Auschwitz (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Auschwitz Tim Cole (bio) Angela Morgan Cutler . Auschwitz. Ullapool, Scotland: Two Ravens Press, 2008. Paper £9.99. ISBN 1906120188. In part, Angela Morgan Cutler's Auschwitz is an example of a recent genre that combines Holocaust travelogue with family history. Like Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost, Cutler seeks to uncover the places where family members lived and died. This search begins in Auschwitz, but ends up taking in Budapest, where her husband's grandmother lived, and the Blagovshschina Forest near Minsk, where she died. The journey begun in Auschwitz ends in Berlin with its Holocaust memorial and Jewish museum. Throughout, Cutler is interested in asking questions not only of her husband En's family's past, but also of Holocaust representation and memory in the present. The latter is a fairly well trodden path, with little new in Cutler's meditations on Holocaust tourism, or the possibilities and impossibilities of writing about Auschwitz. More interesting is one family's journey to (re)connect in some way with the lives of an Austro-Hungarian Jewish couple incarcerated in the Maly Trostinec camp and murdered in a nearby forest. When they reach this forest, En digs a hole and buries stones with messages written on them by family members, as well as a treasured doll from childhood. It is in many ways the end of their quest, and a symbolic burial of sorts for the grandparents En never knew. Alongside this story of travelling back to the Holocaust past comes another aspect to this intriguing book. Throughout, the text is interspersed with verbatim e-mails. These reveal Cutler's discussions with a variety of friends, but in particular with the Jewish-American writer Raymond Federman, himself a Holocaust survivor, who was hidden in a closet in their Paris apartment by his mother just before the rest of his family was taken to Auschwitz. Federman's story interweaves with the family story Cutler pursues, but he also becomes a critical friend in the process of writing Auschwitz. What is striking for someone rooted in fairly traditional academic writing practice is the extent of self-reflection on the act of writing integrated in the text. In particular, there is much on the dilemmas thrown up by writing Auschwitz. In one e-mail exchange, Federman claims that, "you cannot write about Auschwitz in a normal organized controlled way – it has to be a mess – the writing must be as obscene as Auschwitz was/is" (41). Elsewhere Cutler suggests that, "the only way to write this, as always, is to write digressively" (103). The place for messiness and digression in writing of this past and present is explored throughout the book. Not only are more familiar pages of descriptive [End Page 143] travelogue interspersed with e-mail correspondence setting up those journeys or Federman's comments on life and writing, but passages of prose are also broken up with a précis of a recent dream – or rather nightmare – that Cutler had. Through a combination of experimental form and intense self-reflection on the struggle of writing, Cutler offers both a story of journeying to Auschwitz, Budapest, Minsk, and Berlin as well as her own story as a writer engaged in trying to make sense of her husband's family's past and her own present. Although some may find the degree of self-reflective questioning potentially tiring or self-indulgent, it does, I think, challenge the ways in which those of us who are academics writing the Holocaust craft our narratives. In particular, it suggests the possibilities of laying bare the process of research and writing more clearly, as well as a greater degree of self-reflection upon constructing narratives of this past. However whilst reading, Auschwitz does, given the intimacy of e-mail exchange, mean that we get to know Cutler and Federman as much as we do the Holocaust stories they reflect on, there is one person who, in some ways, is almost missing from the text. This is En, Cutler's Jewish husband, who is a child of survivors, although he "hates the term Second Generation Holocaust Survivor" (313). He is only given to us through Cutler's authorial voice...