ozick

8/8/2019 ozick

1/9

SAJL 46 Volume 28 (2009)

Narrative Constructs and Border Transgressions

in Holocaust Literature within the American

Context1

Mihai Mndra

Michael McKeon states, in his introduction to the anthologyTheory of the Novel:A

Historical Approach, that a genre is a problem solving model on the level o orm

(1). One is tempted to consider each work as an isolated case, a trait in search o

a type (4). This approach suits the novel as orm encompassing extremely het-

erogeneous matter. Ater production and consumption what remains is, as Alain

Robbe-Grillet declares, the perceived object, a partial and provisional signi-

cation (McKeon 804). Both writer and reader accede to reality via the betraying

slippery words. The language they put together, writing and reading, is loaded with

personal cultural memory.

When the reality represented in novelistic matrix is as traumatic and uncanny

as the Holocaust, then genre has to get adjusted to the sinuous, tricky psyche remem-

bering and attempting to communicate. Trauma blocks or a long while the capacity

to reminisce and express. One tells the catastrophic story abiding by the rules o the

aected brain and soul o the witness, participant, or perpetrator.In the case o indirect renditions o history, the extent and depth o documen-

tation stand trial, as much as the capacity to reconstruct it via imagination. Access

to the Shoah2may be denied by the tragically incommensurable event, but lack o

empiric experience may help. One classical example is oered by the midrash o

Lamentations by Rabbi Judah the Prince and Rabbi Yohanan. The rst one, although

the compiler o the Mishnah and a pre-eminent sage o the period was bested by

R. Yohanan, his disciple, and one o the Amorites, the rabbis who succeeded the

sages o the Mishnah and whose authority was considered secondary. The paradoxis resolved by indicating the distance in time o each rom the destruction o the

Temple. Rabbi J. the P. lived in the second hal o the second century and the begin-

ning o the third, and though not an eye witness to the horrible consequences o

the Bar Kochba wars o 132-35, he was close enough to hear accounts o witnesses

8/8/2019 ozick

2/9

Narrative Constructs and Border Transgressions in Holocaust Literature 47

Volume 28 2009

and to observe the eects o the disaster. R. Y., living one generation later, was not

burdened by the same weight o memory. Experience and memory can act as im-

pediments to interpretation and authenticity. Reading and interpreting depend not

upon the authenticity o experience, but upon will and imagination: the will to re-

cover meaning rom the text and the imagination o exegetical ingenuity, which in

turn depend or their success upon time and distance (Mintz 51).I shall discuss three Holocaust hybrid texts whose constructors represent both

cases: Elie Wiesels novel, Night(French 1958/English 1960), actually rooted in

the authors personal experience, as well as two novels: Cynthia Ozicks The Shawl

(1989) and Jonathan Saran Foers Everything Is Illuminated (2002), imaginarily

roundabout artistic representations o the catastrophic event. Their very unorthodox

structures illustrate the diculty o making the matter o literary genre contain a

humanly disruptive occurrence. The uncanny schizoid nature o the Holocaust as

Final Solution, meant to exterminate a whole ethnic group by routine bureaucraticand technological eciency is refected in the matter o these novels.

Wiesels cultural and experiential acquisitions inused in his testimonial text

include interest in the Talmud, a certain complicated, existentialist Judaism, which

mixes Camusian rebellion with mystical aith, and two years o his teenage child-

hood spent in our Nazi concentration camps (Auschwitz, Buna, Buchenwald, and

Gleiwitz).Nightis born out o a tormenting doubt concerning the artistic or even

scientic possibility or Hurban3 to be described or explained. The Holocaust dees

reerence, analogy, he wrote (Wiesel 1968: 26). It is unique in history and irretriev-able in documentary writing or ction. However, ten years ater liberation, he meets

the challenge. The brie, terse sentences combining actual rendition with poetical

lamentation using biblical rhetoric are the product o an eort to capture the favor

o cruelty, suering, and despair o his Nazi camp experience. Wiesel writes:

() everything that has to do with writing is sacred. Since the event itsel

is testimony, it must be communicated in its purest orm. Later on come

the commentariesBut rst is that rst word, which must be basic and

austere. That is why I try to capture in writing what we call the tzimtzumor condensationone word instead o hundreds. (Edelman II, 83)

The austere expression and brieness come out o this respect or the economy and

concentration o words as urgent messengers o undamental truths. He had the

responsibility to communicate the incommunicable cataclysm as near as possible

to its resisting core. There are at least two conessed sources o this aesthetic creed:

religious and historical; Rebbe Mendel o Kotzk said that truth can sometimes be

communicated by words, though there is a level o truth so deep it can be conveyed

only by silence (Wiesel 1970: I, 239). He also sees himsel as a writer in the traditiono Emanuel Ringelbaum and Chaim Kaplan, the chroniclers o the Jewish agony in

the Warsaw Ghetto (Against Silence 21). I was amazed and astounded by the style,

he writes. Such an incisive short style; sometimes sentences o one word. When I

read them I understood my own style, why I wrote in such a condensed wayAc-

tually I saw mysel ollowing in their ootsteps (Edeleman II, 78).

8/8/2019 ozick

3/9

SAJL Studies in American Jewish Literature

48 Mihai Mndra

The ghetto memoir style, actual-descriptive, and lapidary is mixed with poeti-

cal interstices and religious connotations, in the Book oLamentations manner:

A barrel o petrol at the entrance. Disinection. Everyone was soaked in it.

The a hot shower. At high speed. As we came out rom the water, we were

driven outside. More running. Another barracks, the store. Very long tables.

Mountains o prison clothes. On we ran. As we passed, trousers, tunic, shirt,

and socks were thrown to us. (Wiesel 1960:34)

And a ew pages urther he evokes the Eve o Rosh Hashana at Buna:

What are You, my God, I thought angrily, compared to this aficted

crowd, proclaiming to You their aith their anger, their revolt? What does

Your greatness mean Lord o the Universe, in the ace o all this weakness,

this decomposition, and this decay? Why do You still trouble their sick

minds, their crippled bodies? (Wiesel 1960:63)

Possible similarities with Lamentations continue, deploring the destruction o Jeru-

salem and the First Temple (587 B.C.) by the Neo-Babylonian (626 B.C.). The historic

event was dened as catastrophe or its apparently nal spiritual destructive aspect:

the religious lie o the nation had been broken. All means o communication with

God were terminated. It was also destruction that made no sense; how could God

permit this? How could God disappear (no more Temple).The incommensurabil-

ity o the tragedy as related to the poets calling to heal via language (metaphors)

reminds readers o Wiesels and other Holocaust writers diculties in representingthe Nazi catastrophe. The poet(s) oLamentations had the same creative problems:

to nd the way to express the event (Mintz 22). Like withNight, one perceives and

renders collective not individual undeserved and unexplained pain (see quotations

on the Jews suering and God). Inimical representation o God, as it appears below,

compares with Wiesels above:

From above [the Lord] sent a re

Down into my bones.

He spread a net or my eet,

He hurled me backwards(Mintz 27)

According to Mintz in Lamentations God is also pictured as a erce hunter,

stalking and ensnaring his prey, author o the Destruction, and the general

o a ravaging army (Mintz 27).

The religious spirit oLamentations penetratesNightparadoxically slightedby secular doubt; Moshe the Beadle, the Talmud scholar, appears as a prophet o

catastrophe. No mystical Jeremiah-like intuitions dene his status. The motivation

is empirical and pragmatic. He had witnessed the Nazi murder o Romanian Jews

o Hungarian extraction rom Sighet and miraculously escaped death to send his

8/8/2019 ozick

4/9


Volume 28 2009

warning. However, he is traditionally misunderstood and qualied, in the spirit o

the biblical tradition, as mad:

He told his storyThrough long days and nights, he went rom one Jew-

ish house to anotherPeople reused not only to believe his stories, but

even to listen to them. Hes just trying to make us pity him. What an

imaginations he has! they said. Or even: Poor ellow. Hes gone mad.

(Wiesel 1960: 4-5)

There are scholars who consider that Lamentations (possibly written by Jeremiah)

was a continuation o pre-exilic prophecy. The prophets predicted doom i the people

did not stop sinning. They did not stop, and they were punished with Babylonian

annihilation (Stinespring 83-84). However, Wiesel, at the time o writing Night,

seems to have considered the religious and the secular as parallel realities. Moshe,

the Kabbala teacher turned into a prophet o doom, is actually a witness o catas-trophe turned into messenger o death and emptied o his Jewish aith: Moshe had

changed. There was no longer any joy in his eyesHe no longer talked to me o God

or o the cabbala, but only o what he had seen (Wiesel 1960: 4).

The only elements that make him a secular singular copy o the prophet(s) o

Lamentations are his miraculous escape and the drama o the peoples incapacity to

understand and believe him:

I have been saved miraculously. I managed to get back here. Where did

I get the strength rom? I wanted to come back to Sighet to tell you thestory o my death. So that you could prepare yourselves while there was

still timeI wantedto warn you. And see how it is, no one will listen to

me. (Wiesel 1960: 5)

Wiesel, like the author(s) oLamentations, deplores the punishment o the Jews

hoping or redemption:

In one ultimate moment o lucidity it seemed to me that we were damned

souls wandering in the hal-world, souls condemned to wander through

space till the generations o man came to an end, seeking their redemption,seeking oblivionwithout hope o nding it. (Wiesel 1960: 34)

The structure o the plot inNightmay also allude to religious sources. It seems to

ollow David Roskies Jewish memory origination in the covenantal scheme4: ex-

ile (deportation), destruction (the burning o mother and sister in the Birkenau

ovens, the re evoked by Mrs. Schchter in the cattle train taking Sighets Jews to

Birkenau), martyrdom o ather. However, the similarities are interrupted by the

lack o redemption. Instead, the end o the ordeal brings physical satisaction (ood

and sex), near death o fesh (ood poisoning), and spirit (Eliezer sees himsel as acorpse). The lack o redemption with Wiesel is non-normative. Everything is set

against an apocalyptic landscape.

The biblical covenantal scheme (Adam and Eve, Noah, Moses) was replaced

in Holocaust literature by its secular version, where the reerence point is no longer

8/8/2019 ozick

5/9


50 Mihai Mndra

the Old Testament but history. Wiesel the experiential writer and Wiesel the would-

be Talmudist cooperate in this rst book. The tragedy oHurban is expressed in the

dual, existentially splitting actual and symbolical narrative garb. However, history

is not abrogated, and no messianic message closes WieselsNight. The lamentation

tonality is there, as well as the everyday concentration camp reality, never ollowed

by hope or celebratory solutions.I the hybridityo Elie WieselsNightis motivated by the singular character-

istics o the event described and the authors status oDie Endlsung5 survivor, the

composite structure o Cynthia Ozicks book The Shawl(1989) is paradoxically the

result o this writers strictly aesthetic link to her Jewish ethnicity. The Holocaust

constitutes or Ozick, who has no personal experience o it, a means to revive Jewish

memory in America, the country that belatedly saved but also assimilated Hitlers

victims into a consumerist, hedonist culture inviting orgetulness.

Ozick realizes in 1989 that the storyThe Shawland the novella Rosa, initiallypublished separately in 1977 and in 1980, respectively, go together as a Holocaust text

(The Shawl) and its North American midrash6 (Rosa). Consequently, she publishes

them jointly in one book orm entitled The Shawlin 1983. The short story is inspired

by a brie historical account taken rom William L. Shirers book The Rise and Fall

of the Third Reich (1960) (Friedrich 93). A young mother marching to and then kept

in a concentration camp is trying to hide her toddler, Magda, rom the Nazis, who

nally hurl her onto the electried ence. The story is told in a highly metaphorical

manner. Ozick seems to suggest that the past can be humanized and thus properlyconveyed in this way. Human pain, destruction, and loss are approached in mod-

ernist ashion through symbolical representations o the psyche:

Stella was ravenous. Her knees were tumors on sticks, her elbows chicken

bones. (Ozick 1990: 3)

Rosa did not eel hunger; she elt light, not like someone walking but like

someone in a aint, in trance, arrested in a t, someone who is already a foat-

ing angel, alert and seeing everything, but in the air, not there, not touching

the road. As i teetering on the tips o her ngernails. (Ozick 1990: 4)

Sometimes the electricity inside the ence would seem to hum; even Stella

said it was only an imagining, but Rosa heard real sounds in the wire:

grainy sad voices. The arther she was rom the ence, the more clearly the

voices crowded at herThe lamenting voices strummed so convincingly,

so passionately, it was impossible to suspect them o being phantoms.

(Ozick 1990: 9)

Ozick explains this stylistic method in her essay Metaphor and Memory.7 She con-

siders that metaphor preserves and transmits the past via imagination. It is a way o

translating history into human language, communicating it successully:

Through metaphor, the past has the capacity to imagine us, and we it. Those

who have no pain can imagine those who suer. Those at the center can

8/8/2019 ozick

6/9


Volume 28 2009

imagine what it is to be outside. The strong can imagine the weakWe

strangers can imagine the amiliar hearts o strangers. (Ozick 1991: 283)

The book may be considered an ingenious novel where past and present appear in a

creative relationship. Rosa Lublin and Stella, her niece, survive the Nazi nightmare

poetically and tragically represented in the short story. In the novella, they live in theUnited States in opposite existential states, as a direct consequence o Stellas induc-

ing the murder o Magda, Rosas daughter, obsessively symbolized by the shawl.

Although Rosa subsists in novel genre terms, with its quasi realistic descrip-

tions o location (Miami) and class (Jewish American high middle class: Finkel-

stein, Simon Persky; Rosas similar social position: ather, president o the Warsaw

National Bank beore the Holocaust), its interpretative/midrashic aspects constitute

the core o the ctional matter. The shawls and the dead toddlers ate reverberate

and shape characters and the vision o contemporary American Jewry as orgetul

o its ethnicity, o America as scientically dealing with the historic drama, mem-

ory, and trauma mutilating everyday human relations. Ozicks midrash decodes

the present consequences o the Holocaust in the lives o her illustrative characters

maniestations: Rosas criticism o Finkelsteins business attitude toward her Jew-

ish emblematic suering, the continuous perception o Stella, who dared to steal

Magdas shawl, thus hurrying her tragic demise, as the criminal enemy, Dr. Trees

obsessive insistence to treat Rosa or her trauma triggered delusions, Simon Perskys

opposing his humanistic seize the day response to obsessive, sel-destructive hate

engendering Holocaust memory. Finally, the America o the novella appears as ool-ish and trivial in the light o the European Holocaust:

Rosa hugged the box [my note: containing the shawl]; she was eeling ool-

ish, trivial. Everything was rivolous here, even the deepest property o be-

ing. It seemed to her someone had cut out her lie-organs and given them

to her to hold. (Ozick 1990:56)

The novelistic duality o Holocaust representation also appears in Jonathan Saran

Foers Everything is Illuminated (2002). Foer has no biographical Holocaust experi-

ence. Imagination looms large and deep in his debut novel. Shtetl (Trachimbrod/

Soovka) lie and characters (Yankel and Brod imagine each other) are gments o

magic realism contrivance, o academic composition class practice. In postmodern-

ist ashion, the writer doubts history relevance, that is, the attempts to organize and

explain the past or acknowledge its subjectivity by undermining it imaginatively and

linguistically. Thus, he highlights the importance o the mythopoeic and language

lters separating human consciousness rom the Holocaust.

A young American Jew in his twenties, Jonathan Saran comes to Ukraine

to nd the woman (supposedly called Augustine) who saved his grandather romthe Nazis during WWII. He is helped, via the Heritage Tour travel agency run by

Alexender Perchovs ather, by Alex and his grandather. They nd instead Lista,

a survivor o the pogrom that destroyed Trachimbrod/Soovka (named ater an

eponymous mad squire), a shtetl where Jonathans grandather had been born and

8/8/2019 ozick

7/9


52 Mihai Mndra

lived. Alexs grandather will, in the end, commit suicide due to awakened remorse

or causing the death o Herschel, his Jewish riend, in order to save his own and

his amilys lives.

Foers novel contains three types o discourses, two o which mirror the Ho-

locaust in literary American English: Listas and Alexs grandathers testimonies

and Foers, a doppelganger character-writer, magical realistic shtetl lie stories. Thethird discourse renders, in plain, realistic manner, post-communist Ukraine, in a

creatively original Ukrainian-American English doublespeak lingo. The vocabulary

used by Alex, in his story o the trip and his post-trip letters to Jonathan Saran,

seems to indicate Foers expertise in pre-1989 East Communist mechanical per-

ception o Western culture dictated by ideological Iron Curtains. Modern Western

languages were taught, in the Communist Block, according to academically out o

ashion dictionaries and East European textbooks using high standard, archaic,

non-colloquial dead lingos. The real live West was replaced by its dead classic cul-ture. In this way, Ukraine and America are placed, even in the atermath o the 1989

communist revolutions, at an almost incommunicado distance: one highlights es-

pecially the diculty or the East to perceive correct North America otherwise than

enobled (Foer 3) in comparison with humble (ibid.) Ukraine. Here are a ew

lexical examples selected rom Perchovs discourse: cogitate instead o think,

view instead o watch, repose instead o rest, dislodge instead o move,

manuacture instead o make.

The palpable present (1997, 1998) is located in post-communist Ukraine. Thereis also the immediate present o the letters addressed by Perchov to Foer ater the

trip, in Ukrainian-American English. The irretrievable past (1790s, 1940s, 1960s)

is placed by the protagonist-narrator Foer in Trachimbrod/Soovka, the virtually

assumed shtetl in Ukraine, where Bord and Saran, his presumed grandparents, are

imaginatively positioned.

There has been no attempt, so ar, to organize the multiplicity o Holocaust

novels by relating their narrative structures to the nature o the Holocaust repre-

sented and the cultural moment when they were written. The literary history books

organized around this topic are either collections o essays on individual novels or

they use chronological and geographical criteria or discussion.

I tried to point out three literary genre disruptions in three books that are

ormally perceived as novels. My assumption is that such inner dislocations are

caused by the psychological and, consequently, artistic impossibility to integrate

the historical event represented, the Holocaust, into a coherent narrative matrix,

due to the writers or any creators incapacity to incorporate that event into their

human apparatus.

When, however, coherently narrative structure, unitary language and stylenovels about the Holocaust are written, readers should be suspicious o acts pro-

cessed to t novelistic patterns. This applies to other genres or domains that re-

construct the Shoah. Holocaust testimonies like Ruths Story: A Survivors Memoir

(1997) and Ruth Klugers Still Alive (2001) assume the garb o narrative testimony

8/8/2019 ozick

8/9


Volume 28 2009

and oered wholesome descriptive versions o the humanly incoherent and inex-

plicable. So did such highly and expertly organized super productions like Steven

Spielbergs Schindlers List(1993).

The Holocaust novels discussed here are truthul attempts at rendering the

genuine, problematic phenomenon and its unusual nature characterized by the split-

ting and mincing o imaginary, harmonious humanity into evil particles engagedin the Brownian movement o history. Art replicates history. This is whyNightis

torn between actual and Bible existentialist rhetoric, The Shawlsuperimposes the

poetically imagined Holocaust with its secular contemporarymidrash that tries to

suggest the esoteric aspect o the Shoahs survivors psyche, and Everything Is Illu-

minated ironically spreads the novel matter over three narrative levels (epistolary,

descriptive narrative, and magic realism) expressed in two linguistic versions. These

three works tell readers that literature can hint, through its means, in the text, at

the strangeness, inhumanity, and illogicality o history.

Notes

1. Acknowledgment: The writing o this paper was partially supported by UEFISCU

grant no.280/October 1, 2007 [code 1003] or the research project entitled Cultures o

Diaspora: The Margin and the Mainstream in Jewish-Romanian and Jewish-American

Literatures.

2. Hebrew or Holocaust. The usage o a variety o terms or the word Holocaust,

motivated by the ancient connotation o the English word (originating in the Greek ,

holkauston: holos, completely and kaustos, burnt, with ritual sacricial sense), was

suggested by Alan L. Bergers Crisis and Covenant. The Holocaust in American Jewish Fiction.

Albany: State University o New York, 1985 note 2, 197.

3. Yiddish or Holocaust.

4. The Jewish literature o destruction (to speciy/explain) was part o a three-way

dialogue that engaged the writer, the people and the God o Israel. The basis or that dialogue

was the covenantal ideal o sin-retribution-and-restoration. This covenantal ideal was laid

out explicitly in the biblical exhortations o Moses and the Prophets to the Israelites. I the

Israelites observed the commandments, the Land would yield its ruit; i they sinned, the

land would spew them o. But exile did not mean abandonment, or i Israel returned tothe ways o God, He would return them to their LandIn traditional Jewish society, one

rehearsed the catastrophes o old at set times in the liturgical calendar, according to xed rites

o mourning and penitence. I there ever existed a ormal anthology o Jewish responses to

catastrophe, it was the collection okinnot (dirges) or the Ninth o Av, the ocial date when

the First and Second Temples were destroyed. In addition to the ull text o Lamentations,

these kinot included supplementary poems that refected on later disasters in Jewish history.

They ended with a cycle o poems on the Land o Israel, thus looking ahead to the abrogation

o history with the coming o the Messiah. This juxtaposition o mourning and celebration,

o asting and easting, was the operative principle o Jewish collective memory. (Roskies

4-5)

5. German or the Final Solution.

6. The rabbinic hermeneutic technique o interpretation and expansion o the

Talmud.

7. Ozick 1990: 26583.

8/8/2019 ozick

9/9


54 Mihai Mndra

Works Cited

Abrahamson, Irving.Against Silence. Ed. The Voice and Vision of Elie Wiesel. New York: Ho-

locaust Library, 1985.

Berger, Alan L. Crisis and Covenant: The Holocaust in American Jewish Fiction. Albany: State

University o New York, 1985.

Edelman, Lily. The Use o Words and the Weight o Silence. National Jewish Monthly,Nov. 1973.

Foer, Saran Jonathan. Everything Is Illuminated. London: Penguin Books, 2002.

Friedrich, Marianne M. The Rendition o Memory in Cynthia Ozicks The Shawl. Eds.

Alan L. Berger and Gloria L. Cronin.Jewish American and Holocaust Literature: Repre-

sentation in the Postmodern World. Albany: State U o New York P, 2004.

McKeon Michael. Ed. Theory of the Novel. A Historical Approach. Baltimore & London: The

Johns Hopkins UP, 2000.

Ozick, Cynthia.Metaphor and Memory. New York: Vintage International, 1990.

. The Shawl. New York: Vintage International, 1991.Roskies, David G. The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe. Ed. Phila-

delphia, Jerusalem, New York: The Jewish Publication Society, 1988.

Stinespring, W. F. Review o Norman K. Gottwalds Studies in the Book o Lamentations.

Studies in Biblical Theology, 14 (1954): 122.Journal of Biblical Literature, 75.1 (Mar., 1956):

134.

Wiesel, Elie.Night. New York: Bantam Books, 1960.

. Legends of Our Time. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1968.

. From Holocaust to Rebirth. New York: Council o Jewish Federations and Welare

Funds, 1970.

Mihai Mndra, University o Bucharest

ozick

Documents

Transcript of ozick