Redemptive Possibilities of Holocaust Remembrance

In her recent book After Such Knowledge, Eva Hoffman distinguishes between two categories of scholarly works on the "memory, history, and the legacy of the Holocaust": those that primarily address the "psychocultural" dimensions of the legacy of the Holocaust and those that are more concerned with "sociopolitical" issues.¹ Hoffman's distinction nicely captures the different emphases of the two books here under review. Image and Remembrance: Representation and the Holocaust, edited by Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz, addresses the "psychocultural" aspects of the Holocaust's legacy through essays devoted to questions about artistic representation and memory, while Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke's Louisiana by Lawrence N. Powell focuses on "sociopolitical" issues through an examination of one survivor's personal and political journey. Both works are concerned with the moral imperative of remembering the Holocaust for those who do not possess personal memory of the events—a category of individuals that will soon encompass us all. Despite this shared concern, the books reach radically different conclusions about the redemptive possibilities of Holocaust memory, one emphasizing the impossibility of finding closure in relation to this traumatic past and the other exploring the resolution achieved by one Holocaust survivor in her quest for political justice. Considering the two works together offers an opportunity to reflect on the contributions and shortcomings of these two scholarly approaches to the legacy of the Holocaust.

The eighteen essays in Image and Remembrance examine a wide range of issues relating to art and the commemoration of the Holocaust. Hornstein and Jacobowitz explain in their introduction that, unlike other collections of essays on art and the Holocaust, they sought to assemble a volume of critical essays which would be a Holocaust memorial in its own right. They argue: "A book, like a work of visual art, a film, or a monument, is a place that can inspire thought, reflection, learning, debate, and mourning" (p. 1). As a result, they intend for the volume to reach more people than just academics, and they expressly mention their desire not to contribute another book "to what might arguably be seen as a growing Holocaust industry" (p. 2). Despite the editors' best intentions to create a volume that would make art criticism accessible to a broader audience, most of the essays remain on the level of high academic discourse. Nevertheless, they do offer analyses of a wide range of art relating to the Holocaust, much of which may be familiar only to specialists in the field.

Hornstein and Jacobowitz address the volume to longstanding scholarly discussions about the unrepresentability of the Holocaust. They seek to move that discussion forward by placing art on an equal footing with historiography, arguing that realism is itself a complex aesthetic and that, for this reason, art does not pose a more significant threat to the aestheticization of the Holocaust than other forms of representation. They call attention, not to the problems of artistic representations of the Holocaust, but to the possibilities of expression opened up by artists' work on the Holocaust. Art, they suggest, is neither solely about history nor memory but fills an intermediary role between the two and thus has the potential to function as both. In order to highlight these issues of representation and commemoration, the volume is organized thematically rather than by artistic medium in the hope that such themes might compel a reconsideration of issues. The four sections—"Commemoration and Sites of Mourning," "Personal Responses and Familial Legacies," "Memento Mori: Atrocity and Aesthetics," and "National Expressions of Remembrance"—

are based on different sites and agents of memory, yet they ultimately blend together, for they all treat the themes "of shaping or spatializing absence," of witnessing trauma in art, and of aestheticizing the Holocaust (p. 5). Out of their desire to avoid creating any semblance of...