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[ 1 The mother is the faceless figure of a figurant, an extra. She gives rise to all the figures by losing herself in the background of the scene like an anonymous persona. Everything comes back to her, beginning with life; everything addresses and destines itself to her. She survives on the condition of remaining at bottom. [ JACqUES DERRiDA, The Ear of the Other in Against the Apocalypse, David G. Roskies shares the following personal story: Not long ago . . . i visited one of my mother’s israeli friends, Regina, and brought a fountain pen as a gift. Regina, who studied with Eisenstein in Moscow and is the first professor of film history at an israeli university, tested the pen just as her father had taught her to do in bialystok before World War i: she wrote the word “Amalek,” and then crossed it out. here was a lapsed daughter of her people heeding the ancient call of Deuteronomy: “Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey, after you left Egypt . . . You shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget!” (25:17, 19).1 Of the numerous biblical injunctions to “remember,” this one quoted from Deuteronomy by Roskies is to me the most intriguing and profound. its historical referent is an incident, reported in Exodus, in which Amalek led his seminomadic tribe in a particularly savage and cowardly raid against the israelites, then in flight from Egypt, attacking their temporary encampment and massacring those incapable of defending themselves—the women and children, the old and infirm. Thus Amalek, a progenitor of haman, became the symbol of pure evil for the Jews and an enemy not only to israel but to God, who pledged to annihilate his nation. but how is one to never forget to forget him? i am fascinated by the idea that we must write his story in order to unwrite him from history. Thus the act of writing, so meaningful in the eternal Jewish quest for deciphering history, is both capable of creation and its opposite. This way, remembering for the Jews is established as the act of charging the perpetrators for their guilt while iNTRODUCTiON Remember What Amalek Did to You 2 holocaust mothers & daughters blotting out the qualities they embody, the unethical message their dreadful and murderous stories carry. To wipe out the “memory” (zekher, zikaron, meaning remembrance) of Amalek means to wipe out his “name” (also zekher). The connection existing between a man (zakhar, denoting male in hebrew), his name, and the memory that carries into his genealogical line is the central concern of chapter 25 in Deuteronomy, which deals with the rules of levirate—according to which a brother-in-law is obliged to take his sister-in-law as his wife, should she be widowed, and devote their first-born son to the memory of the deceased husband and brother by naming the child after him.2 Within this brief chapter, as Roskies reminds us, the fateful name of Amalek suddenly reappears: it is in the context of illustrating what God abhors (that is, fraud and deceit) and how such abominable crimes should be dealt with (that is, by blotting out forever the memory of their perpetrators). Thanks to the way in which Deuteronomy frames Amalek’s story, his symbolic meaning becomes manifest: we write “Amalek” in order to preempt his posterity (the continuation of his “name”). but blotting out the memory has to do with annihilating the lineage of evil, certainly not with forgetting its effects. “Do not forget!” We must remember to write his name in order to blot it out, and in the act of blotting it out, we etch it all the deeper into our personal and collective consciousness. A distant relative of that ancient injunction, and a product of twentieth-century history, is the post-holocaust mantra “Never again!” in order to assure that the holocaust is never repeated, we make sure to repeat its story over and over again in as many variations and different media as possible: “Never again” in history, but “forever and ever” in the Jewish mind. Although men have been the patrons of the written records of Jewish history throughout the millennia, from the middle of the twentieth century onward, women have picked up the pen and contributed their viewpoints to the archives of Jewish collective memory with an unprecedented engagement. The holocaust has been retold equally devotedly by men and women alike. Legions of women stepped into...

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