Jewish Fate Research Articles

On the Construction of Jewishness and the Inescapable Jewish Fate: The Cases of Werner and Gershom Scholem

Abstract The two youngest brothers of the Scholem family, Werner and Gerhard (later Gershom), became prominent personalities, each in his field. Werner was one of the leaders of the KPD, the German Communist Party, and Gershom became the founder of the field of Kabbalah research at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. As a result of this prominence, both brothers were confronted throughout their lives with reactions to their physical appearance, which was perceived by the people they met as typically Jewish. These reactions came to reflect their exceptional position as political, philosophical and scholarly vanguards. Both Werner and Gershom were well aware of the reactions that their faces evoked, and each of them dealt with these ascriptions in different ways at different times: by either ignoring or employing them as they pursued their social and political goals, the brothers defined—and redefined—their relationship to Germany and developed a performative level of Jewishness. This article explores the questions: in what sense did their physical appearance in the eyes of others shape the self-perception of the two youngest Scholem brothers? And to what extent did this perception influence their complex relationship to Germany and Germans during the height of their public fame in Germany—in Werner's case the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany, and for Gershom the post-war period? Although both of them were proponents of utopian ideas that offered a kind of salvation to the Jewish condition in turn-of-the-century Europe, this article argues that their looks and habitus determined their German-Jewish fate.

Dziennik jako forma życia. Zapiski Józefa Hena. Genezy, genealogie, archiwa

The article discusses the impact of the experience of the Holocaust and the war on the form and issues of eight volumes of Józef Hen’s literary journals I am not Afraid of Sleepless Nights. The “long shadow” of these traumatic events shaped both the history of their delayed origins, the form of the notes, and their main themes. The poetics of these diaries is based on the structure of a collage, which, on the one hand, connects the past and present, and on the other, it combines the chronicle of everyday life with night-time meditations, memories and reflections on history, wartime and post-war experiences and the Jewish fate. Hen contrasts these devastating forces of the twentieth century with his own philosophy of life, which is a special form of Jewish vitalism. The diary thus becomes a symbolic form of survival in the form of a literary, autobiographical work. All the volumes of Hen’s journals seem to be permeated by the effort to record, preserve and perpetuate what is characterized by the fragility and susceptibility to the corrosion of time – that is, life itself. Ultimately, thanks to this effort, the trace of the author’s own presence is also preserved. The collage poetics of the record, resulting from “composing”, makes it part of the work itself. The subject is transformed in it into an idiomatic “gesture”, i.e., a trace of a constantly repeated expressive act, which seems to retain traces of the author’s expressive gestures, his preferences, choices and ways of seeing, and the modality of individual feeling recreated in the text. In a way, it can be said that, according to Hen, journals are written to preserve the specific literary composition of existence. A diary understood as a “form of life” preserves a certain inalienable ethical moment, contained both in the need to give a certain order to the biography and to save the life experience itself – in its various forms. While history and everyday life constitute a source of a constantly reborn fear in Hen’s diaries, as they seem to still emerge in the long shadow of the Holocaust and the possibility of its possible repetition recognized in many events, the very ability to transform them into a diaristic record counteracts it therapeutically. For despite the fact that life can be destroyed, thanks to writing – as Hen’s final lesson seems to sound – something can always remain and survive.

Józef Hen i Józef Bau

The main subject of this article is Józef Hen’s 1955 short story Samotność (Loneliness). The prototype of its protagonist is Józef Bau, and the prototype of its main theme, the volume of poetry containing the poems “born from the nightmare of the death camp”, is his 1949 volume Cień przechodnia (The passer-by’s shadow), a work interesting both in terms of literature and art (graphics). Samotność is probably the only (and at the same time peculiar) expression of the reception of the volume Cień przechodnia. Hen and Bau met in 1945. The familiarity between the two writers, with Jewish roots, seems to result from a shared experience, the Jewish fate. In the case of Bau, who passed through the ghetto and concentration camps, this fate turned out to be traumatizing, as both his parents and his brother were murdered by the Germans. Nonetheless, the experiences of Hen, who fled to the East (the Soviet Union) in September 1939 and thus avoided similar torments, were painful too. Bau was the first person to report to Hen in detail what a concentration camp was. It seems that Samotność is, above all, a self-referential work, exploring the issue that has been and is still preoccupied with Hen as a writer and as a man who lost a number of his relatives during the war. By writing Samotność, as well as other works dealing the Holocaust and the loneliness of the survivors, Hen frees himself from his own trauma, and also calls for the memory of the “Jewish tragedies” (which were displaced during the period of Stalinism and the domination of socialist realism).

The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture

The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture

Selected Aspects of Józef Wittlin’s Franciscanism

BARBARA OLECH is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Cultural Studies at the University of Bialystok. She specializes in 20th and 21st century literature and culture. Her book publications include a critical edition of Maria Grossek-Korycka’s Utwory wybrane (Selected Works) (2005), Harmonia. liryzm, trwoga. Studia o tworczości Bronislawy Ostrowskiej (Harmony, Lyricism, and Fear: Studies on the Works of Bronislawa Ostrowska) (2012), Zachor. Żydowskie losy odzyskane w slowie (Zachor: The Jewish Fate Recaptured in a Word) (2017) and her articles can be found in book collections in Poland and abroad (Belarus, Ukraine, Israel).

A New Vision of Jewish History: The Early Historical Writings of Salo Baron

While rejecting the traditional belief that Jewish fate was controlled by God, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians of the Jews maintained prior perceptions of post-70 Jewish history as a sequence of unmitigated disasters. Beginning in 1928, the young Salo Baron combatted this perspective on the Jewish past, which he dubbed “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history.” In his well-known 1928 essay “Ghetto and Emancipation” and more substantially in the 1937 edition of his Social and Religious History of the Jews, Baron vigorously rejected this view. In the process, he formulated a new periodization of the Jewish past and moved beyond the ideologically grounded and programmatic reconstruction of Jewish history to a rigorously descriptive portrayal of the multi-faceted Jewish historical experience. In so doing, Baron laid the foundations of the flourishing contemporary Jewish historiographic enterprise.

Invoking Samuel Hirszenberg’s Artistic Legacy—Encountering Exile

Samuel Hirszenberg (1865–1908), the Łódź-born artist, created several signature works of art that would emerge as emblematic of the Jewish historical experience of the twentieth century. Exile (1904) is one of these works that came to evoke the trials and tribulations of Jewish fate in the decades following its creation. After placing Exile in the context of Hirszenberg’s oeuvre, this essay charts its cultural and artistic reception over close to a century in diverse media. Exile evoked instinctive, negative responses alongside a deep sense of identification and appropriation. The essay illuminates the ways in which a seminal work of art can engender intense interaction over decades, allowing a wide range of interpretations, references, and quotations.

Tragiczna noc okupacji niemieckiej : o problematyce „kolaboracji oddolnej” w Generalnym Gubernatorstwie (1939–1945)

The article is an attempt of critical and methodological consideration about a phenomenon of so-called by the author “collaboration from dawn” with German authorities in the years 1939–1945. Author as the legal historian indicates, especially on example of the history of village territories of Little Poland (Malopolska) and Kielce, that a number of pathological phenomena in the attitudes of various Polish communities must be considered and studied in the context of the general framework of the occupation created by Nazi terror. At the same time it is impossible to generalize any phenomenon in this era, also the problem of the tragic Jewish fate, if the comparative perspective of the era and its negative phenomena across Europe occupied by German is entirely omitted. This type of selective look creates an – despite appearances – often subjective and altogether tendentious picture. The issue of aid to the Jews and its narrow limits can`t be detached of the general history of German occupation, which in Poland lasted the longest time and was – in comparison with the German occupation in Western Europe, unusually hard for the whole society. The author as a legal historian also points to specifi c, very unreliable materials of communist justice in the years 1944–1956 (the epoch of Stalinism in Poland), which, without a comprehensive analysis of the sources, may not constitute the sole basis of knowledge of the era. Normal 0 21 false false false PL X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:Standardowy; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:Times New Roman,serif;}

Sanctuary in the wilderness: a critical introduction to American Hebrew poetry

The effort to create a serious Hebrew literature in the United States in the years around World War I is one of the best kept secrets of American Jewish history. Hebrew had been revived as a modern literary language in nineteenth-century Russia and then taken to Palestine as part of the Zionist revolution. But the overwhelming majority of Jewish emigrants from Eastern Europe settled in America, and a passionate kernel among them believed that Hebrew provided the vehicle for modernizing the Jewish people while maintaining their connection to Zion. These American Hebraists created schools, journals, newspapers, and, most of all, a high literary culture focused on producing poetry. Sanctuary in the Wilderness is a critical introduction to American Hebrew poetry, focusing on a dozen key poets. This secular poetry began with a preoccupation with the situation of the individual in a disenchanted world and then moved outward to engage American vistas and Jewish fate and hope in midcentury. American Hebrew poets hoped to be read in both Palestine and America, but were disappointed on both scores. Several moved to Israel and connected with the vital literary scene there, but most stayed and persisted in the cause of American Hebraism.

Christians, Jews, Journeys, and Salvation. Intertextuality and Inversion in Laish by Aharon Appelfeld and Crusade by Amos Oz

This article offers a comparative study of two Modern Hebrew novellas: Crusade (1971) by Amos Oz and Laish (1994) by Aharon Appelfeld (both works were written in Hebrew by writers who are Israel Literature Prize laureates). The study is based on revealing both the similarities and the distinct points of difference between these two works, which share similar details in their plot outline. In doing so I am trying to decipher the aim and purpose of the obvious ties woven between the latter novella and the early one that serves as its model.Both works tell about a caravan making its way from Europe to Jerusalem, encountering hardships and obstacles on the way. In Oz’s novella it is a Christian caravan on a crusade aiming to arrive at Jerusalem but never leaving the European continent; in Appelfeld’s work the story is of a Jewish caravan wandering for years on the soil of Europe on its way to the port of Galacz, aiming to leave Europe on the way to the Land of Israel.Both authors make their point by using covertly the image of the “Wandering Jew,” but differ about the conclusions that can be drawn from the encounter between that symbol and Jewish fate. In Crusade, by using the image of the Wandering Jew, Oz signals both Jewish weakness in exile and Christian religious fanaticism, the encounter between which is disastrous for the Jews. Oz thus points to what he perceives as an insoluble problem on account of its mythical roots.Appelfeld uses the image of the Wandering Jew quite differently and for another purpose. In Laish Appelfeld is producing “a realization of a metaphor,” so to speak, when he turns the entire Jewish caravan into the actual exemplification of the Wandering Jew.Contrary to Oz’s novella, where unequivocally there is no hope for the wandering Jew, who continues to symbolize the Jewish people in exile among the nations, the use of the myth of the Wandering Jew as frame and form in Laish is quintessentially dialectic. Therefore it also enables its deconstruction. In the hidden dialogue that takes place between Appelfeld’s novella and that of Oz, the latter’s work is in fact disputing with the earlier one trying to refute its deep pessimism. Although the caravan’s way in Laish is not a simple and easy one, the implications of the emergence of a “Zionist” solution, which in turn shatters the Christian “Wandering Jew” myth, hints at a real possibility of salvation.

New York Intellectual/Neocon/Jewish; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Ignore Ruth Wisse

New York Intellectual/Neocon/Jewish; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Ignore Ruth Wisse

From PTSD to “national trauma”: The case of the Israel Trauma Center for Victims of Terror and War

Since its establishment in 1998, NATAL, "The Israel Trauma Center for Victims of Terror and War," has been propagating the notion of national trauma as a comprehensive category of suffering related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Against the shifting perceptions of PTSD in Israel, we explore recent undertakings of NATAL's experts to naturalize trauma among "pre-clinical" populations of Israeli Defense Force (IDF) veterans. The experts' attempts to de-politicize the suffering of the veterans are constrained by the fact that in their clinical ideology, the apolitical language of the therapeutic is aligned with a somber national pathos that strikes a collective cord of common Jewish fate and identity. This alignment may account for the Israeli public's acceptance of NATAL's agenda, despite its subversive connotations.

Der nationalsozialistische Judenmord und das polnischjüdische Verhältnis im Diskurs der polnischen Untergrundpresse (1942-1944) by Klaus-Peter Friedrich (review)

REVIEWS 155 Friedrich, Klaus-Peter. Der nationalsozialistische Judenmord und das polnisch jiidische Verhdltnisim Diskurs derpolnischenUntergrundpresse (ig42-ig44). Mit einem Vorwort von Karol Sauerland. Materialien und Studien zur Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung, 15. Herder-Institut, Marburg, 2006. ix + 246 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 33.00 (paperback). No subject ismore guaranteed to setpulses racing and voices raised in anger than the contentious one of Polish attitudes and actions towards theJews of Poland during theNazi occupation of that country in the Second World War. For those years, the lines of this difficult subject are easily drawn: towhat extent did endemic Polish antisemitism manifest itselfduring thewar, and if sowas this really a factor in themanner inwhich theNazi authorities killed nearly threemillion Polish Jews? Were the Poles able or willing to help the Nazi-oppressed Jews, and was what theydid sufficient? And ifnot, why not? Klaus-Peter Friedrich's meticulous studyof thePolish wartime underground press and itsresponses to theJewish question inPoland then isguaranteed to stoke the fires of controversy even further.This is because of the evidence he has uncovered of the extremes ? and some of it really is extreme ? of Polish anti-Jewish sentiment at a time when the Nazi authorities were methodically gassing Polish Jews in their extermination camps. Friedrich's study isbased on over 1,000 examples of thePolish underground press during the war, and represents the views of the whole gamut of Polish political and religious resistance to theGermans: The Home Army; the Government [in-Exile] Delegates; theLeft; theRight; the Sanacja Group, i.e. the Pilsudski clique; theNational Catholics; the Peasant Movement; and the Communists. Usefully, Friedrich begins with a survey of those groups and theirpublished views on theJews. The centre-piece of this study is the reaction of the Polish press to the elimination of the Warsaw Jewish ghetto in the summer and autumn of 1942, and the January and April 1943 anti-German uprisings in the ghetto. Yet whatever the topic, the comments quoted always need to be contextualized within a number of consistent anti-Jewish themes that frame the overall subject: Polish Jews, like theGermans and Russians, are the perennial enemy of the Poles; Polish Jews collaborated with the Communist authorities in anti Polish policies in eastern Poland after itsannexation by Soviet Russia on 17 September 1939; after thewar therewill be no place forJews in Poland; the Poles need to think of themselves firstand foremost, especially since the fate of theJews under Nazism could foreshadow the same for the Poles. Yet as Friedrich underlines, since the Poles (correctly) regarded themselves as victims of Nazi terror ? at the Nuremberg trials itwas asserted that almost one-third of Poles died under Nazism ? they inevitably regarded the fate of Polish Jews under Nazism exclusively from thepoint of view of theirown forms ofmartyrdom. It should also be remembered that Poles laboured under the German threat of execution ifcaught assistingJews. Not that such attitudesmeant that feelings of empathy or sympathy for the Jewish fate under theNazis were altogether missing. Time and again reports on the clearing out of theWarsaw ghetto in the summer of 1942 and the transport of theJews to be gassed at Treblinka (from their very beginning, I56 SEER, 87, I, JANUARY 2009 reports were carried on the mass murder of Jews at named places such as Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor and Treblinka) prompted extensive comments on the 'bestiality' and cruelty of theGermans. A socialist publica tion,WRN, issued a call on 28 September 1942 that itwas 'the duty of every Pole to help the victims of German bestiality' (p. 93). However, a report in the 14October 1942 issue of Rzeczpospolita Polska (ThePolish Republic) of the Government-in-Exile Delegates summed up precisely the kinds of thinking to be found across the board of the underground press at all times and which are fully represented throughout this book. Admitting that that therewas not a party or person inPoland that did not consider theJews as the principal and most threatening enemy of thePoles, nevertheless, in the circumstances, Poles should react to theJews in the sense 'that they are humans' (p. 63). Interestingly, while there was much criticism of the 'passivity' of the Warsaw Jews in the summer of 1942when the ghetto was being...

Master and Margarita: a Literary Autobiography?

The dialectics of a triad—the author, his creation, and the surrounding reality—is the focus of this essay, which aims to discover how much of his soul Mikhail Bulgakov put into his famous opus, Master and Margarita. The author's mind becomes a bifurcation point between his work and reality, a kind of Borgesian Aleph, where causality might change direction and where the border between the Kantian 'thing in itself' and phenomena disappears. Though Stalin was keenly interested in Bulgakov's work, the latter's attempt to play Seneca's role near Emperor Nero was mercilessly crushed. Still, one of the writer's prophecies regarding the Jewish fate, symbolised in the novel by a Yom Kippur rooster, very nearly came true 13 years after his death. TO THE FRIENDS OF MY YOUTH IN DONETSK The Middle Ages are dear to us because they possessed in a high degree the feeling of edges and separation. They neuer mixed different plans and looked at the supernatural with great moderation. A noble mixture of thoughfulness and mysticism brings us close to that epoch and calls us to gain strength from the works written c. 1200} O. Mandelstam (1891-1938) Sleeplessness. At daum I start looking at the ceiling and straining my eyes until the time when, behind the mndows, life starts its routine: cap, kerchief, kerchief, cap. How boring! M. A. Bulgakov (1891-1940) Every European is a miter, potentially or in fact.3 J. L. Borges (1899-1986) At The end of 1938, in Buenos Aires, the 39-year-old avant garde poet, Jorge Luis Borges, was ill with a dangerous infection. While recovering from a difficult operation that saved his life, Borges decided to check his sanity by Literature & Theology © The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press 2006; all rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: joumals.permissions@oxfordjoumals.org > The Author 2006. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.231 on Thu, 06 Oct 2016 04:37:07 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Making American Civilization Jewish: Mordecai Kaplan's Civil Religion

xM ffordecai M. Kaplan's concept of Jewish civilization has received more than its share of ink from American Jewish historians, and rightly so. Kaplan not only proposed the most original and far-reaching program for revitalizingJewish life in America but also offered the most penetrating analysis of the challenges facingJews in twentieth-century America. Yet, for all the attention paid to Kaplan's innovative notion ofJewish civilization, considerably less interest has been expressed about his description of American civilization. After all, the foundation of Kaplan's philosophy rested on the assumption that Jews lived in two civilizations, one Jewish and one American, and he insisted thatJews could and should be full participants in both. It is not surprising thatJewish historians have devoted the bulk of their scholarly attention to exploring Kaplan's concept of Jewish civilization, but a closer examination of the American portion of his program reveals Kaplan's great faith in the promise of American democracy as well as just how much he believed Jewish fate to be bound up with the security and continued improvement of the American democratic system. Kaplan's Jewish civilization ultimately rested

Making American Civilization Jewish: Mordecai Kaplan's Civil Religion

Making American Civilization Jewish:Mordecai Kaplan's Civil Religion Beth S. Wenger (bio) Mordecai M. Kaplan's concept of Jewish civilization has received more than its share of ink from American Jewish historians, and rightly so. Kaplan not only proposed the most original and far-reaching program for revitalizing Jewish life in America but also offered the most penetrating analysis of the challenges facing Jews in twentieth-century America. Yet, for all the attention paid to Kaplan's innovative notion of Jewish civilization, considerably less interest has been expressed about his description of American civilization. After all, the foundation of Kaplan's philosophy rested on the assumption that Jews lived in two civilizations, one Jewish and one American, and he insisted that Jews could and should be full participants in both. It is not surprising that Jewish historians have devoted the bulk of their scholarly attention to exploring Kaplan's concept of Jewish civilization, but a closer examination of the American portion of his program reveals Kaplan's great faith in the promise of American democracy as well as just how much he believed Jewish fate to be bound up with the security and continued improvement of the American democratic system. Kaplan's Jewish civilization ultimately rested [End Page 56] on the foundation of a well-defined vision of American civil religion and the Jewish role in bringing it to a fuller realization. If Kaplan's concept of Jewish civilization was novel and innovative, his definition of American civilization emerged as particularly bold, especially in the context of interwar America. Cognizant of the fact that American Jews lived in a time of persistent attacks on "hyphenated Americans," Kaplan addressed precisely those fears that he perceived might make Jews resist his vision for American Jewish life. In an era when many Jewish leaders forcefully denied charges of divided loyalty, Kaplan refused to concede the argument so easily. He frequently compared the status of Jews in America to that of Catholics and insisted, without apology, that both groups were indeed hyphenated Americans, loyal to two civilizations at the same time. Although he rejected the hierarchical authority structure of the Catholic Church, he remained enamored with the way that American Catholics managed to maintain a vibrant educational, social, and religious system of their own and to live successfully as what he called "cultural hyphenates."1 "If it is legitimate for the Irish to parade on St. Patrick's day, in glorification of the patron saint of a non-American nation," Kaplan asked rhetorically, "why would it be less legitimate for Jews to carry the Sefer Torah in procession through the streets on Simchat Torah?"2 Kaplan imagined a program for American religions and ethnicities that would embrace such group expressions, not only in private but also in public, in order "to have the cultural hyphenism of minority groups be accepted as legitimate" in American society.3 For Kaplan, being a hyphenated American did not mean that Jews would harbor any kind of divided allegiance to two civilizations, but rather a dual loyalty that allowed them to live simultaneously and fully within both Jewish and American civilizations. The Jew, he insisted, would not be "fifty percent Jew and fifty percent American, but one hundred percent of each."4 Directly confronting charges of divided loyalty and boldly challenging the prejudices of his day, he explained that, "For American citizens to live in two civilizations may not be compatible with American jingoism, but it is unquestionably compatible with the American dream."5 In fact, his philosophy rested on the foundation of this idealistic vision of America—a vision he consistently refused to abandon. Kaplan clung tenaciously to an unwavering belief in the promise of America. Steadfast faith in the ideal of American democracy served as a cornerstone of his program for the Jewish future, the American future, and the relationship between the two. He repeatedly stressed that the fate of Jews was "bound up with that of genuine democracy."6 But the notion that Jewish survival rested on the security provided by [End Page 57] American democracy represents only one (perhaps the most obvious) element of Kaplan's philosophy. Kaplan also posited a specific mission for...

“Senseless Is Your Death as Senseless Is Your Life”

Our gate into Bialik's poem "In the City of Slaughter" is the line used for the title of the present essay. The voice that the poet hears at the cemetery is an amazing one, as long as it is taken to be a human voice. A divine voice may ascribe senselessness without creating so much amazement. A divine voice may ascribe senselessness from another point of view, that of a certain divine project, in which such an individual human being could have played a role but failed to. Accordingly, the claims that "senseless is your life" and "senseless is your death" should be understood within the framework of a divine project that failed. What is the divine project that failed? A prevalent reading of the poem leads to a simple answer to our question. The divine project is that of maintaining a Jewish form of life that is honorable. Thus, self-defense of Jews was justified on grounds of honor protection. The major conceptual ingredient of the new, viable, collective project that emerged as a lesson of the poem is the idea of shouldering full responsibility for the Jewish fate. Most important among the differences between the old and the new projects is the difference between every Jewish form of life in exile and a possible Jewish form of life in an independent state of the Jews. Pace Bialik, even on the background of a new collective project, an ascription of "senselessness" to a certain person's life rests on conceptual mistakes. The lives and deaths of the victims of Kishinev were not senseless, even though they took place within a collective project that failed and that was replaced by an alternative one.

"Senseless Is Your Death as Senseless Is Your Life"

Our gate into Bialik's poem In the City of Slaughter is the line used for the title of the present essay. The voice that the poet hears at the cemetery is an amazing one, as long as it is taken to be a human voice. A divine voice may ascribe without creating so much amazement. A divine voice may ascribe from another point of view, that of a certain divine project, in which such an individual human being could have played a role but failed to. Accordingly, the claims that senseless is your and senseless is your death should be understood within the framework of a divine project that failed. What is the divine project that failed? A prevalent reading of the poem leads to a simple answer to our question. The divine project is that of maintaining a Jewish form of life that is honorable. Thus, self-defense of Jews was justified on grounds of honor protection. The major conceptual ingredient of the new, viable, collective project that emerged as a lesson of the poem is the idea of shouldering full responsibility for the Jewish fate. Most important among the differences between the old and the new projects is the difference between every Jewish form of life in exile and a possible Jewish form of life in an independent state of the Jews. Pace Bialik, even on the background of a new collective project, an ascription of senselessness to a certain person's life rests on conceptual mistakes. The lives and deaths of the victims of Kishinev were not senseless, even though they took place within a collective project that failed and that was replaced by an alternative one.

The Ventriloquial Paradox: George Steiner's ‘The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H.’

Surveying the intellectual passions and pursuits of a lifetime in his memoir Errata: an Examined Life (1997), George Steiner commented that ‘such was the response to The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H. and to Alec McCowen's overwhelming interpretation on stage of the dominant figure that I could have made of the novel or novella my foremost business’. Adapted by Christopher Hampton and directed at the Mermaid by John Dexter in 1982, The Portage is the only example of Steiner's fiction to have been dramatized for the stage. Through the character of A. H., Steiner – Britain's foremost scholar, critic, and polemicist on the Shoah and European thought in a ‘posthuman’ era – proposes the metaphysical idea of ‘negative transcendence’ as necessary to any attempt to understand Jewish fate during the Holocaust, a perspective unique amongst dramatic representations seen in Britain. The play itself has not been produced on the professional stage in the following twenty years, and critics and commentators continue to be perplexed by Steiner's decision to present his arguments in such a fashion. Nick White argues that while the novel's weaknesses were mercilessly exposed by the ‘translation’ of Steiner's novel into the dramatic idiom of stage naturalism, it was the subsequent controversy which exposed as fundamentally flawed Steiner's attempt (through recourse to the ideas and language of his own critical writing) to construct a composite, ‘inter-textual’ identity for the character A. H. He goes on to show that the initial confusion became polarized around conflicting interpretations of Steiner's intentions: were the arguments advanced by A. H. to be understood as an accurate rendering, or a misinterpretation – by the master manipulator of language, A. H. – of Steiner's published theses about the compulsions upon which Jewish fate depended during the Holocaust?

Gitta Sereny and Albert Speer's ‘Battle with Truth’ on the London Stage

Prompted by the investigative journalist Gitta Sereny's biography Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth, two recent productions, Esther Vilar's Speer and David Edgar's Albert Speer, have set out to explore the reputation of Hitler's architect and later Minister of Armaments and War Production, Albert Speer, the only leading Nazi to acknowledge his guilt at the Nuremberg Trials. The plays, like the biography, are concerned with the extent of Speer's knowledge of the ‘Final Solution’ during his career in the Nazi hierarchy, and consequently with the integrity of the stance he adopted at Nuremberg and thereafter – that is, of his claim of guilt by association and omission rather than by active participation. In her biography, Sereny claims that as a result of her association with Speer he eventually acknowledged his guilt to her, and was repentant. But Nick White believes that the evidence – much of it unearthed by Sereny herself – suggests otherwise, and that Sereny had failed to acknowledge that between 1978 and his death in 1981 Speer consistently deceived her about crucial aspects of this evidence. How successful are Vilar and Edgar in their quite different dramatic sifting, not only of the public persona of Speer, but also of the interpretation granted their subject by the biographer upon whom their plays, to a lesser and greater degree, depend? Nick White has taught at City University, London, and his PhD dissertation, ‘In the Absence of Memory? Jewish Fate and Dramatic Representation: the Production and Critical Reception of Holocaust Drama on the London Stage, 1945–1989’ (1998) has been followed by a companion volume of criticism, articles, and letters, The Critical Reception of Holocaust Drama on the British Stage, 1939–2000.