BOOK REVIEWS 495

Like the poet who forces words to become a habitation for living ex-perience, Winnicott shares his experience through his words, while simul-taneously helping us discover our own. Transitional words are a bridge between one person’s experience and that of another, and through such words the experience of each is validated. As Seamus Heaney (2002) put it in referring to some lines by the poet Elisabeth Bishop:

They are inhabited by certain profoundly true tones, and they do what poetry most essentially does: they fortify our inclination to credit promptings of our intuitive being. They help us to say in the first recesses of ourselves, in the shyest pre-social part of our nature, “Yes, I know something like that too. Yes, that’s right; thank you for putting words on it and making it more or less official.”16

As I see it, this is also the project of psychotherapy and psychoanal-ysis: to give form to experience, recognize and “put words on it,” and in so doing to give it a habitation and a home. In such a transitional (creative) process lies the genesis of the self as experiential being. Begin-ning, if we are lucky, in infancy—through mirroring and attunement,17 continuing progressively in our later relationships, and resuming, again if we are lucky, in our own analysis—we discover and create ourselves through containing resonant forms. The furtherance of such a project with patients is the more or less explicit aim of those who have contrib-uted to this book, who have taken inspiration from Winnicott, and who now inhabit his universe—because it is also their own.

KENNETH WRIGHT (HADLEIGH, IPSWICH, UNITED KINGDOM)

NEVER AGAIN: ECHOES OF THE HOLOCAUST AS UNDERSTOOD THROUGH FILM. By Sylvia Levine Ginsparg. New York: Interna-tional Psychoanalytic Books, 2013. 158 pp.

This is a troubled and troubling book. It was written by someone—pri-marily a concerned citizen with a good heart—who was moved to write

16 Heaney, S. (2002). Finders Keepers: Selected Prose, 1971–2001. London: Faber & Faber, p. 188, italics added.

17 Wright, K. (2009). Mirroring and Attunement: Self-Realisation in Psychoanalysis and Art. London: Routledge.

496 BOOK REVIEWS

it out of intense concern that the countless victims of the largest and perhaps most horrific evil ever perpetrated by one segment of humanity upon another might be lost for a second time unless continual efforts are made to keep their memory alive. As the author emphasizes at the begin-ning of the book, the Holocaust and its victims have tended to disappear from people’s minds as the result of a combination of denial, the wish to forget, shift of public interest to new concerns, and the pronounced tendency of the survivors to refuse to talk about their experiences, in-cluding and especially with their own children.

Ginsparg notes that a number of Holocaust survivors have written memoirs containing accounts of their experiences as their lives have ap-proached an end, so that they might communicate about the horren-dous chapter in human history in which they painfully participated—not to their children but to their grandchildren. Apparently, they have over-come their wish to put distance between themselves and their past out of fear that the world will choose to forget what happened and be at risk of reverting to the dangerous conditions that once affected them and now might arise again to endanger those who succeed them in life.

The film world turned a blind eye to the Holocaust for almost a whole generation. Many decades passed after the end of World War II before the movie industry began to produce movies with Holocaust themes. It did so out of apparent fear of entering into an emotional abyss (or cesspool?), which the film-watching public would not be able to handle, and of alienating those who would prefer to hide the truth or to deny its own responsibility for allowing it to happen. This occurred even though film, in a major way, as Ginsparg observes, is an ideal vehicle for establishing a permanent record of what happened between the 1930s and 1945 in Europe and elsewhere in the world (including the atrocities perpetrated by the Japanese in Asia and the Pacific Rim).

Ginsparg is a clinical psychoanalyst, so it is inevitable that she should have attempted to use psychoanalytic ideas and concepts to try to un-derstand various aspects of the Holocaust and its effects on the survivors (and perpetrators). This is the weakest part of the book, but how could it possibly be otherwise? Bestiality on such a gigantic scale can hardly be engaged and comprehended in terms of such ordinary and common-place psychological concepts as neurotic conflict, separation-individua-

BOOK REVIEWS 497

tion, neurotic defense mechanisms, and object relations, although she is quite correct in reaching for those concepts as she tries to understand the problems of the survivors, their children, and their grandchildren. The self-protective mechanisms employed by people desperately strug-gling to survive in the phantasmagorically horrible conditions that pre-vailed in the concentration camps, the Warsaw ghetto, the Bataan death march, or the worst of the World War II prisoner of war camps are nec-essarily much closer to primitive, basic, brainstem-generated responses than they are to higher cortical functions. To survive, the victims would have had to be willing to undergo extreme deprivation and hardship, to summon up superhuman strength, to persevere despite utterly de-grading and disgusting treatment, and to do whatever it might take in order to stay alive.

Reading this book, I was reminded of the solitary hiker in the moun-tains who cut off his own hand to free himself when he was pinned be-tween two boulders; of John McCain’s account of the prisoners of war in the “Hanoi Hilton” eating their own vomit; and of Solomon Northup’s description of his horrific life in Twelve Years a Slave1—as well as the de-piction in a recent PBS program of what slaves had to endure to stay alive before the Civil War finally abolished slavery in the United States.

Ginsparg does get into an important area, however, when she con-siders how survivor parents assiduously protected their children from knowing the details of their experiences in concentration camps and slave labor camps—that is, from hearing about their exposure to dehu-manization, starvation, torture, and mass extermination—but were not able to protect them from transgenerational transmission of the impact of what had been done to their parents. Holocaust survivors, Ginsparg notes, especially those who were robbed of the normal experience of childhood or adolescence, have not always come away from their experi-ences well equipped to become parents. They have been handicapped at times by private, unstated, chronic, and extreme mourning for lost family members, including children from former marriages, that has in-

1 Many versions of Northup’s memoir are available in print and online; see, for example: http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/northup/northup.html. The 2013 feature film of the same title (directed by Steve McQueen) was recently awarded Best Picture by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

498 BOOK REVIEWS

terfered with their capacity to love and be satisfied with the children born to them when their horrendous ordeal came to an end and they had a chance to rebuild their shattered lives. Holocaust survivors have often tended, usually without being consciously aware of it, to look to the children born during their new lives to replace those whom they have lost and/or to repopulate the decimated Jewish community.2

Holocaust survivors have tended at times to be harsh to the point of abusiveness to their children, in apparent identification with their Nazi oppressors. Even when they have been otherwise loving and at-tentive parents, the mystery of their blocked-out biographical past, as Ginsparg emphasizes, has often interfered with their children’s ability to understand important aspects of the relationship between them and their parents, as well as with their ability to construct their own iden-tity. All this is expressed cinematographically in a number of films upon which Ginsparg focuses, both in terms of the contents of the films and in what led the films’ producers, directors, and actors to make them. This is epitomized by examples such as A Secret (2007), Rosenzweig’s Freedom (1998), Left Luggage (1998), and Vivienne’s Songbook (2004). Ginsparg’s motivation for writing this book in part is her wish to call attention to the plight of members of the second and third generations of victims of the Holocaust.

It is not surprising that the first film upon which Ginsparg focuses at length is Life Is Beautiful (originally titled La vita è bella; 1997). In that film, which stirred extremely positive but also negative reactions before garnering accolades, actor-director Roberto Benigni employs wry humor to sugar-coat the horrors of the concentration camp atrocities that he presents—but that is not all he does. He not only dedicated the film to his father, Luigi Benigni, who survived two years in a Nazi concentration camp, but also centered the story around the astonishingly clever de-vices a fictional father, Guido, employs to help his son survive (although he himself does not)—including inducing him to collaborate in using imaginative, dramatic, film- and theater-like pretense to protect the child

2 Fill the Void (originally titled Lemale et ha’lal), a 2012 film written and directed by Rama Burshtein—an American woman who immigrated to Israel and entered into the ultra-Orthodox Hassidic community there—depicts this graphically; but it was not included among the films examined in this book.

BOOK REVIEWS 499

from the terrifying impact of the otherwise overwhelming reality of what the internment camp is actually all about.

Ginsparg completes the first section of her book, which is organized around the use of humor to contain and soften the message of Holo-caust films, by examining two additional films, the first of which is Jacob the Liar (1975). It was based on a novel by Jurek Becker, himself a child survivor. He lost his mother and twenty-one other relatives. The film’s di-rector, Peter Kassovitz—another survivor—was hidden by a Polish Cath-olic family, beginning when he was five years old, while his parents spent several years in a concentration camp. The film is about a concentration camp inmate who invents a fictitious radio with which he can convince his fellow inmates that help is on the way.

The second film with which Ginsparg completes her first section is Train of Life (originally titled Train du vie; 1998). This movie recounts a fantastic story of a group of Jews who hijack a train, impersonate German officers, and try to outwit the Nazis as they steam out of occupied terri-tory toward Switzerland.

Both Jacob the Liar and Train of Life center on imaginative ways with which to sustain hope in the midst of helplessness and hopelessness. I cannot help but wonder if a latent message is that somehow we viewers of the films must find a way to hold on to hope about the future of humanity, despite what we are capable of doing to ourselves and to one another.

The second group of films to which Ginsparg calls attention, in a somewhat similar vein, is organized around the theme of music as a way of preserving a shred of human dignity and nobility in the midst of total breakdown of the basic tenets of “civilization.” Shine (1996) takes as its subject the exquisitely talented but apparently schizophrenic Australian concert pianist David Helfgott. This film focuses to a significant extent on the impact on the protagonist of the secondary effects of the Holo-caust, in the form of his father’s demands that he fill the void created within him by the loss of his own parents to the Nazis in Poland, and that he restore his father’s sense of worth and dignity by performing beautiful music.

Gloomy Sunday (1999) is a film about the strange but true story of a haunting piece of music, the only work composed by Rezso Seress, which

500 BOOK REVIEWS

purportedly induced a number of people to kill themselves—this during the ascent to power of the Nazis. (Seress himself eventually committed suicide.) Bach in Auschwitz (1999) tells the tale of twelve of the Jewish musicians whom the Nazis ironically required to play beautiful music in order to calm the people transported there while they were being herded to the gas chambers.

In addition, major attention is paid in this chapter to the well-known film The Pianist (2002)—the true story of the harrowing escape from execution of Wladyslaw Szpilman—which won multiple major awards. Roman Polanski, who produced and directed it, after many years during which he summoned up the courage to do so, was himself a survivor; as a child, he “escaped certain death by crawling through a hole in the barbed wire fence of the Warsaw ghetto” (p. 37). Szpilman, who wrote the book on which the film is based, was repeatedly robbed and betrayed, but he somehow managed, with the help of others, to evade capture for a good number of years. When his ordeal was almost over, he was discovered by a German officer, Captain Wilm Hosenfeld, who surprised Szpilman by not only protecting him but even providing him with food, blankets, and a warm coat. Hosenfeld later perished in a Soviet prisoner of war camp, despite Szpilman’s efforts to save him.

Schindler’s List (1993), a film that received wide acclamation, is an ac-count of courageous assistance by a non-Jew, Oskar Schindler, who—de-spite initial self-serving exploitation of Jews for his own financial profit—eventually subjected himself to great risk and major personal sacrifice to save the lives of nearly a hundred Jews who would otherwise have been killed. Schindler and Hosenfeld (the German officer depicted in The Pianist) were both acclaimed as among the Righteous of the World by Yad Vashem in Israel.

Thus, we see that both The Pianist and Schindler’s List, which each garnered high honors, contain an element that is of great importance. As Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, and others have pointed out, it was rarely possible to survive the concentration and forced labor camps all alone. Connecting with others for mutual assistance and inspiration was almost universally necessary for survival.

When Ginsparg turns to such films as Mendel (1997) and Fugitive Pieces (2007), in an effort to delve into the problems of the children of

BOOK REVIEWS 501

survivors and their tangled, at times tortured relationships with their par-ents, she gets into somewhat murky territory. The films and Ginsparg’s ideas about them are not quite as clear as what is to be found elsewhere in the book, but that is not totally surprising. One of the central themes of this group of films is the murkiness and mystery about parents’ past experiences and their past families with which Holocaust survivors’ chil-dren have had to contend, as well as the huge problems this has created for them with regard to their identity formation and their feelings about their parents.

The penultimate section of the book addresses the perpetrators of the Holocaust. It examines four films: Music Box (1989); The Nasty Girl, the title of which is a thought-provoking translation of Das Schreckliche Maedchen, since schreckliche means “awful,” while nasty is close to Nazi (1990); Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary (2002); and Walk on Water (2004). Once again, a spotlight is cast upon the problems of the children, who, like children of the surviving victims, often find themselves struggling with major emotional conflicts involving their identity, their ambivalent feelings toward their parents, and their struggle to hold on to parental idealization, which all children need, despite learning that their parents (and their society) have done horrendous things to other people.

I was reminded while reading this of several papers written by young Germans about just these kinds of wrenching emotional struggles, which I heard presented at the International Psychoanalytical Association meet-ings in Berlin just a few short years ago. In this section of Never Again, Ginsparg returns to the issue with which she began the book, that of denial of the perpetration of terrible atrocities and the large-scale wish to have the past gone and forgotten.

Her final chapter focuses on The Pawnbroker (1964), for which Rod Steiger was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor and was also awarded a Golden Globe award and a BAFTA award, among other honors. Ginsparg approaches The Pawnbroker from the point of view of the mechanism of identification with the aggressor. This seems to me to be reasonably appropriate, although my own impression is that the film deals much more saliently with how extremely difficult, even impossible it can be to recover from the devastating effects of having gone through the Holocaust.

502 BOOK REVIEWS

After I wrote this review, I sent it to The Psychoanalytic Quarterly’s Managing Editor, Gina Atkinson, to whom I am indebted for calling my attention to my having misidentified Roberto Benigni as Luigi Benigni in the initial version I sent to her. I immediately realized that I had made a very meaningful slip of the pen (or word processor). I realized that Roberto Benigni, as Ginsparg indicates in her book, made the film Life Is Beautiful as “a gift to his father” (p. 27), Luigi Benigni, who was the inspiration to Roberto to direct and star in the film. I realized that I had conflated father and son together into one and the same person! It was Roberto’s father Luigi who spent two years in the Bergen-Belsen concen-tration camp but, after his release—weighing just ninety pounds—was remarkably unfazed and free of rage at the Nazis (or at least he pre-sented himself that way to his son). In Life Is Beautiful, Roberto played the part of a fictional father, Guido, who was so creatively and wonder-fully helpful to his little boy, protecting him and ensuring that the hor-rors they were going through together in the Nazi concentration camp would be minimally devastating.

Roberto Benigni, it is my impression, probably did more than play the part of the film’s impressively devoted and clever father so as to pay homage to his own father. I suspect that, in addition, probably outside of awareness, he also played the part of the father in this remarkable film in an effort to understand his own father—to comprehend what his father had experienced but did not talk about, and to figure out how he had managed to come out of his ordeal as well as he seemed to have done. Perhaps, in addition, Roberto was even working through the anger he felt toward his father for disappointing him by de-idealizing himself when he submitted without a fight to being interned in the camp, and then seemingly was not even enraged at the Nazis for what they had done to him.

This is precisely the kind of dilemma Ginsparg addresses in her book about the psychology of the children of survivors of the Holocaust. It was puzzling to many viewers of Life Is Beautiful that the father in the film was portrayed as doing a very foolish thing, which got him killed just as liberators were approaching the camp. The film ends with a scene of Guido’s little boy riding triumphantly on an American tank. Is this the tank that Guido has been talking to the child about all through the film,

BOOK REVIEWS 503

as though he and his son did not know all the while that it was prepos-terous for them to behave as though engaged in a contest to win a tank if they followed orders and obeyed the camp rules?

Like the imaginary radio in Jacob the Liar, the tank story epitomizes the need to find a way to cling to hope by whatever means—the hope that enabled a number of concentration camp inmates to persevere long enough and desperately enough to stay alive and ultimately survive.

I have worked a good deal with Holocaust survivors, their children, and their grandchildren, and I continue to do so. I can attest to the rel-evance and accuracy of what is contained in this book, and I recommend it to psychoanalysts, as well as to the general public, as very much worth reading. It addresses the twin topics of understanding the impact of the Holocaust on its survivors and on their progeny and of the necessity to preserve meaningful records of what transpired so that it will not be for-gotten and, hopefully, will never happen again.

Never Again can also contribute heuristically, it seems to me, to un-derstanding the challenges involved in treating patients who have expe-rienced or are experiencing the ravages of such horrific events as deep, melancholic depression, manic episodes, and other psychotic states. Psy-choanalytic and psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy can often be very effective for those extreme but not necessarily untreatable condi-tions. Human beings can be remarkably resilient. With appropriate as-sistance, they can often recover from the most horrendous assaults on their emotional well-being and on their very humanity.

MARTIN A. SILVERMAN (MAPLEWOOD, NJ)

FREUD IN OZ: AT THE INTERSECTIONS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CHILDREN’S LITERATURE. By Kenneth B. Kidd. Minneapolis, MN/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. 336 pp.

A Tuscan proverb invoked by the Italian writer Italo Calvino came to my mind as I was reviewing this book. Calvino, a modern Grimm brother who collected some 200 fables into one volume,1 rephrases this proverb

1 Calvino, I. (1956). Italian Folktales, trans. G. Martin. San Diego, CA/New York: Harcourt, 1980.