The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture by Samantha Baskind

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture by Samantha Baskind Cordula Grewe (bio) The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture By Samantha Baskind. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2018. 328 pp. Striding forward with unstoppable determination while cradling a blond girl asleep from exhaustion, "Superman breaks the wall!" With a startled Lois Lane clinging to his overly muscular biceps and a few vividly colored main characters by his side, the caped crusader leads a group of downtrodden survivors, a mass of grayish-blue shadows, toward a bright future that lies beyond our sight and their imagination. The image of the well-known superhero might be a surprise first encounter when it comes to the imaginary afterlife of the Warsaw Ghetto. But it aptly points to the ghetto's widespread presence in American visual culture and to the breadth of material explored in Samantha Baskind's engaging study, ranging from contemporary radio dramas to the unprecedented uprising of Warsaw's doomed Jews on April 19, 1943, to Joe Kubert's rattling graphic novel commemorating that day, his 2003 Yossel. Second in prominence as "a potent emblem of the war and Jewish life in Europe" (1) only to Auschwitz, yet by its nature more intricate in its richly textured sociocultural fabric and various forms of resistance, the Warsaw Ghetto had many facets, with an equally multifold kaleidoscope of reflections across media and mediums. With great sensitivity for the nuances of the life in the festering city within a city, and a determined advocacy to do justice to a moment in time that defies essentialist readings, Baskind sets out "to widen our understanding of the ghetto's legacy in the American consciousness" (7). The result is a reception and perception history that, written for a general as much as an academic audience, lives off a series of astute, often descriptive close readings. Drawn from high art and popular culture alike, judiciously contextualized—historically, political, culturally—and approached with a keen awareness for the effects of "postmemory" (Marianne Hirsch) and the psychology of viewership, they "reveal much about identity, memory, and values in American Jewish life" (8). Unearthing the persistent role of the Warsaw Ghetto, [End Page 208] Baskind reveals it "as a recurrent tool for fashioning and refashioning Jewish identity" (13). Before World War II, Warsaw's Jewish community had been the largest in Europe, making up a tenth of Poland's population and a third of its capital. In November 1940, the occupying forces began to sequester the city's Jews in a ghetto of merely 1.3 square miles. By 1941, almost half a million people, including Jews from outside the capital, were trapped inside the now iconic brick wall that sealed it off from the outside. By then life in the overcrowded ghetto had become unbearable, marked by squalor, starvation, and widespread disease, dead bodies littering the streets, and orphaned children begging for a morsel of food or a moment of warmth. By the spring of 1942 liquidation began, and a year later, the numbers had shrunk to 60,000. Yet a second series of mass deportations in January 1943 provoked spontaneous resistance, and a small number of deportees escaped. Heartened by this unexpected success, the remaining inhabitants united across factions, and on Passover eve 1943, they mounted what has become a legendary revolt against the Nazi oppressors—proudly described by the commander of the Jewish Combat Organization, twenty-three-year-old Mordecai Anielewicz, as "the magnificent, heroic fighting of Jewish men in battle" (14–15). It is this moment, and this vision of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising as "heroic, empowering, and epic," that dominated the ghetto's earliest depictions and thus mark, with historical inevitability, also the beginning of Baskind's account. The initial artistic responses between 1943 and 1950, mapped out in chapter 1, were fueled by the need to rally support for Europe's persecuted Jews and to defy the caricature of the Diaspora Jew as bookish, passive, and weak, a person who—as an all-too-common canard claimed—went to the gas chamber like a "sheep to the slaughter" (15). As their coreligionists were herded off in cattle...