The Holocaust Short Story [1 ed.] 036733920X, 9780367339203

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THE HOLOCAUST SHORT STORY

The Holocaust Short Story is the only book devoted entirely to representations of the Holocaust in the short story genre. The book highlights how the explosiveness of the moment captured in each short story is more immediate and more intense, and therefore recreates horrifying emotional reactions for the reader. The main themes confronted in the book deal with the collapse of human relationships, the collapse of the home, and the dying of time in the monotony and angst of surrounding death chambers. The book thoroughly introduces the genres of both the short story and Holocaust writing, explaining the key features and theories in the area. Each chapter then looks at the stories in detail, including work by Ida Fink,Tadeusz Borowski, Rokhl Korn, Frume Halpern, and Cynthia Ozick. This book is essential reading for anyone working on Holocaust literature, trauma studies, Jewish studies, Jewish literature, and the short story genre. Mary Catherine Mueller, Ph.D.,  teaches Holocaust Literature at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Mueller has presented her work in the field of Holocaust studies to scholars, educators, and human rights advocates around the world. Her research and writings examine representations of the Holocaust in art, culture, and memory; Jewish studies;  anti-Semitism; and representations of the Holocaust in literature.

THE HOLOCAUST SHORT STORY

Mary Catherine Mueller

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business © 2020 Mary Catherine Mueller The right of Mary Catherine Mueller to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Mueller, Mary Catherine, author. Title: The Holocaust short story / Mary Catherine Mueller. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2019028903 | ISBN 9780367339203 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367339197 (paperback) | ISBN 9780429322846 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945) in literature–History and criticism. | Short stories. | Fink, Ida–Criticism and interpretation. | Borowski, Tadeusz, 1922–1951–Criticism and interpretation. | Ozick, Cynthia–Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC PN56.H55 M84 2020 | DDC 808.8/0358405318–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019028903 ISBN: 978-​0-​367-​33920-​3  (hbk) ISBN: 978-​0-​367-​33919-​7  (pbk) ISBN: 978-​0-​429-​32284-​6  (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Newgen Publishing UK

In memory of my father, Clem In honor of my mother, Pamela

CONTENTS

Preface  Acknowledgments  Introduction: the features of the Holocaust short story 

ix xvii 1

1 The collapse of time: introduction to select themes of the Holocaust short story 

13

2 The collapse of silence: the role of silence in Ida Fink’s short stories 

21

3 The collapse of man –​and then man created the anti-​man: the role of the Muselman figure in select short stories from Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen 

43

4 The collapse of relationships and home: the Nazi assault on relationships, family, and home as portrayed in two Yiddish Holocaust short stories 

66

5 The collapse of motherhood: Cynthia Ozick’s short story “The Shawl” 

89

Conclusion  Bibliography  Index 

109 112 119

PREFACE

For two long years [those who went to the crematorium] trod through me, their eyes penetrating mine. And time there, on planet Auschwitz, was not like time here. Each moment there revolved around the cogwheels of a different time-​sphere. Hell-​years last longer than light-​years.1 Like testimonies piecing together the horror and enormity of a crime, Holocaust short stories individually convey a defining aspect of the Nazis’ assault on the soul  –​ the collapse of time and unraveling of human relations. In these short stories, the collapse of time is connected with the collapse of the yet-​to-​be that constitutes meaningful human relationships. To be in a relationship is to be there for the sake of another, which opens up a response yet to be offered, a task yet to be engaged. In the short story, we see this collapse of time in the form of the explosiveness of a moment, which portrays wherever the relationship to another, for the sake of another, is crushed by oppressive hands of hate and death that yielded the Holocaust and “planet Auschwitz.” When addressing the short story, Michael Kardos writes: “There must always be a necessary relationship between a story’s form and its meaning, because a story’s form is part of what creates meaning.”2 While some scholars address these authors and their stories, they tend to approach these stories by situating them in conjunction with other literary genres, rather than as their own genre. Even though there are countless Holocaust short stories that address the collapse of time and relationships, this genre is one of the least researched in Holocaust literature. This lack of critical response to Holocaust short stories must be addressed because the various representations of the Holocaust captured in the short story form are crucial to our understanding of the Shoah — the time known as the Holocaust. The tight time frame of the Holocaust short story accentuates its testimonial aspect, which in turn quickly

x Preface

draws the readers into the text as a witness to what they have encountered. The genre of the short story is distinctly different from a novel or a novella. The latter two genres allow the author to engage in extensive descriptions of characters and situations. The elements of time and size allow the novelist to describe character developments and objects in great detail. However, the short story must recreate the explosiveness of the moment in an almost immediate fashion. In that sense, the short story writer replaces detailed descriptions with the invention of striking tensions in character juxtapositions and unusual images and metaphors –​all within the span of a few pages. It is the explosiveness of the moment that recreates the horrifying emotional reactions for the reader. The short story lives on the dissonant confrontation of words, images, and sounds. In the following chapters, I shall show how the narrowly focused structure of the short story makes this implication of the reader more immediate and more intense, as compared to the longer, more elaborate forms of Holocaust literature. Thus, it might be said that the short story comes closer to starkly capturing, for the reader, horrifying pictures of the Holocaust than does the novel. Consequently, due to the narrative structure of the Holocaust short story, the reader undergoes an abrupt collision with the collapse of time and meaning, which characterizes the human relationships that came under assault at the hands of the Nazis. The main themes that underlie the various chapters of my work deal with the collapse of human relationships, the collapse of the home, and the dying of time in the monotony and angst of surrounding death chambers. All of a sudden, man loses an identity and becomes an anti-​man who lives in an anti-​world. The image for that anti-​man gains presence through the character of Muselmann, who has lost all human energy and collapses on the ground in a physical state reminiscent of a person bowing over praying. I shall demonstrate this aspect of the Holocaust short story through an examination of the works of authors such as Ida Fink, Tadeusz Borowski, Rokhl Korn, Frume Halpern, and Cynthia Ozick. In Fink’s stories, I  will focus on the internal, psychological impact of the assault on the family structure; in my examination of Borowski’s stories, I will move to the external aspect of the “anti-​world” (life amid the Holocaust) and its most characteristic inhabitant, the Muselmann; in the Yiddish short stories written by Rokhl Korn and Frume Halpern, I highlight the extent to which the home and the family structure came under assault under Nazi rule; and in Cynthia Ozick’s stories, I  consider the narrative’s portrayal of the collapse of motherhood in Auschwitz. This absence of motherhood, as portrayed in Ozick’s story, is indicative of the collapse of time, which renders human relationships impossible. Following the Introduction, which addresses the features of the Holocaust short story, my first chapter will serve as an introduction to the select themes woven throughout Holocaust short stories. I  begin this book by highlighting unique features of the Holocaust short story, and the reason why one cannot approach reading a short story about the Holocaust the same way one would approach reading a novel, poem, or memoir about the Holocaust. In texts like

Preface  xi

Jerome Stern’s Making Shapely Fiction or Gilda Pacheco and Kari Meyers’ The Telling and the Tale: An Introductory Guide to Short, Creative Prose, literary critics address the various definitions of the “short story.” Consequently, how one can define the “short story” elicits many different answers. When considering the short story, definitions like Norman Friedman’s a “short fictional narrative in prose,”3 or Flannery O’Connor’s “The short story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way”4 come to mind. However, while many scholars approach defining the short story as Friedman did, I will build upon O’Connor’s definition by adding that not only do Holocaust short stories attempt to say what cannot be said, but their very form uniquely reflects the fragmented, broken life of the characters, as these stories capture the moment when death and hate engulf reality. Therefore, unlike the longer structures of novels, or varied structures of poems or essays, the short story form lends itself to inserting the reader immediately into a narrative that focuses on a particular moment –​revealing aspects of the “anti-​world” of its character(s) through concise, yet fully developed, short narrative structures. In studies written by Lawrence Langer, Edward Alexander, Alvin H. Rosenfeld, and Sidra Ezrahi, scholars have approached Holocaust literary texts and genres through different lenses; nevertheless, one genre missing from their examination is the short story. Many scholars of Holocaust literature have not situated their criticism of Holocaust short stories in relation to the stories’ genre, but rather have situated it in relation to the stories’ narrative prose or characterization. Consequently, for one to approach analyzing Holocaust short stories without acknowledging the genre and structure of these stories somewhat teeters on the edge of diminishing the authors’ chosen art form and misconstruing the meaning and purpose of these narratives. Unlike larger literary works that entail sub-​plots and utilize their length to gradually knit together a narrative of atrocity, I will address how the literary form of the short story offers an instant glimpse into the lives of its characters by inserting the reader into the world of the story –​where the narratives focus on a moment in the characters’ experience of unraveling life as they knew it. When considering the various forms of narratives, Jerome Stern writes, “The shapes [various genres] of fiction inspire by presenting ways to embody your experiences, memories, and imaginings. Some of these shapes are particularly suited to the creating of individual scenes, short stories, or single chapters.”5 Here, the “shape” of the short form lends itself to amplifying the various theme(s) inculcated in its narrative. The uniqueness of the short story form lies in its ability to contribute to the literary canon through the microscopic worlds it weaves for its readers. However, I  will address how Holocaust short stories are distinctive in how they tend to focus on a particular moment capturing the collapsing of time, the rupturing of presuppositions, the crumbling of the world (life before the Holocaust) into the “anti-​world,” and the tearing apart of relationships. I will highlight how the form of this genre magnifies this collapsing and tearing apart of worlds and relations through its concise narratives.

xii Preface

The second chapter will examine Ida Fink’s short story collection, A Scrap of Time and Other Stories, with an emphasis on her utilizing the simplicity of the short story form to reveal a “moment” of the “anti-​world” in which the internal family relationships break down. Although most scholars, such as Marek Wilczynski,6 merely address Fink’s work in terms of her ability to weave the notion of memory into her narratives, or make note of the internalized language of her prose or her use of “paradoxes,” the tearing apart of family relationships in Fink’s stories has not been examined. For example, in Fink’s “The Key Game,” a boy rehearses finding a “lost” key, in order for his father to hide if or when the Nazis come to their door. This story captures an aspect of the “anti-​world” for the reader that demonstrates the tearing of meaning from expression and language. In Fink’s stories, the reader sees various fragmented facets of the Holocaust and comes to understand that this is a “world in which a child is forced across the threshold of danger and impending death”;7 it is a world in which language and expression between parent and child are devoid of meaning. Fink’s “Aryan Papers” captures another layer of this inverted world, depicting how a girl trades her virginity for false papers in the hope that these documents would save her and her mother’s lives. The structure of this genre enables the reader to immediately see this perversion of justice, mockery of language, and appropriating of humanity that occurs when one fails to see the value of each life. In addition to the two aforementioned stories, I will address how in her other stories, Fink captures the psychological strains and emotional toils facing individuals (parent(s) and child(ren)) through centering her stories on a particular moment in time. Moving from considering the silent dialogue captured in Fink’s short story narratives, the third chapter will address the often silent figure of the Muselmann in select stories from Tadeusz Borowski’s collection: This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. By addressing the role of the often overlooked dehumanized figure in the concentration camps known as the Muselmann, who appears throughout Holocaust literature and testimonies, this chapter will emphasize the ways in which this figure reflects the themes of the collapsing of time and relationships that are woven throughout Holocaust short stories. Through his stark, straightforward, and strong diction, Borowski highlights the extent to which the Nazis’ sought to dehumanize the victims of the Holocaust through the embodiment of the Nazi-created dehumanized “anti-man” of the “anti-world” – the Muselmann. The fourth chapter considers the collapse of the home, as seen in two Holocaust Yiddish short stories. By focusing on a close analytical reading of Rokhl Korn’s short story “The End of the Road” (1957) and Frume Halpern’s short story “Dog Blood” (1963), my fourth chapter examines the role of the Nazis’ assault on the home, relationships, family, and memory as portrayed in two Yiddish Holocaust short  stories. These short stories lend themselves as literary accounts, literary witnesses of life during the anti-​world; life forging the framework for which Auschwitz-​Birkenau and every other Nazi-​occupied ghetto and camp would stand. More specifically, with their parallel settings, these two short stories, which were originally written in Yiddish (a language that was almost completely eradicated

Preface  xiii

during the Holocaust in the mass murder of the Yiddish-​speaking population of Europe), portray the extent to which the Nazis sought to destroy the home and family structure of the Jewish people of Europe. In conjunction with Fink’s attention to the psychological strains facing individuals, and in tandem with Borowski’s stark images of the physical breakdowns, and Korn’s and Halpern’s accounts of the destruction of the home, Cynthia Ozick’s short story, “The Shawl” will be the focus of the fifth chapter. In this chapter, I will address how Ozick portrays the impossibility of motherhood in the “anti-​world.” Ozick provides her readers with a glimpse into a world leading to a moment when a mother (Rosa) witnesses her child’s murder; yet, rather than crying out for her child, Rosa is frozen in the collapsing of time and the feeling that constitutes the “anti-​world”  –​a place where to feel or act was a reason to be killed.8 Writing about Ozick’s fiction, Lawrence Friedman briefly addresses how Rosa is caught in a “hellish present”;9 however, the majority of his analysis, in tandem with the works of Victor Strandberg10 and Sanford Pinsker,11 highlights Ozick’s various aesthetics and religious allusions in her work, rather than addressing her use of the short story form, or the portrayal of the character’s inability to foster the mother–​child relationship within the anti-​world. Authors writing about the Holocaust choose this literary medium to sound their voice as a form of testimony, and in doing so, account for the time the world collapsed into an “anti-​world.” Holocaust scholar Steven Jacobs addresses the role of the artist when he writes, “Among those Shoah artists, both those who survived and those who did not, were those who chose to put their talents and skills to best use by recording what they were seeing and experiencing, no matter how painful, no matter how horrific.”12 Jacobs reiterates what several scholars of Holocaust literature have noted: to write about the Holocaust is to write as one who is bearing witness to the atrocity, as one who is testifying and speaking for the silent ones –​ the millions whose voices will never speak, testify, nor bear witness. This notion of writing as testimony is a notion that traces back to Judeo-​Christian traditions that are rooted in the early biblical writings and addressed in the accompanying commentaries. In her chapter, “A Genre of Rupture: The Literary Language of the Holocaust,” Victoria Aarons further emphasizes the writings of Holocaust narratives with the Jewish expression comprising midrash and lamentation narratives. Aarons writes: “Holocaust narrative, in drawing from two vital traditions of Jewish expression, midrash and lamentation, constitutes a genre of rupture that creates, extends and responds to the trauma of the Shoah.”13 Yet, in addition to Holocaust short story narratives serving as a means for rupturing preconceived notions of narrative structures by sounding a testimony or lamenting atrocity in their texts, literary critics of the short story, like William Saroyan14 and Susan Lohafer,15 further highlight the idea of how those who read short stories are more than merely readers, but rather embody “listeners” and, I will also add, witnesses of that which they are reading. Therefore, alongside the writer who bears witness, the reader bears witness upon reading short stories about the Holocaust. Regarding this idea of the reader as

xiv Preface

witness, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel noted, “To listen to a witness is to become one,”16 and how “For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.”17 It is through the act of reading (hearing of the atrocities that took place during the Holocaust) that one in turn becomes a witness of what they have learned. One way we see the reader assume a role beyond merely reading is through a particular rhetorical device.Within the Holocaust short stories is the rhetorical device of dramatic irony, which enables Holocaust stories to directly insert the readers into the narrative by weaving them into a story where they know the ending and where they are able to assume what might happen to the characters before the characters do (whether liquidation or ghettoization is about to occur, whether the train will lead to Auschwitz, or whether their food rations will decrease). However, what makes this rhetorical tool of dramatic irony unique in the Holocaust short story is not only how the brevity of this form accentuates this device, but also how the implication is imposed on the reader by the author: to know, share, and in turn, tell (relate) that “story” by also bearing witness. Through these stories and various “moments” captured in their narratives, the reader sees how the “anti-​world” is a place where fathers do not recognize their children, where a piece of bread holds more value than a life, where neighbor turns on neighbor, and where it seems both God and supposedly civilized humanity are silent when millions are being murdered. While David Hirsch,18 Lawrence Langer,19 and other writers address these various forms of Holocaust literature’s implication of the reader, they do not fully consider the unique ways the short story genre adds to this implication of the reader. All of the short stories that I have chosen lead the reader into a never-​ending inferno whose doors all open to the death chamber. In each of these stories, the writer displays an enormous creativity in the objects and situations they have chosen to come closer to an expression of the unending horror that probably cannot fully be expressed through the power of words. Through my analysis of Holocaust short stories, I aim to highlight how these works written in the short story form capture the moment of tension, crisis, utter silence, and the tearing apart of relationships (fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, neighbors, and lovers). Through this genre’s form, authors of these stories give the readers a glimpse into a world where death is celebrated, commanded, and carried out; or, perhaps better, these authors tear an opening into the fabric of an “anti-​world,” in which even death is not death. They focus on the destruction of relationships. They center on a moment when the world of the story collapses under the assaults by man, rather than flourishes by the uniting of humanity, so that time itself comes undone. Lastly, these stories tend to engage in a narrative testimony of the characters’ deaths, rather than their lives, which in turn may implicate the reader to remember the people and places from which these stories arise. I  hope the following chapters will contribute to the ongoing conversation about Holocaust literature by highlighting the unique features of this genre; I  hope to address how these stories create the intensity of the experience of the Holocaust in that they highlight various moments capturing the collapsing of relationships among family, friends, neighbors, and future generations.

Preface  xv

Notes 1 Ka-​tzetnik 135633, Shivitti:  A Vision, translated by Eliyah De-​Nur and Lisa Herman (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), xi. 2 Michael Kardos, The Art and Craft of Fiction: A Writer’s Guide (Boston, M.A.: Bedford/​St. Martin’s, 2013), 103. 3 Kari Meyers and Gilda Pacheco, The Telling and the Tale: An Introductory Guide to Short, Creative Prose (San José: University of Costa Rica Press, 2006), 28. 4 Ibid., 28. 5 Jerome Stern, Making Shapely Fiction (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 3. 6 Marek Wilczynski, “Trusting the Words: Paradoxes of Ida Fink,” Modern Language Studies 24, no. 4 (1994): 25–​38. 7 Dorota Glowacka, Disappearing Traces:  Holocaust Testimonials, Ethics, and Aesthetics (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012), 156. 8 Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl (New York: Vintage, 1990), 10. 9 Lawrence S.  Friedman, Understanding Cynthia Ozick (Columbia:  University of South Carolina Press, 1991), 17. 10 Victor H.  Strandberg, Greek Mind/​ Jewish Soul:  The Conflicted Art of Cynthia Ozick (Madison: University of Wisconsin press, 1994). 11 Sanford Pinsker, The Uncompromising Fictions of Cynthia Ozick (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987). 12 Steven L. Jacobs, In Search of Yesterday: The Holocaust and the Quest for Meaning (Lanham, M.D.: University Press of America, 2006), 151. 13 Victoria Aarons, “A Genre of Rupture: The Literary Language of the Holocaust,” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Holocaust Literature, edited by Jenni Adams (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 27. 14 William Saroyan, “International Symposium on the Short Story, Part Two [United States],” Kenoyn Review, 1st Ser., 31 (1969): 58–​62 (at 62). 15 Susan Lohafer, Coming to Terms with the Short Story (Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State University Press, 1983), 8. 16 Pat Morrison, “Elie Wiesel, History’s Witness,” Los Angeles Times, April 23, 2013. 17 Elie Wiesel, Night, edited by Marion Wiesel (New York: Hill & Wang, 2006), xv. 18 David H.  Hirsch, The Deconstruction of Literature:  Criticism after Auschwitz (Providence, R.I.: Brown University Press, 1991). 19 Lawrence L. Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (New Haven, C.T.: Yale University Press, 1975).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

On February 5, 1675, Isaac Newton penned in a letter: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” I am grateful for the many “giants” whom I have had the pleasure of meeting, knowing, learning from, and working with over the years –​who, in various ways, came alongside me throughout the journey of completing this project. To Dr.  Zsuzsanna Ozsváth, Dr.  Nils Roemer, Dr.  Rainer Schulte, and especially Dr. David A. Patterson, for your insight, encouragement, and support on this project –​thank you. To my family and friends:  I am grateful beyond words for the steadfast love, prayer, and encouragement from each of you  –​especially my mother, Pamela Mueller, and my seven siblings:  Tiffany, Bert, Caroline, Juliana, John, Grace, and Matthew –​thank you. To my parents: I am thankful for the daily example they both set for me in how they treated each other and every human being –​whether friend or stranger, rich or poor, weak or strong, sojourner or neighbor, refugee, immigrant or citizen –​with love, kindness, and care. While my father (H. Clem Mueller, M.D.) is not here to read this book, due to his having briefly battled inoperable pancreatic cancer 11  years ago, I  am thankful for having had such a kind and wise father, whose unwavering love for the Lord and for us set an example of walking with God and loving others (Proverbs 20:7). Thank you, both. To everyone at the Routledge Taylor & Francis Group: for your involvement in the production, editing, formatting, and publication of this book –​thank you. To the readers:  For each of you reading this book, whether volunteering in Holocaust Museums or community centers, teaching courses about the Holocaust or Human Rights, generously donating to Holocaust studies, professorships, programs, or those expressing interest in learning about this topic in any way –​thank you.

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xviii Acknowledgments

We read, we learn, and we speak up in hopes that such an atrocity as the Holocaust will never happen again. To the survivors and victims of the Holocaust: For those who had the courage to write about your horrific experiences –​ thank you. For those who had the courage to live each day –​thank you. For those who had the courage to speak up –​thank you. For those who had the courage to risk their lives (“Righteous Among the Nations”) –​thank you. For those who had the courage to share their story, their suffering, their loss in either written or oral testimony, in books or interviews, or in conversations with a family member, neighbor, friend, student, reader, school group, or a grandchild –​thank you. May your memory be a blessing.

INTRODUCTION The features of the Holocaust short story

What a curious power words have. –​ Tadeusz Borowski This critical approach to Holocaust short stories will both address the distinct features of the Holocaust short story, and introduce three key themes woven throughout Holocaust short stories:  the collapse of time, the anti-​world, and the assault on domestic spaces and relationships. Yet, before focusing on the key features of the Holocaust short story genre, we must briefly address the complexity of the notion of any narrative that falls under the broader category of “Holocaust genre,” for the framing of this complex literary field aids in ushering in our discussion of the Holocaust short story genre. Berel Lang emphasizes in his book, Holocaust Representation: Art within the Limits of History and Ethics, the blurring of genres when addressing Holocaust literature. Lang argues that “this blurring effect reflects two principal sources –​the character of the Holocaust as subject for literary representation and the role of historical and ethical causality in shaping the genres, and thus the forms, of literary discourse.”1 Lang also addresses the multifaceted notions surrounding the discussion of Holocaust Literature by noting: Any reference now to “Holocaust writing” involves texts that number in the tens of thousands. The difficulty of characterizing that body of work as a whole and through the specific categories of genre is compounded by use of that that category (itself typically “blurred”) to include as well “metagernes”:  the form of discourse that distinguishes historical and scientific discourse, for example, as these complement more standard literary

2 Introduction

genres like the novel or the short story, which themselves fall under the metagenre “imaginative writing.”2 Concomitant with Lang’s discourse on the complexity and blurring of genres when it comes to considering Holocaust Literature, Victoria Aarons also contributes to this discussion through her reading of Holocaust narratives as a “genre of rupture.” Aarons stresses how “Holocaust writing as an emergent form of representation, draws upon historical fracture and sets in motion the very rupture and dissociation of which it speaks, ‘a traumatic rupture,’ to borrow a phrase from Joshua Hirsch’s study of cinematic images.”3 She further supports her reading of Holocaust literature as a genre of rupture by stressing how Holocaust narratives committed to responsible representation create the conditions for discomfort and unease; they create a language and a landscape of rupture, of discursive disequilibrium and of narrative disjunction. To that end, Holocaust novels, memoirs, poems, fables, and historical “imaginings” that attempt, as Elie Wiesel once put it, to bring the reader “to the other side,” must enact the very conditions they evoke.4 Similar to Aarons’ concept of “genre of rupture,” in my argument regarding the Holocaust short story genre, I note how various hallmarks of this genre uniquely reflect, for the reader, a narrative of collapsing –​the collapsing of time, the collapsing of the home (domestic spaces), and the collapsing of relationships and humanity. In addition to this genre highlighting these narratives of collapsing, the tight time frame of the Holocaust short story accentuates its testimonial aspect, which in turn draws the readers into the text as witnesses to what they have encountered by the inculcation of the aforementioned key themes into each narrative. Holocaust short stories convey the characters’ experience with the collapse of time revealed in the unraveling of human relationships that takes place in the anti-​world –​ life in the midst of the Holocaust. This collapse of time is a defining feature of what makes the anti-​world “anti-​”:  for it is a world outside of the space-​time reality of life, outside the concentrationary5 universe, or what many survivors, such as Ka-​tzetnik 135633, called “planet Auschwitz.”6 The “ruina temporis,” the Latin phrase for the catastrophe, destruction, or collapse of time, is the moment when all preconceived notions of the reality of life before the anti-​world come tête-​à-​tête with the newfound reality of life in the midst of the Shoah; a world in which hate is praised, death is commanded, and a human being deems another human being unworthy of life. Holocaust short stories capture this collapse of time and the anti-​ world through their literary depictions of the unraveling of human relationships and crumbling of any presumptions from life before Hitler. In these short stories, the collapse of time is connected with the collapse of the yet-​to-​be that constitutes meaningful human relationships. The collapse of time manifests itself in the collapse of relationships in the anti-​world. To be in a relationship is to be there for the sake of another, which opens up a response yet to be offered, a task yet to be engaged;

Introduction  3

however, in the midst of the atrocities of the anti-​world, not only does time cease to move on a positive trajectory toward a “future,” but so too do any presuppositions of seemingly normal relations. In the anti-​world, parents ceased to be parents and neighbors began to be enemies. In the Holocaust short story, we see this collapse of time in the assault on relationships  –​wherever the relationship to another for the sake of another is crushed by the oppressive hands of hate and death that yielded the Holocaust. These narratives capture a focused look into the anti-​world wherever there is the utterance of “kill thy neighbor,” or the building of a ghetto wall, the running of a camp, the tattooing of a number on an arm, or the tearing apart of a family by Nazism and hate –​that which fueled the Holocaust. However, before further defining the three themes woven throughout Holocaust short stories, and before proceeding in addressing the genre and features of the Holocaust short story, we must consider what scholars and writers have said about the short story genre in general, as well as the significance of the story in Jewish tradition. The significance of the storyteller and stories in Judeo-​Christian tradition is echoed throughout time in forms of narratives shaped by questions. For centuries, every year Jewish people have gathered around their tables to observe the Passover Seder. According to tradition, the youngest at the table will ask: “How does this night differ from all other nights?” Throughout the course of the Passover meal, families will read from the Jewish text, the Haggadah (literally Hebrew for “telling”), and retell the story of their escape and exodus from slavery in Egypt; this story will answer the child’s question of why this night differs from all others. Regarding the Jewish tradition of storytelling, the scholar David Booth highlights the importance “storytelling” plays in Holocaust literature and narratives, as well.When considering Holocaust survivor, writer, philosopher, and storyteller Elie Wiesel, Booth notes that “Wiesel turn[ed] to storytelling as a way of finding meaning in the modern world. This conception of storytelling as a meaningful act comes from Hasidism’s conception of storytelling as a religious act, and from earlier Midrashic traditions.”7 Moreover, storytelling is considered central to the life of the soul  –​to memory. Regarding the latter point, both Wiesel8 as well as Primo Levi9 have noted how the Holocaust was a war against memory –​memory of life before planet Auschwitz; memory of a life and a time where relationships bloomed rather than crumbled. It is through storytelling that man learns of the relationships between fellow men; it is through storytelling that man accounts for and witnesses about that which they have learned, seen, and experienced; it is through storytelling that memory can take shape and form. Consequently, Booth’s theory of storytelling as a religious act is found in analyzing the various figures that appear in works by Wiesel, as well as in other Holocaust narratives. Other scholars also note this connection with Holocaust literature and the storytelling (testimonial) aspect of literature attesting to this atrocity, which echoes characteristics of Jewish tradition. For instance, when considering Holocaust narratives in relation to Jewish narratives of midrash and lamentation,Victoria Aarons writes:

4 Introduction

Holocaust narratives draw from two vital traditions of Jewish expression as they mediate a post-​Holocaust universe: midrash and lamentation. By midrash I refer to the traditional stories that extend themselves through retelling into the interpretative repertoire of Jewish writers, explanations of events and stories that bring them to life in the present, showing their persistent relevance and dramatizing their historical resonance. […] Lamentation is the second tradition from which Holocaust narratives draw, originating in the Hebrew Book of Lamentations, the prophet Jeremiah’s mourning the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem in 586 BCE. […] Holocaust texts simultaneously call upon literary and cultural traditions as a framework for the ongoing response to the devastation of the Holocaust, all the while creating within this responsive framework an interpretative reconfiguration of conventional forms of expression.10 As Aarons notes, the traditional and cultural roots of Jewish expression that shape Holocaust literature both deeply dig into the traditions of past centuries, while also reaching out to post-​ Holocaust generations. With this tradition in mind, one recognizes that the art of storytelling stems from both the centuries-​old oral traditions and the innate and almost habitual everyday utterances formed when one responds to a simple “What is your name? Who are you? Where are you from? What have you done with your brother?” Storytelling is part of the fabric of humanity; storytelling (and the short story genre) is part of the tapestry of Holocaust literature. Storytelling in the Judeo-​Christian tradition is deeply rooted in even the early accounts of the creation of man in the first book of the Bible. Nevertheless, the accounts of the origin of creation and mankind do not merely serve as the building blocks for the narrative of humanity, but rather, these accounts serve as the first inquiries regarding man’s responsibility and relationship to God and fellow man. For example, one of the first questions the devil posed to man in the Bible was: “did God actually say…”11 Whereas, one of the first few questions God posed to the children of man in the Bible was: “Where is Abel your brother? […] What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.”12 These questions (though asked by different sources) stem from similar lines of inquiry, and that inquiry is about relationships –​man’s relationship to God, and man’s relationship to man. Keeping in tandem with Judeo-​Christian tradition, since the dawning of time, man has struggled with his brother, for there has been enmity among relationships. In the twentieth century, this enmity was manifest in the fighting and passing of laws, building of walls, and rising of smoke from gas chambers, as men killed their fellow men in the name of “pure race.” The Hebrew for bread (lechem) and a battle, war (milchamah) share the same root (l-​h-​m).13 Some religious scholars believe that these two very different ideas stem from the same root because both the giving of one’s bread to another and fighting (close struggling in battle) in the hand-​to-​hand combat of war with one another are actions of a relationship between two people –​sharing in life or sharing in the struggle of death. This belief in reality and the sharing of bread, the sharing of stories, and the sharing of relationships,

Introduction  5

came to a halt for millions of Jews during the Holocaust –​a time of mass death. In the Holocaust, the murderers took away the bread –​the source of life: meaning, memory, and relationships  –​from the Jewish people who were not at war with their murderers; nevertheless, their murderers waged a war against their very soul and memory, which robbed them of their stories:  their lives. For the Holocaust was a war against human relationship, for in planet Auschwitz, as Elie Wiesel writes in Night, “In this place, there is no such thing as father, brother, friend. Each of us lives and dies alone.”14 In the twentieth century, man once again was faced with the questions: Did God really say,“Thou shalt not kill?”15 Do the voices and the blood of our six million brothers and sisters cry out to God? For authors of Holocaust short stories, to write a narrative about that which took place in Europe from 1933–​1945 is an attempt to give a voice to the millions murdered and killed by their brothers. To write and read is to witness and tell of “that which happened”16 during the anti-​world; it is a response to restore the relationship, the soul, extinguished in the obliteration of bread –​that is, life. Holocaust short stories capture the Nazis’ assault on humanity and destruction of relationships. In many ways, the structure and shape of a story make it the genre most akin to one’s daily experiences. One tells stories and listens to others’ stories because stories are a characteristic of humanity. When one tells a story, one tends to focus on a particular moment or experience. Hence, to have a story is to have an experience –​whether seemingly insightful or insignificant –​to share with another person. In the sharing of this story, the storyteller enters into a relationship with his listener or reader. To tell a story is to participate in the narrative of humanity through testimonial accounts of life. Nevertheless, even though the experiences and moments captured in stories tend to shape and inform the humanity of various aspects of life, when it comes to the Holocaust short story, scholars and readers alike still seem to ask: Why should we read Holocaust short stories? And how can a few pages of a short story illuminate the reader about something as atrocious and unfathomable as the Holocaust? These questions, amongst many others, serve as the impetus for writing this critical examination of the Holocaust short story. Subsequently, in the following chapters, the gravity of this critical approach to Holocaust short stories will unfold for the reader. Furthermore, both the significance that the Holocaust short story plays in broadening our understanding of the Shoah, and why the Holocaust short story should be read and included in the conversation about the Holocaust and Holocaust literature, will be illuminated. The history of the short story is as multifaceted as the genre’s definitions. Consequently, for the purpose of this discussion, one of Europe’s greatest writers, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s definition of the short novella, serves as the springboard for the analysis of the ongoing debate surrounding the short story narrative, which namely addresses the short story’s brevity in length as its major defining feature. Goethe’s definition of the novella aids in shaping the definition of the short story  –​especially as his definition situates itself as a fixture in the literary genre canon. On January 29, 1827, Goethe penned a letter to his friend, Johann Peter Eckermann, where Goethe sought to define the novella (a very short novel, often

6 Introduction

without chapters, a long short story). In his letter, Goethe characterized the novella as “an unheard-​of event”17 Since Goethe’s characterization of the short story or novella, scholars and writers alike have sought ways to also define and characterize the short story. Although Goethe’s definition aims at distinguishing fact from the makings of interesting fiction, when considering his definition with regard to Holocaust fiction, one can also expand his definition to thinking morally about a topic or an unheard-​of event. Nevertheless, although the novella is not the same as the short story, Goethe’s characterization of a novella’s telling of “an unheard-​ of event” seems appropriate when considering how Holocaust short stories seek to capture (and witness) in their narratives an unheard-​of event –​mass death, gas chambers, Auschwitz, and more –​rather than merely relying on the typical defining feature of the short story –​its short, concise narrative. Adding their voices to Goethe’s, from Franz Kafka to Walter Benjamin to Norman Friedman, writers have attempted to both define the literary short story genre and pinpoint the characteristics its narrative holds in conjunction with the topography of other (longer) literary genres. For instance, regarding twentieth-​ century German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin’s understanding of the short story genre, literary scholar Carolin Duttlinger notes how, for Benjamin, “short prose fosters a much-​needed sensitivity for ‘austere, delicate face-​less things.’ ”18 Nevertheless, although the inquiries surrounding the defining and shaping of the short story are vast, the majority of them reiterate the structuralism debate of the short story; namely, they tend to focus on how even though the crafts of a short story might be manifold, the ruling factor of its genre is the brevity of the narrative’s length. Such attention to the structure and length of the short story is found in critical work such as Brander Matthews’ 1901  “Philosophy of the Short-​Story.” Regarding the short story, Matthews states, “The difference between a Novel and a Novelet is one of length only:  a Novelet is a brief Novel.”19 Furthermore, in texts like Jerome Stern’s Making Shapely Fiction or Gilda Pacheco and Kari Meyers’ The Telling and the Tale: An Introductory Guide to Short, Creative Prose, literary critics address the various definitions of the short story in the past century, many of which tend to again focus on the length of the story. Consequently, when moving away from merely noting its length, how one can define the “short story” elicits many different answers. For instance, in her article “The Short Story: The Long and the Short of It,” Mary Louise Pratt succinctly compiles what she calls the eight major “propositions” (or components) of the short story. As a literary scholar whose work was shaped by an in-​depth consideration of the assertions and assumptions other scholars have voiced regarding the short story genre, Pratt’s “propositions” serve as the catalyst for our discussion of the features and hallmarks of the Holocaust short story. Thus, basing her “propositions” of the short story on what writers and scholars have asserted regarding the short story genre, Pratt moves beyond solely noting circular arguments surrounding the structure of the genre, and instead maintains that there are other key aspects to the short story as well.20 While also drawing upon other characterizations of the short story genre, Pratt succinctly addresses the core aspects of the short story genre,

Introduction  7

which is why her eight propositions serve as a reference point for addressing how the Holocaust short story is similar to and different from other short stories. By weaving through Pratt’s various “propositions” of the short story, the similarities and differences of the Holocaust short story with its contemporary counterparts will be noted. Furthermore, by building upon Pratt’s assertions, how the Holocaust short story is distinct from other short stories, the uniqueness of the Holocaust short story, and the role it plays in contributing to the larger literary canon of Holocaust literature will also come to light. The short story is an ever-​present narrative in twentieth-​and twenty-​first-​century literature. That being said, after 1945, the Holocaust short story created a ripple effect for this genre. Mary Louise Pratt begins her discussion of the short story by stating: Proposition 1. The novel tells a life, the short story tells a fragment of a life. One of the most consistently found narrative structures in the short story is the one called the “moment-​of-​truth.” Moment of truth stories focus on a single point of crisis in the life of a central character, a crisis which provokes some basic realization that will change the character’s life forever.21 Pratt argues that the short story rests on this “moment-​of-​truth.” This moment might be considered akin to the short stories of James Joyce’s characters’ moments of epiphany, or Flannery O’Connor’s characters’ moments of awakening. Holocaust short stories also have this moment-​of-​truth; however, this moment is not solely a spiritual or ethereal awakening, but rather it is found in the moment the character(s) enter into the anti-​world. This anti-​world is a world yielded by moments of death rather than moments of life. How entering into the anti-​ world looks, and what that experience or moment is, will be addressed in the following chapters. The thing: building upon what she calls a moment-​of-​truth, Pratt proceeds to claim, in her second proposition: “The short story deals with a single thing, the novel with many things.”22 Here, her claim is aesthetic in that the “thing” to which she is referring relates to the genre and its specific focus; whereas, in the Holocaust short story, this “thing” is often thematic –​in that each story hinges on a moment for which the author reveals, for the reader, a key theme about the anti-​world. This proposition is found in Holocaust short stories when the protagonists are faced with a newfound reality that the life they once knew –​the life of order, decency, humanity –​ceases to exist in tandem with “the thing” –​Auschwitz, gas chambers, mass shootings, fake papers, hiding of children from the hands of death. The “thing” in Holocaust short stories is the metaphysical struggle for life and civility in a civilized society propagating death. Although Holocaust short stories differ in their content, they all tend to capture the collapse of time and the anti-​world for their readers. In this sense, the Holocaust short story differs from other short stories, in that other short stories may focus on a sole moment or thing; whereas, Holocaust stories, though they differ in their perspectives, all tend to focus on the same thing: a

8 Introduction

life and an environment where a thing like Auschwitz was created and implemented for mass murder. Pratt’s third and fourth propositions address the partiality of the short story. Regarding this lack of wholeness, she claims:  “Proposition 3.  The short story is a sample, the novel is the whole hog”23 and “Proposition 4. The novel is a whole text, the short story is not.”24 She goes on to claim about her third proposition that it “refers to the tendency for short stories to present themselves, usually through their titles, as samples or examples of some larger general category.”25 In the context of the Holocaust short story, on one hand, Pratt is right in that these short stories can be considered as samples or examples of the larger narrative of atrocity found in other Holocaust literary genres. Nevertheless, on the other hand, Pratt’s propositions about novels being whole and short stories being a sample cannot be applied to the Holocaust short story, because to have what some might consider a “sampling” of the anti-​world or Auschwitz in a few pages of a story is to have the whole:  meaning that, where other short stories may be found wanting when it comes to addressing larger concerns, themes, topics, character growth, or plot development, when considering the Holocaust short stories, authors capture a moment of atrocity that, although it might seem like a “sample” because of its length, is instead a poignant and pointed reflection of the vehement degree to which men suffered from the hands of their fellow men. In other words, where Pratt and other scholars may seem to view the novel as the “whole text” or a complete narrative as a result of its length, such specifications seem irrelevant when applied to Holocaust short stories, for their short narratives and condensed structure immediately insert their reader into a whole text that effectively captures in its subject matter, the collapsing moments of life and relationships in the anti-​ world. The Holocaust was a time of shattering comprehension  –​it was a time when pieces of the whole could never come back together. In this sense, the Holocaust short story provides a glimpse into that whole, yet it is a glimpse into the whole of the catastrophic concentrationary universe. Pratt moves on to her fifth point, where she addresses the short story and subject matter. Pratt writes, “the short story is often the genre used to introduce new (and possibly stigmatized) subject matters into the literary arena.”26 This assertion about the short story serving as a springboard from which authors launch their new subject matter into the world is especially true when considering Holocaust short stories and the role they have played in introducing countries and generations to the moment when an individual or family is thrust into the horrors of Hitler’s Europe. Pratt adds to this idea when she claims: “In other parts of the world we similarly find the short story being used to introduce new regions or groups into an established national literature, or into an emerging national literature.”27 Yes, other literary genres introduce the scope and gravity of the Holocaust to their readers, but as will be noted in the forthcoming paragraphs and chapters, the short story has an accessibility to it that other genres do not have; consequently, there is a testimonial nature found in the short story that uniquely lures its readers into its short narrative in addressing the Holocaust in a way that reaches a broad readership. Another way

Introduction  9

in which we see Pratt’s fifth proposition in the Holocaust short story is in her claim that this genre introduces an “emerging national literature” to readers. This idea is supported in the collective work of Holocaust survivors and authors of all nationalities who, regardless of whether they chose to write in their mother tongue or in their newfound language, chose to write about a subject and crime that was so atrocious, so absurd, so foreign, and so horrific that a word was created to name it in 1944: genocide. We also see how authors like Ida Fink chose to live in Israel and volunteer by listening to and transcribing the testimonies of those who survived the Holocaust, which, in turn, inspired her to write her own short stories comprising A Scrap of Time and Other Stories. For like Fink’s stories, we see how “the short story cycle sometimes is used to convey a particular social perspective too.”28 Authors of Holocaust short stories utilize this genre and its features to illuminate for their readers the trepidations and terrors facing individuals entering into and living in the anti-​world. Unlike other national literatures like British, French, Polish, Russian, or Italian literature, the Holocaust short story has no place in a national literature –​for, in a way, the Holocaust undermines any notion of a national literature, and instead becomes a literature marked by nations, a literature birthed into existence from the pains of death; a literature without a nation, a land, a home, or a language –​nevertheless, it is a literature seeking to be read by all nationalities and all traditions. Pratt acknowledges the testimonial and traditional aspects of the short story in her sixth proposition: the “Orality”29 of the short story. Rather than merely alluding to the oral tradition from which the short story stems, by “orality” Pratt refers to the “consistent trend in the short story, ranging from the incorporation of oral-​ colloquial speech forms in the language of narration.”30 We see this proposition in Holocaust short stories when the authors embed the language of Auschwitz or the anti-​world into their narratives. Furthermore, this incorporating of various speech forms and narratives is seen in Holocaust short stories when authors use their narratives as a way to introduce their readers to the language of Auschwitz –​the language of the anti-​world. In addition to this, these short stories echo the language of Jewish life and Jewish religion regarding men’s responsibility to and relationship with one another –​especially man’s relationship within the family structure. Not only does the Holocaust short story spring from the “orality” of its narratives as a way to immediately insert its readers into the narratives of Auschwitz, but it also springs its readers into language that witnesses about the perpetrator or, as Pratt calls it, the oppressor: “The tradition of orality in the short story has special significance in cultures where literacy is not the norm, or where the standard literary language is that of an oppressor.”31 Here we see how Pratt’s sixth proposition applies to the Holocaust short story in that these authors contributed to a newfound tradition of literature of atrocity –​literature of the Holocaust. Nevertheless, we also see how Holocaust short stories differ from merely consisting of the language of the oppressor. In the Holocaust short story, we see the act of an author choosing to write a narrative that breaks away from the narrative of the oppressor and, instead, provides the reader with a narrative that accounts for the acts of the oppressor in the language of a victim.

10 Introduction

Moving from orality and language to narrative traditions and craft, Pratt’s seventh and eighth propositions about the short story are applicable to the Holocaust short story as well. In her seventh proposition, “Narrative Traditions,” Pratt echoes what I  have previously mentioned about the tradition of the short story genre, while she also adds that the short story genre struggles for validity when compared with the “older narrative traditions”32 of the novel. She then proceeds to her final proposition about the short story (“Craft versus art”), noting how “one of the most intriguing aspects of the short story’s generic status is the widespread tendency for it to be viewed as a (skill-​based) craft rather than a (creativity-​based) art.”33 Pratt further discusses how the short story is often seen as craft rather than art. Moving past the “craft rather than art” short story debate, as noted in the previous passages comparing and contrasting Pratt’s propositions of the short story with the Holocaust short story, one can see that although the Holocaust short story shares many similarities to other short stories in general, there are, nevertheless, distinct features of the Holocaust short story, namely: place, time, and theme, which will be addressed later. These features are the result of the ethical demands of history, which, with regard to the Holocaust short story, take the issue of genre beyond the distinctions of craft and art. Therefore, when considering the short story, features like Pratt’s, or definitions like Norman Friedman’s a “short fictional narrative in prose,”34 or Flannery O’Connor’s “The short story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way,”35 come to mind. However, while many scholars approach defining the short story like Friedman, when addressing Holocaust short stories, I build upon O’Connor’s and Goethe’s definitions by adding that not only do Holocaust short stories attempt to “say what cannot be said” and address an “unheard-​of event,” but that their very fragmented yet concise form also highlights three defining features of the Holocaust short story for their readers:  the collapse of time, the anti-​world, and the assault on relationships. Although other Holocaust literary genres contain variations of these three features, the Holocaust short story form tends to amplify collapsing of time into the anti-​world through its fragmented yet focused narrative. This collapsing of time is seen in Holocaust short stories where the tearing apart of relationships and the shattering of reality and life before 1933 crumble into an anti-​ world –​an unheard-​of event that would later be known as the Holocaust. Holocaust short stories are not merely brief narratives or short novels, but rather they are structured narratives that capture the moment when death and hate engulfed reality to form the anti-​world. They are narratives which capture the moment when all presuppositions of life and relationships moving on a positive trajectory toward the future seem to warp, as time ceases to move toward a future, and instead collapses into a world consumed by death and haunted by the realities of what once was. Therefore, unlike the longer structures of novels or varied structures of poems or essays, the Holocaust short story form lends itself to inserting the reader immediately into a narrative that focuses on a particular moment –​revealing aspects of the collapse of time and the anti-​world of its character(s) through concise, yet fully developed, narrative structures. In studies written by Lawrence Langer,

Introduction  11

Edward Alexander, Alvin H. Rosenfeld, and Sidra Ezrahi, scholars have approached Holocaust literary texts and genres through different lenses; nevertheless, one genre missing from their examination is the short story. Unlike larger literary works that entail sub-​plots and utilize their length to gradually knit together a narrative of atrocity, I  will address how the literary form of the short story offers an instant glimpse into the lives of its characters by inserting the reader into the world of the story –​where the narratives focus on a moment in the characters’ experience of life as they knew it to be unraveling. Furthermore, when addressing the short story genre, Michael Kardos writes: “there must always be a necessary relationship between a story’s form and its meaning, because a story’s form is part of what creates meaning.”36 Kardos’ point addresses this notion of form (of the short story) and its relationship to meaning –​ meaning that becomes apparent when the act of writing takes place within said form. When reflecting on this notion in light of the Holocaust short story, Kardos’ claim seems especially fitting when considering the form of the Holocaust short story, and how that form lends itself to the very act of writing and storytelling. This is tightly woven with the “meaning” and testimonial aspect of Holocaust literature, rather than a meaning stemming solely from the genre’s form.When building upon Kardos’ assertion of form and meaning to include both meaning of structure and meaning of content, this notion applies to the analysis of Holocaust short stories in that these short narratives render themselves as meaningful testimonial accounts of atrocity or of life on planet Auschwitz. Yet this “necessary relationship between a story’s form and its meaning” is amplified in the Holocaust short story in its concise, accessible narratives, which immediately insert the reader into a world devoid of comprehensible meaning –​the anti-​world. Here, the meaning is not in the story’s form, but rather the meaning is found in the margins and in the white space between the words of the narrative, for the meaning is found in the void, it is found in the authors’ attempts to give sound to the silence of a camp when the last child is hanged,37 or give voice to a young girl who silently takes false Aryan papers purchased with her innocence.38 While some scholars address Holocaust authors and their stories, they tend to approach these stories by situating them in conjunction with other literary genres, rather than as their own genre. Even though there are numerous Holocaust short stories that address the collapse of time and relationships, this genre is one of the least researched in Holocaust literature. This lack of critical response to Holocaust short stories must be addressed because the various representations of the Holocaust captured in the short story form are crucial to our understanding of the Shoah.

Notes 1 Berel Lang, Holocaust Representation: Art within the Limits of History and Ethics, (Baltimore, M.D.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 35. 2 Ibid., 35. 3 Aarons, “Genre of Rupture,” 34.

12 Introduction



4 Ibid., 29. 5 Ezrahi, By Words Alone,  49–​66. 6 Ka-​tzetnik 135633, Shivitti, xvii. 7 David Booth, “The Role of the Storyteller  –​Sholem Aleichem and Elie Wiesel,” Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought 42, no. 3 (1993), 298–​312 (at 304). 8 Elie Wiesel, Evil and Exile, edited by Philippe de Saint-​Cheron (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 155. 9 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Summit Books, 1988), 31. 10 Aarons, “Genre of Rupture,” 28–​29. 11 Genesis 3:1 (ESV). 12 Genesis 4:9–​10 (ESV). 13 Mitchell First, “What is the Connection between the Words Lechem (Bread) and Milchama (War)?” JewishLink, last modified Deember 31, 2015, www.jewishlinknj. com/ ​ d ivrei- ​ t orah/ ​ 1 1067- ​ w hat- ​ i s- ​ t he- ​ c onnection- ​ b etween- ​ t he- ​ words- ​ l echem-​ bread-​and-​milchama-​war. See also the Old Testament Hebrew Lexicon for Lechem (www.biblestudytools.com/​lexicons/​hebrew/​kjv/​lechem.html)and Milchamah (www. biblestudytools.com/​lexicons/​hebrew/​nas/​milchamah.html). 14 Wiesel, Night, 110. 15 Exodus 20:13 (KJV). 16 Paul Celan, Selected Poems and Prose, translated by John Felstiner (New  York:  W.W. Norton, 2001), 395. 17 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Conversations of Goethe with Johann Peter Eckermann, translated by John Oxenford, edited by J.K. Moorhead (New  York:  Da Capo Press, 1998), 163. 18 Carolin Duttlinger, The Cambridge Introduction to Franz Kafka (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 23. 19 Brander Matthews, “The Philosophy of the Short-​Story,” Lippincott’s Magazine of Popular Literature and Science 36 (1885): 366–​374 (at 366). 20 Mary Louise Pratt, “The Short Story: The Long and the Short of It,” in The New Short Story Theories, edited by Charles E. May (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1994). 21 Ibid., 99. 22 Ibid., 101. 23 Ibid., 102. 24 Ibid., 103. 25 Ibid., 102. 26 Ibid., 104. 27 Ibid., 104. 28 Ibid., 105. 29 Ibid., 107. 30 Ibid., 107. 31 Ibid., 108. 32 Ibid., 109. 33 Ibid., 109. 34 Meyers and Pacheco, The Telling and the Tale, 28. 35 Ibid., 28. 36 Kardos, Art and Craft of Fiction, 103. 37 Wiesel, Night,  64–​65. 38 Ida Fink,“Aryan Papers” in A Scrap of Time and Other Stories (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1983), 68.

1 THE COLLAPSE OF TIME Introduction to select themes of the Holocaust short story

All of us walk around naked. The delousing is finally over, and our striped suits are back from the tanks of Cyclone B solution, an efficient killer of lice in clothing and of men in gas chambers. –​Tadeusz Borowski, “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen” Upon considering the structural features of the short story and the Holocaust short story genre discussed in the “Introduction,” we shall now direct our analy­ sis toward the three essential thematic concepts rooted in Holocaust short story narratives  –​particularly as seen in the writings of Ida Fink, Tadeusz Borowski, Rokhl Korn, Frume Halpern, and Cynthia Ozick. These key concepts capture the essential way the Holocaust short story contributes to the greater Holocaust literary canon, and aids in highlighting what victims faced during the Holocaust. These themes are: the anti-​world, the collapse of time, and the assault on the home (domestic spaces) and relationships. Building upon what has already been addressed regarding these ideas, the Holocaust short story inserts its readers into various degrees of the anti-​world. The anti-​world is the life during Hitler’s reign –​Nazism, Nuremburg Laws, ghettos, hidings, Aryan papers, Stars of David, tattoos, camps, crematoriums. Short stories lend themselves to reflecting the anti-​world differently than other literary genres, in which the short narratives immediately insert the reader into a scene or a moment encapsulating this world. In some of the short stories that will be discussed in the following chapters, this scene or moment begins in a domestic space, capturing the Nazis’ assault on the home –​a place which once housed safety, comfort, love, provision, and warmth, which crumbles into the anti-​world as the narrative progresses. The collapsing of homes followed by the separating of relationships often highlights the beginning step of the Nazis’ path to annihilation of the Jewish people, which was to render them homeless; therefore, devoid of the security, the peace, and the comfort of their once familial domestic dwelling

14  The collapse of time

place: their homes. Whether a young family in an apartment in Fink’s “The Key Game,” multi-​generations gathered around a kitchen table in Korn’s “The Road of No Return,” or the couple in Halpern’s “Dog Blood,” survivors of the Holocaust, these domestic spaces often serve in ushering the reader into the world of the short story, in which the collapsing of time and relationships into the anti-​world often occurs. The Nazi ideologies and numerous anti-​Jewish measures and laws began a legal wave of annihilation that first renders Jewish people homeless before rendering them devoid of a future  –​as seen in these victims being moved to ghettos, concentration camps, and eventually, gas chambers. Stemming from the domestic spaces or settings of some these select stories, the height and depth of the degrees and layers of the anti-​world become evident for readers when they read stories that hinge, not on a moment of time, but rather, on a moment of the collapse of time. The collapse of time seems contradictory in and of itself; nevertheless, the anti-​world –​all that comprised the Holocaust –​was itself a contradiction of any presuppositions one might have had of a cultured, civilized society. Instinctively, one often thinks of time in terms of scientific measurements or constants. In the late 1600s, Sir Isaac Newton’s discoveries in theoretical physics and mathematics assert scientific reason concerning time and space. In 1687, Newton defined time:  “absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equally without relation to anything external.”1 Various scholars have also noted the different approaches to the discussion of time. For instance, in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, Reinhart Koselleck explores the concept of historical time in relation to modernity (the late eighteenth century through World War I). In his work, The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–​1918, Stephen Kern considers the nature of time, culture, and technology as perceived in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries by various philosophers, scientists, and humanists. Kern addresses how philosophers like Kant rejected this idea of time in the absolute sense which Newton claims for it. Kern writes: In The Critique of Pure Reason (1781) Immanuel Kant rejected the Newtonian theory of absolute, objective time (because it could not possibly be experienced) and maintained that time was a subjective form or foundation of all experience. But even though it was subjective, it was also universal –​the same for everybody.2 Often, human beings have a relative understanding of time, meaning that one can only comprehend time when measuring it in modes of distance (e.g. miles to the moon, meters to the post office, minutes in an hour, seconds in a minute), or when we consider time to be a metaphysical constant continuing forward on a positive trajectory into the future. This scientific notion of time resurfaced in the early 1900s, with Albert Einstein building upon Newton’s scientific and mathematical theories, when he further enlightened the world on the notion of time in his mathematical theories regarding relativity, gravity, and space. The dawn of the new century was the dawn of a new theory of time. As Kern notes:

The collapse of time  15

With the special theory of relativity in 1905 Einstein calculated how time in one reference system moving away at a constant velocity appears to slow down when viewed from another system at rest relative to it, and in his general theory of relativity of 1916 he extended the theory to that of the time change of accelerated bodies. Since every bit of matter in the universe generates a gravitational force and since gravity is equivalent to acceleration, he concluded that “every reference body has its own particular time.”3 Consequently, when one thinks of time, one tends to naturally think of the future or of a counting or measuring of something –​some thing, some reality, some hope in the forward and beyond. Or one thinks of systems and galaxies in motion toward, beyond, or in the midst of black holes and voids of the stratospheres. Yet while most of the scientific and mathematical world was enthralled by Einstein’s theory of time and relativity, in the small corner of Saransk, Russia, twentieth-​century literary philosopher Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin sought to apply this notion of time to literary studies, introducing his idea in the essay “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel.”4 Bakhtin wrote this essay in order to address what he calls the “chronotope” –​or space-​ time –​a term he coins to describe the novel’s literary representation of time and of temporal and spatial relationships. Bakhtin maintains that when regarding the novel, time is not bound, constrained, or adherent to any presuppositions of time in the scientific sense, but rather it uniquely molds to the shape of the narrative which it is describing. Or as one scholar notes, “Chronotopic analysis thus seeks to address literary history at a very fundamental level; it mediates between historically created and thus changing conceptions of time and space, and their realization in the underlying narratives of literary texts.”5 Drawing from the writings of Goethe and Kant,6 Bakhtin’s philosophy of literary time and space is a twentieth-​century attempt to address and challenge the scientific understanding of time when applied to literary theory. Regarding this notion he states: In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-​out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible, likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope. The chronotope in literature has an intrinsic generic significance. It can even be said that it is precisely the chronotope that defines genre and generic distinctions, for in literature the primary category in the chronotope is time. The chronotope as a formally constitutive category determines to a significant degree the image of man in literature as well.The image of man is always intrinsically chronotopic.7

16  The collapse of time

Where Bakhtin seeks to define space-​time in relation to the novel, the following analysis seeks to define collapse of time in relation to the Holocaust short story. When one thinks the collapse of time in the short story, one must move beyond the scientific definitions of time that are shaped by physics or mathematics, and instead look to the metaphysical and even theological definitions of time. Like gravity causing an object to collapse due to gravitational pull of its mass, time in the anti-​world collapses onto itself. Time in the anti-​world is not that of a mathematical formula, but rather it is like the melting timepiece depicted in Salvador Dalí’s surrealist painting, “The Persistence of Memory.” Holocaust short stories tend to directly insert the reader into the anti-​world by focusing on a moment or scene where the character(s) undergo the collapsing of time that entails the assault on memory in the form of the crumbling of human relationships as a result of the Nazis’ assault on humanity, which is the third theme that is woven throughout Holocaust short stories. Again, Holocaust survivor and author Ka-​ tzetnik 135633 addresses memory and time “on planet Auschwitz” in his foreword to Shivitti, when he says, “For two long years they [those who went to the crematorium] trod through me, their eyes penetrating mine. And time there, on planet Auschwitz, was not like time here. Each moment there revolved around the cogwheels of a different time-​sphere. Hell-​years last longer than light-​years.”8 As we will discuss in the following chapters, time in the anti-​world fell into the realm of “Hell-​years” rather than “light-​years” –​time collapsed into itself rather than unfolding into future space, and the Holocaust short story provides a glimpse into this particular hellish world. The uniqueness of the short story form lies in its ability to contribute to the literary canon through the microscopic worlds it weaves for its readers. Furthermore, many of these Holocaust short stories differ from other literary genres in that they have a tendency to focus on a certain, singular, particular moment that captures the collapsing of time, the rupturing of presuppositions, the crumbling of the world (life before the Holocaust) into the anti-​world, and the tearing apart of relationships. The following chapters will highlight how the form of this genre magnifies this collapsing and tearing apart of worlds and relationships through the concise narratives of Ida Fink, Tadeusz Borowski, Rokhl Korn, Frume Halpern, and Cynthia Ozick. Also, the reader will see how the narrowly focused structure of the short story implicates the reader to bear witness through its immediate narratives, often able to be read in one setting. Thus the reader undergoes a more abrupt collision with the collapse of time and meaning, which go into the human relationships that came under assault at the hands of the Nazis. Addressing key themes demonstrates this definitive aspect of the Holocaust short story through an examination of the works of select authors. In Fink’s stories, I will focus on the internal, psychological impact of the assault on the family structure within domestic spaces; in my examination of Borowski’s stories, I will move to the external aspect of the “anti-​world” (life amid the Holocaust) and its most characteristic inhabitant, the Muselmann; and in Cynthia Ozick’s stories, I shift to considering the relationship

The collapse of time  17

of motherhood collapsing within the walls of the concentration camps during the Holocaust, which is indicative of the collapse of time and the collapsing of any notions of safety and domestic spaces, thus rendering human relationships almost impossible during the anti-​world. I begin this discussion of these key themes in Holocaust short stories by examining select stories from Ida Fink’s short story collection, A Scrap of Time and Other Stories, with an emphasis on her utilizing the simplicity of the short story form to reveal a “moment” of the “anti-​world” in which the internal family relationships break down. Although most scholars, such as Marek Wilczynski,9 merely address Fink’s work in terms of her ability to weave the notion of memory into her narratives, or make note of the internalized language of her prose or her use of “paradoxes,” the tearing apart of family relationships in Fink’s stories has not been examined. For example, in Fink’s “The Key Game,” a boy rehearses finding a “lost” key in order for his father to hide if or when the Nazis come to their door. This story captures an aspect of the “anti-​world” for the reader that demonstrates the tearing of meaning from expression and language. In Fink’s stories, the reader sees various fragmented facets of the Holocaust and comes to understand that this is a “world in which a child is forced across the threshold of danger and impending death”;10 it is a world in which language and expression between parent and child are devoid of meaning. Fink’s “Aryan Papers” captures another layer of this inverted world, depicting how a girl trades her virginity for false papers in the hope that these documents would save her and her mother’s life. The structure of this genre enables the reader to immediately see this perversion of justice, mockery of language, and appropriating of humanity that occur when one fails to see the value of each life. In addition to the two aforementioned stories, I highlight how in her story, “Jean-​Christophe,” Fink further echoes this dialogue of silence, while in her story, “A Scrap of Time,” she captures the psychological strains and emotional toils facing individuals (parent(s) and child(ren)) through centering her stories on a particular moment in time –​ even a “scrap” of time. I  continue this line of reasoning when I  consider how this similar collapse of home and relationships is also portrayed in two Yiddish Holocaust short stories:  “The End of the Road” by Rokhl Korn, and “Dog Blood” by Frume Halpern. Moving from the internal, psychological struggles captured in Fink’s, Korn’s, and Halpern’s narratives, I  will address Tadeusz Borowski’s collection of stories, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. It will concentrate on Borowski’s use of the short story form, and his dark diction, stark images, and concrete details, to capture a world where time is suspended between death and life, as portrayed in the external, physical dissolving of relationships. In Borowski’s tales, this collapse of humanity and human relationship is represented in the Muselmann. Although scholars like Rosenfeld,11 Young,12 Langer,13 and Ezrahi14 have noted how the language and descriptions of Borowski’s narratives emulate the language and world of Auschwitz, they do not address the confining form of Borowski’s art, mirroring the

18  The collapse of time

“anti-​world” of Auschwitz. In tandem with Borowski’s attention to the tight, consistent form of these stories, the figure of the Muselmann appears again and again in this collection of short stories, embodying what Ezrahi calls “concentrationary realism.”15 The Muselmann is the epitome of the faceless, expressionless, and cruel product of the Nazi machine during the “anti-​world.” Yet, at the same time, the Muselmann figure is the visage of a person caught between life and death. In Borowski’s “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” the Muselmann figures are dehumanized and depicted as insects hiding from light.16 In these stories we see how in the “anti-​world,” the expressionless faces found on the Muselmanns serve as traces of the time before, where “to love” was commanded, rather than when “to kill” was commanded. In conjunction with Fink’s attention to the psychological strains facing individuals, and in tandem with Borowski’s stark images of the physical breakdowns, Cynthia Ozick’s short story “The Shawl,” from The Shawl will be noted. I  will address how Ozick portrays the impossibility of motherhood in the camps through her depiction of the collapsing of relationships between mother and daughter in the “anti-​world.” In this short story, Ozick provides her readers with a glimpse into a world leading to a moment when a mother (Rosa) witnesses her child’s murder; yet, rather than crying out for her child, Rosa is frozen in the collapsing of time and the feeling that constitutes the “anti-​world” –​a place where to feel or act was a reason to be killed.17 Writing about Ozick’s fiction, Lawrence Friedman briefly addresses how Rosa is caught in a “hellish present”;18 however, the majority of his analysis, in tandem with the works of Victor Strandberg19 and Sanford Pinsker,20 highlights Ozick’s various aesthetics and religious allusions in her work, rather than addressing her use of the short story form, or her survivor’s inability to leave the “anti-​world.” Finally, I  will address the relationship between the writer and readers of Holocaust short stories. Authors writing about the Holocaust choose the literary medium of the short story to sound their voice as a form of testimony, and in doing so, account for the time the world collapsed into an “anti-​world.” Holocaust scholar Steven Jacobs addresses the role of the artist when he writes, “Among those Shoah artists, both those who survived and those who did not, were those who chose to put their talents and skills to best use by recording what they were seeing and experiencing, no matter how painful, no matter how horrific.”21 Jacobs reiterates what several scholars of Holocaust literature have noted: to write about the Holocaust is to write as one who is bearing witness to the atrocity, as one who is testifying and speaking for the silent ones  –​the millions whose voices will never speak, testify, nor bear witness. This notion of writing as testimony is a notion that traces back to Judeo-​Christian traditions that are rooted in the early biblical writings and addressed in the accompanying commentaries. In the Jewish tradition, there is a history of writing chronicles in response to catastrophe and even during catastrophe; this approach is seen in the First and Second Books of Chronicles in the Bible. According to Jewish tradition, this writing (chronicling of history) assumes an aspect of testimony inasmuch as

The collapse of time  19

it sees something meaningful at stake in the history to which it responds. This tradition of writing about and chronicling experiences and events, philosophies and phenomena, continued throughout the centuries. In the early twentieth century, Walter Benjamin further addresses the role of the chronicler of history in his Theses on the Philosophy of History. Rather than approaching history and engaging the past from the skewed view of the victor, in his third thesis, Benjamin urges the “historian” to view himself rather as a “chronicler.” For “a chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth:  nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history.”22 In the same way as Benjamin sees the historian, authors of Holocaust short stories take on the task of writing about that which happened in hope that it would never be regarded as lost for history. Alongside the writer who bears witness, the reader bears witness upon reading short stories about the Holocaust. Within the Holocaust short stories is the rhetorical device of dramatic irony, which enables Holocaust stories to directly insert the readers into the narrative by weaving them into a story where they know the ending and where they are able to assume what might happen to the characters before the characters do (whether liquidation or ghettoization is about to occur, whether the train will leave for Auschwitz, or whether their food rations will decrease). In many ways, the reader approaches the text with the knowledge and the context of history, therefore enabling them to anticipate the end, which also adds, in some instances, tension and suspense to the reading. However, what makes this rhetorical tool of dramatic irony unique to the Holocaust short story is not only how the brevity of this form accentuates this device, but also how the implication imposed on the reader by the author is to know, share, and in turn, tell (relate) that “story” by also bearing witness. Through these stories and various “moments” captured in their narratives, the reader sees how the “anti-​world” is a place where fathers do not recognize their children, where a potato holds more value than a life, where neighbor turns on neighbor, and where supposedly God and civilized humanity are silent when millions are being murdered. While David Hirsch,23 Lawrence Langer,24 and other writers address these various forms of Holocaust literature’s implication of the reader, they do not consider the unique ways the short story genre adds to this implication of the reader. Through this critical analysis of Holocaust short stories, I aim to highlight how these texts written in the short story form capture the moment of tension, crisis, utter silence, and the tearing apart of relationships (fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, neighbors, and lovers). Through this genre’s form, authors of these stories give the readers a glimpse into a world where death is celebrated, commanded, and carried out; or, perhaps better, these authors tear an opening into the fabric of an “anti-​world,” in which even death is not death. The short stories focus on the destruction of relationships. They center on a moment when the world of the story collapses under the assaults by man, rather than flourishes by the uniting of humanity, so that time itself comes undone. Lastly, these short stories tend to

20  The collapse of time

engage in a narrative testimony of the characters’ deaths, rather than their lives, which in turn, may implicate the reader to remember the people and places from which these stories arise. The aim of the following chapters is to join the ongoing conversation about Holocaust literature by highlighting the unique features of this genre –​and how these stories aid in our understanding of the Holocaust, in that they highlight various moments capturing the tearing apart of relations between family, friends, neighbors, and future generations.

Notes 1 Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–​1918 (Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 11. 2 Ibid., 11. 3 Ibid., 19. 4 Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84–​258. 5 Simon Dentith, “Chronotope,” The Literary Encyclopedia, July 18, 2001, www.litencyc. com/​php/​stopics.php?rec=true&UID=187, accessed August 31, 2016. 6 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, edited and translated by Marcus Weigelt and Max Mueller (London: Penguin, 2007). 7 Bakhtin,  84–​85. 8 Ka-​tzetnik 135633, Shivitti, xi. 9 Wilczynski, “Trusting the Words.” 10 Glowacka, Disappearing Traces, 156. 11 Rosenfeld, Double Dying,  72–​75. 12 Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, 104–​106. 13 Langer, Versions of Survival. 14 Ezrahi, By Words Alone, 55. 15 Ibid.,  49–​66. 16 Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, 32. 17 Ozick, The Shawl, 10. 18 Friedman, Understanding Cynthia Ozick, 17. 19 Strandberg, Greek Mind/​Jewish Soul. 20 Pinsker, Uncompromising Fictions of Cynthia Ozick. 21 Jacobs, In Search of Yesterday, 151. 22 Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 254. 23 Hirsch, Deconstruction of Literature. 24 Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination.

2 THE COLLAPSE OF SILENCE The role of silence in Ida Fink’s short stories

“Who’s the girl?” he asked, entering the room. “Oh, just a whore.” “I thought she was a virgin,” he said, surprised. “Pale, teary-​eyed, shaky…” “Since when can’t virgins be whores?” “You’re quite a philosopher,” the other man said, and they both burst out laughing. –​Ida Fink, “Aryan Papers” Silence. There is the silence filling outer space –​soundless galaxies, moons, stars. There is the silence that filled the earth before God said, “Let there be light.”1 There is the silence filling the Intensive Care Unit of a hospital when the machines generating the constant cacophony of beeps and alarms turn off. A sheet floating in the air, resting on stillness. Time of death called, silence … Then there is a silence against time, against presuppositions of normalcy, decency, honor, life –​it is a silence created by man against man. It is a silence filling the winds when man said, “Let there be ash,” and the cries and voices and hopes and lives of millions were murdered during the atrocities that occurred during the Holocaust. Polish-​born writer Ida (Landau) Fink and her younger sister escaped from the confines of the Zbarazh ghetto in 1942 after acquiring false identity papers.2 Though Fink’s short stories are brief in length, the narratives and motifs she constructs copiously capture, for her readers, the collapse of time and relationships in the anti-​world. Specifically, Fink’s use of silence echoes the psychological collapse of relationships that occurred during the Holocaust. The force behind the building of systematic anti-​Semitic laws, ghetto walls, and gas chambers was an ideological hatred that reached into the ethical, philosophical, physical, and spiritual realms of reality for those living during the Holocaust. By weaving the motif of silence into her narratives, in each of the following three short stories, which serve as the

22  The collapse of silence

springboards for our analysis, Fink introduces the reader to various dimensions of the collapsing of time. In “Jean-​Christophe,” the protagonist is serving in a labor unit laying the tracks for a train –​all the time wondering if she will live to finish the book she is reading: Jean-​Christophe; in “The Key Game,” a family waits for the time the Nazis will ring their doorbell to take them to their death, while playing the Key Game with their son; in “Aryan Papers,” a girl waits for the Nazi with whom she will exchange her innocence in order to obtain fake Aryan Papers. In reading Fink’s work, one notes how, “in such narratives, spatial relationships typically overshadow the temporal relationships with which they are fused, since time is ruptured, fragmented, frozen, annulled. For the narrators of such texts, time is dead.”3 Therefore, silence is not merely a poetic pause or a moment of rest in the overarching narrative’s song of atrocity, but rather it is the motif of silence in Fink’s short stories that purposefully resonates the collapsing of time and relationships during the anti-​world. In her writings, silence fills the space of unspoken terror when meaning is torn from language  –​as language becomes the instrument of speaking death and destruction instead of life and hope. The first story to appear in Ida Fink’s collection is “A Scrap of Time.” As the title indicates, Fink, like so many who experienced the Holocaust –​the anti-​world –​ came to quickly understand that time itself seemed to have collapsed under the pressures of mass humiliation, mass exodus, mass death. Fink writes: I want to talk about a certain time not measured in months and years […] Today, digging around in the ruins of memory, I found it fresh and untouched by forgetfulness. This time was measured not in months but in a word –​we no longer said “in the beautiful month of May,” but “after the first ‘action,’ or the second, or right before the third.”4 Regarding this notion of time which Fink addresses, Marek Wilczynski notes, “Fink makes clear at the very beginning of her enterprise, what happened to Jews disrupted the very foundation of the genre of narrative –​the underlying continuity of time.”5 In other words, Wilczynski also emphasizes how Fink’s choice to write in the short story genre, like so many authors, was a conscious choice –​a narrative choice that seems to best mirror the fragmented, yet wholly horrific experience of life during the Holocaust. In addition to Fink’s stories (e.g. “A Scrap of Time” and “Traces”) that wrestle with this notion of time and memory, in her other stories, which will be discussed later, the reader sees how in the anti-​world, relationships are also under assault, and this is seen in the characters’ inability to express language –​to communicate with one another. This inability to express language is heard in the motif of silence that she weaves throughout her narratives. Again,Wilczynski notes: In most “scraps” silence prevails, yet in time “measured in a word” speech also has its roles to play. The scarcity of spoken words is compensated by a variety of languages used by Fink’s characters: Polish, Yiddish, German, Ukrainian, and even French. […] Words are often a matter of life and death: German

The collapse of silence  23

kills; Yiddish and Polish are the jeremiad of the victims; Ukrainian derides; and French  –​it kills just as well, suddenly turned into a snare. Fink, who used to be a student of music, exploits linguistic polyphony to orchestrate delusions, ironies, and unpredictable twists of fate.6 In Fink’s stories, silence precedes the breaking of relationships in the anti-​world. Where language ceases to be heard, the name ceases to be called, one thus ceases to respond to and recognize one’s fellow brother. Consequently, this silence can be seen as a form of confusion –​an inability to communicate and, in turn, respond to one another. It is reminiscent of the story of the Tower of Babel and the Confusion of Tongues found in the Bible, where language and human relation collapsed.7 As seen both in this story from Genesis, as well as in Fink’s stories, where language is confused, so too is the very notion of a human being and human beings’ role in relationships. This relation between confusion of language and the confusion of the notion of a human being is found in the confusion and the inability for one to understand another when talking or relating. This inability to relate, and therefore, listen and hear another speak, is seen in the motif of silence that is woven throughout these Holocaust short stories. Ida Fink’s own experiences during the Holocaust, as well as the stories of friends, relatives, and strangers, not only shaped her writing, but also were the catalyst for which she sought to remember and give voice to the atrocities of the past by writing of them for the present and future. Upon considering the scope of her short narratives comprising A Scrap of Time and Other Stories, Holocaust literary scholar Myrna Goldenberg notes, “Each story is a slice of very specific life under the Nazi occupation of Poland from September 1939 to the Displaced Persons camps established in 1945.”8 When asked about her writing in an interview, Fink replied:  “I write mainly about what I  lived through. I  belong to the so-​called writers of the first generation after the Holocaust. […] One poet told me, that is not the way to write about the occupation. He said it’s as if I opened a window and left open only a small gap, through which I look at the world. And then I wrote about what I saw, in a quiet voice, a whisper. […] Despite his advice, I did not stop writing this way. I couldn’t write any other way.”9 Fink employs the short story genre by creating narratives, which consist of “scraps of time,” stagnant sounds of silence, and moments of quietness in the midst of the clanging cacophony of chaos that comprised the anti-​world. In tandem with utilizing the short story genre to best capture her various literary representations of the Holocaust for her readers, Arun Kumar Pokhrel notes in his article regarding Fink’s writing that Ida Fink’s stories contain the traditional sense of story-​telling. They have certain narrative structures and an evolving plot to follow. By employing traditional narrative structure, Fink portrays a sudden tragedy of family doom. Importantly, she also uses the stream of consciousness to demonstrate the flux of temporal experience. Often in Fink’s stories, bewildered and paranoiac voices spell out the inescapability of impending disaster. Inner actions

24  The collapse of silence

of characters such as hope for survival, lamentation for the loss of family life, contemplation of life and death, remembering and refusal to remember are associated with the outer events of Nazi atrocities.”10 As Pokhrel stresses, Fink’s traditional sense of storytelling, when paired with the quiet whispering voice of her narrative, provides her readers with a short story collection, A Scrap of Time, which uniquely sheds light on the horrors of the anti-​ world, through Fink’s motif of silence found in her stories. Fink’s writing, though brief and structurally adherent to the short story genre’s features, cannot be so easily described, for within each Holocaust short narrative, Fink weaves traces of terror, moments of memory, and hints of horror known as the anti-​world for the reader. Though each of her narratives is multifaceted in artistic and structural creative techniques, we will discuss the motif of silence Fink weaves throughout her narratives, for this motif amplifies the themes of collapsing of time and the collapse of relationships that are key themes found in the fabric of the Holocaust short story. Through the cognitive narration and the actions of the characters in the short stories “Jean-​Christophe,” “The Key Game,” and “Aryan Papers,” Fink creates a dialogue of silence. It is in the thoughts and moments of silence, created in each story, that she captures the psychological strains plaguing all those who live in the tormenting moments of wondering in the anti-​world –​moments of wondering if they or those around them are to live another second, hour, day, week. There are two types of silence which Fink creates in her short stories and these silences are amplified in the stories’ narrative structure. There is the silence that is described by the narrator of each story and there is the silence that speaks through the actions or inactions of the characters. Furthermore, this dialogue of silence speaks to the collapsing of relationships that occurred in the anti-​world. Though this dialogue of silence streams throughout each of the short stories in the collection A Scrap of Time and Other Stories, we will focus on the three short stories mentioned above. The dialogue of silence is a tool that Fink uses to shape her fiction for all generations of readers: those who lived and survived the horrific years of the Holocaust, and those who have been told the tales, those who have read the history books and those who have observed the evidence. As many Holocaust scholars have noted, the strains and challenges facing those who are attempting to teach the events of the Holocaust to the “next generation” lie in the challenge to make the past as tangible as the present, for the sake of seeking some deeper understanding, yet not for the sake of merely “knowing what the Holocaust was like.” There is a looming fear among scholars and historians that between the survivors and the readers of the next generations, the sharp pains and reality of the events of the Holocaust might lose their edge and their piercing truth. It is with this haunting fear that many historians approach the challenge of discussing the Holocaust by soaking the student with data, dates, and debates –​crafting a skeleton-​like creation of the events tracing and following the Holocaust. However, it is with the aid of well-​crafted Holocaust fiction, like Fink’s short stories, that those who did not live to see the horrors of the Holocaust, but were rather born years or decades later, are able to attempt to understand the

The collapse of silence  25

horrendous reality which plagued those persecuted and murdered during the 1930s and 1940s. Where historians have created a skeleton-​like structure of data, such as dates and names for people to learn of the events of the Holocaust, it is through the creation of silent dialogues and other literary techniques that Ida Fink has created a DNA-​like identity of the Holocaust for her readers. When addressing her artistic style, one reader noted: The great tragic art of Ida Fink requires memory, fragments slowly assembled into a whole. More than other kinds of literature, the resulting form of fiction naturally rejects certain themes, manners of writing, pathos and the revelation of the narrating person. It is not just a matter of modesty. It is a poetics of asceticism, of abstinence. The stories are sparely and severely constructed. The story resides in a fragile balance. It maneuvers through the accepted poetics of the short story. The extroverted toughness, the incorporation into time and space, the emphasis on tragic gaiety during the plague [what I call the anti-​world], the surprise or sublime transcendence of the ending, even originality –​all these must be carefully, repeatedly weighted. Indeed, it might be argued that these are not really short stories or scraps of autobiography, but sketches of events caught in the magnetic force of the plague.11 These sketches of the plague, or what I  call the anti-​world, are what make a Holocaust short story differ from all other short stories. Fink, like so many other Holocaust authors, writes narratives attesting to death rather than life. She writes stories where her characters’ epiphanies are not enlightened moments of revelation of ideas, but rather are moments of revelations of death. In her fiction, she captures the collapse of time and the assault on relationships through depicting survivors’ hiding and fighting to live and the psychological, emotional, and spiritual essence of those who were murdered, as well as those who survived the Holocaust. In her story “Jean-​Christophe,” Fink creates a dialogue of silence that is between those who are “safe,” those momentarily out of harm’s way, and those who are “unsafe,” those exposed to the unimaginable realties of the ghettos and camps. This story is an example of the multifaceted aspect of how silence speaks not to those who hear nothingness, but rather to those who hear silence. In “Jean-​Christophe,” Fink creates an atmosphere of tranquility and beauty that is marred by the pains and torment of silence. As a group of Jews is working and waiting in the woods surrounded by life –​blossoming buds and flowing fields –​they are aware that just down the tracks and near the village, carts are being loaded with people to kill. Thus, Fink creates a dichotomy in the silence. There is the silence of those waiting in the woods –​those alive; and the silence of those loaded in the carts being taken to camps and gas chambers –​those riding to their death. The characters in this story are few and uncomplicated. There is the Aufseherin who is in charge of this group. She is described as a young woman who “was pretty […] she used to sleep with the clerks in the district office, and now she slept with the Germans, but she was a good girl –​she only slept with them, that’s all […] It was obvious she was

26  The collapse of silence

sensitive.”12 The remaining characters are those who are silently listening for the coming train –​their coming death: In the day of action in town she was tactful enough not to ask why we weren’t working, why our shovels and hoes lay under the tree. She sat at the edge of the clearing with her back to us. We were lying on the grass, not saying a word, waiting for the thundering of the train, because then we would know it was all over –​though not, of course, who was on the train, who had been taken and who had been spared.13 The narrator then goes on to note, for a second time,“we lay on the grass, not saying a word, as if our voice could have drowned out the thundering of the train, which would pass near the edge of the forest, not far from where we were working.”14 The dialogue of silence for the narrator is a conversation between those being gathered into the trains and those not digging in the woods, those not saying a word. The conversation of silence continues through the woods and down the train tracks: “five or maybe eight kilometers outside of town, amid the silence of the trees” the “oldest girl kept putting her ear to the ground.”15 Fink captures, in this action of the girl placing her ear to the ground, a sense of urgency, of questioning, of looming fear for what is to come for all those waiting in silence: “It was silent in the forest. There were no birds, but the smell of trees and flowers was magnificent.”16 Through passages like the above, Fink creates an almost revolting juxtaposition of a wood abandoned of all creatures –​most likely because of the sounds of nefarious shooting and the sounds of death –​with the “magnificent” and almost regal, pure, innocent, smell of trees and flowers: living things. This lack of sounds from nature echoes the collapsing time, for the very natural order and response of sound (creatures in their habitats) is displaced and silenced by all that is occurring around them. The narrator proceeds to state: We couldn’t hear anything. There was nothing to hear. The silence was horrifying because we knew that there was shooting going on and people screaming and crying, that it was a slaughterhouse out there. But here there were bluebells, hazelwood, daisies, and other flowers, very pretty, very colorful. That was what was so horrifying –​just as horrifying as waiting for the thundering of the train, as horrifying as wondering whom they had taken.17 The above passage highlights the contrast between the silence and the noise they do not hear; the silence is precisely the silence of the noise they do not hear, and for the narrator, the juxtaposition of beauty and all the living creation with the silence of those awaiting death was “horrifying.” The “silence”  –​the inability to speak, shout, denounce, name, state the prohibition against life that was happening around them, down the road, in this anti-​world, “was horrifying.” In this silent, horrifying moment, the collapsing environment of the Holocaust blooms to reveal the contradictory nature and reality of the anti-​world –​a place where the beauty of

The collapse of silence  27

wildflowers and noiseless surroundings is horrific, and mass murder of parents and children is expected, normal. Here, silence becomes the sound of the anti-​world; for it is a silence whose ripple effect transcends nature, the natural world, reaching even to the heavenly supposed silence of God, as alluded to in the scene depicting a boy being hanged in Elie Wiesel’s Night. Through the silence of the narrator and the silence of the living, Fink sculpts the psychological terrors tantalizing those who wonder whether or not their friends, family, or they, themselves, will be the next murder victims. She writes: All of us were aware that every passing minute brought the train’s thunder nearer, that any moment now we would hear death riding down the tracks. One girl cried “Mama!” and then other voices cried “Mama!” because there was an echo in the woods.18 For the narrator, death is riding toward her. She knows that like the young girl’s “Mama,” any one of them could, and very well might be, the next name echoed in the woods. Similar to Fink’s scene, the power of the one calling out for Mama only to be met with silence is also mentioned in Sara Nomberg-​Przytyk’s memoir, Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land. Nomberg-​Przytyk recounts: Suddenly, the stillness was broken by the screaming of children, as if a single scream had been torn out of hundreds of mouths, a single scream of fear and unusual pain, a scream repeated a thousand times in the single word, “Mama,” a scream that increased in intensity every second, enveloping the whole camp and every inmate. Our lips parted without our being conscious of what we were doing, and a scream of despair tore out of our throats, growing louder all the time. […] Finally, our screaming stopped. On the block we could still hear the screams of the children who were being murdered, then only sighs, and at the end everything was enveloped in death and silence.19 This silence in both Fink’s and Nomberg-​Przytyk’s accounts follows the assault on the human relationships, the assault on spoken language that is underscored by the word “Mama” –​often a child’s first word, a word that cries out of the most fundamental relationship –​that of motherhood. Fink ends this short story with a circular device in her writing. The very last lines of this story are almost identical to those lines that appear near the beginning of the story: “the oldest one of us knelt down and placed her ear to the earth. But the earth was still silent.”20 Unlike the earlier account of this action of the eldest in the woods listening to the tracks, the “earth” was silent, not merely the “woods.” Here we see how silence transcends the silence of the speaking world, reaching to the silence of the earthly and heavenly world –​ the silence of the supernal mother, the feminine presence of the Holy One –​the Shekhinah –​the one who first utters our name with love, the one who goes into exile and dwells with the children of Israel, is silent, which echoes the horror of said

28  The collapse of silence

silence. The Shekhinah –​the female aspect of God, the feminine Divine Presence that is inculcated and quite prevalent in various Jewish and Kabalistic teachings, is associated with the matriarch figure of the home. With this unresponsiveness to a child’s call for Mama, Fink attests to the one of the greatest assaults on relationships in the Holocaust –​that against mother and child. The dialogue of silence Fink creates in “Jean-​Christophe” is not merely a conversation between those silently waiting in the woods and those silently being murdered in the town, but it is a dialogue of silence between the earth and the victims –​victims whose names, remains, and deaths would echo in the wind all around the world for years to come: “The girl who had been crying began sobbing still louder. It wasn’t weeping anymore, it was lamentation.”21 This “lamentation” is a lamentation of a girl’s soul not over the loss of community or commodity, but of familyhood –​of the one who replies, “yes,” and “coming” when her name was called: Mama! With the inclusion of this motif of silence into her short stories, the reader sees how silence becomes one of the cries in the inverted world of horror, destruction, and death: the anti-​world. In addition to the silence of motherhood in nature, Fink provides a glimpse into the anti-​world where silence of motherhood in the home is also heard. Fink transitions the dialogue of silence from the silence of narration and her characters’ thoughts to the physical silence of her characters’ actions, which do the speaking rather than her using the words of the characters’ conversations. This silence is the silence that is heard in the anti-​world, when all preconceived notions of acceptable actions and motions no longer are voiced or heard. On one hand, Fink’s short stories –​“The Key Game” and “Aryan Papers” –​highlight the motif of silence in Holocaust short stories, but on the other hand, they also shed light on how the collapse of time and relationships in the anti-​world was an atrocity that began with a philosophical, moral, psychological assault on the face and soul of the victim, before it was a physical assault. For the boundaries of the anti-​world extend beyond the barbed wire walls of ghettos and camps. Therefore, upon both a close reading of the motif of silence, and a reading of Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophical notions applied to her narratives, in the remainder of this chapter we will focus on Fink’s two stories “The Key Game” and “Aryan Papers,” and how relationships between parent and child came under assault and collapsed.Writing in a post-​Holocaust world, the events and realities of the Shoah22 shaped, challenged, changed, and impacted several writers of the twentieth century  –​specifically, the writer and philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas. Found in the core of Nazi ideology was the assault on the soul of the Other –​the Jew. This very assault was rooted in the Nazis’ appropriating and possessing of the Jews as merely objects, things, and faceless beings. Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophy of the face-​to-​ face encounter with the Other reinforces this emphasis on silence and the crumbling of relationships seen in Fink’s two stories, as this philosophy sheds light on the internal collapsing of relationships in the anti-​world. The fuel of the Nazi ideological machine was to render the Other  –​the Jew –​faceless, expressionless, commandmentless, and insignificant. Consequently, as we consider Fink’s two short stories, we will address to what extent Levinas’

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and various religious concepts rooted in Judaism surrounding the face-​to-​face encounter are evident in these Holocaust short stories, and in what ways the face summons the Other in the midst of a world where the command to “Love thy neighbor” is replaced with the command “Kill thy neighbor.” The face of the Other is what summons one to answer, hineni –​“Here I am,” when asked, “Where are you?” Yet, how can one answer the call of the Other when the Other is rendered faceless? How can the expression of the face summon one into relation with the Other when it is considered a crime to view the Other as fully human? Just as God spoke the world and man into being, thus creating the relation between the heavenly Divine and the earthly created, in these Holocaust stories, it is through language of the face, through saying that which is not said or thematized, that the Other is enabled to speak of what he has witnessed (the face of the Other). Yet before proceeding, we must ask: why should we, readers of Holocaust short stories, consider various philosophical or religious readings of these Holocaust short stories? The philosophical ideas, like Levinas,’ found woven throughout these short narratives, also stem from Judaism and Judaic teachings and traditions. Thus, these notions highlight the extent to which the Nazis’ grip of hate and murder reached out –​to family structure and the structure of neighbors and communities –​namely, the assault on relationships, which was an assault on the soul. This assault on the soul entails an undermining of biblical teaching concerning the dearness of the other human being, the commandment to love thy neighbor, and the prohibition against murder. Again, this notion traces back to the very root of Judeo-​Christian tradition regarding man’s responsibility toward and for fellow man. As mentioned in the previous chapter, the very first question God posed to man in the Bible is an ethical question about the human-​to-​human relation, posed by the Infinite One toward the face. It is a question for the face to summon a response toward the Other –​the face of one’s brother: Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?” He said, “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?” And He said, “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground.”23 For Levinas, this responsibility for and the relationship to the Other, this demand to answer “Here I  am for you,” is the very root from which the discussion of ethics grows throughout his writings. To see the face of the Other is to hear the command, “Thou Shalt Not Kill,”24 to hear the voice of the Other when they cry, Ayeka!?  –​“Where are you?” and to respond:  Hineni! Regarding this command, Levinas writes, The Other is the only being that one can be tempted to kill. This temptation to murder and this impossibility of murder constitute the very vision of the face. To see a face is already to hear “You shall not kill” and to hear “You shall not kill” is to hear “Social justice.” […] “You shall not kill” is therefore

30  The collapse of silence

not just a simple rule of conduct; it appears as the principle of discourse itself and of spiritual life.25 For Levinas, the command “You shall not kill” is synonymous with social justice; yet, during the Holocaust, when this command is burned, destroyed, or deemed illegal, then any sense of “social justice” is replaced by injustice and murder. To murder is to murder that which the Divine created; therefore, by erasing this command from a society, one (the Nazis) attempts to erase all that represents the Divine (the Torah and all those who study, believe, and follow it). Consequently, one notes how the prohibition against murder that is found in the Torah issues from the face, just as the Word –​and in turn, language –​issues from the face. The Torah is the text considered the most fundamental to Judaism and Jewish identity, yet in the anti-​world, a place spoken into existence by a man who declared his word law, rather than God’s Word as law –​the assault on the face comes with the collapse of the Word and the undoing of the prohibition (the commandment) against murder. By setting out to annihilate the Jews, the Nazis set out to annihilate Judaism and the Torah, which commands this prohibition against murder. Thus, Holocaust literature, like Fink’s stories, sets out to restore this fundamental Jewish teaching and testimony by attesting in its narratives to that which happens when the face of the Other is sought to be erased and eradicated, and when silence becomes the sound of horror. When reading these short stories, the immediate reaction and result of such an attempt of the Nazis to render the Jew as “the other” is evident for the reader of these narratives because the genre’s structure does not delay in describing and capturing this dehumanizing of Jews’ faces during the Holocaust. Scholar David A. Patterson addresses the Nazi assault on the face of the Jew (and what the Jew represents) when he writes: Judaism represents a view of God, a world, and humanity that is diametrically opposed to the Nazi Weltanschauung […]. If the Nazis are to be Nazis, then they have to eliminate the notion of a higher, divine image within the human being that places upon each of us an infinite responsibility for the other human being.26 As Patterson notes, the Nazi assault against the Jews was one rooted in erasing the face of the Jew by erasing the human relation with the Divine. Consequently, when addressing the role that responding to a higher relation to the Other by responding “hineni” plays in Levinas’ ethical response, Jonathan Ryan notes: Whether in the case of Abraham (Gen 22:1) or Isaiah (Isa 6:8), Lévinas finds in the response hineni an “obedience to the glory of the Infinite that orders me to the other” (OB 146).Without seeking to comprehend the other, hineni embodies an ethical response that makes me “available to the neediness (and especially the suffering) of the other person […] without reservation.”27

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As Ryan claims, for Levinas, the face of the Other demands a response –​an ethical response, and a holy response to that which the Divine created. However, as developed throughout his writings, Levinas sees the face as that which serves as the prohibition against murder, embodying the ethical response of “Here I  am,” while also demanding the response of “for you” at the same time. When caught in the skewed anti-​world of the Holocaust, where death was more common than life, every ethical response for the Other, whether that response was a minuscule act or a fleeting glance, ushered one into a face-​to-​face encounter and reminded one of one’s relation to one’s brother: the Other. This relation came under attack during the Holocaust, and narratives such as Fink’s echo the attack for her readers, which is seen in her portrayal of the crumbling of relationships (inversion of parent and child roles) and language (the role of silence instead of language as a means of communication). In her short stories “The Key Game” and “Aryan Papers,” Fink paints the psychological fears, frustrations, and feelings the characters experience as they live life teetering on the edge of the abyss to death. In the “The Key Game,” a mother, father, and three-​year-​old son rehearse a “game” where the “chubby, blue-​eyed” child pretends to find a key, while his father attempts to hide –​escape, if necessary. The title alone causes one to pause and consider the significance of the words “key” and “game.” On one hand, “key” could refer not only to the noun –​the key that locks and unlocks a door –​but also, an adjective –​any crucial, important aspect of something. When considering the latter use, one reads the “key” as the most essential, important, and defining feature of the “game.” At first, this game seems to shout of the daily fears families lived with, fears of capture, fears of death, yet the true “game,” the key game, is played in the silent actions of the mother, child, and father during the “rehearsing” of the game –​the silent actions of a mother who is helpless when it comes to protecting her child. In this sense, “game” also takes on a new meaning, as well. A game? A reality? Life in the anti-​world was as unpredictable as a casting of lots. Like a murky layer of water between the surface and the depth, the silent, unspoken actions of the characters in “The Key Game” reveal the underlying threats and fears of people, parents, children, and families who were hiding and waiting during the Holocaust. An example of the silent dialogue of actions is in the dichotomy of the boy’s actions before the game and his actions during the game. This dialogue of silence between the boy and the reader is introduced by the narrator, who states: “The boy sat erect, his back straight, his eyes fixed on his father, but it was obvious that he was so sleepy he could barely sit up.”28 Fink captures, in this story, the stolen innocence of children during the Holocaust. In this story we see the very assault on the relationships within the family structure.We see how in the anti-​world children assumed the role of protector, and parents assumed the role of dependents. The boy, though young, may be somewhat aware of the consequences of the actions surrounding him –​his family’s having fled their previous apartments, his father’s necessity of hiding quickly, and his mother’s urgency for excellence. Thus, the tired three-​year-​old “sits erect,” looks alert, is ready to

32  The collapse of silence

begin rehearsing “the key game.” The narrator traces the energetic, regimentally rehearsed and executed actions of the boy while he’s playing the game: At the sound of […] his mother’s lips, the boy jumped up from his chair and ran to the front door, which was separated from the main room by a narrow strip of corridor. “Who’s there?” he asked […] “I’ll open up in a minute, I’m just looking for the keys,” the child called out. Then he ran back to the main room, making a lot of noise with his feet. He ran in circles around the table, pulled out one of the sideboard drawers, and slammed it shut.29 In the above passage, the silent dialogue of the boy continues to be voiced, as he plays the game with precise steps and memorized excuses such as, “Just a minute, I can’t find them” that he shouts to the imaginary soldier waiting at the door, and “ ‘I found them!’ he shouted triumphantly,” as if he truly had found the lost key, the key that would enable the enemy to invade his home. In this place, a child was not a child, a “game” was not a game, and a home was not a home, for in this anti-​world, the enemy has already invaded their dwelling place the moment the “key game” needed to be invented. Nevertheless, it is the silent actions of the mother that follow her mimic of a “ding-​dong” that is “quite a soft, lovely bell”30 that capture the psychological and emotional tensions seeping from her silent actions, which attest to the collapsing of the mother–​child relationship. With her lips the mother plays the melodious music of a doorbell, with her lips she promises: “We’ll play the key game just one more time, only today,”31 with her lips she praises the game well-​played by her three-​ year-​old son:  “ ‘Shut the door, darling’ the woman said softly. ‘You were perfect. You really were’ ”;32 yet, it is with her actions that she silently cries for freedom, for her son’s innocence to play a game of triviality rather than survival, it is with her actions that she silently discusses life and death with her son and husband. When the boy rehearses his line, “Who’s there?,” the narrator reveals the true dialogue between the mother and son: “The woman, who alone had remained in her chair, clenched her eyes shut as if she were feeling a sudden, sharp pain.”33 Sitting still, as if she were invisible, non-​existent, not home, the mother cannot help but clench her eyes shut when she hears the words that her son executes to perfection. It is through the silent dialogue of the mother’s actions that Fink freezes the reader in this world where, to the enemy, one’s life was as trivial as a game, as meaningless as a child’s toy, as useless as a pawn without a chess-​set. However, in this game the narrator does not merely capture the silent dialogue voiced through the actions of the boy but through the father, as well. Through this game –​a small child acting as protector and defender of the home and father –​Fink depicts, for the reader, the father who is no longer a father, for the meaning of the word father seems to have been torn away from the word in this world. The father’s eyes are bloodshot, seemingly a simple observation that speaks volumes of the painfully long hours parents endured for days, weeks, months, years (if lucky), waiting –​ listening for those who might be approaching their door to ring the door bell. They

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are the eyes of a man whose sleep has been robbed by horror. His words are scarce, yet sharp, and his actions absent yet present. For the child, the object of the game was to delay finding the key while persuading the “person” on the other side of the door that, in earnest, the lost key is being hunted. For the parents, the object of the game is survival and is time (life), rather than death. Fink traces the object of the game toward the end of the story, when the acting is replaced with reality: Every evening she repeated the same words, and every evening he [the boy] stared at the closed bathroom door. At last it creaked. The man was pale and his clothes were streaked with lime and dust. He stood on the threshold and blinked in that funny way. “Well? How did it go?” she asked. “I still need more time. He has to look for them longer. I slip in sideways all right, but then … it’s so tight in there that when I turn … And he’s got to make more noise –​he should stamp his feet louder.34 Though this portion of the story captures the dialogue between the mother and father, the silence lurking between the ellipses portrays the frustration fuming through the father’s mind, as he knows that the child is listening to every word uttered from his lips, while his wife is listening to the pauses in his speech. His silent sentences supply his cries for more time, more time, more time. “Say something to him,” the woman whispered. “You did a good job, little one, a good job,” he said mechanically. “That’s right,” the woman said, “you’re really doing a wonderful job, darling –​ and you’re not little at all.You act just like a grown-​up, don’t you? And you do know that if someone should really ring the doorbell someday when Mama is at work, everything will depend on you? Isn’t that right? And what will you say when they ask you about your parents?” “Mama’s at work.” “And Papa?” He was silent. “And Papa?” the man screamed in terror. The child turned pale. “And Papa?” the man repeated more calmly. “He’s dead,” the child answered and threw himself at his father, who was standing right beside him, blinking his eyes in that funny way, but who was already long dead to the people who would really ring the bell.35 This moment inserts the reader into the instant time crumbles, for in this moment, a child no longer lives or acts as a child (with a sense of innocence and a naiveté about life, the world, his surroundings), but instead he acts with a broken understanding of his broken reality that he is assuming the role of protector, guardian, father. In this last portion of the story, Fink weaves the silent dialogue into a tapestry that portrays

34  The collapse of silence

a family functioning in fear. The son fearing failing his father and the father fearing failing his family –​the only thing he has remaining in life. This scene presents the inversion of life and death when meaning is torn from the word; where words once uttered life, and where language once spoke of love –​in the anti-​world, even the spoken word is robbed of meaning, and all that is left is silence and utterances of dodging and delaying death. Like the “The Key Game,” Fink’s short story “Aryan Papers” illustrates her ability to stitch a dialogue of silence throughout her characters’ actions, as well as into the spaces of time that carry the plot of the story. In “Aryan Papers,” the narrator accounts the destroying of innocence through the silent dialogue that the girl voices in her actions of trading her virginity for false Aryan papers for herself and her family. In this story, we see how the literature of the Holocaust lends itself to educating its readers about the horror of the anti-​world, where merely examining historical documents would fall short. Furthermore, this act of a young girl trading her virginity for false papers is another way the reader sees relationships come under assault during the Holocaust; namely, the anti-​world was a place that fostered the stealing and trading of innocence –​even the most intimate kind of innocence. For in the assault on the good, there is a radical assault on innocence itself. Regarding this topic, Myrna Goldenberg writes, “Prior to being murdered in Einsatzgruppen actions, single girls and young women were often raped, despite the fact that the 1935 Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor prohibited intercourse between Aryans and Jews.”36 Fink addresses this horrific reality in her story, bringing to light an evil often overlooked in the history books, though often accessible through testimonial accounts and literary responses to the Holocaust. “Aryan Papers” is another example of how Fink links the psychological with the physical, the innocent with the corrupt, the fake with the real, and the silent with the spoken. Again, the motif of silence speaks to the assault on relationships, which is seen in the inability to speak or communicate in the anti-​world. In this story, Fink immediately creates an atmosphere where the silent dialogue of the girl is echoed through her chaotic, loud surroundings: “The girl arrived first and sat down in the back of the room near the bar. Loud conversations, the clinking of glasses […]”37 The narrator begins this story by creating a dichotomy between the environment of the bar and the psychological environment of the girl: “the shouts from the kitchen hurt her ears; but when she shut her eyes, it sounded almost like the ocean.”38 Instead of a voice, there is noise; instead of a word there is a din. Yet, though the contrast of the two environments is seen for the reader, the silent dialogue of the girl is revealed through her actions, like forgetting her handkerchief: “in her anxiety she had forgotten her handkerchief.” Or other silent moments when her anatomy betrays her false confidence:  “When he entered, her legs began to tremble and she had to press her heels against the floor to steady herself,” and later when “her legs were still trembling as if she had just walked miles; she couldn’t make them stay still.”39 Her trembling legs signify the shifting ground, the shifting reality, and the shaking foundation of who she is –​an embodiment of innocence. Also, the moment when her eyes truly saw the monster waiting for his prey: “He was tall,

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well built, with a suntanned face […] he was good-​looking. He was in his forties. He was nicely dressed, with a tasteful, conservative tie. When he picked up the glass she noticed that his fingernails were dirty.”40 The narrator continues to pepper moments of silent dialogue through the thoughts and actions of the man and the girl between forced verbal conversing: She was afraid that she would pass out; she felt weak, first hot, then cold. She wanted to get everything over with as quickly as possible. “Do you have it ready, sir? I brought the money…” “ What’s this ‘sir’ business? We’ve already clinked glasses and you still call me sir! You’re really something! Yes, I have everything ready. Signed and sealed. No cheating –​the seals, the birth certificate –​alles in Ordnung! Waiter, the check!”41 In the above passage, Fink captures the frivolity of the man’s concern with the girl’s situation. In essentially the same breath, he speaks of the papers and the check, as if they were of the same significance, as if they hold the same weight of freedom. As the story “Aryan Papers” proceeds, the spoken dialogue dwindles as the silent dialogue develops: “He took her arm and she thought that it would be nice to have someone who would take her by the arm. Anyone but him.”42 In this moment, though no dialogue is spoken, Fink utilizes the girl’s silent narration to shout for the readers the harsh reality many women, girls, and families were forced to endure in the hope of living another day, week, or year. The majority of the spoken dialogue in this story is through the man, such as the following: “For a sixteen-​year-​ old you’re definitely too thin and too short. But I like thin girls. I don’t like fat on women. I knew you were my type the day you came to work. And I knew right away what you were. Who made those papers for you? What a lousy job. With mine you could walk through fire. Even with eyes like yours. How much did your mother give him?”43 This turning the word over to the service of violence tears meaning from the spoken word and imposes silence on the girl. Nevertheless, though he speaks, the silent dialogue that is not spoken reveals the necessity of the girl’s situation. When the man states, “I knew what you were” rather than, “I knew you were a Jew,” or his later line when he states “I like to help people,” rather than “I’ll help you  –​no price,”44 Fink fossilizes the deep-​rooted triviality that some people’s lives (like this girl’s and her family’s) became to others (like this man). As the story progresses, the silent dialogue of actions reveals the man and the girl to be the player and the pawn: “But we don’t have any more money –​really. The money I’ve brought for you is all we have.” He steered her through a gate and up to the third floor. The stairs were filthy and stank of urine. “That means you want to leave tomorrow.” And he added, “Send me your address and I’ll come to see you; I’ve taken a liking to you.”45

36  The collapse of silence

In the preceding passage, Fink depicts the man “steering” the girl, as one would steer cattle, through human excrement, infested alleys, and stairwells. However, the truly disgusting reality is when the man utters the phrase, “I’ll come to see you; I’ve taken a liking to you,” to which the girl responds with silence. She does not speak or even whisper a reply, and in this moment, Fink leaves the readers with the response of wonder, wonder of how often a situation like this (the girl’s) was “visited” again and again and again –​until the war was over? Until the girl died? Until her family was betrayed? Thus, like the girl being “steered,” Fink steers and directs her readers (those alive) toward this account as a means of a testimony to and exposure of this evil –​the appropriating of innocence and life –​that thrived and bloomed in the anti-​world. In the room, the girl only states a few words; nevertheless, the thoughts and actions of her silent dialogue narrate the moment of surrender, loss, and blackmail plaguing her life: “Please give me the documents, sir, I’ll get the money out right away,” she said. “Sir? When you go to bed with someone, he’s not a sir! Put your money away, we have time.” It probably doesn’t take long, she thought. I’m not afraid of anything. Mama will be happy when I bring the papers. I should have done it a week ago. We would already be in Warsaw. I was stupid. He’s even nice, he was always nice to me at work, and he could have informed. “Don’t just stand there, little one.” He sat down on the bed and took off his shoes […] “I’ll turn off the light,” she said. She heard his laughter and she felt flushed. An hour later there was a knock at the door.46 Again, Fink’s use of “Mama” exposes this assault not just as an assault on innocence, but as an assault on the child, which is a defining feature of the anti-​world. According to Judeo-​Christian teachings, children are a gift from God to mankind, and through the blessing of a child, man and woman are able to participate in divine creation. It is through children that mankind’s legacy continues. It is for children that wisdom is passed on and traditions are taught. Yet, the anti-​world is a place where even the innocence of an unborn child holds a threat punishable by death, for inside Hitler’s ghettos and camps, “Mama” is a cry and a thought met by silence. The above passage provides the reader with a contrast between the verbal dialogue and the silent dialogue. The man appears comfortable, at ease, accustomed to such situations; whereas the girl is mocked and laughed at by the man, and though she barely speaks, her mind is streaming with justifications, excuses –​anything to keep her mind off her present state. The silent dialogue that Fink creates is captured between the two lines, “She heard his laughter and she felt flushed” and “An hour later there was a knock at the door.” Once again, it is silence that allows the reader

The collapse of silence  37

to discuss, through reading the story, the desperation of the girl’s actions to save herself and her family. As “Aryan Papers” ends, the girl is literally silent. Only the man speaks: “You’ll be a terrific woman someday.”47 Yet, Fink does not end the story with this chilling line that captures the injustice of the situation, but instead she has the man exchange dialogue with another man knocking at the door: “Who’s the girl?” he [the other man] asked, entering the room. “Oh, just a whore.” “I thought she was a virgin,” he said, surprised. “Pale, teary-​eyed, shaky…” “Since when can’t virgins be whores?” “You’re quite a philosopher,” the other man said, and they both burst out laughing.”48 Fink ends this story with the men laughing, ricocheting the laughter of the man earlier in the story when the girl turned off the light. This motif of laughter only strengthens the silent dialogue, which carries the story. As the men laugh, the silence coming from the room, the silence of the girl, resounds for all those who were forced into such situations and predicaments as the girl in this story represents. Thus, by crafting this short story, Fink creates, in “Aryan Papers,” a narrative of survival, a story of situations, another story in which silence helps tell the story of the collapsing of relationships found in the erasure of faces, identities, and humanity that occurred during the anti-​world.Yet this silence is not merely a physical silence of the unspoken word, but it is also a silence that lends itself to highlighting, for the reader, the metaphysical and even spiritual assault on the relationship that occurred during the anti-​world. This motif of silence echoes the collapsing of relationships in the anti-​world, which is akin to the erasing of the “face” and the identity of the victim (the “Other”) by the enemy (the Nazis). Consequently, upon discussing the role of silence in Fink’s stories, one must note the systematic rendering of the Jew (or “Other”) as faceless –​identity-​less, valueless –​by the Nazis. In addition to the role silence plays in these narratives, these three stories also attest to the ways in which relationships (among parent and child, husband and wife, neighbor and neighbor) were under assault during the Holocaust. When considering Holocaust literature, the questions what does it mean to gaze at the Other, how does the gaze yield to relation, and how do that gaze and relation manifest themselves when caught in the midst of the anti-​world –​the Shoah  –​ are often asked. In Ida Fink’s stories “The Key Game” and “Aryan Papers,” the characters’ use of language reflects the tearing of meaning from language. In “The Key Game,” a small three-​year-​old boy rehearses finding a supposedly “lost” key, in order for his father to hide if or when the Nazis come knocking on their door. This story captures an aspect of the anti-​world, an aspect that demonstrates the tearing of meaning from expression and language.

38  The collapse of silence

In this story, “The Key Game,” the language is rehearsed, it is not genuine, it is not a response to the face of the Other, but it is a forced utterance in fear for the sake of the Other: He [the husband] didn’t answer because he was not sure if this really would be the last rehearsal. They were still two or three minutes off. He stood up and walked towards the bathroom door. Then the woman called out softly, “Ding-​dong.” She was imitating the doorbell and she did it beautifully. […] At the sound of chimes ringing so musically from his mother’s lips, the boy jumped up from his chair and ran to the front door […] “I’ll open up in a minute, I’m just looking for the keys,” the child called out. Then he ran back to the main room, making a lot of noise with his feet. He ran in circles around the table, pulled out one of the sideboard drawers, and slammed it shut.49 From the sound of his mother’s voice, to the chaotic commotion the boy makes in the apartment, the expressions of the characters are ones that are learned and mimicked, rather than expressions that are a result of relations in face-​to-​face encounter. This anti-​world is a “world in which a child is forced across the threshold of danger and impending death” and it is a world in which language and expression are devoid of meaning.50 In tandem with the backward meaning of language and expression in these stories, the characters’ rhetoric reveals the injustice of the anti-​world. Levinas writes, “We call justice this face to face approach, in conversation [… for] justice consists in recognizing the Other as master,” yet, in the anti-​world –​a place where the victims are rendered faceless –​the notion of justice is a skewed reality, shaped by propaganda and implemented by hate.51 In her story “Aryan Papers,” Ida Fink captures this perversion of justice, the mockery of language, and the appropriating and possessing of humanity that occur when one fails to see the face of one’s brother. In this story, a young virginal girl meets with a guard to exchange her virginity for a set of Aryan papers for herself and her family. In the anti-​world, the concept of the perpetrator abdicating his ego –​his self-​interest –​for the sake of another –​his fellow human being, his brother –​is a threat to the very injustice that fuels the Nazi machine. However, in the very act of substituting herself (in this case, physically trading her virginity for false Aryan Papers in order that she and her mother might obtain papers to escape) for the sake of another (her family), the girl in this story stands as a very contradiction to the laws and language of Nazism. However, in the very act of substituting herself for the sake of another (her family), the girl in this story stands as a very contradiction to the laws and language of Nazism. Here, she stands as the substitute for others, which recalls for her, while in the grip of this anti-​world, the trace of the face, and the hint of the expression. Through the thought of her mother (the memory of the face of the Other, to use a Levinasian concept), the girl’s act of substitution ensues: “It probably doesn’t take

The collapse of silence  39

long, she thought. I’m not afraid of anything. Mama will be happy when I bring the papers. I should have done it a week ago. We would already be in Warsaw. I was stupid.”52 Here, the memory of the girl’s mother is what serves in calling forth the face of the Other for the girl. Regarding this motif of the memory of the mother, which is woven throughout Holocaust literature, Patterson notes, “Thus the memory of the mother re-​establishes a bond not only between mother and child but also between word and meaning.”53 With this bond, the girl acts as a substitution for the Other. Although the majority of the language and dialogue in this story is that of the guard’s, it is met with contrasting silence of the girl who remains faceless to him, and therefore, she remains something for him to possess, according to Levinas:  “What one gives, what one takes reduces itself to the phenomenon, discovered and open to the grasp, carrying on an existence which is suspended in possession  –​whereas the presentation of the face puts me into relation with being.”54 The contrast of these two characters lies in that in her silence, the girl answers the call for-​the-​Other by saying, with her actions, “Here I am for the sake of you.” She is responding to that which “commands [her] and ordains [her] to the other.”55 Here, in this act of substitution, she is not merely usurping the place of the Other (her family), but instead, she is taking the place of the Other for the Other. In this moment of substitution, the girl in this story both answers for the Other, and responds to the Other, concurrently. In “Aryan Papers,” the girl’s action is one that is a response to the face of the Other for-​the-​Other. “To substitute oneself,” Levinas explains, “does not amount to putting oneself in the place of the other man in order to feel what he feels […] Rather, substitution entails bringing comfort by associating ourselves with the essential weakness and finitude of the other; it is to bear his weight while sacrificing one’s interestedness and complacency-​ in-​being, which then turn into responsibility for the other […] The in-​itself of a being persisting in its being is surpassed in the gratuity of being outside-​ of-​oneself, for the other, in the act of sacrifice or the possibility of sacrifice, in holiness.”56 Consequently, through her act of substitution, this girl transcends the enclosed walls of the anti-​world, breaks through the barbed-​wire-​like rhetoric of Nazi injustice, and answers the cry of the Other by responding to seeing their face(s). Therefore, upon considering her three stories, “Jean-​Christophe,” “The Key Game” and “Aryan Papers,” Fink’s creation of a silent dialogue between the characters’ narrations and their lack of verbal dialogue among each other attests to the collapsing of meaning and language that precedes the collapsing of relationships within the anti-​world. It is in this silent dialogue that Fink captures the trepidations and sufferings of those who were forced to wonder if they might survive the hour, the day, the week, or the year. It is in her silence that Fink allows fiction to echo its place in Holocaust studies, for it is stories like the ones discussed in this chapter that

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enable future generations to imagine the inhumanity which accompanied the dates, names, and historical figures of the years 1941–​1945 in Europe. A Holocaust literature scholar, Alvin Rosenfeld, once wrote: “Those writers who have attempted to compose fiction about the Holocaust have been faced with a new kind of problem, one that defies the traditional as well as the more experimental modes of narrative representation. For when fact itself surpasses fiction, what is there left for the novel and short story to do?”57 Yes, like Rosenfeld argues, capturing the horrendous, dehumanizing atrocities that occurred during the rise of the Third Reich, the Nazi reign, and throughout every second of the Holocaust, seems not merely daunting, but impossible, for many writers of fiction. Authors of Holocaust short stories, like Ida Fink, seem to refute and redefine the role fiction can and should play in studying the Holocaust. Furthermore, Fink’s stories testify to the various ways relationships came under assault during the Holocaust: the crumbling of time and relationships (children acting as protective guardians), and the assault on language and communication (the inability to speak or communicate with one another, and silence filling voids of incomprehension). In tandem with ways the themes and motifs addressed in Fink’s short stories contribute to the Holocaust literary canon, the following chapter will address how the portrayal of the Muselmann in selected stories in Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen also depict the collapse of time and assault on relationships, which embodied the epitome of the anti-​world; a place where the only constant was man caught between life and death.

Notes 1 Genesis 1:3 (KJV). 2 Jewish Women’s Archive, “Ida Fink,” https://​jwa.org/​people/​fink-​ida. 3 Ruth Ginsburg, “Ida Fink‘s Scraps and Traces: Forms of Space and the Chronotope of Trauma Narratives,” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 4, no. 2 (2006): 205–​218 (at 212). 4 Fink, “A Scrap of time,” in A Scrap of Time and Other Stories, 3. 5 Wilczynski, “Trusting the Words,” 28. 6 Ibid., 31. 7 Genesis 11:3–​9 (ESV). 8 Myrna Goldenberg, “ ‘From a world beyond’: Women in the Holocaust,” Feminist Studies 22, no. 3 (Fall 1996): 667–​687 (at 683). 9 “Farewell Ida Fink,” Culture.pl, http://​culture.pl/​en/​event/​farewell-​ida-​fink, accessed February 12, 2016. 10 Arun Kumar Pokhrel,“Representations of Time and Memory in Holocaust Literature: A Comparison of Charlotte Delbo’s Days and Memory and Ida Fink’s Selected Stories,” Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-​Disciplinary Inquiry 4, no. 8 (2009): 27–​37 (at 33). 11 Dan Tsalka, “The Tragic Art of Ida Fink,” Haaretz, August 6, 2004, www.haaretz.com/​ jewish/​books/​the-​tragic-​art-​of-​ida-​fink-​1.130733, accessed April 3, 2016. 12 Fink, “Jean-​Christophe,” in A Scrap of Time and Other Stories, 31. 13 Ibid.,  31–​32. 14 Ibid., 32.

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15 Ibid., 31, 32. 16 Ibid., 32. 17 Ibid., 32 18 Ibid., 33. 19 Sara Nomberg-​Przytyk, Auschwitz:  True Tales from a Grotesque Land (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 81–​82. 20 Fink, “Jean-​Christophe,” 34. 21 Ibid., 34. 22 “The biblical word Shoah (which has been used to mean ‘destruction’ since the Middle Ages) became the standard Hebrew term for the murder of European Jewry as early as the early 1940s.” YadVashem.org, www.yadvashem.org/​yv/​en/​holocaust/​resource_​ center/​the_​holocaust.asp. 23 Genesis 4:9–​10 (NIV). 24 Exodus 20:13. 25 Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom:  Essays on Judaism, translated by Seán Hand (Baltimore, M.D.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 9. 26 Patterson, “The Nazi Assault on the Jewish Soul through the Murder of the Jewish Mother,” in Different Horrors, Same Hell:  Gender and the Holocaust, edited by Myrna Goldenberg and Amy H. Shapiro (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013), 164. 27 Jonathan Ryan, “Like Bread from One’s Mouth:  Emmanuel Levinas and Reading Scripture with the Other,” Pacifica 21, no. 3 (October 2008): 285–​306 (at 294). 28 Ida Fink, “The Key Game,” in A Scrap of Time and Other Stories, 35. 29 Ibid., 36. 30 Ibid., 36. 31 Ibid., 36. 32 Ibid., 37. 33 Ibid., 36. 34 Ibid., 37. 35 Ibid., 38. 36 Myrna Goldenberg, “Lessons Learned from Gentle Heroism:  Women’s Holocaust Narratives,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 548 (1996): 78–​93 (at 84). 37 Ida Fink, “Aryan Papers,” in A Scrap of Time and Other Stories, 63. 38 Ibid., 63. 39 Ibid., 63, 64. 40 Ibid., 64. 41 Ibid., 64. 42 Ibid., 65. 43 Ibid., 65. 44 Ibid., 65. 45 Ibid., 66. 46 Ibid.,  66–​67. 47 Ibid., 67. 48 Ibid., 68. 49 Fink, “The Key Game,” 36. 50 Glowacka, Disappearing Traces, 156. 51 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, P.A.: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 71–​72. 52 Ibid., 66.

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53 Patterson, “Nazi Assault on the Jewish Soul,” 169. 54 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 212. 55 Levinas, Otherwise than Being:  Or, Beyond Essence, translated by Alphonso Lingis (The Hague and London: Nijhoff, 1981), 11. 56 Emmanuel Levinas, Is it Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, edited by Jill Robbins (Stanford, C.A.: Stanford University Press, 2001), 228. 57 Rosenfeld, Double Dying, 65.

3 THE COLLAPSE OF MAN –​AND THEN MAN CREATED THE ANTI-​MAN The role of the Muselman figure in select short stories from Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

Then God said, “Let us make man in Our image, after Our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. –​Genesis 1:26–​27 (ESV) Muselmann, Muselmänner, Musselman, Muselman, Moslem … whether spelled or spoken in Slavic languages or Romance languages, the essence of the word is the same: a human once made in the image of God for life, now made in the image of man for death. In the Nazis’ very creation of the Muselmann, they ushered in a collapsing of time and an undoing of creation, of life. Where Ida Fink’s short story narratives shed light on the collapse of language and relationships through the motif of silence, Tadeusz Borowski’s short story narratives shed light on the collapse of time and humanity during the Holocaust through the motif of the Muselmann –​ the Nazi-​created anti-​man of the anti-​world. On January 20, 1942, fifteen high-​ranking officers of Adolf Hitler’s regime met for a conference at a villa in Wannsee –​a pristine suburb of Berlin, Germany.1 Among the various things discussed, the answer to the “Final solution of the Jewish Question” was posed.2 That answer was: erasure –​ erasure of the traditions, teachings, and faces of millions of Jewish people all over Europe and the world; that answer was death  –​death in the form of systematic state-​sponsored murdering of all European Jewry. As the systematic murder of the European Jewry had already been underway since the invasion of the Soviet territories on June 22, 1941, what soon followed this meeting was the murder of over six million European Jews in cities, streets, woods, villages, ghettos, death marches, and death camps across Nazi-​occupied Europe. What occurred during the years of the Holocaust was an undoing of society, culture, and humanity; it was

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a man-​created monstrous world governed by hate, brutality, and death; it was the anti-​world inhabited by parents and children, lovers and peers, officers and Moslems or Muselmanns (“prisoners who had lost the will to live”3). A witness to such horror is a man whom some people called Communist, Polish, Prisoner, or “119 198.”4 119 198 –​not a name, but an itemization of a human being that forever left a mark on the author, poet, and man –​Tadeusz Borowski, one of the greatest Polish authors of the twentieth century. Tadeusz Borowski’s experience during the Holocaust, namely his witnessing of an anti-​world inhabited by the anti-​man (Muselmann), forever altered his view of life and death. In “The January Offensive,” Borowski plainly notes to those inquiring about life in the camps: We told them with much relish all about our difficult, patient, concentration-​ camp existence which had taught us that the whole world is really like the concentration camp; the weak work for the strong, and if they have no strength or will to work –​then steal, or let them die. The world is ruled by neither justice nor morality; crime is not punished nor virtue rewarded, one is forgotten as quickly as the other. The world is ruled by power and power is obtained with money. To work is senseless, because money cannot be obtained through work but through exploitation of others.5 Before Hitler’s rise to power in Europe, Borowski was part of seemingly uneventful surroundings, yet throughout the course of the war, he would enter into a suffocating reality where “concentration camp existence” hung in the balance of death and horror –​a reality that haunted him until he took his life on June 26, 1951: Borowski was born on 12 November 1922 in the Ukrainian town of Zhytomyr as the son of ethnic Poles. Both parents separately survived several gulags. In 1932, the family was repatriated to Poland in exchange for communist prisoners. After the outbreak of war in 1939, the 17-​year-​old high-​school student studied Polish and English literature at conspiratorial university courses and worked as a night watchman for a builders’ merchant. During this period, he wrote many poems and prose pieces for the underground press. Borowski was arrested on 24 February 1943 and spent two months in the notorious Pawiak prison. From his barred window, he was able to observe the uprising of the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. His fiancée Maria Rundo, the love of his life, was also arrested, just before him. The two of them were taken to Auschwitz at the end of April 1943, separately of course. His tattooed camp number was 119 198 and he survived pneumonia thanks to the help of fellow Poles. They were both fortunate in that a short time before their arrival, gassings of non-​Jews (except for gypsies) had ceased. On 12 August 1944, Borowski was transferred to the Dautmergen-​ Natzweiler concentration

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camp near Stuttgart, and then in early January 1945 to Dachau-​Allach, where he was liberated by the U.S. Army on 1 May.6 Not only did Borowski “live” during the Holocaust, but he came of age and was educated in a time of an un-​doing, un-​educating, un-​living of all preconceived notions of reality, decency, and humanity. Consequently, with his harsh, raw –​ironic at times  –​yet constantly unyieldingly honest portrayal of the grotesque absurd reality of life in Auschwitz (life in the anti-​world), Borowski’s Holocaust short stories not only witness to his readers the horrors of the Holocaust, but they also highlight the epitome of the death camps –​the Nazi-​made creation of the anti-​man. This anti-​man is a man caught in the very collapse of time, a prisoner suspended between life and death:  the Muselmann. The following discourse will focus on stories of Borowski’s that address this anti-​man, for this man-​created (by the Nazis) creature –​ the Muselmann –​embodies the essence of the collapsing of relationships and time that occurs during the Holocaust. Yet, before discussing the anti-​man of the anti-​world, the inimitable narrative style of Borowski’s Holocaust short stories must be noted, for the style of his short story prose echoes for the readers the silencing of humanity that he witnessed –​such as his witnessing of the image of the Muselmann. The narrative style of Borowski’s “Auschwitz Stories” may elicit an array of literary characterizations. For instance, when considering Borowski’s short story writing, literary scholar Chris Power states: In Borowski’s stories atrocity is piled upon atrocity, in frank dispassionate prose […] His stropped back style, although not as extreme as that of Hemingway, whom he read avidly, is crafted just as sedulously. His metaphors reflect the reality of the camp, as with ‘the empty pavement glistened like a wet leather strap,’ and equal care is applied to structure.7 Moving from Power’s observations of Borowski’s raw style, in Ruth Franklin’s “The Writing Dead,” she addresses how his narrative style lends itself to resonating with larger thematic tones: “This [Borowski’s] Auschwitz, in contrast to the myths that sprang up immediately in the war’s aftermath, is not a place of martyrdom or heroism. […] All of this is recounted in a chillingly unsentimental and brazenly nihilistic voice that emphasizes its own detachment from the horrors that it records.”8 Other scholars, like Timothy E.  Pytell, in his article “Shame and Beyond Shame,” usher away categories of “-​isms” and note how Borowski’s “voice is a constellation”9  –​a constellation which, I  might add, orbits planet Auschwitz. Again addressing his style and use of language as a form of storytelling and witnessing, in his article “Tadeusz Borowski: Implicating Prose,” Tony McKibbin writes: To comment on the Holocaust is to be implicated in it; to try to speak of it is to push beyond the limits of the language readily available to us […].

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Borowski’s very writing seems to find a way out of the impasse by creating what could be called an implicative prose, a prose style that seeks neither the sentimental nor the pitying, but the robust and pragmatic, a language, perhaps that reflects not the drowned but the saved, a language that takes into account the sort of arguments by made by Ranciere and Levi. […] Borowski finds a style that is both implicative and descriptive, that both acknowledges how a survivor survives and also finds the language to explain the nature of that survival. The tone absorbs the paratactic but isn’t quite confined by it […]10 Regardless how one attempts to characterize his literary craft, the uniqueness of the narrative “voice” of testimony that Borowski speaks through his Holocaust short stories is singularly distinct. The implicative nature of Borowski’s writing is found in his relating for the reader the undoing of the human being in the form of the Muselmann, and therefore, causing the reader to consider his or her understanding of the meaning or value of a human being. Literary analyst Tony McKibbin further addresses this distinguished tone voiced in Borowski’s narratives when he claims: what he wanted to do was make his language pragmatically survivalist and also, more strangely, horribly poetic, as if determined to produce metaphors and similes out of the camps that were new, capable of reflecting the casual terror of the experience, and one’s sense of implications in relation to the events. This combination of paratactic simplicity, linguistic neologisms and distinctive metaphors and similes, makes Borowski’s work not “merely” testament but literature.11 What McKibbin alludes to as “work not ‘merely’ testament but literature” is what Jan Kott also mentions in the introduction to the short story collection This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. However, Kott, like many Holocaust scholars (including myself), notes that Holocaust literature is both literature and testimony. The testimonial aspect of this literature, in a way, is connected to its implicative nature, in that the reader assumes the role of listener and witness to the atrocities described in the prose. When writing of the atrocities that comprised the Holocaust (the Shoah and the anti-​world), one takes to the pen as both a witness and an author –​crafting, composing, and categorizing the extent to which one witnessed the sufferings and horrors of those around one in the form of atrocity literature or Holocaust literature. Kott writes: Borowski’s Auschwitz stories, however, are not only a masterpiece of Polish –​ and of world  –​literature. Among the tens of thousands of pages written about the holocaust and the death camps, Borowski’s slender book continues to occupy, for more than a quarter century now, a place apart. The book is one of the cruelest of testimonies to what men did to men, and a pitiless verdict that anything can be done to a human being.12

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With his selection of literary genre –​the short story –​Borowski inserts his readers into the anti-​world, as he testifies in his literary prose about the horrors of his experience in the Holocaust, horrors of mundane, mandatory, and murderous everyday existence, through focusing on particular moments for the reader. This is why the short story, and not the novel, is precisely what is called for here, for the Holocaust short story genre’s characteristics enable the author to focus on a moment of the crumbling of time  –​a moment of testimony. Concomitant with others, Isabel Wollaston also notes the testimonial language of Holocaust literature in her article “ ‘What Can –​and Cannot –​Be Said’: Religious Language After the Holocaust.” Wollaston writes: Building upon Primo Levi’s reference to such testimony as the “stories of a new Bible,” the literary critic, David Roskies, suggests that these “stories” assume the status of “sacred texts.”The importance attached to testimony reflects the conviction that the Holocaust, or l’univers concentrationnaire, represents “a universe apart, totally cut off.” Those outside –​the non-​survivors –​depend on the “soul-​seared writings of those who were there” to gain access, however partial, to the experience of the Holocaust. Thus, the testimony of the victim and survivors is essential, for they alone can bear witness to the “experience of extermination.”13 What Roskies touches on in this passage regarding the uniqueness of the Holocaust survivor bearing witness to that which they, and they alone, have experienced, serves as one of the hallmarks of the autobiographical traces found in Borowski’s short story narratives. Furthermore, Borowski’s style and choice of the short story genre are what enables the reader to see the typical shadow-​figure of the Muselmann come into the spotlight. Borowski’s writing style transcends that of literary techniques and craft to become literary testimony rooted in autobiographical experiences, which yields to a bearing witness to the extent man is capable of destroying fellow man. Building upon this notion, in their collaborative work, “A Discovery of Tragedy (The Incomplete Account of Tadeusz Borowski),” Andrzej Wirth and Adam Czerniawski assert: Borowski’s work, in its artistically climactic moments, has become an expression of a will to give witness to the unbelievable truth about the fate which man has prepared for man in the twentieth century. In cherishing this noble desire Borowski is not unique in world literature. The uniqueness of his position lies in that his writing does in fact witness to this truth. […] He was able to depict tragedy outside the classical laws of tragedy without alternative, without choice, without competing values. […] He also had the courage to formulate a principle that once a certain limit of inhumanity is passed, the differentiation between tormentor and victim becomes fluid. “Murder feeds on murder” is the substance of this formula.14

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This “truth” that transcends mere literary devices is that which enables many readers to learn, whilst reading Borowski’s stories, the truth that attests to the collapsing world of the anti-​world –​more specifically, the collapsing of humanity that is portrayed in Borowski’s “Muselman” characters. Borowski’s experiences in the camps directly influenced and shaped his writings, and these experiences are most clearly seen in his detached third-​person narration and the scenes depicting the Muselmann. Regarding this anti-​world for which Borowski’s writing accounts, Holocaust literary scholar Theofanis Verinakis claims: Tadeusz Borowski worked in one of these special camps and his account bears witness not only to the barbaric conditions of the camps, but also the projection and internalization of hatred. […] Hate and hatred are not natural or innate. They must be cultivated and brought into being, similarly like our minds and civilizations. […] Borowski’s [writing] demonstrates that not only did the camps produce hatred, but Borowski has both become hatred and the camp. He finds solace and refuge in the camp that has robbed him of his humanity.15 Here Verinakis hints at the inverted norms of the anti-​ world –​manners and expectations forged by degradation rather than respect, hate rather than love. Verinakis goes on to address the stripping away of humanity that occurred during the anti-​world:  Both accounts by Levi [The Drowned and the Saved] and Borowski [This Way for the Gas] convey the power of the camps by demonstrating that the distinction between victim and executioner is stripped of its magnitude. Not only were the camps able to reduce humanity to a liter of soup, a blanket, or a pair of shoes with thick soles, but they also forced the inmates to be responsible for their own demise.16 Both above passages by Verinakis highlight the various dimensions of the Nazis’ dehumanization processing of their victims. Moreover, even though Verinakis and other scholars insightfully address various aspects of the narrative descriptions of his Auschwitz stories, when considering Borowski’s writings in the context of the short story, we must address his inclusion of the Nazis’ created anti-​man –​the Muselmann –​and how this figure who embodied the collapsing of time in the anti-​ world is woven throughout his stories. And then man created the anti-​man. What a Muselmann is has been attempted to be defined by scholars as a “sub-​language [term] of the death camps […] for someone wasted away and close to dying,”17 or “a term of unknown and debatable origin but widely used to denote ‘emaciated walking corpses’ […and] those prisoners who were physically and psychologically worn out, those who surrendered their will to live.”18 The survivors, the witnesses to this anti-​man, to this product yet genesis of the anti-​world, describe the Muselmann in various ways, from Wolfgang

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Sofsky’s personal account that “Basically, the difference is minimal anyhow. We’re skeletons that are still moving; they’re skeletons that are already immobile. But there’s even a third category: the one who lies stretched out, unable to move, but still breathing slightly”;19 to more cautionary descriptions like that of Primo Levi, who states, “one hesitates to call them living”;20 to, finally, survivors such as Bruno Bettelheim or Jean Améry who describe them as “walking corpses.”21 From the assertions written by scholars, to the accounts recollected by survivors, one draws the conclusion that the Muselmann embodies the epitome of Nazi thinking and ideology. The Muselmann is the destruction of a who, as the Muselmann is a turning over or transformation of a who into a what. The Muselmann represents the quintessence of the dehumanizing of man in the Nazis’ anti-​world –​the anti-​man of the anti-​world. The question of Who is the Muselmann? is addressed throughout Holocaust literary texts, such as Borowski’s Auschwitz short stories, for these stories and narratives bear witness not merely to that which happened but also to whom it happened. In the Muselmann figure, we see a man suspended between life and death, a man not quite complete yet not quite a shadow, a man rising into existence only under the weight of the collapsing of time, relationships, meaning, world, we see the anthropomorphism of the native inhabitants of Auschwitz. Whether reading memoirs, biographies, essays, novels, poems, or short stories, allusions to this Nazi-​created anti-​man (or the Muselmann) are often lurking in the margins or lying in the shadow of the ink –​for the Muselmann embodied the extent to which man sought to undo and dehumanize his fellow man. The Muselmann is the man created by the Nazis, born into the anti-​world formed by the Nazis –​ planet Auschwitz. Isabel Wollaston also notes the presence of the Muselmann in Holocaust texts when she writes: The experience of the Muselmänner is inaccessible, in that there is “no story,” or there is a story but one that is beyond the experience of the survivor. Thus, a mimetic approach to the Holocaust can only reach a certain point:  the “naked reality” of the camps, as typified by Muselmänner, is beyond that point.22 This “naked reality” of the camps is the Muselmann  –​a walking mass of atoms whose shape once held the form of a man is now merely like a remnant, hint, or shadow of a man. In his The Harvest of Hate, Léon Poliakov writes how Muselmänner “moved like automatons; once stopped, they were capable of no further movement. They fell prostrated on the ground; nothing mattered any more to them. Their bodies blocked the passageway. You could step right on them and they would not draw back their arms or legs an inch. No protest, no cry of pain came from their half-​opened mouth. And yet they were still alive…”23 What once were considered men walking, are now considered by the Nazis, the perpetrators, as objects in motion –​objects whose existence is somehow accounted for solely because they echo laws of physics as objects in motion, hollow objects filling empty space. Souls? Thoughts? Memories? Often, such abstractions of humanity were seen to have no

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value –​no traces of worth –​in the form of the anti-​man, for this “body” is seen as a shape inhabiting space, rather than a person –​a father, son, mother, daughter, neighbor, friend –​a living being. Regarding this anti-​man, Primo Levi wrote, “All the mussulmans who finished in the gas chambers have the same story, or more exactly, have no story; they followed the slope down to the bottom, like streams that run down to the sea.”24 He goes on to say that the Muselmänner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-​men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call them living:  one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.25 Yet, in Borowski’s Holocaust short story, this visage of what once was considered a man is not hidden in asides or footnotes, but rather is plainly, starkly placed into the narration for the reader. For the Holocaust short story captures for its readers the collapse of time, and this collapsing and crumbling of reality is a crescendo in the silent collapsing of humanity in the image of the hunched-​over, bowed-​down, “backbone of the camp” Muselmann; the anti-​man suspended in a living-​dying state-​sponsored anti-​world:  Auschwitz-​Birkenau. The Muselmann is not just the victim of starvation, brutality, exhaustion, exposure, and more. His very soul has come under a radical assault. He has lost his religion, his home, his name, his identity, his family –​as he is given over to a radical isolation and a radical meaninglessness. He is silent and nameless. Before discussing the transformation the Nazis wrought in turning men and women into anti-​men and anti-​women –​the human beings who take the form of the Muselmann in camps  –​we must address the process by which the Nazis rendered their fellow human beings faceless, formless, and eventually, lifeless. One particular philosopher, whose theoretical notions are applicable in addressing the transformation that occurred in the camps when man morphed into Muselmann, is Emmanuel Levinas. The events and realties of the Shoah shaped, challenged, changed, and impacted several writers of the post-​Holocaust twentieth century –​specifically, the writer and philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, and his notions regarding seeing the Face of the Other. Found in the core of Nazi ideology was the assault on the life of the Other –​ the Jew. This very assault was rooted in the Nazis’ appropriating and possessing of the Jews as worms, insects, objects, things, and faceless beings. The fuel of the Nazi ideological machine was to render the Other  –​the Jew  –​faceless, expressionless, commandment-​less, and insignificant. Consequently, when considering the placement of the Muselmann in Borowski’s short narratives, one might ask: to what extent are Levinas’ notions surrounding the face-​to-​face encounter evident in Holocaust short stories, and in what ways does the face summon the Other in the midst of a world where the command to “Love thy neighbor,” and the command to

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answer “Here I am,” when called by the Other, is replaced with the command “Kill thy neighbor”? Moreover, I will address what it means to approach the face of the Other, as well as what it means to depart and erase the face of the Other, during the Shoah or in the midst of the anti-​world, again –​a world where any assumptions about humanity, rooted in living in a civilized world during the twentieth century, are inverted and distorted. The face of the Other is what summons one to answer, hineni –​ “Here I am,” when asked, “Where are you?” Yet, how can one answer the call of the Other when the Other is rendered faceless, like the Muselmann? How can the expression of the face summon one into relation with the Other when it is considered a crime to view the Other as fully human? Just as God spoke the world and man into being, thus creating the relation between the heavenly Divine and the earthly created, in these Holocaust stories, it is through language of the face, through saying that which is not said or thematized, that the Other is enabled to speak of what he has witnessed (the face of the Other). Therefore, through the use of particular Holocaust short stories, I examine how, when in midst of the Shoah, the anti-​world, the face summons the Other, who in turn, through relation in face-​to-​face encounters, summons the memory, the justice, and the language of the Other, as well. Yet, the namelessness of the Muselmann must be noted, for having neither name nor memory, he or she cannot respond to the call of “Where are you?” When addressing the role of the Muselmann in the short story, where characters normally have names, the namelessness of the Muselmann figure is even more pronounced for the reader. Here the “character” is precisely the silent, nameless one –​embodying the new image and likeness of the silent Nameless One. The Holocaust was a time when men deemed other men racially inferior, sub-​human, and therefore, deserving of complete eradication from society and life. Levinas sees this assault against man as an assault against Him who created him  –​the Divine. As Levinas notes in his essay “ ‘Between Two Worlds’ (the Way of Franz Rosenzweig),” the relationship between God and word, God and man, and man and man is key to seeing the face of the Other. For Levinas, within the ethical (the relation between the face and the Other) lies the presence of God Himself. Without God, there would be no ethical command of the Word: “You shall not kill.” Without man, there would be no ethical demand of the response: “Here I am… for you.” Or, as Levinas writes regarding Rosenzweig’s philosophy: “Religion, before being a confession, is the very pulsation of life in which God enters into a relationship with Man, and Man with the Word. […] The love of God for ipseity is, ipso facto, a commandment to love […] the response to the love of God for Man is the love of my neighbor.”26 To love the Other is to respond to the face of the Other; however, loving the Other is only possible when one sees the face of the Other. As both Rosenzweig and Levinas note, the encounter with the face of the Other is what yields to Revelation and enables one to enter into this Revelation via one’s face-​to-​face relationship with the Other.27 In her book Levinas and the Crisis of Humanism, Claire Elise Katz further

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highlights Levinas’ direct association of the ethical relation with the Other to that of the Other with the Divine, when she writes: To approach the Other with the idea that the Other comes before me is, for Levinas, the quintessential movement of transcendence and of being in contact with the divine. Ethics, as Levinas defines it, is religion –​and here he distinguishes religion from spirituality, which can shift from the human to the non-​human.28 As Katz notes, the direct correlation between the Other and the Divine seems rather obvious. Or as Levinas asserts, “The attributes of God are given not in the indicative, but in the imperative. The knowledge of God comes to us like a commandment, like a Mitzvah. To know God is to know what must be done.”29 However, one must then ask, in what ways can the Other exist in the anti-​world –​a world where God is silent, where the Word is deemed illegal, and where the face of the Other, according to Nazi law, elicits the response of “Kill,” rather than “Love?” Whether in the anti-​world or not, Levinas sees a “dimension of the divine” in each face of a human being: The dimension of the divine opens forth from the human face. A relation with the Transcendent free from all captivation by the Transcendent is a social relation. […] His very epiphany consists in soliciting us by his destitution in the face of the Stranger, the widow, and the orphan.30 The Other exists in the anti-​world when one realizes that the Other is the face of the neighbor, the widow, and the orphan –​and their cry is heard in the sound of the fellow prisoner’s voice calling out “Where are you?” In the Shoah, the Other is heard in the voice of the “half-​naked man” in Borowski’s story “A Visit,” who was “drenched in sweat, who fell on the loading ramp out of the cattle car in which no air was left […and who] staggered up to a stranger, and putting his arms around him whispered: ‘Brother, brother…’ ”31 The implication here is that the Muselmann is not only the result of starvation, humiliation, etc.; beyond that, he or she is the outcome of a radical assault on God –​the One whose Image all mankind bears. During the Holocaust, the Nazis’ assault on the face of the Other is through their defacing the Jews by their possessing of the Jews’ identities (rendering them nameless in the camps), their homes (rendering them homeless), and their families (rendering them without community). Various moments capturing the realities of what this assault on the face of the Other looked like during the anti-​world is woven throughout the four selected Holocaust short stories. From the burning of the Torah scrolls to the burning of human beings, the heart of the Nazi assault against their “neighbors” or “brothers” lies in their erasing the face of the Other and deeming the Other sub-​human, insignificant –​faceless. David Patterson also addresses this in his chapter “The Muselmann and the Matter of Human Being,” when he writes:

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The Nazis’ transformation of man into Muselmann is a singular phenomenon that constitutes the singularity of the Holocaust, and it makes the Holocaust decisive for all humanity. The Muselmann is not merely the calculated outcome of torture, exposure, and deprivation. Far more than the victim of starvation and brutality, the Muselmann is the Jew whose very existence was deemed criminal, whose prayers were regarded as an act of sedition, whose holy days were subject to desecration. He is the Jew for whom marriage and childbirth were forbidden, for whom schooling was a crime, for whom there was no protection under the law. He is the Jew both widowed and orphaned, forced to witness the murder of his family, and rendered “ferociously alone” before being rendered ferociously faceless.32 These “ferociously faceless” beings are beings whose expression and face no longer summon a response from their brothers. To see the face of a human being is to acknowledge the sanctity of the living, breathing collection of atoms known as “man.” According to the philosophies espoused by Levinas, to see the face of the Other is to be summoned by the Other, called by the Other’s expression, which, in turn, allows one to enter into relation with the Other: …the epiphany of the face qua face opens humanity. The face in its nakedness as a face presents to me the destitution of the poor one and the stranger; but this poverty and exile which appeal to my powers, address me, do not deliver themselves over to these powers as givens, remain the expression of the face […] The presence of the face, the infinity of the other, is a destituteness, a presence of the third party (that is, of the whole of humanity which looks at us), and a command that commands commanding.33 Through expression, the face calls out to the Other. Yet, how can the face “call” the Other, when the face is rendered faceless? For Levinas, the ethical is a call by the Other, which interrupts and disrupts the identity and ego of the one, as the Other calls to be answered.34 In this disruption, this call by the Other is answered in the moment of transcendence; the moment of putting the Other before oneself is a response to the Other’s expression. This response to the expression of the face is in the brief, mundane utterance of “after you” (a phrase, a gesture which never happens in the anti-​world), or in the moment, when “seeing” the Other transcends into “gazing” at the Other. However, in the Shoah, in the midst of the anti-​world, where all presuppositions of common decency, all “norms” of a “civilized society” are shattered upon the implementing of Nuremburg Laws, the demarcation of ghettos, or the building of Auschwitz –​the call of the Other seems silenced, as the face of the Other is rendered expressionless. Regarding the expression of the face, in Totality and Infinity, Levinas writes: The face is a living presence; it is expression. The Life of expression consists in undoing the form in which the extent, exposed as a theme, is thereby

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dissimulated. The face speaks. The manifestation of the face is already discourse. […] To present oneself by signifying is to speak. This presence, affirmed in the presence of the image as the focus of the gaze that is fixed on you, is said. […] The eyes break through the mask –​the language of the eyes, impossible to dissemble. The eye does not shine; it speaks.35 As Levinas notes, the eye –​the gaze –​is what speaks and what summons the face to the Other. Not only is the Muselmann rendered faceless; rather, he or she is rendered blind and deaf to the face of the other. Here lies the collapse of humanity in the anti-​man that is the Muselmann. When considering Holocaust short stories, the questions are often raised: what does it mean to gaze at the Other; how does the gaze yield to relation; and how do that gaze and relation manifest themselves when caught in midst of the anti-​world –​ the Shoah? For Tadeusz Borowski, this moment of “gazing” and seeing the face of the Other is found in his story “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.” In this story, seeing the Other is a moment that seems rather brief and fleeting, while extended and unprecedented for the inverted, morphed laws and customs of the anti-​world. In this scene, the narrator is given the task of clearing the train cars of the infants and adults who died during their transport. His life is spared in the moment that he recognizes the gaze and face of the Other –​the grey-​haired woman who summons him into relation. While the Muselmann is not specifically in this scene, the scene nonetheless reveals how to read the Muselmann –​namely, as the figure whose eyes and gaze the reader and other characters will never meet, the figure whose namelessness calls out to his or her reader to respond: “Take them, for God’s sake!” I explode as the women run from me in horror, covering their eyes. The name of God sounds strangely pointless, since the women and infants will go on the trucks, every one of them, without exception. We all know what this means, and we look at each other with hate and horror. “What, you don’t want to take them?” asks the pock-​marked S.S.  man with a note of surprise and reproach in his voice, and reaches for his revolver. “You mustn’t shoot, I’ll carry them.” A tall, grey-​haired woman takes the little corpses out of my hands and for an instant gazes straight into my eyes. “My poor boy,” she whispers and smiles at me. Then she walks away, staggering along the path.36 As the above passage notes, even in the midst of the anti-​world, if only for an instant, the gaze, the eyes –​the summons by the face of the Other to enter into a face-​to-​face relation is not wholly abandoned; it is merely foreign to a place where the face of the Other is most often seen in the face of the dead brother or neighbor.37 Yet, this “gaze” is what enables the face to see the Other as their brother. Here, in this story, this “gaze” allows for the face to transcend the customs and rules of the anti-​world, and enter into a relation with the Other. Upon responding to her

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gaze, the woman’s words to the narrator of “My poor boy,” as she lifts the burden of death (the “little corpses”) from his hands, ushers in the face-​to-​face encounter, while also reflecting the extent to which relationships crumbled in the pitiless pit of death known as Auschwitz. In addition to the various motifs found in Holocaust literature of “closing one’s eyes” or “looking away” from the horrors of the realities occurring in front of them, or seeing death rather than life, the figure of the Muselmann appears throughout Borowski’s Holocaust short stories. The various theological traces of what and who the Muselmann embodies are noted by Emil L. Fackenheim, when he addresses to what extent the divine image of man comes under assault during the Holocaust. Fackenheim writes, “The divine image in man can be destroyed. No more threatening proof to this effect can be found than the so-​ called Muselmann in the Nazi death camp.”38 David Patterson builds upon this notion in his book Open Wounds: The Crisis of Jewish Thought in the Aftermath of Auschwitz, by asserting: “Far more than an emaciated human being, the Muselmann is the manifestation of the evil that is ultimate, incarnate in a creature in whom prayer has been silenced and whose death is no longer death.”39 Whether considering the philosophical or theological implications regarding how to perceive, view, understand, and reckon with the Muselmann, what must be noted is that the Muselmann is the epitome of the faceless, expressionless product of the Nazi machine during the anti-​world.Yet, at the same time, the Muselmann is the visage of the human being who is caught between life and death; he or she is the very product of collapsed relationships, languages, and time that form the anti-​world. Thus, the Muselmann finds a place in the “Auschwitz Stories,” for every story about Auschwitz inadvertently or purposefully is a story about the Muselmann –​ the Bedouins of planet Auschwitz. In Holocaust literature, the Muselmann, on one hand, embodies the memory of the Other, the trace of the face, and the hint of the relation of man, while on the other hand, he embodies the unfamiliar, the unknown, the unrecognizable anti-​ man of the death camps. Borowski refers to the “Moselems” in several of his stories about Auschwitz. In “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” the Muselmann figures are dehumanized and almost depicted as insects hiding from light: “Just as we finish our snack, there is a sudden commotion at the door. The Muslims scurry in fright to the safety of their bunks, a messenger runs into the Block Elder’s shack.”40 In his other stories, such as “The Supper” or “A True Story,” Borowski has the narrator refer to those around him who have almost completely succumbed to death as “Muslimized” or “like a ‘Muslim’ ” to capture this state of life-​death in the anti-​world.41 To be seen as “like a ‘Muslim’ ” in the anti-​world was to be seen not as a man, not as a human, but rather as a faceless fading form of atoms. Like the brief moment of seeing the face of the Other in the form of a woman uttering “Don’t shoot,” in the anti-​world, the faceless faces and expressionless expressions found on the Muselmann serve as traces of who the Other is, and of the time (before the anti-​world) where “to love” the other was commanded, rather than, “to kill.” The problem of making the Muselmann into a character in a story is the absence of his

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or her description, for he or she is a being who neither sees nor speaks yet moves seamlessly undetected toward death each moment in the anti-​world. To see the face of the Other is to enter into a relation. When face-​to-​face with the Other, one is summoned to commandment and one is commanded to stand against rhetoric and injustice and strive for justice.42 Just as the Nazis failed to renounce their rhetoric (the language of propaganda and their hate speech), they failed to see the face of the Other in the form of the face of their neighbor –​the Jews. Through rhetoric and the language of injustice, one is demonized. In the same way, through language of justice one is humanized. One is summoned, through the language of the face –​through the eyes that gaze and seem to speak rather than merely see –​to respond to the command, and therefore, enter into relation with the Other. The language of the face and how the eyes gaze upon the Other serve in summoning the face to hear the speaking and calling out of the Other, yet, in the Muselmann there is an obliteration of the word of language, as his or her face –​ gaze –​is erased in the anti-​world. For Levinas, the expression of speaking and the meaning of language can only follow the expression of seeing the face of the Other. Levinas writes: “language is possible only when speaking precisely renounces this function of being action and returns to its essence of being expression.”43 In his discussion about meaning and language, Levinas notes: The primordial essence of language is to be sought not in the corporeal operations that disclose it to me and to others and, in the recourse to language, build up a thought, but in the presentation of meaning. […] Meaning is the face of the Other, and all recourse to words takes place already within the primordial face to face of language. […] That “something” we call signification arises in being with language because the essence of language is the relation with the Other.44 Upon reading his passages regarding language and meaning, the meaning of language stems from seeing the face of the Other, and therefore, entering into the face-​to-​face relation with the Other. The power that lies in meaning of language in the face-​to-​face encounter is exactly the epiphany and revelation of the narrator in “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” when the face of the stranger becomes the face of the Other. For the narrator, the tall, grey-​haired woman speaks, “Don’t shoot,” and in that brief transcending ethical moment in the midst of an ethics-​ less world, he enters into relation with the Other. Nevertheless, where Borowski recounts the narrator’s newfound encounter with his fellow inmate and fellow human being, the lack of said encounter with the Muselmann figure further amplifies this notion of the Muselmann as a figure seen more as an anti-​man than a man –​a reality created and fostered by laws and expectations of the anti-​world. However, a shift in the narrative occurs when the reader encounters the silent, faceless Muselmann. Rather than the audible silence that Ida Fink weaves throughout her writing, Borowski’s writings reflect the chaotic sounds of meaninglessness  –​ when language which once, when uttered, led to thinking, conversing, relating, now

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is uttered leading only to confusion, chaos, and death. Borowski inserts his readers into this inverted world with his title short story, “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.” With its title and first story, Borowski’s short story collection invites the reader into this anti-​world. With a phrase graced with civility and spoken with a manner of deportment, the reader is invited into the gas chamber. With a phrase, Borowski ushers the reader into a world where meaning is torn from language. Furthermore, this phrase included in the title of this collection ushers the reader into the anti-​world; a world where luggage and shoes hold more value than human beings; a world where rules, regulations, and orders are created, implemented, and spoken for the sole purpose of defacing souls, erasing life, forgetting humanity; a world where man becomes an anti-​man. Regarding this physiological metamorphosis of humanity that occurs in Auschwitz, Giorgio Agamben writes: this biological image is immediately accompanied by another image, which by contrast seems to contain the true sense of the matter. The Muselmann is not only or not so much a limit between life and death; rather, he marks the threshold between the human and the inhuman.”45 This “threshold” marked by the Muselmann is the threshold over which one steps when entering planet Auschwitz. It is the threshold they pass over as they are greeted –​“This way for the gas, ladies and gentlemen” –​by their seemingly neighborly Nazi. Yet, before the greeting is ever uttered, all meaning from language has disintegrated in the flames of hate and death, which illuminate Auschwitz. Immediately following the greeting “This way for the gas, ladies and gentlemen” found in the title, the reader is inserted into the anti-​world, where all identity, humanity, decency is stripped away and replaced with humiliation, degradation, and death. With this title, Borowski introduces the greeting of the anti-​world –​a greeting that is the opposite of a greeting affirming life between one human being and another, and instead is a greeting ushering in death. The story begins:  “All of us walk around naked. The delousing is finally over, and our striped suits are back from the tanks of Cyclone B solution, an efficient killer of lice in clothing and of men in gas chambers.”46 With this opening following the title of the story, Borowski begins ushering his readers into an environment where men are only greeted as men upon their arrival for death. Borowski’s use of the short story genre allows him to succinctly, starkly introduce his reader to the process of the collapsing of relationships within the concentration camps, by which man becomes the Muselmann of Auschwitz. This process by which Borowski accounts for the anti-​man is simple, subtle, and successful: there is tearing of meaning from spoken language, as noted in the title; there is an undoing of modesty and the sanctity with which it is represented in relationships (husband and wife, parent and child, stranger and neighbor), as seen in the narrator’s objective voice recounting the nakedness of those around him; there is the tearing of individuality from humanity, as seen in the erasing of names with numbers, individuality with masses.We see the process of rupturing man into the anti-​man continue on a path that leads to the closing door

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of the gas chambers, where Nazis merely see themselves as simply carrying out the order to eradicate pests, not people, with a pestilent killing agent. The process of dehumanizing and the collapsing of relationships in the anti-​world begins with humiliation –​the erasing of one’s name, the shaving of one’s hair, the removing of one’s clothes. In her memoir, Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land, Sara Nomberg-​Przytyk attests to this initiating, dehumanizing humiliation forced upon all those who entered Auschwitz:  “Zugangi [a Yiddish term used by Nazi Officers] –​the new prisoners who did not know how to ‘organize’ –​did not know how or where to hide; they made themselves absurd trying to defend their human dignity.”47 Regarding this early phase of humiliation in the form of the tearing away of modesty from modesty from a human being as another means of erasing identity (taking away names, clothing, hair –​personal identity), Nomberg-​Przytyk writes: The shearing of the sheep had started, and with scissors so dull that they tore bunches of hair out of our heads. There was one big difference between us and sheep, however. The sheep bleated as they were being shorn, but we stood there in silence with tears streaming down our cheeks. “Spread your legs,” yelled the blokowa. And the body hair was shorn too. All of this took place very quickly, to the accompaniment of shouts and blows, which fell thickly on our heads and shoulders. We ceased to exist as thinking, feeling entities. We were not allowed any modesty in front of these strange men. We were nothing more than objects on which they performed their duties, non-​sentient things that they could examine from all angles. It did not bother them that cutting hair close to the skin with dull scissors was excruciatingly painful. It did not bother them that we were women and that without our hair we felt totally humiliated. Once again, we were sitting on the benches, naked, the hair on our heads, what was left of it, cut in layers, all of us hunched over from the cold. I was looking for acquaintances among those transformed figures, and truly, I did not recognize anybody. […] In a few hours we were robbed of everything that had been ours personally. We were shown that here in Auschwitz we were just numbers, without faces or souls.48 Nomberg-​Przytyk’s harrowing narrative recounts the dehumanizing process by which the transformation of the anti-​man in the horrific realities of the anti-​world starts. Building upon this reality, the objective voice of Borowski’s narrator in “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen” weaves the motif of nakedness into the story as a way to echo, for the reader, the second phase toward ushering victims into the visage of the Muselmann. This first phase of stripping away of clothing and tearing away of modesty is the means by which the Nazis sought to humiliate, dehumanize, and ultimately erase individual identity away from all those who stepped off the trains and walked into Auschwitz. Within the first paragraph, this motif is introduced: “All of us walk around naked. […] But all the same, all of us walk around

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naked […] All day, thousands of naked men shuffle up and down the roads, cluster around the squares, or lie against the walls and on the top of roofs. […] Twenty-​ eight thousand women have been stripped naked and driven out of the barracks.”49 Although this motif is woven throughout the narration of the short story, it is with the first sentence that Borowski inserts the reader into this process of dehumanization from man toward Muselmann: “All of us walk around naked.”50 Yet the emphasis on this statement is not on the naked, but rather, it is on the first word:  all. Like the state of every child born into the world, all those born into the anti-​world are naked. Nevertheless, their state is not one determined by natural order; instead, it is one commanded by an unnatural inversion of presuppositions of life, decency, and order –​it is the inverted birthing-​like process into Auschwitz, where one lives each moment for moving toward death not life. This ubiquitous exposing of humanity, that served as the first step toward ushering victims into the rules that governed this anti-​world, stripped away, for the victims, any preconceived beliefs regarding modesty and how one viewed the role of nakedness in relationships. The second and third sentences of this short story capture the theme of the collapsing of time in the death camp –​when human beings cease to live life according to an internal linear trajectory toward life, and instead, begin to exist in an environment where an individual teeters in time and space on an inverted chasm where death dictates the future: “The delousing is finally over, and our striped suits are back from the tanks of Cyclone B solution, an efficient killer of lice in clothing and of men in gas chambers.”51 Here the narrator introduces the reader to the reality of the anti-​world –​a place where vermin, pests, lice, and human beings are the same. In this place, the face of the Other is completely erased, the significance of a victim’s life is not merely irrelevant, but inconceivable and treasonous to Nazi thinking. Furthermore, it is a world where one man’s reasoning and scientific discoveries are solely discovered and implemented to terminate, eradicate, and erase another man’s existence, life, and memory. Later in the story, the narrator leads the reader to the figure that embodies the collapsing of relationships in this anti-​world –​the Muselmann: “Just as we finish our snack, there is a sudden commotion at the door. The Muslims scurry in fright to the safety of their bunks, a messenger runs into the Block Elder’s shack. The Elder, his face solemn, steps out at once.”52 Traces of this figure appear in several of Borowski’s other stories, as well. For instance, in “The Supper,” the Muselmann represents the extent to which the Nazis sought to dehumanize their fellow man, by creating an environment and reality in which man would turn on man, man would even feed on man in the hopes of “surviving” another moment the horrific state of Auschwitz. This story recounts of a moment where a group of Russian prisoners were executed for being “Communists,” which also carried the charge of not allowing any of the other prisoners to have their supper that evening. The story ends with the narrator’s account: “No sooner was the greying, sunburned Kommandant out of sight than the silent crowd, pressing forward more and more persistently, burst into a shrieking roar, and fell in an avalanche on the blood-​spattered pavement, swarming over it noisily. […] I had been standing some distance away from the place of execution so I could not reach the road. But the following day, when we were again driven out to work,

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a ‘Muslimized’ Jew from Estonia who was helping me haul steel bars tried to convince me all day that human brains are, in fact, so tender you can eat them absolutely raw.”53 Borowski, again, brings the Muselmann of Auschwitz into the spotlight when he ends the short story, “The Supper,” with the narrator pondering the words of a Muslimized Jew. In this creation of the anti-​man that is the Muslimized Jew, the Nazis attempt to eradicate the face, image, identity, and humanity of the Jewish victims. This very idea posed by the anti-​man in the short story “The Supper,” reflects the undoing and the erasing of humanity and the sanctity of life for which the roads of the Holocaust were paved, and on which the walls and fences of Auschwitz stood. Where the title of this story might connote fellowship  –​the breaking of bread between family, friends, even strangers before the Holocaust, in the context of Borowski’s narrative, this “supper” is a supper of the anti-​world –​a supper in which the characters share in suffering rather than fellowship, and in death rather than nourishment. For in the final sentence, Borowski unfolds the three main layers of the anti-​man: physical, spiritual, and suspension between life and death. As already discussed, the physical layer to which the Muselmann –​the anti-​man –​succumbs is one of complete exhaustion, starvation, and eventually death. However, the spiritual layer of the undoing of man into the anti-​man is a camp mentality in which the Nazis forced their fellow brothers –​human beings –​to exist in such a reality that the thoughts of eating the brains of their murdered fellow prisoners for “supper” was deemed a rational action in the irrational confines of Auschwitz. Such an action stems from the prisoners’ hopes of living another moment, another second, another minute, and maybe, just maybe, another hour. Finally, we see the third phase of man suspended on the verge of collapsing into the category of Muselmann. Thus, what is significant is not the words uttered by this so-​called “Muslimized Jew from Estonia,” but the contemplation of his words by the narrator. How the narrator responds after this conversation determines whether or not he seeps into Muselmann mentality, yet Borowski ends his short story without a response from the narrator, and thus, he ends his story with this incomplete thought for the reader. In this final moment, the reader sees two men –​the Muslimized anti-​man and the yet-​to-​be-​Muslimized anti-​man. Through this narration, through this final exchange, Borowski inserts his reader into a conversation between the man (narrator) and the what-​once-​was-​a-​ man (Muselmann). Just like the narrator silently –​passively –​listening to the words of this fellow prisoner, the reader finds himself passively reading and listening to the same conversation. In this narrative moment, Borowski brings to the forefront of the readers’ thoughts the often over-​looked figure of the Muselmann –​the figure of the emotionally dehumanized, spiritually degraded, and physically disintegrated anti-​ man of the anti-​world. Therefore, literature like Borowski’s short stories serves as a vehicle for which the reader might enter into a conversation with the Muselmann, who were often considered incapable of conversation, and therefore, voiceless. Borowski revisits this phase of the one being suspended between man and anti-​ man in his short story “A True Story.” The title of this story inserts the reader into the testimony of the narrative  –​for the title is a declaration of truth, and a declaration of testimony. This story is about the narrator, who is faced with

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the task of telling stories to entertain “Kapo Kawasniak.” The narrator states that Kawasniak “hated all extravagant talks of the themes of romantic literature. But he would abandon himself with passion to any ridiculous, sentimental plot as long as I managed to convince him it was taken from my own life.”54 In this story, the narrator finds himself on the verge of Muslimizing, yet that which suspends him from succumbing to the collapsed figure of a man, the shell-​like visage of humanity, is his relating a story –​sharing, whether true or not, in the act of conversing and telling his story to someone. Or in the words of Levinasian thought, his face is seen by the Other (the Kapo) in the movement toward one another that occurs in the act of telling, relating a story. Before the narrator begins to share a story with the Kapo, Borowski begins “A True Story” by describing the narrator as one not merely teetering between life and death, but between man and the anti-​man –​the Muselmann of Auschwitz. The implication here is that the borderline Muselmann is the narrator, because the fully Muslimized Muselmann could never be a narrator of anything, since the Muselmann has no story, and therefore, no voice to tell nor relate his or her story to others. Borowski writes, “I felt certain I was going to die. I lay on bare straw mattress under a blanket that stank of the dried-​up excrement and pus of my predecessors. I was so weak I could not even scratch myself or chase away the fleas. Enormous bedsores covered my hips, buttocks, and shoulders. My skin, stretched tightly over the bones, felt red and hot, as from fresh sunburn. Disgusted by my own body, I  found relief in listening to the groans of others. At times I thought I would suffocate from thirst.”55 The story begins with a call to death, not a call for action. For in the anti-​world, time collapses and thinking is consumed by thoughts of death rather than thoughts of life, thoughts of regression rather than thoughts of progression. The shift in narration happens when the Kapo, who “felt a nostalgic longing for his Kommando working in the women’s section,”56 was bored and was waiting for a sound of life from the narrator, for which the Kapo would say: “So at last you have had enough sleep,” he would say angrily, barely able to hide his mounting impatience. “For heaven’s sake, go on with the story. What a goddam nuisance for a healthy man to be rotting in bed like a ‘Muslim’. Have you noticed, by the way, that it’s ages since we’ve had a selection?”57 In this passage, the reader sees two things about the anti-​world: first, how effortlessly the thinking amongst all prisoners is centered on death  –​death of others, death that might happen (selections), and death of self (a fever, a cold, typhus, starvation). Building upon this notion, in this moment the reader sees two things concerning the anti-​man of Auschwitz: first, the process by which one turns into the anti-​man is not a seamless effort, but rather it is a painful, disgusting, and horrific path created by the Nazi perpetrators, paved by shame, loneliness, isolation, and death. The narrator of this story is lying in open sores, human excrement, and the belly that is being filled is not his own, but is the belly of the louse or flea feeding upon his body.Yet, Borowski’s story does not shed light solely on this narrator’s situation, nor does it merely shed light on the Kapo’s role in the anti-​world, but rather

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nestled in the core of Borowski’s narrative is the story of the moment where one becomes the anti-​man of the anti-​world: the Muselmann. Here, Borowski does not portray for the reader a ghost-​like creature, nor a surrealist, distorted, Picasso-​like image of a man; instead, he portrays a man that once was a lover, that once was a son, student, worker, pal, professional, who now emerges from the puddle of his own bodily fluid to only either collapse further into this state “like a ‘Muslim’ ” or to resist, in the moment, and fight to live another moment more as a man –​a living, breathing, relating man whose stories of life that once was lure him to the side of the abyss where he is seen by those around him, like this Kapo, as still a man, and for a few more moments, still worthy of bread and breath. Borowski ends this story with an instant of frustration from the Kapo, who recognizes that the story the narrator is telling him is not of the narrator’s own life, but it is about someone else’s in the camp. The Kapo rested comfortably against the pillow and kept bouncing the tomato from one hand to another. “You may have my coffee if you like; I’m not allowed to drink it anyway,” he said after a short hesitation. “But don’t tell me any more stories.” He threw the tomato on my blanket, moved the coffee table closer to me, and tipping his head to one side watched in fascination as I glued my lips to the edge of the cup.58 What might be read as a moment of mercy (the giving of coffee and a tomato to the narrator) is rather a moment reflecting an undoing of relationships that occurs in the anti-​world. Storytelling and relating to one another before Auschwitz was a means of passing time, growing in one’s relationship with another, learning and conversing as a means of learning from and about others; however, in this moment, the relating comes to a halt –​for upon realizing that the stories were not solely from his own life, the Kapo quickly comes to the realization that he no longer has a use for the narrator. This is the anti-​world, this is the making of the Nazis’ Muselmann –​ the anti-​man of Auschwitz –​the once being, hint of a figure, shadow of a human who no longer holds any value or use to those around him. Yet there is no longer a place in this anti-​world for him, and often that is what pushes him over into the abyss of death. In his short story “A Visit,” Borowski, again, has his narrative recount the harrowing moments in the anti-​world where both time and relationships collapse, as man turns his fellow man into anti-​man and then ash. “A Visit” begins in medias res  –​but instead of recounting the story of the hero’s short, but glorious life, Borowski, through this inverted epic-​like structure, captures the story of a short but horrific, harrowing life of the anti-​man and all men who journeyed into the depths of the anti-​world: Auschwitz-​Birkenau. The story begins, “I was walking though the night, the fifth in line. An orange flame from the burning human bodies flickered in the centre of the purple sky.”59 The narrative weaves the reader through past memories of the narrator, as he navigates through thoughts of his life whilst in the anti-​world: Yet, this narrator, who may have physically surfaced from the depths of the anti-​world and walked out of Auschwitz, never truly left Auschwitz. This

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story is typical for Borowski in that he utilizes this short story genre and form to immediately insert the reader into the reality facing those who “survived” the anti-​ world, yet feel the burden and responsibility to tell others of that which happened to all those who did not survive:  “And every one of the people who, because of eczema, phlegmon or typhoid fever, or simply because they were too emaciated, were taken to the gas chamber, begged the orderlies loading them into the crematorium trucks to remember what they saw. And to tell the truth about mankind to those who do not know it.”60 Moreover, in this story, Borowski illustrates the silencing of millions of voices and visits through the voice of his narrator. Although a survivor, the narrator is haunted by the voiceless visits of millions of his murdered brothers and sisters, which can be seen by the reader in the penultimate and final paragraphs of the story. Like a shadow lingering behind its source, the narrator (Borowski) –​although a survivor –​is like a shadow, always connected, always attached, whether closely or stretched across the universe, to Auschwitz and what and whom he witnessed whilst there: I sit in someone else’s room, among books that are not mine, and, as I write about the sky, and the men and women I have seen, I am troubled by one persistent thought –​that I have never been able to look also at myself. A certain young poet, a symbolic-​realist, says with a flippant sarcasm that I have a concentration-​camp mentality. In a moment I  shall put down my pen and, feeling home-​sick for the people I saw then, I shall wonder which one of them I should visit today: the smothered man in the officer’s boots, now an electrical engineer employed by the city, or the owner of a prosperous bar, who once whispered to me: “Brother, brother…”61 The Muselmann is precisely the one who is no longer capable of whispering, “Brother” –​there lies the obliteration of his human soul. This concentration-​camp mentality to which Borowski alludes in the above passage is the shadow of Auschwitz that forever lingers behind all those who witnessed the atrocities of the Holocaust. Rather than turning to chapters and essays, it is within the first few paragraphs of Borowski’s short story that the reader learns about, through the narration, all the visits of the friends, neighbors, parents, siblings, lovers, and strangers that never happened and were prevented by the closing of the gas chamber doors. In his short stories, Tadeusz Borowski does not merely write “about Auschwitz,” instead, he defines the anti-​world –​a place not merely created by man for man, but a place where the horrific replaces hope; where desecration replaces decency; where death replaces life; where time ceases to move forward toward the future and where man ceases to respond to his brothers’ cries. In his short stories, he defines Auschwitz-​Birkenau. Similarly to Tadeusz Borowski’s writing of short stories as a form of witnessing about the Holocaust, Rokhl Korn’s short story “The End of the Road” and Frume Halpern’s short story “Dog Blood” also seek to testify about that which happened during the Holocaust, by giving accounts of the collapsing of relationships by addressing the Nazis’ assault on the home and family.

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Notes 1 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Introduction to the Holocaust,” in Holocaust Encyclopedia, www.ushmm.org/​wlc/​en/​article.php?ModuleId=10005143, accessed on March 4, 2017. 2 Lillian Goldman Law Library, “Wannsee Protocol, January 20, 1942,” in The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy, http://​avalon.law.yale.edu/​imt/​wannsee. asp, accessed on February 10, 2017. 3 Tadeusz Borowski, “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” in This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen; and Other Stories, translated by Barbara Vedder, Introduction by Jan Kott (New York: Penguin, 1976), 22. 4 Timothy E.  Pytell, “Shame and Beyond Shame,” New German Critique 39, no.  3 (2012): 155–​164 (at 159). 5 Tadeusz Borowski,“The January Offensive,” in ThisWay for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, 168. 6 Arno Lustiger, “Who was Tadeusz Borowski? Pole, Concentration Camp Inmate, Truth Fanatic, Communist, Cultural Attache, Suicide:  A Brief Life in the 20th Century.” Signandsight.com, February 15, 2007, http://​www.signandsight.com/​features/​1206.html. 7 Chris Power, “A Brief Survey of the Short Story Part 35: Tadeusz Borowski,” Guardian. com, August 25, 2011, www.theguardian.com/​books/​2011/​aug/​25/​brief-​survey-​short​story-​tadeusz-​borowski . 8 Ruth Franklin, “The Writing Dead.” New Republic, September 24, 2007, 41–​48 (at 41). 9 Pytell, “Shame and Beyond Shame,” 161. 10 Tony McKibbin, “Tadeusz Borowski: Implicating Prose,” Tonymckibbin.com. August 29, 2011, https://​tonymckibbin.com/​article/​tadeusz-​borowski.html. 11 Ibid. 12 Jan Kott, Introduction to Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, 12. 13 Isabel Wollaston, “ ‘What Can –​and Cannot –​Be Said’: Religious Language after the Holocaust,” Literature and Theology 6, no. 1 (1992): 47–​56 (at 48). 14 Andrzej Wirth and Adam Czerniawski, “A Discovery of Tragedy (The Incomplete Account of Tadeusz Borowski),” Polish Review 12, no. 3 (1967): 43–​52 (at 52). 15 Theofanis Verinakis, “The (Un)Civilizing Holocaust:  From the Colony to the Lager,” Social Identities 14, no. 1 (2008): 53–​62 (at 58–​59). 16 Ibid., 60. 17 McKibbin, “Tadeusz Borowski.” 18 Goldenberg, “Lessons Learned from Gentle Heroism,” 87. 19 Wolfgang Sofsky and William Templer, The Order of Terror:  The Concentration Camp (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 328. 20 Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz and the Reawakening: Two Memoirs, translated by Stuart Woolf (New York: Summit Books, 1986), 90. 21 Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, translated by Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1980), 9; Bruno Bettelheim, Surviving and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1979), 106. 22 Wollaston, “What Can –​and Cannot –​Be Said,” 51. 23 Léon Poliakov, Harvest of hate: The Nazi Program for the Destruction of the Jews of Europe (New York: Holocaust Library, 1979), 222. 24 Primo Levi, If This Is a Man (New York: Orion Press, 1959), 103. 25 Ibid., 103. 26 Levinas, Difficult Freedom, 191. 27 Ibid., 190–​195.

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28 Claire Elise Katz, Levinas and the Crisis of Humanism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 134. 29 Levinas, Difficult Freedom, 17. 30 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 78. 31 Tadeusz Borowski, “A Visit,” in This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, 174. 32 David Patterson, Open Wounds: The Crisis of Jewish Thought in the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012), 149–​150. 33 Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 213. 34 Ibid.,  42–​43. 35 Ibid., 66. 36 Borowski, “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” 40. 37 Ibid., 45. 38 Emil L. Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of Future Jewish Thought, (New York: Schocken, 1982), 100. 39 Patterson, Open Wounds, 144. 40 Borowski, “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” 32. 41 Tadeusz Borowski, “The Supper,” 156, and “A True Story,” 158, in This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. 42 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 70. 43 Ibid., 202. 44 Ibid., 206–​207. 45 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 55. 46 Borowski, “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” 29. 47 Nomberg-​Przytyk, Auschwitz: True Tales, 13. 48 Ibid.,  14–​15. 49 Borowski, “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” 29. 50 Ibid., 29 51 Ibid., 29 52 Ibid., 32. 53 Borowski, “The Supper,” 155, 156. 54 Borowski, “A True Story,” 158. 55 Ibid., 157. 56 Ibid., 158. 57 Ibid., 157. 58 Ibid., 160. 59 Borowski, “A Visit,”  174. 60 Ibid., 175. 61 Ibid., 176.

4 THE COLLAPSE OF RELATIONSHIPS AND HOME The Nazi assault on relationships, family, and home as portrayed in two Yiddish Holocaust short stories

They figured it was less difficult for an old person to die. Maybe that was true when death came on its own, to your own bed. But going like this, bringing death your bundle of wornout bones. Shush! She wasn’t done with everything. –​Rokhl Korn, “The End of the Road” By focusing on a close analytical reading of Rokhl Korn’s short story “The End of the Road” (1957) and Frume Halpern’s short story “Dog Blood” (1963), the following chapter examines the role of the Nazis’ assault on the home, relationships, family, and memory, as portrayed in two Yiddish Holocaust short stories.1 These two stories present an account of the moments the Nazis physically invaded the towns, communities, and homes of Jewish people in Eastern Europe and the moments of memory following that invasion. Understanding this assault by the Nazis is key to understanding the distinctive features of the Holocaust short story, as illustrated by these two examples. For these short stories lend themselves as literary accounts, literary witnesses of life during the anti-​world; life forging the framework for which Auschwitz-​Birkenau and every other Nazi-​occupied ghetto and camp would stand. More specifically, with their parallel settings, these two short stories, which were originally written in Yiddish (a language that was almost completely eradicated during the Holocaust in the mass murder of the Yiddish-​speaking population of Europe), portray the extent to which the Nazis sought to destroy the home and family structure of the Jewish people of Europe. Though coming from very different backgrounds, both authors, Rachel (Rokhl) Haring Korn (1889–​1982) and Frume Halpern (1888–​1966), moved to North America after the war, where they continued their writings about the Holocaust. Little is known about these authors; however, what is known is that they sought to write in an older language no longer familiar to people, yet in a newer genre

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form that is more easily accessible and digestible for their readers. For Rokhl Korn, writing in Yiddish was an escape from the horrors that occurred during the Holocaust in her mother tongue and land: Poland. Editors and translators Linda Schermer Raphael and Marc Lee Raphael also address this linguistic and literary journey of Korn’s biography by noting that she was a young girl living in a poor, rural Galician village near Podliski, Poland, where she lived among Jewish and Christian peasants and farmers. What we know about Korn is that she wrote poetry in Polish before switching to Yiddish, which she learned from her husband, and she published several volumes in Poland before World War II. Her postwar Yiddish poems rank with the finest produced in that language. […] Her first collection of Yiddish short stories appeared in Montreal in 1957, where she had settled in 1949. When the Nazis invaded Poland, she managed to flee to Uzbekistan (Soviet Union) with her youngest daughter. Her husband and most of her family were killed. After the war, she returned to Poland and resumed her literary career in Lodz, but eventually moved to Montreal (via Sweden) where she continued to write and publish poetry and stories.2 Though Korn’s and Halpern’s experiences that brought them to North America were very different, both authors’ short story narratives about home and family relationships serve as sounding-​boards for the Yiddish-​speaking people who were forever silenced by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Although Frume Halpern was already living in America during World War II, her roots stretched across the Atlantic to bridge the political discussions from one Atlantic coast to another, as voiced in her writings. Regarding her biographical traces in her Yiddish writings, editor and translator Rhea Tregebov highlights: Frume Halpern was born in 1888 and immigrated to the United States in 1905. She was known as a proletarian writer, because, like the protagonist in Blessed Hands, she worked as a masseuse, but also because her writing is informed by her commitment to left-​wing political causes. The stories are also infused with a profound and nuanced psychological insight into the moral and ethical dilemmas her working-​class protagonists experience. Although Halpern’s stories were published for over forty years in the left-​wing daily newspaper Morgn frayhehy [Morning Freedom] and, in later years, in the literary quarterly Zamlungen [Collections], as well as in numerous anthologies, her first collection of short stories, Gebentshte hent [Blessed Hands], did not appear until 1963. Halpern was by then in her mid-​seventies. Gebentshte hent was published by a committee of prominent writers determined that Halpern’s work not “languish in newspapers,” as they noted in the preface to the book. Halpern died in New York in 1966 at the age of seventy-​eight.3 Korn’s and Halpern’s paths leading to their short stories about the Holocaust differ much, as briefly addressed; however, where the narrative paths of these two stories

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come together is in each author’s similar portal of the anti-​world for her readers. Both stories follow a moment inside the home of a family. For Korn’s “The End of the Road,” that moment occurs in a small Galician village during the 1940s, when multiple generations of a family are gathered around a table, waiting for their death, as they internally and physically wrestle with the idea of who should sacrifice their life so that the rest may live. For Halpern’s “Dog Blood,” that moment occurs after the Holocaust, in a small apartment in New York City, where an elderly couple is visited by a “Guest,” and conversation quickly turns to the horrors they survived during the Holocaust, only to be met by the silence of the multiple generations of family who did not survive, yet whose faces echo the absence and silence of life after the Holocaust. Two stories –​one takes place during the Holocaust, one after the Holocaust –​yet both highlight the motif of silence, as well as emphasize the destruction the Nazis wrought on the home and family of victims across Europe –​during and after the war. The Yiddish language is like an ancient linguistic mosaic. Tracing as far back as the mid-​thirteenth century, Yiddish is a language comprised by a piecing together and a blending of germanic, hebraic, and aramaic, as well as slavic, and a few traces of Romanic languages.4 In the following centuries, Yiddish became a stronghold of the Jews across Europe: During the Middle Ages, masses of speakers of the new Jewish vernacular then moved from Germany to Slavic territories, especially Poland […] the journey of the people and the language did not stop there. Some Yiddish speakers returned to Germany, Holland, or northern Italy because of pogroms, expulsions, or other anti-​Jewish measures. Indeed, the golden age of Old Yiddish literature took place in northern Italy from 1474–​1600. Then, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, millions of Jews fled from tsarist Russia […] Jews also left western Poland […] And these migrants and refugees spread Yiddish all over the earth […] Eventually, however, Yiddish lost its various strongholds. It was destroyed in Europe chiefly by the Nazi genocide and by the Soviet tyranny, and in the rest of the globe, by the mass linguistic and cultural assimilation of Jews…5 And just as varied as its traces across the globe, so too was the subject matter of Yiddish literary texts.6 Similarly to this blending of languages that forms the Yiddish language, Korn’s and Halpern’s stories depict a moment in time, where the reader sees a blending of generations within the setting of a home. The reader witnesses the literary account of the Nazis’ uprooting of the family tree that weathered both generations of persecution and generations of life. Consequently, the focus of my analysis of these Yiddish Holocaust short stories is how they reveal the Nazis’ assault on the home, relationships, and the family in Korn’s “The End of the Road” and Halpern’s “Dog Blood.” These two stories hinge on a moment –​a common characteristic of Holocaust short stories. Stern writes about the moment (or “snapshot”) when he claims, “single moments  –​crises, revealing incidents, or epiphanies  –​make

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crisp, focused short stories.”7 Although both Korn and Halpern create the world of their story that rests on a particular moment, as Stern notes about a well-​crafted story, like other Holocaust short stories, the hinging moment found in these two stories is not a moment of time, but rather a moment in the collapse of time, as seen in a moment portraying the collapse of a future. For Korn, the moment in “The End of the Road” surrounds a family’s decision about whether or not one of them should report for execution or if they should not choose, but rather “let God decide” and all die. For Halpern, the moment is when a middle-​aged couple has a visitor (the “Guest”) and tension builds as to whether or not they are any better off in America than they were in Nazi-​occupied land. Another characteristic of Holocaust fiction, which appears in these two short stories, is the assault on relation (the parent–​child relation, husband–​wife relation, and neighbor–​friend relation), which is woven throughout the prose and narrative of these stories. These two stories also represent two different, yet similar perspectives on the assault on the “home”  –​the traditional, Judeo-​Christian understanding of the home:  the dwelling place of the family. Tracing back to the Hebrew Bible and Mount Sinai where Moses was given the Ten Commandments, which are ten laws concerning the relation of man to God and man to man, the notion of dwelling in relation with each human is a sacred concept and holy command. However, in the anti-​ world, the assault on the relation begins with the assault on the home and the assault on the family. The word for marriage in Yiddish is kiddushin, which means “holiness,” yet, when the community starts to crumble, as time serves to measure one’s death rather than one’s life, then all sense of holiness and human relation, which was found among marriages, amidst families, and around the home (the dwelling place), begins to crumble, disintegrate, and fade into the shadow and silence of the anti-​world. Both Korn’s and Halpern’s short stories are well crafted and are rich with rhetorical elements and literary devices such as motifs, images, structure, and form, which aid in highlighting the theme of the collapse of time and relationships in these texts. When considering the prose and rhetorical tools both authors used to whittle their stories for the reader, Noah Lukeman’s discussion on the necessity and power of prose in his book The First Five Pages: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile comes to mind. Lukeman writes: There is a sound to prose; writing is not just about getting a story across, but also –​if not mainly –​about how you get there. Prose can be technically correct but rhythmically unpleasant. This is one of the distinctions between writing in general and writing as an art form. We’ve all encountered the ill-​ sounding sentence, most commonly found in the run-​on. Technically it’s correct, but it just “sounds” wrong. Indeed, what I label sound may also be thought of as “rhythm.”8 In the above passage, Lukeman builds upon this notion of how prose, like a road, guides the reader through the pages of a text. Prose, whether jarring or smooth, is

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essential for any good, successful story. Lukeman’s observation applies to the literary translations of these two Yiddish short stories, for the narratives –​though difficult in subject matter –​are written in an accessible prose for the readers. Lukeman, like many other writers, distinguishes “writing in general and writing as an art form” based on the author’s prose of the text. It is considering this notion of writing as an “art form” that causes one to appreciate the craft of the short story, the delicacy of the short story’s form, and the keen eye given to each detail inculcated in its text by the author. This attention to detail, from the macro details of its structural elements to the micro details of word choice or sentence structure, is another difference and uniqueness to the narrative and story found in the Holocaust short story genre that is not a pressing or necessary rhetorical element when considering the other literary forms of Holocaust fiction and writing. Another distinction between Holocaust literary forms and the literary form of the Holocaust short story is that in these two tales, like in other Holocaust short stories, the “sound” of the chaos of the crumbling of the world, juxtaposed with the rising of the anti-​world found in these stories, underscores the profound “silence” these authors weave into their short tales (the silence of the family members gathered around the table in Korn’s story, and the silence of the wife in Halpern’s story), which captures how silence sweeps through the cities, streets, homes, and relations, as it announces the disintegration of human relation and, with it, human dwelling. It is in this anti-​world found in Holocaust short stories that the silence of the broken relations between husband and wife, parent and child, neighbor and stranger, are all heard by the reader. Another similarity of Korn’s and Halpern’s stories is that both short stories are written in Yiddish. Like the act of telling their (those who lived during the Holocaust) story, the act of writing in Yiddish is both Korn’s and Halpern’s expression of their tradition and culture. In his book Adventures inYiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture, the Yiddish linguist and scholar Jeffrey Shandler writes: After the war, the sudden absence of Yiddish became, especially for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, a compelling metonym for the tragic loss of its speakers. This development invited some to make special efforts to restore the use of Yiddish as a gesture of rebuilding or memorization.9 Korn’s and Halpern’s authorial choice to write in Yiddish –​a language that fell prey to the Nazi regime, which massacred nearly half the world’s population of Yiddish speakers –​adds another unique element to the Holocaust short story. The language used to create the world of these two stories is the language of the voiceless: the dead. In his book A Bridge of Longing:  The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling, David G. Roskies addresses Yiddish writers and their stories when he states: With the apocalypse of World War I, the Bolshevik revolution, and the Ukrainian civil war, the rehabilitation of the lost folk was obsolete. The next generation of Yiddish writers resorted to storytelling both as an escape from

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the strictures of realism and as a response to the anarchic forces that history itself had unleashed.10 As Roskies maintains, this urge and need to write in Yiddish was a common feeling among Holocaust survivors and writers of that generation. In many ways, the sound of these authors’ stories is always haunted by the silence of the murdered Yiddish speakers. For Korn and Halpern, writing in Yiddish is not merely a response to the “anarchic forces” they lived through, but it is also a means by which they burden themselves in order to invoke the voices of those who suffered and died from the demoralizing, dehumanizing, and barbaric forces of the Nazis from 1933–​1945. We see also this urge to tell the stories of the other Holocaust survivors and victims, as well. In his book Five Biblical Portraits, Elie Wiesel discusses the burden of the story (telling it and writing it) and being the witness, when he writes: And what are we doing, we writers, we witnesses, we Jews? For over three thousand years we have been repeating the same story –​the story of a solitary prophet who would have given anything, including his life, to be able to tell another kind of tale, one filled with joy and fervor rather than sorrow and anguish.11 It is with the weight of being the storyteller and bearing the tale of “sorrow and anguish” that Korn writes her short story “The End of the Road” and Halpern writes her short story “Dog Blood.” Three characteristics of this inverted, upside-​down world of the Holocaust governed by Nazis are the unmitigated, constant, and relentless breakdown of the Jewish peoples’ concept of home, the meaning of human relationships, and the notion of family. Rokhl Korn’s “The End of the Road” is a short work of fiction that tells  –​relates  –​a moment when a family’s life and world as they know it succumb to the assault of the Nazis and crumble into the anti-​world perpetrated by the Nazi laws, decrees, and actions. “The End of the Road” takes place in the home of Hersh-​Layzer Sokol, where he, his wife, their children, and his mother are faced with the decision to have one family member from each household volunteer to die in place of their relatives; otherwise, the Nazis will take the whole household. In this story, the battlefield is not a trench but a kitchen; those fighting the enemy are not trained soldiers but children, women, parents, grandparents; and finally, the thoughts of each family member are thoughts of their deaths, not of their lives. This is a story of the anti-​world. It is a story of a family, like millions of families during the Holocaust, whose lives changed in a moment –​a moment when the enemy invaded their home. In “The End of the Road,” Korn provides her readers with a scene and a setting that capture the systematic disintegration of three generations (the grandmother, the parents, and the children) and their relationships to each other.

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Korn’s story begins by introducing the reader to the father of the household, Hersh-​Layzer Sokol. In his book Open Wounds, David Patterson addresses the assault on the father when he writes, “In the ontological assault on Jewish being, it is not enough simply to murder the father. The killing of his body must be preceded by the annihilation of his image, for in his image lies the Jewish tradition that the father symbolizes.”12 Building upon Patterson’s assertion, I would also add that the father is not merely a shadow that resembles one who follows biblical teachings, but rather, he is the actual figure whose shadow of religious teachings covers all those in his home –​his wife and children.Yet, here in this place, in this ghetto, and in this deteriorating form of a home, the father is no longer one who can follow, embody, and instruct the biblical command to teach his children the laws of God: And these words, which I  command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes. And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates.13 Instead, he is without answer; he is rendered as almost a shadow instead of a being. Both father and teacher have the same root in Hebrew (horeh and moreh); however, in this story, Korn creates for her readers a world where the association between father and teacher is severed due to the environment fostered by Nazi ideology. We further see the severity of the breaking of the relation between father and child when we remember how the Talmud says a father (if he is a father) must teach his son three things: Torah, a trade, and how to swim.14 Yet, here in the anti-​world, the Torah that the father would teach is itself under assault; the son has no future, therefore no trade; and the father cannot show him how to “swim” in the deluge of atrocity that is rising all around them. In this story, Korn immediately inserts the reader into a moment when the family is locked inside their own home and awaiting the execution of either one individual from each home (if they so choose to volunteer), or the execution of all in the home (if they so choose to all “volunteer”). With her first sentence, the reader sees a world where the characters are forced to weigh the value of each life. Here not only is this a world that is ordered by perverse notions of certain human beings having more value than others, but it is a world where each individual is motivated to remain silent when asked where is their brother,15 rather than risk their life by speaking for their relation and associating with the other. The father’s character triggers the cracking of this family and the home and the relationships between each member. Korn writes: For a while, father and son gazed at one another. The son’s eyes asked, demanded to learn what the father knew and what would be kept secret from the others. The father’s head was stooped as if he himself bore the guilt

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for what was happening, the guilt for having married and brought children into the world, for now being unable to protect them.16 In this moment, the father, through his silence and inaction, speaks of the breaking of their world as they know it  –​the breaking of the family dynamic where his responsibilities as father and husband are not only no longer allowed, but considered a threatening act in this anti-​world governed by death. Where a father once stood for the teaching of the law, shared in the responsibility of representing the wisdom of relating memory and tradition, and embodied truth of relation in life, he is now like all the rest of his household: silent, immovable. In Korn’s story, the assault on relationship within the family is seen in the severing of the father’s relationship with his children through his interaction with his daughter, Mirl. Thus, we see how the father’s connection and the children’s connection to their parents and each other begin to unravel. This is also the moment when she turns to hate her father rather than love him. In his book The Shriek of Silence, David Patterson highlights the power lurking in the anti-​world where all sense of relation between father and child are distorted and destroyed: Operating in the absence of the father, of course, may breed not only a longing for the father but also a rebellion against the father. As the bearer of the word, the father bears a promise; when the word is emptied of its meaning, the promise goes unfulfilled. The effort to regain the word of the father, who harbors the seminal seed of life, may take the form of a struggle with the father, to wrestle from him what death has swallowed up.”17 The very concept of the breaking of relation between father and child is one that not only prowls throughout this short story, but throughout testimonies and writings of the Holocaust, as well. In “The End of the Road,” we see the physical struggle of the father losing his place in his household. We see this in the instant where the child (Mirl) assumes the responsibility of the father, when she decides to assume the role of protecting the family, speaking for the family, and leading the family: Whether it was the gown or her tight, stubborn lips that made her look older, more adult, everyone felt that Mirl had grown a lot taller during those past few hours. “Go where? What are you talking about?” Her father went over to her with bulging, bloodshot eyes. “You know where! Goodbye everyone!” She was already at the door. With a broad, wild jump, her father caught up with her and grabbed her sleeve […] They all gaped at the scene, but no one stirred, no one held back the father or assisted Mirl. Hersh-​Layzer clutched his daughter with one hand while removing his belt with the other […] He finally gripped the belt and

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whirled it over Mirl’s head like a noose […] Then, grabbing the loose end, he dragged Mirl like a hog-​tied calf to the oak table […] For the first time in her life, Mirl hated her father…18 In the above scene, the assault on the relation is evident. By constructing an anti-​ world where the father is no longer able to pass on the “word” and “promise” of his teachings of the Law to his child, the Nazis created a foundation where the assault against the family was implemented from within. The father’s frustration and act of violence against his child are a direct consequence of the pressing reality of living and functioning in a place consumed by the thought of death. This is a place –​or a non-​place of the ghetto –​where everything a Jew does to stay alive is illegal, as Chaim Kaplan says in his diary: “Whatever we do, we do illegally; legally we don’t even have the right to exist.”19 In this story, the bond between father and daughter is fully severed in the moment when his actions of haste, violence, and struggle breed Mirl’s internal response of rejection and hate. In this moment, a father scurries in vain to protect his child’s innocence, only to realize that she looked “older, more adult […] during those past few hours.” Here the father and child are both rendered the same and the relation and the role of the father is equated with the role of the child –​they are equally helpless in their present situation (a Nazi-​occupied environment). Along with the assault on the father’s relationship to his family in “The End of the Road,” Korn captures the assault on the child and his/​her relationship in the family, as well. Again, although other short stories may write of childhood memories or the dealings and characteristics of children, in Holocaust short stories, any stories about a child or children tend to be about their death –​their spiritual, mental, or physical death –​and not about their life. To see a glimpse of the unraveling of a culture, of a tradition, and of a teaching, one merely has to look at the child. According to Jewish teachings, children represent and embody salvation.20 Children are the pure innocent vessel from and for which adults might draw near and learn. Or as Patterson writes in his book Open Wounds, “While the mother and father signify an origin and a tradition, the child represents a future and a redemption, from which the present and past derive their meaning.”21 However, in this story, the traditional associations of the child are blurred, out of place, and foreign. In tandem with other Holocaust short stories, the children in Korn’s story do not stand for a hopeful present and do not hold a future. Korn introduces the reader to the children through an episode where they are “playing resettlement”: “Mama, he’s hitting me!” Sorke burst into tears, feeling her mother’s protection. “Go away, Mama, go away right now!” the eight-​year-​old boy insisted, pulling over his little sister. “We’re playing resettlement, and there’s not a mother in resettlement. You have to obey the policeman. Since she didn’t want to give her baby up, she has to go with her baby. See? I’ve got my rifle.” He brandished his stick.22

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Following the above passage, the mother (Beyle) instantly reacts in anger toward her children for playing the game, only to realize that these little vessels of innocence  –​these children who are her source of redemption  –​are as entangled as she is in this world formed by the webs of decrees and deaths. Through having the children “play resettlement,” Korn creates for her readers a micro glimpse into the anti-​world the characters inhabit. This world is a world where children eat in silence hoping to avoid the evil lurking outside their door. Yet at the same time, these children are falling prey to an environment and world where their childhood innocence is robbed from them the instant they understand that mothers and babies are shot, and when they believe that men carrying guns hold more power than the divine teachings of their fathers or the prayers uttered by their mothers. In this anti-​world, this world paved by mass-​shooting and extermination camps, “resettlement” really means “extermination.” In this sense, the children, who represent a life, meaning, and future, are playing extermination –​death. Patterson addresses this assault on the children when he associates them with the face of God. He writes, “In a post-​Holocaust world, that countenance [God’s] is the face that must be restored through a never-​ending tikkun haolam, for the face of a child is where the assault on God and the wounding of creation takes place. And the Nazis knew it.”23 Here, in Korn’s story, we see the assault on the family –​on the father, the mother, and the children. We see the displacement of spiritual concerns by the threat of physical concerns. Where we see the fracturing of the role of the father, and we see the severing of innocence from the mindset of the children, we also see the role of motherhood during the Holocaust come into light. With the breaking of the relations, we see the radical inversion of the world into the anti-​world. In tandem with the assault on and disintegration of the father’s relation among his family that is portrayed in Korn’s story, so too is the assault on the relationship and role of the mother. From the earliest religious and exegetical texts, the trope of the mother is one that has surfaced and resurfaced throughout literature. When one specifically considers the role of the mother in Jewish literature, motifs of Rachel weeping for her children or the matriarch figure representing the feminine Divine Presence of the Holy One (the Shekhinah) are all deemed pertinent. When discussing the role of the woman of the household, Patterson writes: The woman of a household is called an akeret, a word that derives from ikar, which means “essence,” “basis,” “foundation,” and “origin”: the mother is all these things that define Torah. Once again, it is through the mother that we have the Torah. Bearing life into the world, she bears Torah into the world. For the Torah is life; it is the Ets Chayim, the “Tree of Life” that sustains all of life.24 Applying Patterson’s assertion about the role of the woman of the household to Korn’s “The End of the Road,” one notices the breakdown of the relations of the mother, which further supports this notion of the distortion growing from an anti-​ world fostered by those who usher in death (the Nazis) versus those who usher in

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life (the mothers and fathers). The mother in this story is not one who embodies foundation, or who represents the basis for order, nor is she one who stands as the essence of Torah  –​of teaching and instruction. Instead, the readers are given a glimpse into a world where the essence of home is lost in the cage of a house. Korn begins this story with the household’s response to the decree: By morning, the whole town had learned about the new German decree. But in Hersh-​Layzer Sokol’s household, they virtually pretended not to know about it. As on any other day, Beyle, his wife, put on the pot of grits and half-​ rotten potatoes, the ghetto’s rations, and punctually set the table for the entire family […] as if to fend off all the evil lurking beyond the door.25 In this moment, the mother is trying to do all that she can to sustain the home as a home –​to fend off evil; yet, in this struggle she is rendered weaker, helpless, and unable, for her efforts seem to be in vain when faced with the unrelenting onslaught of Nazi terror knocking on her door. Therefore, her identity as a mother –​a teacher, protector, and vessel of life –​begins to fade in this anti-​world. As this passage notes, in this story, like in most Holocaust short stories, the home is transformed into a holding cell for each family. And with each new decree, the responsibilities associated with the woman of the household and the mother seem more and more like an idea versus a reality. Just as the father represents the source of memory and tradition, the mother represents the vessel of Torah; however, in this anti-​world, with each new decree, with each deportation, and with each death, the vessel, which the mother embodies, becomes slowly cracked until it is shattered completely. In “The End of the Road,” the reader is given a glimpse into a shattered world where a man’s threat and decree against another serves as an impetus to severing the relations between the characters, as well as distinguishing the spiritual light and teachings of the “home.” When considering the setting of this Holocaust short story, the home, one must consider the Jewish motifs, tropes, and associations with the home. Just as a home has many sides, so too are there many sides and various associations synonymous with the home. However, when considering and analyzing this story, the home is the dwelling place for the family and “the home, which houses life within its walls, is symbolized by the woman, who also houses life within her womb.”26 The Shekhinah –​the female aspect of God, the feminine Divine Presence that is inculcated and quite prevalent in various Jewish Kabalistic teachings, is associated with the matriarch figure of the home. Similarly to the assault on the relation of the mother, which was previously discussed, the assault on the home is an assault on the dwelling place of the mother (the feminine association of the Holy One). As Ori Z. Soltes states, “this is the realm associated with the three uppermost heikhalot of merkavah literature. Above all, it is referred to as the ‘dwelling’ of God’s Shekhinah ‘aspect’ –​that aspect of Godness that dwells among us even as God is so ungraspably beyond us.”27 Soltes’ commentary about the Shekhinah’s presence being associated among God’s people is one that echoes the

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notion of how God’s Presence “dwelt” among Moses and the Israelites, even when they were exiled in the wilderness. In this story, where the mother is, the divine presence of the Shekhinah dwells, too. However, the Word –​Torah –​is central to the home and to the Divine Presence dwelling within the home. In this story, we see how the Word has been hushed through the mother’s and father’s silence and how they do not teach –​tell and relate –​Torah to their children. Patterson claims, “The Temple is the House of the Shekhinah not because it is the site of rite and ritual but because it is the center attesting to the sanctity of human life, beginning with the children.”28 In this story, we see not a home of instruction and relating of Torah, but we see the parents (the source of teaching) sit, inactive and silent, waiting for death to knock on their door or for someone (the grandmother, in this case) to leave the home and dwelling place, and go alone to her death. Another characteristic of this anti-​world and its assault on the home is seen in the moment where light comes into the home rather than light exiting from the home and enlightening the community. Korn writes,“The streak of light coming through the window kept shifting, shifting across the floor, until it reached her legs.”29 Although the Temple’s windows are designed to enable the light of the Torah to illuminate the community,30 in “The End of the Road,” the source of the Torah and wisdom –​the relations of the mother and father –​are shattered, severed, and extinguished, thus causing the darkening of a world where Torah is burned and tradition is scoffed to come into their home from the broken community, rather than allowing their home to illuminate the community. For families like the Hersh-​Layzer Sokol family, a moment like receiving a decree by the Nazis on that autumn day in 1942 represented the end of the road for life as it once was. The very title of this story –​“The End of the Road” –​serves as a reminder, a reminder of life’s culminations and experiences leading to the end of the road; the title also serves as a hindrance, a roadblock stopping the trajectory of movement in life toward a future destination –​toward a future: life. In its very title –​“The End of the Road” –​Korn introduces her reader to a predicament facing her characters (a predicament that was also facing millions of people). For like the family in this short story, and like the millions of families across Europe, one day they awoke to a day that would lead to the end of the road. One day, they awoke to the anti-​world –​a world where death knocks on doors, where death is discussed at dinner tables, where parents, children, and grandparents have nowhere else to go but the end of the road. With this title, Korn provides her readers with a narrative that captures a moment when all previously held beliefs, understandings, hopes, and even memories of the world, now seem to no longer exist in this newfound anti-​world. This assault on familial relationships carried out by the Nazis in the anti-​world is further amplified in the inability of a family to be a family and relationships to be relationships, as portrayed in the inability of even one’s memory to exist in a world where the roads all seem to lead to Auschwitz. A memory is like a piece of glass intricately placed in the mosaic of life. Memory is powerful. A certain smell, a particular sound, a familiar touch, a childhood snack, or a random object –​all hold the cognitive power to instantly flood an individual with memories of a particular

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moment in time.Yet concomitant with the power of one’s positive associations with a memory, there can also be negative associations with one’s memory of an object. For instance, before Auschwitz, a pile of shoes was merely a pile of shoes; whereas, after Auschwitz, those shoes were his first day in kindergarten, the last summer when she learned to jump rope, a mother’s shoes often worn on the Sabbath. Throughout the Holocaust, objects like the Yellow Star of David sewn onto one’s sleeve, Aryan Papers clenched in one’s hand, striped prison uniforms folded on a bench, or a pile of children’s shoes arriving on a train cart became either a death sentence or a life sentence. Objects and their corresponding memories became pieces of life before or life after Hitler, Nazis, Auschwitz. In relation to the Holocaust, when considering this idea of memory in conjunction with an object, one can either turn to the spoken or written testimonial accounts of survivors, or turn to the written narratives of Holocaust literature. One such literary account that inculcates an object and memory into its narrative is Korn’s “The End of the Road.” As previously noted, this is a story that captures one of the Nazis’ greatest assaults: the assault on the family and on the memory of life before Hitler’s Nazism, Race Laws, and death camps. This story highlights, for the reader, the power an object has in sparking a memory for one particular character. In this story, the object (a wedding dress) unlocks the grandmother’s memory of life before the war, for the reader. This story takes place in the autumn of 1942, in a small Galician village, in a home where a family learns that the Nazis have decreed that “within two hours from now, each family has to hand over one member –​ do you understand? The family has to choose the victim themselves. They have to make the choice, otherwise the Germans’ll take everyone, the entire household, no exceptions.” […] They were all stunned. But they weren’t surprised. […] The family members exchanged glances. Who? Who would go? Go to the place from which no one ever came back?31 Caught in the claws of Nazi selection process, the three generations (the grandmother, the parents, and the children) of the Hersh-​Layzer Sokol household sitting around a table are faced with the incomprehensible task of determining who would go –​who would go to the place of no return? Who would go to die in order that the other family members’ deaths might be postponed for even one more day, or hour, or minute, or moment? Yet, in the midst of a moment in time where each generational relationship seems to dissolve throughout the course of the narrative, Korn unobtrusively brings an object into the narrative that ushers the reader back in time through the grandmother’s memory. This narrative reveals for the reader that this story is a story of a woman who, though she happens to be a grandmother, through her memory, she is still very much the young woman who once fell in love, married, and had a family. Before Korn introduces the grandmother’s thoughts to the reader, she crafts the narrative in such a way that the rhetoric, when addressing the grandmother, is of a distancing and dehumanizing tone. Like the other characters in the story

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who view the grandmother through a distancing lens, the reader is introduced to a scene in which the characters are forced into an incomprehensible situation where they must weigh the value and need of each life –​specifically, the life of the grandmother: The father couldn’t go, that was clear. He was the provider, the breadwinner for the whole family. The mother, certainly couldn’t go. What would become of the smallest children without her? Lippe? What had he already gotten out of life in his twenty-​four years, the last two darkened under Hitler’s reign? […] Was there no one who could go instead of him? What about the grandma? The old grandma? Lippe’s eyes, seeking his grandma, encountered his parents’ gaze above her head. They had stripped the leaves from her years the way falling autumn leaves expose the naked and vulnerable tree trunk. But no one dared to say what they were thinking, no one dared to say, “Go!” No one dared to take control of the few ragged years she had left. […] Their eyes dug into her so sharply that the old woman started dropping, her entire body pushed into her chair, as if she were vanishing from the surface, growing into the bit of floor beneath her, taking root there so that no one could pull it out from under her feet. At that instant, each person’s sense grew more acute, more alive. Each person’s thoughts were open for everyone else in these moments of intense spiritual strain. The grandma’s mind was the only one that stayed shut, just like her two half-​extinguished eyes. She was locked up inside herself, warding off death. Suddenly she felt so alone, so lonely in the midst of her own family, next to her son, whom she had borne and raised. Her own flesh and blood. And his eyes were searching for her too, focusing on her. And that would enable her to defend herself against all of them, with her last ounce of strength. There was no one who would take her part, no one who would at least put up a wall around her, protect her with a warm gaze. That would have made it easier for her to draw the final balance. Dying is less arduous if you know you’ll be missed.32 In the first part of the above passage, the characters’ thoughts regarding “Who would go?” reflect the unraveling of the fabric of family relationships that occurred under Nazi occupation. In addition, this passage captures the breakdown of family roles through the inability of parents to be parents (a father unable to protect his family), children to be children (sons and daughters attempting to assume the protective parental roles), grandparents to be grandparents (the ones who pass down their wisdom and teaching of life and traditions). More importantly, however, the latter part of this passage serves as a prelude to the rest of the story that inconspicuously hinges on the grandmother and her memories of her childhood and wedding. The object that kindles the thoughts of the grandmother and breathes life into her memories of bygone moments of happiness, home, and hope –​is her wedding dress that her granddaughter (Mirl) is wearing.

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In the midst of this atrocious situation –​choose one life or have all lives chosen –​ Korn gradually weaves her reader through the narrative that unveils the significance of the grandmother’s memory when she thinks of her wedding and the dress she wore. In the final moments of her life, the grandmother’s thoughts are not of the future –​where she will go, how long she will live, what will happen to her family (for such thoughts can hardly exist in a world commanded by death and hate) –​but rather her thoughts are of the past and a time where she was seen by others. Korn writes: They figured it was less difficult for an old person to die. Maybe that was true when death came on its own, to your own bed. But going like this, bringing death your bundle of wornout bones. Shush! She wasn’t done with everything. She had to look back at her life once more, from start to finish. The time when she had been a child with her mother. She too had once been a child, after all, like her son, like Beyle with Sorke.“Mama, mama,” she pleaded as she had done in her childhood […] Two large, heavy tears rolled down from under her closed lashes, fell into the mesh of wrinkles, and spread down the full length of her face.33 Here, the reader sees how the grandmother’s memories drift to a realm where love and life were celebrated, where a mother could answer the call of a child, where families could sit around a table and speak of future life not of future death, and where concern for the brother and other was taught and praised. In this very moment, the thoughts of her life before Nazi occupation serve as an unspoken protest against her captors  –​the very people stealing others’ memories by extinguishing the light of their lives. Nonetheless, Korn does not leave the reader in this moment, but she ushers the reader through the memory of the grandmother’s wedding day: she recalled herself as later –​as ready for marriage. She had seen Duvid, her betrothed, only once, at the engagement ceremony, but all her girlish dreams were filled with his presence.When they had prepared her wedding garments, she stubbornly insisted on having the costliest fabrics, the iridescent blue silk with its rosy glow and the pink flowers woven into it. She wanted her intended to find her attractive. All these years, her wedding gown had been hanging in the closet until recently. She hadn’t let anyone touch it. Then, a few months ago, she had let them make it over for Mirl. Because her granddaughter was her spit and image: when she looked at Mirl, she saw herself as she had been long ago.34 The narration moves away from the memory of the grandmother and back to the present moment, as the “clock struck sharply. Once, then twice.”35 Again, who will go? Will it be the father, or Lippe, whose lover is waiting for him to meet her? Will it be young Mirl who is wearing her grandmother’s wedding dress? As the tension

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in the room rises, the father attempts to protect his family, even by means of force to prevent his daughter Mirl from leaving the house: “I’m going.” They all turned their heads toward her. She stood in the iridescent blue-​and-​rosy dress, which had been made over from her grandma’s wedding gown. Mirl had forgotten to take it off […] “Go where? What are you talking about?” Her father went over to her with bulging, bloodshot eyes. “You know where! Goodbye everyone!” She was already at the door. With a broad, wild jump, her father caught up with her and grabbed her sleeve […] As Mirl tried to free herself from her father’s grip, they heard a loud swish, which sounded like a whip. The old, lengthened silk sleeve had ripped. They all gaped at the scene, but no one stirred, no one held back the father or assisted Mirl.36 Like the tearing of a sleeve, in the above passage, the reader sees the tearing apart of any previously held presuppositions regarding a world and environment where parents could protect their children. Furthermore, in this moment, a father scurries in vain to protect his child’s innocence, only to realize that she looked “older, more adult […] during those past few hours.” Here the father and child are both rendered the same and the relation and the role of the father is equated with the role of the child –​they are equally helpless in their present situation (a Nazi-​occupied environment). Yet, who will go? still silently lingers in the story. It is not Mirl the young, Mirl the bold, Mirl assuming the role of family protector, or Mirl wearing the “iridescent blue-​and-​rosy dress” that will go. No, Mirl will not go, but it is the one who, when she “looked at Mirl, she saw herself as she had been long ago,” not just a stored away silk dress, or a vulnerable leafless tree trunk in autumn, or a bundle of worn-​out bones. No, it was the young girl who remembered calling out, “Mama, mama” when frightened as a child; it was the young bride who remembered wearing the silk dress on her wedding day; it was the mother who remembered cradling her baby son –​the son, now grown and with his own family, whom she could protect once more by walking out the door: Grandma’s chair was empty. They had all been so deeply absorbed in their own thoughts that no one had noticed her getting to her feet. Where was she? When had she stolen out so softly that no one had heard her? It could only have been just minutes ago.”37 In a an act spurred by a memory, in a moment of fear frozen in time, the grandmother leaves the home and her family as a way of staying with them forever.

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A single death added to the tally of millions, Korn’s story unravels the extent to which the Nazis’ reach to tear away families from one another extended. Written in 1957, Rachel Haring Korn’s short story “The End of the Road” pieces together a narrative about a few hours in the life of a family living in a Nazi-​occupied Galician village, where time and relationships collapse into the anti-world. Although this is a multifaceted story that addresses various themes found in Holocaust literature, one of its key aspects is the role of the grandmother and the memories of her life before death camps and liquidations. Through the grandmother’s memories of her wedding and early life, the reader is ushered back into a world that was paved by life, love, and future, which serves as a juxtaposition to the world paved by destruction, hate, and death –​the Holocaust. If a memory is like a piece of glass in the mosaic of life, then the objects that trigger memories like those that are found in Holocaust testimonies and narratives aid in piecing together the horrific accounts of the atrocities that swept across Europe from 1933–​1945. Concurrent with the various themes and motifs which are woven throughout Rokhl Korn’s short story “The End of the Road,” in Frume Halpern’s Holocaust short story “Dog Blood” the Nazis’ assault on relationships, home, and memory is inculcated into the narrative as well. “Dog Blood” is set in a post-​Holocaust New York City. This story follows a moment in the life of a couple (the Shtroms) who are visited by a guest. All that the reader knows about this guest is that he is a man who is “younger” than the “middle aged” couple, and is someone who also “survived” Auschwitz. He is described as “an emaciated manikin with high cheekbones,” who “was a lot younger than the Shtroms. He never removed his right hand from his pocket, while his left hand kept tugging at his throat as if to indicate that even though he was absorbed in his thoughts, he could hear what was being said.”38 What the reader knows about this guest is what he voices to the Shtroms, which is about his frustration with America, with the rich “philanthropists,” and what one can assume to be his frustrations with “life” –​life beyond, “after” Auschwitz, for he like so many never truly left Auschwitz, but rather stands, breathes, and lives in the shadow of the anti-​world. Both the Shtroms and the guest are survivors of the Holocaust; however, though they are alive and living in New York, Halpern’s narrative shows that the scope of the Nazis’ assault extends far beyond the camps and ghettos, as portrayed in the couple’s inability to communicate with each other and the guest. In tandem with other post-​Holocaust narratives, this story addresses survivors’ responses to the assault on their homes and the consequences of living through the anti-​world.When addressing the life of survivors, Janet Hadda writes, “The Holocaust was actively incorporated into their daily lives, making it an increasingly significant aspect of existence rather than the opposite.”39 What Hadda alludes to is present in the narrative of “Dog Blood.” Written in 1963, this story is a post-​Holocaust tale that illustrates the scope of the Holocaust itself, reaching far beyond the confines of the camps and ghettos. Through words, Halpern paints for her readers a picture that captures how time no longer functions on a linear trajectory for Holocaust survivors, but rather how it functions in a cyclical motion that constantly carries them back to a world where laws protected death, decrees

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commanded murder, neighbors turned on neighbors, and parents were as helpless as their children. Inserted in post-​Holocaust 1950s New York, Halpern creates for her readers a story that captures a conversation between the Shtroms (“a husband and wife […] way into a middle age”) and their guest (a man “with whom [they] had wandered through the Holocaust years until he [the guest] managed to reach these shores”40). When considering the rhetorical tools implemented in forming this story, one cannot point to any specific moment of outward action or conflict; rather Halpern’s story hinges on the internal turmoil of the characters and the assumed guilt they carry because they survived what millions did not: the Holocaust. In this story, the survivors (the Shtroms and their guest) are rendered homeless; they have no dwelling place and are wanderers in a strange land: “Do you really believe that we were rescued by being dragged here? It’s all the same whether she sits on a chair or I trudge around. We’re still there! Over there our eyes were glued to the earth. Every grain of sand, every stone reminded us of something. And here? There’s nothing to look at […] If we’d stayed there, we’d find some solace for the blood we lost, we’d have revenge and consolation.”41 This impossibility of liberation is a distinguishing feature of the Holocaust –​a feature that also echoes throughout the Holocaust short story genre. Furthermore, in the above passage, the protagonist’s assertion “We’re still there!” is a reality that faced Holocaust survivors all around the world. The Holocaust and its anti-​world is like one’s shadow –​at times it is minuscule and unnoticeable, at other times it is a large, distorted image of one’s faceless self. Halpern addresses this assault on the home through this couple who no longer communicate with each other, but rather, “sit in silence” or “trudge” around alone. In this isolation, we see the collapse of the word. To speak is to relate to the other; yet, the other must be present, responsive. David Patterson also addresses the problem of liberation in his chapter “The Failure of Liberation” in his work Sun Turned to Darkness. Regarding liberation, the home, and silence, Patterson writes: Home, of course, is made of far more than bricks and furniture. Its essence lies in human relation; a human being liberated is a human being returned to human relation. The breakdown of this relation is just what underlies the failure of liberation and the alienation from the home.Very often this failure and alienation are revealed in the failure of the word, that is, in silence.42 Patterson addresses how the collapse of home, relationships, and meaning (word) in the anti-​world often remained collapsed “after” Auschwitz. In a sense, Halpern’s story serves as a response to that isolation and collapse of time, meaning, and relationships. In this story, we see how the couple, like so many survivors, may have left Auschwitz, though the trauma, memories, and experiences of Auschwitz never left them. In the concentrationary universe, there were no couples, just as there were no fathers, no sons, no mothers, no daughters, no sisters, etc. Without a dwelling place –​a home –​the relation between the husband and wife is strained and the sphere in which the Divine Presence would normally dwell is rendered non-​existent. When he discusses post-​Holocaust exile, Patterson writes

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how “the horror of the post-​Shoah exile is that it passes for a state of normality, yet it is a calm haunted by an underlying panic. Thus we seethe in a state of behalah which is ‘fright,’ ‘panic,’ or ‘confusion.’ ”43 This behalah which Patterson mentions surfaces in the story in the panic and fright of moving in a foreign land, yet mentally living in the past. This panic reveals itself through the confusion or lack of communication between the husband and wife. One characteristic of the Shekhinah is that she dwells in the Temple and dwells among her children. According to midrash, when the children of Israel were exiled in the desert, the Shekhinah went with them. As it has been said, “the Temple is the House of the Shekhinah not because it is the site of rite and ritual but because it is the center attesting to the sanctity of human life, beginning with the children.”44 “Dog Blood” is a brief story where the readers are introduced to three adults. Although there are no children mentioned in the present action of the narration, there are nonetheless children present in the absence of the present action.What is rendered absent when children are rendered absent is the notion of a future –​a continuation of life through the next generation. The Nazis systematically created these realms devoid of children, and so that aspect of the soul continues “after” Auschwitz. The tension of the story rises with the guest’s and Mr. Shimkhe Shtrom’s heated discussion about whether their life is better as survivors alone in America rather than still together with their family and community murdered at Auschwitz, or alone yet rebuilding a life for themselves in Europe (as the guest ardently advocates). The protagonist (Shimkhe Shtrom) responds not with words, but with the silent wordless faces of photographs of loved ones: He felt his wife’s mute eyes begging him to rest. He sat down on the sofa and again produced the old, worn wallet from his bread pocket. His wife’s hand reached out, and for the first time she stammered something: “Don’t!” When he slipped the wallet back into his pocket, she lowered her feeble hands. Suddenly, as if forgetting his wife and the guest, Shtrom stood up, hurried over to the small table at the window, yanked forth the wallet with both hands and started laying out photographs. In an orderly, unhurried manner, he placed them one by one in straight lines, counting out four generations. He put young next to young, old next to old, calling them by name and title:  rabbis, doctors, lawyers. There were radiantly smiling faces of bridal couples in wedding clothes, students clutching diplomas, playful children with joyous faces and defiant eyes. Clouds of smoke, clouds of colors hovered in front of Shtrom… Black, red… His eyes prickled, his ears buzzed…45 The significance of the image of the face in each photo echoes the Nazis’ assault on the face –​on the humanity, the soul, that emanates from the face. In this story, even though the reader can assume the photos in the protagonist’s wallet are photos of dead children, again, there are no children present in the narrative.Without children, there is no one to teach, relate, guide, or instruct. It is through this representation

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of exile that the notion of the “home” is under assault. The Shtroms are not caged inside the walls of a ghetto or camp, but like the “clouds of smoke” that hover in front of Shtrom –​invoking the smoke from the chimneys of Auschwitz, they are trapped in a world of their yesterday. The reader knows little about the three characters; however, through the lives of those depicted in the photos, the reader has a glimpse into a world of the past –​children, diplomas, weddings, smiles –​and this world of the past is as fading and tucked away as the images on the paper. Unlike the memory of the grandmother in Korn’s “The End of the Road,” the memory consuming Shimkhe Shtrom is that of a recurring motif of yearning and death. The Shtroms are caught in the panic, fear, and state of wondering –​wondering why they left, why they survived, and why others did not or could not. Without a home, a dwelling, one is counted a wanderer and a stranger. Accompanying that notion of homelessness is the lack of community and communication, which renders the characters alone. Amid uncertainty as to why the guest visited the Shtroms, the sources of conversation that only lead to discord seem to capture a tone of frustration and despair felt by the characters regarding their “new” life in America. As previously mentioned, one aspect of the breaking down of the community in “Dog Blood” is the lack of communication between the husband and wife. In her book, Janet Hadda discusses how “marriage is one of the covenantal obligations of Jewish existence.”46 However, when faced with the realities that accompany existence inside the walls of the Holocaust, all presuppositions about the traditional teachings of marriage, the conventions of marriage, and the notions of “covenantal obligation” appear foreign and unattainable in the post-​ Holocaust, post-​anti-​world life. Alongside the silencing of communication is the absence of community. In this story, the couple is rendered incommunicative with each other  –​he wanders aimlessly and she sits in silence. Rather than breaking through the walls of the anti-​world and finding haven and comfort within the walls of their newfound home, this story does not portray a couple existing in present, together in relation and community; but rather, it portrays two individuals living in the past and in the time where various forms of communication were silenced and where any sense of community crumbled to ruins. This lack of communication represents the breaking of the relation and the traces of the anti-​world inserting itself into the post-​Holocaust world. Halpern captures this in the ending of “Dog Blood,” when she writes: The tree shook and circled hastily as if trying to escape. Shtrom trembled to the rhythm of the small, parched branches, which reminded him of human hands that he had once seen sticking out of hills of soil. The guest said, “Goodnight.” But the Shtroms didn’t hear him.47 In this ending, the reader can see how without communication, one cannot relate to or teach one another. More importantly, the reader is given another glimpse into Shtrom’s memory. Like the photographs he carries in his wallet that remind him of those whose faces will never smile again, whose voices will never speak or respond

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when their name is called, this moment reflects how even in the movement of living nature and creation, Shtrom’s memory is that of the dead –​the murdered. In this ending, it is revealed for the reader that for Shtrom –​like for many survivors of the Holocaust –​there is no “after Auschwitz,” for Auschwitz is the anti-​world, and in the anti-​world memory, relationships, all that “once was,” come under assault as time, communication, and life collapse. “Dog Blood” is a short story about the spiritual death of these survivors of the Holocaust. The story provides its readers with a glimpse into the world of the exiled wanderer –​one who is depicted as both homeless and people-​less. “Dog Blood” is a story that adds to the Holocaust short story genre through its ability to insert the reader into the cavern of the survivors’ struggle to live in the present while daily haunted by the memory of the past. Rather than merely narrating a tale of woe or poetically crafting prose that captures some scene or setting, both Rokhl Korn’s short story “The End of the Road” and Frume Halpern’s short story “Dog Blood” insert the reader into a literary world that captures the atrocities of life during the Holocaust and life after the Holocaust. Though they continue the tropes, characteristics, and motifs typically found in Holocaust literature, Korn and Halpern, like most authors of Holocaust short stories, distinguish themselves from the literary and rhetorical elements typically characteristic of the short story genre. As highlighted throughout this book, Holocaust short stories differ from all other short stories in multiple ways, particularly in that they actively engage the reader and writer to bear witness to the atrocities of Nazi-​occupied Europe from 1933–​1945 and the Nazis’ assault against humanity, against the community, against the family, and against the home. In addition to authors like Korn and Halpern, who chose to write about the Holocaust as a means of testifying about the Shoah, many “East European Jewish writers and artists, whether they lived through the Holocaust or not, tempered their personal desire to innovate with the collective need to commemorate.”48 Accompanying the desire to commemorate is the urge to write and to relate and tell the stories of life inside the Shoah –​a place where time was inverted and one lived days counting death rather than life, a place where fathers were as helpless as their infants, a place where homes became holding cells, and a place where communication was replaced with silence. As David Roskies states, “Because of the Holocaust, every teller of local traditions became a teller of exotic places.”49 For Yiddish writers of Holocaust stories like Korn and Halpern, these “exotic places” were in the kitchen of a multi-​generational family struggling to decide who should die and who should not, or in the living room of an older couple striving to live in the present and ignore the voices of the silenced, murdered family, friends, and strangers of their past. For Korn and Halpern, through their writings, they tell of and give witness to the Nazis’ assault on the home, the relation, and the family. Through these two Yiddish Holocaust short stories, the readers are enabled to witness and to tell of these assaults and atrocities through their acts of reading and remembering. Korn and Halpern write in order to bear witness; we read in order to remember, to teach, to instruct, and to tell of what happens when villages, towns, cities, and countries are driven to succeed by implementing death rather than cultivating life.

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Alongside the short story narratives of Rokhl Korn and Frume Halpern, the following chapter will address how Cynthia Ozick’s short story, “The Shawl,” further highlights this motif of the Nazis’ destruction of the family by its focus on the relationship between a mother, daughter, and niece inside the Holocaust camps. The anti-​world is a world where fathers do not recognize their children, a world where a piece of bread holds more value than a life, a world where neighbor turns on neighbor, and a world where humanity seems silent as millions are being murdered. In her narrative, Cynthia Ozick portrays how this is a place where mothers could not be mothers, and where an infant’s sound is as threatening as a battle cry from an enemy.

Notes 1 Included in this chapter is a section, pp. 00–​00, taken from my previous written work that was featured by The Curio Project: Mary Catherine Mueller, “The Wedding Dress,” TheCurioProject.com, www.thecurioproject.com/​reflections/​2016/​6/​8/​the-​wedding-​ dress, accessed June 8, 2016. 2 Linda Schermer Raphael and Marc Lee Raphael, “Rachel Haring Korn 1889–​1982,” in When Night Fell:  An Anthology of Holocaust Short Stories, edited by Linda Schermer Raphael and Marc Lee Raphael (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 191–​198 (at 194). 3 Biography of Frume Halpern from Arguing with the Storm:  Stories by Yiddish Women Writers, edited by Rhea Tregebov (Toronto: Sumach Press, 2007), 99. 4 Joachim Neugroschel, Introduction to No Star Too Beautiful:  Yiddish Stories from 1382 to the Present, edited by Joachim Neugroschel (New  York and London:  W.W. Norton, 2002), xiv. 5 Ibid., xiv. 6 Ibid., xvii. 7 Stern, Making Shapely Fiction, 48. 8 Noah Lukeman, The First Five Pages: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 41. 9 Jeffrey Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 18. 10 David G. Roskies, A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 341. 11 Elie Wiesel, Five Biblical Portraits (Notre Dame, I.N.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 127. 12 Patterson, Open Wounds, 141. 13 Deuteronomy 6:6–​9 (KJV). 14 Kiddushin 29a, The William Davidson Talmud, sefaria.org, www.sefaria.org/​Kiddushin. 29a?lang=bi, accessed September 7, 2017. 15 Genesis 4:9 (KJV). 16 Rachel Haring Korn, “The End of the Road,” in No Star Too Beautiful, 635. 17 David Patterson, The Shriek of Silence: A Phenomenology of the Holocaust Novel (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 54. 18 Korn, “The End of the Road,” 639–​640. 19 Chaim A. Kaplan, Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan, translated and edited by Abraham I. Katsh (New York: Collier, 1973), 332–​333.

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20 Zohar, I, 1b. 21 Patterson, Open Wounds, 141. 22 Korn, “The End of the Road,” 634. 23 Patterson, Open Wounds, 199. 24 Ibid., 126. 25 Korn, “The End of the Road,” 633. 26 Patterson, Open Wounds, 127. 27 Ori Z. Soltes, Mysticism in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: Searching for Oneness (Lanham, M.D.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), 119. 28 Patterson, Open Wounds, 135. 29 Korn, “The End of the Road,” 640. 30 Midrash. “Midrash Tanchuma,Tetzaveh 6.” sefaria.org. https://​www.sefaria.org/​Kiddushin. 29a?lang=bi (accessed September 7, 2017). 31 Korn, “The End of the Road,” 636. 32 Ibid., 637–​638. 33 Ibid., 638. 34 Ibid., 638. 35 Ibid., 638. 36 Ibid., 639. 37 Ibid., 640. 38 Frume Halpern, “Dog Blood,” in No Star Too Beautiful, 657. 39 Janet Hadda, Passionate Women, Passive Men:  Suicide in Yiddish Literature (Albany:  State University of New York Press, 1988), 193. 40 Halpern, “Dog Blood,” 656. 41 Ibid., 657. 42 David Patterson, Sun Turned to Darkness:  Memory and Recovery in the Holocaust Memoir (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1988), 187. 43 Patterson, Open Wounds, 113. 44 Ibid., 135. 45 Halpern, “Dog Blood,” 659. 46 Hadda, Passionate Women, Passive Men, 2. 47 Halpern, “Dog Blood,” 660. 48 Roskies, Bridge of Longing, 310. 49 Ibid., 312.

5 THE COLLAPSE OF MOTHERHOOD Cynthia Ozick’s short story “The Shawl”

Yet she became an exile; she went into captivity; her infants were dashed in pieces at the head of every street; for her honored men lots were cast, and all her great men were bound in chains. –​Nahum 3:10 Through her depiction of the collapse of motherhood in the camps that is portrayed in Rosa’s and Magda’s relationship, Cynthia Ozick’s Holocaust short story “The Shawl” sheds light on the extent to which the perpetrators’ contempt and hate for the victims manifested itself in the camps. Incubated within the racial decrees comprising the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 was the systematic assault against the Jewish people; namely, the prohibition against life in the form of pregnancy or procreation –​a “crime” eventually deemed punishable by death. The thought of a Jewish woman bringing life into the world –​a life that the Nazis viewed as a “what” or “it,” and as a source of vile evil, another sub-​human to be eradicated from the earth –​was not merely a treasonous thought, but was a thought worthy of instantly exterminating. In the anti-​world, a Jew’s crime was existing, living in this world; thus, the most heinous of criminals was the Jewish mother who brought the Jew into this world. Therefore, this hate-​filled, contemptible, and vile view found itself etched into the Nazi law and ideology under the banner of the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour1 and Rassenschande2 (“racial shame” or “racial defilement” or “race pollution”). Under these legal documents and newly promulgated Nuremberg Laws, the systematic legal attack against marriage and family must be noted. According to Beverley Chalmers’ exhaustive research on abuse of women and their families, identities, and personhood under Nazi rule:

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Two of the Nuremberg Laws adopted on 15 September 1935:  the Rich Citizenship Law that removed German citizenship from Jews, and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour together with their 13 implementation ordinances issued between November 1935 and July 1943, were part of a series of racial-​hygienic laws that prevented “contamination” of “pure” German blood. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour stipulated not only that the Jews were forbidden to marry or have sexual relations with “persons of German blood” but also that marriage could not be contracted if “offspring likely to be prejudicial to the purity of German blood” were likely to result.3 Furthermore, this “law forbade marriage between Germans and Jews and rendered any marriages concluded outside of Germany, in order to circumvent this law, to be invalid. Such couples were then regarded as having indulged in forbidden, extramarital Rassenschande.”4 Although these race and marriage Nuremberg Laws are often considered amongst scholars of the Holocaust as the catalyst for anti-​Semitic measures, the violating of such laws by the Nazis and soldiers in the form of raping and impregnating Jewish women throughout the war is often unaddressed for reasons varying from the humiliation of the victim, the forever silencing of the victim(s) when they were murdered, shame, guilt  –​survival guilt, and shame, to name a few. One scholar notes how “sexual violation of Jewish women occurred to provide sexual entertainment, but also as a means of humiliating Jews and confirming their dehumanized status, not worthy, even, of sexual respect.”5 For “rape and sexual brutality, especially, but not only, when followed by murder, contributed considerably to the Nazi goal of humiliating all Jews and eliminating their reproductive function.”6 This sexual violence against Jewish women during the Third Reich is coming to light in the form of literary accounts, as well as recent scholarship, interviews, and archival research conducted by scholars like Beverley Chalmers, author of Birth, Sex, and Abuse: Women’s Voices under Nazi Rule, and Federica K. Clementi, author of Holocaust Mothers and Daughters: Family, History, and Trauma. These works amplify the thousands of accounts and survivors’ testimonies addressing the humiliating and dehumanizing intimate sexual violence against women (rape) by certain Nazis that occurred throughout all stages of Nazi-​occupied Europe. In spite of laws, such as the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour and Rassenschande, sexual violence occurred by the perpetrators against female victims of all ages –​ regardless of age, religion, physique, health, etc. Through examining the role of the mother in the short story “The Shawl,” I will address an aspect of the anti-​world, of the Holocaust, that is rarely discussed, or written about. Furthermore, I will address to what extent we can learn about the collapse of time, relationships, and humanity that occurred during the Holocaust when confronted by this intimate, forceful hate to which so many people fell prey when in the anti-​world. Cynthia Ozick’s “The Shawl” is a short story that sheds light on one of the Nazis’ greatest, most intimate assaults on relationships and family

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that women faced during the Holocaust: rape and death. This assault against Rosa is seen in the absence of a father-figure and in the absence of Rosa mentioning Magda’s father, as well as in Stella’s observation of Magda’s resemblance to the guard, which will be addressed later in this chapter. Originally published as a short story in the The New Yorker in 1980, Cynthia Ozick’s “The Shawl” introduces the readers to a glimpse into the anti-​world through the three characters Rosa, Magda, and Stella, and their time in a Holocaust concentration camp. Building upon the themes of the collapse of time and relationships in the anti-​world, Ozick addresses, through a powerful, pointed narrative, the cruelty that thousands of Jewish women suffered under the Nazi occupation. Born of Russian Jewish immigrant parents, Cynthia Ozick, a native New Yorker, first introduced her readers to Rosa’s, Magda’s, and Stella’s world when she wrote the short story “The Shawl,” which is the short story comprising the first section of the novella The Shawl, followed by the second story, “Rosa” (1983), which comprises the second section.7 In his work, Imagining the Holocaust:  Representation, Responsibility, and Reading, Daniel R.  Schwarz notes how these two stories embody two aspects of Holocaust fiction: life within the horrors of the camps and the death marches, and the retrospective view of those events by a survivor whose life has been shaped for decades by the horrors of those events. The relationship between the two stories shows how memory imbues the present with a corrosive energy.8 The two stories, though different in structure, time, and space, address the characteristics of Holocaust fiction  –​namely, Holocaust short stories. When considering Ozick’s personal literary influences on this topic, Schwarz claims: By the 1980s, Ozick may have felt that the realistic tradition in Holocaust fiction had somewhat played itself out, and Ozick is influenced by the parables and folktales of the Yiddish and rabbinic tradition of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Franz Kafka and perhaps the magic realism of South American writers like Gabriel García Márquez.”9 Building upon this literary tradition, Ozick adds her voice to the many voices of Holocaust literature. However, well aware of the weight of this literary task, Ozick heeds the warnings of her tradition and her heritage, as well as those of scholars, authors, and survivors, whilst taking to the short story genre to testify about “that which happened,”10 to use Paul Celan’s words, during the Holocaust to millions of women –​the destruction of the family, motherhood, and innocence. In his work, Understanding Cynthia Ozick, Friedman addresses Ozick’s concern with writing a story that falls under the umbrella of “Holocaust fiction,” as he notes her hesitation, while also asserting his analysis of her work as a work of Holocaust literature:

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“I worry very much” said Ozick, “that the subject is corrupted by fiction and that fiction in general corrupts history.” Like many postwar Jewish writers Ozick is torn between the fear of trivializing the Holocaust and the belief in the necessity of bearing witness to its enormities. Those enormities are crystallized in “The Shawl” when a German guard hurls Magda, Rosa’s starving baby, onto the electrified fence of the concentration camp. That the story’s forced marches, numbing cold, constant hunger, excremental stench, random brutality, and innocent victims seem all too familiar testifies to the success of Jewish writers in preserving the Holocaust in the collective memory. In the story’s few pages cluster together the atrocities that will sear Rosa’s memory in the far longer sequel to “The Shawl.” Like that of so many death camp survivors, Rosa’s future identify will be fatally determined by what she has witnessed and endured “in a place without pity.”11 While Friedman attests to the characteristics of Holocaust literature that are woven throughout Ozick’s narratives, when considering how her work applies to those of the Holocaust short story, one must take into account the style of her writing, and the presence of key themes, motifs, and hallmarks of the Holocaust short story genre (which are addressed in the preceding chapter). As previously mentioned, Cynthia Ozick draws upon both her background and her religion when writing her fiction. However, in addition to this, her distinct narrative style, which weaves both religious undertones and her stark, pointed descriptive overtones, provides her readers with a short story –​“The Shawl.” She tells a story about the Holocaust and the anti-​world, a story that testifies about the collapse of relationships between mother and daughter that occurred throughout the Holocaust. “The Shawl” follows the lives of three characters: Rosa, her infant, Magda, and her niece, Stella. This story builds to the moment when Rosa’s baby stumbles out of hiding (in the barracks where she often stayed nestled in her shawl) and is seen by a guard, who then quickly, calmly throws her onto the electric fence. Consistent with the hallmarks of Holocaust short stories, the narrative of this short story attests to a moment during the Holocaust –​a moment when time, relationships, home, family, and hope all seem to collapse as Rosa’s baby (Magda) is suspended in the air only to land in the abyss of death and destruction. When considering the weight of the narrative, and the literary constructs by which Ozick successfully attests to this continuously dehumanizing moment in the anti-​world, literary scholar Daniel R. Schwarz emphasizes Ozick’s style, word choice, and genre choice. As he notes: Use of nonhuman images to describe humans stresses the dehumanizing quality of the camps. Looking into Magda’s face through a gap in the shawl, Rosa sees “a squirrel in a nest” (4). As if an animal, Stella is described twice as “ravenous” (1, 5). Rosa is reduced to an animal protecting her young. Her sacrifice and love give a human touch to her feelings. Magda makes her first

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sound after the shawl is lost; she howls in the square in the roll-​call area […] Magda’s instinctive cry contrasts with the omniscient narrator’s elaborate prose about the lice and the rats and with her own prior silence. The brevity of the story intensifies its claustrophobic nature. The reader is in a world where the usual patterns of thought  –​and life –​are absent. Humans are reduced to silence, living with excrement, threatened with annihilation –​this is the ontology of “The Shawl.” Ozick’s narrator creates an ontology in which the child’s death is inevitable.12 It is through the development of key themes in Ozick’s short story, Schwarz asserts, that the narrator of “The Shawl” creates an “ontology in which a child’s death is inevitable” that becomes evident for the reader. Ozick captures a world in which it is a crime punishable by death to be a Jewish mother; it is a crime punishable by death to be an unborn child and any child already born of a Jewish woman. Through the characters and an object (the shawl), Ozick’s short story depicts the collapse of relationships through a focused narrative highlighting the intimate assault on women –​mothers, girls, and infants –​which was rampant throughout the camps during the Holocaust. In the characterization of how Rosa views Stella, the reader sees the portrayal of the collapsing of relationships of the family unit; thereby, ushering in the emphasis on the individual rather than on the family. In the anti-​world, the bond between relatives was severed, as the environment the Nazis created forced one to constantly think of one’s self (the individual) rather than others, as a mode of survival. The Nazis sought to destroy the family and dehumanize the individual. Through the character of Stella (Rosa’s niece), the reader sees the collapse of relationships among relatives within the camps. The narrative descriptions and internal narration of Rosa regarding Stella portray an aspect of the anti-​world in which families and acquaintances became distant toward one another, as their relationships disintegrate within the toxic environment of the anti-​world. As in many Holocaust stories’ accounts of the experiences of close relatives within the camps, in the characters of Rosa and Stella (Rosa’s niece), the reader sees the detachment between two family members expand throughout the pages of the short narrative, as Stella’s desire for Magda’s (Rosa’s daughter’s) shawl crescendos to the extent that she steals the object –​an act that eventually leads to Magda’s death. When faced with the unimaginable responsibility of caring for a baby in the camp, Rosa not only fears the glances of the guards, but of fellow prisoners (even her own niece, Stella), who might bring harm toward Magda. One example of this is how, while on a march, Rosa observes Stella and imagines her thoughts of destruction toward Magda: On the road they raised one burden of a leg after another and studied Magda’s face. “Aryan,” Stella said, in a voice grown as thin as a string; and Rosa thought how Stella gazed at Magda like a young cannibal. And the time that Stella said “Aryan,” it sounded to Rosa as if Stella had really said “Let us devour her.”13

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As the narrative progresses, so too does this crumbling of bond and relationship between Rosa and her niece, for with each step further into the anti-​world, the threat of death (death of her infant, Magda) seems to loom larger. Magda is a miracle baby, with each moment, hour, and day she has survived, and Rosa watches in wonder, yet waits in fear –​fear of the guards, fear of death, fear of Magda being heard or seen, fear of Stella: But Magda lived to walk. She lived that long, but she did not walk very well, partly because she was only fifteen months old, and partly because the spindles of her legs could not hold up her fat belly. It was fat with air, full and round. Rosa gave almost all her food to Magda, Stella gave nothing; Stella was ravenous, a growing child herself, but not growing much. Stella did not menstruate. Rosa did not menstruate. Rosa was ravenous, but also not; she learned from Magda how to drink the taste of a finger in one’s mouth. They were in a place without pity, all pity was annihilated in Rosa, she looked at Stella’s bones without pity. She was sure that Stella was waiting for Magda to die so she could put her teeth into the little thighs.14 The above passage reflects both the pressure that life in the anti-​world forced on relationships within families (aunt and niece), and also the relationship between mother and child. It also highlights the pressure the anti-​world had on Stella –​a pressure that leads to cannibalistic lust. In this moment, the narrative portrays Stella’s desire for food as an overwhelming notion that swallows the sanctity of life and the essence of a human being, as seen in the child, Magda. Additionally, regarding this moment among the three characters, in Cynthia Ozick’s Fiction: Tradition and Invention, Elaine M. Kauvar addresses Rosa’s struggle to conceal Magda from the Nazis, which in turn increases the conflicts with a fourteen-​ year-​ old’s jealousy and makes more fierce the battle Rosa must wage to say alive. […] Stella’s relationship to Rosa is divulged in the [above] story –​the epitome of coldness, her envy the prelude to cannibalism.”15 Kauvar continues: But it is Stella who studies the blueness of the baby’s eyes, gazes at the roundness of its face, stares at the yellowness of its hair, and declares Magda an Aryan. In fact, Magda appears to be ‘one of their babies,’ the child, Ozick intimates, born of an S.S. officer in a concentration camp.”16 This allusion to Magda and the S.S.  officer’s uncanny resemblance echoes the horror that Rosa endured  –​nine months before giving birth to Magda and before her entering the anti-​world. Caught in this “place without pity,” the role

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of motherhood is very different from that of life before Auschwitz, life before the anti-​world: the Holocaust. While other Holocaust short stories also address this theme of the collapsing of relationships within families, “The Shawl” differs through the portrayal of a mother’s (Rosa) and her infant daughter’s (Magda) relationship inside the camp. One particular motif Ozick knits into the narrative to capture this collapsing of motherhood is the motif of Rosa’s nipples –​now empty and unable to provide milk or nourishment for her daughter. Magda is only fifteen months of age, yet happens to look more like the Nazi “Aryan” guard than her mother. With this characterization of Magda, the narration hints at a horrific reality that faced many women inside the camps –​the collapsing of relationships in the form of prohibition against motherhood and pregnancy. This is seen in the appropriating of love, and the allusion to the intimate, contemptible, sexual violence of rape by the very men who would soon kill them and their unborn or born children, as was the case with the banning of births in the Nazi-​occupied Lithuanian Shavli ghetto in August 1942,17 or the compulsory abortion ordered issued throughout Theresienstadt in July 1943.18 In her memoir Five Chimneys, Olga Lengyel recalls the horror women experienced in the women’s camp when they were placed in the position of killing newborns in order to save mothers: As soon as a baby was delivered at the infirmary, mother and child were both sent to the gas chamber. That was the unrelenting decision of our masters. Only when the infant was not likely to survive or when it was a stillborn was the mother spared and allowed to return to her barrack. […] We five whose responsibility it was to bring these infants into the world –​the world of Birkenau-​Auschwitz –​felt the burden of this monstrous conclusion which defied all human and moral law. […] And so, the Germans succeeded in making murderers of even us. To this day the picture of those murdered babies haunts me. Our own children had perished in the gas chambers and were cremated in Birkenau ovens, and we dispatched the lives of others before their first voices had left their tiny lungs. Often I sit and think what kind of fate would these little creatures, snuffed out on the threshold of life, have had? Who knows? Perhaps we killed a Pasteur, a Mozart, an Einstein. Even if those infants had been destined to live uneventful lives, our crimes were no less terrible. The only meager consolation is that by these murders we saved the mothers.Without our intervention they would have endured worse sufferings, for they would have been thrown into the crematory ovens while still alive. […] I marvel to what depths these Germans made us descend!19 Lengyel’s tragic account of an unimaginable reality facing mothers and their unborn children in the camps is also addressed in other memoirs, such as Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After and Sara Nomberg-​Przytyk’s Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land. Each of these texts reveals a piece of the shattering heartbreak that mothers (and those who were forced to implement Nazi policy and law in the

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camps, killing the babies of their fellow inmates for the sake of saving the mothers’ lives) endured in the anti-​world. Drawing upon this heart-rending reality, Ozick’s story inserts her reader into a moment of time in the anti-​world where a niece, a mother, and her infant are teetering between life and death, each moment and with each breath they take. They experience these moments all the while Magda continues to exist unbeknownst and unseen by the guards: Stella, cold, cold, the coldness of hell. How they walked on the roads together, Rosa with Magda curled up between sore breasts, Magda wound up in the shawl. Sometimes Stella carried Magda. Bet she was jealous of Magda. A thin girl of fourteen, too small, with thin breasts of her own, Stella wanted to be wrapped in a shawl, hidden away, asleep, rocked by the march, an infant in arms. Magda took Rosa’s nipple, and Rosa never stopped walking, a walking cradle.20 The story opens with this image of a walking cradle and empty breasts; an image of homeless wanderings on death marches and empty nourishment. If an undetected child survived the pregnancy to full-​term, if it were not terminated before then or shortly after, most likely its brief life –​existence –​would soon be extinguished along with the hope and life of the mother. Regarding this violence against women (and children), Beverley Chalmers also finds in her research that rape of Jewish women has been reported in the major concentration camps including Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Bergen-​Belsen, and Ravensbrück. Rape of young Jewish women by Ukrainian assistants occurred on the way to the gas in Treblinka. Rape also occurred in the barracks after admission to camps.21 Chalmers goes on to state that “rape occurred, and Jewish women were not exempt despite the laws against Rassenschande. While sexual indulgence may have been the apparent motivation in many cases, such as when women were used for entertainment, the deeper intentions of humiliation, dehumanization, disrespect, and fear of the ‘Jewish enemy,’ probably paid a considerable role in facilitating these events.”22 Through these two characters, Ozick’s short story adds to the voices of countless victims and survivors by attesting to the collapsing of the relationships –​especially the collapse between mother and child within the camps. The narrator hints at the possibility of Magda being the offspring of a guard: [Rosa] looked into Magda’s face through a gap in the shawl:  a squirrel in a nest, safe, no one could reach her inside the little house of the shawl’s windings. The face, very round, a pocket mirror of a face:  but it was not Rosa’s bleak complexion, dark like cholera, it was another kind of face

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altogether, eyes blue as air, smooth feathers of hair nearly as yellow as the Star sewn into Rosa’s coat.You could think she was one of their babies.23 Nevertheless, regardless of whom Magda came from, with this ambiguous description, this narrative sheds light on one of the gravest threats to the Nazi regime –​the life of a Jewish child from the womb of a Jewish woman. The narrative captures how the very existence of Magda’s life, and thus, the bond Rosa shares with her, are deemed a crime and punishable by death. Through Ozick’s concise, vivid diction depicting images of fragility and death, this story captures the collapse of relationships seen in the inversion of the role of motherhood that mothers and their child(ren) face throughout the anti-​world. For the first paragraph of the story inserts the reader into the broken relationship between the three characters, as well as inserting the reader into their living hell –​ the place governed by death, not life, in which Rosa attempts to raise her child. The opening paragraph ends with images of starvation, images of emptiness, images of the frailty of life, and the strength of death: “There was not enough milk; sometimes Magda sucked air; then she screamed. Stella was ravenous. Her knees were tumors on sticks, her elbows chicken bones.”24 This opening scene introduces the reader to both the stark language capturing images of death and the dismal tone that are woven throughout the narrative. These literary devices and techniques amplify Ozick’s account of the anti-​world –​specifically, her account of the relationship between a mother and her child within the confines of the camp. Furthermore, this opening sets up the juxtaposition between the two younger girls –​the two “relations” of Rosa –​Magda, the infant, and Stella, the young girl, both of whom are constantly perceived by Rosa with images of death and destruction. The narrative casts this dark shadow across the two young figures to shape the constant murmur of hunger and the threat of death that so many adults and children faced in the ghettos and camps. In the midst of these characterizations and descriptions is the narration and characterization highlighting Rosa’s perception of Magda. Rosa’s perception of Magda highlights the inversion and collapsing of motherhood that women faced in the anti-​ world. Furthermore, this role that Rosa represents also amplifies this theme of the collapsing of relationships and time that the Nazis’ death-​filled environment fosters. Ozick’s narrative of motherhood within the camps depicts Rosa with delicate images of fragility, death, and destruction, rather than nourishment, hope, and life for her child: Rosa did not feel hunger; she felt light, not like someone walking but like someone in a faint, in a trance, arrested in a fit, someone who is already a floating angel, alert and seeing everything, but in the air, not there, not touching the road. As if teetering on the tips of her fingernails.25 Rosa is caught in the suspension between life and death, between mothering and grieving. On these roads, in this camp, Rosa experiences the collapse of time, when

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thoughts of her child are thoughts of her child’s future death rather than thoughts of a future life: Rosa, floating, dreamed of giving Magda away in one of the villages. She could leave the line for a minute and push Magda into the hands of any woman on the side of the road. But if she moved out of the line for half a second and pushed the shawl-​bundle at a stranger, would the woman take it? She might be surprised, or afraid; she might drop the shawl, and Magda would fall out and strike her head and die.26 As Rosa considers the possibility of “saving” Magda by giving her away, the thoughts of Magda’s possible immediate death overshadow any thoughts of hope. This passage also reflects Rosa’s detached language toward her child, when she references the infant with the neutral, detached “it” pronoun versus the personal pronoun “she.” Rosa refers to Magda as a “she” only when the thought of her dying invades her hopeful thought of giving her baby away –​getting her out of this anti-​ world. In this moment, like every moment facing mothers and their child(ren), in the anti-​world, Rosa’s attempts to “save” Magda seem to collapse under the reality of the constant threat of the death of her child –​death if a stranger decides to turn her in; death were a guard to see or hear her; death if someone accidentally drops the bundled shawl not realizing it is a baby; death if she does not get a sip, taste, ounce of nourishment; death. Death was the future for unborn or born babies in the ghettos and camps during the Holocaust, and this “future” is the thought that consumed mothers like Rosa during the anti-​world. A  child’s growing life was not marked on the doorframe of a home, but rather was marked by the rations consumed and the rations not consumed within the camps. Concomitant with the narrative’s description of the “Aryan” appearance of Magda, and the thin, emaciated appearance of “Stella,” Rosa’s physical description is that of a vapid mother, who is forced into an existence where the inability to nourish and raise a baby is the norm. Just as the reader sees the collapse of motherhood in Rosa’s inability to protect her child from the constant threat of death, the reader also sees the collapse of motherhood in the motif of Rosa’s nipples, reflecting the physical description of Rosa’s attempts to nurse and nourish Magda: Such a good child, she gave up screaming, and sucked now only for the taste of the drying nipple itself. The neat grip of the tiny gums. One mite of a tooth tip sticking up in the bottom gum, how shining, an elfin tombstone of white marble gleaming there. Without complaining, Magda relinquished Rosa’s teats, first the left, then the right; both were cracked, not a sniff of milk. The duct-​crevice extinct, a dead volcano, blind eye, chill hole, so Magda took the corner of the shawl and milked it instead.27 Again, Ozick gently weaves vivid imagery of death (“elfin tombstone”) and destruction (“dead volcano”) into the narrative about Rosa’s lack of breast milk; and

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therefore, of the lack of nourishment she can provide her breastfeeding child. This passage ushers in another aspect in which motherhood collapsed in the Holocaust –​ the inability of mothers to breastfeed their babies, and in turn, aid in their cognitive, emotional, and physical growth: Rosa knew Magda was going to die very soon; she should have been dead already, but she had been buried away deep inside the magic shawl, mistaken there for the shivering mound of Rosa’s breasts; Rosa clung to the shawl as if it covered only herself. No one took it away from her. Magda was mute. She never cried. Rosa hid her in the barracks, under the shawl, but she knew that one day someone would inform; or one day someone, not even Stella, would steal Magda to eat her.28 Caught within the recesses of Rosa’s mind is the constant tug-​of-​war between her thoughts of Magda’s life and of Magda’s death. Again the reader sees this glimpse of what Holocaust survivor, Primo Levi, calls a death that is not death, as though Magda were the child Muselmann –​teetering between life and death –​something unheard of even in the anti-​world, the place where the reader sees the collapsing of relationships between mother and child. Other ways in which Magda is seen as a “child Muselmann” is in that she is born into the anti-​world, and therefore, her entire existence –​ life –​is that of one surrounded by death rather than life. Another way is in her inability to communicate with others –​constantly silent and incommunicable to those around her, yet also constantly present, though overlooked or unnoticed by others, like the Muselmann figures. As Magda survives each day, so too does the looming threat of her death in Rosa’s mind: When Magda began to walk Rosa knew that Magda was going to die very soon, something would happen. She was afraid to fall asleep; she slept with the weight of her thigh on Magda’s body; she was afraid she would smother Magda under her thigh. The weight of Rosa was becoming less and less; Rosa and Stella were slowly turning into air.29 Accompanying the movement of Magda in the form of her learning to walk, the narrative ushers the reader toward the significance of the shawl. Ozick’s narrative style further portrays for the reader the inversion and collapse of motherhood through her juxtaposition of Rosa with the object of the shawl –​an object whose metaphor reaches into the realm of emotional, spiritual, and physical support. When considering Ozick’s rendering of the moment of the Holocaust (motherhood) captured in this story, Daniel R.  Schwarz’s Imagining the Holocaust emphasizes how the way Ozick never uses the word “Jew,” “Nazi,” or “concentration” paradoxically increases the story’s impact. The story’s focus is on a woman protecting her baby, the reader must make sense of what is happening –​if it were a death march, as it

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at first seems, why the electrified fence unless they stop at a camp along the way? –​and must give the tale historical context and setting. The story itself is a kind of skeleton, a miniature of the Holocaust. The story’s lack of sentimentality gives it its power. Rosa knows she can’t protect the baby, yet she is obsessed with trying; for her, Magda and the shawl become interchangeable. […] Rosa shows how the instinct for motherhood is all that remains.30 As Schwarz asserts, although Ozick’s short story is a concise narrative, the diction and images she weaves together seem to spin for the reader various images of atrocity –​images of starvation, frailty, abuse, death, dehumanization, and more. Nevertheless, the one thread that consistently guides the reader through the harrowing tale is the “instinct of motherhood” that Rosa embodies when she gives Magda the shawl. For both Rosa and Magda, the shawl is not just a shawl. Referred to in the short story as the “magic shawl,” this object extends beyond physically enveloping the body of Magda to also representing various aspects of motherhood and life before the camps, before the anti-​world… before the Holocaust. Given the unimaginable responsibility of giving birth to a child in the camps –​when the other inmates were killing babies to save mothers, as noted previously –​or giving life to a human being whom others deem only worthy of death, Rosa seems, at moments, detached from Magda, yet in the swaddling of Magda in her shawl, Rosa attempts to provide her child a hint of a home, a glance at a gift, and a look at love. The reader is first introduced to the shawl as a dwelling place for Magda, a source of comfort and shelter: “She looked into Magda’s face through a gap in the shawl: a squirrel in a nest, safe, no one could reach her inside the little house of the shawl’s windings.”31 Where relationships collapse within the confines of the anti-​world, through her wrapping Magda in the shawl, Rosa attempts to build a home, a refuge for her daughter. Yet, in this seemingly hopeful image, one must pause and note the dehumanizing undertone in that it is still an image of an animal’s –​a rodent’s –​nest and home. Nevertheless, Rosa sees the shawl as Magda’s home, thus, invoking the association of pregnancy (the dwelling place of a child within the mother) and the domestic sphere of the home (the dwelling place of a child outside of the womb). In Judeo-​Christian traditions, the mother is often seen as the priest of the home, the source from which light and life emanate to the rest of the world. In this camp, Rosa has no home, and therefore, both she and Magda are rendered homeless. Yet, the metaphor of the shawl as Magda’s home serves as a beacon of hope for Magda, and in a way, hope for Rosa, too. Upon serving as the dwelling place, Rosa soon sees the shawl as the source of nourishment for Magda. Again, where the role of motherhood collapses in the anti-​world when mothers, due to the starvation and (lack of) nutrition forced upon them by the Nazis and guards, could no longer provide breast milk or nourishment for their child, the shawl takes on the metaphor of being the source of food for Magda:

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Without complaining, Magda relinquished Rosa’s teats, first the left, then the right; both were cracked, not a sniff of milk. The duct-​crevice extinct, a dead volcano, blind eye, chill hole, so Magda took the corner of the shawl and milked it instead. She sucked and sucked, flooding the threads with wetness. The shawl’s good flavor, milk of linen. It was a magic shawl, it could nourish an infant for three days and three nights. Magda did not die, she stayed alive, although very quiet. A peculiar smell, of cinnamon and almonds, lifted out of her mouth.32 Where the “magic shawl” is seen as powerfully, inexplicably providing both a sheltering home and bodily nourishment for Magda, in its similarities to a prayer shawl, it also serves in providing spiritual shelter and nourishment for Magda.When considering the title of this story and the religious allusions in the object of the shawl, Daniel R. Schwarz writes: “The Shawl” is a play on the Hebrew term Shoah or Sho’ah, which literally means “desolation.” […] for Rosa and even Stella and Magda the shawl is a pedestrian object transformed into a totem or fetish, a way of creating meaning in a time of terror. And the shawl recalls, too, the Jewish prayer shawl that honors the sacredness of life –​here in the face of the Germans’ efforts to destroy the Jewish people.33 In addition to the religious allusions invoked in the title of this short story, Ozick also claimed, when she wrote to scholar Susanne Klingenstein, that the “The shawl is about –​no, is symbolically, the Nazi murders.”34 As the shawl is symbolic of the Nazi mass murder of millions of Jewish people across Europe, Magda becomes symbolic of the children that were murdered and Rosa, symbolic of motherhood. Magda is born into an anti-​world –​a place where the response to finding out one is with child is death, and if in some miraculous way, a child should live to full-​term and birth, that child’s life would only be a few minutes long.Yet, she lives; she lives to fifteen months old, all the while nestled in her mother’s shawl, feeding on her mother’s shawl, learning from her mother’s shawl. When considering the various metaphors of the shawl in this short story, Holocaust literary scholar Elaine M. Kauvar writes: in “The Shawl” Rosa owes her life to the shawl’s magic. And Magda, her saliva redolent of cinnamon and almond –​part of the sacred anointing oil in Scripture and a biblical symbol of divine approval –​becomes for Rosa a holy babe capable of being sustained for three days and three nights as if by magic.35 In addition to Kauvar’s noting of the religious significance of the shawl and the odors and tastes Ozick weaves into her narrative, in his work Crisis and Covenant:  The Holocaust in American Jewish Fiction, Alan L. Berger states:

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The peculiar aroma of cinnamon and almonds, itself so out of place in the midst of death, corpses, and wind bearing the black ash from crematoria, evokes a quasimystical image of the besamin (spice) box. Jews sniff the besamin at the havadalah ceremony which marks the outgoing of the Sabbath, thereby sustaining themselves for the rigors and tribulations of the profane or ordinary days of the week. By utilizing the prayer shawl and spice box imagery, and paranormal phenomena usually associated with the mystical element of Judaism, Ozick’s tale conveys the message that the bleakness of the historical moment is not the final chapter in Jewish existence.36 Although both Kauvar and Berger address the religious undertones associated with the powerful flavors of the shawl, they fail to fully consider the significance of Rosa’s act as a mother-­​­figure –​in wrapping her child (the source of hope, light, and a future) in the very object symbolizing that which condemns them both to death:  Judaism. With respect to the shawl’s association with a prayer shawl, one must note how in Judaism, the blessing said upon wrapping oneself in the shawl is actually wrapping oneself in tzitzit, or “fringes.” According to Judaic teachings, the word tzitzit has a numerical value of 600; therefore, one adds the 8 threads and 5 knots of the threads to get 613. The significance of the number 613 is in that it is the number of commandments in the Torah. Thus, when one wraps oneself in the prayer shawl, one wraps oneself in Torah, in the Light of God, while reciting in Hebrew: “Baruch atah adonai eloheinu melech ha’olam asher kid’shanu b’mitvotav v’tzivanu l’hitatef batzitzit.”This is translated as: “Blessed are You, our God, Creator of time and space, who enriches our lives with holiness, commanding us to wrap ourselves in the tallit.”37 The radical incongruity with the shawl in this short story is that it is worn in a place where time and space seem to crumble, where the God who created man in His image, and then said it is “good,” seems absent as man has attempted to usurp God by destroying man in man’s own image. In Understanding Cynthia Ozick, Lawrence S.  Friedman also notes how “most remarkable in the story, however, is the shawl itself –​a symbol of life amidst the many symbols of death. […] Successively nourishing Magda, warming Stella, and saving Rosa, the magic shawl is a life preserver in a sea of death.”38 Like an invisible prayer a parent utters over the life of their child, by wrapping Magda in the shawl, Rosa clothes her in a garb of hope, a cloth of faith, and a garment of life. In an anti-​ world where time collapses as the concept of a future or a hope seems to crumble under the weightless burden of smoking chimneys and floating ash, Rosa’s act of wrapping the shawl around Magda seems, like a prayer to God, momentarily, even miraculously, to be an act of faith and life in a seemingly faithless and death-​filled environment. As Magda grows, so too does her love and care for the shawl: “She guarded her shawl. No one could touch it; only Rosa could touch it. Stella was not allowed. The shawl was Magda’s own baby, her pet, her little sister. She tangled herself up in it and sucked on one of the corners when she wanted to be very still.”39 In this passage, the significance is not merely in the anthropomorphism of Magda’s shawl in becoming an object of affection –​like a pet or littler sister to her –​but

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rather, it is in the ability of the shawl to quiet and “still” her. In this moment of quietness and stillness, Magda is safe, as she is unheard and unseen by the guards. Then, with the following sentence, the story’s tone shifts, as the shawl and all that it represents are usurped from Magda; thus, causing her to die: Then Stella took the shawl away and made Magda die. Afterward Stella said: “I was cold.” And afterward she was always cold, always. […] Rosa saw that Stella’s heart was cold. Magda flopped onward with her little pencil legs scribbling this way and that, in search of the shawl; the pencils faltered at the barracks opening, where the light began. Rosa saw and pursued. But already Magda was in the square outside the barracks, in the jolly light. It was the roll-​call arena. Every morning Rosa had to conceal Magda under the shawl against a wall of the barracks and go out and stand in the arena with Stella and hundreds of others, sometimes for hours, and Magda, deserted, was quiet under the shawl, sucking on her corner. Every day Magda was silent, and so she did not die. Rosa saw that today Magda was going to die […]40 As this moment continues, the narrative surrounding Rosa’s inability to breastfeed Magda, due to malnutrition, resurfaces, as does her concern with Magda’s development: Ever since the drying up of Rosa’s nipples, ever since Magda’s last scream on the road, Magda had been devoid of any syllable; Magda was a mute. Rosa believed that something had gone wrong with her vocal cords, with her windpipe, with the cave of her larynx; Magda was defective, without a voice; perhaps she was deaf; there might be something amiss with her intelligence; Magda was dumb. […] But now Magda’s mouth was spilling a long viscous rope of a clamor. “Maaaa–​” It was the first noise Magda had ever sent out from her throat since the drying up of Rosa’s nipples. “Maaaa…aaa!”41 The sound Magda makes when she slices the silence that she and Rosa have grown so accustomed to is not a sound voicing a cry for the shawl she is searching for; rather, it is a cry for Rosa –​her Maaa-​ma, her mother. In this moment of utterance in search for her lost shawl and all that such an object represents, Magda cries for her mother; thus, triggering the rupture of silence that had consumed both her and Rosa for almost fifteen months. This breaking of silence between Rosa and Magda sounds the physical collapse of the relationship of motherhood for Rosa. As discussed in the previous chapters, the motif of silence often precedes the collapsing of relationships in these short story narratives; yet in this moment, silence is broken as the bond between mother

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and child is voiced for the reader. Rosa is overcome by “noise” from Magda, and torn as to how to respond, how to silence her daughter’s howling from the guard: A tide of commands hammered in Rosa’s nipples: Fetch, get, bring! But she did not know which to go after first, Magda or the shawl. If she jumped out into the arena to snatch Magda up, the howling would not stop, because Magda would still not have the shawl; but if she ran back into the barracks to find the shawl, and if she found it, and if she came after Magda holding it and shaking it, then she would get Magda back, Magda would put the shawl in her mouth and turn dumb again.42 Rosa is torn  –​does she run after Magda? Does she rush for the shawl? In this moment, Rosa knows that silence is life. The silence that has so consumed her role as a mother and her relationship with her daughter is now the silence for which she yearns. Rosa finds Magda’s shawl –​“Stella was heaped under it, asleep in her thin bones.”43 Without a word, without a change, without an utterance of anger, pity, or regret toward Stella, Rosa “tore the shawl free and flew –​she could fly, she was only air –​into the arena”44 in search of Magda, her howling fifteen-​month-​old baby girl. For an instant, in a moment, both time and her relationship with Magda seem to be suspended in a minuscule of hope, only to be interrupted by the familiar sound of the electricity inside the fence –​the hum of the anti-​world: She stood for an instant at the margin of the arena. Sometimes the electricity inside the fence would seem to hum; even Stella said it was only an imagining, but Rosa heard real sounds in the wire: grainy sad voices. The farther she was from the fence, the more clearly the voices crowded at her. The lamenting voices strummed so convincingly, so passionately, it was impossible to suspect them of being phantoms. The voices told her to hold up the shawl, high; the voices told her to shake it, to whip with it, to unfurl it like a flag. […] She was high up, elevated, riding someone’s shoulder. But the shoulder that carried Magda was not coming toward Rosa and the shawl, it was drifting away, the speck of Magda was moving more and more into the smoky distance. Above the shoulder a helmet glinted […] and a pair of black boots hurled themselves in the direction of the electrified fence.45 Rosa does not see her daughter learn to talk, or witness her learning to skip or run, nor does she experience the joy of hearing her giggle when playing with toys, or wrestle when waking up from an afternoon nap after lunch. Instead, Rosa sees her flutter in the air like a butterfly: The electric voices began to chatter wildly. “Maamaa, maaamaaa,” they all hummed together. How far Magda was from Rosa now, across the whole square, past a dozen barracks, all the way on the other side! […] All at once

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Magda was swimming through the air. The whole of Magda traveled through loftiness. She looked like a butterfly touching a silver vine.46 But Magda was not a butterfly touching a silver vine, but rather, she was a baby being murdered in front of her mother. This moment leading to Magda’s death captures the collapse of motherhood in the anti-​world:  the lulling of a baby’s cry in the form of killing, and forever silencing the sound, the utterance, the howl of “Mama.” Rosa sees; she sees Magda fly though the air. Rosa hears; she hears the “steel voices [that] went mad in their growling, urging Rosa to run and run to the spot where Magda had fallen from her flight against the fence,”47 yet Rosa does not move. And in many ways, she will never move from the spot, as told in the continuation story “Rosa.” She will never “leave” Auschwitz; she will never forget the sound of her child suckling on her empty nipples; she will never forget the sound of the electric fence; she will never forget the sound of her baby’s cry for “Maaa”; she will never forget the anti-​world and the place and moment when she could not move toward the body of her baby for fear of death, death, death: She only stood, because if she ran they would shoot, and if she tried to pick up the sticks of Magda’s body they would shoot, and if she let the wolf ’s screech ascending now through the ladder of her skeleton break out, they would shoot; so she took Magda’s shawl and filled her own mouth with it, stuffed it in and stuffed it in, until she was swallowing up the wolf ’s screech and tasting the cinnamon and almond depth of Magda’s saliva; and Rosa drank Magda’s shawl until it dried.48 This story ends with Rosa’s scream, followed by Rosa’s immediately muffling her mouth with the shawl that once filled and protected Magda. Again, revisiting the chapter, “A Living Torch” from her memoir, Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land, Sara Nomberg-Przytyk testifies about the moment and the sound of utter heartbreak and horror when children cried “Mama” before they were murdered – a moment similarly captured in “The Shawl.” Nomberg-Przytyk recounts: We were standing, as was our wont, in front of the block, watching the sky turn to a deeper red. All around us was quite that night, because there was not transport. […] Suddenly, the stillness was broken by the screaming of children, as if a single scream had been torn out of hundreds of mouths, a single scream of fear and unusual pain, a scream repeated a thousand times in the single word, “Mama,” a scream that increased in intensity every second, enveloping the whole camp and every inmate. Our lips parted without our being conscious of what we were doing, and a scream of despair tore out of our throats, growing louder all the time […] Finally, our screaming stopped. On the block we could still hear the screams

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of the children who were being murdered, then only sighs, and at the end everything was enveloped in death and silence.49 Magda’s attempt to cry out for her mother, and Rosa’s scream, echo the millions of children whose cry for their Mamas before their deaths were met by their mothers’ shock, terror, screams of despair, and then silence. Throughout Judeo-​Christian tradition, and as a theme inculcated throughout Scripture, motherhood often illustrates the relationship between God and His people.50 However, in the anti-​ world, there is no place for tradition, and there is no room for a womb or a child or a mother, as portrayed in “The Shawl” through the relationship between Rosa and Magda. Furthermore, upon considering the various metaphors of the shawl, the reader sees how this is not merely cloth muting her “wolf ’s screech” of pain, sorrow, horror, and despair, but it represents her religion, traditions, and very existence for which she and her daughter (like the millions of other mothers and children) are sentenced to death. The milk of this shawl is like the “black milk” in Paul Celan’s “Todesfuge” poem –​it is the milk that Magda would drink at daybreak, at sundown, at noon, in the morning, and at night; yet after her death, it becomes the milk that Rosa will also drink until her own death years following her time in Auschwitz and the anti-​world. Cynthia Ozick’s short story “The Shawl” captures one of the greatest assaults on relationships by the Nazis; it captures the collapsing of motherhood and childhood in the anti-​world. Through powerful, pointed imagery, and through weaving the motif of nipples and breastfeeding with the metaphors associated with the shawl, this short story testifies about one of the darkest moments of the history of the Holocaust: the death of the child. Ozick illustrates the collapsing of relationships between mothers and their children (as seen in Rosa’s and Magda’s relationship) by giving this woman and child the names Rosa and Magda. As one scholar notes, “Ozick’s genius is to capture the tiny eye in the storm of history, to render a victim’s pain at the moment of crisis.”51 It is upon successfully utilizing the structure and hallmarks of the Holocaust short story genre that Ozick’s “The Shawl” so masterfully reveals a moment of the Holocaust for the reader. By focusing on a moment in the “tiny eye of the storm” of the Holocaust, “The Shawl” attests to the collapsing of relationships that occurred during the Holocaust  –​specifically, the collapsing of the role of motherhood which the Nazis appropriated from millions of victims who hoped to be mothers, who were experiencing motherhood, and whose role as mothers came to a halt with the death of their child(ren) –​a lingering feeling from hell that they will forever carry close to the breast that once nourished and provided life for their baby (as seen in the continuation story “Rosa”). Ozick’s reticence to write about the Holocaust is a notion many authors share; however, through her narrative, she gives voice to the countless number of women who were sexually assaulted throughout the camps. Through her narrative, she gives sound to the countless number of children born into and killed by the deadly atmosphere of planet Auschwitz. Through her narrative, we hear the cries for “Mama” and we see the inability of those mothers to respond, protect, or defend their child.

The collapse of motherhood  107

Upon consideration of the various metaphors associated with the shawl, and through her depiction of the collapsing of motherhood in the anti-​world, Cynthia Ozick’s “The Shawl” sheds light on the depth to which the atrocities of the Nazi anti-​world reached:  the destruction of motherhood. Found in the prose of her short story, Ozick gives a voice to the harrowing reality of what millions of mothers and women experienced during the Holocaust. Furthermore, through her powerful prose portraying the characters Rosa and Magda in “The Shawl,” Ozick inserts her readers into unimaginable moments capturing the collapsing of relationships as seen through the mother and daughter roles. Through weaving key themes and various motifs, such as silence, into their narratives, the authors of Holocaust short stories provide their readers a glimpse into “planet Auschwitz.” With each short story illustrating these key themes of the collapsing of time, home, and relationships, they capture in their narratives the undoing of humanity and mankind during the twentieth century –​the Holocaust.

Notes 1 Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, Documents on Nazism 1919–​1945 (New  York: Viking Press, 1974), 463–​467. 2 “Nazi Court to Try First Foreign Jew for ‘rassenschande’.” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, November 3, 1935, www.jta.org/​1935/​11/​03/​archive/​nazi-​court-​to-​try-​first-​foreign-​ jew-​for-​rassenschande, accessed January 5, 2018. 3 Beverley Chalmers, Birth, Sex, and Abuse:  Women’s Voices under Nazi Rule (Guildford: Grosvenor House, 2015), 14. 4 Ibid., 14. 5 Ibid., 210. 6 Ibid., 210. 7 Friedman, Understanding Cynthia Ozick, 1. 8 Daniel R.  Schwarz, Imagining the Holocaust:  Representation, Responsibility, and Reading (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 304. 9 Ibid., 304. 10 Paul Celan, “Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen,” in Collected Prose, translated by Rosmarie Waldrop (Riverdale-​ on-​Hudson, N.Y.: Sheep Meadow Press, 1990), 34. 11 Friedman, Understanding Cynthia Ozick, 113–​114. 12 Schwarz, Imagining the Holocaust, 308. 13 Ozick, The Shawl, 5. 14 Ibid., 5. 15 Elaine M. Kauvar, Cynthia Ozick’s Fiction: Tradition and Invention (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 181. 16 Ibid., 181. 17 Yitzhak Arad, Israel Gutman, and Abraham Margaliot (eds.), Documents on the Holocaust: Selected Sources on the Destruction of the Jews of Germany and Austria, Poland, and the Soviet Union (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press; Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1999), 450–​453. 18 Lenore J. Weitzman and Dalia Ofer, Introduction to in Women in the Holocaust, edited by Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman (New Haven, C.T.: Yale University Press, 1998), 7.

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19 Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1995), 113–​114. 20 Ozick, The Shawl, 3. 21 Chalmers, Birth, Sex, and Abuse, 223–​224. 22 Ibid., 231. 23 Ozick, The Shawl, 4. 24 Ibid., 3. 25 Ibid., 4. 26 Ibid., 4. 27 Ibid., 4. 28 Ibid., 6. 29 Ibid., 6 30 Schwarz, Imagining the Holocaust, 305. 31 Ozick, The Shawl, 4. 32 Ibid.,  4–​5. 33 Schwarz, Imagining the Holocaust, 307. 34 Susanne Klingenstein,“Destructive Intimacy: The Shoah between Mother and Daughters in Fictions by Cynthia Ozick, Norma Rose, and Rebecca Goldstein,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 11, no. 2 (Fall 1992), 162–​173 (at 172). 35 Kauvar, Cynthia Ozick’s Fiction, 183. 36 Alan L. Berger, Crisis and Covenant: The Holocaust in American Jewish Fiction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), 54. 37 Alfred J.  Kolatch, The Second Jewish Book of Why (New  York:  Jonathan David, 1989); and Rabbi Nina Beth Cardin, The Tapestry of Jewish Time (Springfield, N.J.:  Behrman House, 2000). 38 Friedman, Understanding Cynthia Ozick, 114, 115. 39 Ozick, The Shawl, 6. 40 Ibid., 6. 41 Ibid.,  6–​7. 42 Ibid., 8. 43 Ibid., 8. 44 Ibid., 8. 45 Ibid., 9. 46 Ibid., 9. 47 Ibid., 10. 48 Ibid., 10. 49 Nomberg-​Przytyk, Auschwitz,  81–​82. 50 Martin H.  Manser (ed.), Zondervan Dictionary of Bible Themes:  The Accessible and Comprehensive Tool for Topical Studies (Grand Rapids, M.I.: Zondervan, 1999). 51 Schwarz, Imagining the Holocaust, 305.

CONCLUSION

Upon our consideration of the features of the Holocaust short story in Chapter 1, we noted how authors writing about the Holocaust choose this particular genre to sound their voice as a form of testimony, and in doing so, account for the time the world collapsed into an “anti-​world.” One of the defining features of the Holocaust short story is that it tends to focus on a moment of the Holocaust –​and this moment often captures the collapsing of time, relationships, and home. The chapters of this book all address different phases in which time, home, and relationships came under assault during the Holocaust. Through analyzing the motif in her short stories, Ida Fink captures the collapse of relationships that occurred during the early stages of ghettoization during the war. Moving from the ghetto life to life in the camps,Tadeusz Borowski’s short stories highlight the collapse of time and humanity during the camps through the role of the Muselmann figure. In this figure, we see the anti-​man of the anti-​world, and we address the significance of this figure in Holocaust literature. In Chapter 4, I analyze the collapse of relationships and home, as portrayed in the two Yiddish short stories by Rokhl Korn and Frume Halpern. These two stories weave both the motif of silence and the Muselmann figure into their narratives. Lastly, in Chapter  5, the collapse of motherhood is captured in Cynthia Ozick’s short story “The Shawl.” This story depicts the collapsing of relationships that occurred throughout the camps in the severing of the physical bond between mother and daughter. This absence of motherhood is indicative of the collapse of time, which renders human relationship impossible in Auschwitz. Holocaust scholar Steven Jacobs addresses the role of the artist when he writes, “Among those Shoah artists, both those who survived and those who did not, were those who chose to put their talents and skills to best use by recording what they were seeing and experiencing, no matter how painful, no matter how horrific.”1 Jacobs reiterates what several scholars of Holocaust literature have noted: to write about the Holocaust is to write as one who is bearing witness to the atrocity, as one

110 Conclusion

who is testifying and speaking for the silent ones –​the millions whose voices will never speak, testify, nor bear witness. This notion of writing as testimony is a notion that traces back to the Judeo-​Christian traditions that are rooted in the early biblical writings and addressed in the accompanying commentaries. Alongside the writer who bears witness, the reader bears witness upon reading short stories about the Holocaust. Within the Holocaust short stories is the rhetorical device of dramatic irony, which enables Holocaust stories to directly insert the readers into the narrative by weaving them into a story where they know the ending and where they are able to assume what might happen to the characters before the characters do (whether liquidation or ghettoization is about to occur, whether the train will lead to Auschwitz, or whether their food rations will decrease.). However, what makes this rhetorical tool of dramatic irony unique to the Holocaust short story is not only how the brevity of this form accentuates this device, but also the implication imposed on the reader by the author: to know, share, and in turn, tell (relate) that “story” by also bearing witness about the atrocities and human rights violations that occurred during the Holocaust. Through these stories and various “moments” captured in their narratives, the reader sees how the “anti-​world” is a place where fathers do not recognize their children, where a potato holds more value than a life, where neighbor turns on neighbor, and where both God and supposedly civilized humanity are silent when millions are being murdered. While David Hirsch,2 Lawrence Langer,3 and other writers address these various forms of Holocaust literature’s implication of the reader, they do not fully consider the unique ways the short story genre adds to this implication of the reader. Through my analysis of Holocaust short stories, I  highlight how these texts written in the short story form capture the moment of tension, crisis, utter silence, and the tearing apart of relationships (fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, neighbors, and lovers). Through this genre’s form, authors of these stories give the readers a glimpse into a world where death is celebrated, commanded, and carried out; or, perhaps better, these authors tear an opening into the fabric of an “anti-​world,” in which even death is not death. They focus on the destruction of relationships. They center on a moment when the world of the story collapses under the assaults by man, rather than flourishes by the uniting of humanity, so that time itself comes undone. Lastly, they tend to engage in a narrative testimony of the characters’ deaths, rather than their lives, which in turn, may assist the reader in remembering the people and places from which these stories arise. These stories aid in our understanding of the Holocaust, in that they highlight the various moments capturing the tearing apart of relations between family, friends, neighbors, and future generations. Elie Wiesel once said, “For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.” For the authors addressed in the book, they bear witness through testifying about the Holocaust in their short stories. For readers of these short stories, as well as other Holocaust literary texts, we bear witness by learning about these atrocities that took place across Nazi-​occupied Europe.

Conclusion  111

As Tadeusz Borowski wrote, “What a curious power words have.” Let us read, and in reading learn; let us learn, and in learning bear witness in the hope that nothing like the Holocaust ever happens again.

Notes 1 Jacobs, In Search of Yesterday, 151. 2 Hirsch, Deconstruction of Literature. 3 Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination.

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INDEX

Aarons,Victoria xiii, 2–​4, 112 Adorno, Theodor  112 Agamben, Giorgio 57, 112 Alexander, Edward xi, 11, 112 Améry, Jean 112 annihilation 13, 72, 93; annihilate 30; mass murder xiii, 8, 27, 66, 101 anti-​Jewish measures  14, 68 anti-​Semitic  21, 90 atrocity xi, xiii, 3, 8, 9, 11, 18, 22, 28, 45, 46, 72, 100, 109 Auschwitz ix–​xiv, 2, 3, 5–​9, 11, 16–​17, 19, 27, 44–​46, 48–​50, 53, 55, 57–​58, 60–​63, 66, 77, 82, 84–​86, 95–​96, 105–​107, 109–​110, 112, 114–​116, 118; after Auschwitz 78, 82 Bakhtin, Makhail Mikhailovich 15, 112 Benjamin, Walter 6, 19, 112 Berger, Alan L. 101–​102, 112 Bettelheim, Bruno 49, 112 bible 4, 18, 23, 29, 47, 69, 116; biblical xiii, 18, 29, 72, 101, 110 Blanchot, Maurice 112 Bloom, Harold 112 Booth, David 3, 113 Borowski, Tadeusz x, xii–​xiii, 1, 13, 16–​18, 40–​50, 52, 54–​63, 109, 111, 113, 116–​118; “The Supper” 55, 59–​60; “The Visit”  62; This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen 40, 57 bread 4, 60, 62, 84

Celan, Paul 91, 106, 113 Chalmers, Beverley 89–​90, 96, 113 Chambers, Ross 113 command 29, 50–​51, 53, 56, 69, 72 concentration camp: camp xii–​xiii, 3, 11, 18, 27, 44–​45, 48, 50, 55, 59–​60, 62–​63, 66, 78, 82, 85, 91–​95, 97, 100, 105, 116 concentration camps 14, 16, 57, 96 Cubilié, Anne 113 death camp: gas chambers 1, 4, 6–​7, 13–​14, 21, 25, 50, 57–​59, 95 death march 99 Eaglestone, Robert 113 Europe xiii, 5, 8, 40, 43–​44, 66, 68, 77, 82, 84, 86, 90, 101, 110, 117 evil 34, 36, 55, 75, 76, 89 Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven xi, 11, 17, 113 Fackenheim, Emil 55, 113 faith 102 family x–​xi, xiii, xv, 3, 8–​9, 14, 16–​17, 20, 22–​23, 27, 29, 31, 34–​36, 38, 44, 50, 53, 60, 63, 66–​68, 70–​82, 84, 86–​87, 89, 91–​93, 110; babies 74–​75, 81, 92–​106; child xii–​xiii, 3, 11, 17, 18, 27–​28, 31–​33, 36–​39, 57, 59, 69–​75, 80–​81, 93–​106; childhood 74–​75, 77, 79–​80, 106; children xiv, 4, 7, 19, 27, 31, 36, 40, 44, 71–​81, 83–​87, 95–​97, 101, 105–​106, 110; fathers xii, 5, 17, 31–​34, 37, 50, 72–​81, 91, 104; generation xv, 23–​24, 70–​71, 84;

120 Index

grandmother 71, 77–​82, 85; motherhood x, xiii, 16, 18, 27–​28, 75, 89, 91, 95, 97–​107, 109; mothers xii, xiii, 9, 17, 18, 27–​28, 31–​33, 35, 38–​39, 50, 67, 71, 74–​81, 87, 89–​90, 92–​107, 109 Fink, Ida x–​xv, 9, 13–​14, 16–​18, 21–​28, 30, 31–​40, 43, 56, 109, 113–​114, 117–​118; “Aryan Papers” xii, 17, 21, 28, 34–​37; “Jean-​Christophe” 17, 22, 24–​25, 28, 39; “The Key Game” xii, 14, 17, 22, 24, 28, 31, 34, 37, 39; A Scrap of Time and Other Stories xi, 17, 23, 24, 113 Franklin, Ruth 45, 113 Fridman, Lea Wernick  113 Friedman, Lawrence S. xi, xiii, 6, 10, 18, 91, 92, 102, 113 Fuchs, Esther 113

21, 24, 92–​93, 97, 109; collapse of time ix–​x, 1–​3, 7, 10–​11, 13–​16, 21, 25, 28, 40, 43, 45, 50, 69, 83, 90, 91, 97, 109 home x, xiii, 2, 9, 28, 32, 50, 63, 66–​68, 71–​72, 76, 78–​79, 81–​83, 85–​86, 92, 98, 100–​101, 107, 109; Nazi assault on the home xiii, 13, 63, 66, 68–​69, 76–​77, 83, 86 human rights 110 humanity xii, xiv–​xv, 2, 4, 5, 7, 16–​17, 19, 30, 37–​38, 43, 45, 48–​49, 51, 53–​54, 57, 59–​61, 84, 86–​87, 90, 107, 109–​110

gas chambers: Cyclone B 1, 13, 57, 59 Germany 43, 68, 90, 112 ghetto xiv, 3, 21, 44, 66, 72, 74, 76, 85, 95, 109; ghettoes 28; ghettoization xiv, 19, 109, 110; Warsaw 36, 39, 44, 112, 114 Ginsburg, Ruth 114 Glowacka, Dorota xv, 114 Goethe, Wolfgang von 5, 6, 10, 15, 114 Goldenberg, Myrna 23, 34, 114

Jacobs, Steven xiii, 18, 109, 114 Jew 28, 30, 35, 37, 50, 53, 60, 74, 89, 99, 116; Jewish xiii–​xiv, 3–​6, 9, 13–​14, 18, 28, 30, 43, 55, 60, 66–​68, 70, 71–​76, 85–​86, 89–​93, 96–​97, 101–​102, 112–​116, 118 Judaic teachings 29, 102 Judeo-Christian 3–​4, 29, 36, 69, 100, 106

Haas, Peter J. 114 Halpern, Frume x, xiii, 14, 16, 17, 66–​68, 70–​71, 82–​83, 85–​87, 114, 118; “Dog Blood” 17, 66, 82, 84–​86, 114 hate 48–​49 Hebrew 3, 4, 69, 72, 101–​102 hiding xii, 7, 18, 25, 31, 55, 92 Hirsch, David xiv, 2, 19, 110, 114, 116 Hitler, Adolf 2, 8, 13, 36, 43–​44, 78–​79 Holocaust ix–​xv, 1, 3–​11, 13, 15–​31, 34, 37, 39, 43, 45–​46, 48–​55, 60, 63, 66–​71, 73–​76, 78, 82–​83, 85–​87, 89–​93, 95, 98–​101, 106–​107, 109–​118; post-​Holocaust 4, 82–​83, 85; Shoah xiv Holocaust literature ix, xi, xiii–​xv, 5, 7, 11, 18–​20, 30, 40, 46, 78, 86, 91, 109–​110 Holocaust short story ix–​x, xiv, 1, 3, 5, 7, 8–​11, 13, 16, 19, 24, 47, 50, 66, 70, 83, 86, 92, 106, 109, 110 Holocaust short story theme xi, 7, 10, 16, 53, 59, 69, 95, 97, 106; anti-​man x, 43–​45, 48–​50, 54–​58, 60–​62, 109; anti-​world x, xi–​xiv, 1–​3, 5, 7–​11, 13, 14, 16–​19, 21–​28, 30–​32, 34, 36–​40, 43–​63, 66, 68–​77, 82–​83, 85–​110; collapse of home 17, 83; collapse of relationship 2,

injustice 30, 37–​39, 56; language of xii, 9, 17, 29, 38, 47, 51, 54, 56, 70; rhetoric of 38–​39, 56, 78 Israel 9, 27, 84, 112

Kant, Immanuel 14–​15, 114 Kaplan, Chaim 74, 114 Kardos, Michael ix, xv, 11, 114 Katz, Claire Elis 51–​52, 114 Ka-​Tzetnik, 135633 2, 16, 114 Kauvar, Elaine M. 94, 101–​102, 114 Kern, Stephen 14, 114 Korn, Rokhl x, xiii, 13–​14, 16–​17, 63, 66–​78, 80, 82, 85–​87, 109, 115, 117; “End of the Road” xii, 17, 63, 66, 68, 69, 71, 77, 82, 86 Kott, Jan 46, 115 LaCapra, Dominick 115 Langer, Lawrence xi–​xiv, 10, 17, 19, 110, 115 law 30, 52–​53, 73, 89–​90, 95, 115 Leak, Andrew 115 Lengyel, Olga 95, 115 Levi, Primo 3, 46–​50, 99, 115 Lévinas, Emmanuel 28–​31, 38–​39, 50–​54, 56, 114–​115 Levine, Michael 113, 115 life x–​xiv, 2–​5, 7–​11, 13, 16–​17, 19, 21–​23, 25–​26, 30, 31–​33, 36, 40, 43–​45, 49–​51, 54–​55, 57, 59–​63, 66, 68, 71–​80, 82–​87, 89, 91–​97, 99–​102, 104, 106, 109, 110, 116

Index  121

liquidation xiv, 19, 110 literary genre ix, 2, 6, 8, 10, 11, 13, 16 Lohafer, Susan xiv, 115 love xiv, 13, 18, 27, 29, 34, 44, 48, 51, 55, 73, 78, 80, 82, 92, 95, 100, 102 mass death 5, 6, 22 Matthews, Brander 6, 116 memory xii–​xiii, 3, 5, 16–​17, 22, 24–​25, 38, 51, 55, 59, 66, 73, 76–​78, 80–​82, 85, 91–​92 Muselmann x, xii, 16–​17, 40, 43, 45–​58, 60–​61, 63, 99, 109 Nazi x, xii–​xiii, 14, 17, 22–​23, 28, 30, 38–​40, 43, 45, 49–​50, 52, 55, 57–​59, 61, 66, 68–​71, 74, 76, 78–​82, 86, 89, 90–​91, 95, 97, 99, 101, 107, 110, 113–​114, 116–​117; Nazi atrocities 24; Nazis ix–​xiii, 5, 13, 16–​17, 22, 28–​30, 37, 43, 45, 48–​50, 52–​53, 56, 58–​60, 62–​63, 66–​68, 71, 74–​75, 77–​78, 82, 84, 86–​87, 89–​90, 93–​94, 97, 100, 106 Nomberg-​Przytyk, Sara 27, 58, 95, 105, 116 novel ix–​x, 2, 7, 8, 10, 15, 40, 47; novella ix, 5–​6, 91 Nuremburg Laws 13, 53 Ozick, Cynthia x, xiii, 13, 16, 18, 87, 89–​102, 106–​107, 109, 112–​118; “The Shawl” xiii, 89–​93, 95, 106–​107 Parmet, Harriet L. 116 Patterson, David 30, 39, 52, 55, 72–​75, 77, 83, 116 perpetrator 9, 38 Pinsker, Sanford xiii, 18, 117 poetry 67; poem x, 106 Poland 23, 44, 67–​68, 112 Pratt, Mary Louise 6–​10, 117 prison 44, 78; Pawiak 44 reader x–​xiv, 2, 5, 7–​13, 16, 17, 19, 20, 22, 24–​25, 28, 30–​34, 36–​37, 46, 50–​51, 54, 56–​58, 60, 62–​63, 68–​69, 72, 74, 76, 78, 80–​82, 84–​86, 93, 96–​100, 104, 106, 110; reader as witness xiv Rosen, Alan 117 Rosenberg, Alan 117 Rosenfeld, Alvin H. xi, xv, 11, 40, 112, 117 Roskies, David G. 47, 70–​71, 86, 117

Schwarz, Daniel R. 91–​93, 99, 100–​101, 117 Shandler, Jeffrey 70, 117 Shekhinah 27, 75, 76, 84 Sicher, Efraim 118 silence xiv, 11, 17, 19, 21–​28, 30–​31, 33–​39, 43, 50, 56, 58, 68–​69, 70–​71, 73, 75, 77, 83, 85–​86, 93, 103–​104, 106–​107, 109–​110 Sofsky, Efraim 49, 118 Soltes, Ori Z. 76, 118 Stafford, Kim Robert 118 Stein, Lorin 118 Stern, Jerome x–​xi, xv, 6, 68–​69, 118 Stibbe, Matthew 118 storytelling 3–​4, 11, 23, 45, 70 survival 24, 32–​33, 37, 46, 90, 93 survivor xiv, 3, 16, 18, 46–​47, 49, 63, 91 testimony xiii–xv, 18, 20, 30, 36, 46–​47, 60, 109, 110; testimonial ix, 2, 3, 5, 8–​9, 11, 34, 46–​47, 78; testimonies ix, 9, 46, 73, 82, 90; writing as testimony xiii, 18 Third Reich 40, 90, 118 trauma xiv, 83 truth 7, 19, 24, 47–​48, 60, 63, 73, 116 Verinakis, Theofanis 48, 118 victim 9, 13, 23, 27–​28, 37–​38, 47–​48, 50, 53, 58–​59, 68, 71, 78, 89–​90, 92, 106; dehumanization 48, 59, 96, 100; dehumanize 49, 58–​59, 93; dehumanized xii, 18, 55, 60, 90; sexual violence 90, 95; violence 35, 74, 96; voiceless 60, 63, 70 Wannsee conference 43, 115 war 3–​4, 36, 44–​45, 66–​68, 70, 78, 90, 99, 109 Weitzman, Lenore J. 118 Wiesel, Elie xiv, 2, 3, 5, 27, 71, 110, 113, 116, 118 Wilczynski, Marek xi, xv, 17, 118 Wirth, Andrzej 47, 118 witness ix, xiii–​xiv, 5–​6, 16, 18, 19, 44–​49, 53, 71, 86, 92, 109–​111; witnessing 44–​45, 63 Wollaston, Isabel 47, 49, 118 Yiddish x, xiii, 17, 22–​23, 58, 66–​71, 86, 91, 109, 114–​118 Young, James Edward 17, 118