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

"Remember." The word that has become the aphorism for the Holocaust - the single word printed on buttons distributed at the museum in Washington - provides the foundation for Holocaust Girls, S.L. Wisenberg's powerful collection of twenty-four essays. Remember. Whether writing about the Holocaust in a historical sense or as a backdrop for her experiences as a Jewish woman born in America a few years after the war, Wisenberg reminds us in compelling and lyrical prose that "we are all afraid of being erased." Wisenberg's unusual and haunting essays help us recall the horror of the Holocaust. Yet the essays also present wonderful details, beautiful images, and strange stories that show why life - despite its horrors - is worth living and documenting.

Continually experimenting, Wisenberg often writes essays composed of short pieces, fragments, or episodes - sometimes numbered or subtitled - that add up to a cohesive whole. The first essay in the collection, "Holocaust Girls/Lemon," broken into four sections, tells the story of Jews in a Polish city who, when trapped, descend into the sewers, only to emerge "as pale as larvae" when the Russians reclaim the city. "Covered in filth, backs hunched," they are "dripping. Their pupils [have] shrunk, too small to hold daylight. Everything look[s] blood red to them, or black and white." As horrific as this description sounds, it is redeemed by the entrance of friends and sewer workers who bring the survivors candy and lemons. One survivor bites into a lemon and eats it whole, "peel and all." Wisenberg explains that you don't have to be Jewish to be a Holocaust Girl. "What matters most is that you must love suffering. You have to pick at wounds, must be encumbered by what you consider an affliction." But just as important is to "yearn ... to want and appreciate something as intently, as specifically as that whole lemon ... [Holocaust Girls] want to greet lovers with that lemon, night after night."

Another segmented essay, "Kavka/40," a stream-of-consciousness riff on Kafka, is divided into seven parts. The segments jump from Kafka's resemblance to Wisenberg's father, to Kafka's presence in a poster on her wall in Chicago, to his grave in Prague, to the plight after his death of the woman he loved, and, finally, to an image of a jackdaw who "can be taught to speak." The essay is, like most of Wisenberg's writing, replete with evocative imagery. She describes the cemetery in the Jewish section of Prague (where because of limited ground, bodies were buried on top of one another) as "tombstones leaning and crowded like gray broken teeth." The essay also includes details that reveal Kafka's character. For example, once when he was on vacation with his girlfriend, Kafka, "a man who counted change ... gave a beggar a two-crown piece and asked for one crown back." At the end of the short essay, in spite of the leaps in time and space, Wisenberg creates a more authentic and intimate portrait of Kafka - and what he has come to represent to Jews worldwide - than a linear, historical account could accomplish in as many pages.

"Holocaust Girls/Closet," Wisenberg's description of how she and her sister played at hiding from Nazis, shows the impact of the holocaust on the postwar generation. In her imagination, the Nazis "would take [her] glasses and asthma drugs and let death just come up and kill [her], like that." For years, she "kept a bag in her closet - saltines and a notebook, a change of clothes. An alarm clock, so that [she] would know the time." The contrast between the sewers where European Jews hid and the ordinariness of the pink-carpeted walk-in closet in the Texas ranch house where Wisenberg and her sister play works to make the implications of the game more chilling.

Wisenberg also uses contrast effectively in "Monica and Hannah," an essay in which...