The Holocaust in the Jewish American literary imagination

Abstract

In the third of the Zuckerman novels, Philip Roth includes the following poignant detail concerning the protagonist's dying mother: A year after his [father's] death she developed a brain tumor. [F]our months later, when they admitted her again, she was able to recognize her neurologist when he came by the room, but when he asked if she could write her name for him on a piece of paper, she took the pen from his hand and instead of “Selma” wrote the word ”Holocaust” perfectly spelled. This was in Miami Beach in 1970, inscribedby a woman whose writings otherwise consisted of recipes on index cards, several thousand thank-you notes, and a voluminous file of knitting instructions. Zuckerman was pretty sure that before that morning she'd never even spoken the word aloud. Her responsibility wasn't brooding on horrors but sitting at night getting the knitting done and planning the next day's chores. But she had a tumor in her head the size of a lemon, and it seemed to have forced out everything except the one word. That it couldn't dislodge. It must have been there all the time without their even knowing. ( Zuckerman Bound , 447-448) Roth's figure of the Holocaust lodged in the brain of the American-born Jewish mother in a 1985 Jewish American novel that seems in no way a work of Holocaust fiction can be taken as a measure of the place of the Holocaust in the Jewish American imagination. As Norma Rosen puts it in the foreword to the recent republication of her 1969 novel Touching Evil : “As safe Americans we were not there. Since then, in imagination, we are seldom anywhere else” (Preface, 3). For most Jewish Americans (and many non-Jewish Americans as well: Rosen's own novel deals with non-Jews as does Emily Praeger's even more recent Eve's Tattoo [1998]), this Holocaust consciousness is largely unspoken and, as compared with the daily concerns of ordinary life, it is almost of radical disconcern.