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The Second Life of Holocaust Imagery Recently an eminent Jewish historian claimed that what readers of Holocaust literature want is not more documentation, but someone to infuse meaning into the terrible facts. What readers want, the historian said, is novelists. Jewish tradition has always been more than text; it has also been the experience of text. Not only what occurred or was said, but how it is interpreted-commentary. When the tradition was whole, said the historian, Yosef Yerushalmi, there were mystics and great poets to give it meaning. Now we must turn elsewhere. A call to the imagination of a people to repair the work of reality-to recreate a destroyed world by infusing meaning into the very events that destroyed it-what else could be more moving? Yet also alarming. Elie Wiesel, yes; Andre Schwarz-Bart, yes; Nelly Sachs, yes. These Europeans possess a tradition of grandeur in language and idea. But the American-Jewish novelist has not by and large been concerned with grandeur. Comedy, satire, one-line jokes-these have been what the American reading public most prizes in the Jewish novelist. Thinking of American fiction writers as a whole, we may be tempted to say, Alas for meaning. With such meaning-bestowers, who needs nihilists? If novels are to be, as Yerushalmi indicates, a reflective source of something like a wholeness still hidden from us, clues buried somewhere in the creative imagination, whose creative imagination will they come from? The energy that sprang from the immigrant generation's break from ghetto life created a fervant literature celebrating freedom and-from the very beginning-mourning the loss of connectedness . It gave birth to a fireworks display of novels and poems, from bittersweet American success stories like The Rise of David Levinsky to countless poems of sharp disappointment in the new world. 47 48 A HOLOCAUST MENTALITY After that, though no doubt sociologists were writing about how safe, how prosperous, how educated and well integrated Jews in America were becoming, for the novelist there came loss after loss, observed and commented on: the corruptings of assimilation . Jews became materialists in the way they viewed their Jewishness-which was, beneath the comedy, the terrible message of those Jews in Philip Roth's "Eli the Fanatic," who feel threatened in their Waspy suburb by the arrival of a tiny Hasidic remnant from Europe. Dr. Braun, the narrator of Saul Bellow's novella, "The Old System," remembers the anguish of the old Jewish family feuds. "A crude circus of feelings," he calls them. "Oh, these Jews-these Jews!" he exclaims to himself. "Their feelings, their hearts!" What, he wonders, was all this emotion good for? "This old-time fervor ?" The implication is that perhaps what it was good for was the old time religious passion. With that gone, only grotesqueries, passions without real goals, are left. In Zakhor, ':. a slim book of enormous reach, Yerushalmi tells us that when Jewish belief dies Jewish history is born. For many Jewish novelists, the Jewish component is no longer a matter of struggle, tension, dialogue, or dialectic. All that is over, and can be portrayed, if at all, as belonging entirely to the past. The choice for reader and writer lies between two approaches: on the one hand, railing hotly (even in the shadow of the Holocaust) against a maddeningly less-than-perfect Jewish presence ; on the other, relegating that presence to the past, embalming it as something sweetly nostalgic and then dismissing it and burying it with the dead. The tension of such a choice echoes the dichotomous nature of the identification dilemma posited for our post-Holocaust time by two Jewish philosophers. Emil L. Fackenheim argues that surviving Jews present a posthumous victory to Hitler when they fail to live as conscious Jews. Michael Wyschogrod replies that the real victory to Hitler is coercion of any kind. Reinstate choice-including choice to decide against being a Jew-and you wrest ultimate victory from the would-be defeater of the Jews. (With such victories, Jewish irony is sure to comment, who needs defeats?) "The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1982. The Second Life of Holocaust Imagery 49 But the greatest paradox forms about the Holocaust, it seems to me, for novelists, in the tension between writing and not writing about it. If the writer treats the subject, the risk is that it may be falsified, trivialized. Even a "successful" treatment of the subject risks an aestheticizing or a false ordering of it...

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