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Reviewed by:
  • American Jewish Loss After the Holocaust
  • Susan Chevlowe (bio)
American Jewish Loss After the Holocaust. By Laura Levitt. New York: New York University Press, 2007. xxviii + 283 pp.

I have to admit that I was initially taken aback by the intimacy of Laura Levitt’s American Jewish Loss After the Holocaust. Levitt’s self-exposure is discomfiting because it overlaps with another trespass: her engagement with the Holocaust from a subjective point of view that is usually reserved for survivors and the next generations. Yet she does not claim to speak for the victims; she speaks only from her own experience. Levitt’s vision is somewhat ironic, as she challenges the privileging of uniqueness “to show how legacies of ordinary Jewish loss need not displace the Holocaust but, instead, how attending to ordinary stories might help many of us better appreciate the human dimensions of the Holocaust” (8).

Central to her personal narrative is the discovery of family photographs, in particular a photograph of a grandmother whose image she had never seen before, who died when her father was very young. Her story also concerns her grandfather’s second wife, who raised her father and figured prominently in her own childhood. Levitt was the longtime director of Jewish studies at Temple University and is now director of its Women’s studies program. While her first-person account reads like a memoir, it simultaneously challenges the objectivity of traditional scholarly work and naturally builds upon her first book Jews and Feminism: The Ambivalent Search for Home (1997).

Levitt’s down-to-earth approach is in stark contrast to theoretical writings, such as Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, for example, in her essay from the mid-1990s, “Representing Auschwitz,” which concludes:

What I have presented as two divergent orientations are actually part of the same dialectic which posits the wholely transcendent as wholely unrepresentable. For the mythifiers, it is inherently unsayable, elusive, inscrutable and immutable, the sole determinant and ultimate extinguisher of meaning. For the relativizers, it is precisely in its ineffability that it is infinitely and diversely representable; the urgency of representation, then, unfolds in continual tension between desire and its limits. When it gives license to pluralistic interpretations and shifting sites of memory, Auschwitz “authorizes” the open horizons of a post-Holocaust world.1 [End Page 383]

Levitt follows Ezrahi in responding to the centrality of “Auschwitz.” Her contribution is to expand meaning outward rather than to turn it inward, close it off and seal it, and to do so in a way that is accessible—ordinary.

In Chapter 1, Levitt confronts the shame she at first experienced viewing Yaffa Eliach’s Tower of Faces at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. She reflects on different forms of identification with and connection to the lives and experiences of the individuals represented in the photographs that comprise the Tower. As she writes: “In many ways, this book is a wager that I am not alone in this uncomfortable, unspoken desire” to identify with those represented in the Tower and to find a place for one’s own story (21). In this chapter, Levitt writes in detail about Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, which posits that in such works as Art Spiegelmann’s Maus, for example, as the son tries to come to terms with familial and cultural memories, he is inevitably confronted by the “deferred, mediated, secondary memory that has cast its shadow over contemporary life” (25). There is a compulsion to search out the past, to uncover memories that are unknowable, or as art historian and the child of survivors Dora Apel has written, “a search that serves as an excavation for the roots of identity, in the end both reveals and withholds the continuity of identity.”2 As a writer and historian, Levitt enacts the same search, ceaselessly beginning again, to construct her story, to structure a narrative that cannot possibly have an ending, but that leaves open possibilities of establishing connections to the losses of others, both Jews and non-Jews, that come when one brings one’s own ghosts into the room, she tells us.

Chapter 2 offers a close reading of Abraham Ravett’s 1985...

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