The Holocaust Novel

Efraim Sicher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135457150
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The first comprehensive study of Holocaust literature as a major postwar literary genre, The Holocaust Novel provides an ideal student guide to the powerful and moving works written in response to this historical tragedy. This student-friendly volume answers a dire need for readers to understand a genre in which boundaries and often blurred between history, fiction, autobiography, and memoir. Other essential features for students here include an annotated bibliography, chronology, and further reading list. Major texts discussed include such widely taught works as Night, Maus, The Shawl, Schindler's List, Sophie's Choice, White Noise, and Time's Arrow.

Chapter 1

About the Holocaust Novel

BIRTH OF A GENRE

The unbelievable, sickening sight of emaciated walking skeletons revealed to the liberators of the concentration camps in 1945 a class of humanity hitherto inconceivable and unknown. The eyes of the inmates that met the gaze of Allied soldiers marked the immeasurable distance that could not be bridged by words, only by terror. From inside the barbed wire, Jorge Semprun saw that gaze and observed: “What I read in their eyes is fear.”¹ The look in the prisoner’s eye, wrote the French Catholic poet and Mauthausen survivor, Jean Cayrol, in 1946, “was indeed that of a man who had seen too much, a look which leaps over obstacles, which contemplates what blinds it.”² A year later, Cayrol characterized the “Lazarean novelisitic” as an apocalyptic literature of the extreme and the natural, “the fantastic and the real, terror and exaltation,” a literature that blocks its decipherment and prevents the unfolding of the plot and all communication between characters; like some modern forms of art which resist representation.³

To relate these human forms standing behind the barbed wire to some mythical or poetic archetype seems to imply a miserable failure of the imagination, or, worse, an obscene injustice. Yet it is to literary paradigms that David Rousset, a French Resistance fighter caught by the Gestapo and sent to Buchenwald, resorts in trying to capture for his incredulous readers, just two years after liberation, the hell ruled by Ubu Roi:

The inmates of the camp belong to a world by Céline with overtones of Kafka. The color in vogue is green. His hands tied behind his back, a man kneels on an iron bar that penetrates slowly, inexorably, into his flesh, his face streaming with sweat, his eyes bulging out of his head, fixed on a glaring light, inescapable and insistent, that holds him through the hours of an eternity, sears his eyelids, drains his brain and peoples it with insane fears and yearnings as relentless as thirst….⁴

The figural has become literal, a world beyond metaphor, which Rousset calls the “concentrationary universe.” It is a world of its own, with its laws and logic, that

has little in common with the existence of an inhabitant of Paris or Toulouse, New York, or Tiflis. But the very fact that this concentrationary universe exists at all is not without importance for the meaning of the universe of ordinary people, of mankind as men. It is not enough to establish a sort of physical contact with this life so totally separated from the accepted structure of the twentieth century. There still remain its rules to be grasped and its meaning to be understood.⁵

Rousset analyzes this world as a human society that works by brutalization and dehumanization. The methodical and routine torture is a lesson in totalitarian control, one learned by the communist internees who had built their own infrastructure of power within the camps.

The unwanted waste of society is to be degraded and drained of the last vestiges of humanity. However, if resistance fighters, or political and religious dissidents, had committed themselves to fighting the system, a different perspective is offered by the victim of the Nazi state’s program for the annihilation of the Jewish race. This was “excrement” to be eliminated, not simply subjected to detention for the better discipline through terror of the population. To this purpose, the system treated Jews as beasts, unworthy of life (not unlike the mentally retarded and crippled who had originally been the victims of euthanasia by gassing). Survival meant—in contrast to Rousset’s prison camps—not just maintaining a basic human dignity when all vestiges of humanity had been stripped, but living another day, no mean achievement when each new day was a condemnation to death.

Olga Lengyel’s memoir, Five Chimneys (1947), takes pleasure in disproving Nazi ideology, which vaunted the superiority of the Aryan master race. Lengyel, a doctor from Cluj, was forced to participate in Mengele’s cruel medical experiments and the sterilization program. Her anger at the way she and her fellow-inmates were forced into behaving like beasts is avenged by her acute observation of the true nature of the Aryan “master race”— Mengele’s cowardice and madness, the sexual abuse by SS guards, or the drunken soldiers in retreat who drag starving prisoners with them. The voyeuristic stripping of the SS woman Irma Griese reveals her for what she is below her smart uniform, a naked, sadistic pervert who abuses her position for her own pleasure. Irma Griese appears also in Gisella Perl’s harrowing memoir, I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz (1948), which describes how she forced Perl, a gynecologist, to perform an abortion on her. In the end, Lengyel has won the battle and has, incredibly, not lost faith in humanity. Anne Frank in her diary famously noted “in spite of everything I still believe that people are good at heart,” but that was in the context of the realization of “the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too.”⁶ Nevertheless, what kept Lengyel going was the faith that all this would come to an end one day and that there would be a future in which ideals could be sustained. Lengyel ends her personal account, her debt to the dead, with the tale of the deliberate freezing to death of children at the end of 1944, yet concludes that if not all camp inmates acted inhumanly there is still hope: “The Nazis succeeded in debasing them physically, but they could not debase them morally.”⁷

Like Lengyel, the survivors wanted to forget; however, they felt mandated by the victims to tell the story. Otherwise the Nazis would have scored a victory. For however meticulous they were in record-keeping, they were not going to leave anyone alive to tell the true story. Story-telling is therefore a means to preserve memory and give at least some meaning to survival. The falsification of the past by the perpetrators is not the same as the reluctance of survivors to remember, as Primo Levi has noted,⁸ yet the memory of the survivors does not come unprocessed by ideological filters and cultural norms of the time of narration.

The first accounts came from personal testimonies and from the newsreels documenting the atrocities of Buchenwald and Belsen. These shocking scenes justified what was presented by Allied propaganda as a war against evil. But that evil could not be imagined as other than demonic, carried out by inhuman maniacs on some “other planet” called Auschwitz. What the novel did was to enable the imaginative empathy necessary to understand the Holocaust as a real event that happened in recent history and in the heart of Western civilization. A. Alvarez noted that in the twenty years following the end of World War II there had been countless books about the Holocaust but, apart from much that was cheap and sensational, there had been little creative writing. Alvarez singles out Josef Bor’s Terezínské rekviem (1963; The Terezin Requiem, 1963) as an allegory of culture defying totalitarianism and Elie Wiesel’s La Nuit (1958; Night, 1961) as a work based on autobiographical facts that allows the pain to turn art into rhetoric.

Paradoxically, Alvarez writes, after the liberation it was possible to maintain a safe distance from the horror that had been revealed, but now it was all the more apparent that the same annihilation threatened all Europe.

So the literature of the camps has become, insidiously and unanswerably, our own under-literature. Its connections with our lives, our despairs, our fantasies are subterranean but constant and powerful. When the façade of our bright, jazzy, careless affluence rifts, and our well-conditioned domestic psyches explode, what oozes out is the same sour destructiveness passive or active, the need to destroy or be destroyed as once, for some years, contaminated almost the whole of European morality.⁹

The Holocaust novel not only questioned the existing moral order, but also called in doubt the existential assumptions of life’s continuity and cyclicity: everyday existence was a living death. It could therefore not be contained in conventional generic forms and, like other postwar writing, when traditional styles and movements were invoked they could only come out ironically parodied or inverted. The reader’s deluded belief in some mimetic realism could not but result in an ethically charged revulsion at what the world had allowed to happen. Fiction, writes Terence des Pres, brings into focus existence in extremity, the rock-bottom essence of humanity.¹⁰ Hence the universal appeal of the survivor’s tale of despair and atrocity, driven by the belief, however pessimistic and disappointed, that it must not be allowed to happen again, or, failing even this, that the revelation of the truth about the human condition should not fall on deaf ears.

HISTORY OF A GENRE AND NATIONAL HISTORY

Testimony, writes Shoshanna Felman, is the privileged discourse of our time, as epic and tragedy were to the literatures of former ages. Felman presents Camus’ La Peste (1947; The Plague, 1948) as an exemplary piece of testimony about the Occupation and the Holocaust, which shows that the writer is a witness compelled to be a medium for the truth about history and about the traumatic past.¹¹ To read The Plague, however, as an allegory of deportation and extermination may distort the meaning of Camus’ novel and also underestimate the horror of Auschwitz, however much Camus, like others, probes the existential condition of living under an evil regime. Michel Tournier’s Le Roi des Aulnes (1947; The Ogre, 1972) is also not about the Holocaust as such, but it does give a grotesque picture of the bestial, cannibalistic nature of humanity under fascism. Nevertheless, Lawrence Langer, in his seminal The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (1975), treats the war novels of Pierre Gascar (pseudonym of Pierre Fournier), a veteran of a prisoner-of-war camp, and the existential novels of Camus as archetypal texts of Holocaust literature. In Italy, too, Curzio Malaparte won notoriety for his war novel Kaputt (1944; Kaputt, 1946). Yet the Jewish experience of Nazi genocide was not merely a further degree of worse conditions in the camps. The Holocaust cannot simply be subsumed in the history of World War II. It was a struggle for existence of an entire people, and therefore, Irving Howe tells us, its literature is of a different order, posing moral risks, aesthetic challenges, and unanswerable questions.¹²

Holocaust writing has appeared in almost every language of the world and was produced in vast quantities in the ghettos, in hideouts, and in the camps themselves, where every available means of writing and drawing were used to meet the urgency of recording what was happening. The victims knew they must beat the Nazi objective of wiping out the remembrance of the Jews without any trace other than a museum of the extinct Jewish race in Prague. The diary format predominated in what has been preserved, the most famous being the Warsaw Ghetto diaries and The Diary of Anne Frank. Yiddish, the vernacular of most of east European Jewry, was the language of many of the victims although some wrote in other European languages to ensure that they would be understood or because Polish or Dutch or French was their native tongue. Yiddish was, above all, the language of a culture that was decimated together with its speakers: to write was a form of resistance. After the war, the wish to sanctify the memory of the Holocaust martyrs produced commemorative yizkor books (collective albums recording the destruction of communities), essays, and short stories. The Holocaust poetry of Abraham Sutzkever and Isaac Katzenelson is among the finest of its kind. Yiddish had less impact on the Holocaust novel, partly because the novel form does not lend itself to wartime conditions, least of all to the near impossible task of bare survival in the Holocaust. Yiddish did not have a large readership outside the survivor community, though some Yiddish authors, such as Leyb Rochman (1918–1978) and Mordecai Strigler (1921–1998), penned fictionalized memoirs and documentary novels. Rochman in particular was to be a strong influence on Israeli Holocaust novelists Ka-Tzetnik and Aharon Appelfeld. Yiddish Holocaust writing occasionally stirred controversy over authenticity or over ideological positions, but found a ready audience among the displaced persons and refugees in Paris, Tel Aviv, New York, or Buenos Aires.¹³ Rachmil Bryks, Chaim Grade (who had escaped east from Poland into the U.S.S.R.), and Isaac Bashevis Singer (an immigrant from prewar Poland) also incorporated Holocaust survivors and themes into their fiction.

ELIE WIESEL

Elie Wiesel (born 1928) found himself in France after liberation from Buchenwald along with other Jewish orphans who were denied entry to the Jewish homeland in Mandatory Palestine. He quickly acquired mastery of the French language and its literary classics and enrolled in the Sorbonne. Wiesel published his book based on his experiences in Yiddish, Un di velt hot geshvigen (And the World Was Silent, 1956), in a series of Holocaust testimony in Argentina. He then adapted it in French as La Nuit (1958; Night, 1960), in a version that reads like a contemporary French novel. The work was published by Éditions de Minuit, a publishing house that was begun clandestinely during the German Occupation.¹⁴ As U.N. correspondent for an Israeli newspaper, Wiesel moved to New York in 1956, and he has lived there ever since. A prominent figure in American Jewish life, Wiesel, who writes mainly in French, is an internationally known novelist who brings together the Jewish heritage and modern European literature.

Night is primarily read as testimony, yet as we will see in the next chapter, it is, as Lawrence Langer has remarked, a Bildungs-roman that initiates the boy into death, not life.¹⁵ It is the introduction par excellence to the kingdom of night. Together with L’Aube (1960; Dawn, 1961) and Le Jour (1961; The Accident, 1962), Night forms a trilogy that reads as an existentialist search for moral purpose within a universe that challenges the author’s religious faith. Indeed, Wiesel’s novels are often read for their theological statements rather than for their literary value. Dawn is set immediately after the Holocaust in Mandatory Palestine when Jewish underground resistance fighters are struggling against the British for a Jewish state. When a British soldier is taken hostage in a reprisal raid, the Holocaust survivor faces the test of whether he will turn executioner. The Accident is also a tense narrative of moral introspection, though this time the survivor breaks out of the kingdom of night (hence the French title, “day”) in a love affair with Catherine, a strong-willed American woman living in New York who cannot fathom the hold death has on him. Hit by a taxi while crossing a busy street, the survivor is rushed to hospital, where Catherine overcomes his resistance and nurses him back to health. This is not an accident in the strict sense, because death has marked him out already in the camps where existence was a living death. But this meeting with mortality forces him, in a debate with a young doctor, to solve the mystery of life and death and to decide why he should maintain the will to survive.

By contrast, La Ville de la chance (1962; The Town Beyond the Wall, 1964) and Les Portes de la forêt (1964; The Gates of the Forest, 1966) are more complex novels that revisit scenes of the Holocaust. Why Michael, in The Town Beyond the Wall, has come back to Hungary is a question that interests the secret police who are torturing him while his mind conjures up his childhood and memories of poverty in Paris after the Holocaust where he tried to start life again and to believe again in existence. Through conversations with figures from his past and Pedro, a Spanish smuggler he meets in Tangier, Michael explores existential questions that torture him and that preoccupy most of Wiesel’s writing, such as how evil can be resisted, why humans have power over life but not over death, or why the innocent suffer. Two paths, he hears from a heretic, lie before us, and only one of them can lead to truth; one cannot follow both at the same time. Like Lot’s wife looking back at the destroyed city, he returns to his childhood home, where the dead live only in memory, and humiliates the bystander who was indifferent to the round-up of the Jews and who now denounces him to the police. Michael withstands torture and does not break his silence or betray his accomplices. The prison experience is both the real suffering that God imposes and a parable of God’s relationship with the Jews, but it is also a place where the meaning of being human is rediscovered.

The Gates of the Forest also returns to the scene of the Holocaust, this time to a cave in a Hungarian forest, where two young Jews are hiding from the Nazis. Gregor and Gavriel may be separate characters, alter egos, or someone who encounters a mystical emanation of a savior. Typically in Wiesel’s novels, the dialogue takes on the metaphorical language of a philosophical dispute and the plot remain...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Chronology
• Chapter 1. About the Holocaust Novel
• Chapter 2. Survivors: “If It Is a Novel, It Is Not About Majdanek...”
• Chapter 3. The Jewish American Post-Holocaust Novel: Imagining the Unimaginable
• Chapter 4. Holocaust Fictions, or Fictional Holocausts
• Chapter 5. The “Second Generation”: The Vicarious Witness
• Chapter 6. Postmodernist “holocausts”
• Bibliographic Essay
• Recommended Reading
• Notes
• Index