After Representation?: The Holocaust, Literature, and Culture

9: “And in the Distance You Hear Music, a Band Playing”

179 9 “And in the Distance You Hear Music, a Band Playing” Reflections on Chaos and Order in Literature and Testimony SIDNEY BOLKOSKY When I asked my friend Abe P. to describe his prewar life in Betclan, Transylvania, he at first seemed urgently driven to discuss his arrival in Auschwitz. His response to “What was life like in Betclan before the war?” was a quickly delivered positive scenario followed by the coming of the Hungarians and the train. But as we slowly returned to a more detailed description of that life, he sighed, “Ohh, it was [pause] happiness.” As he talked, the idealistic patina gave way to a more realistic description filled with love and antagonism, fear and joy, childhood memories that encompassed a wide range of happiness and sadness. Yet what emerged most clearly from Abe’s description of the first eighteen years of his life was its order: from dawn to dusk he followed a rigid schedule that included both religious and secular school, rote memorization of portions of the Talmud, and household duties and responsibilities such as responding to questions from his father on the Sabbath. Often harsh, even violent , the learning process dominated much of his youth and he addressed it with some ambivalence, nevertheless imbuing the telling with warmth. Abe grew up in a family that lived and breathed religious devotion. His initial reflections announce his religious sensibilities and their links to his family life. His father, he begins, had bord and peyas (long beard and side locks); his mother wore a sheitl (head covering); the region knew his grandfather as a moira tzadek, someone with an awesome or authoritative knowledge of interpreting the Law (Torah). Abe’s childhood life revolved around religious education. He recalled in minute detail the table in his cheder (religious school), around which the students sat learning the alphabet; and he remembered the weekly examinations , the questioning, the potches (slaps) at incorrect answers, the Thursday night examinations and the Sabbath ones at home beginning with the weekly query from his father, “Wos hoben ge’lernt?” (What have you learned?). Any sign of failure and “God help you!” Abe boasts that his father endeared himself to Betclan’s rebbe (religious leader) because of his piety and also bore the profound respect of the community . Partly as a consequence of that respect, the idea of questioning either of these two figures simply was beyond imagining: “God forbid!” There were no questions or conversations probing the nature of God—an unthinkable topic. Lessons learned by rote filled his mind and “the worst thing you could say about [a peer] was ‘he doesn’t know, he doesn’t know Chumash [the Torah].’ ” To say that Jewish life in Subcarpathian Ruthenia (Karpatorus), a part of Hungary before World War I and of Czechoslovakia between the wars, revolved around religion would be a gross understatement. Roughly  percent of the population was Jewish. Judaism, ritual, and piety were inhaled there like air; “it was a way of life,” as had been the case since the seventeenth century (beginning in ), when large numbers of Jews arrived from Galicia fleeing Chmielnicki’s pogroms, up until the time of the Holocaust. Poor and frequently downtrodden, they settled in the agricultural backwater towns and villages where the overwhelming majority remained at or below the poverty level. From Galicia, too, emigrated key Hasidic rabbis in the late eighteenth century, establishing major schools (yeshivas) in Munkacs, Sighet, Ungvar, and Chust, among other cities, which provoked strife with traditional, non–Hasidic Jews. Despite or because of that strife, the Jews of Subcarpathian Ruthenia maintained devoutly religious households and communities. Hasidic sects, each with its own rebbe, filled the region. Jewish communities there were characterized by orthodoxy, piety, and a religious education steeped in talmudic literalism. When the area was occupied by the Hungarians in  as a result of the November  First Vienna Award, life remained essentially the same, although the new authorities established quota systems and antisemitic laws. The gendarmerie along with the Arrow Cross Party became a frightening presence for Jews. Jewish men were conscripted into labor gangs and consigned to camps beginning in March  and later into labor battalions for service with the army after the  invasion of the Soviet Union. But only with the German occupation in March  did the Nazi genocide reach fully into this region. The first deportation from Hungary took place in mid-May, and by the fall of  virtually all Jews in these occupied areas had...