Echoes from the Holocaust: Philosophical Reflections on a Dark Time (review)

Volume 9, No.2 Winter 1991 97 to the atrocity. These were also the ingredients that Tory documented for survival in the Kovno Ghetto. On 12 February 1943, Tory identified the goals of life in the Ghetto: "to keep on going, and to keep spinning the golden thread of the eternal glory of Israel" (p. 210). Such goals would, according to Tory, yield the courage to survive. Survival involved building morale, feeding the inhabitants of the Ghetto, along with about 2000 additional unregistered Jews, and supplying labor, in the hope that survival would be facilitated. Tory recognized that the need "to appease the Germans" (p. 193) was distasteful, but necessary. In this the reader can discern the terrible, painful, and sorrowful decisions forced on the Jewish Councils of the Ghettos. Efforts to feed and sustain the inhabitants, to supply labor, to develop a network of cooperation, to care for the aged and orphans, to sustain morale, to organize resistance activities, to dig hiding places were all ways of preserving life in the Nazi "society of total domination" that Tory describes so poignantly. That description reflected the need to bear witness-to tell the world, because, in Tory's words, "These details must not be allowed to sink into oblivion" (p. xxi). We are, indeed, indebted to Avraham Tory for those tragic details. Terrence Des Pres said, "To hold on and wait are imperatives which define the survivor's struggle" (p. 29) and in Tory's account of the Kovno Ghetto the reader can glimpse the horrendous and unforgettable meaning of survival in the Holocaust. This volume is recommended without hesitation or reservation. Saul Lerner Associate Dean of the Graduate School and Professor of History Purdue University Calumet Hammond, Indiana Echoes from the Holocaust: Philosophical Reflections on a Dark Time, edited by Alan Rosenberg and Gerald E. Meyers. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988. 453 pp. $34.95. I must apologize to the editors of Shofar for the lateness of this review. In fact, I feel very much like a sophomore making a last plea for making up an incomplete grade in a course. But the lateness is, itself, a part of the review . I have been directly involved in Holocaust related research and writing since 1972, a total of eighteen years as of this writing. In the course of my work, numerous questions have been raised in my mind for which either I could find no answers or the answers were limited and unsatisfactory. In reviewing this book, I found a group of serious scholars who addressed many of 98 SHOFAR those questions. Most of them were professional philosophers, i.e., academic philosophers active in the discipline of "doing" philosophy; some were not. As a result, my engagement with these numerous questions at levels of depth and meaning affected me at a deeply personal level. That is part of the reason for the lateness mentioned above. I had to stop reading on many occasions and ponder what had been told me in the essay. This proved to be the case over and over again. It simply became impossible for me to "speed" my way through the book, as is often possible by an experienced reviewer. Ponder ? Yes. Often deeply and for long periods of time. The problem of "meaning" was addressed in a number of the essays, a problem which plagues every student of the Holocaust. Both Wiesel's often repeated admonition to be silent before the "void" and Greenberg's "no lessons" are addressed . Essay #22, Dan Magurshak's "The Incomprehensibility of the Holocaust: Tightening Up Some Loose Usage," is particularly valuable at this point. He disagrees with Wiesel (p. 422-426), then argues that as a "human phenomenon" it is possible to make the Holocaust comprehensible (p. 427-430). This essay alone makes the book valuable. Add those by Alan Rosenberg and Paul Marcus (#10); Rosenberg (#19); Ronald Aronson (#11); George Kren (especially #12, for there are two by him); Steven Katz (#13); Hans Jonas (#14); Gerald E. Meyers (#15); Edith Wyschogrod (#16); Manfred Henningsen (#20); Peter Hare (#21); and Alice and Roy Eckardt (#23), and, to use a metaphor, the reader's plate is full to overflowing. I...