An Interview with Thane Rosenbaum

An Interview with Thane Rosenbaum

Perhaps no contemporary writer has done more to mark the ongoing legacy of the Holocaust than Thane Rosenbaum. Over a series of three books now known as the post-Holocaust trilogy—Elijah Visible (St. Martin's, 1996), Second Hand Smoke (St. Martin's, 1999), and The Golems of Gotham (HarperCollins, 2002)—Rosenbaum has explored the ways in which the Shoah continues to define our collective consciousness. His fiction is filled with what Alan L. Berger has called "second-generation witnesses," children of Holocaust survivors who have given voice to their horrendous inheritance. Rosenbaum emphatically rejects the label "Holocaust writer"; for him, the Holocaust can only be represented by those who witnessed it, and even then its representation is fraught with problems. Rosenbaum's narrative territory is the post-Holocaust world, a region populated largely by American-born children of survivors and usually set against the backdrop of New York or Miami. Although he refuses to capture the horrors of the concentration camps, the pages of his books reverberate with their consequences.

Born in 1960, Thane Rosenbaum grew up in Washington Heights, New York, and Miami Beach, Florida, where his parents moved when he was nine years old. Both of his parents were Holocaust survivors—his mother had been in Majdanek, his father in various concentration camps, including Auschwitz—but the subject of the Nazi death camps was unmentionable within the household. Yet despite, or perhaps because of, these conspicuous silences, the aftereffects of the Shoah found their way into his adult work. He studied law because he felt that the security of a law degree would help to mitigate his inherited sense of vulnerability. Although successful as an attorney, Rosenbaum quit practicing law full-time in the 1990s, and from then on his career has been largely literary. His first book, Elijah Visible, a cycle of nine tales he calls "a novel in stories," was published in 1996, and between 1996 and 2002 he served as the literary editor of the progressive Jewish American magazine Tikkun. Nonetheless, his legal background continues to inform his writing. Rosenbaum's most recent book, The Myth of Moral Justice: Why Our Legal System Fails to Do What's Right (HarperCollins, 2004), is an attempt to redefine the American legal system by arguing that moral responsibility (expressed through storytelling and the public acknowledgment of harms and grievances, apologetic discourse, and restorative remedies) supersedes legal duty. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal, and he is currently the John Whelan Distinguished Lecturer in Law at Fordham Law School, where he teaches courses in human rights, legal humanities, and law and literature and also directs the Forum on Law, Culture, and Society.

I first met Rosenbaum in October 2004 at the American Literature Association's Jewish American and Holocaust Literature Symposium in Boca Raton, Florida. He was our guest speaker, and during his talk he entertained the audience by reading from The Golems of Gotham, a post-Holocaust "romance" where the ghosts of notable concentration camp survivors (all artists who committed suicide) haunt the streets of Manhattan, imploring its populace never to forget. I say "entertained" because that is what Rosenbaum does, in the fullest sense of the word. During his address, filled with deadly seriousness, I could not help but notice the affability and even humor he brought to his delivery. Afterward I approached Rosenbaum, telling him how much I enjoyed his talk and mentioning that I was teaching Elijah Visible to a class of undergraduates in three weeks' time. He was sincerely interested in my teaching of his book and agreed to talk with my students. The result was a conference call with my class sitting around a speakerphone and Rosenbaum fielding a wide variety of questions. This classroom exercise was such a success that I asked him...