Fire in the Ashes: God, Evil, and the Holocaust

Part Two: Searching Traditions

PART TWO SEARCHING TRADITIONS My mother’s Singer sewing machine, too, vanished in the confusion of war like an orphan . . . —danilo ki1 The Serbian novelist Danilo Ki1 (1935–1989) was the son of a Montenegrin mother and a Jewish father. Subotica, Ki1’s Yugoslavian home town, stood near the Hungarian border. When the Germans attacked Yugoslavia, in April 1941, Subotica came under Hungary’s control. Not until March 1944, when the Germans occupied the territory of their faltering Hungarian allies, did the Jews of Hungary face the Holocaust’s full onslaught. When it came, that disaster took Ki1’s father to an Auschwitz death. Ki1’s poignant novel about the Holocaust, Garden, Ashes, is narrated from the perspective of a boy named Andi Scham. Ki1 does not take his reader inside a ghetto, a deportation cattle car, or a death camp. Instead, as the story’s title suggests, the rea der is led to consider the Holocaust as an absence, an unredeemed emptiness and unredeemable ruin— ashes—where once there was life that flowed and flowered like a rich, green garden. The absence is personified by Andi’s Jewish father, Eduard, who was taken away and presumably killed at Auschwitz, although his son is never quite sure of that and keeps hoping and looking for his father’s return, which never comes. 109 The character Eduard Scham—eccentric, di‹cult, but in his own way loving and lovable—is a writer whose masterpiece remains unfinished. This lack of closure, however, is not due entirely to the murder of the author. Scham’s project is to be the third edition of his previously published Bus, Ship, Rail, and Air Travel Guide. In its revised and enlarged form, this book becomes a mystical, metaphysical exploration that includes not only “all cities, all land areas and all the seas, all the skies, all climates, all meridians” but also spiraling roads and forking paths that carry him “afield in both breadth and depth” so that “abbreviations became subchapters, subchapters became chapters,” with no end to their multiplying enigmas.1 Like Eduard Scham’s travel guide, which leads in so many directions without arriving at a certain destination, Garden, Ashes also lacks closure. One of the reasons involves the Singer sewing machine that belonged to Andi’s mother. The novel’s early pages describe it; a sketch adds to the specificity that Ki1 conveys. Andi’s mother created beauty with that machine, and thus the sewing machine itself is beautiful, for it signifies home and a world in which one could be at home. It is even possible that the destination sought by Eduard Scham’s travel guide is the place where that sewing machine belongs and can be found. The sewing machine is not to be found, however. Apparently it belongs nowhere, for it has “vanished in the confusion of war,” as Ki1 writes.2 The garden it helped to create has been turned to ashes by the Holocaust. This recollection of Ki1’s Garden, Ashes is an apt prelude to the second part of this book. Many philosophical and religious traditions, especially those pertaining to the relationship between God and evil, have been called into question—some would say they have vanished—during and after the Holocaust.3 In place of the intellectual and spiritual homes that these traditions provided, the world they reflected and supported—never completely beautiful, any more than Andi Scham’s nostalgic remembrances eliminate the upheaval and fear that aªected his growing up— the most sensitive philosophical and religious reflection now takes diªerent turns. It embraces searching akin to the travel without closure that becomes unavoidable for those who try to fathom Eduard Scham’s metaphorical “guide” to the world, or the all too real and still present, if scattered and invisible, ashes of Auschwitz. 110 Part Two: Searching Traditions “Searching traditions”—these words, the title of this part of the book, contain more than one thread of meaning applicable to the following set of essays and exchanges. There is searching that criticizes: it probes philosophical and religious traditions about God and evil to determine their weaknesses and vulnerabilities, especially weaknesses and vulnerabilities revealed by the Holocaust. There is searching that retrieves: it explores philosophical and religious traditions about God and evil to see what can be saved, what must be salvaged, from these traditions’ fragmentation during and after Auschwitz. There is also searching that re-searches: it takes its...