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chapter one A Dandy and Jewish Detritus I who am not, who only was once, There where the road led to the camp gate. My trace, a diary hidden between bricks. Perhaps someday it will be unearthed. —Czesław Miłosz The Nazi war economy sustained itself not only through production, exploitation , or looting, but also through substitution and replacement, which took the form of a whole range of ersatz products, cheap fakes, and impermanent copies. For example, an inferior food product made from sugar beets replaced marmalade and its proverbially bad taste was long remembered after the war. These imitative products were a part of larger processes of emulation summed up by Kazimierz Wyka in the phrase ßycie na niby, “life as if lived, life not quite lived.”1 One encounters the same bitter resentment in the expression ßycie-ersatz, “ersatz life,”2 coined by Władysław Szlengel, the PolishJewish poet (1914–1943), to whom this chapter is dedicated. The expression aptly refers to his existence in the Warsaw Ghetto. This ubiquitous substitutive force had its parallel within the domain of Holocaust representation, mainly in its wide use of metonymy and synecdoche. When objects entered the frame of representation, playing the role of protagonists while signifying their absent users, they performed only one role among the many available in the metonymical paradigm. Paradoxically, this entrance into the sphere of representation gave trivial things their maximum agency. An ordinary item, such as a pair of shoes, introduces us to the world of the Holocaust. It should be surprising that shoes perform this function, but it is not; the shock they cause comes from their sheer quantity. Moreover, shoes achieved a stunning career through literary strategies of substitution. Though a pair of shoes is just a pair of shoes, their inside is a reversed image of the feet which they protect. Together with their outside peculiarities, they inform an imprinted “portrait,” and, by extension, a metonymic image of the individual who, long absent, made this “footprint.”3 Likewise, the worn surface of a tool 18 on JOUISSANCE contains an impression of the hand that used it for various chores. One is intrigued by the visual details inscribed on the surface of objects: the older the object, the more intricate the traces and texture of use and abuse. A single ordinary item—a pencil, suitcase, or penknife—can stand for the larger whole of historical processes. Once again, the Holocaust comes to mind, engaged, as it is, repeatedly and stubbornly, in the dynamics of miniature and massive accumulation . An indispensable item such as a pair of shoes, accumulated in camps as detritus, became part of a common series of things that were regularly thematized in Holocaust texts. One of them, entitled simply “A Load of Shoes,” was written by the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever on January 17, 1942, in the Vilna Ghetto. In an attempt to reach beyond an amassed and unspecified pile of shoes, “transported,” as they were, “from Vilna to Berlin,” he questions the “objectual heroes” of his poem about their owners—“where are your feet?” or “where is the child / who fit in these?”4 —and emphasizes the forced separation of these things from their users, whose demise they, then, suggest. While the poem tends to personalize the shoes in a sentimental fashion , it also attempts to dispel a sense of the all-encompassing and chaotic anonymity of their pile. This is clearly the case with a pair of women’s Sabbath shoes, which are identified as belonging to the poetic persona’s mother. This moment of recognition communicates her death. A written account, perceived in terms of a physical object, reveals a similar logic. Here a poem stands for its author, implying both the person and his or her lived experience. When considered within the context of mass genocide, a poem enters a stage of contradiction: it stands as a testimony to the dying human presence, but also to its own, often accidental, survival. A single episode from the posthumous peregrinations of Szlengel’s oeuvre is sufficiently evocative. After the war, Ryszard Baranowski, a man from the town of Józefów near Warsaw, found a typed collection of Szlengel’s poems in the double top of an old table Baranowski was demolishing. The collection bore the poet’s handwritten inscription with the date 11.2.1943. Hence, these were some of the last poems Szlengel wrote before his own death. Although it turned out that these...

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