Postmemory, Psychoanalysis and Holocaust Ghosts

The Salonica Cohen Family and Trauma Across Generations

Rony Alfandary

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000411843
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

Throughthe collection of letters sent by members of a Jewish family between 1923 and 1942, this fascinating book explores phenomenological and psychoanalytical aspects of the Holocaust and its associated trauma, and the impact on future generations of the same family.

This book charts a postmemorial study of the Cohen family of Salonica which branched out to Paris and Tel-Aviv during the 1920s and 1930s. The exploration of the contents of four boxes containing hundreds of letters, pictures and other documents portray a microhistory of one familythat was once a part of a thriving community. Showing how the shadows of trauma can be passed through the generations, the book uncovers the tragedies that befell the Cohen family, and how the discovery of these materials has affected existing family members.

In an intriguing work of postmemory research and analysis, this book appeals to both scholars of the Holocaust and psychoanalysts interested in the unconscious impact of history.

Part 1

Introduction

The end, the beginning and all that was left in between

The facts are stark, if little known – before World War II, the Jewish community of Thessaloniki (in its old Ottoman name – Salonica) in Greece numbered more than 50,000, the largest single ethnic minority in this Mediterranean port city which had known many past glories. When the war was over, only 5,000, less than 10%, of the Jews survived. About 45,000 people, men, women and children, were taken from the city by the local Greek police, supervised by the SS Nazi police, and between March 15th and August 10th 1942, nineteen convoys took them to their deaths in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Of the 340,000 Jews lived in France in 1940, more than 75,000 were deported to death camps, where about 72,500 were killed, about 20%.¹

As Eva Hoffman (b. 1945), a Polish Jewish writer, wrote, the shadows of the survivors of the Holocaust continue to haunt the future generations.² Even though these future generations are far removed from the actual experiences of World War II, the stories told, and the stories avoided, continue to have a deep impact upon the psyches of the children and the grandchildren. They are passed on through unconscious processes, uncanny in nature, creating psychic implants in the souls of the children and grandchildren, where they continue to exert a heavy burden.

Ever since I developed a consciousness of being a part of a family, a part of a collective history, I have felt that the near annihilation of that Jewish community, and its branches elsewhere in Europe, was affecting me as if I were there myself. When my life’s circumstances are examined, as I have done as part of my training and practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy and as a writer over the last thirty-five years, I have come to the conclusion that the traces of the haunting memories I remember are not of events I have experienced myself. The events this book studies took place twenty years before I was born. They had been projected into me and have become unconsciously my own. The stories of the Holocaust that I had been exposed to since I was a child have moved me to be and act in ways it has taken me many years to make sense of. I have found that I was not just making life-choices based upon my own deliberations and options but also based upon deeper layers I was not yet aware of. It was as if I was obeying an inner dictum I could not comprehend, let alone control.

My psychoanalytic training and practice have taught me that the mental and emotional mechanism that has facilitated those processes is called, in short, repetition compulsion, which encompasses a wide array of mental and emotional processes.³ It is through those insights that I have come to understand that what I thought of as haunting, traumatic memories are indeed traces of postmemory, that is vivid experiences and “memories” of events, which clearly did not happen to me but affect me as if they did.⁴

I have since formulated my own definition of postmemory which is as follows: The realization (always in retrospect) that one is being driven (in the Freudian sense of dual drive) by events that had taken place before one’s actual sensual experience. One finds himself haunted by and repeating patterns of behavior, forms of relationships and (obsessive) ideas and emotions which cannot be explained solely by one’s own individual history and current circumstances. It is only through an in-depth creative investigation that one can uncover the unconscious roots of the repetition one has been engaged with. Once the pattern is revealed and made conscious, it can become postmemorial work. Otherwise, if it remains unconscious, it can lead to pathological symptomatic behavior, either as an individual or as a collective.

This is a study of a memory of events that did not happen to me but have been affecting me as if they did. It tells the story of the Salonica Cohen family who have died in the Holocaust, based upon the interpretation of hundreds of letters which were discovered during the last two decades.⁵ As Eli Wiesel (1928–2016) wrote, I often found myself writing so as not to lose my sanity, but often found myself only being able to write from an insane part of my awareness, as it is impossible to write about the Holocaust without losing one’s sanity.⁶ I hope that, as he wrote, I have been able to create a legacy of words, not so much to prevent history from repeating itself (as that would be a far too ambitious and crazy ambition), but to “simply” preserve a record of how the postmemory of the Holocaust has shaped me.

There are many such memorial stories, and this tale humbly joins them. It focuses upon the Cohen family who lived in Salonica.⁷ Before World War II, the Cohens counted more than thirty: Shabtai and Rachelle Cohen, their nine children, spouses and grandchildren (Figure 1). All but one daughter, Rita, her husband Shmuel Parenti (often referred to as Sam in the letters) and their children died during the war, either in the concentration camps or in unknown circumstances. None has a grave one can visit.⁸

Figure 1 The Cohen Family Tree.

Two of the Cohen children, Leon and Isaac, moved to France during the 1920s, where they became a part of the Greek-Jewish community. The only survivor of the family, Rita, moved to Palestine during the 1930s. Both Greek and French Jewish communities were subject to mass deportation and murder during the 1940s by the Nazis and their local collaborators. In both Salonica and Paris, it was with the active aid of local police and municipal workers, as well as ordinary citizens, that the Jews were taken from their homes, had their properties looted and were sent to their deaths in the concentration camps.⁹

This is not a comprehensive history book of the Holocaust in Salonica or Paris. It is the story, a microhistory,¹⁰ of my postmemorial tale of the Cohen family and in particular of Leon Cohen (1901–1942), one of the two brothers who emigrated to Paris, based upon the primary sources as found in the letters that were addressed to him and were found almost sixty years after he was murdered by the Nazis, along with his wife Bondy (Boena) (1905–1942) and their two children, Benjamin (1935–1942) and Eliane (Rachelle) (1939–1942), in Auschwitz in 1942. The exact date of their deaths is unknown. We only know when the family was deported from the Drancy transit camp on October 11th 1942, in train car number 45, as recorded by Serge Klarsfeld (Figure 2).

Figure 2 The Cohens Deportation Cards.

It is a story of a postmemory and inevitably carries the faults of a story told from a distance. And yet, it is the only possible way left to tell this story. In her seminal essay about Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, Shoshana Felman (b. 1942) wrote that being a witness is about taking responsibility for what really happened. It is about obeying the legal pledge and the juridical imperative of the oath the witness takes. It is akin to testifying before both the court of history and of the Law, in front of an audience of readers or fellow human beings. It is not just a reporting of the facts, recorded or remembered. It is an act of conjuring memory so as to present another human being and a community. Giving testimony is a moral commitment to carry on narrating history beyond its personal dimensions.¹¹

The role of the testimony bearer is not one carried with ease. It is not only a burden but also a privilege. It is a burden due to the necessity of carrying it. It is a privilege as it positions the narrator along the long familial line, thus renewing and perhaps even somewhat healing a sense of continuity severed by the Holocaust. It is a possible way of combating the oblivion of forgetfulness. It is a process whereby the burden of the transmission of the traumatic memory does not turn into a haunting and crippling postmemory but lends itself to postmemorial work. In his 2019 essay on postmemory, Stephen Frosh (b. 1954) wrote that in our time, the future has collapsed. We are overwhelmed by what we have to witness. This is what haunts second and third generations – the ongoing transmission not of the experiences themselves but their dark shadows. It is an uncanny experience, both alien and deeply familiar, lying deep in the unconscious. Struggling with those shadows can be as daunting as with the concrete realities that have cast them.¹²

While Frosh and others like Hoffman wrote about the transmission of memories of Holocaust survivors to the second generation, I suggest that within the term, second generation, it is necessary to include future generations as well, upon whom those experiences-which-they-have-not-experienced continue to exert a meaningful and even fateful impact. A certain guilt is inherent in such a claim as it is clear that the lives and well-being of future generations are not under the immediate threat of the events of World War II, yet their shadows certainly create the sensation that those events are not in fact over and are present, like a bad dream that continues to distress the dreamer long after he had been awoken from the dream. Some of that is normally explained by the fact that caretakers transmit to their off-springs unprocessed areas of their experience and create a parental environment which is shaped by their own experience. But, somehow, in an uncanny way and yet open to psychoanalytic suggestions, the impact of those events upon those who were born after their occurrence continues to exert an influence.

It is possible to try and deny that impact and suppress its poisonous expressions or try and deal with it through interpretation and creativity. The former option can lead to pathological, individual and social consequences, while the latter can help to stop the compulsive repetition and become postmemorial work.

The Cohens’ Hall of Names

This book presents the journey I have taken to turn my own potentially toxic postmemory, based upon hundreds of original documents and slivers of childhood memories, into a postmemorial project. It is my own Hall of Names. My private Hall of Names does not occupy a place in space, as does Yad Vashem’s Hall of Names in Jerusalem, and it will undoubtedly draw fewer visitors from around the world, but I believe that it forms a part of the ever-increasing postmemorial Hall of Names, which the second, third and fourth generations of Holocaust survivors are creating around the world.¹³

Stepping into the Cohen family Hall of Names, I look around and see their faces. The first visual testimony is a family photo taken around 1916, where all but one member of the family are photographed together in Salonica (Figure 3).

Figure 3 The Cohen Family in 1916.

They are still all together in one frame. The parents are in their late forties, while their children range from early twenties to primary school age. Eight of the nine Cohen children are present. The one missing, uncannily, is Isaac. As the story will unfold, it will become clearer that his absence from the only group photo is not so innocent.

Everybod...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Part 1 Introduction
• Part II The letters
• Bibliography
• Index