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9 Art and Atrocity in a Post-9/11 World THANE ROSENBAUM We now live in a time of terror. It preys on our fears and vulnerability, and provides all the necessary justification for having those fears in the first place—because the threats are real. That's what terrorism does. It puts images that would otherwise live on only as fantasy into our head, with real antecedents, tangible proof that our fears are not wholly imagined. There was the fall of the World Trade Center and the continued suicide bombings in Israel, the revival of anti-Semitic fervor in France, and the sympathetic tilt toward the purveyors of violence and the lack of moral equivalence in the press. one thing is for sure: such movements of extreme vulnerability only deepen and reinforce the dark, historical fears of what it means to be a Jew in the world. But precisely at times such as these, we must be reminded not to focus so much on our fears, but on our loss, to think about the moral duties of mourning and memory. Despite the gravity of what we are now witnessing, we must resist the impulse to personalize, because the moral imperative is otherwise. I am a post-Holocaust novelist, which means that I rely on my imagination —my capacity to reinvent worlds and reveal emotional truths—in order to speak to the Holocaust and its aftermath, one generation removed from Auschwitz. I don't write about the years 1939-1945. I see that time period as holy ground, the last millennium's answer to Mount Sinai. Instead, I focus on the looming dark shadow of the Holocaust as a continuing, implacable event, how it is inexorably still with us, flashing its radioactive teeth, keeping us all on our toes, imprinting our memories with symbols of, and metaphors for, mass death. Yes, there were survivors of the Holocaust; one out of every three Jews of Europe did miraculously survive. Yet when we speak of survival and survivors , what do we mean? What are we talking about? What is the quality of 125 126 THANE ROSENBAUM a survivor's life? Are vital signs measured only in terms of pulse rates and heart beats, or is there something even more vital, other signs of life that can't be measured solely by medical criteria? Sometimes a heart can be broken even though it beats just fine. Physical survival, alone, is not a satisfying victory. There were millions of lost lives. But even among the survivors , there was unspeakable spiritual damage—dead souls—which inevitably is more long lasting and far reaching, since it invades the bloodstream and the DNA, infecting new generations, making it nearly impossible to engage fully, faithfully, in everyday life. That's my fictional landscape, where my characters live, what they face, what they know to be true, the secrets they possess but are afraid to share. There is something patently absurd about reentering the world of the living after so much collective loss. Just think about it: when everything that you once loved was taken away from you—murdered, stolen, gassed, and burned—and you are now left to the world all by yourself, what incentive and reasons do you have to start over again? unlike Job, most people would not, and should not, accept replacement children for the ones who were taken away and murdered. And yet they did. Holocaust survivors started over. They rebuilt their lives. They persevered and somehow managed to focus entirely on a future improbably before them. Yet survivors, and even their children, had no reason to assume that the odds were with them this time around, even though, after surviving Auschwitz, you'd expect to receive a general immunity from life's worst tragedies . Survivors knew better. Things don't necessarily work out for the best. You hope and wish for more, but survivors are first and foremost realists, and fatalists. The Nazis robbed them of their faith in a normal, carefree, ordinary life. And yet the post-Holocaust world is invariably forced to live with faith; it depends on faith, almost as fossil fuel for man's continuing march away from the Stone Age. Yet we all know that the very things we have placed our faith in will eventually disappoint us. But we go on with our faith anyway, because we are commanded to do so—not by a god, but by our instincts for moral survival. And so the post...

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