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5. Shoah: Words in Spite of Themselves
- State University of New York Press
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5 Shoah: Words in Spite of Themselves Be gentle when you teach us to live again. Lest the song of a bird, Or a pail being filled at the well, Let our badly sealed pain burst forth again and carry us away— —Nelly Sachs, “Chorus of the Rescued” More than in any of the Holocaust hauntings in Cynthia Ozick’s fiction, it is the scene of baby Magda’s murder and her mother Rosa’s paralysis that most wrenchingly causes the reader to suffer the horrors of the Shoah.1 Norma Rosen claims that fictional renderings of such events allow readers to “enter . . . into a state of being that for whatever reasons makes porous those membranes through which empathy passes, or deep memory with its peculiar ‘thereness,’ so that we can move, as far as it is given to us to do so, into the pain . . . of the Holocaust.”2 The mimetic potency of such fiction can become “a kind of memorial,”3 offering a judicious counterpoint to the criticism of imaginative depictions of the Shoah.4 The Shoah is like a wash that colors much of Ozick’s fiction.5 But contrary to its treatment in “Rosa,” the first section of her two-part novella, The Shawl, in which Ozick fixes specifically and exclusively on the real time of a death march and concentration camp, the Shoah in her narratives is more often referenced as a wound in history that must be reckoned with by survivors, witnesses, and a rather disengaged American Jewry.6 It is through this removal of history, and not as a contemporary phenomenon, that her characters mull over the implications and reverberations of the Final Solution for individual Jews, for the Jewish people as a nation, for Jews as members of the world community, and for the world community. 139 140 Belonging Too Well Ozick’s decision to cast most of her Shoah-affected characters in the post–World War Two world with the distance of time and space firmly established, allows them to interact with “the Jewish tradition of memory which . . . is marked not by static transference of timeless religious truth, but by liquidity and creativity in response to repeated historical ruptures and lacunae.”7 Their contact and struggle with the Shoah enable them to grapple with issues of individual and communal identity, confirming Yerushalmi’s claim that the increasing secularization of the Jews has fostered a condition whereby “history, not a sacred text, becomes the arbiter of Judaism.”8 The formation of their identities takes place in the corridors of memory. It intrudes in the tangled details of their everyday lives, dragging along family members, colleagues, and friends. Only in “Rosa” is the immediacy of the death camps felt, and even in this text Ozick does not use the words “ ‘Jew,’ ‘Nazi,’ ‘concentration camp’ or even ‘war.’ ”9 The reader knows where she is located; she feels it without signposts. Ozick’s characters use language to write their way out of the conundrums of persecution and pain. Some write letters, some learn and teach traditional Jewish texts, some engage in historical research, others give testimony while others listen. They all share the belief that language enables the individual and the collective to work through the trauma. The talking cure. Yet this is not simply and only a Jewish phenomenon. Roskies claims that the “Jewish dialectical response . . . is at its core a profoundly neoclassical impulse: the greater the catastrophe, the more its victims reshape the ancient archetypes in its wake.”10 Ozick combines these impulses by capturing characters in various stages of dis/repair. Rising or failing, they all have something to say and a need for others to listen. The creative act of reshaping, of speaking the destruction into a living memory, enables the community to lift the veil of ‘night and fog’11 that shrouded the Shoah both during the war and for an unconscionable number of years afterward. The epigram for The Shawl is taken from Paul Celan’s much anthologized poem, “Death Fugue.”12 The two lines that recur, “dein golenes Haar Margarete /dein aschenes Haar Sulamith” (37–38)13 are a soft contrast to the harsh “black milk of daybreak” (1, 11, 20, 28) that the Jews are forced to drink by the German master all day and night long. The riveting imagery of Celan’s poem provoked Adorno to conclude that the writing of poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric.14 This frequently cited ‘decree’ is applied too broadly...