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Biography 23.3 (2000) 547-549



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David Patterson. Sun Turned to Darkness: Memory and Recovery in the Holocaust Memoir. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1999. 256 pp. ISBN 0-8156-0530-7, $29.50.

That the Holocaust was a distinctly Jewish disaster, or one that had, and continues to have, repercussions primarily for the Jewish community, is a point not easily carried in twenty-first century America. For reasons that scholars have now begun fully to unpack--look at Peter Novick's excellent The Holocaust in America, for instance--it is clear that in the United States, many citizens of all backgrounds and creeds have been called upon to explore their own relationship to this genocide. Popular culture has exploded with representations of the Holocaust, and audiences have eagerly and even gratefully sat through horrific images of this catastrophe. From kindergarten through twelfth grade, students are asked to read, write, and respond to it. The assumption, whether actually verbalized by educators, or only implied by Hollywood filmmakers, is that all Americans are duty-bound to examine their relationship to the Holocaust. As an historical, political, and moral event, it has implications for all of us. Such a statement, of course, seems both obvious and bulletproof, still meaningful perhaps to children and perfectly harmless to the rest of us.

But to study the academization of the Holocaust is to realize that even the most seemingly innocuous statements easily breed dangerous thorns. The conclusion that the Holocaust can have implications for all Americans, simple as it is, lends itself to contextualizing the event with others in the national consciousness. Or in other words, to capture the attention of American citizens, it has become necessary to cast the Holocaust in relation to other events, to compare it, and often to clothe it in more familiar and accessible metaphors. For instance, it is not at all uncommon to see American slavery and the Holocaust paired as comparable historical events. If you are familiar with the ongoing debates in Holocaust studies, you have already realized that even in such brief and introductory remarks, dangerous sparks ignite. In another example of how such controversies develop, we can look at the case of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, stalled for over ten years while the President's Committee argued whether the museum should try to present the event as one that could be applied to the contemporary U.S., or one that should primarily be viewed through a Jewish framework.

What do all these arguments have to do with David Patterson's book, Sun Turned to Darkness: Memory and Recovery in the Holocaust Memoir? In a very thoughtful and thorough reading of Holocaust memoirs, Patterson establishes a new typology for reading these texts, one that relies on the [End Page 547] presence or absence of God as a crisis point in the narrative. The moment when the writer confronts his doubt about God's presence becomes the vehicle through which the reader understands the lasting rupture of the Holocaust. For instance, in perhaps the most widely read Holocaust memoir, Elie Wiesel's Night, Wiesel, as a prisoner of Auschwitz, must decide whether or not to observe Yom Kippur. Not to observe the holiday would confirm for the young Wiesel the absence of God, and be a living proof that he has turned away from his own Judaism. Although it is debatable whether or nor Wiesel does reclaim his faith in Night, he will in subsequent memoirs. But through Patterson's typology, the moment where Wiesel interrogates God gains increasing importance. By not abandoning his faith, the narrator saves himself from becoming what many survivors became: musselman. The musselman, Primo Levi tells us in Survival in Auschwitz, is the human being who the Nazis robbed of his soul, his humanity, and of course his belief in God. Because these thefts reduce human beings to only their brute physical needs, Levi suggests, they are in some ways worse than the deprivation of life.

Patterson would agree with Levi's basic formulation; that is, that worse things can be attributed...

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