Holocaust Studies without the Holocaust: Review Essay

Abstract

Words and Witness: Narrative and Aesthetic Strategies in Representation of by Lea Wernick Fridman. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. 177 pp. $49.50 (c); $16.95 (p).Writing Writing Trauma, by Dominick LaCapra. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. 208 pp. $39.95 (c); $17.95 (p).Holocaust Representation: Art within Limits of History and Ethics, by Berel Lang. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. 175 pp. $38.00.The may be defined as attempted extermination not only of Jews but also of Judaism, inasmuch as meaning of each is tied to other. With proliferation of scholarship on the representation of Holocaust, however, itself -- that is to say, attempted extermination of Jews and Judaism -- has become more and more obscure. Focused on representation and not on scholars are far more interested in theory and aesthetics than in Jews and Judaism. result has been general erasure of Jews from studies. Yes, Jews are usually mentioned somewhere in these theoretical, analytical, and philosophical investigations. But in their examination of representations of Holocaust scholars seldom address what Jews represent as a people. While they often proceed from a well-intentioned, ethical concern, they seldom consider ethical grounding that comes to world through Jewish teachings and traditions. All sorts of texts are invoked and examined in these studies, except texts that most profoundly define who Jews are and what was therefore under assault in murder of Jews. Thus we have studies without Holocaust.Three recent publications illustrate this point, albeit it to varying degrees. In Words and Witness: Narrative and Aesthetic Strategies in Representation of for example, Lea Wernick Fridman explores existential connection between experience of trauma and its utterance in poetic and literary form (p. 3). In History, Fantasy, and Horror, first of her six chapters, she contrasts Edgar Allen Poe's psychological with Joseph Conrad's historical horror to show, quite rightly, that in Heart of Darkness Conrad opens a realm of previously unrepresented in literature. In her analysis of Conrad's novel, however, she mistakenly views Kurtz's famous dying words, The horror, as an into human capacity for and complicity with (p. 28). What Fridman fails to understand -- and what feeds forces that led to -- is this: that Kurtz collides with lies not in an insight into evil but in realization that is no evil, no good, no meaning. There is simply what is there, neutral and void of any value except value we impose through our will. It is of what Emmanuel Levinas describes as there is, from which emerges nothing but anonymous rumble of silent emptiness.(1)In her second chapter, The Silence of Historical Traumatic Experience, Fridman offers an excellent observation on function of silence in Aharon Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939, noting that the words have died...the way Jews of Badenheim will die (p. 39). In tearing of word from meaning indeed parallels tearing of soul from Jew, divine spark from human being, before murdering him. But Fridman does not explain this connection between assault on word and assault on human being. Similarly, she cites Dr. Pappenheim's comment in novel on Jews' need to return to their origins (p. 42), but she addresses neither Jewish origins nor Jewish identity. And here lies much of of Badenheim: Jews here had lost their Jewish souls long before they were murdered for being Jewish. For in a tragic effort to fit into world that murdered them, they had lost their identities as adherents of Torah that forbids murder. …