The Holocaust and Postwar Jewish Identity in Daniel Stern's Who Shall Live, Who Shall Die

THE HOLOCAUST AND POSTWAR JEWISH IDENTITY IN DANIEL STERN'S WHO SHALL LIVE, WHO SHALL DIE Philippe Codde Ghent University Good or bad, treacherous or loving or cruel, all men suffer and die. Such a fellowship cannot be treated lightly. —Daniel Stern, Who ShallLive, Who Shall Die In spite ofhis early involvement in Holocaustwriting, and despite his distinct interest in Jewish subject matter, Daniel Stern's name remains unrecorded in surveys ofJewishAmerican and Holocaustwriting.1 Though he published his debut novel at the peak of the Jewish renaissance, his starwas eclipsed by the omnipresent Bellow-Malamud-Roth triumvirate. In fact, Stern's critical neglect is perhaps the most remarkable—and unjustified —aspect of a literary career which spans over five decades by now. It is all the more puzzling given that Who ShallLive, Who ShallDie (1963) won him the International Prix du Souvenir from the BergenBelsen Society, and it moved EHe Wiesel to an enthusiastic encomium: "I loved itwhen it first appeared, I love it still. I believe it stands among the best of the genre."2 Apart from its purely literary merits, the novel remains a valuable period document because it is one ofthe earliest American attempts to address the topic of the Holocaust in a work of fiction. Like Elie Wiesel's Night (1960), Stern's novel already considers the theological implications ofthe Shoah, which soon afterwards found their full expression in Richard Rubenstein's notorious AfterAuschwitz (1966).3 It also addresses some of the controversial issues that would later spark debate in Holocaust studies: the equation ofvictim andvictimizer, andthe question offreedom in the death camp universe. In the tradition ofthe great Jewish immigrant novel, Who ShallLive, Who ShallDie again addresses the issue of authentic Jewish identity in a fully commercialized American society. Published in 1963, Stern's novel is in all likelihood the second Jewish American novel to deal with the Holocaust as an important thematic concern. It was composed at about the same time Edward Lewis Wallant was writing The Pawnbroker (1961), generally considered the first Jewish American novel on the Holocaust.4 The issue is not competition—who was first—but rather the originality ofStern's subject matter. When he was writing his novel in the 1950s and early 1960s, 166Philippe Codde Stern notes, "there were not a halfdozen works available to anyone interested in the still recent fate ofthe Jews ofEurope. Raul Hilberg and Lucy Dawidowicz had yet to publish their major research tasks; Holocaust studies had not yet been born."5 So Stern used other novels, such as André Schwartz-Bart's Le dernier desjustes (The Last ofthe Just) and Wiesel's La Nuit (Night), as sources ofinformation.6 A historical motive forwriting the novel, he remembers, was "the arrest and then the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem" (WSL, xv). Though Ehe Wiesel asserts that the issues in Stern's novel "are not those ofBelsen, but ofthe theater. In other words, the author is not telling an Auschwitz story" (WSL, x), Stern does not shy away from graphic and fairly detailed descriptions of the univers concentrationnaire, ranging from a Blockfiihrer's random and indifferent cruelty when drowning an inmate to the nightmarish experiences ofthe cattle car transports and the selections. While the novel's depiction ofscenes inthe concentration camps, and the protagonist's involuntary memories ofthese scenes, closely parallel Wallant's The Pawnbroker, the novel's setting and plot also bear a striking resemblance to The Victim (1948), Saul Bellow's early indictment of anti-Semitism in America.7 As in the latter novel, a successful Jewish protagonist, Jud Kramer, is suddenly confronted with the accusation of having destroyed someone else's life, and in both novels, the theater is the setting for some of the most dramatic scenes. But whereas Leventhal's misconduct in The Victim may or may not have been the result of a conscious decision, Jud's single recriminating act stems from an unmistakable moral choice: aged fourteen and set to work in an SS orderly room in Belsen, Judah Kramer decides to cross his own number, as well as his mother's and sister's, off the deportation list he was ordered to retype, and he replaces...