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5 Memory and Collective Identity: Narrative Strategies Against Forgetting in Contemporary Literary Responses to the Holocaust GERHARD BACH A story provides a structure for our perceptions; only through stories do facts assume any meaning whatsoever.1 At the outset of The Bellarosa Connection (1989), Saul Bellow's treatment of Holocaust survival in the context of memory and forgetting, the narrator, looking back on his professional life as a kind of historian of twentieth -century consciousness, pronounces that "if you have worked in memory, which is life itself, there is no retirement except in death."2 Bellow here expresses what Alvin Rosenfeld, in a very different context and with a different agenda in mind, had said some ten years earlier in his treatise on Holocaust literature, A Double Dying (1980), where he demands that postHolocaust generations develop a phenomenology of reading Holocaust literature . In generating mind maps, Rosenfeld suggests, such a phenomenology would help readers —particularly of the younger generation—"to comprehend the writings of the victims, the survivors, the survivors-who-becamevictims , and the kinds-of-survivors, those who were never there but know more than the outlines of the place."3 This essay deals with four fictions by writers who were never "there" but reveal that they do know more about "the place" than its outlines. Thus, in terms of objectives, my one purpose is to illustrate how literary texts may induce readers to generate the kind of mental maps or models Rosenfeld suggests. A cursory reading of these texts will reveal the obvious —namely 78 GERHARD BACH that such models will vary greatly from one text to the next, and more markedly from one generation of Holocaust writers to the next. Such insight raises more questions than it answers: What possibilities are there to add further detail to the individual mental maps we create? More important, where can we identify "boundaries" between specific groups or generations of Holocaust writers and how do we deal with these boundaries—as markers of separation or of connection? Answering questions such as these takes us from Rosenfeld's phenomenology to Alan L. Berger's taxonomy of universalist and particularist literary approaches to the Holocaust, an approach by which Berger classifies second-generation American Jewish writers, revealing how particularist and universalist patterns function in current Holocaust fictional texts. Addressing these issues demands structural focalization, and here three parameters or dimensions are important: the aesthetic, the material , and the methodological. The first parameter relates to the aesthetic dimension invoked by Adorno's dictum that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, and the forceful insistence of post-Holocaust literature and art on dislodging Adorno's position. In the wake of Adorno's thesis, the debate over the possibility or impossibility of rendering the atavistic in artistic terms basically has always been conducted as a moral debate. However, the second generation of Holocaust writers, in dealing with what is best summarized as the "aesthetics of disfigurement" (Gila Safran Naveh), have expanded this notion in a twofold way, in connecting the moral issue of Holocaust remembrance (and its artistic modes of expression) with a postmodern discourse that now includes, besides the victims and survivors of the Holocaust, its perpetrators and collaborators as well. In other words, in generating mental maps of Holocaust literature we are now also faced with the question of how to deal, in aesthetic terms, with the "nature of the offense" (Primo Levi). As Martin Amis reminds us in the afterword to Time's Arrow (1991), a novel revolving around the issue Levi raises, "The offense was unique, not in its cruelty, nor in its cowardice, but in its style— in its combination of the atavistic and the modern."4 The second parameter is defined by the literature selected for this study: Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl (1990), Saul Bellow's The Bellarosa Connection (1989), Irene Dische's Pious Secrets (1991), and Martin Amis's Time's Arrow (1991). The reasons for this selection are external and internal. The obvious fact is that these are four fictional texts about the Holocaust all published at about the same time, between 1989 and 1991.5 In this sense, these works form a coherent group of late-twentieth-century responses to the Holocaust. This external coherence is counterbalanced by some complex internal dissimilarities. First, while Ozick and Bellow belong to the older generation of Jewish American writers, those that are usually grouped as contemporaneous witnesses of the Holocaust who tend to foreground the [52.14.22...

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