American Jewish Loss after the Holocaust (review)

In American Jewish Loss after the Holocaust, Laura Levitt likens herself to the Odyssey’s Penelope, “simply appreciating the unfinished character of ordinary life, weaving and unweaving . . . both putting together and taking apart . . . beloved family stories (p. xvi).” Levitt describes such actions as an American Jewish response to the Holocaust in that they enable American Jews to see a connection between their own stories and Holocaust experiences.

Through analyses of her family’s personal history, including its immigration to the United States as part of “the vast migration of Eastern European Jews at the beginning of the twentieth century,” Levitt suggests that we “begin to imagine other Jewish futures after the Holocaust” (p. xvii). She hopes American Jews will “bring their own pictures and stories” to the Holocaust—that they will “no longer be embarrassed about [being] encumbered with [their] own losses,” and that they will therefore participate in an “affirming” and “generative” practice (p. 191). Ultimately, Levitt describes three things: her search for the history of her father’s mother, Lena Levitt; the search’s significance to her family now; and the pertinence of the search to Holocaust loss.

Having received a cache of unattributed photographs of her family, she thinks back to the “allure of family photographs in . . . Yaffa Eliach’s Tower of Faces in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum” (p. 8). In her first chapter, Levitt recalls that “seeing familiar Jewish faces, postures, and poses in this public space,” she wanted “to imagine these people as my own. I wanted these photographs to be those of my own family’s albums” (p. 19). She identifies with these “Jewish faces,” and imagines her own “family pictures . . . on display in public as a way of complicating the notion of identification” (p. 8). For this reason as well, she sandwiches family photographs between sections analyzing other forms of Holocaust representation. Her notion of a complicated identification implies that American Jews need to integrate the Holocaust into “normal” stories of loss; their “desire to be included in the narrative of the Holocaust is expressed quite literally in [their] efforts to seek out a connection” (p. 21).

Levitt’s position is freighted by her desire for public connection, which leads her to contrast her desires for identification and inclusion with those of Lori Lefkowitz, a child of survivors and a professor at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, who takes “no pleasure in identifying with these images,” and who finds “this recognition . . . unbearable,” for, as she says, this “was not a place of affiliative belonging” (p. 29). Levitt admits that her subject position is underwritten by a desire for such belonging; the desire to see her family album displayed on the Tower’s walls is a desire for recognition within that history, to imagine herself as part of that community. Consequently, she includes herself and her family in that history without being “embarrassed”: they are not victims of the Holocaust, but they have experienced losses.

Lefkowitz’s remarks, though, lead Levitt to the realization that she has “expressed a comfort and pleasure in identifying with European Jews who had been murdered in the Holocaust” (pp. 29–30). Levitt perceives this admission, which is made only rarely in literary criticism, as a part of the “process” that she must make visible to her readers. She provides the provenance of her own responses to the Holocaust; in doing so, she gets at the subjective underpinnings of American Jewish responses to the Holocaust—and this is what makes her work significant.

The third chapter concerns photographs that Levitt’s father amassed as a child. In his youth, he hid them in the house his family eventually would lose during the Depression (p. 87). These pictures came to light only when the new owner of the house discovered them. Levitt’s father recovered the pictures and Levitt analyzed their meaning for her family. She likens the discovery of her father’s “secret stash” of photographs to Ann Weiss’ discovery of...