SUNY series in Contemporary Jewish Literature and Culture

Reading and Teaching

Victoria Aarons, Holli Levitsky, Victoria Aarons, Holli Levitsky

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781438473208
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

What does it mean to read, and to teach, Jewish American and Holocaust literatures in the early decades of the twenty-first century? New directions and new forms of expression have emerged, both in the invention of narratives and in the methodologies and discursive approaches taken toward these texts. The premise of this book is that despite moving farther away in time, the Holocaust continues to shape and inform contemporary Jewish American writing. Divided into analytical and pedagogical sections, the chapters present a range of possibilities for thinking about these literatures. Contributors address such genres as biography, the graphic novel, alternate history, midrash, poetry, and third-generation and hidden-child Holocaust narratives. Both canonical and contemporary authors are covered, including Michael Chabon, Nathan Englander, Anne Frank, Dara Horn, Joe Kupert, Philip Roth, and William Styron.

PART I

READING

1

Black Milk

A Holocaust Metaphor

Eric J. Sundquist

This is the reason why three-year-old Emilia died: the historical necessity of killing the children of Jews was self-demonstrative to the Germans.

—Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

Not quite a year after her liberation from Auschwitz, Seweryna Szmaglewska returned to the scene of her backbreaking labor in the empty ponds from which hard clay was extracted with picks and spades for roadway construction. She could still hear the sorrowful song of motherhood sung by a fifteen-year-old Greek Jew named Alegri in 1943. The song’s first word, “Mamma,” which had the same connotation in Polish as in Greek, was the only way in which Alegri, “tossed into the multi-tongued mob like a deaf-mute,” could speak to the other women. Now, in 1945, Alegri was gone, along with the vast majority of Greek Jews who entered Auschwitz. The cloud of smoke from the crematory had vanished, but footprints still ran along the floor of the ponds:

Past are the days of shrieks, curses, and moans; no echo is left behind. Only, sometimes, as you stand on the dikes between the ponds, listening to the deep whistling of the wind in the reeds, you may hear that sad song sung in an alien tongue, exotic and incomprehensible, you may hear the “mamma” echoing from time to time in that cry of despair.¹

The world of the Holocaust is pervaded by many such cries of despair—strangled, choking voices; shrieks and murmurs; stillness and muteness. No single manifestation of speech or silence is foundational, and yet the silencing of the human voice by murder surely has priority, and perhaps no human voice has greater priority than that of a child or infant on the verge of language, calling to its mother. Cynthia Ozick dramatized this searingly in her short story “The Shawl” when the infant Magda cries out for her missing shawl:

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 had been mute. … Even the laugh that came when the ash-stippled wind made a clown out of Magda’s shawl was only the air-blown showing of her teeth. … But now Magda’s mouth was spilling a long viscous rope of 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!”

By the time Rosa retrieves the shawl from the barracks, Magda has been thrown by a guard against the electrified fence, which itself speaks the word she had started to scream: “The electric voices began to chatter wildly. ‘Maamaa, maaamaaa,’ they hummed altogether.”²

The lost shawl, summoned by Magda’s cry, has taken the place of Rosa’s empty breast: “The duct-crevice extinct, a dead volcano, blind eye, chill hole, so Madga took the corner of the shawl and milked it instead.” Such elaborate metaphors, which fly straight in the face of Theodor Adorno’s notorious proscription of poetry in the wake of the Holocaust, appear to strip the story’s action of historical specificity. “Rosa,” the companion piece to which “The Shawl” was joined in the 1989 novella The Shawl, forces a return to the historical, not only through its setting in 1977 Miami but also through its creation of a complex, allusive web of intertextual clues to what is missing in the first story. On the basis of the second story we are able, for example, to reconstruct a family, Rosa and her niece Stella being its only survivors, and find a possible explanation of Magda’s Aryan features—“eyes blue as air, smooth feathers of hair nearly as yellow as the Star sewn into Rosa’s coat—which “The Shawl” only hints at.³ When she brought the two short stories together in the novella, Ozick dramatically enlarged the issue of Magda’s identity by prefacing her book with one such clue, an epigraph from the concluding lines of Paul Celan’s poem “Todesfuge” (“Deathfugue”):

dein goldenes Haar Margarete
dein aschenes Haar Sulamith
[your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith]

Though she quoted only two lines from Celan’s famous poem, Ozick expected her readers to remember the poem’s relentless cyclicality, enforced by the fugue-like repetitions and lack of punctuation, which carries us back, over and over, to its stunning opening lines:

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening

we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night

we drink and we drink

we shovel a grave in the air there you won’t lie too cramped …⁴

Spoken in the collective voice of perishing Jews, the “black milk” drunk day and night of the opening lines refers first of all to the death sentence passed on all Jewish life. “Terrible nursemaids / Have usurped the place of mothers,” as Nelly Sachs, later Celan’s longtime correspondent, wrote in “O the night of the weeping children!,” a poem published the same year as “Todesfuge.” “Instead of mother’s milk, panic suckles those little ones.”⁵ In Celan’s lines, Ozick thus provided an additional perspective on Magda’s short, cruel life. Magda has the golden hair of Margarete, the idealized embodiment of German romantic love in Goethe’s Faust, rather than the black hair of Shulamith, the embodiment of Israel’s eroticized relationship with God in the Song of Songs. But like other blond-haired, blue-eyed Jews, who, according to a 1938 study at odds with the Nazi racial paradigm, constituted 11 percent of the population of German schoolchildren,⁶ she belongs to the people of Shulamith and must die accordingly.

Lyrically enacting the end of Jewish reproduction envisioned in the Final Solution, the poem’s fugue-like rhythms, running from beginning to end, join “black milk” to the “ashen hair” of Jewish women, whose hair was often harvested for industrial use in the Reich before the remainder of the body was burned. Magda’s eclipsed cry is the vocal signal that Jewish women’s breasts have dried up, their wombs have been burned out—whether by starvation or, as in some instances, by chemical sterilization—and the decision has been reached to bring an end to Jewish regeneration once and for all. Magda has already drunk black milk; soon she will be turned to ash. “Black milk” therefore also directs us to the atmosphere of smoke and ash enveloping the death camps and killing fields in the East. Rain laden with crematoria soot and the “odor of burning flesh” fell in Auschwitz, recalled Charlotte Delbo. “We were steeped in it.”⁷ “I am an incarnation of the body-burners of Ponar,” wrote Abraham Sutzkever, speaking in the voice of a Jew forced to burn excavated corpses outside Vilna. “My bread is baked of ash. Every loaf—a face.”⁸

The figures and actions of “Todesfuge” take us across a range of Holocaust experiences, but the enormity of the Final Solution is captured in Celan’s two opening words, and the indelible terror of their paradoxical juxtaposition has served many purposes. Speaking in a recent memoir of the vitality of Czernovitz, his own birthplace, as well as that of Celan and many other distinguished writers, Aharon Appelfeld reflected on the great flowering of Eastern European literature cut off by the Holocaust:

Czernovitz expelled its Jews, and so did Vienna, Prague, Budapest, and Lemberg. Now these cities live without Jews, and their few descendants, scattered through the world, carry memory like a wonderful gift and a relentless curse. For me, too, the childhood home is that “black milk” … which nourishes me morning and evening while at the same time it drugs me.⁹

Appelfeld’s longing for a homeland that can never be reclaimed—more specifically for a place where both his mother and grandmother were slain—is by no means unique. Of those Jews who survived the Holocaust, few could imagine a postwar life in Germany or Eastern Europe. Whether she borrowed Celan’s central metaphors or came upon them by inspiration, the memoirist Fanya Hiller demonstrated that they cast a long shadow. In the Polish Displaced Persons camp in Bytom at war’s end, Hiller carried on a short correspondence with Jan, a courageous young gentile Ukrainian who had become both her savior and her lover, each of them swinging back and forth in their commitments to the other as he searched in vain for the false papers he would need if he accompanied her to Paris, where she hoped to study medicine, and she contemplated life instead as a Ukrainian housewife in a graveyard for Jews. Their baby, she imagined, would have the face of her Jewish father—but with a cross hanging around his neck:

No, not a graveyard, for there were no graves. The Jews had been burned to ashes, and the ashes had been turned to dust which was in the air we breathed and the water we drank. …

I saw myself holding a baby to my breast, and my breast and the baby were black with the ashes of their murdered relatives. Black milk came out of my breast. My baby coughing … [and then] Jan holding the baby and crying as the child turned stiff in his arms and broke in two like a dry twig, then turned to dust and became part of the dust in the air and the water.¹⁰

For Hiller, the principal figures of “Todesfuge”—black milk, ash, graves in the air—come together in a vision of Eastern Europe in which Jews, the people of Shulamith, have no future.

In The Deputy, his 1963 play about the complicity in the Holocaust of Pope Pius XII, Rolf Hochhuth invoked Celan’s metaphors in arguing against metaphor. He first quoted a scene from Rudolf Höss’s confessional memoir, Commandant of Auschwitz, in which a young Jewish woman soothingly prepares her children for the gas chamber and then, before stepping in, tells Höss: “I avoided being selected as one of those fit for work. I wanted to experience the whole procedure consciously and exactly.” Here, presumably, was the experience itself, unmediated. In Celan’s poem, by contrast, Hochhuth comments, “the gassing of the Jews is entirely translated into metaphors” such as “black milk,” which, notwithstanding their tremendous force of suggestion, “still screen the infernal cynicism of what really took place … [that] this gigantic plant with scheduled railroad connections was built especially in order that normal people … might kill other people.”¹¹ And yet, of course, the condemned woman’s testimony to what really takes place is cut off the moment she enters the gas chamber. Like one of Primo Levi’s “true witnesses,” those “who saw the Gorgon, [but] have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute,”¹² she can tell us nothing more.

There are many reasons to question this mystification of the gas chamber, from which, like a black hole in existential space, nothing can emerge and about which no words can be ventured. There are numerous eyewitness descriptions of what transpired in the gassing procedure to which the words of someone miraculously returned from the dead would add very little. Just as important, Hochhuth obscures the important function of Celan’s metaphoric language. Omer Bartov has spoken of the difficulty in finding an acceptable imaginary mold in which to cast the atrocity of the Holocaust—“elusive precisely because it is ubiquitous, inconceivable because it is fantastic, faceless because it is protean.”¹³ The frequency with which eyewitnesses described their experiences as “unspeakable” or “beyond words” attests to the fact that only language stretched to the boundaries of meaning may be capable of rendering experiences that are themselves at the limits of existence. But the urgency of Fanya Hiller’s metaphors lies in the fact that, like Celan’s in “Todesfuge,” Ozick’s in “The Shawl,” and Sachs’s in “O the night of the weeping children!,” they are but a hairsbreadth away from the literal. “Black milk” was literalized in what Szalma Winer, in his singular testimony about the gas van murders at Chełmno, witnessed: “From one of the vans a young woman with an infant at her breast was thrown out. The child had died while drinking its mother’s milk.”¹⁴ Notwithstanding its scale and seeming inexplicability, the Holocaust was not an abstraction but a multitude of individual atrocities that had one underlying purpose. Figures such as “black milk,” “terrible nursemaids,” and the cry of “Mamma” refer us directly to this foundational intention—the Nazis’ determination to bring an end to Jewish life, a fact so basic that it often goes unstated. In the testimony and literature of the Holocaust, few things are as difficult to confront as the murder—frequently the sadistic, brutal murder—of children, and yet nothing was more integral to the Final Solution, which took the lives of 1.5 million children, more than a million of them Jewish. Canonical works such as The Shaw...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I Reading
• Part II Teaching
• Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover