The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture

Abstract

Samantha Baskind’s The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture offers a profound, broad-ranging, multimedia analysis of American responses to the armed Jewish uprising against the Nazis in Warsaw from Passover eve, April 19, to May 16, 1943—a resistance, as is often pointed out, that lasted longer than the defense of Poland and almost as long as the Battle of France. Baskind examines American cultural responses ranging from a radio drama broadcast in June 1943, only weeks after the defeat of the insurgency and the killing or scattering of the Jews who had suffered and fought in the Warsaw Ghetto, to present-day visits to the United States Holocaust Museum and Memorial. The book generally follows the chronological unfolding of those responses, with chapters focusing on In the Presence of Mine Enemies (1959) and other television plays by Rod Serling along with Millard Lampell’s theatrical adaptations (1960 and 1964) of John Hersey’s seminal novel The Wall (1950); Leon Uris’s bestselling novel about the Warsaw Ghetto, Mila 18 (1962), in relation to his prior novel Exodus (1958) and its film adaptation (1960) about the armed conflict leading to the founding of the State of Israel; the late paintings (1990s) of Samuel Bak (b. 1933), a child-survivor of the Vilna Ghetto; and the comics of Joe Kubert, from the early 1970s to his graphic novel Yossel: April 19, 1943 (2011). In each case, Baskind judiciously adduces related materials, whether contemporaneous texts, parallels, and precedents from the history of art, later images attesting to the impact of the principle works under study, or “paratexts” (a term she borrows from literary theorist Gerard Genette), such as the dust jackets of Uris’s novels. And in each case, too, Baskind provides insightful interpretation grounded in meticulous research and supported by detailed, elegant, and illuminating visual analysis.Baskind herself comes to reflect in her “Epilogue” on the work that she has undertaken through a discussion of the USHMM in which she remarks, “Resistance efforts and rescue […] are part of the last chapter of a Holocaust narrative that—especially in the American context—needs to end on a more positive and uplifting note than in actuality” (248, her italics). The interjection delineates neatly the context and indeed the goal of the book: not a history of events in Warsaw (Baskind clearly anticipates readers who are already familiar with conditions in the ghetto and the course of the armed uprising), but rather a critical assessment of the process of Americanization to which those events have been submitted.In emphasizing the word “needs,” Baskind also signals the motor driving that process, which had also been her starting point. The fundamental need is historicized in the first chapter by bringing to the fore the presupposition to which the Warsaw Ghetto uprising responds in the words of some of its participants and most of its subsequent representations, namely, the cultural stereotype that Jews were not fighters. In a world at war as a consequence of exacerbated nationalism, all but universally articulated through the idealization of a militant virility and especially as the willingness to sacrifice oneself in battle, as George Mosse discussed long ago in Confronting the Nation (1993), there was a corollary to that premise: those who do not fight lack dignity and have no place among the nations. It is a small and heinous step from such views to the inference that the Holocaust was the Jews’ own fault—implausible, but not infrequent. Adorno thought it necessary to assert, in “Education after Auschwitz” (1967), “It is not the victims who are guilty, not even in the sophistic and caricatured sense in which still today many like to construe it.” And still today, former presidential candidate and current Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Trump administration Ben Carson took that step in proposing a “‘what-if’ scenario,” as Baskind refers to Kubert’s fantasies (224), when he suggested that if European Jews had just gotten guns, like NRA members, the Holocaust would have been “greatly diminished,” which is to say that it would not have been the Holocaust.The Warsaw Ghetto uprising was planned and executed as a contestation of the shibboleth (117) of the un-muscled Jews who collaborated in their own demise by allowing themselves to be murdered “like a sheep being led to the slaughter.” Those words of Isaiah (53.7, JPS) were already invoked during the war by Vilna resistance fighter and poet Abner Kovner, and they have been repeated countless times since. Baskind devotes a chapter to Uris as the most prominent spokesperson for the contrasting “muscular Jew”—a deliberate echo of Max Nordau’s Zionism—in the postwar American milieu. The link between Zionism as a fully fledged nationalism and the Warsaw Ghetto uprising as its proto-nationalist prequel is made altogether clear in Uris’s two most influential novels. Uris is not subtle in any respect, nor is Baskind shy in saying so, pointing to his stylistic limitations as a measure of the conceptual simplification in Uris’s archly American version of good guys vs. bad guys.In the preceding second chapter, Baskind contests in advance any sense of the inevitability of Uris’s popular, black-and-white historical understanding in her exquisite discussion of Serling. She demonstrates how, as early as 1959, it was possible to depict the Warsaw Ghetto as what Serling himself would call the twilight zone (see esp. 89), but here more in the sense of what Primo Levi named “the grey zone” in The Drowned and the Saved (1989, orig. Italian ed., 1986). Many of Baskind’s readers will either never have seen or have long forgotten Serling’s relevant teleplays, whereas the belligerent nationalism of Mila 18 cum Exodus has been pervasive and persistent. One infers, then, the deeper American need for the view of death-with-dignity in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising as the proving ground of worthiness-to-nationhood. In traditional terms, the process of Americanization has preferred the zealots to Yohanan ben Zakkai, the nation-state to the rabbinic academy.In the course of the subsequent discussion of Bak, Baskind states that in this and the next chapter, devoted primarily to Kubert, it is her “aim to unpack various cultural responses to children and the ghetto rather than argue for a specific claim, but [the two chapters] still identify a handful of threads that run through the material” (154, emphasis added). The same might be said of the whole book, both with regard to unpacking rather than arguing, and to the gathering of threads. For instance, Baskind ties the knot in the thread that leads from Arthur Szyk’s explicit Zionist images in chapter 1 to Uris in chapter 3 when she arrives at the final paragraph of chapter 5. There she discusses a cover illustration from Life magazine at the end of the Six-Day War, which includes an image of a young man chest deep in water, holding a weapon aloft and looking skyward (one might also say heavenward), with the headline, “Israeli soldier cools off in the Suez Canal” (reproduced, 236). Baskind comments that “one cannot help but wonder if the iconic freedom fighter on the cover of Exodus inspired the Life photographer” (237). Her point is not old-style source hunting. In the wake of that last war in which the world generally saw Israel, like the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto, as the besieged underdog, the icon of the Jewish fighter—or of the Jew as fighter—had been established in the American imaginary: “With the muscular Jew gaining true currency in America and abroad, the place of the Warsaw Ghetto evolved; it was no longer singularly necessary as a symbol of Jewish strength” (237, emphasis added). If the claim of Uris and the editors of Life is that Jews are dignified because they are willing to fight and die for their nation, then the State of Israel supersedes the old testimony of the Warsaw Ghetto.But what if, instead of quoting Isaiah and impugning those who died without fighting, one had always been in the habit of saying that Jews went to the slaughter like Christians to the lions? In fact, that is hardly a what-if scenario, because Anne Frank’s diary has offered an even more influential alternative than the Warsaw Ghetto in the Americanization of the Holocaust. As scholars from Alvin Rosenfeld to Oren Baruch Stier, among many others, have urged, the translated and edited text of the diary, then the stage play, and above all, the film version practiced a tendentious effacement of the Jewish context of the family hideout as well as the Jewish fate of the Frank daughters in Bergen-Belsen, in favor of a universalizing message of moral optimism in which Anne Frank takes on the role of Christian saint, not dying but fading away from the Annex to absolve the sins of the world. Learning from Baskind, it would be well to ask about the underlying need for this forced conversion. Baskind’s own vision is dark enough to suggest that America and the world needed and still need Anne Frank’s innocence—just as the military heroism of the Warsaw Ghetto has been singularly necessary—to dissuade itself from the Jew-hating presupposition that Jews were somehow at fault for the Holocaust. Look here, some Jews were dignified patriots, and some were innocent, too.In any case, Anne Frank is the sometimes explicit and always implicit foil for a figure that constitutes another thread in Baskind’s book, the well-known photo of a boy in the Warsaw Ghetto with his hands raised as Nazi soldiers drive a group of Jews from their hiding place. The image is featured prominently in Bak’s autobiographical paintings and Baskind’s discussion of them, and appears elsewhere in the book as well. Following such theorists of memory as Marianne Hirsch, Baskind emphasizes the ways in which images of children, like the Warsaw Ghetto boy, as she calls him—and, of course, Anne Frank—facilitate identification. In several of his paintings, for instance, Bak transforms the Warsaw Ghetto boy’s face into a blank screen, upon which his own experiences as a child-survivor may be projected (see especially fig. 47 and the accompanying discussion). Baskind makes a different theoretical point of her own, however, when, in her epilogue, she distinguishes her work from Stier’s focus on “icons” in Committed to Memory: Cultural Mediations of the Holocaust (2003) and Holocaust Icons: Symbolizing the Shoah in History and Memory (2015; the chapter on Anne Frank is especially pertinent here), and what she sees as a related term, “signposts,” in Barbie Zelizer’s Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye (1998). Baskind writes “[I] prefer to designate the recurring symbols in my study referents […] rather than icons or signposts, because I believe they retain a referential status specific to the Warsaw Ghetto” (241–42). Again, she does not so much argue the claim as gather the threads that suggest that, quite the opposite of Anne Frank, the Warsaw Ghetto is an image of resistance, not only in the most straightforward sense of armed opposition to the Nazis, but also resistant to de-Judaizing (one might well read Hirsch’s contrasting discussion of decontextualization in the process of the cropping of the photograph of the Warsaw Ghetto boy in later deployments of the image, including Bak’s, in The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust [2012], 140). It is another of those threads, closely bound, that in Baskind’s careful reading, the complexities of Serling, Bak, and Kubert also appear as points of resistance to facile idealizations and nationalisms. In Baskind’s intricate weave, these many threads connect to form new understandings of the enduring images of the Warsaw Ghetto and their place in American culture.ANDREW BUSH is Professor of Hispanic Studies and Jewish Studies at Vassar College and author of books and articles on the modern period in both fields.