The Objects that Remain. Dimyonot: Jews and the Cultural Imagination by Laura Levitt

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Objects that Remain. Dimyonot: Jews and the Cultural Imagination by Laura Levitt Mara H. Benjamin Laura Levitt, The Objects that Remain. Dimyonot: Jews and the Cultural Imagination. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2020. 184 pp. Hardcover $24.95. ISBN: 9780271087825. In the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, a glimpse of gold flashes up, only to be quickly occluded from the viewer's gaze. The wooden box enclosing the treasure is nailed shut, and the camera pans out to reveal a warehouse full of identical boxes, all labeled "Top Secret—Army Intel—Do Not Open!" This iconic last shot of the movie, juxtaposing the numinous and the bureaucratic, the singular and the anonymous, came to mind as I read Laura Levitt's The Objects that Remain. In her powerful meditation, Levitt contemplates the experience of holding and beholding objects that pulse with almost otherworldly power even as they sit in archives, vaults, and storage facilities. The objects to which Levitt turns her attention here are neither the lost ark nor the holy grail, however, but prosaic objects that have been transformed into extraordinary objects by acts of violence. The items she considers have been in contact with specific bodies. They include the sheets and sweatpants Levitt was wearing the night of her rape in graduate school in 1989 and the heaps of shoes and clothing that once adorned and protected [End Page 105] specific people, and which are now displayed in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Levitt is particularly drawn to textiles—marked as they are with a person's scent, sweat, and perhaps DNA—lying in climate-con-trolled rooms, life vibrating quietly within them as they await (re)discovery by police, investigators, and other custodians. For Levitt, the material objects of trauma speak and engage us in reciprocal processes of witnessing. These objects enable us to bear witness to horror, and, at the same time, they themselves witness our survival. The objects that remain after violation, Levitt writes, "bridge time and space, connecting past to present, before to after … Their continued, albeit fragile, existence in the present interrupts the dreaminess, the frightening, alluring, and untenable notion that life after is after life itself. They remind us that we did not die" (15). Levitt explores this power of witness from two perspectives: the perspective of the person who has been violated and the perspective of the one whose body is not itself violated, but whose love for and identification with the victimized person draws her close to the object. These two vantage points are not wholly extricable from one another; in meditating on "the objects that remain" after her own rape, Levitt is drawn to reflect on the experience of being witness to the material evidence of other traumas: the bloodied clothes locked away in police custody (as documented by Levitt's friend Maggie Nelson in Jane: A Murder); the hair of Holocaust victims collected by the Nazis. Levitt's work is deeply informed by the material turn. Levitt, like scholars in a wide variety of fields, regards objects as exercising the capacity to "demand our attention" and "embody a kind of agency," even when they are stored in the functional equivalent of the "Top Secret—Army Intel" box. But religious studies in particular grounds Levitt as she considers the eerie pull of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans in these objects. Notably for a scholar of Jewish studies, Levitt turns to terms rooted in specific forms of Christian religiosity, such as relics (sheets bloodied by rape, pantyhose bearing the DNA of a murderer and a victim) and reliquaries (the storage facilities that house these objects). In so doing, Levitt unapologetically expands Jewish scholars' and practitioners' religious lexicon, convincingly demonstrating how generative this language is for her purpose. Objects, like people, cannot survive without the work of individuals who carefully preserve them from decay. A significant dimension of The Objects that Remain concerns the labor of conservators, which Levitt makes visible to the reader. Much of the most exciting scholarship in the new materialisms implicitly bears a feminist orientation, and certainly that is true in Levitt's attention to the care through which...