Gendered Testimonies of the Holocaust Writing Life by Petra M. Schweitzer (review)

Within the voluminous field of Holocaust testimonial literature, Petra M. Schweitzer selected the theme of motherhood, which she explores in the Holocaust survivor writings of two male poets and three female memoirists. Instead of analyzing the entire corpus of each of these five authors, she picks up written texts she conceives as symbolic of motherhood. She has chosen to explore this particular literature and theme under the impact of the philosophies and writings of Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) and Emmanuel Levi-nas (1905–1995), to whose memory she dedicates her volume. Schweitzer was inspired mostly by Derrida's last testament from an interview he gave to Le Monde when he was terminally ill and confronting his own demise. Schweitzer quotes him, and comments:

In Derrida's view, "a complication of the life-death opposition proceeds in me from an unconditional affirmation of life. Survival, this is life after life, life more than life, the most intense life possible." I chart Derrida's concept of survival as an opposition between life and death as proceeding from the oddly paired connotation of an "unconditional affirmation of life" and "living the most intense life possible."

(xvi)

Schweitzer applies Derrida's final insight to the life of Jews in the camps during the Holocaust, enlightening herself and gaining appreciation for those who lived with such intensity, facing death any minute of their existence during this period. She expects to find resonances of such a perpetual "life-death opposition" in their memoirs, poems, and novels.

Through her own metaphor of motherhood she bridges Derrida's and Levinas's respective thoughts. "My claim," she writes, "is that the act of writing testimony manifests itself as the most intensive form of life possible. Encountering the relation between life and survival, I suggest that writing symbolizes the act of giving birth. … Writing as a symbolized act of giving birth is thus reconstructing the subjects' identity" (xvii). Consequently, writing testimony has a dual function, creating new identity which entails responsibility for "the Other," thereby linking her conception of testimonial writing with Levinas's philosophy. Drawing upon Claire Elise Katz's interpretation of Levinas, she contends that "in bringing together Derrida's concept of 'an unconditional affirmation of life' [and] Levinas's idea on maternity where life is linked to responsibility for the other, I focus on the embedding images of motherhood in the ethical relation between survivor-writers and the other" (xx). Schweitzer builds her concept of gendered testimonies upon the ideas that a) remembering the victims of the horror is akin to the maternal, ethical act of caring for the other; b) just like the creation of a dwelling space, it is similar to home building, which is traditionally the role of Jewish women; c) these acts of caring were true for both men and women writers who lived to write after the war; d) therefore such acts, whether written by men or women, are feminine, maternal, and ethical.

So equipped, she embarks on her literary journey to seek images of motherhood in Holocaust literary testimonies. Her first authors are two Jewish poets, Dan Pagis (1930–1986) and Paul Celan [Antschel] (1920–1970). Both of them were born in Bukovina, then Romania and now Ukraine, to German-speaking Jewish families; both were in concentration and labor camps during the war. Both became leading poets of their generation in their respective languages. Dan Pagis published his Hebrew-language poems in the Israeli periodical literature and collected them into three volumes (1959, 1964, and 1970). His last poems appeared posthumously in 1987 (see Huss, Bar-El, and Padva). Initially, the Holocaust experience was not explicitly apparent in his published poems. The first time he addressed it was in 1970 (Huss, Bar-El, and Padva 158) in a poetic cycle that included the poem "Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway-Car," that Schweitzer selected for her analysis. This is likely his most-quoted poem, which also became a public monument...