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4 Literatures ofPresence and Absence: Borowski) Appelfeld) Ozick Perhaps the most sublime passage in the JeJVish Law is the comma11dment: Thou shalt not make unto thee anygravm image, or any likeness ofany thing that is in the heavm or on earth . .. Kant, Critique ofJudgmmt Aharon Appelfeld, responding once in c01l)'ersatioll to a comment on the obliqueness ofhis novels) representations ofthe horrors ofthe H%callSt, commented that "one does not look directly at the sun." ... "M)ken nisht," literally Yiddish for "one cannot." ... But [this JVay ofspeakingj conl'cys a certain ambiguity, as if the m'ken nisht had a way ofbecoming m'tur nisht, "one mllSt not," so that an acknowledgment oflimit might servc as a warning ofthe forbidden. Lang, Writing and the Holocaust I t is the numbers, the facts of the Shoah that should speak for the event, not fiction representing it: "Keep literature out of the fire zone," is a phrase that Aharon AppelfCid recites as the imperative for writers of fiction. This imperative seems to be imposed most clearly upon those writers of fiction whose generation did not know, firsthand, the experience of the Holocaust-the Nuremburg laws, the contiscations, the humiliation of concentration, and the indignity of death in the ghettos or camps. James Young argues that there is something legitimate about survivors ' desire to tell their stories-though their accounts could not possibly be uncorrupted by political, religious, or private motivation-because suffering requires the expiation that comes with the anguished utterance. Conversely, there must be something illegitimate, we feel, about those 79 80 BetlVeen Witness and Testimony who tell stories about an event that they could not know firsthand. They are committing the cardinal sin in the post-Auschwitz world: singing in the face of the disaster, or perhaps more to Adorno's point, allowing those within earshot of the song to derive pleasure from the deaths of millions. Young suggests that in order to fend off this criticism, novelists historically removed from the event make use of the trope of the document, they mimic the eyewitness account in all of its fallibility, its corruption by motives beyond objectivity, and-in theory at least-recreate the horror for those to whom they bear (false) witness. But the witness, as often as not, tlnds herself unable to speak in the face of the memories of events that seem to defY any kind of discursive logic-or any kind of logic at all. If there is a ring of tire surrounding the events of the Shoah that provokes a respectful or, more likely, fearful silence , that silence would seem to put an end to representation, and confounds Young's sense that fiction would replicate the language of the eyewitness. If that language is at least partly a language of silence-stutters, the inability to speak, the desire to speak knowing that any language is inappropriate or inadequate-then how, precisely, does that language replicate the horror of the event itself? If what we want is fiction that replicates the documentary presence of history, or chronicle, or diary-a language of presence-then we need to closely examine just what that language looks like, and how (or perhaps if) it provides readers with an immediate sense of the event, if not a representation of it. To do so we need now to examine what such representations look like, and just what effect they have, story by story (see Bernstein 52-5). In this chapter we'll examine the responses of three canonical writers of fiction of the Holocaust to the injunction to keep literature out of the fire zone or, in AppelfCld's phrase, to avoid looking directly upon the catastrophe itself Aharon Appelfeld has, in his stories and short novels, obeyed his own injunction by writing about the effects of the Holocaust on both survivors (The Immortal Bartfuss) and bystanders (Katerina), and upon those who will die by gas and fire (Badenheim 1939, To the Land of the Cattails) and those who escape, apparently unharmed (Age of Wonders). More to the point, his prose is metonymic, placing sign next to similar sign to seal off what Alan Mintz has dubbed the "AppelfCld world" from the context that would deign to make sense of it. By contrast, Tadeusz Borowski, whose stories of the camps were collected as This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, seems obsessed by the horrible details of the univers concentrationnaire, and for that reason looks directly at it. His prose...

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