Gender, Genocide, and Jewish Memory
- Gender, Genocide, and Jewish Memory
The study of women in the Shoah, an emergent area of inquiry, has come under harsh criticism. Whether it focuses on the experiences or writing of women, or their representations in postwar reflections, the suggestion of gender-based differences has been seen as inherently problematic. Yet ideas about gender are central to Jewish representations of genocide and atrocity. Examining some of the ways that women and men under atrocity are depicted in classic rabbinic texts, alongside their depiction in several important ghetto diaries and in Holocaust fiction, reveals how gender-based criticism reshapes our understanding of this past and our relationship to it.
To the Jewish men they gave work best done by women, commanding them, "Tonight you must sew, spin, and cook for us."
—The Midrash Says1
Men don't go out. . . . She stands on the long line. . . . The women are everywhere. . . . When a husband escapes . . . his wife has to be the sole provider.
—EMANUEL RINGELBLUM, 19402
Under the shadow of genocide, why gender?
Two classroom occurrences prompted me to think about gender with relation to the Shoah. The first time that I offered an undergraduate course on Holocaust literature, a number of students asked me why none of the books on the syllabus were by women. We were midway through the semester, and the question caught me by surprise. In planning the course, I had consciously sought to include a wide range of sources—diaries written during the war, memoirs, fiction, [End Page 158] and poetry by survivors who were in the camps, in hiding, children, adults, religious, secular, eastern or western European, Jewish, not Jewish. I had made no attempt, however, to balance the number of male and female authors on the syllabus, or to include gender as a consideration in class discussions. After all, race—or a certain constructed vision of "race"—rather than gender, was the engine that drove the Nazi genocide, which targeted Jewish men and women equally for death, as Jews.
But my students' question caused me to reflect further. If, indeed, the horrors of the Shoah victimized both women and men, why had I not included women authors on the syllabus? Surely not out of an intent to actively exclude women's memories and reflections, nor out of a sense that women's writing did not measure up in some way to that of men. My choice of literary texts had been influenced, of course, not only by what was valuable but by what was available—which books students could easily obtain. Many of the novels that I had read by women survivors had gone out of print.3 In addition, the scholarly books and articles that contributed to my early thinking on the teaching of Holocaust literature quoted women survivors with far less frequency than they did men. Moreover, they rarely cited them as thinkers, as reflectors on the implications of the Nazi genocide, in the way that Primo Levi or Jean Améry are evoked. If, as Saul Friedlander has pointed out, a master narrative of the Shoah had been emerging,4 it had until recently been a master narrative, one that reflects the male voice, the male experience, the male memory as normative. The question my students posed about the class readings caused me to wonder whether writing by women victims and survivors, read alongside writing by men, would reveal different sets of experiences, different perspectives, what those differences might be, and what this might teach us about the Holocaust. Little had been written addressing women's memories and women's experiences as such,5 but a small number of scholars in a variety of disciplines, working largely independently from one another (and initially unaware of one another's work) began research projects that involved interviewing women survivors or reading their memoirs, novels, and poetry.6 We knew gender to be an important component in understanding human experience; how might it figure—could it at all figure?—in understanding inhuman experience?
Several years later, the students in my graduate seminar on Holocaust narratives asked a more pointed question, one that emerged out of a consideration of...
