Children of the Holocaust by Arnošt Lustig (review)

Book Reviews 197 to American Judaism is a contemporary story; another volume will be required soon to document women's altered sense of agency. Once immigrants pushed out of their old countries, Midwestern Jewish women are now participating in making changes to their lives, their religious culture, and their country. Eliane Leslau Silverman University of Calgary Arnost Lustig. Children of the Holocaust (Translated by Jeanne Nemcova and George Theiner). Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1995. Pp. 516. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub argue that when history exceeds existing wltural frames of reference and where atrocity operates to eliminate witnesses , literature and art can function 11 as a precocious mode of witnessingof accessing [an otherwise incomprehensible] reality" (Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. New York: Routledge, 1992: 5). Children of the Holocaust, by award-winning Czechoslovakian writer and professor of literature, Arnost Lustig, provides just such testimony . Lustig, himself an eyewitness to and survivor of the Holocaust, has earned an international reputation for his 11 fictionalJI accounts of the human spirit moving through the maelstrom of trauma and death created by the Third Reich. Forced to leave Czechoslovakia in 1968 because his Holocaust writings were deemed critical of the most recent regime, Lustig carried to his new home in the United States a vision that continues to attract acclaim. Children of the Holocaust collects sixteen short stories, previously published under the titles Diamonds of the Night and Night and Hope, respectively, together with the novella-Darkness Casts No Shadow-in a single volume that exemplifies his spare, realist style and his commitment to voicing experiences that might otherwise pass from us without witness. Accessible to a wide audience with only minor flaws in copy editing, the collection has several strengths. One of its many triumphs evolves from Lust1g's power to frame the context in which critical decisions, however impossible, had still to be made from the most tenuous positions created by the war. Thus, Children of the Holocaust opens with "The Return," the story of Hyneck Tausig, a quiet man torn between his impulses to self-preserving 198 Canadian Review of American Studies Revue canadienne d'etudes am encaines flight and his desire to stay in community with those who have also been called to ride the death trains to the camps. The struggle T ausig faces, trying to gauge how his every impulse must either be resisted or translated into actions that can now be unpredictably interpreted with fatal consequences in a hostile environment, prepares the reader for repeated encounters with an experience where "selfhood" is rendered apparently irrelevant by the political regime, and yet where that "selfhood" remains the primary locus of choice and action in a struggle for the trajectory of one's own history, and consequently, for shaping the outcome of the war. Several of Lustig's stories record the many forms and faces of love and pain that emerged under the extremities produced by the Holocaust, together with the unexpected outcomes of choices that, in other contexts, might produce more predictable results. Whether inviting readers close to the tender stirrings of adolescent love-interrupted by a sudden night transport-or the risks taken when a young boy borrows a rabbit from a general 's hutch, hoping to cheer a dying girl he has seen only through the bars of an infirmary window, Lustig's work celebrates and mourns the flowering and waste of human lives in the Holocaust's ghettos and camps. This collection also documents trauma's disruptive effects on human relationships, as, for example, when hunger and pain leave a mother suspicious of the son who refuses a portion of bread he has scavenged so that there will be more for her to share with his sister (188). Lustig does not confine his observations entirely to the courageous spirit and painful struggles of Holocaust captives, however. A small selection of these stories illuminate the perspectives of both those targeted by Hitler's "final solution," and those who were situated to carry it out. These accounts provide significant insights into the range of potentials operating in the characters Lustig presents from both sides of the conflagration. In "Rose Street, u for example...