Diasporas and Exiles: Varieties of Jewish Identity

8. “This Is Not What I Want”: Holocaust Testimony, Postmemory, and Jewish Identity

8 “This Is Not What I Want” Holocaust Testimony, Postmemory, and Jewish Identity Diane L. Wolf I believe in testimony more than anything else. ELIE WIESEL Mit vemen ken ikh redn? Whom can I speak to? di meyseim farshteyen mir afile nit even the ghosts do not understand me IRENA KLEPFISZ To survive was to escape fate. But if you escape your fate, whose life do you then step into? ANNE MICHAELS, Fugitive Pieces The past several years has seen a burst of Holocaust testimonials—both in written and oral forms—in great part due to survivors’ reaching the end of their lives and feeling a sense of obligation to record these histories (Bartov, 1993).1 Although many survivors recount that they felt that no one wanted to hear their stories after the war, there is now a great demand for them.2 After living with their stories for fifty years, it is not uncommon for Holocaust survivors to decide to finally speak in reaction to the denials of Holocaust revisionists or after seeing Schindler’s List. Many spoke for the first time about their experiences to those videotaping for Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation (VHF), which aims to collect and make available taped interviews of fifty thousand Holocaust survivors. Clearly, one of the main purposes of producing Holocaust testimonials is to ensure that the past is not forgotten, thereby creating a cultural memory that will contribute to the perpetuation of Jewish identity. 191 Survivor stories provide rich possibilities for contemporary analysis. Such testimonies can be seen as transnational narratives par excellence;3 they speak of cultural multiplicity (Foster, 1995), of fluid and multiple selves (Langer, 1995), of a dispersed sense of self (Gallant and Cross, 1992), of identity, of the creation of double- or multidiasporic existences, and of negotiation between the language of emotions (often Yiddish), of schooling and of nation (Hebrew, Polish) of the wartime experience (German) and of their new home (e.g., English). Due to these experiences, Holocaust testimonies are both homeless and global (Suleiman, 1996:643), about dislocation and transnational existences. Holocaust testimonials remain, however , surprisingly underanalyzed by sociologists4 and other social scientists.5 The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, based on a survivor’s testimonial that I took as an oral history, I will explore how a displaced and stateless Jewish survivor named Jake made his way in post-Holocaust Europe and North America, with particular attention to his emigration decision and his resultant relationship to home and the diaspora. Second, after delineating Jake’s wartime and postwar experiences, I will explore the linkages between Holocaust testimonial, “postmemory,” and the construction of Jewish identities in the second and third generations and beyond. In this sense, the paper deals with not only the politics of memory but also the politics of Jewish identity. Finally, I wish to connect the richness of Jewish post–World War II refugee experiences with contemporary sociological and interdisciplinary discourses concerning immigrants, refugees, and diasporas, as part of a broader effort to counter “sociological silences” (Kaufman, 1996:6; Bauman , 1991:3) about the Holocaust.6 MEMORIES Collectivememorythattransmitsagroup’shistoryandcultureandultimately its identity constitutes an important role in diasporic groups (Chaliand and Rageau, 1995:xv). Collective memory refers to the “common shared awareness of the presence of the past in contemporary consciousness” (Stier, 1996:1). In her book on the politics of remembering, Sturken (1997:1) argues that “memory establishes life’s continuity; it gives meaning to the present . . . memory provides the very core of identity.” Although there is no monolithic “Jewish” collective memory (Aschheim, 1997:29), contemporary researchers suggest that the Holocaust constitutes the most important basis of American and Israeli Jewish identity, creating a Jewish “civil religion” (Goldberg, 1995; Stier, 1996).7 One ramification of centering Jewish identity in the Holocaust is the perpetuation of a notion of victimhood, creating a curious paradox, given that Jews today constitute a relatively strong and powerful ethnic group in the United States (Biale, 1986). The memorialization of the Holocaust has accelerated in recent years 192 diane l. wolf (Young, 1993), incurring political debates in cities all over the world about the form and content of its representation. Linenthal (1995) provides an unusual view onto the politics of producing Holocaust memory in his book documenting the creation of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. Contentious and divisive debates on the museum’s...