that museum visitors should identify not with Holocaust victims but with the survivors' children. In short, she offers nonwitnesses a closeness to the Holocaust modeled on the second generation's relation to the event. Those who take up this offer, including themselves in the post-Holocaust generation or the generation of postmemory, can lay claim to their own "postmemory" of the Holocaust. 38 In distinguishing between nonwitnesses and the second generation, I do not mean to deny that nonwitnesses may, through close friendships with survivors, attain what feels like a familial connection to the event. Nor do I mean to imply that a nonwitness's interest in the Holocaust is not personal or deeply felt; indeed, a deeply felt interest in the Holocaust is what distinguishes nonwitnesses from the general public. Furthermore, I recognize that the second generation relates to the Holocaust in some ways shared by nonwitnesses. As the opening story about Michael's efforts to experience what his father had experienced at Mauthausen illustrates, the children of survivors are not witnesses of the Holocaust; however, they do live with its aftermath in ways that are foreign to American Jews not born into survivor families. The Holocaust recognized by a survivor's child is not the Holocaust that others learn about through reading and viewing texts and visiting museums and memorial sites. For in addition to having familiarity with such texts and sites, survivors' children know a part of the Holocaust that is all in the family. Novelist Melvin Jules Bukiet addresses this point in his introduction to an anthology of work by second-generation writers, remarking that while the second generation will never know what their survivor-parents know in their bones, what the second generation knows better than anyone else is the first generation. 39 This is stunningly portrayed by Art Spiegelman in his comic-book memoir Maus: A Survivor's Tale, in which Art's retelling of his father Vladek's story is interwoven with scenes depicting Art's torturous relationship to his parents from childhood to the present. The tone is set from the opening pages in which ten-year-old Artie arrives home crying after having

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fallen down while roller-skating. When he tells his father that his friends skated away without him, Vladek responds, "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!" 40 Through such moments, Spiegelman conveys the impact of the Holocaust on his childhood, his father, and their family. Still, not all children of survivors are so engaged with the Holocaust. Aaron Hass, a clinical psychologist who is also the son of survivors, writes that he is continually amazed by how most of the "second-generation children" he encounters know little about the Holocaust and are not concerned with preserving its memory. 41 This may surprise readers, since our understanding of the second generation is largely shaped by secondgeneration writers who are actively engaged in addressing the Holocaust, and who appear to describe a burden and a mindset shared by all children of survivors. 42 Some nonwitnesses shut out of the second generation have found a home in the third generation. While the term has been applied to the children of the second generation, or the survivors' grandchildren, it also has been broadened to include most any Jewish American born in the 196os and 1970s. Thus Bjorn Krondorfer, in his book Remembrance and Reconciliation: Encounters between Young Jews and Germans, writes that whereas "children and grandchildren of survivors still feel deeply connected to the Holocaust ... third-generation Jewish Americans as a whole seem to feel more and more detached from the Holocaust as temporal distance grows." 43 In the mid-1990s I attended a Holocaust conference where a colleague presented~ paper in which she cited Krondorfer's description of the third generation in order to position herself as a member of that group. Following her presentation I overheard two elderly survivors talking in the hallway outside the conference room. One expressed confusion as to whether or not the presenter was the grandchild of a survivor; when her friend told her the young woman had said she was not, the survivor angrily insisted that those who are not the grandchildren of survivors have no right to call themselves members of the third generation. My colleague had adapted the term in an effort to situate herself and others like her at a distance from the Holocaust; however, this survivor saw in its usage a fraudulent, unearned claim to a familial closeness to the event. The term "nonwitness" avoids any suggestion of such a claim. Rather, some will object to it for erring in the other direction; that is, for denying

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the capacity of those who did not directly experience or witness events of the Nazi era to become witnesses by listening to survivors tell their stories, if not by reading books, watching films and videos, or visiting museums and sites related to the Holocaust. In an effort to distinguish between the actual witnesses who lived through the Holocaust and those who know the Holocaust only in mediated form, some commentators refer to the latter as "secondary witnesses," "vicarious witnesses," "retrospective witnesses," "witnesses by adoption," or "witnesses through the imagination." I resist these terms because I believe that such a broadening of the term witness, as well as similar uses of the terms memory and trauma, contributes to a wishful blurring of otherwise obvious and meaningful distinctions between the victims and ourselves, and between the Holocaust and our own historical moment. Even historian and theorist Dominick LaCapra, who is critically sensitive to the dangers of "arrogating to oneself the victim's experience or undergoing (whether consciously or unconsciously) surrogate victimage," describes the historian or interested observer as someone who becomes a "secondary witness" through an act of "testimonial witnessing," thereby gaining "secondary memory" of events and possibly undergoing "secondary trauma." 44 Such language may seem necessary or unavoidable until we encounter alternative terminology. For instance, in his study On Listening to Holocaust Survivors Henry Greenspan refers to those who listen to survivors' stories not as secondary witnesses but, more directly, as listeners. Put simply, the term nonwitness stresses that we who were not there did ~ot witness the Holocaust, and that the experience of listening to, reading, or viewing witness testimony is substantially unlike the experience of victimization. We can read books or watch films on the Holocaust, listen to Holocaust survivors, visit Holocaust museums, take trips to Holocaust memorial sites in Europe, research and write about the Holocaust, look at photographs of the victims, and so forth, but in none of these cases are we witnessing the actual events of the Holocaust. Rather, we are experiencing representations of the Holocaust, all of them created or preserved in its aftermath. Keeping this in mind, we are in a far better position to consider why commentary on the Holocaust increasingly blurs distinctions between the witnesses who experienced the Holocaust as a lived reality and the nonwitnesses who wish to get closer to their horrific experiences.

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How do we begin to understand the desire to be closer to the Holocaust? Perhaps first by recognizing it. Lori Hope Lefkovitz writes, "'The second generation' at once occupies a position of privilege, closer to some rupture and origin than those who cannot number their generations and, at the same time, ours is a position of relative mediocrity, emphatically not first." 45 Even amongst the survivors there are differing positions in a "hierarchy of suffering": "Those who lived through it in 'milder' circumstances are often hesitant to speak of their experiences, deferring to those who were in the 'worst' places," states Aaron Hass. 46 Second-generation writer Sonia Piker similarly remarks, "Treblinka survivors feel superior to the ones who were in Terezin-summer camp in comparison-who are above those in labor camps, who supersede the escapees to Sweden, Russia, and South America. The key question being: Where did you spend the war? The more dire the circumstances, the more family murdered, the greater the starvation and disease, the higher the rung in this social register."47 This hierarchy extends to the second generation. Lefkovitz writes that when asked about her parents, she says that her mother was in Siberia during the war, and, because Siberia is "borderline survivorship," quickly adds that her father was in Auschwitz and Buchenwald (223). Fantasies of Witnessing proceeds from my belief that there is something akin to this hierarchy of suffering-complete with much jockeying for position over who really understands the Holocaust and "what it was like" to be there-amongst those scholars and critics who have little connection to the Holocaust other than their personal interest in the subject and (usually) their Jewishness. Whereas family connections grant the children of survivors a "position of privilege" closer, as it were, to the Holocaust, nonwitnesses must work to convince themselves and others that they too occupy a privileged position in relation to the event. For nonwitnesses, one's own place in the hierarchy of suffering has much to do with one's professed ability to "feel the horror." One's intellect and moral fiber are measured by the degree that one has come, in Fine's words, "to endure the psychic imprint of the trauma." Here "trauma" becomes the sign of one's authentic relationship to the Holocaust: if one has really faced the Holocaust, felt its horror and remembered its victims, one must be "traumatized" by the experience. Some psychologists have found that trauma may be transmitted from survivors to their children, who may even show symp-

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toms of the type found in those who actually lived through the Holocaust.48 But nonwitnesses are not after this clinical sort of traumatic relation to the Holocaust, bound up in parent-child relationships. What they want, instead, is to "feel the horror" and, through it, the reality of an event that threatens to seem unreal. Things feel most real to us when we can see or experience them for ourselves, and with the Holocaust this proves most difficult. I explore this difficulty through a consideration of some exemplary attempts made by nonwitnesses to overcome what separates them from the Holocaust. Such attempts inevitably involve locating the Holocaust in privileged sites or texts where it can be vicariously "experienced" or "witnessed." Each chapter in this study concentrates on a different attempt to locate the Holocaust: the first in the person of Elie Wiesel, the most renowned survivor of the Holocaust, and in his classic memoir Night; the second in videotaped Holocaust survivor testimonies and in a celebrated work of Holocaust scholarship; and the third in the films Schindler's List and Shoah. The first two chapters tell of attempts by specific nonwitnesses-cultural critic Alfred Kazin and Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer-while the third opens up to a wider consideration of nonwitness discourse surrounding Steven Spielberg's and Claude Lanzmann's films. Taken together, these chapters trace a movement away from the view popularized by Wiesel, that those who did not live through the Holocaust will never be able to grasp its horror. Whereas Wiesel has long argued that nonwitnesses cannot represent or even imagine what Auschwitz was like, there are now a growing number of representations that seek to re-create the Holocaust as an "experience" nonwitnesses may put themselves through. I see this development as a response to an encroaching sense that the Holocaust seems unreal or pseudo-real in American culture, which, in the aftermath of the event, fails to reflect in meaningful enough ways that the Holocaust occurred. While the vast majority of the American public is no doubt unconcerned by this "reality loss," it is a thorny problem for nonwitnesses-American Jews and others who are invested in remembering and teaching others about the Nazi persecution of the Jews. In this study, I argue that nonwitnesses are haunted not by the traumatic impact of the Holocaust, but by its absence-by a sense that the Holocaust is not enough with us, the popularity of Holocaust museums and Holocaust movies notwithstanding. Moreover, I contend that, when nonwitnesses take an in-

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terest in the Holocaust, they are not overcoming a fearful aversion to its horror but endeavoring to actually feel the horror of what otherwise eludes them. These attempts are not recognized as such by most Holocaust scholars. When the nonwitness's interest in exposing him or herself to the horrors of the Holocaust is addressed, it is typically denounced as a perverse fascination or morbid curiosity with atrocity, a fascination, as historian Orner Bartov puts it, "with extremity and with artificially recreating the most horror-filled situations so as to be able to observe them from the safety of one's armchair." 49 This shaming rhetoric has taken the place of, and made more difficult, a true coming to terms with our desire to observe the Holocaust's most horror-filled situations. In Holocaust studies, the difficulty of confronting the Holocaust is almost always discussed in terms of the threat a "direct confrontation" with Holocaust atrocity poses to our mental comfort or most cherished beliefs. Scholars repeatedly refer to how, when faced with the Holocaust, an event which threatens to discredit all that we know and value-civilization, culture, tradition, faith, God, humanity-we tum away. This is seen as an understandable but no less reproachable response to an event of such enormity. For instance, Yehuda Bauer, a distinguished historian of the Holocaust, writes: "The event is of such a tremendous magnitude that an ordinary person's mind is incapable of absorbing it. There will therefore be a natural tendency to run away from it, deny it, and, mainly, try to reduce it to shapes and sizes we can cope with ... " 50 The notion that fear inhibits people from facing the Holocaust implies that the event may be "absorbed" by those who are more courageous, truthful, and mentally capable than the" ordinary person," i.e., those scholars who work in the field of Holocaust studies. Though one seldom finds this point as baldly stated as when Lawrence Langer writes that "reading and teaching Holocaust literature requires a flexible stamina-one might even say courage-that few other subjects require," it is an underlying tenet of the field of Holocaust studies. 51 But as Michael's experience at Mauthausen illustrates, one's ability to face the Holocaust involves more than having the courage to overcome a "natural tendency" to avoid events of "tremendous magnitude." It involves, at the very least, an effort to find the Holocaust reduced to "shapes and sizes we can cope with," in the form of survivors one can listen to, books one can read, films and videos and television programs one can watch, museums and memorial sites one can

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visit. Without these, the Holocaust does not threaten to overwhelm us with its horror; rather, it threatens to seem distant, remote, unreal. It has become customary in writings on the Holocaust to begin by making amends for using the term "the Holocaust." With some variation, the writer first points out the deficiency of this term, then names a few terms that may be preferable ("Shoah," "Churban," "the Final Solution," etc.), then briefly considers how each of these terms is also problematic, and concludes by resolving to use "the Holocaust" in the text despite its inappropriateness, since it remains the term most familiar to readers. "The Holocaust" became a widely used term in the United States in the 196o's, appearing, for instance, in the titles of memoirs, anthologies, and studies on the the Nazi destruction of the European Jews. 5 2 Though scholars debate exactly when and where the term was first used to refer specifically to the Nazi destruction of European Jewry, Zev Garber and Bruce Zuckerman maintain that Elie Wiesel is primarily responsible for establishing the term as we know it. "His adoption of the term was the single most important factor involved in legitimizing it in its current usage," they write. "Whether he was strictly the first or not is really beside the pointhe was the one who put 'The Holocaust,' as it were, 'on the map."' 53 Yet, by 1983 Wiesel himself would refer to "what we so improperly call the Holocaust," expressing regret over the term's widespread use. 5 4 Why does the "the Holocaust" present a problem? The word "holocaust" has been traced back to the Septuagint, an ancient Greek translation of the Bible, in which the word "Holokaustos" refers to a burnt sacrificial offering to God. Scholars have argued that because "holocaust" connotes a religious sacrifice, the use of the term suggests that God accepted the destruction of the European Jews as a sacrificial offering, and that the Nazis played a quasi-priestly role in preparing this sacrifice. 5 5 Of course, today few English-speakers are aware of the religious, sacrificial connotations of the term they directly associate with the Nazi genocide of the Jews. Terms such as "the Cambodian holocaust," "the black Holocaust," and "the American Holocaust" (referring to the destruction of native American populations), which gain their rhetorical power by invoking the extermination of the European Jews, and not sacrificial offerings to God, bear this out. (Recently a New York Times columnist referred to mass killings in Congo as "the African holocaust," explaining that "3·3 million people have

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died because of warfare there in the last five years ... That's half a Holocaust in a single country."56) But if "the Holocaust" has come to replace the original meaning of "holocaust," this has not dissuaded scholars from recalling the term's offensive connotations. 5 7 It is likely that resistance to "the Holocaust" lies less in its largely forgotten religious, sacrificial connotations than in what it has come to signify in American discourse, particularly since the television miniseries Holocaust brought the term into household use. The act of replacing this term with the proper name for this event (Shoah, Churban, the Event, the Tremendum, etc.) reflects a desire to get closer to the actual horror of the death camps than this now popular term allows-and to separate oneself from the masses of ordinary people who have heard of "the Holocaust" by giving one's own relationship to the event a special name. "Holocaust is a sanitized word which has entered the public vocabulary," writes Alan L. Berger in "Academia and the Holocaust." Finding that word both inaccurate and inadequate, he writes: "More appropriate to the horror is its designation as Auschwitz, largest of the Nazi death factories. This essay utilizes the term Holocaust only because of its public recognition." 58 In turn, scholars Alice L. Eckardt and A. Roy Eckardt contend that "Auschwitz," though a powerful symbol, is "improperly selective"; though partial to the German term Endlosung ("Final Solution"), they too conclude: "Because of the wide and increasing acceptance of the wording 'the Holocaust,' there appears to be little choice but to use it, although always with a certain unease." 59 The search for a more appropriate term than "the Holocaust" is part of the contest I have described over who really knows the horror. Michael Andre Bernstein notes that many intellectuals writing on the Holocaust have devoted much effort "to introducing, and then defending, a distinctive, almost technically specific vocabulary for which they can then claim a privileged moral-intellectual resonance ostensibly lacking in other formulations."60 The fact that most writers resolve themselves to using the commonplace "Holocaust" suggests that a convincing moral-intellectual high ground has yet to be named, although the biblical Hebrew word "Shoah" (meaning catastrophe, ruin, desolation) popularized by Claude Lanzmann's film of that name, and more recently chosen by Spielberg for his Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, is the main contender. My sense is that Spielberg chose "Shoah" over "Holocaust" in or-

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der to downplay his name's association with American popular culture and to underscore the legitimacy of his foundation's undertaking. For my purposes, "the Holocaust" is the perfect term. It appears in the title of this study and is used throughout; for variation, I refer to "the event," although, as will be discussed in chapter 2, the Holocaust is not a single event but an umbrella term for a multiplicity of events. As a term, "the Holocaust" suggests not only the Jewish genocide but its Americanization, not only the event but the attempt to name or represent it. It is for these reasons, and because its usage is entangled in a contest over who and what comes closest to realizing the event, that this term so perfectly encapsulates the complex of issues examined in this book. During one chilly year I spent in England while working on this study, I took the train from London to Manchester in order to attend a seminar on the Holocaust. There I was met by a professor, and, as we were waiting in the train station for another participant to arrive, we got to talking about books on the Holocaust written by American literary critics. At the time I had just begun working on what would eventually become this study's second chapter, what was then a conference paper on Lawrence L. Langer's Holocaust Testimonies. While discussing our shared dissatisfaction with Langer's book, I said that I thought it was marred by the author's competitive relation to survivors: he seemed to resent those who had not learned what he felt they should have learned from going through the Holocaust. It was as if, I said, the literary critic wished to have for himself the experience of the Holocaust that had been wasted on them. The professor furrowed his brow and said with surprise something to the effect of "You don't mean to say that he actually wishes he'd been there in the Holocaust, do you?" Upon hearing my thought repeated back to me, I too was surprised, and embarrassed. The suggestion that anyone should want to experience what the Jews suffered in the Holocaust seemed indecent. "Well, yes and no," I replied, adding that of course this was the kind of wish only one who was not there could have, and only then because one knows it cannot be fulfilled. The nonwitness's wish to experience the Holocaust and sense of regret for not having been there are difficult to acknowledge and discuss. It is, I believe, far easier to think of the Holocaust as an unimaginably horrifying event that properly repels us, until, in recognition of our duty to "never

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forget" and to learn from the past (lest we "repeat it"), we force ourselves to confront its horrors. But this story, while dramatically and morally appealing, is untrue. American aversion to the Holocaust has less to do with the event's "tremendous magnitude" than with a more banal tendency to overlook, forget, repress, and otherwise divert one's attention from unpleasant matters large and small, particularly those which lack immediate relevance to the concerns of everyday life. For the American public, notoriously ignorant of history, confronting the Holocaust is less a matter of overcoming a profound fear of its horror than of developing an interest in the subject. For nonwitnesses there is, beyond such an interest, a deep-felt desire to feel the horror of the camps and ghettos, to perceive that reality as a reality rather than as a story, a film, or a museum-and fulfilling this desire, to the extent it can be done, takes considerable effort. There will always be a need to address how the Holocaust has been misrepresented, trivialized, or repressed by educators, writers, filmmakers, politicians, propagandists, antisemites and others. But, at a certain point, a fixation on others' fearful avoidance of the Holocaust serves to deflect critical attention from the difficulties faced by those who want to come closer to the horror of the Holocaust rather than run away from it, difficulties that will only become greater with time. What obstacles do we face in our efforts to approach the Holocaust? Where do we look for the Holocaust? And, perhaps most important, what do we hope to find there? By pursuing such questions, I hope this study will contribute to a more candid assessment of our current and future relationships to the Holocaust.

CHAPTER

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An Assault on Memory In October 1994, Elie Wiesel was the keynote speaker for a conference on the Holocaust held at Dartmouth College. 1 His address, titled "The Assault on Memory," was presented to an auditorium filled to capacity with conference participants and Dartmouth faculty and students. Wiesel began by saying that (although he would not want to be accused of "trying merely to please the feminists") he sympathized with Lot's wife who, in looking back to bear witness to the destruction she was fleeing, was tumed into a pillar of salt. 2 Wiesel spoke about the need to look back so as to bear witness to catastrophe, particularly given the threat posed by Holocaust deniers, and he commended the work of those in the audience who were Holocaust educators. Still, what has proven to be the most memorable aspect of the keynote address for me is the outrage Wiesel expressed over an accusation made by the Jewish American writer and critic Alfred Kazin. In a voice that strained with measured disgust, Wiesel reported that Kazin had had the audacity to suggest that a well-known scene in Night, Wiesel's classic memoir of the Holocaust, might have been imagined rather than recalled from memory. Intrigued by this particular "assault on memory," wanting to know on what grounds Kazin could have made such a seemingly scandalous claim, I searched for where in his writings this critic had questioned

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the veracity of Night, which is by far the most widely read survivor memoir of the Holocaust. My search led to a 1989 collection of essays titled Testimony: Contemporary Writers Make the Holocaust Personal. Contributors to this volume were asked to write about their personal experiences as writers living "American lives in the Holocaust's wake." 3 For Kazin, this meant writing about two other contemporary writers in an essay titled "My Debt to Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi." There we learn that Kazin feels indebted to Wiesel and Levi because it is through these two survivor-writers of Auschwitz that he has "related to the Holocaust." 4 But if Kazin feels indebted to both survivors, he hardly repays them with equal consideration. Whereas he eulogizes Levi, lauding his writing and intellect, his treatment of Wiesel is severe, culminating in the comment about Night which Wiesel, five years later, would angrily refer to in his keynote address at Dartmouth. Although Kazin "related to the Holocaust" through both Levi and Wiesel, he related to these two survivor-writers in quite different ways. Having never met Levi, he knew of this survivor only through his books. Fittingly, the last few pages of Kazin's essay, which are dominated by extended citations from Levi's work, function as an homage to a survivorwriter best represented by his own words. Whereas Kazin devotes nearly twice as many pages to Wiesel, oddly we find no quotations from this survivor's vast oeuvre. Instead, Kazin recounts the story of his personal acquaintance with Wiesel. This story begins in 1960, the year Kazin wrote a review of Night, which had just appeared in English translation; it ends when Kazin replaces Wiesel with Levi. Through his review of Night, Kazin would come to befriend the book's author, thirty-two-year-old Elie Wiesel. Kazin, thirteen years Wiesel's senior, was already established at the time as an author, editor, and literary critic, having published On Native Grounds (1942), a renowned study of American literature, and A Walker in the City (1951), the first of his celebrated memoirs tracing his life as a "New York Jew" born to uneducated, Yiddish-speaking immigrants. Wiesel, by contrast, was struggling to support himself as a foreign correspondent for an Israeli newspaper. "When I was an unknown," recalls Wiesel, "his praise of Night in an intellectual weekly called The Reporter helped me get noticed." 5 Kazin's praise not only helped Wiesel "get noticed," but inspired him to write the critic a thankyou note suggesting they meet. 6 Consequently, Night's author and critic not

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only met, but became friends who "saw each other or spoke on the phone regularly" (AR 336). Strangely enough, outside of his essay in Testimony and an entry in his published journals, I have found no reference to this friendship in Kazin's work. In Writing Was Everything (1995), the critic's personal reflection on the literary terrain he covered before, during, and after the Second World War, Wiesel and Night bear no mention whatsoever. Moreover, when Kazin does mention Wiesel elsewhere in his writings, the reader is given no sense that Kazin had ever known him as a friend. When Wiesel briefly appears in a scene near the end of Kazin's memoir New York Jew (1978), he does so as a public figure delivering a speech at an event commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the liberation of the Belsen concentration camp. "The audience listened humbly, in total respect," writes Kazin, who then deflates this "writer's public performance" by noting that Saul Bellow, sitting across the table from him, appeared "bored by the flood of words." 7 No indication is given that Kazin once related to the Holocaust through the very words of this writer. We are left to wonder what went wrong in Kazin and Wiesel's relationship, leading Kazin to largely excise their friendship from his personal history, and Wiesel to write of this critic: "He is among the few people whose paths I regret ever having crossed" (AR 335). I take this crossing of paths as the starting point for an examination of how nonwitnesses, having no direct experience of the Holocaust, conceive of that event through the identifications they, as readers of Holocaust memoirs, form with chosen survivors. Holocaust educators frequently state that nothing connects us to the Holocaust more intimately and directly than the testimonies of the survivors. Little attention has been paid, however, to how this connection is fraught with our personal needs and fantasies, and further complicated by survivors' own difficult relationships to the Holocaust. In this chapter I will explore how Kazin's reading of Night bore on his relationship with Wiesel, in an effort to elucidate how these factors enter into ways we read Holocaust memoirs, characterize the survivors who author them, and use them to "relate" to the Holocaust. Literary criticism of survivor writings has typically regarded the reader as a witness, under the premise that "to listen to the witness is to become a witness." 8 As Terrence Des Pres explains: "This means ... that having crossed the threshold of moral being by our reception of the survivor's

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voice, we are moved by a sense of obligation to pass it on, to transmit the survivor's testimony so that others may likewise be inspired and transformed."9 Presuming that survivor memoirs are read out of a selfless "sense of obligation" to relay survivor testimony to others, and that readers are ennobled by their "reception of the survivor's voice," literary critics working in the field of Holocaust studies have seldom considered the act of reading Holocaust memoirs in less idealistic terms. As a result, the question of why a reader might choose to read one survivor memoir rather than another, and might prefer one survivor's voice over another, has not been adequately considered. This is odd given the truly small number of survivors whose writings are repeatedly quoted from and discussed by Holocaust scholars, and the particular attention devoted to one witness above all others. No Holocaust survivor has received nearly as much attention from American scholars as Wiesel. His work has been the focus of numerous book-length studies, chapters, essays and conferences. While there are thousands of survivor accounts of the Holocaust, Wiesel is repeatedly treated as the authoritative survivor through whom we may come closest to the actual experience and meaning of the Holocaust. But in Kazin's essay we find an instance where a critic's relation to this survivor-as-authority figure has gone terribly wrong: the nonwitness-survivor relationship breaks down, revealing something of its inner workings. Both authors have commented on this tumultuous relationship in their published writings, allowing us to observe aspects of a nonwitness's relation to a survivor-writer which, while rarely given public expression, are here made explicit by the intensity of their friendship and subsequent falling-out. By looking at how Kazin's reading of Night was played out in this critic's ill-fated friendship with Wiesel, I hope to show not only what the relationship between this critic and survivor-writer can teach us about the way we read Holocaust literature, but also what an examination of such readings can add to our understanding of survivor memoirs. The latter half of this chapter therefore turns to a reconsideration of Night, in light of Kazin's reading of this most influential memoir of the Holocaust, and to my own reading of Wiesel's All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (1995). The chapter concludes by looking more broadly at the role of identification in the reading of survivor memoirs.

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A Record of Religious Crisis While the events which would come to be known as the Holocaust were taking place, Kazin felt himself to be "far removed from the daily, hourly massacre of [his] fellow Jews in occupied Europe." Kazin, a Jewish American writer, was neither in the United States nor with his "fellow Jews" in the ghettos and the camps. Nor was he fighting the Axis forces in Nazioccupied Europe. "Nothing had happened to me during the war," he writes, "except some very rich experiences in Britain, where I lectured for the Office of War Information on American literature" ("My Debt" 115-16). At the end of the war he would write in his journal: "I did nothing to beat Hitler. I saved no one" (Lifetime 46). Surely something should have happened to Kazin during the war, something deeply personal and profound, given what had happened to his fellow Jews in Europe; and yet, as he sat in a theater at the end of the war watching newsreel films of the newly liberated Belsen concentration camp, he still felt "far removed from the actuality" of the catastrophe. After all, he was not there in Belsen, amongst the emaciated prisoners, the "sticks in black-and-white prison garb" and piles of corpses "stacked up like cordwood." Instead, he was in a newsreel theater in Piccadilly, sitting in an audience whose response to the spectacle on screen-embarrassed coughing and laughter-did not make him "feel any closer." Back in New York after the war, Kazin occasionally met survivors, but found that they had "no explanation to offer." He also knew "brilliant refugees like Hannah Arendt," who were writing studies on Nazism; but, as Kazin puts it, "all this was theory": so distanced from the horror of what had occurred, this too brought him no closer to the Holocaust's elusive reality ("My Debt" 117). Enter Elie Wiesel, by way of Night. Here was someone who, unlike the refugees, had actually been in the camps, and who, unlike the other survivors Kazin met, had written a book that offered Kazin some "explanation" of what the Jews had experienced there. Recalling his first impression of Wiesel, Kazin writes in his 1989 essay: "When I met him, he seemed to me diffident but awesome, a figure still visibly suffering the atrocities he had experienced in Auschwitz and Buchenwald but holding himself together with a certain strain. But awesome was the word. He personified the Holocaust as no one else in New York did" ("My Debt" 115). Kazin seems to have met not so much the author of Night but the book's protagonist, fif-

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teen-year-old Eliezer, grown older and relocated from Nazi Europe to New York. Indeed, Kazin precedes his description of this still-suffering figure by remembering that the first letter he received from him was signed "Eliezer" ("My Debt" 115). At the same time, when describing scenes from Night Kazin identifies the protagonist not as Eliezer but as "Wiesel" or "the boy Wiesel," collapsing any distinction between the book's protagonist and the awesome, still-suffering figure he met in New York. Of course, it might be said that there is nothing unusual about identifying Wiesel with Eliezer. After all, Night is autobiographical; if we read it, we know about the atrocities Wiesel experienced as a boy in Auschwitz and Buchenwald; for what it matters, Eliezer is the young Elie Wiesel. However, a further look at Kazin's treatment of Wiesel should make clear the problems and perils of affirming too simple, too direct a connection between the survivor-writer and the protagonist of Night. For ultimately the extent to which Wiesel conformed to Eliezer would fall far short of Kazin's expectations. Strangely enough, in a passage that appears in Kazin's published journals, presumably written at the time he met Wiesel, we find a quite different description of Kazin's first impression of this survivor-writer. It reads: "A most appealing, gentle man ... Meeting Wiesel was an extraordinary experience for me, he is so quietly charming and so strangely humble after his unspeakable afflictions" (Lifetime 172). Awesome was hardly the word for that Wiesel. Rather, it was as Eliezer, born from the pages of Nightwhere Kazin had read of the atrocities he would claim to recognize in Wiesel's "still visibly suffering" figure-that Wiesel would personify the Holocaust "as no one else in New York did" for this self-described "New York Jew." By bringing the Holocaust to New York in person, Wiesel allowed Kazin to feel closer to a reality from which he had felt" far removed." Wiesel not only made the Holocaust local, but personal: here was "the Holocaust" with whom Kazin could listen to records and sit in Riverside Park ("My Debt" 121). Still, we might ask, what was the Holocaust that Wiesel personified for Kazin? Certainly it was "the Holocaust" experienced in Auschwitz and Buchenwald by Eliezer in Night. But what was Kazin's understanding, as a reader, of this Holocaust? For an answer we can turn to this critic's 1960 review of Night, in which Kazin explains why Wiesel's book is especially noteworthy: "What makes his book unusual and gives it such a particular

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poignancy among the many personal accounts of Nazism is that it recounts the loss of faith by an intensely religious young Jew who grew up in an Orthodox community of Transylvania. To the best of my knowledge, no one of this background has left behind him so moving a record of the direct loss of faith on the part of a young boy." 10 A blurb derived from this passage appears on the back cover of the widely available Bantam paperback edition of Night. Printed below an illustration of three hanging bodies wrapped in barbed wire, the blurb reads: "To the best of my knowledge no one has left behind him so moving a record." This abbreviation of Kazin's statement obscures a peculiarity of his claim, which is that he does not praise Night as a record of the Holocaust. On the contrary, what makes Night so unusual and moving for Kazin is precisely what sets it apart from "the many personal accounts of Nazism." This point is reiterated in his 1989 essay, where Wiesel's book not only "stand[s] out among other camp memoirs" but is "lifted above" them as "a record of religious crisis" ("My Debt" 119-20). What moves Kazin then is not so much "the terrible experiences of the camps" -which, as he wrote in 1960, "a few good books" had already conveyed ("Least" 279)-but a Jewish boy's "direct loss of faith." In short, Wiesel personified the Holocaust by representing not the systematic extermination of six million Jews, but the religious crisis of one Jew who survived.

Job in Auschwitz Kazin concludes his 1960 review of Night with a description of what he takes to be the book's most lasting image: "I don't think that I shall soon forget the picture of this young boy standing on a mound of corpses, accusing God of deserting His creation" ("Least" 283). This is a picture coauthored, in a sense, by Wiesel and Kazin, for in the pages of Night we find no such scene of Eliezer crying out against God from atop a mound of corpses. This picture is therefore emblematic of Kazin's reading of Night, which, like all readings, combines elements found in the text with those invented or projected onto the text by the reader. In his review, Kazin emphasizes Wiesel's Job-like accusations, and with this picture he evokes Job on the ash-heap, crying out against God, more literally than Wiesel has in any scene that does appear in Night. 11

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Kazin again portrays the young Wiesel crying out against God in his 1989 essay, this time locating him in a scene that does occur in Wiesel's book. "There was one particular scene," he writes, "the thematic center of the book for me, that was to make Night stand out among other camp memoirs" ("My Debt" 119). The scene is set in Buna, an Auschwitz sub-camp for slave labor, at the assembly place where a gallows had been erected for hanging prisoners in front of the whole camp. It recounts how thousands of prisoners assembled for roll call were made to watch the hanging of three prisoners. After two of the victims were dead, the third, a young boy, was still alive; he was light and hung struggling from the rope for more than half an hour as the prisoners marched past the gallows. The narrator tells us: He was still alive when I passed in front of him. His tongue was still red, his eyes were not yet glazed. Behind me, I heard [a] man asking: "Where is God now?" And I heard a voice within me answer him: "Where is He? Here He is-He is hanging here on this gallows .. :m How was this scene the "thematic center of the book" for Kazin? He offers the following explanation: "I was more than 'moved' by this account. I felt it was bringing me home-to something at the heart of the age-old Jewish experience: an intimacy with God so deep-rooted and familiar that it could rail against Him in a bitterness more eloquent of faith than all ritual practice of faith" ("My Debt" 119). This evocation of "home" may be startling given the context, an account of the slow hanging death of a boy. Only what moves Kazin is not the hanging itself, but something else, what he calls "Wiesel's cry before the gallows." "I was somehow convinced by Wiesel's cry before the gallows that no one of his background had left behind him so moving a record of religious crisis," writes Kazin ("My Debt" 120). Whereas in his 1960 review he had ·discussed the book in its entirety, now Kazin's estimation of Night centers on a single scene credited with making Night stand out from other memoirs, and on a single aspect of this scene-the "cry before the gallows." And yet, much as Kazin invented the scene of the young boy crying out against God from atop a mound of corpses, so he invents this "cry before the gal-

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lows." That is, he has Wiesel cry out against God as he passes in front of the hanging child, although in the scene itself there is no cry as such. Rather, Eliezer "heard a voice within" answer the man behind him. The image conjured by this voice, that of God hanging on the gallows, is open to numerous interpretations, including the possibility that God has not deserted the Jews but suffers alongside them: He too hangs on the gallows. Alternatively, it may be taken to mean that "God is dead," that atheism has supplanted belief-although Wiesel has rejected this reading of the image, calling it "an interpretation bordering on blasphemy" (AR 8). 13 However, Kazin believes that in imagining God on the gallows, Wiesel was bitterly crying out against Him; and he believes that this act is "more eloquent of faith than all ritual practice of faith." But if this is so, if crying out against God is so expressive of faith, how could Night be regarded as a moving record of a young Jew's loss of faith? For Kazin it seems that nothing attests to the intensity of faith so much as its loss: faith is impassioned only when in crisis. Thus, whereas "ostentatiously learned Jews, whether observant or not," struck him as "lacking in religious fire," he found Wiesel's book to be "inflamed with a religious urgency and despair" ("My Debt" 117-18). Given the inevitable associations with the crematoria and the open pits, this metaphoric use of fire is curious, but also strangely apt; for it seems that what gives Jewishness its intensity, its religious urgency and "fire," is the Holocaust, insofar as it fosters religious crisis. Without this crisis, Kazin suggests, what passes for faith is merely adherence to ritual. Like many of his contemporaries, Kazin took little interest in affirming his Jewishness until after he had learned of the destruction of European Jewry. Even in 1944, when the Contemporary Jewish Record published a symposium in which younger American Jewish writers were asked to reflect on their heritage, Kazin made no mention of "the daily, hourly massacre of [his] fellow Jews in occupied Europe" ("My Debt" 116), but focused instead on distinguishing himself from his fellows Jews in America. "I have never seen much of what I admire in American Jewish culture, or among Jewish writers in America generally," he states in the symposium; "I learned long ago to accept the fact that I was Jewish without being a part of any meaningful Jewish life or culture." 14 Kazin was more interested in identifying himself as an American writer, and he points out that the writing which most deeply influenced him "has no direct associations in my mind with

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Jewish culture; it has every association, of course, with the fact that, like many another American, I have had to make my own culture" ("Under Forty" 11). Two decades after the war, Kazin would supplement this fact with another one: "At the core of our existence as Jews lies the fact of the Holocaust." 15 No longer wanting to be like "many another American," Kazin wanted to be an American Jewish writer, connected to the Holocaust by virtue of his Jewishness. But at the same time, he did not want this Jewishness to connect him to the American Jewish community. In the 1944 symposium, Kazin writes, "I think that I have been most deeply influenced by my struggle against a merely imposed faith." Faith, thus understood as an imposed system of religious belief and practice, is set against what Kazin describes as a solitary struggle "to follow what Ireally believed in, not that which would merely move me through associations or naive community feelings" ("Under Forty" 11 ). When Kazin describes Night as the record of a young Jew's loss of faith, he refers to a faith that is also "merely imposed," for he finds a struggle against this faith in Wiesel's accusation of God. The connection I am drawing between Kazin's struggle and Wiesel's Job-like rebellion is made explicit by Kazin in his 1989 essay, when he explains his response to Night by describing his own difficult relation to Jewishness: Growing up in an entirely Jewish milieu whose most active faith, at least in my family, was a naively credulous socialism (in my case this did not survive the war), I had long been bored by so much enclosed Jewishness and found no illumination in Judaism proper.... When it came to matters of faith I had a horror of public piety and depended on my own reading of the Bible and on certain incomparable moments of illumination in my favorite poets, novelists, philosophers-and composers. So a certain religious frustration in me responded to Wiesel precisely because of the rebellion he experienced in Auschwitz. ("My Debt" 118-19)

This passage expresses Kazin's rejection of a communal Jewish identity, secular or observant. In place of "Judaism proper," Kazin describes an idiosyncratic form of "religious" practice, one which replaces participation in any Jewish milieu with the solitary contemplations of the secular male Jewish intellectual. He concludes that he was moved by Night because he recognized a "certain religious frustration" of his own in Wiesel's rebellion,

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as if in Auschwitz Wiesel rebelled against those same aspects of Jewishness and Judaism which frustrated this American critic. Clearly, there is some basis for this reading in Night, in which the young Jew's rebellion is expressed largely through his rejection of "ritual practice" and "public piety." This is demonstrated by a scene that must have appealed to Kazin, as he quotes it at length in his 1960 review. Like the gallows scene, it occurs at the assembly place in the center of Buna where ten thousand prisoners gathered to attend a prayer service. As thousands of men chanted the words "Blessed be the Name of the Eternal," Eliezer refused to join them in prayer: "Why, but why should I bless Him? In every fiber I rebelled .... Because in His great might He had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many factories of death?" (64). In his rebellion, Eliezer stood very much alone, even while surrounded by thousands of Jewish prisoners. "This day I had ceased to plead," the narrator recalls. "I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes were open and I was aloneterribly alone in a world without God and without man .... I stood amid that praying congregation, observing it like a stranger" (65). To Kazin this scene illustrates "the Job-like accusations that actually unite Wiesel to the religion of his fathers" ("Least" 281). Readers more typically find what unites Eliezer to Judaism in the first page or two of Night, where the narrator describes the life he led as a twelve-year-old in Sighet before the war intruded on this "little town in Transylvania" (1). In 1941, Eliezer "believed profoundly"; he spent his days studying the Talmud and his nights in the synagogue, weeping as he prayed (1). When asked why he prayed, he thought: "Why did I pray? A strange question. Why did I live? Why did I breathe?" (2). Kazin, however, finds what ties Wiesel to Judaism in the scene where the young Jew refuses to pray and rebels against God, where what estranges him from the religion of the congregationthat is, the religion of his childhood-is also what unites this young Jew to "the religion of his fathers." A list of these" fathers" is provided by Josephine Knopp in an essay from the 1978 collection Responses to Elie Wiesel, in which she relates Wiesel's accusation of God to "the well-established Jewish tradition of challenging God by questioning His ways." 16 "Job is the most obvious (and perhaps the best) example" of this tradition, writes Knopp, but "it should not be forgotten that other prominent figures of the Old Testament, including Abraham, Moses, and Jeremiah, rebel against God and hold Him respon-

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sible for the injustice of the world" (92). In effect, Kazin sees Wiesel practicing the religion of Job, Abraham, Moses, and Jeremiah-the religion not of the congregation, but of "prominent figures," lone men who rebel against God. Knopp writes that "Wiesel, remaining firmly within this Judaic tradition of protest, cries out against the destruction of European Jewry, against God's failure to intercede" (92). Kazin describes Eliezer/Wiesel in much the same way, as a Job-like Jew. As Kazin explains, it is precisely because Wiesel was like Job at Auschwitz that this survivor-writer personified the Holocaust for this critic as no one else did: "Young Wiesel's embittered interrogation of Providence united, as it were, Job's ever-human cries against God to the most terrible event in the history of the Jews. It brought back that peculiarly scolding closeness to God that I had often seen quoted in past texts but that was peculiarly applicable to Auschwitz. So Wiesel became, as it were, 'my' Holocaust" ("My Debt" 120-21). Other books portrayed the terrible experiences of the camps, but only Wiesel's presented Auschwitz as a "peculiarly applicable" setting for an individual Jew's Joblike protest. In the young Wiesel, Kazin saw his own "struggle against a merely imposed faith" dramatically rendered at Auschwitz. It may be objected that Kazin's "religious frustration" cannot be compared to "Wiesel's anguish as a Jew," which Kazin locates "at the heart and center of Night" ("My Debt" 118). But this is just the point: the Holocaust serves as that site where our own identity crises can gain dramatic intensity and be lent profound meaning. Even Job's protest against God is augmented by being staged at Auschwitz. Yet, it is also true that, in relation to the Holocaust, one's own crises may appear petty and inconsequential, if not to oneself then to others. Edward Alexander disparages the volume Testimony: Contemporary Writers Make the Holocaust Personal, in which Kazin's essay appears, chastising its contributors for drawing "mawkish, self-pitying, licentious equations between their Lilliputian 'personal' disturbances and the torture and murder of European Jewry." 17 Whereas Alexander may be accused of evoking the Holocaust to heighten his own moral stature (lest he be confused with his Lilliputian contemporaries), a rebuke of this kind from survivors is harder to deflect. Their sufferings are deemed not only "personal" but monumental. Survivors' children have described growing up with a looming sense that their own problems and struggles lack significance, given what their parents went through.

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In his book With God in Hell, Eliezer Berkovits tells of a rabbi who delivered a speech to a Jewish organization in which he professed that after the Holocaust he could no longer believe in God. Many Holocaust survivors sat in this audience, and, according to Berkovits, "these survivors, who might well have lost their faith as a result of their experiences, were angered by this 'successful' American rabbi's facile dismissal of faith in God. They must have thought ... 'What does he know of the anguish of the believing Jew who loses his faith because he is so overwhelmed by the inhumanity of man that he can no longer believe!"' 18 Next to the suffering of the survivors, the religious crisis of a successful American rabbi or writer who was not there may very well appear facile. However, Kazin draws our attention to the opposite possibility, that through an identification with the right survivor, one's own spiritual struggle or existential crisis may be endowed with an aura of pathos and gravity, an intensity by association. It is hardly surprising that in his search for some connection to the Holocaust, Kazin should feel drawn to Wiesel, whom he saw as uniting Job and Auschwitz by becoming, as it were, Job in Auschwitz. Through Wiesel's "Job-like accusations" Kazin found liimself connected to a particular Judaic tradition. But this connection is a peculiar one, given that Job was arguably not Jewish. Or was he? In an essay titled "Job: Our Contemporary," Wiesel writes, "More than likely he was not," noting that biblical commentary often refers to Job as a Just Man "among the Gentiles"; but, he adds, "If Job was not Jewish to begin with, he became Jewish." 19 It is precisely this notion of a Jewishness constituted solely through crisis and solitary protest that makes Job and, by extension, the "Job-like" Wiesel such appealing figures for Kazin.

A Far More Trustworthy Witness "So Wiesel became, as it were, 'my' Holocaust." This statement suggests not only that Kazin chose Wiesel over others, but that he felt some claim over this, "his" Holocaust. The critic's sense that he had Wiesel to himself is accentuated by what he goes on to describe, how "Wiesel soon became a charming friend" ("My Debt" 121). As readers might not expect charm from a figure known for his weary, pained expression, Kazin elaborates. Wiesel, we learn, possessed "European good manners and a sort of anx-

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ious civility"; a bachelor, he "expressed himself wistfully on the subject of women, professed himself astonished by the openness with which American Jewish writers were describing the sexual life" ("My Debt" 121). If Kazin was humbled by the young boy who had railed against God in Auschwitz, he also felt charmed by the unworldly innocence of this young man who, having survived Auschwitz, could still be astonished by depictions of sexuality in a novel by Saul Bellow. If for a time Kazin regarded Wiesel as both "his" Holocaust and his charming friend, this would not be the case for long. By 1964, when Wiesel stopped working as a journalist in order to devote himself full-time to writing, three novels he had written after Night had been published in English translation. In 1965 he received the National Jewish Book Council Literary Award and the Jewish Heritage Award, and in 1966 he started lecturing on Jewish themes at the 92nd Street Y in New York. It must have been with these developments that, as Kazin puts it, "things began to slide": "I thought of him as a survivor, was not prepared to see him become such a professional survivor. My astonishment at his celebrity did not please him. He was increasingly swept up, by the very demand of the madly achieving but Holocaust-shaken Jewish community, into their favorite surrogate. For the many Jews who like me had experienced nothing of the horror, Elie Wiesel became the very embodiment of the Holocaust. He did not seem to shirk the role ... "("My Debt" 121). Kazin did not see Wiesel's appeal among a growing number of secularized American Jews as a confirmation of what he had long recognized, that Wiesel personified the Holocaust as no one else did. Rather, it meant the undoing of what Wiesel had personified for him. For Kazin, "Wiesel's increasing magnetism for a great body of American Jews" meant the loss of his privileged relation to this survivor, who was no longer "his" alone ("My Debt" 121). Moreover, Kazin had to ask himself how this survivor, who had estranged himself from the Jewish community in Auschwitz when he rebelled against God, could now be taken up so enthusiastically by the American Jewish community. Could it be that Kazin-who thought himself" a Jewish rebel against the modem Jewish establishment" 20 -was not so different after all from all these other "Holocaust-shaken" American Jews who now made Wiesel "their" Holocaust? Rather than entertain this possibility, Kazin argues that Wiesel had changed, that the Holocaust he had personified for him was substantially

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different from the Holocaust he now embodied for the Jewish establishment. Kazin accounts for this difference by pointing to Wiesel's transformation into a public figure: whereas history had made Wiesel a survivor, his "celebrity" now made him a "professional survivor." With this remark Kazin criticizes Wiesel for having made a successful career out of bearing witness to the extermination of European Jewry. Given Wiesel's success, this criticism is not an uncommon one. Jon Blair writes that Wiesel "charges in excess of $2o,ooo plus first-class air fares for the privilege of listening to his post-Holocaust thoughts and memories," and Rabbi Michael Goldberg portrays the "apparent incongruity" between Wiesel's "sorrowful-survivor persona and his comfortable, prosperous private life" by seizing on these same details: "Lionized by Jews and non-Jews alike, he can command five-figure fees for his speaking engagements, to which he has been known to fly by private plane." 21 Yet, whereas Goldberg attacks Wiesel for being the "High Priest" of a "Holocaust cult" that threatens to displace traditional Jewish self-understanding with a Holocaust-based notion of what it means to be a Jew today, Kazin faults him for acting the part of the traditional rabbinical scholar. "What bothered me in Wiesel's sudden emergence as a Jewish sage was a certain sleight-of-hand he performed on the stage of the 92nd Street Y," he writes. "Sitting behind a table on the platform as if addressing a class, talking in the gravest possible tones to enchanted audiences that often included Catholic priests and nuns, he made the wonderful Jewish texts he spoke from, spoke for, a rally of Jewishness" ("My Debt" 122). What bothered Kazin beyond the stage performance with which Wiesel dazzled Jews and Christians alike (here we might recall Kazin's horror of "public piety") was this survivor's very emergence as a Jewish sage who had transformed his prior message of despair into a "rally of Jewishness." 22 This Wiesel spoke out against despair, claiming that "this is the essence of being Jewish: never to give up-never to yield to despair." 23 And, perhaps most disturbing for Kazin, he described his protest against God in a way that made it consistent with his new-found faith. Whereas Kazin had pit Wiesel's Job-like accusation of God against the traditional Judaism of the congregation, Wiesel now argued for their compatibility. "We may protest against God, provided we do so on behalf of the community," he has written. "The beauty of the Jewish tradition is that as long as we are inside that body of human beings that has created a community 4,ooo years

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old, as long as we are part of it, we may take God to task. Do not think that the moment you say, 'Where are You?' you are quitting the people or that you are breaking with our tradition." 24 Kazin had difficulty reconciling this Wiesel, who spoke against despair and for community, with the Jew who cried out against God before the gallows. Thus he wondered "if the young rebel against God, who had virtually denied God in Auschwitz, could be reconciled with the platform idol who gave such rhetorical assurances of the Jewish tradition to secularized middle-class audiences" ("My Debt" 122). Ironically, Kazin's frustration with Wiesel echoes Wiesel's own criticism of Job. In "Job: Our Contemporary" (1976), Wiesel expresses his disappointment with how Job, "the fierce rebel, the fighter who dared to face God and speak up as a free man, abruptly bowed his head and gave in" when God spoke to him out of the whirlwind. 25 Voicing his protest against Job, Wiesel writes, "Much as I admired Job's passionate rebellion, I am deeply troubled by his hasty abdication. He appeared to me more human when he was cursed and grief-stricken, more dignified than after he rebuilt his lavish residences under the sign of his newly found faith in divine glory and mercy.... I prefer to think that the Book's true ending was lost. That Job died without having repented, without having humiliated himself ... He should not have given in so easily. He should have continued to protest, to refuse the handouts" (233-34). Much as Wiesel wishes that Job had remained the "fierce rebel" who "in his solitude and despair, found the courage to stand up to God" (235), so Kazin wishes that Wiesel had remained the "young rebel against God" he was in Night. For it was through the solitude and despair of this young rebel that Kazin had related to the Holocaust. "Jews so often resemble one another in every particular," writes Kazin in his published journals, "but the really great men among them are unlike anyone else-free-minded, independent-minded" (Lifetime 309). In Wiesel, Kazin had thought he found one "really great man" -only to lose him to the Jews. Responding to this betrayal, he turns on Wiesel, writing: "If I once related to the Holocaust through Elie Wiesel, I have learned over the years that Primo Levi is a far more trustworthy witness" ("My Debt" 123). In the last pages of his essay, Kazin makes it clear that Levi is the real writer and independent-minded Jew. Kazin praises the precision and clarity with which Levi recalls his life in the camps, his "old-fashioned philosophical

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intelligence," and, above all, his faithfulness to the "natural reflectiveness" of his own mind ("My Debt" 127-28). Kazin found in Levi a Jewish survivor whose faith, like his own, was not imposed from without, but determined through a solitary process of forming and testing his own beliefs. Whereas Wiesel had become a Jewish sage, Levi had remained, up to the time of his death, a secular Jewish intellectual-the thinking man's Elie Wiesel. Thus Levi replaced Wiesel as the favored "good" survivor through whom Kazin could relate to the Holocaust, while Wiesel assumed his new place as the "bad" survivor. While surprising in its dramatic abruptness, this move is nonetheless familiar. Having" once related to the Holocaust," Kazin does not want to give this up; so he replaces Wiesel with "another writer-survivor of Auschwitz" ("My Debt" 123). In the United States, Wiesel and Levi are cited, read, taught, and written on to a far greater extent than any other survivors of the Holocaust; Levi's Survival in Auschwitz must be the second most widely read memoir of the Holocaust, following Night. Consequently, it is all too predictable that when Kazin needs someone to dethrone Wiesel, he should choose Levi. Lest Kazin's treatment of Wiesel and Levi seem idiosyncratic, we might consider a 1995 essay by theologian Richard Rubenstein, titled "Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi." There Rubenstein recalls how, shortly before he was to serve as the student rabbi for a Reform congregation, he heard reports about the recently liberated Majdanek death camp. "In Night Elie Wiesel has told us about his inability to pray on Rosh Hashannah after immersion into the world of Auschwitz," he writes. "In the relative security of a small southern town, I had a similar experience. The dissonance between the Rosh Hashannah liturgy I was obliged to recite and the cold-blooded slaughter I had just learned about could under no circumstances be reconciled."26 In light of the Holocaust, Rubenstein ceased to believe in the God of traditional Judaism. But at a 1970 conference on the Holocaust, he was to learn that Wiesel, the survivor-writer with whom he had come to identify, did not share or accept his disbelief. Following Rubenstein's presentation, Wiesel dropped his prepared talk on Holocaust literature in order to refute the belief that after the Holocaust the idea of a God who protects the Jews when they are faithful to His law, and punishes them when they are unfaithful, is no longer viableP Consequently, Rubenstein writes that he went through "a period of im-

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patience with Wiesel's writings" when he neither understood nor sympathized with "Wiesel's efforts to reconcile his experience with our people's faith and tradition" (150). Moreover, Rubenstein writes of feeling "drawn closer to Primo Levi than to Elie Wiesel," noting that Levi "steadfastly refused the consolations of religious tradition" (151). 28 This scenario is much like what we find in Kazin's case. Although Rubenstein's essay concludes on a more redemptive note, as he comes to realize that "both witnesses are very precious indeed" (162), the same dynamic is at work. The privileged survivor is that writer with whom the reader feels some degree of shared identity and with whom the reader therefore agrees. This agreement with the survivor-writer's viewpoint, philosophy, or mindset serves as the basis for a belief that the survivor's depiction of events is more trustworthy than other accounts. When this most trusted survivor disappoints, the fragility of the bond between reader and survivor-writer is exposed: the privileged survivor becomes the object of resentment. For Rubenstein this resentment was apparently short-lived; not so for Kazin. "There has been nothing worth reading since Night," he wrote in his journal in 1978 (Lifetime 179). Some ten years later, he would question the worth of even this book.

Lending Credence to Deniers Kazin's criticism of Wiesel reaches its climax in his 1989 essay with a striking statement bearing on the credibility of Night. Kazin writes: "The more I learned about him, the more I pursued the vast literature about Auschwitz, the less surprised I would have been to learn that the episode of the boy struggling on the rope had never happened" ("My Debt" 123). It was this remark, the suggestion that the scene of the boy struggling on the rope might never have happened, that I had heard Wiesel bitterly refute when he spoke at Dartmouth in 1994· Reading it now, I am struck not only by its harshness, and by what I take to be its vindictiveness, but by the trickiness of Kazin's wording: "the more I pursued the vast literature about Auschwitz, the less surprised I would have been to learn that the episode ... had never happened." These words suggest the likelihood of Wiesel's dishonesty by referring to something that might have happened, but never did: Kazin never did learn that the episode in Night "had never happened." He suggests that the episode is at odds with what one finds in "the vast lit-

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erature about Auschwitz," that someone more conversant with this literature would be more apt to recognize it as made up. But no evidence is provided to support this (though, as we will see, many scholars have expressed uncertainty as to whether Night is a purely factual or partly fictional account). If Kazin's remark manages to cast doubt on Wiesel's character and the veracity of his book, it does so without demonstrating that he or anyone else has sufficient reason to believe that the episode in question did not, in fact, occur. Wiesel calls Kazin's remark "the most intolerable" thing that this critic has ever written. He views it not only as a personal insult but as an affront to the memory of the Holocaust; for, as he explains, "In the last analysis, a man like Kazin is lending credence to those who deny the Holocaust. If he refuses to believe me, why should others, more removed, believe any survivor?" (AR 336). And yet surely a man like Kazin is quite different from those who deny the Holocaust. He is also different from those "others, more removed," who would be more susceptible to Holocaust denial due to ignorance and lack of personal interest in this history. Kazin presents a significantly different case than that posed by neo-Nazi skinheads, "revisionist" antisemites, right-wing extremists, or, for that matter, the American public. In rushing with Wiesel to "the last analysis," we lose sight of this difference, along with whatever we might learn from analyzing it. Wiesel's question places emphasis on Kazin: "If he refuses to believe me, why should others, more removed, believe any survivor?" It implies that if a prominent Jewish writer such as Kazin refuses to believe Wiesel, there is no reason why others, less concerned with the Holocaust (and less Jewish) than Kazin, should believe Wiesel-or, for that matter, any survivor. However, the logic of this slippery slope argument ultimately places emphasis not on Kazin but elsewhere, on what it means to refuse to believe Wiesel. If the survivor of the Holocaust is not to be believed, why believe any survivor? To this question Kazin does provide a simple answer: there are other, more trustworthy survivors than Wiesel. For Kazin, the singular, more trustworthy witness is Primo Levi. In other words, he answers Wiesel's question by replacing him with Levi. If Wiesel does not acknowledge this answer, perhaps it is because just as Kazin once thought Wiesel personified the Holocaust as no one else did, so now Wiesel recognizes himself in this way, as the Holocaust personified. And for good reason. As far back as 1968, Albert H. Friedlander wrote

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in his influential anthology Out of the Whirlwind: A Reader of Holocaust Literature, "Of all the witnesses, Elie Wiesel is the most sensitive one, with the most accurate vision and the clearest recall." 29 More than any other person, Wiesel is treated as "the spokesman for the Holocaust and for the meaning of Jewish life and thought," and not only in academe but, more importantly, in the public sphere. 30 At least since 1979, when, as head of the President's Commission on the Holocaust, Wiesel spoke alongside President Carter at a Holocaust remembrance service held in the Rotunda of the Capitol, his presence as a featured speaker at prominent national and international Holocaust ceremonies has come to seem mandatory. To cite just a few examples: in 1993 he stood beside President Clinton and spoke at the opening ceremony of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; in 1995 he accompanied Poland's president Lech Walesa and spoke at ceremonies commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau; in 1996 he spoke at a ceremony in Kielce, Poland, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of a pogrom in which forty-two Jews were killed by their neighbors; and in 2000 he spoke before Germany's lower house of Parliament in a ceremony commemorating the dedication of land for a national Holocaust memorial. Wiesel did not accompany President George W. Bush on his 2003 visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, but the President made sure to evoke Wiesel's name and quote him in a speech delivered in Krakow later that day. 31 Over twenty years ago, an article in the New York Times Magazine described Wiesel as "the foremost public personality associated with the commemoration of the Holocaust," and the title still holds (indeed, it is difficult to think of any other Holocaust personality in American public life). 32 Out of all the thousands of Holocaust survivors, Wiesel is the most renowned. He has received many honors, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States Congressional Gold Medal, the French Legion of Honor, and the Nobel Peace Prize, but his stature owes far more to the unique position he holds in relation to the Holocaust. As James E. Young has observed, in his role as "emblematic survivor," Wiesel figures as "a living icon of that catastrophe."33 His words are received as if the Holocaust has endowed this singular survivor with hallowed wisdom and moral authority. The question all this raises is not only why Wiesel, but why has any survivor emerged as emblematic? That any one survivor should emerge as representative is particularly odd, given the widely held belief

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that the Holocaust is "unrepresentable": impossible to render in writing or by other means, it is indescribable, unimaginable, incommunicable. Ironically, Wiesel is largely responsible for establishing this conception of the Holocaust as a sacred mystery. 34 In essays, interviews, and newspaper articles, he has maintained that "Auschwitz" cannot be represented, comprehended, or even imagined; it can only be remembered by those who were there, the survivors-and since they are incapable of conveying it, those of us who were not there will never know what it was like, can never understand. "Since we are incapable of revealing the event, why not admit it," writes Wiesel. "Those who never lived that time of death will never be able to grasp its magnitude of horror .... In spite of all the movies, plays, and novels about the Holocaust, it remains a mystery, the most terrifying of all times." 35 If scholars have taken up this conception of the Holocaust as their own, it may be because what they lose in giving up a scholarly understanding of the event is offset by what they gain by identifying with Wiesel, namely, this survivor's profound understanding of the "incomprehensibility" of the Holocaust. Through Wiesel they gain an understanding that, by definition, precludes any competing claim to a fuller understanding of the Holocaust. This explains, at least in part, the symbiotic relationship that exists between Wiesel and Holocaust scholars. An early example of this may be found in an essay by Terrence Des Pres included in the volume Confronting the Holocaust: The Impact ofElie Wiesel, which arose out of a 1976 conference on "The Work of Elie Wiesel and the Holocaust Universe." In his contribution, Des Pres quotes Wiesel's view on "the scholars and philosophers of every genre" who have taken an interest in the Holocaust: "they willif they are capable of sincerity and humility-withdraw without daring to enter into the heart of the matter; and if they are not, well, who cares about their grandiloquent conclusions? Auschwitz, by definition, is beyond their vocabulary." Following Wiesel's words, Des Pres writes: "Wiesel means that in this special case, our traditional categories of value and interpretation have been demolished by the very event they would seek to explain. The negativity of the Holocaust was so total, the event so massive and complete in itself, that concepts drawn from tradition ... become, if not useless, then extremely problematic." 36 Wiesel's statement is striking enough, given its disparaging tone and apparent contempt for Holocaust scholarship. But it is made more striking

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still by its appearance in a volume of scholarly essays dedicated to his work, a volume that Wiesel in fact authorizes by joining "the scholars and philosophers" as a contributor. And then there is the remarkable way in which Wiesel's statement is taken up by Des Pres. While he may skirt "the heart of the matter," this scholar nevertheless takes it upon himself to tell his readers what "Wiesel means" to say about it. In so doing, he turns Wiesel's condemnation of know-it-all scholars into a demonstration of his own knowledge, and Wiesel's criticism of Holocaust scholarship into one more "grandiloquent conclusion" about the Holocaust-this one presented as if under Wiesel's authority. Des Pres's essay, "The Authority of Silence in Elie Wiesel's Art," appears not only in the 1978 volume, but in a posthumous collection of his essays for which Wiesel wrote the foreword. There Wiesel tells us: "Terrence relentlessly desired to penetrate the forbidden sanctuary of the nocturnal kingdom that was Auschwitz. Sometimes he would not think himself worthy of this: 'After all, I wasn't there.'" Wiesel reassured him: "That is true: you were not there. But it is your part to study its gates and ditches." 37 Not just any scholar can study these gates and ditches, Wiesel makes clear in an interview with Harry James Cargas: "Not anyone-and not everyonehas the right to declare, to say, 'I became a Holocaust scholar,' or 'Holocaust historian,' or 'Holocaust writer.' It's not given to everyone. You must be worthy of it. Unfortunately, these days, because the subject is so popular, all kinds of people have entered the field and they desecrate the Temple."38 Wiesel offers those scholars who accept his consecration of the Holocaust as a "Temple" or "sacred realm" a sense of worthiness in the face of an event that threatens to reduce them to insignificance. Through their identification with Wiesel they gain membership in the Temple and the sense that, as Holocaust scholars, they are engaged not merely in scholarly work but in sacred work. This sacred work often involves an excessive focus on and overvaluation of Wiesel's corpus, which is treated as sacrosanct. This is amply demonstrated by another passage from the 1978 volume of collected essays. In "Telling a Tale That Cannot Be Told," John K. Roth states that "a full understanding of Wiesel's authorship would entail a full understanding of the Holocaust. The latter, however, is not to be found. Indeed it must not be found. To do so would be to confer meaning on events so as to falsify them, so as to make them even more horrible and thus even less understandable.

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That point is one of the messages that Wiesel wants to drive home, and so a single explanation of his works will not do. Neither will a thousand. Every explanation is too little and too much, and yet we should try to tell a tale that cannot be told." 39 The astonishing logic of this passage rests on an unsupported and unexplained equation between Wiesel's oeuvre and the Holocaust. While the details of Roth's argument may be difficult to decipher (would a full understanding of Wiesel's "authorship" require or result in a full understanding of the Holocaust?), he clearly advocates that we occupy a relationship to Wiesel that mimics Wiesel's own relationship to the Holocaust. 40 Much as Wiesel has said that he writes to "tell of the impossibility one stumbles upon in trying to tell the tale," so Roth claims that one stumbles when trying to explain or "tell the tale" of Wiesel's works. And just as Wiesel describes the Holocaust as "a tale that cannot be-but must be-told," so Roth claims that Wiesel's works cannot but must be explained, also through endless retellings. 41 Wiesel has stated that the survivors' testimonies "seem to have been written by one man, always the same, repeating a thousand times what you, the reader, ... will never understand" (JT 237). The irony of this statement is that Wiesel is the survivor who comes closest to being this one man. If Auschwitz is beyond scholars' vocabulary, Elie Wiesel's words are not. As the supplement to what is unrepresentable and unknowable, this survivor-writer's oeuvre has become the object of study for many Holocaust scholars, resulting in a relationship that is oddly sycophantic. Conferences and collections of scholarly essays canonize Wiesel as a singular authority on the Holocaust while Wiesel, in turn, bestows his authority on this scholarship through his involvement as keynote speaker or special contributor. Describing this phenomenon in a 1981 review of several studies of Holocaust literature, David G. Roskies claims that Wiesel's "person and message have come to eclipse the Event itself."42 Scholars and survivors of the Holocaust have questioned the veracity of survivor memoirs for decades. As early as 1950, Samuel Gringauz wrote, in an issue of Jewish Social Studies, that "most of the memoirs and reports are full of preposterous verbosity, graphomanic exaggeration, dramatic effects, overestimated self-inflation, dilettante philosophizing, would-be lyricism, unchecked rumors, bias, partisan attacks and apologies." 43 Far from leaving these words hidden in the archive, historian Raul Hilberg chooses to quote Gringauz-who, he informs us, is "himself a survivor"

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(and thus more qualified to utter, or get away with uttering, such a sentiment)-to explain why survivor accounts are oftentimes poor sources for historical information. 44 And Lucy Dawidowicz sounds quite a bit like Gringauz when, in the introduction to her 1976 Holocaust Reader, she writes that the trustworthiness of survivor accounts may be compromised by such factors as feebleness of expression, falsification, bias, imperfect observation, flawed memory, and the inclusion of "hearsay, gossip, rumor, assumption, speculation, and hypothesis." 45 Primo Levi makes similar points in his final book, The Drowned and the Saved, writing that although "the most substantial material for the reconstruction of truth about the camps is the memories of the survivors," their testimonies need to be "read with a critical eye." 46 Levi explains that critical reading is warranted because these testimonies may be compromised by a number of factors, including the limited perspective of any prisoner in the camps (17); the anomalous, non-representative experience of any prisoner who managed to survive (17, 83); and the fact that surviving witnesses have "ever more blurred and stylized memories, often, unbeknownst to them, influenced by information gained from later readings or the stories of others" (19). For reasons such as these, James E. Young argues that the critical reader should not tum to Holocaust memoirs for "indisputably 'factual' testimony." Because survivor testimonies are not indisputably accurate records of survivors' experiences, Young writes, readers should value them for conveying how Holocaust victims have understood what they experienced.47 Gringauz, Dawidowicz, Levi, and Young's comments are clearly more far-reaching than Kazin's, which are restricted to questioning the facticity of a single incident in a single survivor's account. Or they would be, if that survivor was not Wiesel, or if Wiesel had not come to personify the Holocaust. If Wiesel is right, if Kazin is "lending credence" to Holocaust deniers when he remarks that a scene in Night may have been fabricated, the fault may lie less with Kazin than with the "Wieselization" of the Holocaust. Only when Wiesel has come to personify the Holocaust is the historical reality of the extermination of some six million Jews made vulnerable to personal attack and criticisms directed at one man. While Kazin contributed to this phenomenon by embodying the Holocaust in Wiesel, and even perpetuates its logic by substituting one "good" survivor for another, he also indicates that the Holocaust's actuality adheres in its having happened, regardless of the trustworthiness of particular postwar survivor accounts.

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Also, it is important to note that while Kazin's criticism of Wiesel appears unnecessarily aggressive and bitter, he does not doubt that Night's author was deported to Auschwitz, that his mother and little sister were sent immediately to the gas chamber, or that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Rather, Kazin states that he would not be surprised to learn that one episode in Night, that of "the boy struggling on the rope," had never happened. Whereas Wiesel asks why, if Kazin refuses to believe him, "others, more removed" should believe any survivor, we should focus on how Kazin's disbelief is specific to those who are not "more removed" from the Holocaust but deeply invested in feeling closer to it. If we grant that Kazin's motivation is not to lend credence to Holocaust deniers, we can ask a more productive and potentially revealing question: what motivates Kazin to question the actuality of a scene he had once found so deeply moving, calling it "the thematic center of the book for me"?

The Boy Struggling on the Rope Why does Kazin write that he would not have been surprised "to learn that the episode of the boy struggling on the rope had never happened"? Why this episode and not another? Wiesel does not address this question in print but sets out vigorously to refute what Kazin has suggested. In his 1995 memoir, All Rivers Run to the Sea, he remarks, In a text in which he recalled "what he owed" to Primo Levi and me, [Kazin]

wrote that he would not be surprised to find that the episode in Night describing three inmates who were hanged together had been invented. How dare he? There were thousands of witnesses, some of them still alive, among them Yaakov Hendeli, who now lives in Jerusalem, and Freddy Diamond of Los Angeles, whose brother Leo Yehuda was the youngest of the three victims. (The two others were Nathan Weisman and Yanek Grossfeld.) Of all the vile things this bitter man who has aged so badly has written in his life, this is the most intolerable. (336) Here I will note a small detail. Whereas Wiesel writes that Kazin questioned "the episode in Night describing three inmates who were hanged to-

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gether," Kazin actually refers to "the episode of the boy struggling on the rope." The difference is telling. Wiesel's description points to the historical occurrence itself, the hanging of three inmates at Buna. With apparent exasperation, he explains that this was an event witnessed by thousands of prisoners; he can identify the three victims by name and identify at least two corroborating witnesses. Still, all this seems beside the point. For Kazin is not concerned with the three inmates who were hanged together; his interest lies rather with "the episode of the boy struggling on the rope." Both Kazin's 1960 review and his 1989 essay (which borrows much from the earlier piece) summarize the episode as follows: "A young boy, after days of being tortured in an attempt to make him reveal where a Dutch prisoner had hidden arms, was put up on the gallows to be hanged" ("Least" 280; "My Debt" ug). Two of the three inmates (who, we read in Night, were sentenced to death because they too had been discovered hiding arms) disappear from the gallows; Kazin notes only the boy struggling on the rope. But even so, he is not concerned with the boy per se, but with what the boy gives rise to: the image of God hanging on the gallows. And it is precisely this image that neither Yaakov Hendeli of Jerusalem, nor Freddy Diamond of Los Angeles, nor any of the thousands of witnesses possibly could have witnessed. Wiesel's insistence on the fact that the hangings did take place strikes me as peculiarly misguided, given that the scene in Night reads not as a historical account of the hanging of three inmates, but as the story of the hanging of one remarkable inmate-a young boy who had "the face of a sad angel" and was "loved by all" (6o). Moreover, the oft-noted employment of crucifixion imagery in this scene further distinguishes the story Wiesel tells from less embellished, more fact-based eyewitness testimony. 48 For this reason, Wiesel's comments regarding the episode seem surprising (how odd to realize that the child with the face of a sad angel has a "real name"). To my mind, these comments have the unintended effect of emphasizing the distance between the event and its literary re-creation-the dissimilarity between the episode in Night and the episode as it took place in Buna. Whereas Wiesel's reference to the episode in Night seems peculiar (his. expansion of the hanging victims from one Jewish boy to three inmates being tantamount to "the expansion of the victims of the Crucifixion to three-the Son of God and two thieves"), Kazin's description, with its men-

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tion only of the boy struggling on the rope, is hardly unusual. 49 Similar descriptions of this episode abound in scholars' writings on Night. "The scene of the hanging child has been viewed by many as the central event in Night," remarks Ellen Fine, while Richard Rubenstein similarly refers to "a scene that many of us regard as the most memorable in Night, the one in which the camp inmates are forced to witness the excruciatingly long death by hanging of a young boy." Likewise, Frederick Garber refers to "the scene of the slow hanging of a child"; Barbara Foley refers to "the hanging of a child who was arrested for sabotage and who is too light to be immediately throttled by the heavy rope around his neck"; Daniel R. Schwarz refers to the hanging "of a young boy [the narrator] knew who took half an hour to die," and so on. 5° Commentators typically focus on the young boy to the exclusion or negation of the other two hanging victims. Even Wiesel, elsewhere in All Rivers Run to the Sea, refers to the passage in Night "recounting the hanging of a young Jewish boy" and not to the episode in which three inmates were hanged together (AR 84).51 Furthermore, the literary effect of Wiesel's storytelling is such that the hanged child has been read as a symbol for any number of things. "Who, what, is dying on the gallows?" asks John Roth. His answer: "One child, all children, and Elie Wiesel among them," as well as the "lovable part of God." Fine provides yet another answer, claiming, "The six million are embodied in this one angelic figure." For Irving Halperin, the boy on the gallows is a voice of conscience. He writes that "at certain times, when I am speaking to students about the Holocaust, the face of this boy appears to monitor my words, to offer perspective and scale to my values." Halperin goes so far as to claim that "it is inappropriate to view the hanging in Night as simply another scene in a literary work; rather, it is emblematic of the cosmic tragedy that was the Holocaust." And Michael Brown writes, "In what is probably the climactic scene of Night, God dies on the gallows, just as Christians understand God to have done in the person of Jesus almost zooo years ago." 52 The scene invites assorted interpretations and therein lies a certain richness, but one thing is certain: almost no one reading Night would answer the question "Who, what, is dying on the gallows?" by identifying the victim as Leo Yehuda. In a real sense, Nathan Weisman, Yanek Grossfeld, and Leo Yehuda are all displaced by "the sad-eyed angel." Asked what he meant when he wrote that he saw God hanging in place of the child, Wiesel replied, "What I meant there is very simple .... I had

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to tell God of my anger.... What I meant there was protest." 53 In fact, this is exactly Kazin's reading of the episode. Where Wiesel refers to telling God of his anger, Kazin refers to "Wiesel's cry before the gallows." The episode of the boy struggling on the rope, the "thematic center of the book" for Kazin, rests on this cry of protest. And it is this cry, which Kazin had previously inferred and read into the scene, that he now questions. Without denying that three inmates were hanged together, Kazin questions Wiesel's response in Buna to the slow death of the youngest victim, the boy struggling on the rope. In effect, Kazin asks: when he marched past the hanging child, did the young Wiesel really cry out against God by imagining Him hanging there on the gallows? Or did Wiesel the writer invent this cry, retrospectively adding it to a scene based on actual events? Did the young Jew's Job-like protest against God happen at all in Auschwitz? In raising this question, Kazin questions the memoir in its entirety, for in casting doubt on the scene that serves as the "thematic center" of Wiesel's book, he suspects nothing less than the sincerity of the book's theme. This entails far more than questioning the factual basis of a single episode. The matter can be put another way, utilizing terms employed by D. Mesher in his consideration of "Holocaust autobiography." Mesher writes that as readers of survivor memoirs "we can and should distinguish between the 'objective' truths of an historical account, and the 'subjective' truths of a personal one." The first is directed outwardly, "toward providing the reader with an historically accurate account," while the latter is directed inwardly, "toward recovery of personal experience" in an effort to record emotions and impressions. 5 4 While Kazin appears to challenge the "objective" truth of Wiesel's account when he wonders if a certain episode really happened, it is the book's "subjective" truth that he really questions, and thus the entirety of Wiesel's inner response to what he experienced in the camps at the time. Of course, the historical accuracy of subjective truths is quite difficult if not impossible to assess; we have no direct access to what young Wiesel was thinking and feeling when he was in the camps. We only have his words and his word, as he reasserts the truth of his account: "I place my trust in readers, hoping I will be understood. They must know that the truth I present is unvarnished; I cannot do otherwise" (AR 336). But do readers know this? "When reading these memoirs, it is tempting to take what is said for fact, but safer to label what happens as theme," writes Marlene E. Heinemann in her study of writings by female Holocaust

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survivors. "Many of the 'themes' in memoirs seem more factual than those of novels, where everything is presumed to be fictional. ... But the factuality of memoirs is open to question and cannot be assumed without verification from other sources." 55 Kazin's example complicates the opposition Heinemann draws between fact and theme, showing the degree to which the reader of Holocaust memoirs wants the memoir's theme to be a direct expression of the author's actual or "factual" experiences during the Holocaust. Kazin writes, "I was moved by the boy Wiesel in Night for imagining God Himself on the gallows (Wiesel did imagine this, whether in Auschwitz or not)" ("My Debt" 123). The question, then, is who did imagine this: the boy in Auschwitz or the survivor writing after Auschwitz? For Kazin, the truthfulness of the theme of religious crisis and protest in Night rests on whether or not the young Wiesel truly experienced a crisis of faith at the time he was in the camps.

Only Later A chapter of All Rivers Run to the Sea titled "Darkness" offers us another account of Wiesel's experience in the camps. He writes: "My intent here is not to repeat what I recounted in Night but to review that testimony as I see it now. Was I explicit enough? Did I miss what was essential? Did I serve memory well? In fact, if I had it to do over again, I would change nothing in my deposition" (79). Yet, in this chapter he does recount "over again" much of what appears in Night, from the German occupation of Sighet and the deportation of its Jews to Auschwitz to the liberation of Buchenwald; and we do find significant changes in his testimony, changes that bear directly on the question of Wiesel's faith when he was in the camps. Wiesel's description of the death of his father in Buchenwald offers one striking instance of disparity between the two memoirs. In Night we read how during roll call, when only invalids were allowed to stay in the block, Eliezer lay on the top bunk in order to stay with his sick father. He lay there still while an SS officer beat his father's head with a truncheon: "I did not move. I was afraid. My body was afraid of also receiving a blow" (1o6). His father called out his name, but still he did not move. Only after roll call did he leave the top bunk to gaze at his dying father "for over an hour" before

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returning to his bunk. He awoke the next morning to find that his father was gone and another dying prisoner lay in his place. The much-quoted passage concludes: There were no prayers at his grave. No candles were lit to his memory. His last word was my name. A summons, to which I did not respond. I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I had no more tears. And, in the depths of my being, in the recesses of my weakened conscience, could I have searched for it, I might perhaps have found something like-free at last! (106) In the 1995 memoir we find a remarkably different description, one which serves to add the missing prayers, candles, and tears to the scene. "My father was dying and I was in pain," writes Wiesel: He shuddered and called my name. I tried to get up, tried to crawl to him, but the torturers were there, forbidding all movement. I wanted to cry out, Hold on, Father, hold on.... My father was dying and I was bursting with pain. I didn't want to leave him, but I did. I was forced to. They were beating me, I was losing consciousness .... My father called to me and I could not rush to hold his hand. Suddenly I saw Grandma Nissel. I begged her to accompany me to the House of Study. We opened the ark, prayed to the Holy Torah to intercede for my dying father. She held out her hand, but I touched only emptiness. (AR 93-94) This passage seems all the more melodramatic in comparison with the clipped prose of Night. I am struck most by the dream or vision that Wiesel describes, the surprising sudden move from the bunk in Buchenwald to Grandma Nissel and the House of Study. Wiesel writes in Night that, shortly after his arrival in Auschwitz, Eliezer's transformation into a camp prisoner was complete: "The student of the Talmud, the child that I was, had been consumed in the flames. There remained only a shape that looked like me" (34). The vision that Wiesel describes in his 1995 memoir marks thereturn of this child, the intensely religious young Jew, in Buchenwald. Along with his grandmother, who had been sent to her death upon arrival at Auschwitz, the Talmud student is resurrected from the flames, and the two

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pray for the dying father. Why does this vision not appear in the pages of the earlier memoir? And which version presents the more "unvarnished" truth, the one that includes this holy vision or the one that does not? Was the moment of the death of Wiesel's father marked by a resurgence of faith or a sense of being "free"? Scholars in their interpretations of Night typically treat the words "free at last!" as a dramatic declaration of the breakdown of the father-son relationship. The son, relieved to be freed from his burdensome father, can now concentrate on his own survival. "In disclosing his feelings," writes Ted Estess, "Eliezer simply confesses the extent to which the Holocaust has corrupted the primary relationships of life." 56 But nothing of this corruption is suggested by the version of the father's death which appears in All Rivers Run to the Sea. Whereas Eliezer did not move for fear of being beaten, Wiesel was beaten back. Moreover, he gives the notion of being "free at last" another meaning: "With my father dead, I felt curiously free; free to go under, to let myself drift into death" (94)· Perhaps All Rivers Run to the Sea does not depict the return of the student of the Talmud from the flames, so much as it claims that he had not been consumed by the flames after all-not, at least, in Auschwitz. Perhaps most surprising to the reader of Night is this passage in the 1995 memoir where Wiesel describes the rituals he and his father practiced in the camp: In the morning my father and I would rise before the general wake-up call

and go to a nearby block where someone had traded a dozen rations of bread for a pair of phylacteries (tefillin). We would strap them onto our left arm and forehead, quickly recite the ritual blessings, then pass them on to the next person. A few dozen prisoners thereby sacrificed their sleep, and sometimes their rations of bread or coffee, to perform the mitzvah, the commandment to wear the tefillin. Yes, we practiced religion even in a death camp. I said my prayers every day. On Saturday I hummed Shabbat songs at work, in part, no doubt, to please my father, to show him I was determined to remain a Jew even in the accursed kingdom. My doubts and my revolt gripped me only later. (AR 82, my emphasis) This passage seems irreconcilable with the portraits of Eliezer and his father in Night. Here Wiesel presents a remarkably different description of what it meant "to remain a Jew" in Auschwitz-and what it might mean

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to remain a Jew after Auschwitz-than that which Kazin derived from Night. In Night not only do we find no mention of this daily religious practice, but it is most difficult to imagine it occurring; the notion of Eliezer and his father rising before the rest of the camp to strap on tefillin and pray is simply inconsistent with the rest of the narrative. When father and son bond in Night, it is not through religious observance; rather, the narrator recalls how, after the service on the eve of Rosh Hashanah when he refused to pray, he ran off to look for his father, though, as he tells us, "I was afraid of having to wish him a Happy New Year when I no longer believed in it." When he found his father, he realized that he would not have to say these words: "I said nothing. Nor did he. We had never understood one another more clearly" (65). Reading the above passage from All Rivers Run to the Sea, I felt a greater understanding of Kazin's charges against Wiesel. When first reading "My Debt to Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi," I took note of how dramatically and explicitly it demonstrated a nonwitness's self-seeking, aggressive use of survivor testimony to create a personal relation to the Holocaust. Kazin struck me as ill-humored and naively unaware of how literally he was enacting a game of pitting "good" survivor against "bad" survivor; that these survivors should be Wiesel and Levi made his moves all the more typical. So I sided with Wiesel against this "bad" critic. But then a strange thing happened: as I read All Rivers Run to the Sea the troubling question at the core of Kazin's essay returned to haunt me: did Wiesel really have a crisis of faith as portrayed in Night? I found that the later memoir read as the culmination of Wiesel's development in directions indicated by Kazin when he described Wiesel as taking on the role of a "Jewish sage," transforming his prior message of religious crisis and despair into"a rally of Jewishness" ("My Debt" 122). And I found myself sharing some of Kazin's frustration and suspicion of Wiesel. Reading through Wiesel's earlier essays, one finds passages referring to aspects of Wiesel's Holocaust and post-Holocaust experiences that receive their fullest recounting in All Rivers Run to the Sea. For instance, in a 1981 essay titled "Making the Ghosts Speak," he writes that "the deepest change took place not in the camps, but after their liberation. During the ordeal, I lived in expectation: of a miracle, or death. Atrophied, I evolved passively, accepting events without questioning them .... I continued to say my prayers.... It was only later, after the nightmare, that I underwent a crisis,

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painful and anguished, questioning all my beliefs." 57 If, as Wiesel indicates here and in his 1995 memoir, his "doubts and revolt" gripped him not at Auschwitz but "only later," we might wonder: how much later? Wiesel offers readers of All Rivers Run to the Sea a clue in a chapter titled "New York." The year is 1956, and twenty-eight-year-old Wiesel is scraping by as a journalist in New York. He writes: "Except for the High Holidays and the Yizkor service, I now avoided public prayer, for I was mired in a religious crisis. I had no one to discuss such matters with ... but the God of my childhood was tormenting me .... It had started during my first visitto Israel ... And it was in Jerusalem, most sacred and spiritual of cities, that I first felt the need to protest against divine justice and injustice" (293). When he first visited Israel as a journalist in 1948, Wiesel was surprised to hear from Holocaust survivors that there too they were treated like outcasts. Seen to embody weakness and victimization, survivors of the camps were scorned as unpleasant reminders of the Nazi genocide, a subject Israelis considered embarrassing and therefore avoided. Wiesel, who would come to embrace this persona of the Jew as victim, was deeply unnerved by this "demoralizing state of affairs": "It tarnished my joy at breathing the air of Jerusalem" (184). Perhaps this state of affairs, which so upset Wiesel's long-held dreams of Jerusalem, set the climate for his religious crisis, though in "Making the Ghosts Speak" Wiesel locates his religious crisis earlier. "I felt like a stranger," he writes. "I had lost my faith, and thus, my sense of belonging and orientation. My faith in life was covered with ashes; my faith in humanity was laughable; my faith in God was shaken" (FKM 142). Though these words recall those in Night, here Wiesel describes how he felt not at Auschwitz, but at the time he was leading a hermit-like existence in Paris, prior to becoming a journalist. "Every one of us must go through a religious crisis," said Wiesel in a speech delivered in 1981. "Every one of us must feel the anguish of being alone in a world ruled and dominated by an invisible God. My crisis occurred after the war." 58 What we read in All Rivers Run to the Sea supports this. After claiming that his crisis occurred only later, after Auschwitz, he asks, "Why so much later?" (82). He answers that in Auschwitz he needed God. Moreover, he writes, "There in the camp, I had neither the strength nor the time for theological meditation or metaphysical speculation about the attributes of the Master of the Universe. The daily bread ration was the center of our concerns. Would it be a centimeter thicker or thinner?" (AR

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83). The wording here-"theological meditation or metaphysical speculation" instead of doubts, "the Master of the Universe" instead of Godmakes doubts about God sound spuriously academic in the context of the camp. Of course, this raises the question of why, in Night, Wiesel chose to locate Eliezer's religious crisis in the camps, making it the central theme of his testimony. Moreover, it is on the facing page in All Rivers Run to the Sea that Wiesel describes how a few dozen prisoners, he and his father included, would sometimes sacrifice their rations of bread to recite the morning prayers. Thus he suggests that prisoners were too preoccupied with bread toquestion their faith in a merciful God, but not to stop their observance of Jewish law, which cost them this very bread. Here he also describes how in the camp he worked with a former rash yeshiva, a director of a rabbinical academy. "I can see us now," he writes," carrying bags of cement or large stones, pushing wheelbarrows filled with sand or mud, all the while studying a Law of the Mishna or a page of the Talmud" (AR 82). Wiesel had already written about how he studied the Talmud with this man while they carried rocks, picking up on the page he had last studied in Sighet, in One Generation After (1970) and elsewhere. 59 In fact, Wiesel's previous writings and lectures include numerous references to acts of religious study and contemplation in the camp; he even recounts how in 1944, there in the camp, his teacher, the rash yeshiva, asked him to witness a trial he and two other Talmudic masters were convening to indict God for failing to protect the Jews from extermination. "I remember every word, I remember every phase of that trial," states Wiesel. "It lasted for several nights. Witnesses were summoned. Arguments were heard, always in a whisper, in order not to arouse suspicion and punishment from the others." 60 It is indeed difficult to reconcile this act of witness with Wiesel's claim in All Rivers Run to the Sea that in the camp he had no time for theological deliberations about God. In Night we find a passage in which the narrator recalls discussions amongst prisoners as they lay in their bunks shortly after their arrival in Auschwitz: "Some talked of God, of his mysterious ways, of the sins of the Jewish people, and of their future deliverance. But I had ceased to pray. How I sympathized with Job! I did not deny God's existence, but I doubted His absolute justice" (42). Wiesel's claim that his "doubts and revolt" gripped him" only later" raises a number of questions. Did he choose to stage at Auschwitz a Job-like religious crisis he experi-

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enced only after liberation? Did it seem not only more dramatic, but perhaps more "true" to situate this crisis in the camps rather than in the aftermath? To locate his doubts and revolt in Auschwitz-Birkenau and Buna rather than in Paris or Israel? In short, did Wiesel present a survivor's religious crisis as a camp inmate's rebellion against God? And if so, what might Wiesel's literary decision share with Kazin's desire to locate vicariously his own "religious frustration" at Auschwitz?

Jewish Faith at Auschwitz The question of whether Wiesel lost his faith at Auschwitz or after bears not only on our perception of this one survivor-writer, but on our understanding, through him, of what the vast majority of Jewish prisoners experienced in the camps. "Insofar as any book can, Night encapsulates the Jewish experience at Auschwitz," claims Richard Rubenstein. 61 But as an examination of this book and the later memoir All Rivers Run to the Sea reveals, Wiesel's depiction of "the Jewish experience at Auschwitz" takes two forms in connection with this writer's portrayal of his own crisis of faith. In his 1979 study of Wiesel's work, The Vision of the Void, Michael Berenbaum writes that Wiesel "underscores his rejection of faith" throughout Night by describing not only his own but other pious Jews' deteriorating belief in God: "Each of the characters Wiesel develops feels the acute anxiety of disappointment. None survive with their faith intact. Old Rabbis declare their heretical feelings. Akiba Drumer, a formerly pious man, abandons his belief in both God and life. Mercifully, others die before they can fully lose their faith." 62 But as we will see, when Wiesel no longer wishes to underscore his own loss of faith, his description of the other pious Jews' belief in God also undergoes profound change. In Night, only the narrator-protagonist Eliezer is empowered by his crisis of faith. Whereas he becomes Job-like, loss of faith equals death for the other characters. Thus the pious Jew's fate in the Holocaust is represented in Night less by Eliezer than by Akiba Drumer. Soon after arriving at Auschwitz, Drumer maintained that the Jews had no right to despair, as God was testing them: "And if He punishes us relentlessly, it's a sign that He loves us all the more" (42). Thirty pages later, however, the narrator states that Drumer had neither the strength nor the faith left to survive, for "as soon as he felt the first cracks forming in his faith, he had lost his rea-

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son for struggling and had begun to die" (73). His faith broken, Drumer was sentenced to death by SS doctors at the next selection. "He was not the only one to lose his faith during those selection days," writes Wiesel. "I knew a rabbi from a little town in Poland, a bent old man, whose lips were always trembling. He used to pray all the time, in the block, in the yard, in the ranks. He would recite whole pages of the Talmud from memory, argue with himself, ask himself questions and answer himself. And one day he said to me: 'It's the end. God is no longer with us."' The rabbi admits that he has no right to say such a thing, but protests that he is "not a sage, one of the elect, nor a saint/' but "an ordinary creature of flesh and blood" who has eyes and sees what is happening in the camp. Given this, he asks, "How can I believe, how can anyone believe, in this merciful God?" (7273). This portrait of a rabbi from Night can be juxtaposed with one that appears in the more recent memoir: "I remember a Polish rabbi who tried to console those who had not fasted on Yom Kippur. 'Jewish law does not order a person to fast at the risk of his life,' he said. 'To eat today is more pleasing in the eyes of the blessed Creator than to mortify oneself.' But he himself had fasted. Weakened by hunger, he was' selected' soon afterward, and he implored his barracks comrades to say Kaddish for his soul. The entire barracks did so" (AR 87-88). While these two Polish rabbis, or the spirits they represent, co-existed at Auschwitz, they do not co-exist in Wiesel's accounts, but appear in different, and differently oriented, versions of his Holocaust experiences, written over three decades apart. Unlike Akiba Drumer, whose death is an outcome of his loss of belief in God, the Polish rabbi, physically weakened by his observance of Yom Kippur, dies a martyr-even as he assures others that God is merciful and values their lives over adherence to religious practice. The tone of reverence, culminating in the point that the entire barracks recited the Kaddish, a prayer for the dead, contrasts with the tale of Akiba Drumer. For despite his loss of belief in the blessed Creator, Drumer too asked that the Kaddish be said for him. Ten friends promised that, when they saw smoke rising from the crematorium's chimney, they would think of him, gather together, and hold a special service: "All his friends would say the Kaddish" (73). But they forgot to do so. Thus the tone of reverence that infuses the account of the fasting rabbi is not to be found in Night. When Yom Kippur and the matter of fasting arises in its pages, there is no mention of this rabbi and his martyrdom. Instead, we read about how

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Eliezer, finding no reason to fast, chose to eat on Yom Kippur as an act of protest against God's silence: "As I swallowed my bowl of soup, I saw in the gesture an act of rebellion and protest against Him" (66).1t is precisely this rebellion against God, the protest which takes the form of acting against the observance of Jewish law, that we do not find in the memory presented in All Rivers Run to the Sea. The two versions of Wiesel's memory have vastly different motivations. In All Rivers Run to the Sea he is interested in affirming what he calls the Jewish soul. Wiesel writes, "The Jewish soul was a target of the enemy. He sought to corrupt it, even as he strove to destroy us physically. But despite his destructive force, despite his corrupting power, the Jewish soul remained beyond his reach" (87). The tale of the fasting rabbi is offered as one of four examples of the incorruptible, indestructible Jewish soul; another is that of "a Dutchman who shared his bread with a comrade sicker than he was, a comrade he did not know" (87). Forgotten here are the numerous counter-examples in Night, such as one scene in which a crowd of on-lookers threw pieces of bread into a train car in order to watch the skeletal prisoners engage in a death struggle over the scraps of food. The narrator describes how a boy beat his own father to death for a small piece of bread, before being killed in tum by the throng of starving prisoners (gsg6). In Night, Berenbaum observes, "Wiesel does not shrink from exposing negative aspects of the victim's behavior," as he describes moments in which "each man battled on his own for survival." These were moments in which "fathers betrayed sons and sons fathers" (Vision 188). In All Rivers Run to the Sea Wiesel describes his greater interest in the positive aspects, writing, "I prefer to emphasize the kindness and compassion of my brothers in misfortune. These qualities were found even in the kingdom of darkest night, as I can testify-indeed, as I must" (87). But he does not reflect on why, when he wrote Night, testifying to these qualities was not an imperative-why, on the contrary, his testimony had an opposing focus.

Between Memoir and Novel Wiesel has memorably declared: "A novel about Auschwitz is not a novel, or it is not about Auschwitz" (JT 234). This pronouncement is often

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cited by scholars and repeated by Wiesel himself. 63 Nevertheless, scholars appear strangely unsure as to whether Night is not, after all, just that: a novel about Auschwitz. For example, Berel Lang includes Wiesel's book in a list of novels about the Holocaust which "appear in the fictional guise of diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, or 'objective' historical studies." Lang describes Night as a novel "written in the genre of the memoir," while Irving Howe calls it a "slightly fictionalized record." 64 Neither Lang nor Howe substantiates these provocative claims; but then several scholars have referred in passing to the curious status of Night without attempting to sort out its relation to Wiesel's actual experiences in the camps. In place of such analysis, for decades scholars have fallen back on a number of hazy terms. For example, Night has been described as a "novel/autobiography," an "autobiographical novel," a "non-fictional novel," a "semi-fictional memoir," a "fictional-autobiographical memoir," a "fictionalized autobiographical memoir," and a "memoir-novel." 65 This has not stopped secondary school educators from valuing Night as a book that is simply true on all levels. After advising high school teachers to stick to nonfiction, since "the events of the Holocaust are so unbelievable that there is the chance that fictional accounts will be seen by students as 'not true,'" Carol Danks recommends Night as "one literary work that presents accurate historical information, has an authentic narrative voice, seems approachable to students, and can be taught in limited classroom time." Margaret A. Drew similarly stresses the importance of using books that are "good history as well as good literature," stating that "one of the few books that can meet the criteria in both history and literature is Elie Wiesel's Night." Nevertheless, in his introduction to a volume titled Teaching Holocaust Literature, Samuel Totten writes of having discovered that many teachers have taught Night as a novel, and Drew mentions that in some libraries Wiesel's book will be found in the fiction section. 66 In 1997 the question of Night's literary classification surfaced in the pages of Publishers Weekly. Columnist Paul Nathan noted that whereas Night now sells more than 30o,ooo copies annually in the United States, in 1958 New York agent Georges Borchardt had great difficulty finding an American publisher for Wiesel's "autobiographical novel." In a follow-up column Nathan offered a correction: Night is not fiction; he had been misinformed by his source, The International Dictionary of 2oth Century Biography, where Night is described as one of Wiesel's "powerful autobiographical novels."

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Nathan admitted that he had not read the work in question; otherwise he would have known that Night is not a work of fiction. 67 However, this was not to be the end of the matter. A month later, Nathan reported that his correction was being challenged by Hugh Rawson, director of Penguin Reference Books, who claimed that he could cite half a dozen sources, including the Encyclopedia Britannica, "to substantiate that the book is a novel." Nathan explained that his correction had been occasioned by a letter from Borchardt, who, still in his capacity as Wiesel's agent, had written him: "The book is not a novel. It is (like Anne Frank's diary) a work of nonfiction." 68 Of course, if Night is nonfiction, it is nevertheless quite unlike the diary, which was written during the war rather than in its aftermath. Perhaps realizing that neither reading Night nor consulting reference books would resolve the question of its literary classification, Nathan excused himself from the matter. "The line between fact and fiction, tenuous at best, tends to vanish altogether in autobiographical novels such as Wiesel's Night," writes Ernst Pawel in a 1970 essay that is one of the earliest surveys of Holocaust fiction.69 Subsequent commentary has attributed this aspect of Wiesel's book to all written testimony. "Although widely read as an autobiographical memoir, Night also continues to be classified and critically acclaimed as a novel, and not without reason," writes Lawrence L. Langer. "Because it is a written text, Night suffers the curbs and enjoys the privileges of art, from which courtroom testimony, or any oral account of the Auschwitz ordeal, is exempt. " 70 Aside from granting oral testimony an uncompromised truth-value that is highly questionable (a point I will return to in the next chapter), Langer's explanation fails to account for why any written text is read as non-fiction rather than fiction. EllenS. Fine observes that "a thin, almost indistinguishable line often exists between testimony and fiction, between the facts and their representation." 71 But instead of writing that Night is typical in this regard, in her 1982 book, Legacy of Night, she suggests that this ambiguity makes Wiesel's book exceptional: "The work defies all categories. It has been described as personal memoir, autobiographical narrative, fictionalized autobiography, nonfictional novel, and human document. Essentially it is temoignage, a first-hand account of the concentration camp experience, succinctly related by the fifteen-year-old narrator, Eliezer.... However, Night is more than a temoignage . .. " 72 Fine would have us believe that if it is difficult to determine the facticity

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or fictiveness of Night, this is not because the work has been the object of much mystification, but because it masterfully "defies all categories." Irving Abrahamson takes this point even further in the introduction to his three-volume collection of Wiesel's work, Against Silence: The Voice and Vision of Elie Wiesel, claiming that "Night is an unprecedented book, the beginning of something new in literature, if not in religion." 73 "What kind of book is Night, what genre-memoir or novel? And what makes it part of Jewish American literature?" ask the editors of Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology (2001), which includes two chapters from Night. The first question is left unanswered, though the editors suggest an answer to the second when they comment that Night has become "almost an article of faith, a spiritual and moral touchstone" for American readers?4 For his own part, Wiesel has long insisted that Night is not a novel. In All Rivers Run to the Sea he refers to Night as his "deposition," the written testimony of a witness who is under oath (79). Uncertainty regarding the generic status of Night nevertheless persists. Its publication in a volume titled The Night Trilogy, which joins Night with two of Wiesel's novels (Dawn and The Accident) under a single cover, adds to the confusion. In the volume's introduction, Wiesel writes that whereas the first narrative is a testimony, the other two "serve only as commentaries." Whereas all three narratives are written in the first person, he explains that in Night "it is the 'I' who speaks; in the other two, it is the 'I' who listens and questions." 75 Not surprisingly, this explanation has not clarified matters for all readers. With this in mind, it is easy to imagine why Wiesel responded so sharply to Kazin when the critic suggested that an episode in Night may have been invented: Kazin had touched on a sore point. This sore point is not, as Wiesel would suggest, Holocaust denial but the relation generally between testimony and fiction in Wiesel's life and work. The relationship between testimony and fiction, or truth-telling and storytelling, is the subject of one of Wiesel's oft-cited anecdotes. It recounts his visit to a Reb be, or Hasidic rabbi, whom Wiesel, as a child in Hungary, had last seen twenty years before. The Rebbe is disturbed to learn that Wiesel has become a writer: "What are you writing" the Rebbe asked. "Stories," I said. He wanted to know what kind of stories: true stories. "About people you knew?" Yes, about people I might have known. "About things that happened?" Yes,

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about things that happened or could have happened. "But they did not?" No, not all of them did. In fact, some were invented from almost the beginning to almost the end. The Rebbe leaned forward as if to measure me up and said with more sorrow than anger: "That means you are writing lies!" I did not answer immediately. The scolded child within me had nothing to say in his defense. Yet, I had to justify myself: "Things are not that simple, Rebbe. Some events do take place but are not true; others are-although they never occurred." 76 Some scholars have taken this story to mean that, in writing on the Holocaust, to tell the story as it "happened" would strain the reader's belief, for "sometimes it is only fiction that can make the truth credible." 77 In the name of a greater truth, the writer is granted poetic license not to distinguish poetic license from adherence to fact or memory. Another version of this story appears in All Rivers Run to the Sea. There we learn that the Rebbe was upset by Wiesel's secular appearance. "Tell me," he asked Wiesel, "what is the relation between the man you are and the man I see?" Wiesel writes that he "fell back on philosophical double talk," replying: "Being is not necessarily visible, and that which is visible is not necessarily part of being" (274). When asked if the stories he tells in his books are true, he similarly responded, "In literature, Rebbe, certain things are true though they didn't happen, while others are not, even if they did," writing that he offered this answer "not too convincingly," perhaps because it too is philosophical double talk (275). Nevertheless, the climax of Wiesel's story, his final answer to the Rebbe, remains a valued insight for many Holocaust scholars. Certainly the answer Wiesel gives the Rebbe-that certain events are true although they never occurred-is not one he uses in response to Kazin. Instead, he offers his critic the far simpler explanation that the episode in Night is true because it did in fact happen, and he has the witnesses to prove it. Here we might recall Wiesel's insistence that his readers trust him unconditionally: "They must know that the truth I present is unvarnished; I cannot do otherwise" (AR 336). Yet this claim to unvarnished truth is at odds with "truth" as portrayed in the story of Wiesel's encounter with the Rebbe, raising the question of whether the truth Wiesel conveys cannot avoid a certain amount of literary varnish. Furthermore, Wiesel elsewhere describes a relationship to his readers that is problematic. Commenting on how he narrated the scene in Night which recounts the hang-

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ing of the three inmates, he states: "What I meant there was protest. ... that was, of course, the epitome of protest. Even when I wrote it, I was very careful. I was afraid of commentaries. What I said is that when I saw the child hanging, I heard a voice saying. Well, whose voice was it? I did not say it was mine. And what if it was God's voice saying?So I left it ambiguous on purpose. I like clarity except when it comes to certain very dangerous topics."78 Wiesel's strategy seems to have backfired, as he complains, "Theorists of the idea that 'God is dead' have used my words unfairly as justification of their rejection of faith" (AR 84). If Wiesel was fearful of such "unfair" commentaries, he might have aimed for greater clarity in order to reduce the chances of being misread. But just the opposite is the case: he applied, and continues to apply, a strategy of "philosophical double talk" and ambiguous writing, as if fearing that readers might otherwise comprehend his intended message.

Smashing and Restoring the Mirror Wiesel has often stated that the reality of the Holocaust, its magnitude of horror, cannot be conveyed, even by the survivors; that memoirs, including his own, inescapably fail in their efforts to get at the truth of what the ghettos and the camps were like. "Survivors and witnesses have done their best to describe their experiences," he writes, "yet their writings have perhaps no substantial relationship with what they have seen and lived through" (OGA 57). His conception of writing vis-a-vis the Holocaust is worth comparing to that of another survivor-writer, Jorge Semprun. In sharp contrast to Wiesel, Semprun suggests that what he and other political prisoners at Buchenwald experienced requires literary and artistic rendering in order to be communicated to others, as the truth of such experiences can only be conveyed through "literary writing," or "the artifice of a masterly narrative." 79 But literary artifice is perhaps the last thing Wiesel wishes to evoke in connection with Night. Wanting to ground his testimony in something more authenticating than the potentially fictionalizing medium of writing, Wiesel takes pains to locate the truthfulness of his account in something other than the written word. This something other is the absence of writing and, more broadly, the negation of language. In short, Wiesel ties the truth of his testimony to silence. Although Night is clearly a work of literature, Wiesel locates its testimo-

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nial authenticity in the far greater "silence" that surrounds it and permeates its pages. He accomplishes this through storytelling, particularly through the recounting of three stories. Since Wiesel first recited them in the early 1970s, these stories have attained the quality of mythic truths uncritically embraced by scholars. The first story concerns a "vow of silence" taken by Wiesel shortly after his liberation from Buchenwald. One telling of this story reads as follows: "It took me ten years to write my first book. It was not a coincidence; it was deliberate. I took a vow of silence in 1945, to the effect that I would wait ten years to be sure that what I would say would be true." 80 In other tellings Wiesel states that he needed a decade "to collect words and the silence in them," or "to unite the language of man with the silence of the dead." 81 The second story involves the paring down of Night from eight hundred pages to a slim volume closer to one hundred pages in length. Why did Wiesel cut so much, as if unwriting his testimony? He offers the following explanation: "To bring back at least a certain fragment of the truth the writer becomes responsible not only for the words but for the white spaces between the words, not only for the language but for the silence. Therefore, the less you write, the more true the message and the story." 82 He maintains that although the reader does not see them, the seven hundred-plus pages he has cut are still there: "Behind every word I write are ten words I do not write. " 83 The third story situating Night within the context of a far greater silence maintains that this book is the only work Wiesel has written directly on the Holocaust. Though this claim appears patently untrue given all he has said about his Holocaust experiences in a multitude of books, essays, and speeches, one can discern its motivation. Wiesel believes that what he wrote in Night will somehow be more true if, aside from this exceptional book, he has remained silent about the Holocaust. Thus he distinguishes writing that "deals directly with the Holocaust" from all the rest, maintaining that he has written "only one book which had a direct connection with the experience, and that was Night." 84 This line of reasoning is no more compelling than Wiesel's notion that shorter memoirs are more truthful than longer ones, or that a memoir written ten years after the Holocaust is more truthful than one written just after liberation, such as Levi's Survival in Auschwitz. Clearly, the reasoning behind these three stories is highly questionable, even nonsensical, but that is not all. The factual basis

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of each story begins to erode when we consider that before writing Night Wiesel had already published a memoir of his Holocaust experiences written in Yiddish. In All Rivers Run to the Sea Wiesel states that he finished writing the Yiddish memoir in 1954, while aboard a ship traveling from France to Brazil. Simultaneously acknowledging and disregarding the fact that he did not wait ten years before writing about the Holocaust, he remarks, "My vow of silence would soon be fulfilled; next year would mark the tenth anniversary of my liberation. I was going to have to open the gates of memory, to break the silence while safeguarding it. The pages piled up on my bed" (AR 240). 85 In Buenos Aires he gave the manuscript to a Jewish book publisher, who published it in 1956. The Yiddish memoir, titled Un di velt hot geshvign (And the World Remained Silent), thus appeared in print two years before La Nuit, the French work from which Night is translated. Un di velt hot geshvign is frequently omitted from discussions of Wiesel's oeuvre and from commentary on Night, which is typically referred to as Wiesel's first book. When the Yiddish memoir is mentioned, it is typically described in passing as a longer, unrefined version of Night. However, as Naomi Seidman shows in her remarkable essay "Elie Wiesel and the Scandal of Jewish Rage," Un di velt hot geshvign stands on its own as a memoir telling a story related to but different from that told in Night. In examining this "unread ghost," she also rereads Night as a text with an elaborate history as a revised, edited, translated and published piece of writing, rather than as a book produced out of "silence." 86 Seidman focuses on how Wiesel wrote his memoirs for two different audiences: one composed of Yiddish-speaking Jews, the other of Christian readers. She finds the differences between the two memoirs best conveyed by these books' contrasting images of the survivor. In Night this image is portrayed in the book's oft-cited concluding passage. We read that three days after the liberation of Buchenwald, Eliezer became ill with food poisoning and was transferred to the hospital, where for two weeks he lay "between life and death." The book's final sentences read: "One day I was able to get up, after gathering all my strength. I wanted to see myself in the mirror hanging on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me" (109). This image has been discussed by innumerable scholars who tend to as-

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sociate it with the dead, who haunt the living with the burden to remember, or with the permanently damaged survivor, who can never fully return to the world of the living. 87 Few scholars have realized, however, that it was not Wiesel who chose to end Night with this image, but his French editor, Jerome Lindon, who also cut sixty-seven pages from the length of the Yiddish memoir to produce the slim volume he and Wiesel titled La Nuit. 88 Whereas the French memoir and its English translation end with the image of the survivor-as-corpse, Un di velt hot geshvign concludes with what Seidman describes as "an entirely different account of the experience of the survivor" (7). In the Yiddish memoir Wiesel similarly describes how Eliezer, ill with food poisoning, "lay in the hospital between life and death" for two weeks; but we read that the doctors said he was" gone," anticipating that he would die, and that his condition "grew worse from day to day." Seidman's translation from the Yiddish reads as follows: One fine day I got up-with the last of my energy-and went over to the mirror that was hanging on the wall. I wanted to see myself. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the mirror a skeleton gazed out. Skin and bones. I saw the image of myself after my death. It was at that instant that the will to live was awakened. Without knowing why, I raised a balled-up fist and smashed the mirror, breaking the image that lived within it. And then-I fainted. From that moment on my health began to improve. I stayed in bed for a few more days, in the course of which I wrote the outline of the book you are holding in your hand, dear reader. (7)1l9 The narrator goes on to state that ten years after Buchenwald he sees the world is forgetting: "Germans and anti-Semites persuade the world that the story of the six million Jewish martyrs is a fantasy, and the naive world will probably believe them, if not today, then tomorrow or the next day. So I thought it would be a good idea to publish a book based on the notes I wrote in Buchenwald" (7). Here the authenticity of Wiesel's testimony is rooted not in "silence," but in the survivor's commitment to bear witness

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through writing, and in this writing's having originated there, at Buchenwald. In discussing Kazin's relationship to the author of Night, I have noted two conceptions of the survivor described by Kazin: Wiesel as Job at Auschwitz and Wiesel as Jewish sage. In comparing the endings of Un di velt hot geshvign and Night, Seidman identifies two more conceptions of the survivor. The one known to readers of Night is consistent with Wiesel's public persona, which she has described as that of "a spiritualized, passive, victimized, silent, sad, still somehow dead Jew." 90 This image of the survivor as ghost is precisely what Eliezer rejects when he smashes the mirror in the Yiddish memoir. In its place, he presents a living survivor who expresses, in Seidman's words, "Jewish rage and unwillingness to embody suffering and victimization" (8). The ending of Un di velt hot geshvign clearly indicates that Eliezer's death is certain until he breaks the mirror as if breaking a spell. This life-affirming act is intimately tied to his will to bear witness through writing-and "not ten years after the events of the Holocaust but immediately upon liberation, as the first expression of his mental and physical recovery," as Seidman aptly notes (7). By contrast, the survivor in Night does not smash the mirror or write the outline for a book he will publish to counter the lies of Germans, antisemites, and a naive world. Why not? Seidman argues that in order to appeal to a wider audience of Christian readers, Wiesel and his French publishers expunged "the survivor's political rage" from the book, sublimating it into the narratorprotagonist's protest against God (15). Wiesel concludes Un di velt hot geshvign by questioning his effort to write about the Holocaust. He remarks, "I am not so naive to believe that this book will change history or shake people's beliefs. Books no longer have the power they once had. Those who were silent yesterday will also be silent tomorrow. I often ask myself, now, ten years after Buchenwald: Was it worth breaking that mirror? Was it worth it?" (7). These comments are curious, since this book's readership was limited to Yiddish-speaking Jews. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that here Wiesel does not doubt the quality of his testimony, but rather the significance of its reception by "those who were silent" while Jews were being rounded up and murdered. Only later would Wiesel shift his concern, suggesting that the central problem posed by survivors' writings on the Holocaust is not socio-politicalwhether and to what effect their testimonies are read-but mystical-reli-

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gious-whether their testimonies can adequately represent the Holocaust at all, when "to substitute words, any words, for it is to distort it" (JT 234). Another problem, as Wiesel sees it, is that survivor accounts cannot convey "the truth of the holocaust in its totality," as "they do not reflect the whole but are a part of it. ... every witness expresses only his own truth, in his own name." In order to reflect the event as a whole, he contends, the survivor-writer not only must listen to other survivors, but also "must find a way to add the silence left behind by millions of unknowns" (OGA 56). The stories of Wiesel's efforts to incorporate the silence of the dead in his writing suggest that with Night he set out to convey something more essential and comprehensive than "his own truth," and thus to be something more vital than a witness capable of testifying only to his own experience. His desire to "reflect the whole" may have been motivated by a sense that it is not enough to bear witness by cleaving to one's own story, that in comparison to the horrific deaths of some six million Jews, even the suffering of a Holocaust survivor may approach insignificance. Primo Levi has suggested as much, writing that "we, the survivors, are not the true witnesses," but "an anomalous minority" made up of those who survived and therefore did not witness or experience the full horror of the death camps. The true or "complete witnesses," according to Levi, are those who not only saw but "experienced personally" the destruction. But, he writes, "The destruction brought to an end, the job completed, was not told by anyone, just as no one ever returned to describe his own death." 91 One can appreciate his point while asking what it is readers want the "true witnesses" to bear witness to. On the one hand, readers desire to access, through witness testimony, the true horror of the Holocaust, a horror arguably eluded by those who managed to survive. But, on the other hand, readers are interested in knowing how witnesses survived and how they have lived with the Holocaust in its aftermath. Levi's "complete witnesses" could not speak to the latter, and therefore would not necessarily provide testimony more complete than that produced by the survivors. In her memoir Still Alive, Ruth Kluger distinguishes between survivors and those she calls "the true victims" in terms that are worth reading alongside Levi's commentary on the true witnesses. According to Kluger, the survivor starts writing "to tell about the great catastrophe," but ends up telling a "survivor story" instead, as "the reader inevitably tends to separate, or deduct, this one life, which she has come to know, from the millions

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who remain anonymous." Proposing that true or complete victimization involved mass death as an anonymous victim, Kluger indicates that readers are justified in separating survivor-writers from the millions who perished. "By virtue of survival, we belong with you, who weren't exposed to the genocidal danger," she tells her readers, "and we know that there is a black river between us and the true victims. Therefore this is not the story of a Holocaust victim and becomes less and less so as it nears the end." 92 Even as I want to recognize Kluger as a survivor and a true victim of Nazi persecution (and Levi as a survivor and a true witness), I find value in the distinction she makes between survivor stories and victim stories. As the conclusion of Un di velt hot geshvign makes clear, Wiesel's Yiddish memoir is a survivor story, owing its very existence to the survivor's reassertion of "the will to live" after doctors have pronounced his death sentence. Night, by comparison, is a victim story in which the Holocaust victim does not outlive the image of himself after death, but incorporates it. Eliezer is the victim who returned to describe his own death. This may account, in part, for why Wiesel has been celebrated as the authoritative witness to the Holocaust. Personifying "the true witness," he has been called such things as "the spokesman for the Holocaust," "the poet laureate of the Holocaust," and the "undisputed expert on the Holocaust period."93 The book's presentation of a victim's story may also explain why Night is so often taught and read as portraying "a personal experience that can be multiplied by 6 million" or "the Jewish experience at Auschwitz," and not one survivor's anomalous story. 94 And yet, Night, like the Yiddish memoir, is still above all a survivor story. As Kluger indicates, this is true of all survivors' stories: readers, knowing that these books' authors survived the Holocaust, identify the narratorprotagonists as "survivors" from the start. Thus, everything the protagonists do lends itself to being read as what they had to do in order to survive, as what enabled them to survive, although in actuality survival was primarily a matter of accident. But in addition to this, Night reads as a survivor story because the questions that haunt Eliezer-Where was God? How could a merciful God allow the Holocaust to happen?-are among the first questions anyone living after the Holocaust might ask when contemplating the event. In short, Eliezer contemplates the Holocaust from a vantage point shared by Wiesel's readers. Here we might recall the concluding image from Kazin's 1960 review of

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Night: "I don't think I shall soon forget the picture of this young boy standing on a mound of corpses, accusing God of deserting His creation" ("Least" 283). This image, like that of Eliezer facing his corpse at the end of Night, combines the figures of the survivor and the dead. Kazin's young boy stands on the mound of corpses as an extension of this mound, one of these corpses reanimated, though at the same time he is the sole survivor, the person who, after the Holocaust, can accuse God of abandoning the Jews. Readers will more readily identify with this survivor than with the camp inmate who, according to Wiesel's 1995 memoir, "had neither the strength nor the time for theological meditation or metaphysical speculation about the attributes of the Master of the Universe" (AR 83). The plight of undergoing a crisis of faith in the midst of mass death is simply more dramatic, engaging, and accessible to readers than that of being physically and mentally reduced, through starvation and brutal overwork, to thinking solely and continually about the daily bread ration. In capturing the former, Kazin's image neatly summarizes what distinguishes Night not only from other survivor testimonies, but also from Wiesel's own earlier and later memoirs.

Truth in the Extreme A problem with Wiesel's many retellings of his Holocaust experiences is that he presents a number of points-each of which has an element of truth-as wide-ranging, mutually-exclusive truth-claims about what it was like "in the camp." This is evidenced by the opposing themes of Night and All Rivers Run to the Sea, which actually present versions of the camps which are more interrelated than either memoir indicates. Rather than sensing this as a problem, Wiesel and the many scholars who write on his work embrace it as a discourse of "paradox." In an interview with Wiesel, Carol Rittner asks about the "apparent paradox" between lines in Night, such as "Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever" and "Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God" (32), and lines in later writings which express his affirmation of God. Wiesel replies that this paradox was intentional: "It was true then, it may even be true for some moments now, but it cannot be true forever." 95 This answer can be taken to mean that he feels differently than thenar-

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rator of Night does: his faith was not consumed forever, in part because forever is too long a time. Wiesel states: "If I had written nothing else, I think that Night would have been a statement of total despair, but I kept on writing in order to show that while I stand by every word, every comma, every silence in that book, one must continue" (32). Finally, this is why Kazin turns on Wiesel: the survivor continues to live and, in living, to change. Having died, Primo Levi does not present Kazin with this problem, and this in no small part contributes to his being a "far more trustworthy witness." When Wiesel proves to be different from Eliezer, Kazin, who never quite managed to distinguish between the two, rejects both the writer and his book. He cannot only fault Wiesel for rejoining the Jewish community, but he must renounce Eliezer as well, and he does so by doubting the veracity of Night. Kazin tells us that if Wiesel's message does not remain one of total despair, then his message of total despair in Night is not to be trusted. Despite the selfish motivations underlying Kazin's treatment of Wiesel, this survivor's writings do lend Kazin's charges some credibility. Night and the 1995 memoir, published thirty-five years apart, present two images of Auschwitz (and of what it meant to be a Jew in Auschwitz) that cannot be easily reconciled. The theme of religious crisis or "total despair" in Night remains in conflict with the theme of religious faith and practice in Wiesel's later work. But such conflict is not unprecedented in survivors' accounts. In his valuable study Searching for Meaning in the Holocaust, Sidney M. Bolkosky remarks, "Holding such simultaneous, conflicting attitudes emerges as a commonplace in many survivor testimonies. And in few other subjects does this pattern manifest itself so strongly as in the subject of religion or God in the Holocaust. "96 Bolkosky discusses one example at length, the testimony of Abe P., a survivor whose background is remarkably similar to Wiesel's. Abe had been a deeply religious Jewish boy from a small town in Transylvania when he was deported to Auschwitz. According to his testimony, while in the camp he never stopped believing. Abe says, "When you davened [prayed] in Auschwitz, you davened with such gehunim, such intensity ... I was afraid .... used to daven constantly with such concentration: 'Please God, help us!'" (61). He states that only after the war did he rebel: "I became a shaygetz [non-Jew] .... I dropped out for a long time ... I'm ashamed to say it. I even ate trafe [nonkosher]. That's when I questioned. No! Let's not put

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it that way ... I rebelled ... Who did I rebel against? I don't know. This is the truth. I don't know whether it was God .... But it didn't last long" (62). Noting how throughout his testimony Abe both affirms and challenges his faith in God, Bolkosky writes, "Perhaps such paradoxical views might exclude each other in different contexts. They do not in this one" (67). Despite Wiesel's embrace of "paradox," paradoxical views do appear to exclude each other in each of his testimonies. Because of this, his highly conflicting views and attitudes become apparent only when his testimonies are looked at together. While this frustrates readers' efforts to identify the "true" Auschwitz and the survivor's "true" experience, the difficulty of settling on a single, authoritative testimony speaks to a larger truth: that each survivor's account of his or her experiences presents its own theme or subjective truth, that a single survivor's accounts may present contrasting themes or truths over time. Readers' investments in the thematic truth of any single survivor's account depends on the degree to which that theme resonates with their own lives. As readers, we respond to themes that speak to us, reaffirming our own worldviews. When reading survivor memoirs, we look for these themes to be rooted in the survivor's wartime experiences," authentically" located there in the Holocaust. The desire to locate thematic truths at Auschwitz is rooted in what Michael Andre Bernstein calls an "ideology of the extreme," the belief that "the truth lies in the extreme moments which 'ordinary bourgeois life' covers over." 97 Bernstein notes that for many survivors of the camps, "the conviction that the experiences undergone there have revealed a fundamental truth about the world often seems irresistible" (89). And this is understandable: "For many, but by no means all survivors, their time in the camps is the central truth of their lives and stays with them," writes Bernstein. "We need to respect their 'total worldview,' but it is not, nor should we try to make it, the truth of ours" (90). Rejecting the notion of in extremis veritas, he holds that our beliefs, ideas, and values are best tested in the daily routines and habits of "normal life," not in situations of extremity (84, 89)· Of course, those survivors who regard their camp experiences as the central truth of their lives do not agree upon a single "fundamental truth about the world," but hold differing views of culture, identity, human nature, and God. Rather than trying to make a survivor's total worldview our own, we may search among this plurality of worldviews for that survivor whose

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portrayal of the Holocaust reaffirms our own previously held attitudes and beliefs. The person we choose, the "good" survivor, not only allows us to locate vicariously our values and beliefs in the camps, but, through this act of identification, enables us to feel closer to the Holocaust. Still, as the case of Alfred Kazin illustrates, this is a hazardous undertaking: the chosen survivor might not turn out to be quite the embodiment of the Holocaust we had wished for. The survivor might turn out to be more complicatedly human. The survivor-nonwitness relationship may be complicated not only by the nonwitness's desire to find his or her own "subjective" truth revealed at Auschwitz, but by the survivor's own adherence to an ideology of the extreme. Wiesel's clashing testimonies appear to result from a desire to locate his changing relationship to God there in the camps, the ultimate site of revealed truth, rather than in the aftermath of the Holocaust-that is, in "normal life." His selective portrayal of Auschwitz and Buchenwald must therefore change in accordance with his developing attitudes and beliefs; retrospectively, these beliefs must be situated at rather than after Auschwitz. Thus in his 1999 sequel to All Rivers Run to the Sea, titled And the Sea Is Never Full, Wiesel states, "I never gave up my faith in God. Even over there I went on praying." As if to prove this was so, he then offers a revised explanation of what he meant to express in the most famous scene from Night: "I tell of a boy's death by hanging, and conclude that it is God Himself that the killer is determined to murder." Wiesel would now have us understand the image of God on the gallows not as an expression of anger and protest, but as a keen insight into the Nazis' motivations. But what then of Eliezer's Job-like protest? Wiesel explains, "It is because I still believe in God that I argue with Him. As Job said: 'Even if He kills me, I shall continue to place my hope in Him.' " 98 This protest attains new meaning when, far from criticizing Job for ceasing to rebel, as he had earlier, Wiesel praises him for retaining faith and hope in God. Between the publication of his 1995 and 1999 memoirs, Wiesel published an op-ed piece in the New York Times titled "A Prayer for the Days of Awe." 99 In this piece, addressed to God rather than readers of the Times, he asks, "What about my faith in you, Master of the Universe?" His answer: "I now realize I never lost it, not even over there, during the darkest hours of my life. I don't know why I kept on whispering my daily prayers, and those one reserves for the Sabbath, and for the holidays, but I did recite

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them, often with my father and, on Rosh ha-Shanah eve, with hundreds of inmates at Auschwitz." Given this realization, what are we, and what is the Master of the Universe, to make of Night? Wiesel offers the following explanation: "In my testimony I have written harsh words, burning words about your role in the tragedy. I would not repeat them today. But I felt them then." When was then? Does Wiesel refer here to the time he was in the camps, or to ten years later, when he wrote about the camps? Or to both? With Wiesel it is hard to know; as a figure, in Kazin's words, "still visibly suffering the atrocities he had experienced in Auschwitz and Buchenwald," he maintains a largely ahistorical persona, permanently identified with Auschwitz regardless of whatever changes he has undergone since being "over there." Vivian Gornick, in her review of All Rivers Run to the Sea, writes that Wiesel's rhetoric "makes him unreal to himself. It allows him to write of himself as he would of a character in one of his own fables."100 Another reviewer, Arthur Hertzberg, similarly observes that the real-life Wiesel, who "has become, so to speak, the living memorial of the Holocaust," goes missing in this book. Hertzberg is unhappy with Wiesel's ritualistic retelling of his time in the camps, but still more troubled by what follows it: "The rest of this memoir, several hundreds of pages in which he tells of his life in freedom, is much more problematic. He gives us many stories ... but the central story of his life after Auschwitz is avoided and even obfuscated. How, indeed, did Wiesel become, in the public mind, the quintessential survivor? Did Wiesel have a role in the creation of his own myth?" 101 At the very least, Wiesel participated in the creation of his own myth by mystifying the story of his life after the Holocaust, effectively suppressing the story of how he came to be the living memorial of that event. The fact that this "central story" has yet to be written will, no doubt, prove to be an essential part of the story itself. Given Wiesel's unparalleled influence on how the Holocaust has been studied and commemorated, it is most curious that the generic status of his canonical book, Night, remains obscure, that Un di velt hot geshvign has not been translated into English, and that a scholarly, comprehensive biographical study of Wiesel's life has yet to be written. 102 Even Peter Novick, whose study The Holocaust in American Life examines how the Holocaust has "moved from history to myth," becoming" the bearer of'eternal truths' not bound by historical circumstances," has very little to say about how

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Wiesel became the emblematic survivor. As if throwing up his hands, he writes of Wiesel: "The relationship between his eminence and the rise of Holocaust consciousness is clearly circular, with no way of distinguishing cause from effect." This admission is startling, given that Novick's historical study sets out to understand the evolution of Holocaust consciousness in the United States. 103 Following Wiesel, many Holocaust scholars regard the Holocaust as "a tale that cannot be told." But more than fifty years after the Holocaust, it is the story of Wiesel's postwar transformation into the emblematic Holocaust survivor, more so than the story of his time in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, that resists the telling. Still, a fragment of this story, the much smaller tale of Kazin's falling out with Wiesel, offers some clues. Above all, it suggests that Wiesel's success owes much to his ability to unwrite the story of his life after Auschwitz by rewriting the story of his life in the camps. Through continual retellings of his story, Wiesel assures readers and listeners that who he is now coincides with who he was then and there, despite change over time. In this way, Wiesel embodies the Holocaust not as a temporally distant historical event, but as a living myth.

Reading Autobiographically Visitors to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum begin their tour of the permanent exhibition by receiving "identity cards," each bearing the name, photo, and brief life history of a victim of Nazi persecution. Michael Berenbaum, in his role as the museum's project director, has explained that these cards enable visitors to begin their tour of the museum with "an immediate, personal leap of identity." As originally planned, visitors would type their ages, gender, and profession into a computer and, based on this information, receive" an identity card of someone like themselves who was caught up in the Holocaust," the idea being, apparently, that museum visitors would be more likely to identify with Holocaust victims who were "like themselves." 104 As they made their way through the permanent exhibition, visitors would have their cards updated three times, learning first what happened to their victims between 1933 and 1939, then what they suffered between 1940 and 1944, and finally whether their victims survived or perished in the Holocaust.

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Due to mechanical problems, this original plan for the identity cards was abandoned. As it turns out, museum visitors neither type their personal information into a computer nor update their cards in machines on each of the museum's three floors. Instead, they simply take their identity cards from one of two stacks en route to the elevator that takes them up to the permanent exhibition. These two stacks are labeled "male" and "female." The desire to match museum visitors with Holocaust victims of similar age and profession could not be realized, but the insistence on matching visitor and victim by sex remains. My attention was drawn to this fact when on one visit to the museum I took the identity card of a female victim. No sooner had I taken the card bearing the image and abbreviated life story of Inge Scheer than a museum worker approached me to let me know I had taken a card from the wrong pile. It seems that Americans can imaginatively put themselves in the place of Europeans; non-Jews can put themselves in the place of Jews; those of us living in the 1990s and 2ooos can put ourselves in the place of those living in the 1930s and 40s; museum visitors can put themselves in the place of Holocaust victims. But one should not, or simply cannot, make the "personal leap of identity" across lines of sexual difference. In one sense the museum designers may be right; for, whereas female readers and viewers are used to identifying with male protagonists (who, after all, are far more often the main characters in books, films, and television shows, female characters being consigned to secondary, "supporting" roles), male readers and viewers are far less willing to identify with female protagonists. Yet the ability of the identity cards to facilitate "an immediate personal leap of identity" for male or female visitors has been greatly overestimated. On one of my visits to the museum, as I rode the elevator up to the permanent exhibition, I overheard teenage boys comparing their cards; one gleefully told his friend, "Cool! Mine got killed by a pitchfork!" Nonetheless, the identity cards speak to the museum designers' belief that the Holocaust is best approached through acts of identification that "personalize" the event and foster greater understanding of what individual victims suffered. This is a widely held belief among Holocaust educators, many of whom, at the middle and high school level, use role-playing games and creative writing assignments to encourage their students to put themselves, as it were, in the victims' shoes. 105 This belief has also influenced which books are widely taught to stu-

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dents. Alan Mintz notes that The Diary of a Young Girl and Wiesel's Night, two books which "gradually became classics for younger readers as a first point of contact with the Holocaust," both facilitate identification for American readers. 106 The diary, first published in English in 1952, gained a large readership because "it steered clear of the horror and because it stressed the commonality of human experience rather than the distinctiveness of the victims" (17). And though Night is often set in opposition to the diary, Mintz observes that it, like the diary, emphasizes common themes: "The universality of Wiesel's themes, the failure of God and the failure of the father, made Night a powerful text for an audience that ... was ready to follow Wiesel's autobiographical narrator into the dark domain that Anne Frank had also entered in her life but not in her diary" (21). The degree to which young readers can identify with the young protagonists of both works accounts in no small part for why these are the two most widely read Holocaust-related books in the United States. When considering which survivor-writers have been most often discussed by Holocaust scholars-Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi immediately come to mind, followed by Jean Amery, Tadeusz Borowski, Jerzy Kosinski, Aharon Appelfeld, Paul Celan, Bruno Bettelheim, and Viktor Frankl-one might assume that gendered identification has played a key role in the formation of this canon. 107 Since the early 198os, many female scholars have argued that a male-dominated "Holocaust establishment" has ignored the place of women in the Holocaust, treating men's writings as representative of all Holocaust victims' experiences. 108 Consequently, the attention of many female Holocaust scholars has turned to the hitherto neglected place of women with regard to the Holocaust, and to analyses of how sex and gender roles affected both women and men's experiences. Some male scholars have responded by charging that these female scholars are projecting their own concerns onto the victims, "allowing a feminist agenda ... to 'take over the Holocaust."' 109 While critical of female scholars' identification with women in the Holocaust, male Holocaust scholars are largely insensitive to how identification with male survivors and the privileging of traditional masculine values has shaped their own work. For example, male scholars writing on Holocaust literature are unlikely to reflect on why their work focuses far more on the inner life of solitary persons than on the social life of interpersonal relations. 110 When male Holocaust scholars do recognize the role played by identification and as-

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sess its positive or negative effects, they are likely to consider identification in connection to one of three devalued groups: women, youngsters, and the non-Jewish masses. Identification is viewed as necessary and good insofar as it causes the overwhelmingly non-Jewish American public to care about the Holocaust and feel for its Jewish victims. Though the Holocaust miniseries was derided as soap-opera, many critics came to appreciate its success at enabling viewer identification with the Jews and thereby emotionally affecting mass audiences. Schindler's List has similarly been lauded, and teachers have defended the use of Holocaust simulations or role-playing games by citing their effectiveness in engaging and affecting young students. But identification may be judged more critically when the Holocaust victims being identified with are female. This is nowhere more evident than when those who identify with the female victims are not men, but women or youngsters. In an essay titled "The Anne Frank We Remember," Alvin H. Rosenfeld has argued that an emphasis on identification can distort readers' understanding of the Holocaust. He maintains that young readers should not be encouraged to "see themselves" in Anne Frank, "for in its historical essence her experience and theirs have almost nothing in common." Instead, "American youngsters should be made aware of the distance between Anne's harried existence and their own." 111 Rosenfeld's argument finds support in novelist Francine Prose's recollections of her own childhood obsession with The Diary of Anne Frank. In her contribution to the volume Testimony, she recalls how for years she reread the diary every few months, memorizing her favorite parts, those with which she most identified; these concerned Anne's romance with Peter Van Daan. As a girl, Prose found in the diary's "story of a girl who had a love affair and a girl who died" a dramatic form of tragic suffering that was romantically appealing. 112 As a child, Prose knew the Holocaust involved real suffering, but, she writes, "the knowledge was abstract for me, distanced; only much later did it become what I would call 'real"' (105). I have found nothing analogous to Rosenfeld's remarks on The Diary of Anne Frank in the vast secondary literature on Night. Scholars have not voiced concern that young readers might overidentify with Eliezer, neglecting the considerably greater distance between his nightmare existence and their own lives. Scholars might very well point to differences between

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the books, claiming that, for instance, identification with the father-son relationship in Night does not provide an escape route from the horror of the camps-horror that is missing from the diary in any case. Yet, as Kazin's reading of Night has shown, a desire to feel closer to the horror does not guarantee a less distorted, more "real" understanding of the Holocaust. Readers may still"see themselves" in Eliezer and interpret Wiesel's testimony in terms of their own experiences and attitudes. In an essay examining the role of identification in her reading of stories written by Holocaust survivors, Susan Rubin Suleiman describes a form of reading she calls "autobiographical." Whereas autobiographical writing involves telling one's own story, she explains, "autobiographical reading" involves recognizing something of oneself in another's story, if not actively "reading for it." 113 In other words, in reading another's life story we read for those aspects which resonate with our own experiences and sensibilities; we are self-seeking readers. A desire for self-recognition influences what we choose to read and write about, as we search for those stories and themes which have autobiographical resonance with our own lives. Whereas women have long been regarded as readers who overidentify with the narratives they read, we have been much less willing to recognize that men similarly engage in autobiographical reading. 114 Suleiman touches on why this is so in an essay that discusses why Simone de Beauvoir made the writer-hero of her novel The Mandarins a man. Beauvoir's explanation reads as follows: "if I had entrusted to [a female character] the totality of my experience, my book would have been ... the study of a particular case. Depicting a writer, I wanted the reader to see in him a fellow human being, not a rare animal ... " (74). In short, for the general reader man represents both men and human beings in general, whereas woman represents only herself-which is to say, the restrictive particularity of being female. This has been the case in Holocaust studies, where, "by assuming that the universal Holocaust experience was the male experience, scholars have simply ignored the different voices of women survivors." 115 Scholars have similarly ignored the ways in which gendered identification has shaped their selective reading of survivor testimony. And yet, gender is only the most obvious factor in the autobiographical reading of testimony. As Pascale Bos observes, "So many of the authors in the canon of Holocaust literature are middle-class, assimilated Jewish humanists (for example, Primo Levi, Anne Frank, Jean Amery, Etty Hillesum,

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while Charlotte Delbo is not Jewish at all), which suggests that in that regard, too, our personal bias as overwhelmingly middle-class and secular scholars leads to the selection of certain texts over others." 116 Just as gender is only one component of any person's sense of self, so gender is only one factor in the autobiographical reading of Holocaust literature. Can this mode of reading really be applicable to subject matter as "incomparable" as the Holocaust? Kazin's efforts to identify his own religious frustration with Eliezer's protest against God at Auschwitz demonstrates the ease with which Holocaust literature may be read "autobiographically."117 But Kazin is only one example; for another, I turn to Harry James Cargas, whose extensive scholarship on Wiesel includes Harry James Cargas in Conversation with Elie Wiesel (1976), the revised and expanded Conversations with Elie Wiesel (1992), and the edited collections Responses to Elie Wiesel (1978) and Telling the Tale: A Tribute to Elie Wiesel on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday (1993). Cargas recalls that when he first read about the Holocaust, his "focus was not on the event, on the tragedy of the 5 million plus, but on father-child relations." 118 He writes: "I was a new father, stunned by the responsibility. Coming from the roughhouse atmosphere of the Detroit suburb ... I thought all fathers had to be flawless, emotionless, tough guys .... Then, in reading Wiesel's memoir Night, I could not comprehend how he could continue to love his father at Auschwitz when his father could not protect the boy from the evils of the concentration camp." 119 Cargas read Holocaust memoirs in search of a better understanding and appreciation of fatherhood and family. He explains, "Were Jewish families different from the kinds of families I knew? I had to find out. So I began reading books about the Holocaust." 120 Because of his candor, Cargas provides us with a particularly explicit account of autobiographical reading, one in which gendered identification plays a decisive role. But what makes it so explicit-namely, the rejection of traditional masculinity and a concern with interpersonal relationships-is also what distinguishes it from Holocaust scholarship in which gendered identification, although no less of a factor, is less visible, because it does not challenge gender norms. Generally speaking, this scholarship is concerned not so much with relationships between human beings, but with the solitary individual; therefore, interpersonal relationships matter insofar as their breakdown relates to an individual's existential crisis. For instance, Langer describes Night as "an account of a young boy's divorce

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from life," writing that "at its heart lies the profoundest symbolic confrontation of our century, the meeting of man and Auschwitz." 121 This conception of Wiesel's book is no less dramatic or romantic than Prose's childhood reading of Anne Frank's diary as the story of "a girl who had a love affair and a girl who died." The story of boy-meets-Auschwitz is a form of existential romance, suggesting that the magnitude of the Holocaust and its implications for humanity are most dramatically and effectively conveyed through a lone male figure's existential crisis. Kazin suggests as much, writing in his 1989 essay that Night was" clearly influenced by Sartre's and Camus's existentialism." He adds that what he took to be the extremely moving expression of "Wiesel's anguish as a Jew" was actually borrowed from these French writers: "The infusion of existentialism into what Wiesel seemed to be presenting as a Hasid's rebellion certainly made for extraordinary intensity" ("My Debt" 118). But more so than Sartre or Camus, Martin Buber seems to have been a major influence on Wiesel; after all, existentialism and Judaism were already united in his work. In a 1951 address, for example, Buber remarked, "In this our own time, one asks again and again: How is a Jewish life still possible after Auschwitz? I would like to frame this question more correctly: how is a life with God still possible in a time in which there is an Auschwitz? ... One can still 'believe' in the God who allowed those things to happen, but can one still speak to Him? Can one still hear His word? Can one still call to Him? Dare we recommend to the survivors of Auschwitz, the Job of the gas chambers: 'Give thanks unto the Lord, for He is good; for His mercy endureth forever'?" 122 In All Rivers Run to the Sea, Wiesel recalls how, as a student in Paris, he saw Buber lecture on religious existentialism to a packed hall. "Buber was treated like a prophet," he writes, perhaps identifying the model for the persona he would acquire in time (154). Though Wiesel would surely object to Kazin's charge that Eliezer's rebellion in Night is actually French existentialism in Hasid's clothing (Wiesel and others have discussed the influence of existentialism on his novels, but never in relation to Night), his narratives do tend to focus on the existential despair of characters who, like Eliezer, are solitary male figures. 123 Due partly to this, in Conversations with Elie Wiesel Cargas asks him why there have been so very few strong female characters in his novels. Wiesel answers by evoking the deep meaningfulness of what I have called the existential romance, a sentimental narrative dramatizing the

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plight of man condemned to suffer alone in a mysterious, seemingly irrational universe: If you have a woman in a book, there is a certain climate that you create. Ul-

timately it becomes a man-woman relationship which really becomes, then, the axis for the book. Of course it's important, it's part of life. But that's not what I could innovate. It's not my subject. If I have something to say, it's in a different way. It's actually man and man; man alone. Until now I always could be able to show the degree of loneliness. If I had put a woman there, it would have diverted the attention from that theme to something else. I am not saying the other one is not good. Maybe it would be better. But it's not when I have things to say. 124 In stark contrast to the concept of "man alone," Wiesel acknowledges no conception of women outside of the man-woman relationship. A woman is "part of life" -that is, she is part of a man's life-but in and of herself she is a diversion from what the survivor-writer has to say, from what actually matters. And what matters most is, to borrow Langer's words, the

meeting of man and Auschwitz. Francine Prose recalls that around the same time she was obsessively rereading The Diary of Anne Frank, she met a married couple who were friends of her parents. They were also Holocaust survivors. "European, sophisticated, multilingual, extremely handsome (Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer), they were the living embodiments of the Holocaust I'd envisioned," she recalls (104). Prose remembers her parents telling her that the couple's story involved being hidden by Polish peasants and finding the woman's mother after the war; she had been sent to the camps and survived. "And mostly what I remember," writes Prose, "was how glamorous it sounded, how romantic, dramatic-how much like the Holocaust movie I had dreamed up in my head" (104-5). The meeting of man and Auschwitz is another kind of Holocaust movie, just as Wiesel is another embodiment of the Holocaust. Scholars and critics are certainly more mature, learned, and interested in engaging the horror than Prose was as a young girL But, as Kazin's broken romance with Wiesel makes plain, greater age and knowledge do not necessarily correlate to a greater willingness to reflect upon the needs and desires that underlie our identifications with those survivors through whom we try to relate to the Holocaust.

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Holocaust Understandings

In

Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum, Edward T. Linenthal presents Elie Wiesel's unrealized vision of what visitors to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum would encounter upon entering the permanent exhibition. At a 1983 council meeting, Wiesel described how he would like visitors to pass into a seemingly endless hall covered with photographs of the Treblinka extermination camp. And as they faced these photos, he would like a voice or a guide to speak to them softly, whispering, "Look at the faces, look at them well. You don't understand, don't try. Just remember." 1 Whether that of a guide or a recording, the declaratory voice, no less coercive for being whispered softly, is Wiesel's. I imagine this survivor haunting the great hall, silently approaching museum visitors as they look at the Treblinka photographs, to whisper his message over their shoulders: "You don't understand, don't try. Just remember." Trying to make plain sense of this instruction, I wonder what Wiesel would have museum visitors "remember" when they look at the faces in these photographs and, for that matter, after they have left the museum. What is remembrance without understanding? Imagining the Holocaust museum that would receive visitors in the manner described by Wiesel, Linenthal comments: "Here the sacred mystery that was the Holocaust would stamp itself on individual psyches,

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and visitors would, ideally, emerge with a renewed appreciation of its mystery" (122). What visitors would remember, then, is that the Holocaust is a mystery, an event they cannot and should not try to understand. Is this kind of Holocaust remembrance beneficial? Many scholars think not, arguing that "the desire to forget, or to ignore, receives support from those formulations that claim that the Holocaust cannot be understood." 2 Historian Yehuda Bauer has written that when we think of the Holocaust as something "mysterious" and "far away" we partake in an "elegant form of escapism" which obscures the contemporary relevance of the event. He argues for a "return to the actual reality and concreteness of the Holocaust," claiming in The Holocaust in Historical Perspective (1978) that emphasis on how the Holocaust defies understanding, or may only be understood by survivors, is misguided: "On the contrary, the crucial problem is how to anchor the Holocaust in the historical consciousness of the generations that follow it." 3 For Bauer, this anchoring requires historical understanding, starting with a basic factual knowledge of what happened. Numerous scholars have argued that without an understanding of how the Holocaust happened once, we will find ourselves unable to prevent its recurrence. "Clearly, there are factors that help make Auschwitz understandable," claims philosopher Alan Rosenberg. "We can isolate institutional and political developments, as well as conceptual and ideological trends, that constituted enabling conditions for Hitler's enactment of his Final Solution.... We must acknowledge the antecedent conditions of the Holocaust if we are to develop an understanding that will prevent them from ever prevailing again" (381). What stops us from acknowledging this history, according to Rosenberg, is "the unintended block to understanding often erected by survivors' testimony" (386). Here he provides the following example: "Elie Wiesel states that 'whoever has not lived through the event can never know it. And whoever has lived through it can never fully reveal it.' To those who are not survivors, he is emphatic: 'You, who never lived under a sky of blood, will never know what it was like. Even if you read all the books ever written, even if you listen to all the testimonies ever given"' (386-67). 4 While Wiesel's words are "eloquent, in one sense true," Rosenberg finds that they are nonetheless dangerously discouraging. But, he adds, this need not be so, for such blocks to understanding are based on a fundamental confusion on the part of survivors and nonwitnesses alike:

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It is a confusion between knowledge by direct experience (which survivors

alone can possess) and knowledge about something experienced indirectly.... We cannot relive the experience of the survivors. We cannot have an immediate experience of the full and actual horror of the events. What the survivors are telling us, then, is that we cannot know Auschwitz or the Warsaw ghetto as an immediate experience. This, however, does not mean that we cannot know about the Holocaust. There is no reason we should not try, as we do with other events of historical importance, to know and to understand the factors that gave rise to the context that made Auschwitz and Warsaw possible. (387) Rosenberg explains that we have failed to distinguish between "knowing by experience" and "knowing about," or between experiential and historical understandings of the Holocaust. With this distinction in mind, he argues, we can remove the block to understanding Wiesel has "erected" by realizing that when this survivor writes that "whoever has not lived through the event can never know it," he means that nonwitnesses can never know it in a lived or experiential sense, and not that they cannot gain knowledge of the Holocaust by studying it as a historical phenomenon. Although Rosenberg assumes that Wiesel would deny nonwitnesses only an understanding of the survivors' experiences, and not a historical understanding of the "enabling conditions for Hitler's enactment of his Final Solution," this is far from evident. Dan Magurshak, based on his own reading of Wiesel's statements (among them, the claim that "the Holocaust transcends history") believes that for Wiesel "incomprehensibility, at the very least, means the impossibility of understanding fully and adequately the 'jointly sufficient,' or the necessary, conditions for the Holocaust's occurrence."5 In addition, many nonwitnesses have argued that the Holocaust is incomprehensible in this sense. Filmmaker Claude Lanzmann has asserted most vehemently that the very attempt to understand the factors that made the Holocaust possible is highly immoral. Between the conditions that may have enabled the Holocaust to occur and the gassing of men, women, and children, writes Lanzmann, there is "a gap, an abyss, and this abyss will never be bridged." Any attempt to bridge this gap participates in what he calls "the obscenity of the project of understanding." 6 This argument challenges Rosenberg's effort to distinguish an area of Holocaust understanding unequivocally open to nonwitnesses.

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Still, the distinction Rosenberg draws between two kinds of Holocaust knowledge-knowing from direct experience and knowing through historical study-is crucial. But there is another related and equally crucial distinction to be made. For we are dealing here not only with two ways of knowing, but with two objects of knowledge. One is the Holocaust, the other what is oftentimes called "the Holocaust experience." This term refers not to the experiences of the millions who died of starvation, disease, beatings, hangings, bullets, or gassing, but rather to the wartime experiences of individuals who survived the Holocaust. Survival is a necessary part of the Holocaust experience when the full experience of the Holocaust is implicitly understood to include not only wearing the yellow star and starving in the ghetto, but learning that most or all of one's family has been killed; not only deportation to the camps, but liberation and emigration; not only being engulfed in the catastrophe, but bearing witness to the catastrophe in its aftermath. The Holocaust and a survivor's Holocaust experience constitute related but distinct objects of knowledge. It is one thing to understand the antecedent conditions of the Holocaust-to know, in Rosenberg's words, "the factors that gave rise to the context that made Auschwitz and Warsaw possible" -and quite another to understand "what it was like" to live and die at Auschwitz-Birkenau or in the Warsaw ghetto. Though the difference between the historical event and the lived experience of the Holocaust may appear obvious, it is seldom articulated and more often than not blurred by those discussing the "incomprehensibility" of the Holocaust. One reason is that the Holocaust and the victim's Holocaust experience are made to stand for each other. The relationship between the two is exemplified by the use of the word "Auschwitz," which might refer to what victims suffered at the Auschwitz camps or, far more broadly, to the Holocaust in its entirety. As a consequence of this semantic confusion, the distinction between historical knowledge and personal experience of the Holocaust is often blurred. The term "memory" also facilitates this blurring, as its imprecise meaning connotes both the survivor's recall of lived experiences and the nonwitness's familiarity with Holocaust narratives? This blurring can serve to accentuate the Holocaust understanding of either the survivors or the nonwitnesses, the assumption or unspoken assertion being that to know the history is to know the experience, or vice-versa.

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However, to know what Bauer calls the stark facts of the Holocaust"the where and when and how and in what sequence" (4)-is not toremember and know what it was like to live through the Holocaust. And the reverse is true as well: victimization and survivorship do not impart broad historical knowledge of the Holocaust. For this reason, those interviewing survivors for the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University are instructed to respect survivors as "experts only of the self," and to intervene if survivors "extensively recount historical fact," in order to lead them back to their own experiences. 8 Clinical psychologist Aaron Hass also addresses this point, stating: Most survivors know little of the general history of the Third Reich and its program for the Jews. If you asked a typical survivor what occurred at the Wannsee Conference, she would not know the answer. Some survivors have a clear understanding of the persecution of Jews that took place in their own country but not of what happened in others. "My Auschwitz world was my barracks," Sol Feingold remarked. "I didn't even think about another barracks." In conversation with another survivor, I mentioned a book concerning the Holocaust that I highly recommended. It was clear that she had been offended in some manner. "I lived it. I don't need to read books about it." 9 Whereas Sol Feingold emphasizes the limits of his experiential know ledge, the other, unnamed survivor expands hers to include or diminish whatever "it" is that might be contained in a book on the Holocaust. Here book knowledge dwindles into insignificance when juxtaposed with the personal experience of the survivor. Her exchange with Hass suggests that historical knowledge of the Holocaust and lived knowledge of the Holocaust experience may not always complement one another; rather, these two bodies of knowledge may compete with each other in a bid for what has been called "proprietorship" of the Holocaust. 10 The question of whether or not the Holocaust is at all understandable is embroiled in a contest over who really understands the Holocaust-and must therefore defend it against deformations by those who lack such understanding. Connecting Wiesel to this phenomenon, Phillip Lopate writes: "Sometimes it almost seems that 'the Holocaust' is a corporation headed by Elie Wiesel, who defends his patents with articles in the Arts and

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Leisure section of the Sunday New York Times. " 11 It was in the Sunday New York Times Magazine that Wiesel stated that "whoever has not lived through the event can never know it. And whoever has lived through it can never fully reveal it." 12 Rereading this statement, we may wonder what "it" is that nonwitnesses can never know and survivors can never fully reveal: the event or what it was like to live through the event? The conflation of the two suggests that the Holocaust can only be understood through lived experience. But perhaps just the opposite is the case; perhaps because it is a historical concept comprising myriad events which no one person experienced directly, the Holocaust can only be understood historically. Although the Holocaust is composed of countless events, it is commonly referred to as "the event" (or, with more gravitas, as "the Event"). As historian George M. Kren explains in "The Holocaust as History": "The word Holocaust does not refer to an event, but is a generalization that unites a variety of discrete events under one rubric: the killing of the mentally ill in Germany, the mass shootings of Jews by the Einsatzgruppen, the Kommissarbefehl (commissar order) that resulted in the killing of Communist functionaries, and the establishment of the death camps. The unity between these events is a historical judgment, never self-evident, and in the case of the Holocaust always subject to polemical arguments." Kren illustrates his point with his reference to the Kommissarbefehl. "Should the (strikingly unreported) systematic mass starvation of Soviet prisoners of war be included in the Holocaust?" he asks. 13 Many scholars would answer no, maintaining that "the Holocaust" should refer strictly to those events involving the systematic killing of Jews.l 4 Meanwhile, the canon of Holocaust literature includes much fiction and non-fiction written by non-Jews who were political prisoners in the camps. Whereas the Holocaust may be understood only in historical terms, victims' Holocaust experiences (as well as discrete Holocaust events) may be the objects of both experiential and historical understandings. A survivor's Holocaust experiences can be known directly by that survivor, as well as indirectly by others, through testimony.l 5 This raises the question of how, for nonwitnesses, a knowledge of various victims' Holocaust experiences, or an understanding of what it was like to experience the Holocaust as a victim, relates to a historical understanding of the Holocaust itself. Can one gain sufficient knowledge of the Holocaust through survivor testimony alone?

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Not according to Bauer. While granting that one "cannot approach an understanding of the Holocaust without the soul-searching writings of those who were there" (49), he claims that it is only when one has a basic knowledge of the history- that is, when one knows the bases of Nazi Jewhatred, the evolution of antisemitism, the relations between Jew and nonJew in countries occupied by the Nazis, the development of the "Final Solution," the identities and backgrounds of the murderers, the reactions of the victims, the possibility of rescue, and so on-that works by Wiesel and others who were there "become intelligible and meaningful" (47). This emphasis on historical knowledge, on what Bauer calls "the very hard and arduous task of actually knowing something about the Holocaust'' (47), is at odds, however, with what appears to be an ever-growing desire to know the Holocaust not through "history" or even as history, but through "sharing" the experiences of those who were there by, as it were, putting oneself through the experience. In Preserving Memory, Linenthal mentions that at a 1981 meeting of the Holocaust Memorial Museum council, members considered the following: "In order to impress the story on visitors, simulation of Holocaust experience seemed an attractive option. 'A room might be constructed like a railroad car and as individuals are in this rocking chamber, views would pass them.' ... There would be a fullscale model Auschwitz ... and, as emotional climax, a 'large room with just shower heads. A metal door is clanged shut and then a voice says, "This is the last thing millions of Jews heard"'" (115). Like Wiesel's vision of the great hall of Treblinka photos, this plan for the permanent exhibition was not actualized, though it may come closer in spirit to what was. According to museum designer Ralph Appelbaum, the exhibition was designed with the idea that if visitors could "take that same journey" as the victims, moving "from their normal lives into ghettos, out of ghettos onto trains, from trains to camps, within the pathways of the camps, until finally to the end," then "they would understand the story because they will have experienced the story." 16 But how effectively does this experience of "the story" bestow an understanding of the Holocaust? "While the 'experiential mode' has come into increasing favor by museums," comments James E. Young in his discussion of the Holocaust Memorial Museum, "it also encourages a kind of critical blindness on the part of visitors." He explains: "Imagining oneself as a past victim is not the same as imagining oneself-or another person-

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as a potential victim, the kind of leap necessary to prevent other 'holocausts.' All of which obscures the contemporary reality of the Holocaust, which is not the event itself, but memory of the event, the great distance between then and now, between there and here. For this, not the Holocaust itself, is our pre-eminent reality now, no less than the Holocaust was the victims' pre-eminent reality then." 17 But is even this true? Taking Young's point a step further, I would argue that memory is the surviving witnesses' pre-eminent reality now, whereas ours is something quite different, having to do with our lack of memory of the event and our efforts to compensate for this lack by turning to ever more experiential modes of representing the Holocaust. A front-page article in Update, the Holocaust Memorial Museum's newsletter, states: "The Museum's focus on individuals brings home the tragic reality of the Holocaust and makes it not a distant historic event, but an immediate experience with great personal meaning." 18 It would be easy to attribute this presentation of the Holocaust as immediate rather than historic, and as an experience rather than an event, to the fact that the museum is intended not for scholars or students of the Holocaust, but for a popular audience. The tum to experiential modes may be attributed to the needs of the public in this way: "While the idea of offering gas chamber experience in the same way as pirate experience at Disney World repels, most people today would choose not to listen about gas chambers if the message was offered in any other format." 19 By blaming the popular audience, however, we obscure the degree to which this desire for a Holocaust experience of one's own, and for a consequent understanding of the Holocaust that is less historical than "immediate" and "personal," underlies much work done by scholars in the field of Holocaust studies. What bearing might this desire to know "what it was like" have on how scholars understand the Holocaust and on how this understanding is presented in their scholarship? To explore this question I focus in this chapter on Holocaust scholar Lawrence L. Langer, whose work exemplifies the current tum away from the belief popularized by Wiesel that only survivors can grasp the Holocaust's "magnitude of horror," as "only survivors of Auschwitz know what it meant to be in Auschwitz." 20 Langer's work is devoted to grasping this magnitude of horror, to knowing what it meant to be in Auschwitz. Since the publication of his 1975 study The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, this literary scholar has endeavored to gain access to the Holocaust through

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the writings of those who were there. With his 1991 book Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, however, he turned his attention to videotaped survivor testimonies, suggesting that non-written texts may afford greater access to the Holocaust. In his review of this book, Michael Berenbaum describes Langer as someone "consumed by the task of understanding the Holocaust." And he writes of Holocaust Testimonies: "I can think of no work that brings us closer to understanding what it was like to be there." 21 This is a remarkable statement worth exploring in some depth. How does Holocaust Testimonies manage to bring us closer to this understanding than any of the writings by survivor-writers who know "what it was like" from direct experience? What is the understanding that this work brings us closer to? Through an examination of Langer's work, and his Holocaust Testimonies in particular, I explore how the desire to gain understanding of "what it was like to be there" shapes scholarship on the Holocaust.

Admitters and Deniers In 1964 Langer was a visiting professor of American studies teaching in Austria. At this time war crimes trials of former Auschwitz guards were being conducted in Frankfurt, Germany, and as Langer followed them he developed an abiding interest in the Holocaust. "I knew a little before, but not much," he says; "I had never been much involved." 22 Today Langer is the preeminent literary critic working in Holocaust studies, due in large part to the success of his fifth book devoted to the Holocaust, Holocaust Testimonies, which won the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. In 1995 he published two more books: Art from the Ashes, an anthology of Holocaust-related texts, most of them written by survivors, and Admitting the Holocaust, a collection of his own essays written in the 198os and early 1990s. Another essay collection, titled Preempting the Holocaust, followed in 1998. Admitting the Holocaust occasioned a New York Times article on Langer titled" A Scholarly Call for a Realistic View of the Holocaust," which reports: "A retired professor of English at Simmons College in Boston, Mr. Langer says that psychologists, scholars and writers who have not been through the Holocaust have difficulty fathoming bottomless evil and tend to seek

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some redeeming message even-perhaps especially-in tales of annihilation."23 This statement encapsulates Langer's critique of how others view the Holocaust, a critique he has expressed repeatedly in books and essays written over the course of three decades. Put simply, those who do not share Langer's "realistic view" avoid understanding the Holocaust by clinging to a language of redemption. "There's nothing dignified in standing by while ro members of your family are killed, and there's nothing triumphant about staying alive when you're powerless to help the people you love to stay alive," states Langer in the New York Times article. Even to call those who lived through the Holocaust "survivors," he holds, is to put their victimization in too rosy a light. 24 Scholars have long criticized portrayals of the Holocaust that serve to minimize its horror, often relating this approach to "a characteristic American urge to find a redemptive meaning in every event." 25 Langer has been the loudest and most insistent critic of feel-good approaches to the Holocaust which stress heroism, spiritual triumph, and happy endings. Yet this criticism, repeated throughout his work, seems less a warranted response to scholarly works on the Holocaust than a point of fixation. "Langer is absolutely right to refuse to find any 'lesson about the value of suffering for the growth of the human spirit' in the Holocaust," writes Michael Andre Bernstein, "but he is attacking a stance whose moral obtuseness has been broadly recognized." 26 while repeatedly staging this attack, Langer has scarcely moved beyond it. He does not address the question of why psychologists, scholars, and writers seeking a redeeming message would be drawn to studying the Holocaust; nor does he elaborate on what it means to "fathom bottomless evil." And he offers little explanation of what, contrary to "some redeeming message," he or other scholars tend to seek in the Holocaust, or in what he calls "the Holocaust experience." "I have no corrective vision of my own to provide, other than the opinion that the Holocaust experience challenged the redemptive value of all moral, community, and religious systems of belief," states Langer. 27 He is certainly not the only writer to refer to "the Holocaust experience," but this phrase-and variations on it, such as "the survival experience" and "the Auschwitz experience, and others like it" -appears with remarkable frequency throughout his work, though seldom in reference to the experience of a specific victim. 28 Langer criticizes Terrence Des Pres, author of The

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Survivor, for "creating a collective identity called 'the survivor'" when

"anyone conversant with the thousands of separate testimonies of survivors knows what an uncommon catastrophe it was for each of them" (AH 183). But Langer himself overlooks this point when he repeatedly refers to a collective experience called "the Holocaust experience." In his writings this phrase not only merges countless victims' experiences under a single rubric, undermining an appreciation of "the different vicissitudes of individual experience in ghetto, hiding, flight from place to place, living under a false identity, forced labor, concentration camp, or extermination camp." 29 Even more abstractly, it seems to refer to a kind of ideal Holocaust experience that no one victim experienced. That is, the term refers less to an actual experience than to the essence of what it was like to be there. This essence, "the Holocaust experience," displaces the historical phenomenon or event called "the Holocaust" as the object of Langer's interest; and the same holds true for a great many scholars and laypersons who are gripped by the human drama of the victim's experience in the Holocaust rather than by Holocaust history writ large. Throughout his work Langer describes what it takes "to understand the Holocaust experience" (AH 25) not in terms of acquiring historical knowledge and contemplating complex issues, but in terms of courageous confrontation; thus he refers, in a 1985 essay, to his "twenty-year confrontation with the Holocaust experience" (AH 68). According to Langer, to understand the Holocaust experience we must confront it, and this requires having "the courage to stare into the abyss" (AH 8). Our ability to understand what it was like, he suggests, is impeded only by a lack of such courage and a consequent need to find some consolatory, redeeming message in the Holocaust. Although the New York Times article reports Langer as saying that those "who have not been through the Holocaust" tend to seek redeeming messages, throughout his writings he targets not only those who have not been through the Holocaust, but those who have, the survivors themselves. In one striking instance, he criticizes Auschwitz survivors for participating in an event commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The problem has to do with the brochure advertising this event; as Langer makes clear, it contains the most hackneyed "redemptive rhetoric," including references to such old chestnuts as "heroism, hope,

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and healing" and "the triumph of the human spirit in the face of unspeakable evil." In short, it contains precisely the sort of language that Langer has spent his career criticizing. With this brochure in hand, then, he refers to the Auschwitz survivors who would attend the commemorative event as "those 'holocaust deniers."' 30 The title of Langer's collected essays, Admitting the Holocaust, plays off that of Deborah Lipstadt's well-known book on Holocaust denial, Denying the Holocaust, suggesting that one is either an" admitter" or a "denier." That is, one is either good or bad vis-a-vis the Holocaust. In constructing such a divisive opposition, Langer not only discourages a more complex understanding of how survivors and nonwitnesses relate to the Holocaust and to each other, but encourages other scholars to see themselves likewise as heroic "admitters," taking on those Holocaust scholars and survivors who are "in denial." This entails informing "deniers" that their incapacity to face the enormity of the Holocaust is attributable to personal weakness. "Sometimes it seems that the real problem is a failure of intellectual courage, a refusal to pursue the inhuman vision of the Holocaust to its awful, dispiriting end," muses Langer. 31 If not a failure of intellectual courage, the problem may be "a failure of nerve, of dramatic sense, or of artistic imagination" (AH 171). Sadly, not only Langer employs this overbearing rhetoric. In the contest over who really understands the Holocaust and honors its victims, scholars often assert the correctness of their own interpretation of the Holocaust by painting their competitors with the broad brush of Holocaust denial. And so it is not all that surprising to find that Langer has himself been criticized in these terms. Novelist Leslie Epstein groups Langer among those critics, artists, and readers who lack the courage to produce or appreciate literature that brings us "closer to what happened to Jewish men and women and children." 32 According to Epstein, Langer and many other critics and artists portray the Holocaust as if it occurred in a separate, special concentration camp universe outside of history, rather than in the world we share (267). In failing "to endure even minimal amounts of the reality of the Holocaust," Epstein claims, they have "suffered a failure of nerve," demonstrated "a failure of imagination," and "engaged in what amounts to a conspiracy of denial" (265, 268-6g). The Holocaust is made the subject of a perverse game of chicken, a contest to see who can come closest to the · edge of the abyss before cowardly veering away.

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Memory and Imagination "One of the most striking events in Holocaust studies in recent years," notes Langer in his 1993 essay "Memory's Time," "has been the proliferation of titles focusing on a single theme: memory" (AH 13). Indeed, by the early 1990s the word not only appeared routinely in titles, but had come to pervade the rhetoric of Holocaust studies. With tedious regularity, we now refer to "memory" where we might otherwise speak of remembrance, commemoration, historical consciousness, awareness, history. A Holocaust museum is said to preserve memory, Holocaust memorials are said to generate memory, and visitors to these sites are called memory-tourists, while "Holocaust memory" itself is subdivided and categorized into an everincreasing number of types. 33 In the closing panel of a 1994 conference on the Holocaust, 34 historian Michael Marrus noted that whereas ten years ago Holocaust scholars spoke of knowledge, information, and lessons, now the key word was memory; and he noted that the two other speakers on the panel, James E. Young and Edward T. Linenthal, had both written new books with this word featured prominently in their titles: The Texture of Memory and Preserving Memory. Marrus' question-Why "memory"?-was not addressed in the discussion that followed his remarks. Of course, one might argue that "memory" is so prevalent in Holocaust studies discourse because of the importance Jews have placed on memory since biblical times. However, this explanation overlooks the degree to which this word, as routinely employed by Holocaust scholars, has little or no real connection to the group memory of the Jewish people. 35 With regard to the Holocaust, Langer himself is uninterested in conceptualizing "a Jewish view of the past," as he "would prefer to speak of a more universal division between our human and our inhuman past" (AH 184). Why then has there been such a turn to "memory" in Holocaust studies in recent years? Langer offers the following explanation: "Perhaps this means we have finally begun to enter the second stage of Holocaust response, moving from what we know of the event (the province of historians), to how to remember it, which shifts the responsibility to our own imaginations and what we are prepared to admit there" (HT 13). Here Langer suggests we are no longer principally concerned with researching, writing or revising the history of the Holocaust; instead, our focus has

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shifted to the question of "how to remember it," or how best to preserve and transmit the Holocaust to future generations. And indeed this question, which only gains in importance as the number of living witnesses dwindles and the Holocaust recedes in time, has been answered by the rhetorical tum to memory. "We sometimes use memory as a synonym for history to soften our prose, to humanize it, and to make it more accessible. Memory simply sounds less distant," writes historian Kerwin Lee Klein. "Memory appeals to us partly because it projects an immediacy we feel has been lost from history." 36 As the last generation of witnesses to the Holocaust passes away, excessive reference to "memory" may express a denial of this loss, or an effort to compensate for it by relocating the witnesses' memories of the Holocaust not only in museums and archives, but also in second-generation and nonwitnesses' imaginations. Langer's description of "the second stage of Holocaust response" indicates that it is not memory but "our own imaginations" that are charged with remembering the Holocaust. How we "remember it" seems analogous to how we imagine the Holocaust-for what we imagine, or" admit" to our imaginations, appears to constitute our own "memory" of the event. But what sort of memory is this? By linking "memory" to how we imaginatively "remember" the Holocaust, Langer obscures vast differences between survivors' memories of past experiences and our own imaginings or fantasies of what these experiences may have been like. These differences are lost at the start of his essay, when, in listing book titles which include the word "memory," he makes no distinction between survivor memoirs, such as When Memory Comes by Saul Friedlander and Days and Memory by Charlotte Delbo, and scholarly works by nonwitnesses, such as In Fitting Memory: The Art and Politics of Holocaust Memorials by Sybil Milton and his own Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. "We speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left," writes Pierre Nora. What we now call memory, he argues, is "not memory but already history"; that is, it is not what we remember, but what we might recall from an archive holding a "material stock" of information which would otherwise be lost entirely. 37 His point finds ample illustration in John Roth's review of Holocaust Testimonies, in which we read that "Langer's book results from years of painstaking excavation in the ruins of memory at the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies ... at Yale University." Roth also writes that this book "takes its readers into a region that Langer's subtitle aptly identifies as 'the ruins of memory."' 38

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Langer's subtitle is taken from Ida Fink's short story" A Scrap of Time"; the passage featuring the phrase "the ruins of memory" appears as an epigraph in Holocaust Testimonies. Reading it, one finds that when Fink, a Holocaust survivor, writes of "digging around in the ruins of memory," she refers to a survivor's process of recollection, which involves examining her own memories, checking them for clarity. Digging in these ruins, she finds that her memory of another time is "fresh and untouched by forgetfulness."39 She writes, "This beautiful, clear morning that I am digging out of the ruins of my memory is still fresh; its colors and aromas have not faded ... " 40 Roth, by contrast, describes these ruins in terms which situate them outside of and apart from the survivor. The "ruins of memory" refers first to an individual survivor's memories, then to the videotaped interviews with survivors in the Yale archive collection, and finally to a more abstract "region" where readers may be taken by Langer's book. This transformation of "memory" mystifies our relation to survivors' memories. When Langer is described as excavating in the ruins of memory, much as Fink describes the survivor-narrator digging around there, little sense is given of the actual work that went into Langer's research: the prolonged process of choosing which testimonies to watch from the archive's collection of over fourteen hundred,41 the days spent sitting in front of a television monitor at the Fortunoff Video Archive or at home, watching and rewatching video testimonies ranging from thirty minutes to more than four hours in length, making observations and taking notes, transcribing certain tapes or employing others to transcribe them, and sorting through the transcripts for quote-worthy material. A matter-of-fact account of Langer's undertaking, unlike Roth's description of a mythic "painstaking excavation," foregrounds how heavily mediated our relation to survivors' memories really is. Whereas Nora suggests that our overuse of the term "memory" is in some sense a denial of memory loss, and other Holocaust scholars contend that the Holocaust is passing beyond memory into history, Langer argues otherwise, suggesting that at least those of us who study the Holocaust are moving away from history, toward memory. 42 The proliferation of titles bearing the word "memory" is taken by Langer to indicate that students and scholars of the Holocaust are entering a "second stage of Holocaust response." The first stage appears to have been dominated by historians and their project of determining, through archival research, our historical knowledge of the event, while the second stage involves moving from

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"what we know" to "how to remember it." This new concern necessitates a move away from "the province of historians" because we do not "remember" by being good historians or students of history, and this because, according to Langer, historians are ill-equipped to "remember it": they do not know the lived reality and lived experience of the Holocaust but only the history, which Langer equates with "Holocaust facts" (AH 75). The inadequacy of "the historian or reporter of mere facts" is already pronounced in Langer's The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (1975). There he explains that while Holocaust literature may be "no more satisfactory than history for solving the desperate and by now persistent questions of how and why the Holocaust occurred," it is far more able to evoke the "atmosphere" of the Holocaust, suggesting the "exact details of the experience."43 In short, Holocaust literature is far better at helping us "remember it" when what we want to remember is not the Holocaust as historical event, but what it was like to experience the Holocaust as a victim. In The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, Langer argues that, when it comes to involving readers in the "atmosphere" of the Holocaust, "the power of the imagination to evoke an atmosphere does far more than the historian's fidelity to fact" (79). That is, literature succeeds where history fails. For whereas the historian's enterprise is limited to the recitation of facts, the survivor-writer is able to draw not only on historical fact, given his or her "memory of the literal Holocaust" (8), but on his or her imagination. Holocaust literature relies on what Langer calls "the literary imagination," as it is the survivor's imaginative, literary rendering of remembered events that makes "the experience of the horror" accessible to our own imaginations (12). Thus, Langer explains, the survivor-writer's memory and imagination are both utilized to produce works like Elie Wiesel's "imaginative autobiography" Night (92). However, in Holocaust Testimonies we find an altogether different valuation of the literary imagination. For here Langer seeks to undo the conjoining of the survivor's memory and imagination described some fifteen years earlier in his first book. That is, he seeks to excise the literary imagination from memory, to remove it as a mediating factor, in order to facilitate a more immediate, direct connection to survivor memory. To accomplish this, the literary critic, having first privileged literature over history, now turns from literature to a non-literary form of testimony: videotaped interviews with survivors. Explaining this move in the book's

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preface, Langer states, "Holocaust literature ... challenges the imagination through the mediation of a text, raising issues of style and form and tone and figurative language that-I now see-can deflect our attention from ... the event itself. Nothing, however, distracts us from the immediacy and the intimacy of conducting interviews with former victims (which I have done) or watching them on a screen" (HT xii-xiii). Langer implies that "the immediacy and the intimacy" of interviewing survivors or watching video testimonies directs our attention to the event rather than to its telling or its "imaginative realization in literature" (HLI 31). But what lends this immediacy and intimacy? "Oral testimony is distinguished by the absence of literary mediation," Langer writes (HT 57). Whereas most written survivor testimonies abide by literary conventions, including "above all, perhaps, the invention of a narrative voice" (HT 41), in oral testimony, especially videotaped testimony, we encounter the immediate, intimate voice of memory. Or so he suggests. Implying that there is no mediating factor present in oral testimony (even when it is videotaped), Langer treats video testimonies as if they constitute this voice of memory, directly conveying the event. Therefore he does not distinguish between "conducting interviews with former victims" and "watching them on a screen," for it seems that in either case the event is transmitted not by a medium-not by the interview process, not by the spoken word, and not by video-but by memory itself. It is worth noting that most scholarship on oral testimony uses the term "oral history" to refer to recorded accounts of firsthand experience communicated to interviewers. "It must be accepted that we never have direct access to memory," states Trevor Lummis in Listening to History. 44 What we do have access to is heavily mediated testimony, conveyed in a form that may be less immediate and less intimate than Langer would have us to believe. In his review of Holocaust Testimonies, David G. Roskies provides this alternative description of the process by which oral Holocaust testimony is given: "Someone comes with a story to tell-how, alone of all his family, friends, and townspeople, he survived the Nazi Holocaust. So you put him in a bare room and sit him down in front of a video camera, and a stranger asks him questions in English to which he replies with a heavy accent. Lawrence L. Langer ... argues that such interviews are the ultimate source of truth." Roskies adds that "anyone who has communicated his thoughts both in writing and in live interviews knows that writing demands preci-

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sion and accountability, while a person fielding questions tends to use cliches, to play for effect and affect." 45 For Langer, however, these contrived or performative aspects of personal expression are confined to the literary realm of written testimony. An irony here is that Langer treats video testimony as if it were a kind of non-literary written testimony. "It is disappointing," writes Joan Michelson, "to find that his explorations of this visual and obviously dramatic material have been confined to text. ... Langer ... does not even mention the plain room where the filmed interviews took place, nor does he describe or analyze non-linguistic features of the videoed experience." 46 Nor does Langer have much to say about the aural quality of these testimonies. By contrast, Irene Kacandes, in an essay discussing two video testimonies from the Fortunoff Video Archive, employs the detailed transcriptional methods of conversation analysis (marking such things as the pace and pitch of speech, the length of silences, and gestures) to represent aural and visual aspects of the taped interviews. Kacandes also observes that these testimonies are produced through the co-participation of survivors and interviewers. Langer considers the role played by interviewers only to the extent that they obstruct survivors' efforts to bear witness to a bleak and distressing reality. He therefore ignores the extent to which, in Kacandes' words, "interaction seems required to narrate and interpret what happened."47 In Holocaust Testimonies, Langer touches on his earlier work on "the literary imagination" when contrasting video testimony with written accounts. He writes that the survivor-writer employs various literary devices in an effort to narrow "the vast imaginative space separating what he or she has endured from our capacity to absorb it." Yet he does so only to note that we, as readers, are often left with "the uneasy feeling of the literary transforming the real in a way that obscures even as it seeks to enlighten" (19). In this way the survivor's imagination becomes associated with literary devices that transform and obscure the reality of the Holocaust. The imagination no longer works with memory but against it, as a contending voice in testimonies. What then of the "power of the imagination" (79) that in The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination enables the survivor-writer to make his or her Holocaust experience accessible to nonwitnesses? In Holocaust Testimonies, Langer has shifted this power from the survivor-writer to the nonwitness:

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our own imaginations now empower us to cross the "vast imaginative space" that separates the survivor's Holocaust experience from "our capacity to absorb it." Thus, according to Langer, it is the power of our own imaginations that enables us to enter the second stage of Holocaust response-to move beyond the limits of Holocaust knowledge which he associates with "the province of historians" -in order to "remember" the Holocaust not as a distant historic event, but as an immediate, personal experience.

Experiential Shortcomings In an essay on writing histories of the Holocaust based on postwar eye-

witness testimony, Christopher Browning offers this description of the limits of the historian's knowledge: "the Holocaust is not an abstraction. It was a real event in which more than five million Jews were murdered, most in a manner so violent and on a scale so vast that historians and others trying to write about these events have experienced nothing in their personal lives that remotely compares. Historians of the Holocaust, in short, know nothing-in an experiential sense-about their subject."48 Browning, echoing Alan Rosenberg's point that we who were not there "cannot have an immediate experience of the full and actual horror of the events" (387), refers to this limit on knowledge as an "experiential shortcoming" (25). Langer, who can never know the event in an experiential sense, shares this shortcoming. But he is intent on overcoming it. He cannot directly experience the Holocaust with which the historian is concerned, the real event in which more than five million Jews were murdered. However, his work does not focus on this Holocaust. Langer's interest lies instead in what he calls "the Holocaust universe," a realm through which one may travel as a "Holocaust voyager" (AH 26, 28). 49 This Holocaust is an abstraction, composed of moments abstracted from thousands of survivor testimonies and cited as so many fragmentary examples in his work. His interest lies in the resulting assemblage, "the Holocaust experience." In "The Literature of Auschwitz," Langer recalls attending the Frankfurt trial of former Auschwitz camp guards in 1964. He tells how, when listening to an elderly Jewish man testify that he was the sole survivor of a transport of 2,8oo Jews deported to Auschwitz, he wondered how this man's

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testimony might become "a shareable experience." This was a decisive moment for Langer. "That instant remains vivid to me," he writes, "because it was one of the first times that I asked myself how a literature of Auschwitz, and of the Holocaust in general, might ever achieve such a goal" (AH 91). In pursuit of the "shareable" Holocaust experience, Langer would eventually tum from literature to video testimonies. A harbinger of this tum is Langer's 1986 essay on Claude Lanzmann's documentary film Shoah, which he describes in the same terms he would later apply to video testimonies. "Unlike history," he writes, "[Shoah] uses a visual and spoken rather than a written text, creating a sense of immediacy, personal involvement, and emotional surrender to the voice of the participant that no other medium could inspire." He quotes a survivor who, at the start of the film, returns to the site of the Chelmno death camp, where he states: "It was terrible. No one can describe it. No one can re-create what happened here." Langer then writes, "By film's end, the viewer will have experienced the undermining of this first witness's assertion, as voice after voice describes and re-creates 'what happened here' and in other death camps." 50 In watching testimonies from the Video Archive, Langer finds that several survivors, faced with telling their stories to interviewers, the video camera and an invisible audience of future viewers, make a point of stating that their experiences cannot truly be shared with or understood by those who were not there. Of course, this claim is not specific to film or video testimony. In The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination Langer writes that Holocaust literature offers readers "not the experience of the horror itself, since by common consent of the survivors this is impossible to do vicariously, but a framework for responding to it, for making it imaginatively (if not literally) accessible" (12). In Holocaust Testimonies Langer is intent on collapsing the distinction between responding to others' experience of the horror and "imaginatively (if not literally)" undergoing this experience oneself. In the book's preface, he presents an excerpt from the video testimony of Magda F. as "representative" of the survivors' insistence that only those who lived through the Holocaust can really know what it was like. Magda F. contends that "to understand us, somebody has to go through with it. Because nobody, but nobody fully understands us. You can't. No [matter] how much sympathy you give me when I'm talking here." Moreover, she voices her hope that "nobody in the world comes to this again, [so] they should understand us" (HT xiv, brackets in original).

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Leon Wiesel tier, literary editor of The New Republic and the son of a Holocaust survivor, echoes this last point in his essay "After Memory." When listening to a Holocaust survivor, he remarks, "you begin to understand that there are situations in which memory is not a privilege, in which history is preferable to memory: if history is your only source of knowledge about the darkness, then you were one of the lucky ones." 51 Langer reaches an altogether different conclusion from listening to survivors. In response to Magda F.'s testimony, he comments: "A statement like 'to understand, you have to go through with it,' however authentic its inspiration, underestimates the sympathetic power of the imagination. Perhaps it is time to grant that power the role it deserves" (HT xv). Langer states that we nonwitnesses have the "power of the imagination" to understand survivors, even those who claim that we cannot understand them. In calling ours a "sympathetic power," he picks up on Magda F.'s claim that no matter how much sympatn~ you "give" her, you cannot get understanding in return; in reply, he seems to be saying that Magda F. fails to realize just how much sympathy our imaginations are capable of giving. In fact, Langer argues that Magda F. underestimates not only our ability "to understand," but also our ability "to go through" the Holocaust, as we can do both by virtue of our imaginations. Thus he does not exactly refute the idea that "to understand, you have to go through with it"; rather, Langer imaginatively stretches the limits of what "going through with it" might include. In Magda F.'s usage, it is fairly clear that this "going through with it" refers to having lived through the Holocaust-in her case, deportation to Auschwitz, then Plaszow, then back to Auschwitz, then to Leipzig, and finally to Theresienstadt-if not also living with having lived through it-in her case, surviving while her brother, three sisters, parents and husband were all killed (HT 73). What could constitute the imaginative equivalent to that experience? To approach an answer, I will look at how Magda F.'s two interviewers utilize "the sympathetic power of the imagination." Langer, who was one of these two interviewers, writes of a moment near the end of her testimony when Magda F. turned to the other interviewer and, "in genuine amazement," exclaimed: "You're crying!" (HT xiv). This "amazement" is offered as proof of her underestimation of the imagination's "sympathetic power," while the interviewer's tears take on a greater burden of meaning. "They were tears of pity, I am sure," writes Langer; "but they may also have been tears of fear and despair, resulting from a di-

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rect encounter with the melancholy universe that had consumed most of Magda F.'s family" (HT xiv-xv). The intriguing distinction between these two kinds of tears, and the comparative insignificance accorded to tears of pity, calls our attention to the shades of meaning that differentiate pity from sympathy. The relevant distinction may be that whereas pity is a feeling felt for another, sympathy is a sharing of another's feelings. Treading a thin line between compassion and appropriation, sympathy raises questions of what another wants to share with the sympathizer and what the self-interest of the sympathizer might be. What does this mean for Magda F., who resists sharing full understanding with her sympathizers? How does the imagination engage its sympathetic power to overcome her resistance? With reference to "tears of pity" and more meaningful"tears of fear and despair," Langer suggests that whereas pity enables us to feel for the survivor, the "sympathetic imagination" enables us to feel like the survivor. The tears of fear and despair do not appear to be felt for or with Magda F., but result from what Langer imagines might have been the interviewer's own "direct encounter" with the Holocaust (imagined as a "melancholy universe"). Yet, in the supposed directness of this encounter-and what makes this encounter direct is left unstated -we lose sight of Magda F. In Langer's description, her testimony becomes, or is displaced by, a directly encountered, directly "understood" Holocaust universe. What then of Magda F.'s other interviewer, Langer himself? In his case we find nothing so unguarded as tears, but rather a more radical transformation of the survivor's story into one's own Holocaust experience. For Langer, understanding appears to be gained not by identifying with individual survivors like Magda F., but by amassing and assessing their testimonies. Thus he remarks: "In spite of Magda F.'s misgivings, listening to hundreds of witnesses' stories is a form of' coming to this again"' (HT xiv). What are we to make of this? By incorporating Magda F.'s awkward phrasing, Langer obscures the significance of his remarkable statement. For when Magda F. says, "I hope nobody in the world comes to this again," what does she mean by "com[ing] to this again" if not coming to experience another holocaust-not a simulated, audio-visual "Holocaust," but actual genocide? My sense is that Langer borrows her wording in order to muffle his claim that watching hundreds of video testimonies is in some way comparable

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to ("a form of") living through the Holocaust. Whereas Browning observes that historians and others trying to write about the Holocaust have experienced nothing in their personal lives that remotely compares, Langer wants to believe that putting himself through the experience of "listening to hundreds of witnesses' stories" does compare. Based on his comparable "Holocaust experience," Langer claims the kind of understanding that Magda F. attributes only to survivors. But he does not stop there. Based on the difference between his experience and that of survivors, he claims a greater degree of understanding; for whereas each survivor sees her or his experiences as "an isolated private ordeal," Langer finds himself "in a position to assess their experiences from a superior vantage point," noting a pattern of behavior during the Holocaust that individual survivors, drawing only on their own experiences, may not recognize or understand (HT 143-44). Langer maintains that this understanding is readily available to any of us who do not avoid confronting the Holocaust. In this vein he argues that "the more we listen, the more evidence we have that the question of inaccessibility may be our own invented defense against the invitation to imagine what is perfectly explicit in the remembered experience before our eyes and ears" (HT 82). His argument does not acknowledge or account for why the inaccessibility of the Holocaust has been asserted most forcefully by survivors. In addition, Langer's claim that the survivor's experience is made "perfectly explicit" by his or her storytelling seems overly optimistic. Is the remembered experience really there "before our eyes and ears"? If so, what need is there to imagine an experience that is already right there before us? Langer's claim conflicts with words he quotes from another video testimony in Holocaust Testimonies. Describing the experience of telling his story, Chaim E., a survivor of the Sobibor death camp, explains, "I see the picture in front of me; you have to imagine something" (62, emphasis in original). Langer collapses this very distinction, as he writes that what we imagine is this picture-it is not only in front of the survivor, but "before our eyes." Chaim E. goes on to say, "The one that listens has to imagine something. So it has a different picture for me than for the one that imagines it. At least I think so, because sometimes I hear telling back a story that doesn't sound at all the same what I was telling, you see" (62). Unlike Langer, Chaim E. describes the steps involved in the storytelling process:

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the survivor tells a story; we listen to it; we imagine it; we retell the story. The discrepancy between Chaim E.'s story and the story his listeners tell back to him emphasizes the gap between the remembered experience and the experience as we imagine it. Although this gap is often referred to as an abyss, it is not a space of radical emptiness; rather, it is a expanse traversed by layers of mediation. My intention is not to answer the question of the Holocaust's accessibility by siding with Magda F. or Chaim E. against Langer. My interest lies instead in exploring how Langer's project is shaped by a desire to make the survivors' experiential understanding one's own. How else might a nonwitness attempt to get "close" to the experience of the Holocaust? I am reminded of a comment made by Kenneth Jacobson during a panel discussion on Langer's work held at a 1996 Holocaust studies conference. 52 Jacobson, who interviewed hundreds of people persecuted by the Nazis and authored a book which features the life stories of fifteen of these survivors, remarked that he is often asked what he had learned most from talking with survivors. His answer was unexpected: "What I learned most is that I was not there." He explained that once he realized this-that the experience of persecution was not his experience, despite his identification, as a Jew, with the survivors-he was able to see more clearly and feel more vividly the experiences being recounted. Instead of projecting himself into these experiences, coloring them with his own needs and feelings, he strove to perceive the experiences from the point of view of the teller. In short, survivors' Holocaust-related experiences became more accessible only when Jacobson came to terms with the larger sense of their inaccessibility. Jacobson's remarks suggest a more complicated response to the question of accessibility, one which negotiates not only the boundary between the Holocaust and those of us who were not there, but the boundary between self and others. 53

Determining "The Way It Was" Charlotte Delbo begins her book Days and Memory with an oft-cited, powerful vignette describing how she manages to go on living after Auschwitz. She writes that the experience of the camp is so deeply etched in her

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memory that she cannot forget a moment of it; but while preserved there, Auschwitz is "enveloped in a skin of memory, an impermeable skin that isolates it from my present self." This skin contains what she calls her memoire profonde, her deep memory of Auschwitz. "Deep memory preserves sensations, physical imprints. It is the memory of the senses," writes Delbo. These preserved sensations of being in Auschwitz are separated from her present self's memoire ordinaire, or common memory. In fact, these two memories are so separate, she states, that" everything that happened to that other, the Auschwitz one, now has no bearing on me ... doesn't interfere with my life." 54 And yet, she goes on to describe how the skin of memory is not quite so impermeable, how the "Auschwitz one" does interfere with her present life, how even now she returns to Auschwitz: "The skin enfolding the memory of Auschwitz is tough. Even so it gives way at times. Over dreams the conscious will has no power. And in those dreams I see myself, yes, my own self such as I know I was: hardly able to stand on my feet, my throat tight, my heart beating wildly, frozen to the marrow, filthy, skin and bones; the suffering I feel is so unbearable, so identical to the pain I endured there, that I feel it physically, I feel it throughout my whole body ... Luckily, in my agony I cry out. My cry wakes me and I emerge from the nightmare ... " (3). As Delbo imagines it, the skin that ordinarily separates the traumatic sensations of deep memory from her everyday, common memory ruptures when she dreams of being in Auschwitz. When she awakens, she remembers what it was like to relive the physical sensations in her dream, and this remembering, unlike the sensations themselves, is not repressed but part of her common memory. Whereas deep memory preserves and represses the past, common memory remembers and narrates it, puts it into words, tells it as a story. "When I talk to you about Auschwitz," writes Delbo, "it is not from deep memory my words issue. They come from ... intellectual memory, the memory connected with thinking processes" (3). As readers, we can begin to imagine what Delbo undergoes in her dreams, and through those dreams what she underwent at Auschwitz; however, we cannot experience her feeling of being in Auschwitz ourselves. We cannot translate the words of common memory back into the bodily sensations of deep memory. This being the case, Delbo's distinction speaks to how much of her experiences in and memory of Auschwitz cannot be shared with her readers. It stresses that our understanding of the

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Holocaust will always be ordinaire rather than profonde, intellectual and common rather than experiential and deep. Yet, perhaps because what Delbo locates in deep memory is so enticing to him, Langer takes up her terms in a chapter of Holocaust Testimonies titled "Deep Memory: The Buried Self," interpreting them in such a way as to make "deep memory" accessible, in some way shareable. After quoting Delbo's description of her dream, Langer writes: "The cry that awakens her also awakens us to the astonishing realization that Delbo, unwittingly or not, has herself pierced the skin of memory through her description, using the dream as an 'excuse' to do so" (HT 7). He arrives at this "astonishing realization" by dismissing the dream as a literary device, disregarding how the dream mediates between deep memory and Delbo's written description. In her description Langer detects "the voice of deep memory struggling to displace the milder tones of common memory as we read, in spite of her insistence that this is not possible" (HT 7). For Delbo this is not possible because deep memory "preserves sensations, physical imprints"; it does not think or voice itself in words, translating sensations into sentences. But in Langer's reformulation, deep memory, like common memory, voices itself to the reader, albeit with a difference: unlike common memory, it has access to the preserved sensations of Auschwitz. For this reason, "deep memory knows better" (HT 11); it knows "what common memory cannot know but tries nonetheless to express" (HT 6). By treating Delbo's lyrical phrases as instrumental terms that may be applied to video testimonies, Langer enables himself to distinguish between the survivors' deep memories, which accurately recall "the way it was," and their common memories, which, through devices analogous to those in literary texts, distort "the way it was" by imposing traditional (pre-Holocaust) or present-day (post-Holocaust) values on the description of the Holocaust past. 55 However, this construction of common memory also forces Langer to reassess his claim that oral testimonies are uniquely characterized by an absence of literary mediation. "In the beginning, I was convinced that these testimonies represented fully spontaneous narratives, unmediated by devices analogous to, though not identical with, ones we find in consciously contrived literary texts," he writes. "But this expectation appears not to be supported by the evidence" (HT 13). With this statement, which appears in the first chapter of Holocaust Testimonies, Langer indicates that his initial conviction was wrong, that video-

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taped oral testimonies are mediated by devices analogous to those we find in literary texts. Nevertheless, when he raises the question, in the second chapter, of what distinguishes written memoirs from oral testimony, especially video testimony, he concludes: "Oral testimony is distinguished by the absence of literary mediation" (HT 57). Similarly, in the fourth chapter he writes: "After having watched more than three hundred such testimonies, ranging in length from thirty minutes to seven hours, I have reached the conclusion that the process of recall divorced from literary effort results in a narrative form unlike the written text," as it is "rich in spontaneous rather than calculated effects" (HT 129). Moreover, in the book's preface he claims that while a written memoir "challenges the imagination through the mediation of a text," this is somehow not the case with video testimony (HT xii). It appears that Langer, after having watched over three hundred video testimonies, is ill-prepared to give up his conviction that video testimonies are fully spontaneous, unmediated narratives, despite evidence to the contrary. His solution is to have it both ways: he recognizes the presence of mediation but relegates it to the bin of" common memory," thereby safeguarding a preserve of pure, unmediated "deep memory." Consequently, it is Langer who ultimately determines "the way it was" as he separates out inauthentic "traditional memory" from authentic "Holocaust memory" (AH 14) in a quest for what he calls "the uniquely imprisoned persistence of a Holocaust event in a witness's memory"(AH 16). In the search for this "Holocaust event," the survivor's present self, and this self's memory of the event, become obstacles to the event itself. Langer's treatment of a moment from the video testimony of Abraham P. is illustrative. When his family arrived at Auschwitz, Abraham P.'s parents were sent to the left, to death, while he and three brothers were sent to the right. Abraham P. then instructed the youngest brother to go with his parents, and in the interview he says, "Little did I know that I sent him to the crematorium. I am ... I feel like I killed him" (HT 185). According to Langer, at this moment in Abraham P.'s testimony, "as memory seeks to recapture the details of what happened as it happened, inappropriate guilt intrudes" (HT 167). This guilt is inappropriate because it supports "the idea of the individual as responsible agent for his actions" although "the law of systematic caprice that governed the selection process" deprived him of moral agency (HT 186-87). Here Langer appears to confuse psychological and legal notions of guilt (feeling guilty and being guilty), judging the possibility

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of guilt feelings in purely rational terms. Because Abraham P. did not kill his brother or knowingly abet his murderers, Langer finds that Abraham P. could not have felt guilt then, and his expression of guilt now only serves to distort "the way it was." Moreover, Langer claims that Abraham P.'s expression of guilt misrepresents how he and other Holocaust survivors might feel in the aftermath. "The evidence in these testimonies ... indicates that guilt, both as label and concept, is totally inadequate and indeed misleading as a description of the internal discomfort of surviving victims," states Langer, claiming a surprising familiarity with survivors' inner lives (HT 144). While granting that the victims experienced a "loss of innocence" in the camps, he writes that "in the absence of new cultural or psychological myths drawing on thereality of the camp universe we-together with surviving victims-continue to equate that loss of innocence with its scriptural, Edenic, or Miltonic sources" (HT 144). But do we really? Here Langer's failure to acknowledge psychoanalytic sources and the term "survivor guilt" is remarkable. Shamai Davidson, an Israeli psychiatrist who, until his death, worked with Holocaust survivors and their children, describes "the well-known phenomenon of survivor guilt" as the first step in a "working through" process by which survivors regain a sense of individual identity, restore "lost human values" and begin "the postponed process of mourning. " 56 This concept of working through trauma has no place in Langer's work; he appears interested in survivors' "Auschwitz selves" to the detriment of their present-day selves. In his drive to imagine the Holocaust "the way it was," Langer wishes survivors to remain the way they were, fully traumatized. No doubt, he would reject the ending of Wiesel's Yiddish memoir Un di velt hot geshvign, in which the survivor smashes the mirror, rejecting the image of himself after death. For Langer, the timeless image of the survivor as corpse portrayed at the end of Night holds far more appeal. "If the closing image of Night affirms anything," he writes, "it is that the face in the mirror is a corpse, not a miracle of renewal" (PH 142). It is interesting to note that Shamai Davidson expresses frustration with precisely those survivors who remain fixated on their traumatic experiences-perhaps because those survivors who "remained fixated in the roles as victims" represent the failure of his clinical efforts (188). 57 Davidson writes that while "relating Holocaust experiences can be an extremely valuable mode of working through" (187), this was not the case for all sur-

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vivors. Some were driven to continuously retell their experiences, although this provided them with little relief or sense of their own survival: For these survivors, it was as if the present did not really exist, except as a stage for presenting the past over and over. They remained fixated in the roles of victims in the Holocaust, as if time had stood still. A true confrontation between their past and present reality never occurred in their stereotyped accounts, and thus they remained unable to change their selfimage from that of the permanently damaged (ego-depleted) victims to free men once again. This kind of repetitive, insistent relating is not a successful working through, but rather a perseveration that creates in the listener a feeling of meaninglessness and depression. (188) The kind of stories Davidson laments-"perseverative" accounts, in which the Holocaust past perseveres over the present-are the kind valued most highly by Langer. Indeed, Langer often idealizes survivor testimony by describing it in "perseverative" terms, as when he writes: "Hearing testimony, we are in the presence of a past that has not been and cannot be effaced, a moment re-presented rather than represented" (AH 17). Where Langer acknowledges that the survivor's past Holocaust experiences are, in fact, less "re-presented" than represented from the perspective of the present, he does so only to better isolate the re-presented past moment from the distorting effects of the survivor's present reality. We can easily attribute Davidson's assessment of survivor testimony to his professional role: as a psychiatrist working with survivors seeking clinical help, he was most interested in helping them live productive lives in the present. But this is not to say that only those treating survivors have reason to be interested in their postwar lives. In his book On Listening to Holocaust Survivors, Henry Greenspan comments that "survivors retell more than specific incidents they witnessed and endured. They also convey what it is to be a survivor-to be a person who has such memories to retell-which includes what it is to be the particular survivor they each, individually, are." Geoffrey Hartman, a literature professor and director of the Yale Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies (which provided Langer with the video testimonies he analyzes), likewise notes that when giving testimony "the survivor is more than a victim, more than the living carcass to which the camps systematically reduced every inmate." 58

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Alas, this is precisely the problem for Langer, who prefers to "use 'former victims' rather than 'survivors' to describe the witnesses in these testimonies," and who claims that for the witnesses, "the fact of having survived ... interferes with a convincing portrayal of the events" (HT xii, 188).59 In Langer's work, sympathy for "former victims" competes with contempt for "survivors"; as literary scholar and Holocaust survivor Ruth Kluger observes in her review of his 1982 book Versions of Survival, his writing is characterized by "a disparagement of survivor reports whenever they attempt to put some order into their experience or draw any conclusions from it, no matter how tentative." Kluger adds that "though Langer himself points out correctly that everyone's camp experience was different, he nevertheless casts doubt on the authenticity of any account that doesn't conform to his own 'version of survival,' and that is essentially one that diminishes the individual and obliterates all differences between inmates." 60 A disregard for such differences allows Langer to present a multitude of testimonial fragments culled from the Video Archive as illustrative of five types of damaged Holocaust selves, the "the buried self" and "the diminished self" among them. Greenspan, by contrast, strives in his book to present survivors not as "abstract 'voices from the Holocaust' or initials attached to fragments of testimony," but as distinct individuals (xix). Hartman similarly values video testimony for presenting "not ghostly voices from the past," but "a living person whose story, however painful, is part of that person" (14). Rather than holding out the prospect of a "direct encounter" with the Holocaust, Hartman remarks that video testimony brings us closer to the people who bear witness to the Holocaust: "Videotaped testimony, which adds body to voice, so that we see the witness reliving his memories, is the closest we will ever get to the person" (14). Such a sentiment is foreign to Langer's work. He desires to get close not to the person, but to "the Holocaust experience" that may be extracted from the person's life story.

Langer Against the Holocaust Commentators Sylvia Plath's poem "Daddy" has received much attention from Holocaust scholars who might otherwise take little or no interest in her writing. Most of this attention has focused on this stanza:

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An engine, an engine Chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I began to talk like a Jew. I think I may well be a Jew. 61 Numerous Holocaust scholars' condemnation of this non-Jewish, female poet's metaphorical use of Holocaust imagery has made "Daddy" emblematic of an unmerited and exploitative identification with the Holocaust. Alvin H. Rosenfeld has argued that "there is a radical imbalance between anyone's personal horrors ... and the horrors brought on by the Nazis .... Not only are these things not interchangeable-they simply do not compare, and no order of imagination can weld them into viable analogy." Rosenfeld concludes that the poem is trite and Plath is to be pitied for imagining any connection between her "self-inflicted wounds" and the Holocaust. Similarly, Irving Howe writes of her poem: "There is something monstrous, utterly disproportionate, when tangled emotions about one's father are deliberately compared with the historical fate of the European Jews; something sad, if the comparison is made spontaneously." 62 To account for why Jewish writers such as Rosenfeld and Howe object to Plath's employment of Holocaust imagery in such strong terms, James E. Young has argued that "Plath's personalization of events ... ignores the immense communal weight by which they have been grasped immediately by Jewish writers." In short, Jewish writers object to a non-Jew imaginatively applying to herself symbols of collective Jewish suffering. What then if Plath had been a Jewish writer herself? Is such personalization of the Holocaust acceptable among Jews? In lieu of an answer, Young proposes that had Plath been Jewish, the question would be irrelevant, for as a Jewish writer, she probably could not have used these figures this way: her entire grasp and knowledge of them would not have allowed it, just as it does not allow her critics to accept these figures. In fact, it may be difficult to find an example of a Jewish writer using the collective suffering of the Holocaust as a figure for explicitly personal suffering, unrelated to war or military persecution. This is not to say that Holocaust figures aren't used at all, for indeed they are used widely in contemporary Jewish writing about non-Holocaust events, but never in regard to purely personal suffering.63

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This is an incredible statement, for nowhere is the Holocaust used as a figure for personal suffering more than in writings by Jewish nonwitnesses describing their own relation the Holocaust. This may go unnoticed by Holocaust scholars because they and other nonwitnesses often construe such personal suffering-the way they have "come to endure the psychic imprint of the trauma" -as continuous with the Holocaust itsel£. 64 It is simply untrue that Jewish writers would not allow themselves to use the Holocaust as a metaphor for personal suffering. Consider, for instance, an essay titled "The Auschwitz of Everyday Life," by Israel W. Charny, a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at Hebrew University, who is also executive director of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide, which he co-founded with Elie Wiesel and Shamai Davidson. In terms reminiscent of Langer's claim that "much of our language about the Holocaust is designed to console instead of confront" (AH 5), Charny states that our language fails to confront the truth of our everyday lives, as "the prevailing cultural motif remains that life is only or mainly beautiful." As a consequence, he finds, people are not prepared to deal with more difficult and disturbing realities, what he calls "life's hells." "We live even our finest hours amid the puzzle and mystery of nothingness and death," he writes. "The staggering richness of the joy of life is always surrounded by grim, bleak Auschwitz camps." 65 Is this metaphorical use of the Holocaust less disconcerting than that found in "Daddy"? Charny reflects on his rhetoric, writing, "Is it possible that the Auschwitz of everyday life is a metaphor of which the real smokestacks of Auschwitz are a concrete representation? Is it possible that Auschwitz casts into deadly real-life sculptures the hell that is each man's private living and dying? I believe so. I believe we need to understand the private concentration camp that makes up much of each person's life. Instead of pretending that life is good and then discovering at the ovens that it is not so, we need to know ... the capricious and demonic nature of our being ... " (133). This picture of the human condition, part gothic horror and part existential romance, reminds me of the image that begins the abovementioned New York Times article on Langer titled "A Scholarly Call for a Realistic View of the Holocaust." It reads: "If life were, as Lawrence L. Langer contends, a tightrope stretched over an abyss, some would walk across watching treetops, the sun and clouds. Others, including this scholar ... would tread the rope with lowered eyes, fixed on an-

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guish, sorrow and the human capacity for cruelty."66 In fact, Langer's "realistic view" is not of the Holocaust, but of life. Expressing an extreme pessimism, he says, "It seems to me you're ignoring half of reality, or maybe three-quarters, if you're only looking up." But how much more is ignored if you look at the whole of life through the lens of the Holocaust? Is the Holocaust scholar who imagines himself on a tightrope over the abyss more attuned to reality than the poet who imagines herself "like a Jew" on a train to "Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen"? Unlike those who chastise Plath for identifying her own suffering with the Holocaust, and those who connect the Holocaust to the "hell" or"abyss" of life, George Steiner proposes that Plath's writing may express her desire to overcome the distance between her own reality and that of the Holocaust-and he proposes that this is a desire shared by many nonwitnesses, including Jews like himself. In "'Dying Is an Art,"' Steiner writes that with "Daddy" "Sylvia Plath became a woman being transported to Auschwitz on the death trains," without explaining how this feat was accomplished or why this act of identification is best described in such literal terms. Yet, even as he lauds "Daddy" as one of the few poems that manages "to come near the last horror," Steiner probes the morality of appropriating this horror for one's "own private design." Because he identifies with Plath, he does not accuse her of using the Holocaust to dramatize her own suffering, but asks: "Was there latent in Sylvia Plath's sensibility, as in that of many of us who remember only by fiat of imagination, a fearful envy, a dim resentment at not having been there, of having missed the rendezvous with hell?" 67 In a striking passage from The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, Langer quotes Steiner's question and responds with the following comment: "These are perhaps the most honest words spoken on the subject by Steiner, who in another moving essay calls himself a 'kind of survivor'; but they represent autobiography, not literary criticism" (19-20). Strangely enough, Langer notes the honesty of Steiner's words only to dismiss them for being autobiographical and therefore falling outside the apparently unself-reflective or objective domain of literary criticism. Although Steiner attributes what he terms "a fearful envy" first to Plath and then to many of us who, "not having been there," can only imagine the Holocaust, Langer attributes this envy to Steiner alone. He does so by insinuating that Steiner is really talking only about himself, that in his honesty he gives himself

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away; hence the charge of "autobiography," leveled at someone who tellingly calls himself a "kind of survivor." 68 With this move, the very opposite of Steiner's sympathetic approach to Plath, Langer distances himself from the implications of Steiner's honest words. He implies that even if one were to feel "a fearful envy, a dim resentment" at not having experienced the Holocaust, recognizing and reflecting upon this feeling is not part of the literary critic's task. Still, it might be worthwhile to linger on Steiner's words. Steiner's claim that many nonwitnesses feel "a dim resentment at not having been there" is provocative: could he really mean to say that some of us wish we had been there in the camps? In fact, Steiner is not alone in voicing this discomforting sentiment. Much as Steiner refers to the feeling of "having missed the rendezvous with hell," so Henri Raczymow, a French Jewish writer born after the war, speaks of "the feeling all of us have, deep down, of having missed a train. You know which train." He laments: "We cannot even say that we were almost deported." 69 A still more stunning articulation of this feeling, and of the difficulty in speaking about it, can be found in Nadine Fresco's fascinating study of French Jews born just after the war titled "Remembering the Unknown." One of her eight interviewees states: "Even now, when I see someone with a number engraved on his arm, what I feel more than anything else is an almost incommunicable feeling, made up for the most part of jealousy. I tell myself that there is nothing to be done about it .... I shall never be one of them, still less one of those who did not come back. What they lived through was a drama that is not mine. They lived through it, they experienced it, and I have nothing but that absurd, desperate, almost obscene regret for a time in which I cannot have been." 70 It is easy to dissociate oneself from such an extreme statement. Perhaps it is more helpful to think in terms of a less consciously held feeling, to speak, as Steiner does, of a fearful envy, a dim resentment. With these terms Steiner recognizes a factor that Langer, in his incessant focus on how we "deny" the Holocaust, leaves unacknowledged: namely, that many nonwitnesses desire the rendezvous with hell. Although Langer does not admit this desire, it is evidenced by his ongoing effort to translate the Holocaust into a shareable experience. The desire to be "back there" in Auschwitz is demonstrated by a passage from Langer's work that recalls Steiner's treatment of Plath. In his essay "The Literature of Auschwitz," Langer quotes a poem by Delbo which reads in part:

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As forme

I'm still there and I'm dying back there every day a bit more I die again the death of all those who died Langer then claims: "Delbo's doom-laden line 'I die again I the death of all those who died' ... stretches the circle of its recruits to include its audience as well" (AH 106). Had Steiner made the equivalent claim, he would have written not only that "Plath became a woman being transported to Auschwitz," but that everyone reading "Daddy" joins her on the death train. For this, in effect, is what Langer claims: that Delbo's poem includes its readers among those dying the death of Auschwitz victims. Langer offers no analysis of how this is so, nor any consideration of what such inclusion might mean or feel like; nor does he reflect on why one might want to join the so-called circle of recruits by reading oneself into the poem's first-person "1." Still, Langer's readers may accept his reading if they too want to join the circle of those "still there" in Auschwitz, reducing the difference between actual Auschwitz victims and themselves. Following his reading of the" doom-laden" line in Delbo's poem, Langer concludes: "The experience of Auschwitz, like all of the Holocaust, cannot be left behind. Nor do we return from our encounter with its literature unblemished. Instead, like Delbo, Levi, and all the rest, we face the necessary burden of adjustment. ... We pay a price for learning how to imagine what happened" (AH 106). While Langer is committed to reminding his readers "how much of our language is designed to console instead of confront the Holocaust," he never considers how, for those who do seek confrontation (like Langer himself), he offers another language of consolation (AH 5). Certainly, many readers would like to imagine that there is enough of a correspondence between the Holocaust and its literature, between their reading experience and Charlotte Delbo's or Primo Levi's Holocaust experience, that they too might gain what Delbo has called "knowledge at the price of suffering" (AH 107). Langer slips into this other language of consolation in a quote that appears at the end of the New York Times article on his work. It reads: "Oddly,

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Mr. Langer does not despair in a career trying to articulate evil. 'It's been exhilarating for me, the discovery that you can find a language to bring alive such a memory,' he said. 'You take the inexpressible, the unimaginable, and you take a language and don't sentimentalize it, and you can describe what happened. In a sense it's a triumph,' he began, and then corrected himself. 'No, a demonstration, of the resilience of language."t71 This language of consolation is also reflected on the dust jacket to Admitting the Holocaust, which reads: "Langer offers a view of this catastrophe that is candid and disturbing, and yet hopeful in its belief that the testimony of witnesses-in diaries, journals, memoirs, and on videotape-and the unflinching imagination of literary artists can still offer us access to one of the darkest episodes in the twentieth century." 72 Against the notion that "an impassable chasm permanently separates the seriously interested auditor and observer from the experiences of the former Holocaust victim" (HT xiv), Langer provides the reassuring message that the Holocaust experience is accessible to all readers or viewers who learn "how to imagine what happened" from Holocaust testimony (AH 106). But at the same time he tends to describe the work it takes to cross this chasm in terms that virtually only he himself has fulfilled, as one who knows what "anyone conversant with the thousands of separate testimonies of survivors knows" (AH 183)?3 When he claims that "listening to hundreds of witnesses' stories is a form of 'coming to this again,'" we might wonder: is it enough to be a "seriously interested auditor and observer," or must one spend years watching hundreds of video testimonies? Given Langer's prolonged encounter with hundreds and thousands of survivor testimonies during a decades-long "confrontation with the Holocaust experience," can anyone ever learn to imagine what happened during the Holocaust as he has? Langer repeatedly distinguishes between those who are capable of imagining what happened and those who are not. In an exemplary passage from Admitting the Holocaust he writes, "It seems that two forces are at work in Holocaust commentary.... what we appear to have is, on the one hand, a historical consciousness determined to distort or at least alleviate the harshest truths of the Holocaust, and, on the other, a historical consciousness resolved to confront its implications wherever they may lead" (183)?4 Langer conceives of Holocaust commentary much as he does Holocaust memory and Holocaust testimony, all in terms of two competing sides: a

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courageous good side, devoted to facing the worst of the horror "without flinching," and a contemptible bad side, devoted to "sweetening" the horror, denying harsh truths, and falsifying "the way it was." Consequently, throughout his writings we find one side pitted against the other: the admitter against the denier, deep memory against common memory, the "good" witness against the "bad" witness. Elie Wiesel is pitted against Anne Frank (HLI 76-77), Jean Amery against Viktor Frankl (AH 91), Pierre T. against Leo P. (HT 88), and so on?5 Finally, Langer sets himself apart from the mass of Holocaust commentators-" they are too numerous to list" -who inevitably betray a "need to make the Holocaust appear more harmless than it was" by heroicizing the victims and finding some redeeming meaning in atrocity (AH 182, 184). The irony of Langer's anti-heroic rhetoric has been noted by Michael Andre Bernstein, who writes, "Paradoxically, while stressing the emptiness of any notion of 'heroism' in a context of industrialized mass extermination, Langer's own rhetoric stakes out a dubious claim to a singular intellectualmoral fortitude in being able to confront the bleak truth from which he thinks the rest of us turn our eyes." 76 The bleak truth, according to Langer, is that "the Holocaust experience" repudiates "the redemptive value of all moral, community, and religious systems of belief" (PH 1). Responding to Langer, Dominick LaCapra points out that "if experience or facts depart drastically from values ... this departure does not invalidate the values but indicates the extremity ... of the circumstances and the repeated need to do everything possible to prevent the recurrence of similar circumstances."77 But for Langer the Holocaust appears to have permanently invalidated pre-Holocaust values and beliefs. Moreover, he suggests that the European Jews' failure to recognize the futility of "all moral, community, and religious systems of belief" was somehow a worse horror than the fact of their systematic extermination. "The deepest horror of the Holocaust," he states, "may have been man's inability to recognize it for what it was, or the desperation with which he suppressed the darkest portents about its true purpose" (HLI 116). Langer believes that because the European Jews shared the same values as those "cherished by the American mind, with its stress on individual success and an infinitely improving future," they were unable to realize that the Nazis intended to systematically exterminate every last one of them; for the same "psychology of mental comfort" that discourages Americans from facing

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the Holocaust today is what made "the intended victims ... unprepared to handle the tales of slaughter that drifted back to the ghettos from the killing centers" (PH 63). Thus, according to Langer, pre-Holocaust European Jewish values were the same as post-Holocaust American values. Moreover, much like the Jews who died in the ghettos and gas chambers, we will fail to "admit" the Holocaust if, in failing to recognize it as a "rupture in human values," we "let old values invade new terror" (AH 3, 9)?8 Langer's resistance to what he calls "the rhetoric of heroic behavior" is tested when he writes about moments in survivor testimony in which he sees his own understanding of the Holocaust verified (AH 36). In Holocaust Testimonies he calls these "crucial moments," defined as "situations requiring a split-second response that often made the difference between life and death" (HT 151). Langer normally denies agency to the victims, describing them as "plunged into a crisis of what we might call 'choiceless choice,' where crucial decisions did not reflect options between life and death, but between one form of abnormal response and another" in a nowin situation (VS 72)?9 But "crucial moments" present a dramatic exception; in these cases, according to Langer, "reactions combine a sense of danger with bluff, bravado, willingness to take a risk, but above all a rejection of normal and familiar deference to authority or apparently insuperable obstacles." He asserts that these reactions require Jewish victims to shed any "expectation of moral continuity" with the pre-Holocaust world (HT 151). That is to say, to avoid death they must share Langer's understanding that all moral, communal, and religious beliefs are now outmoded and irrelevant. Langer provides examples of "crucial moments" taken from the video testimonies of Leon S. and Mira B. In each case, a Jew defies arrest by confronting the person (a Polish policeman in one case, a Lithuanian guard in another) who would abet his or her capture by the Germans. Even as Langer appears to praise Leon S. and Mira B. for what he calls "seizing the crucial moment," he must take care to avoid the kind of heroicizing rhetoric he attacks others for using (HT 154). Thus he states that Leon S.'s defiance "should not be mistaken for a model of successful survival strategy" and Mira B.'s "spiritual dignity and resolute will" should not be applauded, since it is impossible to account for exactly why their efforts to escape arrest succeeded (HT 153, 156-57). In addition, Langer claims that

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at these" crucial moments" it was neither Leon S. and Mira B. who decided what to do, but "the impromptu self," a kind of survival mechanism that takes over in threatening situations-unless it has been "inactivated" by the victim's adherence to prewar values (HT 155). Langer claims that the self-preserving impulses of the impromptu self "replace the faculty of moral choice" (HT 139). However, the stories told by Leon S. and Mira B. indicate that they convinced their potential captors to let them go by appealing to a shared sense of prewar and postwar values. Leon S. challenged a policeman to imagine how Polish "bastards" who delivered Jews to the Germans would be judged after the war, while Mira B. appealed to her young guard's humanity (HT 152, 156). Unlike Kazin, Langer does not attempt to relate to the Holocaust through a single, most trustworthy survivor; his approach is more sophisticated, taking into account the fallibility and shortcomings of any witness's testimony. This scholar trusts no survivor more than he trusts his own ability to decipher "the way it was" in bits and pieces of survivor testimony; he is his own best embodiment of the Holocaust. Thus it should not be a complete surprise that, in his many books and essays on the Holocaust, ultimately only Langer appears to be completely free from the need to deny the Holocaust's harshest truths. No less a figure than Elie Wiesel is occasionally "victimized by his own illusions," notes Langer, and "if Wiesel himself is not immune to such temptations, how careful must we be in assessing the interpretations of other commentators, survivors and nonsurvivors" (VS 144-45). Here being careful does not mean exercising caution in one's own interpretations; rather, it denotes a readiness, if not an eagerness, to expose other commentators' lapses and failings in the face of the Holocaust. We can see this in Langer's allegation that even Wiesel leads us astray. Based on his misinterpretation of a passage in Wiesel's essay "The Guilt We Share," Langer faults this survivor-writer for believing that had the Hungarian Jews only been forewarned about Auschwitz, they might have saved themselves by attempting an escape from the death camp. Langer comments, "Future generations will be baffled or misled by this passage.... To expect starving and frightened men, women, and children, however forewarned, to flee through the barbed wire surrounding Birkenau (to say nothing of SS bullets), to run miles to distant mountains, to sur-

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vive there without food, clothing, or shelter, not knowing Polish, subject to the hostility of a suspicious native population-is bizarre and absurd" (VS 144-45)· In fact, Wiesel does not claim that these Jews would or could have orchestrated a mass escape upon arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Rather, he claims that had they known about Auschwitz before being deported from Transylvania to the death camp, they might have fled from the poorly guarded ghetto into the Carpathian Mountains near Sighet. The confusing passage Langer comments upon reads: "Arriving at the Auschwitz station, [the Jews from Transylvania] still had no idea of what lay in wait for them.... Had they known, they could have made a dash for it, been saved. Not all, maybe, but the great majority. Mountains surrounded the area, and the Jews might have fled into these mountains and hidden out for a while." 80 Langer must have taken "the area" to refer to Auschwitz rather than Sighet. Wiesel makes the same point far more clearly in another essay, where he writes: "We could have fled, hidden ourselves in the mountains or in the villages. The ghetto was not very well guarded: A mass escape would have had every chance of success. But we did not know." 81 What is striking here is not the possibility of misreading Wiesel; rather, it is the zeal with which Langer attributes to Wiesel a conviction that is patently "bizarre and absurd": "Unwilling to concede that in Auschwitz significant resistance by unarmed men, women, and children was futile, heedless (at this moment) of his own traumatizing account in Night of the terrifying journey to the camp and its paralyzing effect on the victims, [Wiesel] insists ... that a Hungarian Jewry forewarned by international denunciation of what they might expect in Auschwitz would have been forearmed upon arrival and prepared to act in support of their own survival" (VS 144, my emphasis). Rather than questioning the accuracy of his own reading, Langer focuses on drawing out the imaginary scenario of the Jews' escape from Auschwitz to full effect by compiling details: the barbed wire, the SS bullets, the distant mountains, the suspicious Poles. At such moments, and they are pervasive in Langer's work, the critic seems more interested in berating others for their failure to face the Holocaust's "harshest truths" than in confronting "its implications, wherever they may lead." Langer has yet to consider that these implications may eventually lead us not into "the abyss of the place we call Auschwitz" (AH 18), but back to ourselves, to a re-examination of our own work. Of course, this self-exam-

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ination raises the very questions and concerns Langer would dismiss as "autobiography." Holocaust scholar Alan L. Berger writes, "There are reasons both conscious and subconscious that impel the attempt to confront the kingdom of night. Autobiography is at least as important as intellectual concern. Or is it the other way around?" 82 In fact, autobiography is inseparable from intellectual concern, and for this reason must be of intellectual concern. That is, we need to reflect upon what "impels" us to confront the Holocaust, as this shapes our intellectual endeavors in significant ways that may elude conscious understanding. Of course, when we who were not there "confront" the Holocaust, we do not interact directly with any of the events or experiences that fall under the rubric of the Holocaust, but with selected texts. We make choices, selecting from an ever-growing, already tremendous array those particular representations of the Holocaust we want to confront. We choose to focus only on certain aspects of those chosen texts, and we make still more choices concerning how we represent the Holocaust in our own work. All of these decisions which we make, for reasons both conscious and unconscious, are constitutive parts of our confrontation with the Holocaust. By reflecting on them we can ask ourselves what it is we seek in and from the Holocaust. Hans Kellner writes that for scholars and artists alike, the desire to represent the Holocaust is shaped by current concerns: "it is a desire to repeat the Holocaust in a suitably altered form to meet complex, often contradictory, sets of present needs. It is the power of these needs, often unrecognized and elusive, that drives the process, and, in my opinion, creates the problem. Once we acknowledge the reality of need and desire in representations of the past, we are open to the tacit contrast of the weight of the event represented and the weight of present desires." 83 However, the weight of the past may itself be evoked to quash the relevance of admitting and reflecting upon these present needs and desires. Given what Kellner calls "the overwhelming sense of imbalance between the Holocaust and any interest in it," it seems that these matters of "autobiography" should dwindle into insignificance. What importance could any set of present needs have when set next to the importance of the event itself? The problem posed by these needs is not only that, once acknowledged, they may compromise "the weight of the event" by deflecting attention from the Holocaust itself onto matters concerning the Holocaust's repre-

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sentation by writers, museum and memorial designers, filmmakers, and others. For a greater problem exists when these needs are not acknowledged. As Kellner states, present needs and desires, both conscious and unconscious, have a role in shaping depictions of the Holocaust. These needs and desires, if unacknowledged and unexamined, can outweigh "the event" because they have the power to color, filter, and otherwise revise the historical past. By granting authenticity or authority to any single representation of the Holocaust without examining how present needs have shaped it, we leave ourselves open to a narrow and potentially distorted understanding of both the past and the present. Although we cannot measure a representation of the Holocaust against the past itself, by considering it in relation to a number of other texts we can gain a greater understanding of the Holocaust as past event and subject of present-day needs and desires. Just as it is important to recognize what Kellner calls "the reality of need and desire in representations of the past," so it is necessary to distinguish between representations of the past and the past itself. But again, the weight of the past may be evoked by those claiming that a focus on how the Holocaust is represented distracts us from what really matters: not our own needs and desires, but the event itself. In the introduction to the anthology Writing and the Holocaust (1988), Berel Lang concedes that "it may be objected that to call attention to the writing in writing about the Holocaust must have the effect of distancing readers and writers from the subject of the Holocaust itself. Surely, this objection goes, what ought to be central are the issues raised by the events of the Holocaust, not the manners of its representation." Lang accounts for the focus of his volume by explaining that "without an understanding of the means by which a subject is 'written,' access to the subject itself is unavoidably impeded."84 That is, we must deal with the writing because it will otherwise hinder our access to the Holocaust itself. This conception of writing as an impediment that must be surmounted is taken to an extreme by Langer in his contribution to Lang's volume. In "Interpreting Survivor Testimony," he notes that when it comes to written texts, such as survivor memoirs, "we are dealing with represented rather than unmediated reality." He then explains: "This led me to an inquiry into whether an unmediated text about the Holocaust experience is ever achievable. And this in tum roused my curiosity about the nature of the differ-

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ence between written memoirs and oral testimony, particularly videotaped testimony ... " 85 This in tum led Langer to write Holocaust Testimonies, the book which would incorporate his essay in the anthology Writing and the Holocaust as part of its second chapter. This story of the genesis of his book is also the story of Langer's quest for the "unmediated text" -that paradoxical text which would enable him to encounter the Holocaust in some way other than "through the mediation of a text" (HT xii). I am reminded once more of Wiesel's cryptic pronouncement, "A novel about Auschwitz is not a novel, or it is not about Auschwitz." 86 The idea of a novel about Auschwitz that is not a novel is much like Langer's notion of a text about the Holocaust experience that is not a text, but with a key difference. Like Langer, Wiesel indicates that only an unmediated text would adequately reveal or convey the event. But when Wiesel claims that the only way for a novel to be about Auschwitz is to be Auschwitz-that is, to be not a novel, but the unmediated reality of the death camp-he is declaring the impossibility of ever "achieving" such a text and, by extension, the impossibility of ever adequately conveying the Holocaust. Langer, however, makes such an unmediated text the object of his academic inquiry. It functions as the elusive holy grail of his ongoing, decadeslong "confrontation with the Holocaust experience." This text would not represent the reality of the Holocaust, but would somehow be this reality"re-presented rather than represented" (AH 17). Whereas Alan Rosenberg writes that we "cannot relive the experience of the survivors" and "cannot have an immediate experience of the full and actual horror of the events," an unmediated text about the Holocaust experience would enable Langer to do both (387). In short, the imaginary unmediated text would enable Langer to experience the Holocaust itself, for himself. We need to think critically and openly about the desire for such a text, exploring how it too mediates our relation to the Holocaust, complicating our relationships with survivors and nonwitnesses.

Trauma and Truth What, ultimately, is Langer looking for in the Holocaust experience? A compelling answer to this question lies in recalling Michael Andre Bern-

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stein's notion of "the ideology of the extreme" (discussed in chapter 1), according to which "the truth lies in the extreme moments which 'ordinary bourgeois life' covers over." 87 Not only do many survivors feel that their Holocaust experiences revealed a "fundamental truth about the world" (89); so do many nonwitnesses, Langer prominent among them. His search for the least transformed, least mediated, and therefore truest portrayal of the Holocaust is ultimately a search for the fundamental truth revealed by the Holocaust. Because there can only be one Truth, he dismisses all that differentiates the survivors-their myriad identities, worldviews, and varieties of wartime and postwar experience. Instead, he is drawn to what obliterated these differences: the leveling experience of the most extreme deprivation and suffering, in which the victim, stripped of all preconceived beliefs and value systems, encountered Truth. As discussed in this chapter, Langer's desire to find Truth in the Holocaust experience causes him to respond to whatever impedes his efforts in a specific way: he splits apart whatever seems contaminated by false consciousness (Holocaust commentary, survivor testimony, memory), situating truth on one side of the divide and that which compromises truth (literary effects, pre- and post-Holocaust values, redemptive rhetoric) on the other. Thus Langer sets written testimonies apart from oral ones, locating the real in the latter; and, when this fails to remove the stain of the literary, he further divides oral testimony into the voices of common memory and deep memory, again locating the real in the latter. But who is to say that deep memory is completely free of the falsifying effects of the literary? Perhaps the next logical step will be to divide deep memory, setting what is "deep" about it apart from a memory that is not different enough, after all, from common memory. In fact, this has already been done, but under different terms-namely, the splitting of traumatic memory into memory and trauma. Since Langer published "Memory's Time" (1993), in which he noted the proliferation of titles focused on the theme of memory, Holocaust scholarship has seen the arrival of a new buzzword. While "memory" still graces the titles of many books and essays on the Holocaust, its use is increasingly being supplemented or displaced by references to "trauma." The term, popularized since the American Psychiatric Association officially recognized post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a diagnostic category in 1980, has entered Holocaust discourse through work done in the 1990s in the field of "trauma

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studies," largely by literary scholars. The most influential scholar of "trauma theory" has been Cathy Caruth, a professor of English and comparative literature. With the publications of her 1995 edited collection Trauma: Explorations in Memory and her 1996 study Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Caruth has become the leading "trauma theorist" in the humanities. Caruth's understanding of memory and trauma breaks radically with that of other trauma theorists, who employ the terms narrative memory and traumatic memory. These terms, borrowed from French psychologist Pierre Janet, a contemporary of Freud, are remarkably consistent with Langer's categories of common memory and deep memory. Narrative memory is described as linguistic, coherently structured, comprehensive, and highly constructed; traumatic memory is described as bodily, sensory, fragmented, intrusive, non-narrative, and accurately preserved. 88 Like Langer's turn from Holocaust literature to videotaped oral testimonies, the embrace of traumatic memory is characterized by a rejection of the literary and a corresponding turn to the visual. Traumatic memories are described in photographic and cinematic terms, as dreams, flashbacks, hallucinations, reality imprints, burned-in visual impressions, indelible images, events engraved on the mind or etched into the brain, and experiences encoded in iconic rather than linguistic forms. 89 Langer appeals to a similar conception of memory free from distortion or decay when he refers to "the uniquely imprisoned persistence of a Holocaust event in a witness's memory" (AH 16). Susan J. Brison has noted that this dichotomizing of memory allows false distinctions to be made. "The tendency to take certain memories-traumatic memories-as simply given, and retained as snapshots, exists in trauma theory," she writes, although "traumatic memory, like narrative memory, is articulated, selective, even malleable, in spite of the fact that the framing of such memory may not be under the survivor's conscious control."90 Indeed, research indicates that traumatic memories are not preserved images but complex constructions and that, while generally persistent and accurate, they are not immune to decay and distortion. 91 This is where Caruth intervenes. Instead of defending traumatic memory, she grants the constructed nature of all memory while setting the traumatic apart, defining trauma in opposition to memory. In the preface and two introductory essays she wrote for Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Caruth

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refers to traumatic experience, traumatic events, the traumatic reexperiencing of the event, the traumatic symptom, the traumatic occurrence, the traumatic nightmare, traumatic dreams and flashbacks, traumatic reenactment, traumatic recall, traumatic recollection, traumatic suffering, traumatic pasts, and traumatic history. 92 Not once, however, does she refer to traumatic memory or traumatic memories. There is a simple reason for this: Caruth sees "traumatic memory" as oxymoronic, the traumatic being "defined, in part, by the way that it pushes memory away" (TEM viii). Much like Langer, Caruth is concerned with "how we can listen to trauma ... for the truth that it tells us" (TEM vii-viii). Though she acknowledges that trauma "requires integration, both for the sake of testimony and for the sake of cure" (TEM 153), she does so only to warn that such integration hinders our access to the "special truth" of traumatic experience (TEM vii, 153).93 She is principally concerned with imagining ways we can gain access to this truth without its taking the form of a "comprehensible story" -which is to say, without its being mediated by memory (TEM 154). Trauma fulfills this need by serving as a memory-free form of recall, or as an "unmediated text" through which catastrophic events and experiences can be re-presented rather than represented. In its essence, this notion of trauma, which Caruth elaborates by drawing on Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, is a more theoretically sophisticated articulation of Langer's notion of deep memory. 94 Though far more indebted to literary theory than to research on memory and trauma, Caruth's theoretically rich conception of trauma has a veneer of scientific authority. Holocaust scholars who adopt her notion of trauma may therefore feel spared the work of consulting scientific writings on traumatic stress, remaining unaware of how much her conception of trauma differs from that found in recent scientific and clinical writings. In Unclaimed Experience, Caruth writes, "In its general definition, trauma is described as the response to an unexpected or overwhelming violent event or events that are not fully grasped as they occur, but return later in repeated flashbacks, nightmares, and other repetitive phenomena."95 This general definition includes no mention of memory since, for Caruth, the flashbacks, nightmares, and other repetitive phenomena that haunt traumatized persons are simply not to be regarded as memories. Yet in their contribution to Trauma: Explorations in Memory, psychiatrist Bessel A. van der Kolk and psychologist Onno van der Hart not only refer to nightmares

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and flashbacks as "traumatic memories," but describe the recent tum to trauma in psychology and psychiatry as a renewed interest in "the memories that plague people." 96 In "Trauma and Memory," van der Kolk defines trauma as "an inescapably stressful event that overwhelms people's existing coping mechanisms."97 For van der Kolk, trauma names the event; for Caruth, trauma names the response to the event, understood as a belated experience of the event itself. This difference is crucial to her theory and, I believe, accounts for a large part of its appeal; for if the trauma is not the event but the response to it, and if the response can recur long after the event itself has occurred, then the trauma is something we may encounter ourselves. For van der Kolk and van der Hart, the traumatized person's response takes the form of traumatic memories, which they describe as "the unassimilated scraps of overwhelming experiences."98 By contrast, Caruth, who refers neither to memories nor people when defining trauma, understands theresponse as the literal return of the event that was too overwhelming to be "experienced fully at the time" (TEM 4). The "overwhelming occurrence," she writes, "remains, in its insistent return, absolutely true to the event" (TEM 5). The implications of this theory for the Holocaust become clearer when we realize that Caruth is writing not only about personal traumas suffered by individuals, but historical traumas involving the collective experience of catastrophic events. Moreover, she draws a link between the two, indicating that the trauma of individual Holocaust survivors can become a collective trauma for those who did not experience the catastrophe itself. Caruth writes that her notion of trauma "acknowledges that perhaps it is not possible for the witnessing of the trauma to occur within the individual at all, that it may only be in future generations that' cure' or at least witnessing can take place" (UE 136 n. 21). She then refers readers interested in "the (inter)generational structure of trauma" to a study of the Holocaust's effects on survivors' children, though she might have directed them elsewhere. For a more closely related account of the Holocaust, conceived as an overwhelming event that could not be witnessed at the time it occurred, can be found in writings by Dori Laub, who introduced Caruth to the field of contemporary trauma studies. Laub is a psychoanalyst who treats Holocaust survivors and their children; he is also a child survivor of the Holocaust and a co-founder of the

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Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, home of the video testimonies analyzed by Langer. In "Truth and Testimony," included in Caruth's Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Laub presents his notion that the Holocaust was "an event without a witness." This notion is predicated on the following principle: "A witness is a witness to the truth of what happens during an event."99 Like Caruth's notion that one can only have memory of events "fully grasped as they occur" or "experienced fully at the time," this postulation raises the question of why being a witness to an event should require a complete and fully accurate perception of "what happens during an event" -particularly given that most if not all witnessing and remembering is partial, subjective, and imperfect. 100 Laub's formulation also involves a familiar slippage between the Holocaust as lived experience and the Holocaust as historical event. The fact that no one could experience or witness all of the Holocaust does not mean that there were no witnesses to the countless events that have come to be called "the Holocaust." Nonetheless, Laub claims that "what precisely made a Holocaust out of the event is the unique way in which, during its historical occurrence, the event produced no witnesses" ("Truth" 65). 101 This is a concept so nonsensical on its face that we might pause to better understand how Laub supports it. Does he mean to suggest, like Levi, that only the dead could bear complete witness to the Holocaust? No. Laub's point is rather that the Holocaust was too overwhelming to be grasped, fully experienced, or witnessed when it occurred. In short, he contends that the Holocaust was a trauma in Caruth's sense of the word. "While historical evidence to the event which constitutes the trauma may be abundant and documents in vast supply, the trauma-as a known event and not simply as an overwhelming shock-has not been truly witnessed yet," writes Laub.l 02 As if to provide a pseudo-scientific basis for Langer's conception of "the Holocaust universe" or Wiesel's claim that the Holocaust transcends history, Laub contends that, as an event without a witness, the Holocaust is a timeless phenomenon: "The traumatic event, although real, took place outside the parameters of 'normal' reality, such as causality, sequence, place and time. The trauma is thus an event that has no beginning, no ending, no before, no during and no after" ("Bearing" 69). The appeal of such fanciful thinking is that, according to its logic, the Holocaust is no longer historically and geographically distant; instead, it becomes something we might witness ourselves. "In fact," Laub tells his

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readers, when listening to a Holocaust survivor give testimony, "the listener (or the interviewer) becomes the Holocaust witness before the narrator does." As Laub explains it, "To a certain extent, the interviewer-listener takes on the responsibility for bearing witness that previously the narrator felt he bore alone, and therefore could not carry out. ... This joint responsibility is the source of the reemerging truth" ("Truth" 69). Exactly why the listener becomes a Holocaust witness before the survivor does remains unclear, except that he or she is made to seem more essential to the process of bearing witness to the Holocaust than the survivor. "The Video Archive might, therefore, be thought of as helping to create, after the fact, the missing Holocaust wit~ess," states Laub ("Truth" 69), leaving it for the reader to decide whether the Holocaust witness is the survivor, the nonwitness who listens to survivor testimony, or both. For Laub, like Langer, the Holocaust is the site of truth, and listening to survivors becomes an effort to find this truth, which is ultimately about life or being in the world. "The survival experience, or the Holocaust experience, is a very condensed version of most of what life is about: it contains a great many existential questions, that we manage to avoid in our daily living, often through preoccupation with trivia," states Laub. These include "the question of facing death; of facing time and its passage; of the meaning and purpose of living; ... of losing the ones that are close to us; [and] the great question of our ultimate aloneness," among others ("Bearing" 72). This conception of "the Holocaust experience" as a kind of existentialist sentimental education encourages those who read and listen to survivor testimony to approach it in search of big answers. It also encourages a response that evaluates the authenticity of a survivor's act of witness in accordance with the answers that survivor provides. What nonwitnesses do not like in a survivor's testimony may be seen as untrustworthy, transformed by the literary, revised by common memory, or constructed by memory. Conversely, when they see their own worldviews reflected, or feel that their encounter with a survivor's account has made for a profound experience, the testimony may be seen as a pure expression of trauma or deep memory, free from literary artifice of any kind. A more sophisticated understanding of how meaning is conveyed in survivor testimony, and the relation of this meaning to truth, seems necessary. Here Henry Greenspan's book On Listening to Holocaust Survivors is most helpful. "In an age of collecting testimonies by the thousands, usually in

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single interviews," Greenspan hopes "to remind us how far we remain from getting 'the story."' 103 His book persuasively argues that there is more to learn in interviewing one survivor numerous times than in listening to a massive number of survivors tell their stories one time each. This is because, when first interviewed, survivors tend to tell "versions of experience that are 'proven,"' ones they believe will be "tellable" for them and "hearable" for their listeners (xvi). Thus, whereas Laub believes that survivors are not witnesses to their own experiences until they are interviewed, and Langer wants to locate truth in videotaped first interviews, Greenspan writes that only through subsequent conversation does the "proven" story give way to more complicated efforts to translate memories into stories, efforts that are never complete. Greenspan refers to these efforts as "recountings" rather than "testimonies," explaining that "'testimony' suggests a formal, finished quality that almost never characterizes survivors' remembrance. 'Recounting,' it has seemed to me, better connotes the provisional and procedural nature of retelling-a series of what are always compromises that always point beyond themselves" (xvii). Though he refers to oral testimony, Greenspan's remarks apply to written testimony as well. A key difference is that survivor memoirs project a formal, finished quality because they are literally finished, published works; and so it becomes even more important for readers to keep in mind their truly provisional nature. For instance, Night is better understood as one recounting among many-reflecting certain compromises and decisions regarding what was hearable and tellable at the time it was written-than as the last word, or the true word, on Wiesel's experiences during the Holocaust. Most important, Greenspan embraces the constructed nature of testimony. "Indeed," he writes, "it may be precisely the unfinished, contested, and not definitive character of survivors' recounting that offers us fullest access to its significance. That is, it is only as we learn to follow survivors' accounts as they become disfigured and finally fail-because the destruction is too vast, because the loss is too unbearable, because meaning becomes undone, because stories fall apart, because voice starts to strangle, because death again invades the recounter-that we begin to approach the Holocaust" (6). Here the failure of survivor accounts to re-present the past or bear complete witness to the Holocaust is not perceived as an impediment to true understanding, but valued as a source of knowledge. Like-

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wise, survivors' reflections on the difficulties of recounting their Holocaust experiences, and their assessment of these experiences from a present perspective, are valued as part of their testimonies, rather than treated as obstructive expressions of "common memory." Caruth writes, "The impossibility of a comprehensible story ... does not necessarily mean the denial of a transmissible truth" (TEM 154). I assume Greenspan would agree, given that survivors do convey some truth about their experiences through their recounting. However, in Caruth's estimation truth is not located in such efforts-what she calls "the narration of memory"-but in uncontrolled eruptions of trauma (TEM 154). Such "transmissions" of truth, which occur despite survivors' efforts to recount their stories, suggest that interpretation involves finding nuggets of the real in testimony that is otherwise deficient or inauthentic. Greenspan offers another approach, writing, "The purpose of . . . interpretation, of course, is not to uncover what survivors 'really' mean or to substitute our words for theirs. Rather, it is to enter into the process by which survivors find words and meanings at all in the face of memories that undo their words and meanings" (6). This does not entail embracing a survivor's words and meanings as authoritative or representative, but working to understand how these words and meanings give shape to present comprehension of past experience. Recognition of the constructedness of testimony thus requires a thoughtful engagement that goes missing when an emphasis on knowing "what it was like to be there" devolves into a single-minded search for the true Holocaust experience, and for the truth one hopes to find in that experience.

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Straight-on Views of the Holocaust Years before his search for an "unmediated text about the Holocaust experience" led him to videotaped testimonies, Langer had wondered if artistic representations, such as plays, television programs, and films, might transform the Holocaust into "a form of artistic experience carrying it beyond its historical moment and making it accessible in all its complexity to those who have not directly experienced it." Given that these imaginative works of "Holocaust art" are created by nonwitnesses who know of the Holocaust only indirectly and after the fact, Langer wonders if they can compete with depictions created by direct witnesses to the event. In "The Americanization of the Holocaust on Stage and Screen" (1983), he asks: "Can representation rival the immediacy of contemporaneous photographs, diaries dug up after the war in the ashes surrounding Auschwitz, or even survivor accounts ... ?" 1 Although photographs, diaries, and survivor accounts are all representations of the Holocaust (rather than the reality itself), for Langer they are distinguished from "representation" by their immediacy. In the case of the photograph or diary, this immediacy can be attributed to what James E. Young calls "the perceived temporal proximity of a text to events." These texts are not only about Holocaust events, but are tied to them by virtue of having been recorded "from within the whirlwind," during the events

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themselves. 2 Although, as Young notes, the photograph and diary are no less constructed or mediated than other forms of representation, each is "able to invoke the authority of its empirical link to events, which in turn seems to reinforce the sense of its unmediated factuality" (Writing 37, 57). What then of survivor accounts written years, even decades, after the war? Here temporal distance is offset by what Young calls "the authentic, genuine voice of one who was there, who is empirically-not imaginatively-linked to these experiences" (Writing 56). What Langer deems a representation lacks any such direct, empirical link to the Holocaust, except, perhaps, to the extent that it incorporates documentary photos or survivor testimony. Unlike Holocaust photographs, diaries and survivor accounts, a representation or work of Holocaust art is only imaginatively linked to past events and experiences. Can Holocaust art "rival" Holocaust photos and testimonies? Much as Langer claims in his earliest book, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, that literature does far more than historical accounts to "involve the uninitiated reader in the atmosphere of the Holocaust," so in his 1983 essay he writes that "only art can lead the uninitiated imagination ... to the icy atmosphere of the deathcamps." 3 While granting that art may never be able "to duplicate the absolute horror of such atrocities," he maintains that Holocaust representations can and must "re-create at least a limited authentic image of that horror" (AH 176). What might such an image look like? Langer considers the 1978 television miniseries Holocaust. "Many who celebrate the film argue that for the first time, at least in America, viewers will get a sense of what it was like to suffer being Jewish during the Nazi period," he writes; but Langer finds little in the miniseries that might provide viewers with an authentic sense of the horror that for him exclusively defines the Holocaust. "The vision which plunges us into the lower abysses of atrocity is not there," he concludes (AH 175). Had it been there, what might television viewers have seen? Inferences can be drawn from Langer's lengthy description of what Halo~ caust fails to show: "We do not know what it was like, in the Warsaw Ghetto and elsewhere, to have been reduced to eating dogs, cats, horses, insects, and even, in rare unpublicized instances, human flesh. We do not know what the human being suffered during days and nights in sealed boxcars, starving, confused, desperate, sharing one's crowded space with frozen corpses. We do not know of the endless roll calls in Auschwitz, often in sub-

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freezing temperature, when men and women simply collapsed and died from exhaustion." Langer is also disturbed that we "never glimpse" dreadful occurrences of the kind he finds in survivor accounts-scenes of" mothers abandoning children or fathers and sons throttling each other for a piece of bread" (AH 175 ). Finally, he complains that we are shown men and women entering an Auschwitz gas chamber, but nothing further, nothing of what he characterizes as "the terror and despair that overwhelmed millions of victims as they recognized the final moment of their degradation and their powerlessness to respond" (AH 176). 4 Langer argues that viewers of the miniseries do not know what the Holocaust experience was like because too little is shown of the horrors suffered by the victims. Elie Wiesel, to the contrary, has argued just as vehemently that the miniseries attempts to show too much: "It tries to show what cannot even be irnagined." 5 In a sharply worded review published in the New York Times, he writes: "We see naked women and children entering the gaschambers; we see their faces, we hear their moans as the doors are being shut, then-well, enough: Why continue? To use special effects and gimmicks to describe the indescribable is to me morally objectionable. Worse: it is indecent. The last moments of the forgotten victims belong to themselves" (157). Furthermore, Wiesel argues that efforts to re-create what happened must fail. "What you have seen on the screen is not what happened there," he writes. "You may think you know how the victims lived and died, but you do not. Auschwitz cannot be explained nor can it be visualized" (157-58). Langer, however, finds the Holocaust already visually depicted in documentary photographs and films. The problem, as he sees it, is that nothing in Holocaust re-creates the horror found in those authentic images. He makes this point by referring to one scene from the miniseries which incorporates black-and-white archival images. "Why is it," he asks, "that nothing in the drama equals or even approaches the unmitigated horror of the actual films of Nazi executions which [fictional SS officer] Dorf shows his superiors?" He answers: "One might argue that art never matches history; but in the case of Holocaust, it is more valid to conclude that talent has not matched intention" (AH 175). Lest the miniseries dissuade us, Langer argues that Holocaust art could rival archival films, photos, and witness testimony, if only greater talent were brought to bear. Strangely, his model for such an art-one that would aptly convey the Holocaust's horror-ap-

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pears to be "the actual films of Nazi executions" showing Jews being machine-gunned into mass graves. No successful works of Holocaust art are identified by Langer in "The Americanization of the Holocaust on Stage and Screen." But for those reading the reprinted 1983 essay in his Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays, an example of good Holocaust art can be found in the book's introduction. Returning to what he had written em Holocaust eleven years earlier, Langer quotes his extensive list of what the miniseries does not show in order to contrast Holocaust once more to a superior vision of the Holocaust. Only now this superior vision is exemplified not by actual films of Nazi executions, but by Steven Spielberg's award-winning film Schindler's List. For Langer, this 1993 film not only succeeds where the 1978 television series failed, but testifies to a growing American willingness to confront the Holocaust. 6 His praise of the film extends to defending it against criticisms that, in his view, fail to understand "the reality on which the experience of Schindler's Jews was based" (AH 10). For instance, he writes, "The complaint that Jews are not sufficiently characterized might be valid were the subject not the Holocaust, which signaled not only physical destruction, but the death of the very idea of the self" (AH 9). If the film's Jewish characters are undeveloped, he argues, it is because Schindler's Jews experienced persecution as an undifferentiated mass. He praises the film for depicting this, writing, "The frantic surge of mobs of people from the shelter of their crowded homes into unprotected public spaces and their subsequent journeys to ghettos, work camps, or (via cattle car) a killing center are followed by the camera without benefit of intense scrutiny of inner responses .... Schindler's List uses visual effects to create chaos rather than form, and when such chaos invades the frontiers of the mind, it leaves little leisure for an orderly response" (AH 10). Langer suggests that the film confronts viewers with the same chaos that denied Jews an orderly response to Nazi persecution. Given his persistent attacks on representations of the Holocaust that "console instead of confront," Langer's assessment of Spielberg's film is quite surprising (AH 5). After all, Schindler's List has been widely criticized as a feel-good Holocaust film-and praised as such, as well. Film critic Gene Siskel, for example, praised Schindler's List as "a Holocaust survival film that teaches the lesson 'one man can make a difference."' 7 Many critics and scholars have questioned Spielberg's decision to represent the

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Holocaust through the redemptive story of Oskar Schindler, contending that this story of a heroic German businessman and member of the Nazi party who saved the lives of over a thousand Jews obscures the reality of an event in which most Germans were Nazi collaborators or passive bystanders, and most Jews did not survive but, unaided by rescuers, suffered horrifying deaths. Indeed, Schindler's List has been described as the "most visible illustration" of how American discourse on the Holocaust has shifted away from the Holocaust's horror to a life-affirming focus on rescuers and survivors. 8 In 2000, New York Times film reviewer A. 0. Scott remarked, "In recent years-perhaps the turning point was Schindler's List-films about the Holocaust have undergone a noticeable change in tone toward a redemptive, even hopeful reckoning with historical catastrophe."9 Langer's description of a cultural shift in just the opposite direction, and his relative silence on the film's consolatory aspects, are therefore most curious. 10 The question I would pose already appears in a letter to the New York Times Book Review, written in response to a laudatory review of Langer's Admitting the Holocaust. It reads: "If Mr. Langer despises the 'persisting myth about the triumph of the spirit that colors the disaster with a rosy tinge,' why does he 'applaud' Steven Spielberg's film Schindler's List, which is nothing if not a tale of survival and hope?" 11 The answer lies in the way Schindler's List offers viewers more than this tale, the story of how Oskar Schindler saved the lives of more than a thousand Jews during the Holocaust. For other than being a tale of survival and hope, at the time it was made Schindler's List was the most ambitious attempt to present the Holocaust as a spectacle to be witnessed and mourned. In her New York Times review of Schindler's List, Janet Maslin describes this spectacle in terms that answer Langer's question of whether postwar "Holocaust art" can rival photographs taken in the ghettos and the camps. Maslin begins by noting that "there is a real photographic record of some of the people and places depicted in Schindler's List." These photographs were taken by Raimund Titsch, an Austrian Catholic who managed a uniform factory inside the Plaszow camp. Hired by the Nazis to photograph social functions, he also secretly documented the camp. Three rolls of his undeveloped film lay buried in a park in Vienna until 1963, when they were exhumed and flown to Israel, where they were developed and used to print over one hundred images of Plaszow. In lieu of describing any of

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the images, Maslin writes, "The pictures that emerged, like so many visual representations of the Holocaust, are tragic, ghostly and remote." 12 At first glance Maslin's words seem to evoke the oft-remarked haunting power of Holocaust photographs. An exemplary description of this power appears in Susan Sontag's book On Photography, where we read: "One's reaction to the photographs Roman Vishniac took in 1938 of daily life in the ghettos of Poland is overwhelmingly affected by the knowledge of how soon all these people were to perish." 13 Concerning pictures taken by German soldier Willy Georg and gathered in the book In the Warsaw Ghetto: Summer 1941, Rafael F. Scharf similarly writes, "The people caught in these photographs-busy, feverish, emaciated, oppressed, but still living a life of sorts-are unaware of the unthinkably cruel end that awaits them shortly. Virtually none will escape a horrible death. One's instinct is to shout a word of warning-run! hide!-but it is too late." 14 The Jews in Georg's and Vishniac's photographs are ghostly because, though shown living in the captured moment, they are already dead, victims of the Holocaust. What is tragic here is not only their inability to avoid this catastrophe, but also our incapacity to intercede on their behalf. Commentators often remark that such images, showing Jewish lives before they were destroyed in the Holocaust, are in fact more disturbing than the atrocity photos taken of the liberated camps. This oft-stated view is presented as counter-intuitive, although it has become commonplace. For example, a review of In the Warsaw Ghetto and a book of Vishniac's photographs contends that these images "convey a sense of normality thatwith hindsight-is almost unbearable. In fact, the more banal the material in the snapshots, the more disturbing they are." 15 Such remarks suggest the more cultivated sensibilities of those who need not view explicit horrors in order to feel the horror of the Holocaust. Nonetheless, when Maslin uses the words "tragic, ghostly and remote" to describe Titsch's pictures, she is not referring to the disturbing power of banal images; on the contrary, she is describing what she regards as their ineffectual quality. The real photographic record is above all remote, depicting the Holocaust as an event so distant, so removed from the world of the living as to seem only pseudo-real. It is not only the people in these still images who appear ghostly, but the photographs themselves. The images tell viewers very little about the people and places Titsch photographed, and less about the thoughts and feelings of the photographer and those he photographed.

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Looking at them, one sees images that have lost a living connection to the photographed moment. Rather than the Holocaust, it is this loss of immediacy and emotional impact that makes these pictures tragic. 16 Maslin evokes these photographs at the start of her review in order to contrast the flatness of the photographic record to the vibrancy of Spielberg's film. After writing that Titsch's photographs now appear "tragic, ghostly and remote," she states that "the horrors of the Holocaust are often viewed from a similar distance ... But the film Schindler's List, directed with fury and immediacy by a profoundly surprising Steven Spielberg, presents the subject as if discovering it anew" (Bl). This Holocaust is the very opposite of that seen in the real photographic record. Spielberg's are moving images that, combined with sound and given an added quality of liveliness by their inclusion in an unfolding narrative, attain a "real" presence lacking in the archival still images. According to Maslin, Spielberg's Holocaust is immediate rather than remote, made present in "visceral scenes" that, unlike Titsch's ghostly images, are "invigoratingly dramatic" (Bl). In short, Schindler's List reanimates the Holocaust, making it a living event once more. Rather than Schindler's story, perhaps even despite that story, it is the film's depiction of the Holocaust as an "immediate" event that appeals to Langer and other viewers. Spielberg's camera offers the illusion of unmediated access to the past, through the re-creation of events set in the Krakow ghetto, the Plaszow labor camp, and the Auschwitz death camp. "These straight-on views of the Holocaust are the most compelling sections of the film, the ones with the greatest claim on the viewer's emotions," writes Caryn James in the New York Times. She finds Schindler's story to be far less compelling, writing that "Schindler (Liam Neeson, in a charismatic but opaque portrayal) is the weakest part of the film." 17 Film critic Simon Louvish reaches just the opposite conclusion, commenting that the central drama of "the good German Schindler" is "intelligently handled," that Liam Neeson is "brilliantly cast," and that therefore "this central hub of the story works." For Louvish, the problem is that Spielberg is not satisfied with telling Schindler's story: "His craft as a storyteller vindicated, he wishes to utilize his grand resources to show us the Shoah, no holds barred. The muddy camp, the brutal executions, the hordes of exhausted Jewish prisoners, the transports, the mass exhumation and burning of corpses. He wants to show us hell. He cannot." 18

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While both James and Louvish give Schindler's List positive reviews, they reach opposite conclusions regarding the film's two main efforts, which may be described in Louvish's terms of show and tell: Spielberg attempts both to tell us Schindler's story and to show us the Holocaust. Louvish believes the latter effort is simply ineffectual. "At the end of the day, the most Spielberg can do is to draw his spectators, for the three hours the film runs, into his Holocaust theme park," he writes (81). Others have denounced the film's "straight-on views of the Holocaust" in more stringent terms that recall Wiesel's objection to the Holocaust miniseries: "to describe the indescribable is to me morally objectionable." For a great many scholars and critics, the necessity of recognizing a limit beyond which lies the unknowable, the unspeakable, the unimaginable, the unrepresentable-something at the Holocaust's core that defies depiction-has been a guiding principle for assessing literary and artistic representations of the Holocaust. Lest it be trivialized, exploited, or otherwise desecrated, the Holocaust may be approached only partially and indirectly, always from a wary distance. Its central horror may be evoked obliquely or tangentially, through its absence or its trace, through silence or the "ruins of memory" or portraits of life before and after; but in no case should it be dealt with directly. When commenting on Spielberg's direct representation of Holocaust horrors, scholars and critics regularly invoke what is widely held to be the best film on the Holocaust, Shoah, a nine-and-a-half-hour documentary by French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann. Shoah serves as an effective counterexample to Schindler's List because of Lanzmann's oft-noted "refusal to visualize the past." The film has been described as "the outcome of a visual act of self-denial: its almost religious respect for the unrepresentability of horror and death leads to an abstention from the use of images of the past." 19 Scholars contend that Lanzmann rejects any direct representation of the Holocaust, to the point of excluding not only historical re-creations, but also archival photographs and film footage. Asked if he was ever tempted to use archive material while making Shoah, Lanzmann replied, "To illustrate? No never, no, no, no, never, this is out of the question." 20 Juxtaposed with Schindler's List, Shoah is often used to represent the superior approach to the Holocaust, one which "has shown the way to avoid the inevitable distortion and kitsch of conventional films dependent on plots and actors, sets and scripts." 21 This comparison has been encouraged by Lanzmann himself, who, in his own review of Schindler's List, de-

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nounces Spielberg's film by calling it "an illustrated version of Shoah." 22 Still, others have noted that it might just take a dramatic re-creation toeducate most people about the Holocaust. In her study of Holocaust remembrance, Isabel Wollaston remarks that while Shoah may be the greatest film about the Holocaust, "it is also 9 hours 27 minutes long, and has only ever been seen by a limited audience"; Schindler's List, on the other hand, "has been seen by millions of people world-wide. Spielberg's film has succeeded in attracting a mass audience, whereas Lanzmann's did not, even when shown on television." 23 Other critics have objected, in tum, to this argument. Michael Andre Bernstein faults "those who recognize the film's evasions and simplifications but are willing to overlook them because of their hope that it will teach people about the Holocaust who otherwise would never take an interest in it. It is this kind of condescension, the conviction that while 'we' may read Primo Levi or see Claude Lanzmann's Shoah for our knowledge of the Holocaust, 'they' could never be expected to do so, that seems to me deeply arrogant." 24 Surely "they" can be like "us"; they too can read Levi and watch Shoah, if they so desire. But the opposite is true as well: "we" who study or otherwise take a strong personal interest in the Holocaust can be like "them." That is to say, nonwitnesses can be drawn to whatever makes the Holocaust accessible for a mass audience, even if this means finding some fulfillment in the "wrong" kind of Holocaust representation. What appeal might Schindler's List hold for those who have read Levi and seen Shoah? What can Spielberg offer those in the know? Elazar Barkan offers a convincing answer when discussing a scene from Schindler's List in which the Jews are moved into the Krakow ghetto. "Spielberg's ghetto scene is overwhelming in its magnitude," writes Barkan. "Although it is almost a conventional Hollywood crowd scene, its use here is very effective because it evokes a historical reality to which we do not otherwise have access. Clearly, affirming this access through fiction is not an uncontroversial claim. Yet what does it do to our understanding of 'the historical record'? We know that a massive violent transfer took place, and Spielberg gives this knowledge visual concreteness." 25 The film's ability to give knowledge of the Holocaust visual concreteness, precisely by "illustrating" past events, applies far less to viewers of Schindler's List who know little about the Holocaust, and who otherwise take little or no interest in it, than to those who bring significant historical

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knowledge of the Holocaust to their viewing experience. Whereas Langer has stressed the value of imaginative re-creations for introducing the "uninitiated" to the Holocaust, Barkan acknowledges the appeal of visual re-creations for Holocaust "initiates." In watching Schindler's List, nonwitnesses can witness for themselves (re-created) events that they have only read or heard about; furthermore, in recognizing these events, they can validate their own knowingness as Holocaust initiates. At the same time, however, nonwitnesses may balk at the thought of having their special knowledge of the Holocaust reflected back at them by Spielberg, the tremendously successful Hollywood director known for feel-good entertainment, who, before applying his cinematic gifts to the Holocaust, set box office records by bringing aliens and dinosaurs to life on the big screen. Furthermore, nonwitnesses may assert a superior understanding of the Holocaust by rejecting Spielberg's simulation of events. Lanzmann exemplifies this response, writing, "Here you have the whole problem of the image, the problem of representation. Nothing that actually happened was anything like that, even if it all seems authentic. The Germans were not like that. And anyway I fail to see how deportees, sick with fear after months and years of misfortune, humiliation and misery, can be played by actors. I can't really justify my argument. Either one understands it or one does not" ("Why" 14). Clearly Spielberg does not understand it, or so Lanzmann argues, claiming that the very effort to represent the horror of the Holocaust through re-creation is deeply misguided and morally contemptible. Most of his review is devoted to rebuking Spielberg for having "supplied images where there were none in Shoah." However, in the latter half, Lanzmann changes tactics, arguing that his "fundamental criticism of Spielberg is that he shows the Holocaust through the eyes of a German. Even if he did save Jews." Lanzmann claims that, by focusing on Schindler's story, Spielberg avoids any direct confrontation with the Holocaust: "For him, the Holocaust is a backdrop. The blinding dark sun of the Holocaust is not confronted" ('Why" 14). When used as a trope for the Holocaust, references to the sun typically express how the Holocaust cannot and must not be confronted straight-on, as when survivor-writer Aharon Appelfeld comments: "I would say that, artistically, it is impossible to deal with [the Holocaust] directly. It's like the sun. You cannot look at the sun." 26 But Lanzmann faults Spielberg for not looking directly at the Holocaust sun. Oddly, after having argued that

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Spielberg's film attempts to show "things that cannot and should not be represented," Lanzmann minimizes and dismisses all the film shows of the Holocaust as a mere "backdrop" to Schindler's story. The matter of the film's visual re-creations of past events seems all but forgotten as Lanzmann determines that only this story appeals to viewers. "In a way, Spielberg's movie is a kitsch melodrama," he concludes. "One is gripped by the story of a German swindler, but that's all" ("Why" 14). But is that all? Or is James correct when she claims that the most gripping part of Schindler's List is not Schindler's story but the film's "straight-on views of the Holocaust"? Lanzmann appears to resist this possibility; he would rather direct our attention to Spielberg's "German swindler," who at this point becomes something of a straw man. Ultimately, Lanzmann's review demonstrates how a focus on Spielberg's decision to tell Schindler's story can be used to divert critical attention from what I take to be a far more complicated matter: the seductiveness of the film's re-creation of the Holocaust as a spectacle granting the past "visual concreteness" in the present. A great deal has been written on Schindler's List, much of it also referring to Shoah in order to address issues of low culture versus high culture, Hollywood movies versus European art cinema. My interest is not in revisiting those debates, which often reassert simplistic oppositions between "good" and "bad" representations of the Holocaust. My focus, instead, is on how and why cinematic re-creations of the Holocaust appeal to viewers. Section 1 of this chapter explores varied responses to Spielberg's "straight-on views of the Holocaust," in order to consider how ambivalence toward images that lend the Holocaust visual concreteness has shaped critical responses to Schindler's List. In section 2, !broaden the view to consider how the desire to make the Holocaust eye-witnessable is manifested not only in Spielberg's film, but even in as reputedly "anti-visual" a film as Lanzmann's Shoah.

Section I. Steven Spielberg and the Sensitive Line

A Helluva Story-Is It True?

Spielberg recalls that, in 1982, after scanning a review of a new novel by Thomas Keneally titled Schindler's List, he remarked, "It'll make a helluva

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story. Is it true?" 27 The simple answer is yes, the story told by Keneally is true. Through a series of payments, bribes, deceptions, and shrewd maneuvers, Oskar Schindler did manage to save over a thousand Jews from being sent to the death camps by employing them as slave-laborers in his factories. Reflecting this simple answer, the slogan on advertisements for Spielberg's film adaptation of Keneally's book reads: "The List is Life. The Man was Real. The Story is True." But if the basic facts concerning the list and the man are undeniable, the veracity of any story incorporating and embellishing upon these facts is far less certain. When considering the veracity of the Schindler's List story, one must bear in mind at least two points: first, Keneally and Spielberg tell significantly different stories; and second, although the novel serves as the factual basis for the film, the story Keneally tells is not simply true or fictive. The complicated answer to Spielberg's question is that Keneally's novel is a strange amalgam of truth and fiction. In 1982, Schindler's Ark (published in the United States as Schindler's List) won Great Britain's most prestigious literary award, the Booker Prize. Keneally was certainly delighted, but he also expressed some bewilderment; for the book, which he considers a work of nonfiction, had won the Booker Prize for Fiction. "There is something in it as a novel, but not as fiction," he told the New York Times. "My publisher, Simon and Schuster, describes it as a nonfiction novel. It is startling that it would win a prize for fiction." 28 But should this have startled Keneally? According to literary scholar Sue Vice, the novelist had already faced this issue with his British editors. "Keneally initially insisted that his work was factual and ... Schindler's Ark . .. was described thus in the publisher's publicity before publication," she writes. "Yet the text is not even journalistic; it is a novel, a fact that became clear to editors at Hodder and Stoughton, the British publisher, when Keneally's typescript was received and read. This realization led the publishers to recategorize the book and issue it as fiction, but with an explanatory author's note." 29 It is curious that Keneally should tell New York Times readers that his American publisher describes his book as nonfiction, but not that his British publisher has classified it as fiction. Articles on Schindler's List that appeared in American newspapers in 1982 describe it as a nonfiction or documentary novel. However, my 1983 Penguin paperback edition adheres to the Library of Congress's classification of the book as a work of fiction. This hardly resolves the question of the book's truth-value. "Is it fiction-

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alized history or a documentary novel?" asks Vice. "The question of generic classification is made harder because Schindler's List does not so much rely on historical documentation as a springboard for fiction ... but rather sets itself the task of bringing such documentation to the public's attention through fictional means" (628). More precisely, in Schindler's List Keneally brings to the public a story constructed from "historical documentation" (mostly interviews he conducted with Holocaust survivors), citing this source material for its documentary authority without sharing it with his readers. In short, the novel is presented to the public in place of historical documentation. Readers looking for a more rigorously historical account of Schindler and the Jews he saved will be largely frustrated. 30 In his "Author's Note" Keneally reports that his novel is based on interviews with fifty Schindlerjuden (or Schindler Jews, as the Jews who worked in Schindler's factory called themselves), written testimonies by other Schindlerjuden, information culled from Schindler's wartime associates and postwar friends, visits to relevant locations in Poland, including Krakow and Auschwitz-Birkenau, and access to "a body of Schindler papers and letters." 31 He also explains how he avoids fictionalization: To use the texture and devices of a novel to tell a true story is a course that has frequently been followed in modern writing. It is the one I choose to follow here-both because the novelist's craft is the only one I can lay claim to, and because the novel's techniques seem suited for a character of such ambiguity and magnitude as Oskar. I have attempted, however, to avoid all fiction, since fiction would debase the record, and to distinguish between reality and the myths which are likely to attach themselves to a man of Oskar's stature. It has sometimes been necessary to make reasonable constructs of conversations of which Oskar and others have left only the briefest record. But most exchanges and conversations, and all events, are based on the detailed recollections of the Schindlerjuden (Schindler Jews), of Schindler himself, and of other witnesses to Oskar's acts of outrageous rescue. (10)

Rather than clarifying the facticity of the novel, this passage suspends Oskar Schindler, and thus Schindler's List, between reality and myth. Keneally refers to "Oskar" as if he knows him on a first-hand basis; yet, Schindler died in 1974, six years before Keneally first heard of him. Michael Rothberg

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observes that, in this passage, "Keneally displaces the inherent problems of the instability of genres onto the' ambiguity' of 'Oskar' ... someone who is already 'novelistic' and 'mythic.' " 32 If, as Keneally states, the form of the novel is particularly well-suited for "a character of such ambiguity and magnitude as Oskar," this is because the novel is less suited than other narrative forms for distinguishing between "reality and the myths which are likely to attach themselves to a man of Oskar's stature." In other words, the novel form lends itself to the mythic portrayal of Schindler's story. This is not to say that Keneally has not striven for accuracy, but that his effort is highly compromised by a desire to make the reality mythic by shaping certain historical facts into what he calls "the story of the pragmatic triumph of good over evil" (14). This can only be accomplished by separating the facts concerning Schindler and the Schindlerjuden from the vast historical reality involving the extermination of some six million Jews and the permanent destruction of Jewish cultures and communities in Europe. Moreover, Keneally uses the facts as a catalyst for mythopoeic musings. This is nowhere more evident than when he depicts characters' inner thoughts and remarks upon their inner natures. Throughout Schindler's List, Keneally displays a penchant for describing in colorful detail exactly those things he has no way of knowing. This is well-illustrated by his description of Schindler's feelings toward Amon Goeth, the Nazi commandant of the Plaszow camp: "The revulsion Herr Schindler felt was of a piquant kind, an ancient, exultant sense of abomination-of the same sort as, in a medieval painting, the just show for the damned. An emotion, that is, which stung Oskar rather than unmanned him" (15). How has Keneally gained such keen knowledge of Schindler's inner life? What is gained by comparing Schindler to "the just" in a medieval painting? What would it mean to be "unmanned" by a feeling of revulsion? Though baseless, unnecessary, and truly odd, this passage is not unlike others found throughout Schindler's List. For instance, Keneally again evokes the ancient, the just, and the sexual when describing Jewish accountant Itzhak Stem's initial impression of Schindler. "There was, of course, in men like Stem an ancestral gift for sniffing out the just Goy," he writes. "It was a sense for where a safe house might be, a potential zone of shelter. And from now on the possibility of Herr Schindler as sanctuary would color the conversation as might a halfglimpsed, intangible sexual promise color the talk between a man and a

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woman at a party" (46). Keneally appears guided by histrionics rather than the historical record. Schindler, Goeth, and Stem are presented as Holocaust-era players in an ancient drama involving the just, the damned, and those who need to be saved. 33 Even as he evokes Judgment Day to lend moral gravitas to the story he tells (as if the Holocaust does not provide enough), Keneally places Schindler's manhood at the center of this drama, telling a story that may ultimately be about the just Goy's virility. One sees this, for instance, in Keneally's admiring references to Schindler's drinking ("he drank for the pure glow of it" [14]), chain-smoking ("he was stylish; his manner implied that he knew where the next cigarette was coming from and the next bottle of cognac" [15]), and womanizing ("if you wanted to talk to Oskar about fidelity, a look of childlike and authentic bewilderment entered his eyes, as if you were proposing some concept like Relativity" [8J]). Although Keneally claims to "avoid all fiction," a predilection for fictionalizing is made evident in a scene describing Schindler's visit to the Plaszow camp, which had been built on the site of two Jewish cemeteries. A road through the camp was paved with Jewish gravestones. Keneally writes, "Commandant Goeth, who claimed to be a poet, had used in the construction of his camp whatever metaphors were to hand. This metaphor of shattered gravestones ran the length of the camp" (16). The reader is left to decide what the metaphor stands or once stood for; it is enough for the novelist to note the metaphoric potential of the gravestones. Although, in a curious move, Keneally attributes this use of metaphor to Goeth, of course it is he who has authored it. Reading Schindler's List, one repeatedly finds that Keneally acts the poet, using "whatever metaphors were to hand" in the documents and testimonies he has gathered. Having no access to the material reality he describes, but being well acquainted with "the novelist's craft," he is prone to see metaphors and ironies in the language and imagery he uses to represent the past-and to attribute them to his characters. Describing Schindler's arrival at Plaszow, Keneally writes: "On the right, past the guard barracks, stood a former Jewish mortuary building. It seemed to declare that here all death was natural. ... In fact the place was now used as the Commandant's stables. Though Herr Schindler was used to the sight, it is possible that he still reacted with a small ironic cough. Admittedly, if you reacted to every little irony of the new Europe, you took it

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into you, it became part of your baggage. But Herr Schindler possessed an immense capacity for carrying that sort of luggage" (16). Keneally attempts to temper the intrusion of the novelist's imagination by granting that it is only possible that Schindler made "a small ironic cough" (whatever that may be). But the rest of the paragraph serves to justify the narrator's belief that Schindler might have coughed at such a time, in such a manner; and this justification, while as speculative as the cough, is presented as certain. First, Keneally describes what it is like to live with the "irony" generated by Nazi conquest; second, he praises Schindler's capacity to perceive and bear this irony; and third, he shares a knowing wink with "Herr Schindler" over the irony of a Jewish mortuary located in a Nazi camp. "The omniscient and self-confident narrative voice in Keneally's novel is ... only rarely troubled about facilely re-creating the most intimate details of the past," writes literary scholar Bryan Cheyette. He claims that when the narrator acknowledges shortcomings in his knowledge of the past, he does so in a way that implies his narrative is otherwise" absolutely sure of itself." Cheyette offers as an example the opening line of chapter 22-"We do not know in what condition of soul Oskar Schindler spent March 13, the ghetto's last and worst day"(go)-noting that Keneally writes this "as if we knew Schindler's 'condition of soul' on other days." 34 Cheyette adds that by referring to the Schindler mythology when he is unsure of a story's veracity, Keneally suggests that his narrative succeeds in distinguishing between reality and myth, keeping the former free from the latter. But even if we pretend that Keneally has accurately distinguished reality from myth, his narrative is not free from distortion. Rothberg notes that Keneally tells a story of survival that "all but erases the genocide," as it is largely based on survivor testimony (228). Schindler's List magnifies the problem that Ruth Kluger associates with survivor memoirs: though survivors set out to write about the genocide, they end up telling stories of escape and survivat35 Keneally's novel is an amalgamation of such stories. "Simply put," writes Rothberg, "no Jewish character whose consciousness the narrative enters (even at the third-person distance) ever dies" (226). There is still another problem related to Keneally's reliance on survivor testimony. His representation of events involving over a thousand Schindlerjuden, and a far greater number of Jews who were not saved, is based on interviews with fifty survivors; one can only imagine how different the story told in Schindler's List might be had it been based on interviews with

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fifty other Schindler Jews. 36 Among those Keneally interviewed, the influence of his "mentor" Leopold Page (or Poldek Pfefferberg as he was called in Poland) is especially notable. 37 It was Page who introduced Keneally to Schindler's story when the two met by chance in the survivor's leathergood store in Beverly Hills. Page not only convinced Keneally to write a book on Schindler, but accompanied him on a trip to Poland to see locations that would figure in the book. Page also convinced other Schindler Jews to speak to Keneally and offered corrections to an early draft of Schindler's Ark. Keneally dedicates his book to Schindler and Poldek Pfefferberg, who, not surprisingly, figures prominently in the novel, where he is portrayed as the consummate survivor, "the sort of young man who survived by raising the stakes" (54). In her book Schindler's Legacy: True Stories of the List Survivors, Elinor J. Brecher writes that Page/Pfefferberg is "an influential and controversial figure among the Schindlerjuden," adding, "As with most homogenous social groups, within the Schindlerjuden there exist factions, alliances and cliques. Some support Poldek Page's position as self-appointed custodian of the Schindler legend; some do not." 38 Clearly, in his role as mentor to Keneally and advisor to Spielberg (Page was present during the filming of Schindler's List in Poland), Page has helped shape two versions of Schindler's story. A New York Times article on the Schindlerjuden reports that some "complain that the film exaggerates the roles of some late additions to Schindler's list, particularly those who helped Mr. Keneally and Mr. Spielberg."39 More notable than these exaggerations, however, may be the novel's omissions, which are reproduced in the film. One of these is made visible by the inclusion in Schindler's Legacy of the story of Helena Stemlicht, who served as Gaeth's housemaid at his villa by the Plaszow camp. Stemlicht shared a room in the villa's basement with another house servant named Helena Hirsch. Keneally met with Hirsch but Stemlicht, approached at the time she was mourning her husband's death, declined to be interviewed (74). Consequently, Stemlicht is absent from the novel as well as the film, whereas "Helen" Hirsch figures prominently in both. Spielberg's film goes further than the novel in depicting Hirsch as Gaeth's solitary maid, creating a special relationship between the Commandant and the Jewess. In the novel, Keneally writes that Helen Hirsch feared Schindler's intentions when he first approached her: "Even though Amon [Goeth] enjoyed beating her, her Jewishness always saved her from

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overt sexual attack. But there were Germans who were not as fastidious on racial matters as Amon" (26-27). The film, however, fabricates an overtly sexual relationship between Goeth and Helen, eroticizing his violent treatment of her. Sara R. Horowitz describes how, following a scene in which "Goeth becomes visibly aware of the physical nearness and femaleness of Helen's body, he follows her into the cellar, which serves, apparently, as her living quarters" -and hers alone, as Sternlicht does not exist in this portrayal. "As Goeth catches sight of her ... Helen is clothed in an inexplicably wet shift which clings to her breasts," writes Horowitz. Daniel R. Schwarz similarly comments: "Goeth visits Helen Hirsch while she is wearing a sheer nightgown-an odd garment to be wearing, we think, considering her knowledge of Gaeth's compulsive lust-that shows her nipples." Resisting a desire to kiss the scantily clad Jewess, Goeth beats her instead. As Horowitz points out, this scene, having no basis in the historical record, is beholden to a tradition of depicting eroticized female victims in films and novels on the Holocaust, such as Night Porter and Sophie's Choice. 40 While this is disturbing, perhaps the most troubling exercise of cinematic license occurs in the film's portrayal of the now-famous list. According to Keneally and other sources, the list was generated because the advance of the Soviet army prompted the liquidation of the Plaszow camp. All the Jewish prisoners were sent to Nazi camps, except for those on Schindler's list, who were sent to his new factory in Brinnlitz. Keneally's narrator states that the circumstances surrounding the creation of the list are hazy: "The names on the list are definite. But the circumstances encourage legends. The problem is that the list is remembered with an intensity which, by its very heat, blurs. The list is an absolute good. The list is life. All around its cramped margins lies the gulf" (290). But there is nothing hazy about the creation of the list in Spielberg's film. Schindler and Stern, alone in Schindler's abandoned Krakow factory, compose the list in a marathon session that ends with the normally reserved Stern holding up the typed pages and speaking the words of Keneally's narrator: "The list is an absolute good. The list is life." The moment is magical, the words catchy enough to become the movie's slogan. However, in reality Stern had no hand in creating the list, which was mired in a desperate and ugly struggle among the prisoners for survival. According to Keneally, Schindler composed the list with Raimund

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Titsch, who would also be named a "Righteous Gentile" after the war. Moreover, after the list was completed, it came into the hands of the personnel clerk, Marcel Goldberg, who took bribes in the form of diamonds from other prisoners, adding some names to the list and removing others (291-92). Then, en route to Brinnlitz, the 8oo listed men, together with 1,300 other prisoners from Plaszow, were sent to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp. When the list failed to materialize, Goldberg had to reproduce it from memory (301). This led to renewed efforts to procure a place on the list, and thus to the creation of a revised set of Schindlerjuden. Turning a blind eye to this less romantic reality, Spielberg's film creates a sense that no Jew was left behind, although seven hundred of the Jews who had worked in Schindler's Krakow factory were deported to death camps. 41 Though, like Spielberg, Keneally is primarily concerned with survival, readers of his novel are informed that "in fact only a tenth of Plaszow people would be alive at the end," even if this information is presented as an aside (233). 42 No such information reaches the film's viewers. In the story Spielberg tells, the only prisoner who might not be granted a place on the list is Helen Hirsch. Will Gaeth allow Schindler to save the beautiful Jewess, or will the Nazi commandant refuse to release her, condemning her to death? In a scene where the list of Jews leaving Plaszow for Brinnlitz is read aloud, drama builds as the audience waits to see if she has been saved. In one of the film's many happy endings, when Helen's name is called she takes her rightful place among the Schindlerjuden destined to survive. The Mass Scenes

When asked what methods he employed to make his film as historically accurate as possible, and in what cases he found it necessary to sacrifice historical accuracy, Spielberg replied: "We filmed in the actual places where Oskar Schindler lived, where his factory was located, where the ghetto stood. We filmed outside the gates at Auschwitz and replicated the camps. Thomas Keneally's book, written after his research, became the basis for Steve Zaillian's script. As in any film, characters and incidents had to be selected, combined, and choices made for sheer length of screen time. Where there weren't actual references to dialogue or incidents, they were developed logically from what we did know." 43 Curiously, Spielberg ties the authenticity of Schindler's List first to its having been shot at the actual

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places where the historical events occurred, as if these sites assure the historical accuracy of what was filmed there. He mentions Keneally's book second, suggesting that it has provided the historically accurate basis for the screenplay. However, he then distances his film from the book, indicating that the story Keneally tells had to be substantially altered. The historical accuracy of Spielberg's film is compromised by Zaillian's efforts to radically condense Keneally's novel. It is surprising to learn, for example, that Stem is a composite of several characters in the book, and that the film's portrayal of the March 1943liquidation of the Krakow ghetto actually combines that event with an earlier Aktion (or raid) on the ghetto's inhabitants that, in May-June 1942, resulted in the deportation of approximately 15,000 Jews to death camps. But Spielberg is less interested in getting the historical facts straight than in accurately showing what certain Holocaust-related figures, places, and events looked and felt like. That is why he places more emphasis on shooting the film at actual sites in Poland than on adhering to the facts of Keneally's novel. I am reminded of Langer's remark that art, unlike the work of "the historian or reporter of mere facts," has the capacity to evoke the "atmosphere" of the Holocaust. 44 With Schindler's List Spielberg has attempted to re-create the atmosphere of the Holocaust through those events involving Schindler and the Jews he saved. He wants the story told in his film to be true, but he is far more concerned with immersing viewers in this atmosphere. Spielberg's desire to evoke what might be called the look and feel of the Holocaust complicated his plan to make a film that would tell Oskar Schindler's story by adapting Keneally's novel to the screen. Zaillian says that he wrote the screenplay for Schindler's List with this rule in mind: "any scene that didn't involve Schindler wasn't in there. Schindler didn't have to be in the scene-the scene just had to have some effect on him." Spielberg's input, however, resulted in the addition and expansion of scenes. "I liked Steve's screenplay," explains Spielberg, "but I wanted the story to be less vertical-less a character story of just Oskar Schindler, and more of a horizontal approach, taking in the Holocaust as the raison d' etre of the whole project. " 45 In effect, Schindler's List is composed of "vertical" scenes that develop the Schindler story and "horizontal" scenes that re-create the Holocaust in broader terms. These scenes include large-scale re-creations of historical events which involved crowds of actors playing Jewish victims. While almost all of

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Schindler's List is filmed in black-and-white, the use of hand-held cameras

and a grainier tonality in many of these scenes enhances their documentary feel. These "mass scenes," as Geoffrey Hartman calls them, include such sequences as the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto; the rounding up and deportation of children from the Plaszow camp; the selection process at Plaszow (for which naked Jewish prisoners had to run in circles past Nazi doctors, who selected those deemed less healthy for deportation to the Auschwitz gas chambers); the exhumation and incineration of thousands of Jewish corpses at Plaszow; and the frightful experiences of a transport of women and children sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. 46 These are the sequences where, as Langer puts it, "Schindler's List uses visual effects to create chaos." Other writers have singled out these scenes by referring to them as the film's "historical representations," its "spectacular reconstruction of historical events," and its "brilliantly staged enactments of central events of the Holocaust." 47 The distinction I am noting here, between large-scale historical re-creation on the one hand and narrative development on the other, is even more evident in Spielberg's next movie set during World War II, the 1998 film Saving Private Ryan. In this case, the division falls neatly between the film's opening sequence, a nearly half-hour-long war montage re-creating the D-Day invasion of Omaha Beach, and everything that follows it. As some critics have noted, the film's story, introduced following the tour de force of the D-Day sequence, has only the vaguest relation to that sequence. Moreover, this story, about a group of soldiers assigned to find and save a single soldier, effectively counteracts the D-Day sequence, in which the monstrous scale, chaos, and carnage of total war are powerfully rendered. For following this re-creation, the film portrays war as an adventure, a special mission carried out behind enemy lines by a rag-tag bunch of soldiers. Whereas the message of the D-Day re-creation is "war is hell," the message of the rest of the film might be expressed by the same Talmudic verse that provides the slogan for Schindler's List: "Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire." "Horizontal" and "vertical" scenes are brought together more successfully in Schindler's List than in Saving Private Ryan. However, because the "horizontal" mass scenes are not fully integrated into the narrative drive of the "vertical" scenes, there has been some disagreement over whether this film is primarily about Oskar Schindler or the Holocaust. For instance,

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in response to Philip Gourevitch's review in Commentary, one letter-writer states: "The movie is not about the Holocaust per se; it is about Oskar Schindler." Another writes: "Mr. Gourevitch (along with some other reviewers) objects that few Jews are 'individuated from the mob of victims.' This, of course, was Spielberg's intent. This film is not about the plight of a person or a family. It is about the Shoah .. ."48 Is Schindler's List Schindler's story or the story of the Shoah? "First and last, though Spielberg does digress into meticulous enactments of Nazi atrocities, the film is Schindler's story," claims film critic and literary scholar Steven G. Kellman. He writes this, however, after having described the film as if it were a tour of Nazi atrocities: "Through extreme close-ups with a hand-held camera, Spielberg takes us into the Krakow ghetto during its savage liquidation. We wander the Plaszow labor camp while inmates beside us are randomly shot through the head. The culminating ride takes us by freight car to the infamous gate of Auschwitz-Birkenau ... " 49 It might be said that Schindler's List cannot "really" be about the Holocaust because the story it tells about a good Nazi and a community of Jews who survive is so unrepresentative of the catastrophe. However, Schindler's List is inevitably evaluated as a movie about the Holocaust, not as a biopic of Oskar Schindler. In fact, commentary on the movie has hardly concerned itself with the veracity of Schindler's story as it is told in the film. Commentators tend to assume the story is true enough; the real topic of concern is Spielberg's treatment of the Holocaust. Certainly Spielberg's decision to tell Schindler's story is integral to this treatment, but as comments by Langer, Caryn James, and any number of other commentators suggest, the film's claim to authenticity lies less in the assumed truthfulness of its narrative than in the perceived immediacy of its audio-visual re-creation of the Holocaust. Tellingly, the documentary source that has had the greatest influence on Spielberg's film may not be Keneally's novel, but archival photographs. Cinematographer Janusz Kaminski says that he prepared to film Schindler's List by studying black-and-white images of the Holocaust era; he describes Vishniac's collection A Vanished World, filled with prewar images of Eastern European Jews, as his "bible."50 When asked why Schindler's List was being filmed in black-and-white, Spielberg replied, "All the photos of the Holocaust are in black and white. In color, it looks Hollywoodized."51 With Schindler's List Spielberg portrays the Holocaust that nonwitnesses will recognize or "remember" from

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having seen black-and-white documentary images of the ghettos and the camps. This allows the film to look real or authentic in a way that many critics find objectionable. "The film seems 'old,' suggestive of genuine documentary footage," writes Horowitz, arguing that "because the film is not really old and genuine but merely filmed 'as if' it were so, it makes a false claim to authenticity" (122). Hartman, by contrast, finds that the film fails to look genuinely old, stating: "That Spielberg shoots in black-and-white has an archaizing effect and could have been a temporal distancing, but it seems post-color, so rich a tonality is achieved" (72). Rather than hurting the film, this supposed failure to create a "temporal distancing" contributes to its effectiveness. For instead of distancing the film's images from the present, locating them in the remote past, Spielberg creates the illusion of temporal proximity to historical figures and events by bringing the Holocaust forward in time, granting it a presence that has led so many writers to describe Spielberg's Holocaust as immediate, visceral, convincing, undeniable, real. A Sensitive Line

In his review of Schindler's List, Lanzmann explains his objection to the film with the same words he had written fifteen years earlier in an essay on the Holocaust miniseries. These words, translated from the French, read as follows: "The Holocaust is above all unique in that it erects a ring of fire around itself, a borderline that cannot be crossed because there is a certain ultimate degree of horror that cannot be transmitted. To claim it is possible to do so is to be guilty of the most serious transgression. Fiction is a transgression. I deeply believe there are some things that cannot and should not be represented." 52 Debate over the alleged "uniqueness" of the Holocaust has focused on the motivation and the intent of the killers, the modernized, bureaucratic nature of the killing process, the rate and scope of the destruction, and the percentage of European Jews killed. But according to Lanzmann's pronouncement, the uniqueness of the Holocaust lies not in what happened to the Jews of Europe but in the permanent unrepresentability of what happened. According to this logic, Schindler's List is a form of Holocaust denial. Lanzmann claims that what can and cannot be represented of the Holocaust has somehow been determined by the event, which "erects a ring of

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fire around itself, a borderline that cannot be crossed." In response, Hartman writes, "I too believe in the possibility of reticence: that there are things that should not be represented. Yet because our modern technical expertise is such that simulacra can be provided for almost any experience, however extreme, it is more today a question of should not rather than cannot. What should not be represented remains a moral decision; a choice that does not have to be aggravated by a quasi-theological dogma with the force of the Second Commandment" (63). Lanzmann's answer to the question of what should not be represented is couched in absolutist terms that circumvent moral decision-making; so is any answer that engages the question of the "limits of representation" in the abstract rather than in relation to specific texts. Beyond the method by which a given text represents the Holocaust (the use of re-creation, fiction, archival images, and so on), one must consider its purpose in trying to represent the Holocaust for a specific audience, and how well the text serves that purpose or achieves its goals. 5 3 The notion that the Holocaust itself limits the manner in which it can be portrayed is an escape route from taking these factors into account. Spielberg has said that his primary goal in making Schindler's List was to educate high school students about the Holocaust, which "had been treated as just a footnote in so many textbooks or not mentioned at all." 54 Rather than condemning the film's visual representation of the Holocaust on principle, one might examine the degree to which Spielberg's film meets its goal of educating a large portion of the American public. If meeting this goal required the use of dramatic re-creations, it also necessitated a depiction of horrific events that would not repel viewers with too much horror. "Spielberg can be forgiven a certain amount of cinematic license with the story," writes Brecher. "There were no hangings [of prisoners] in Schindler's List. No Jews dangled from iron rings in Amon Goeth's office. The dogs wore muzzles; audiences didn't see them gnawing men's genitals and women's breasts like so much hamburger. Spielberg's storm troopers refrained from swinging infants by their feet into brick walls, smashing their skulls like melons" (xix). But if some commentators have "forgiven" Spielberg for these omissions, others have objected to the film's audiencefriendly version of history. Still others have objected to what the film does show. "I cringe when I realize that there were children all across this nation watching this program," said Oklahoma Congressman Tom Coburn, Re-

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publican co-chairman of the Congressional Family Caucus, in response to the 1997 television broadcast of Schindler's List. "They were exposed to the violence of multiple gunshot head wounds, vile language, full frontal nudity and irresponsible sexual activity. It simply should never have. been allowed on public television." 55 Coburn apologized the next day ("I feel terrible that my criticism of NBC for airing this movie was misinterpreted") after colleagues denounced his remarks on the House and Senate floors. New York Senator Alfonse M. D' Amato stated, "To equate the nudity of the Holocaust victims in a concentration camp with any sexual connotation is outrageous and offensive"; former education secretary William J. Bennett remarked, "Coburn's view obscures, even obliterates, the distinction between gratuitous violence and nudity-that is, violence and nudity to titillate-and violence and human realism essential to the telling of an important story or historical truth." 56 These comments correctly point out Coburn's failure to consider the context in which images of violence and nudity were shown. Yet, at the same time, they fail to recognize that representations of the Holocaust are not, by definition, free of gratuitous violence and nudity. Indeed, the charge of "showing too much" haunts all efforts to depict the Holocaust. For this reason, creators and critics of Holocaust literature, films, and museums are particularly sensitive to the appearance of gratuitous sexuality and violence. Edward T. Linenthal writes that the designers of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum agonized over the display of violent images and nudity in the permanent exhibition. "We have to be sparing with images of naked corpses, to have a sense of measure," said museum director Jeshajahu Weinberg. In the interest of "judgment and good taste" a large photograph of naked, emaciated Russian prisoners was cropped at the waist. 57 In Schindler's List, by contrast, one scene shows fully naked prisoners running past Nazi doctors, who mark for death those who appear too ill or old to work. This nudity does not seem gratuitous, most likely because nothing is erotic about this alarming spectacle. The scene in which Goeth acts out his sexual attraction to the scantily clad Helen Hirsch by beating her is another matter. The two scenes suggest that in representations of the Holocaust, as elsewhere, it is not nudity or violence per se that is the problem, but the treatment of nudity and violence, their purpose in a given scene, that makes the difference. When Schindler's List was shown on network television on February 23,

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1997, it was seen by about 65 million viewers, more than doubling the 25 million who had seen it in theaters in the United States. 5 8 Spielberg introduced his movie with the following statement: "I want you, and especially parents, to know that Schindler's List is more explicit and more graphic than anything you may have seen before on television. I made this film for this and future generations so they would know and never forget that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust .... I could not be honest to that history, or to the memories of the victims, without depictions of violence and suffering." Spielberg describes an obligation to portray graphic violence and suffering, but does not refer to nudity. In fact, insofar as nudity was of a piece with depictions of violence and suffering, it remained; but fleeting moments of nudity deemed gratuitous by the network were altered. In TV Guide film critic Gene Siskel wrote that NBC would be making "minor cuts with Spielberg's cooperation, presumably removing some violence, harsh language, and nudity." "But why cut anything?" he asked. "A dramatization of Holocaust events should be offensive, shouldn't it? ... Who would complain? And if someone did, how would the letter read? 'Dear NBC: For my children's sake, couldn't you have made the Holocaust easier to watch?"' 59 Months after the broadcast, NBC executive vice president Rosalyn Weinman told the Wall Street Journal that she had convinced Spielberg to cut a handful of scenes that were inappropriate for "family viewing." However, a letter to the Journal from Marvin J. Levy of Amblin Entertainment, Spielberg's production company, contested this: "No scenes were cut. There were a few seconds of trims and two very brief instances of added shadows placed over some frames involving bedroom nudity. Other scenes with nudity were not touched, nor were the scenes of violence and suffering. " 60 Spielberg had already faced-and rejected-demands that he remove scenes from his film when it was shown overseas. An April1994 article in the New York Times reported that Schindler's List was "being effectively barred from theaters in many Arab and Islamic countries." After creating an uproar by banning the film as Jewish propaganda, authorities in Malaysia announced that they might consider lifting the ban if several scenes featuring nudity and violence were cut, including" a scene of a Jewish man being shot in the head by a German, and scenes of naked men and women being examined by German doctors." Spielberg replied that no cuts

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would be made: "This film needs to be shown intact. There's nothing more obscene than the events that took place between 1933 and 1945. It wouldn't interest me to water down these events because Schindler's List is only a shadow of the actual events. The actual events are much too impossible and obscene to picture in any medium. The film is very, very close to a sensitive line that I drew on the ground when I made the movie between what is viewable and what is not." 61 In evoking the "sensitive line," Spielberg responds to the charge that depictions of violence and nudity in Schindler's List are obscene, and should therefore be cut from the film, by locating obscenity elsewhere: not in his film's re-creation of events, but in the actual events of the Holocaust. At the same time, Spielberg believes it would be wrong not to show somethingif only a "shadow" -of the actual events in his film. But what is shown, he contends, has not and could not capture the obscenity of what actually occurred, as "the actual events are ... impossible ... to picture in any medium." In this way Spielberg's argument adopts Lanzmann's notion of the unrepresentable Holocaust, the "sensitive line" coinciding with the borderline or "ring of fire" that, according to Lanzmann, encloses the Holocaust. Spielberg's cinematic re-creations are "viewable," whereas the obscene events of the Holocaust are not. Still, if the actual events are impossible to picture in any medium, how have some of them been re-created as scenes in Spielberg's film? Perhaps the sensitive line needs to be seen in another way, as drawn not only between the actual events and their "shadow," but through the actual events themselves, demarcating as "viewable" those events that Spielberg chose to re-create and picture in his film. This second distinction is not ontological but moral, involving Spielberg's decision-making with respect to which Holocaust events could be rendered as film images and which could not. If Spielberg can draw the sensitive lines both ways, it is because although he agrees with Lanzmann that the Holocaust's "ultimate degree of horror" or "impossible obscenity" cannot be represented, he does not treat this as a reason to reject or revile representations of the Holocaust. Instead, Spielberg seems to believe in the possibility of a horrific-enough representation of the Holocaust. What then does it mean for his film to be "very, very close" to a sensitive line? Spielberg knows he could create images that are far more horrific than the American public would be willing to watch. Therefore an inability to

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re-create horror in its "ultimate degree" is not a problem; rather, the problem is that re-creations evoking far less horror than an "ultimate degree" can also turn audiences away. Spielberg's sensitive line is a metaphor for his effort to show enough horror to avoid revising or distorting history, but not so much as to alienate or repel viewers. What he ends up with is a compromise: a film that tries to "water down" the Holocaust enough to make it viewable, but not so much as to betray history or the memories of the victims. This compromise, while understandable, is actually quite problematic given that Schindler's List, the film, has nothing resembling the novel's narrator to inform viewers of its compromised, often contrived relation to actual events. Simply put, the film's constructedness is hidden. In Keneally's novel the narrator can inform readers of uncertainties regarding the historical truth and refer to versions of the Schindler myth; in the film, no narrative voice informs viewers that what they are watching is "only a shadow of the actual events." The difference between the actual and its shadow is not articulated by the film's elaborate re-creations, which, in fact, aim at a documentary-like verisimilitude that discourages viewers from making this distinction. If Spielberg had been content with showing only" a shadow of the actual events," Schindler's List could have been positioned firmly on one side of the "sensitive line" he has drawn on the ground-the side of the viewable. However, his emphasis on how "very, very close" Schindler's List is to this line separating "what is viewable from what is not" relates to a contrary desire to picture the actual, to connect the film as closely as possible to the obscene events, the history on the other side of that line. The film's "very, very close" relation to the "sensitive line" reflects, then, conflicting desires to distinguish the film from the actual events and to equate it with these events. This conflict culminates in a dramatic blurring of the line between film and history, fostering a fantasy of witnessing, a fantasy of experiencing the Holocaust as if one were a direct witness to the events. "I can't tell you the shots I did on Schindler's List or why I put the camera in a certain place," Spielberg has stated. "I re-created these events, and then I experienced them as any witness or victim would have. It wasn't like a movie." 62 Ideally, the film re-creates this experience for its viewers, but to what end? Sara R. Horowitz has argued that "undercutting Schindler's claim to seriousness" is the fact that "the historical feature film conveys information already uncovered by and known to historians, to an audience who can re-

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ceive it only in a less demanding, less rigorous format. ... A movie about history is a diminished form of representation, educational only in the limited sense of presenting a soft version of history, but not in the sense of stimulating critical thought" (123-24). Horowitz argues that the genre of the historical feature film is fundamentally flawed, as it not only presents a dumbed-down (typically erroneous) version of history, but in no way challenges viewers to critically assess what they are watching. Though more inquisitive viewers might question the film's historical accuracy and reflect on the present needs and desires that shape its representation of history, as a rule historical feature films do not encourage such thinking. This sounds unfortunate, but many published comments on Schindler's List indicate that the ability of Hollywood films to present a "soft version of history" readily accepted as truth by a mass audience tends to be seen as beneficial, particularly when it generates awareness of the Holocaust. Thus a 1994 article in the New York Times reports that "by softening the horrid reality enough to keep it watchable, Mr. Spielberg seems to have made the Holocaust more accessible, believable and relevant to more people than ever before-and, with Holocaust revisionism and Louis Farrakhan in the news, at a particularly welcome time." 63 Blurring Borders

When filming for Schindler's List had just been completed in June 1993, an article by Jane Perlez titled "Spielberg Grapples With the Horror of the Holocaust" appeared in the New York Times. The article begins: Cracow, Poland. At a railway siding, a Nazi commandant and his servile lieutenants feast on fruit and drink punch from a crystal bowl while hundreds of terrified Jews-penned in stifling cattle cars-beseech their captors for water. Sixty miles from Auschwitz, near the site where this horror unfolded a half century ago, Steven Spielberg was directing this scene from Schindler's List 64

Perlez's depiction of the scene creates a playful tension between" a half century ago" and today, between the actual historical moment and the re-creation of "this horror." The reporter creates a special effect by withholding information from the description of what was occurring at the railway sid-

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ing in Krakow (the filming of a scene for Schindler's List) and then revealing this information in the following paragraph, presenting it as a kind of caption for the image evoked by the preceding sentence. This caption changes the image's meaning. But is this trompe 1' oeil effect not a little troubling? For the surprise here is that the Holocaust image is something of a hoax: the Nazis are not really Nazis but actors; the Jews are not really Jews but extras; and standing just outside the image that Perlez has described to her readers ... why, it's Steven Spielberg, directing the scene. In beginning her article with this surprise, Perlez conveys an attraction to the simultaneous realism and artifice of Spielberg's twenty-three million dollar re-creation of the Holocaust. In a few sentences she both establishes and punctures the verisimilitude of his re-creation. But even after the trompe l'oeil effect has been revealed, the blurring of film and history persists. For in the caption sentence, the image of the Nazis and Jews at the railway siding is described both as "this horror [which] unfolded a half century ago" and as "this scene from Schindler's List." Caught up in the confusion of what "this" really is, Perlez falls for her own trick. Connecting "this scene" with "this horror" is the shared site of Krakow, Poland. "Much of the pre-publicity for Schindler's List has emphasized the extent to which Spielberg chose to film, where possible, in Poland," writes Bryan Cheyette in a review appearing in the Times Literary Supplement. "Krakow was left virtually undamaged during the war, and so Spielberg was able to forego his Hollywood studios and instead have as his backdrop the actual landscape of suffering.... In a further bid at authenticity, many of the actors are the sons and daughters of Holocaust survivors or local Poles whose parents witnessed, to some degree, the events of the film. But this deliberate blurring of the borders between cinema and history generates a good deal of unease in the film." 65 Perlez's description of a moment from the filming of Schindler's List is just one example of how this unease is re-enacted outside the film as well, in media coverage and criticism that act out the blurring of borders. But as this example suggests, the uneasiness created by this blurring of borders is not necessarily off-putting; rather, it may be a compelling point of interest. In representations of the Holocaust and Nazism, a fascination with the blurring of borders-the slippage between fact and fiction, the real and its representation, and the present and the past-frequently competes with an interest in the Holocaust itself. Much of the writing on Schindler's List focuses on where the borders be-

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tween film and history are blurred. In his review, J. Hoberman writes that "Poland is a special effect" which "gives the movie a distinct chill." 66 According to many articles, this special effect influenced the filming process as well, for the effect, a "making present" of the past or a "making past" of the present, was not produced by the filmmakers, but exerted on cast and crew by the historical sites, "the actual landscape of suffering" itself. In Entertainment Weekly, a blurb on the contents page for Anne Thompson's article "Making History" reads: "It took Steven Spielberg a decade to confront the horrors of the Holocaust. But when he brought the cast and crew of Schindler's List to the actual sites of Nazi brutality, history came to life." 67 Here the past is made present, history has risen from the grave. At the start of the article, however, it is not the past that returns in the present, but people in the present who visit the past through a kind of time-travel: "The cold could snap bones. And for the actors filming the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp scenes during their first weeks on location in Poland, the work itself was a chilling business that tore them out of their own place and time and engulfed them in nightmarish history." 68 Behind these metaphors is an embellished sense of the authenticity that filming at the actual sites brings to the filmic re-creations. In the New York Times, Perlez notes that "many events were filmed where they actually happened-the main square in Cracow with its towering spires and Renaissance market building, the exterior of Schindler's apartment building and his factory, which have changed little in the last 50 years." Moreover, she reports that "with the Auschwitz concentration camp only 45 minutes away ... there was a chilling poignancy, not to mention authenticity, for the film makers" ("Spielberg" 17). Spielberg has also pointed to the authenticity that filming "on location" bestows on Schindler's List, stating that he "filmed in the actual places where Oskar Schindler lived" and "filmed outside the gates at Auschwitz." 69 In fact, Spielberg had originally intended to film inside the gates at Auschwitz (actually Auschwitz II or Birkenau),7° but his plan to film there was protested by the World Jewish Congress. A January 1993 New York Times article, "Jews Try to Halt Auschwitz Filming," reports: "Leaders of the congress are concerned that unfettered access to commercial filming at Auschwitz, where more than a million Jews were put to death during World War II, would disturb the dignity of a site that they say requires solemnity. The organization said it understood that Mr. Spielberg planned

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to use hundreds of extras at Auschwitz and that he would be building a fake gas chamber there." 71 Perlez's June 1993 New York Times article tells how this issue was resolved: "At the request of the World Jewish Congress, the director filmed for two days outside the gates of Auschwitz rather than inside" ("Spielberg" 17). This resolution is described in more colorful detail by Thompson in Entertainment Weekly: "A clash with the World Jewish Congress over Spielberg's request to film inside Auschwitz-Birkenau wasn't resolved until Spielberg proposed an ingenious compromise: A train would be backed into the camp and then be shot emerging into a mirror replica of Auschwitz's interior that had been built just outside the actual camp" (7o). To fully picture this image of the "mirror replica," it is helpful to know that in 1944, with the completion of a rail spur off the main line, trains entered the death camp through an arched gateway in the main SS guardhouse (prior to the construction of the rail spur, Jewish transports were unloaded at what became known as the "old ramp," midway between Auschwitz and Birkenau, and marched or trucked to Birkenau). The main guardhouse is a long, single-story structure bisected by a watch tower. The guidebook sold at Auschwitz suggests that tours of Birkenau begin at this main watch tower, "from which there is an excellent view over the whole prison complex (the largest of all the camps of mass extermination)." 72 When taking in this view, one is standing directly over the archway through which transports entered the camp on a track running perpendicular to the guardhouse. What Spielberg did, then, was invert this symmetrical structure, filming the facade of the guardhouse as if it were the back, visible from the camp's interior, effectively turning the camp inside-out. Thus some fifty years after approximately 1.3 million Jews were gassed and incinerated at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Catholic Poles, hired as extras to play Jews/3 climbed into cattle cars which were backed into the death camp by locomotive; then the train was filmed as it pulled out of the camp, coming to a stop not too far outside its gates, where the Poles exited the cattle cars and assembled on a re-created, relocated ramp. The image may be claimed as a metaphor for the distinction that Spielberg has made between what is viewable and what is not; here the main gate functions as a "sensitive line" separating what can be shown from what cannot, the actual camp from the simulated camp, the real from the re-creation, film from history. Still, this metaphor needs to be complicated,

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as these oppositions are blurred rather than maintained. Although Spielberg cannot film in Auschwitz, he nevertheless does film at Auschwitz, with the result that the actual SS guard house is shown in the film and the re-created transport of Jews does cross the "sensitive line" when it is backed into Birkenau. The "sensitive line" does not hold, but is breached from both sides: re-creations incorporate the actual site, and the actual site incorporates re-creations. Contrary to Thompson's description of" a mirror replica of Auschwitz's interior ... built just outside the actual camp," the re-creation of the death camp certainly does not "mirror" Birkenau as it appears to visitors today. "Claiming the authority of unreconstructed realities," writes James E. Young, "the memorial camps invite us ... to mistake their reality for the actual death-camps' reality" (Writing 175). Borrowing these terms, one can say that Spielberg has reconstructed a death camp just outside of a memorial camp. While the past reality of the death camp can be located neither in Spielberg's re-creation nor in the memorial camp, both attempt to convey it. Ironically, whereas Spielberg incorporates the actual site into his recreations in order to make them seem less "like a movie" and more like the actual events, at the actual site there is a move to incorporate re-creations, including a movie shown to visitors at Auschwitz, in order to render "the horror" more vividly. Which is to say: the real resides neither in the actual site nor in the re-creation, yet the two rely on each other to create the special effect of the real. The Gas Chamber Revisited

The move to incorporate re-creations at Auschwitz-Birkenau is discussed in a January 1994 New York Times article, also by Jane Perlez, on the deterioration of Auschwitz-Birkenau and the debate over "whether it should be restored, somewhat restored or be allowed to fade into oblivion."74 As Perlez points out, some aspects of Birkenau have already been restored or re-created; for instance, the wooden barracks (originally designed as horse stables), where thousands of prisoners were packed together in bunks, have been partially rebuilt with new wood and new brick foundations, although "the changes have raised questions about their authenticity." Moreover, according to a 2002 article in the Israel newspaper Ha' aretz, the barbed wire surrounding the camps is not the original, which rusted and fell apart after the war, and the 3,6oo concrete posts that form

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fences around Auschwitz and Birkenau are beginning to crumble. "The fence posts that surrounded the camp are leaning perilously, the wooden barracks of Birkenau are rotted, the remnants of the crematoria are crumbling and rare historical documents with Mengele's signature are yellowed and faded," the article reports?5 "For some visitors," writes Perlez, "the deteriorating ruins are too oblique, even though some renovation has been done to the watchtowers, guard posts, some fences and the wooden barracks where the prisoners of the labor camp were held in appalling conditions. According to this argument, one of the best ways of insuring that the Nazi atrocities are not forgotten is to reconstruct the gas chambers so that visitors can walk in and, perhaps, imagine better what the horror was like." In contrast to "straighton views of the Holocaust," the ruins-silent and old like Titsch's "tragic, ghostly and remote" photographs of Plaszow-are entirely "too oblique," which is to say, not direct or straightforward enough in meaning. The meaning that the ruins lack is the appearance of" the actual death-camps' reality," which Spielberg planned to re-create in Birkenau with hundreds of extras and a fake gas chamber. Indeed, the meaning that the ruins now seem to convey is the disappearance of this past reality. This is not to say a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau is not a powerful experience, but the experience is a complex one, given the postwar museumification of the site, the deterioration of what has been preserved, and the absence of the horrific past reality that, on some level, one anticipates encountering there. This complexity is seldom acknowledged, as writers give expression to the wished-for experience of "horror" instead. In "Anguished Cries in a Place of Silence," a 2002 article in the Travel section of the New York Times, Lynn Sherr writes, "I had come to Auschwitz to pay my respects, to touch the horror I had been spared only because my grandparents had left Poland when the tyrant was the Czar, not Hitler. I went home convinced that everyone ought to visit. To feel. To bear witness. To preserve the lesson." For Sherr touching the horror proved to be remarkably easy, just a matter of seeing the words "Arbeit Macht Frei" ("Work Makes You Free") inscribed on the steel gateway through which visitors begin their tour of Auschwitz I. Sherr writes that "the cynical words arching overhead ... transported [her] directly into the footsteps of those who had once shuffled into Auschwitz with no hope of leaving alive." 76 While well-meaning, such cliched prose takes the place of genuine re-

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flection. Where was Sherr transported to? What did she feel and bear witness to on her visit? What lesson has she helped to preserve? While she begins her article by noting that the gateway with its inscribed arch is smaller than she had imagined-she sees "a black iron portal of human dimensions rather than the monstrous symbol of terror it has become" -Sherr is drawn to the symbol, granting it the power to put her in touch "directly" with the past reality of Auschwitz. To conceive of the "Arbeit Macht Frei" gate in this way, she must not know that very few Jews ever saw or passed through it, as they were sent not to Auschwitz I but to Auschwitz II (Birkenau); and that the gate only served as the main entrance to Auschwitz I in 1941, after which the camp greatly expanded in size, making the gate part of its interior?7 Without knowing this, one is free to project any meaning one wishes onto the "Arbeit Macht Frei" gate, making it the "portal" through which one enters Auschwitz as the prisoner one might have been had one's Jewish ancestors not left Poland for America, or had one been born a Jew caught up in the Holocaust. Whereas the gate at Auschwitz may facilitate such fantasies, there is a growing sense among those charged with preserving Birkenau that, as the decaying camp disappears, it will evoke less and less in visitors. The bulk of Perlez's article addresses one possible solution to this problem: the recreation of a gas chamber at Birkenau. Perlez writes that the remains of the gas chambers and crematoria, which were blown up by the Nazis when they evacuated the camp, appear as "broken slabs of lichen-encrusted concrete and brick." These slabs, like the rest of the camp's ruins, are "oblique" because they do not transmit "what the horror was like"; a re-created gas chamber at Birkenau, however, would offer visitors a fantasy of being the victim of Nazi extermination, so that they might "imagine better" this horror. Although visitors can walk into actual or rebuilt wooden barracks and imagine what the horror was like there, the barracks lack the popular hold on the imagination claimed by the gas chambers. Imagining what life was like in the barracks requires some historical knowledge of the camps, whereas fantasizing about dying in the gas chamber does not; this fantasy appeals to a sense of horror rather than a sense of history. In this case, the deterioration of the camp is somewhat beside the point; it is the particular lure of the gas chambers that explains the impulse behind their reconstruction. Yet, if "one of the best ways of insuring that the Nazi atrocities are not

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forgotten is to reconstruct the gas chambers," what is being remembered by visitors who "walk in"? How is imagining "what the horror was like" related to not forgetting? What is not being forgotten? In the New York Times article, the argument for reconstruction is represented by Jean-Claude Pressac, a French pharmacist who, Perlez writes, "for years doubted that the Holocaust happened and then reversed himself in a book published in 1993 that details the techniques the Nazis used to kill so many people at Auschwitz." 78 Pressac argues for reconstructing one of the least damaged gas chambers and crematoria, claiming that only by following the victims into the gas chamber will visitors receive the "slap in the face" needed to remind them that the use of gas chambers for mass killing was "insane and criminal" -mentally deranged and illegal, rather than a reasoned solution arrived at through state bureaucratic procedure?9 Pressac's argument that visitors need to experience the gas chamber for themselves is reminiscent of Jean-Fran