Sun Turned to Darkness: Memory and Recovery in the Holocaust Memoir (review)

Abstract

Sun Turned to Darkness: Memory and Recovery Holocaust MemoirIn this study of Holocaust memoirs, David Patterson begins with two controversial assumptions. First, he believes experience of Jews camps was different from that of gentiles -- necessarily different, because as Chosen People, are partners covenant with God made at Sinai. Second, and as a result, he assumes any interpretation of that experience must be undertaken light of that covenant, and terms of that God. In nearly every memoir, according to Patterson, God there, either affirmed or denied, either silently or explicitly. Yet, Patterson asserts, in nearly every discussion of Holocaust memoir He is first one forgotten. Patterson's evaluation has value, if only as a corrective to largely secular, often politically based theories that tend to dominate critical discussion of Holocaust and its literature. If God can be forgotten study of Holocaust, hope can there be for a religiously informed approach to literary and historical studies general, which have grown increasingly profane, both senses of word? Patterson's own approach, however, is beset with many problems of both theory and practice. The theoretical assumptions are, alternately, challenging and disturbing; but deconstructive hermeneutics Patterson employs marginalizes and, at times, trivializes his work.Patterson's distinction between Jewish and gentile experiences death camps is an expression of faith, not a subject for verification. Yet it broaches problem of special consideration for suffering of some over others. We know that collectively Jewish experience was, fact, different, especially since, most of death camps, there were no gentile inmates. At Auschwitz, where there were, selections were suspended early war for all but whose clothing and diet were inferior to other camp inmates, whose punishments were more brutal, and whose healthcare was more treacherous -- and that, of course, applies only to those Jews not sent immediately to their deaths upon arrival. But of experience of Jews and gentiles individually -- experience described, after all, memoirs Patterson discusses? Weakened by disease, crazed with thirst, stupefied by malnutrition, numb with exposure, and exhausted by overwork, did those wearing a colored triangle have a qualitatively different experience from that of those wearing a yellow star? Few of us would care to measure individual suffering on such a scale, let alone construct comparisons order to determine who endured more. Some commentators, though, have suggested that criminals camps may have benefited psychologically from their sense of guilt, however cruel and unusual punishment, and that political prisoners may have been sustained by their commitment to a cause or outrage at injustice, while very senselessness of Nazis' war against Jews may have further contributed to mental and emotional anguish of Jewish inmates.Patterson, a sense, wants to move points of reference for this discussion from historical and psychological to spiritual, his exploration of the essential role of eternal Holocaust memoir. In so doing, he claims to have discovered what is distinctively Jewish Holocaust memoir and distinguishes it from other memoirs; One who is invoked memory needs that memory as much as one who remembers. This theme of interdependency of God and Jewish people is a common one Jewish tradition generally and Holocaust writing especially, perhaps expressed most succinctly opening line of Without Jews, by Jacob Glatstein: Without Jews there is no Jewish God. …