Holocaust Girls: History, Memory and Other Obsessions (review)

In S. L. Wisenberg's new essay collection, Holocaust Girls: History, Memory and Other Obsessions, the author seeks to understand what it means to be Jewish-American more than a half-century after the Holocaust. The book's central premise is stated by the author late in the chronology of the twenty-four essays: "We live inside of history, but make the choice to grab and wrestle with it or leave our hands slack, open." Wisenberg chooses to "wrestle" with history throughout this intriguing and important book.

One brief essay, "Holocaust Girls/Closet," illuminates the effect on the author of growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust and attests to her education in American Semitism post-World War II:

At Hebrew School the teachers talked about Nazis. They showed us a film on a small screen. They showed us the small bodies and the striped prison outfits. But we didn't think of it as prison. It was a death camp and the Nazis took people there. Jews.

This stark pedagogy is practiced through a child's imagination in a manner both astonishing and not: Wisenberg and her sister play Nazis and Jews the way children throughout time have acted out roles of adversaries—cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians. "The Nazis came to Texas in the 1960s," she writes, describing her childhood game. "We could hear them just around the corner. My older sister Rosi would make the sound of their footsteps—would tap her hands on the pink carpet of the walk-in closet in her room. . . . I would hold my breath. . . . We had saltines and olives to live on."

The archness of the first line in "Holocaust Girls/Closet" ("The Nazis came to Texas in the 1960s") emphasizes the contrast between childhood innocence and the horrors of the history they absorbed at an early age. This authorial distance serves to illustrate the removal of the author (and thus American Jews of her generation) from the material suffering of European Jews under Hitler's genocide. But the tone does not work as well in other essays. In "The Holocaust Girls/Lemon," the first essay in the collection, Wisenberg opens with an epigraph from "We are the Holocaust Girls," an imagined verse sung to the melody of the "Lullaby League and Lollypop Guild" from The Wizard of Oz. The essay begins:

You don't have to be Jewish to be a Holocaust Girl. But it helps. It helps to have been born in the U.S.A. to parents born here, without accents. But it's not necessary. And you don't have to be a girl, either. What matters most is that you must love suffering.

This glib, self-mocking tone suggests survivor's guilt: reconciling the oppression and annihilation of Jews mid-twentieth century with her experience of relative affluence, comfort, and safety. But the opening line erases the particularity of the Nazi Holocaust, dismisses the regimentation of that extermination campaign like no other in history to mere "suffering," and ignores the specificity of anti-Semitism then and now. The essay is perhaps about wallowing in the righteousness of the oppressed, or at least the uncomfortable ambiguity of that position, but the tone of the essay—ridicule—seems wrong. In striving to explore the way Jews today own and internalize the "suffering" of their people, Wisenberg veers too close to trivializing suffering instead of commenting on the trivialization of suffering.

The problem in this piece may stem from form, which works quite well in others. Most of these essays are mosaics, fragments unstitched, patchworks of prose whose juxtapositions are meant to reverberate into larger meaning. Wisenberg is more successful in longer pieces where she truly essays the topic, in which the sections have a multiplicative effect. In short mosaics, much is left to the reader to determine. When dealing with such...