witness without end

Witness without End?Eric J. Sundquist

In Norma Rosen’s Touching Evil (1969), one of the strangest

Holocaust novels on record, two American women, one pregnant

and the other preoccupied with her own fertility, neither of them

Jewish, watch the televised trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. Each

identifies obsessively with the testimony of survivor witnesses

brought forth in Jerusalem to name the crimes of the Nazi regime.

The narrator, Jean, identifies with a “corpse-digger” (43) who clawed

her way to freedom from within a pile of dead bodies, while the

pregnant woman, Hattie, identifies with a survivor who gave birth in

the “typhus-infested straw” of an unnamed death camp (131). As

Hattie “sucks up the images” of the Eichmann trial, her companion

imagines the unborn child “slipping out, all pale and amniotized, to

get a better look at the screen, then slipping back in again” (68). In

Jean’s fantasy Hattie “bears the fetus that bears witness to the

witness on TV who is bearing witness at the trial” (68).

This passage is one of several that foregrounds Rosen’s pres-

cient dramatization of the ways in which “identification” and “wit-

nessing,” with their attendant problems of corrosion, voyeurism,

projection, replication, and the like, were bound to become key

themes in Holocaust studies in years to come—prescient not least

because “Holocaust studies” barely existed at the time Rosen

wrote her novel, while “the Holocaust,” as a term of art, so to

speak, barely existed at the time her novel is set. Not only that, but

in the scene in question, Jean, a woman in her late thirties, is

called back in memory to her own introduction to the Nazi geno-

cide in 1944, when her college psychology teacher, who deals in

symbolically freighted experiments with mice in mazes, shows

Jean newly revealed photographs of the liberated death camps—

“experimental cell blocks . . . piled-up stick bodies at the bottom

of a lime-pit”—and then takes her virginity (72). “Only joy can

cancel out that horror,” he professes afterward (73). “I seduced

Eric J. Sundquist is a Foundation Professor of Literature at UCLA. He is the

author, most recently, of Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust

America.

doi:10.1093/alh/ajl032Advance Access publication December 19, 2006# The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Forpermissions, please e-mail: [email protected]

Witnessing the Disaster:

Essays on Representation

and the Holocaust,

Michael Bernard-Donals

and Richard Glejzer.

University of Wisconsin

Press, 2003.

The Holocaust and the

Postmodern, Robert

Eaglestone. Oxford

University Press, 2004.

After Such Knowledge:

Memory, History, and the

Legacy of the Holocaust,

Eva Hoffman.

PublicAffairs, 2004.

Post-Holocaust:

Interpretation,

Misinterpretation, and

the Claims of History,

Berel Lang. Indiana


The Holocaust and

Memory in the Global

Age, Daniel Levy and

Natan Sznaider,

translated by Assenka

Oksiloff. Temple


Sounds of Defiance: The

Holocaust,

Multilingualism, and the

Problem of English,

you with dirty pictures”. However this experience marks Jean’s

subsequent “witness” to the Holocaust and launches one strand of

the novel’s overdetermined argument about post-Holocaust “repro-

duction,” Rosen confronts us with the disturbing probability that

the atrocities of the Judeocide are seductive, a kind of pornography

through which we lose our innocence, whatever the motive or epi-

phany, time and again.

Contemporary critics, including a number in the cohort under

review, rightly depict cultural productions of the late 1970s—specifi-

cally, the television miniseries Holocaust in 1978 and the establish-

ment of a commission to plan the United States Holocaust Memorial

Museum in 1979—as propulsive events in the Americanization, and

hence the universalization, of Holocaust “memory.” Even so,

Rosen’s focus on the Eichmann trial is telling. She was responsive

not just to the pivotal role the trial played, by most accounts, in

breaking the postwar “silence” about the Holocaust, but also to the

redundancy of witnessing upon which our understanding of it would

come to be predicated as true witnesses, whether victims, perpetra-

tors, or bystanders, were replaced, generation by generation, by

those who witness only through acts of representation.

Insofar as it marked the convergence of global media cover-

age and pronouncements about the “lessons” of the Holocaust, the

Eichmann trial was also a key marker, argue Daniel Levy and

Natan Sznaider in The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age

(2006), in the “de-territorialization of [Holocaust] memory,” a

process that unfolded in coming decades significantly in English

and through American media (108). Whereas English must at first

have seemed inconsequential within the melange of languages

through which the Holocaust was experienced and subsequently

remembered, its very exteriority also meant it had avoided the cor-

rupting power of Nazism. “Lodged at the corners of the globe,

rather than in the midst of Europe,” as Alan Rosen writes in

Sounds of Defiance: The Holocaust, Multilingualism, and the

Problem of English (2005), English “escaped contamination”

(189). As the language of liberation, moreover, and soon the fore-

most language of technology, capitalism, and democracy, English

was an inevitable vehicle of Americanization in two senses—

making the Holocaust available to a distant American audience

and, over time, universalizing its message. By century’s end,

English had become the principal agent by which the Holocaust

was made not just a moral enormity but also, say Levy and

Sznaider, a “future-oriented memory” (185) on which to base a

cosmopolitan ethics: “all victims have become Jews” (188).

Although it could in no way compete properly with the testi-

mony of survivors and other witnesses that appeared in the initial

Alan Rosen. University

of Nebraska Press, 2005.

The Holocaust Novel,

Efraim Sicher.

Routledge, 2005.

Fantasies of Witnessing:

Postwar Efforts to

Experience the

Holocaust, Gary

Weissman. Cornell


66 Witness without End?

postwar years, American literature, like American English, also

quickly became a major voice in the creation of Holocaust

memory and its dissemination. John Hersey laid out some of the

theoretical problems to come in his 1950 documentary novel about

the Warsaw Ghetto entitled The Wall, which took as its inspiration

clandestine archives such as Emmanuel Ringelblum’s diary, par-

tially published in English in 1958 as Notes from the Warsaw

Ghetto, and the collection of materials written secretly in Lodz

under the direction of Chaim Rumkowski (published in an

abridged English edition in 1984 as Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto).

Supposedly based on an archive compiled by the fictional Noach

Levinson and housed in Israel after being unearthed from the

ruins, The Wall presents itself as excerpts from Levinson’s Yiddish

documents, initially translated into Polish and then into English. In

making an imagined archive available in English well in advance

of the translation of Ringelblum’s and Rumkowski’s manuscripts,

argues Efraim Sicher in The Holocaust Novel (2005), Hersey

demonstrated that memory can be preserved only by being

encoded in a “narrating consciousness that makes sense out of the

confusion of history” (113). Precisely because it is imagined

memory, The Wall alerts us to key problems in the reconstruction

of the Holocaust world—the uncertainties of eyewitness

testimony derived from traumatic experience; the need for

corroborating evidence; the question of rightly interpreting acts of

resistance and non-resistance alike—while focusing, as Rosen

explores in detail, on the ways in which English translation, both

as fact and as trope, mediates our “capacity to imagine” the

Holocaust (A. Rosen 36).

If the role of English in making the Holocaust “witnessa-

ble” by an American, as well as a global, audience thus dates to

the immediate aftermath of the war, it still remains an open ques-

tion what we have been enabled to witness. In each generation

since, the problem of “knowing” the Holocaust has paradoxically

become more acute as various modes of second-order witnessing

have become normative. Before looking more closely at this

process, spelled out collectively in the books under review, it

will be useful first to orient ourselves to the contemporary

moment.

Today’s scholars of Holocaust culture typically take one or

another departure from Marianne Hirsch’s influential concept of

“post-memory,” in which the survivor generation’s memories—

what they recalled of their experiences and even what they are said

to have repressed—are encountered in the next generation

“not through recollection but through an imaginative investment

and creation” (22), what Lillian Kremer, borrowing from Norma

If the role of English in

making the Holocaust

“witnessable” by an

American, as well as a

global, audience . . .dates to the immediate

aftermath of the war, it

still remains an open

question what we have

been enabled to witness.

In each generation since,

the problem of

“knowing” the Holocaust

has paradoxically

become more acute as

various modes of second-

order witnessing have

become normative.

American Literary History 67

Rosen, has called “witness through the imagination” in her book of

that name. Although contention over what the Holocaust was and

how it can be known continues unabated—think only of the dozens

of books and articles speaking to problems of “representation”—

our interest now, say Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer

in Witnessing the Disaster: Essays on Representation and the

Holocaust (2003), lies in “representations of witness rather than

representations of the event itself” (13). However, the upshot of

such an evolution, contends Gary Weissman in his powerful and

incisive study, Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to

Experience the Holocaust (2004), is that non-witnesses today

strive to “convince themselves and others that they too occupy a

privileged position in relation to the event” by claiming to partici-

pate in, to have been imprinted by, its trauma, as though they have

“really faced the Holocaust, felt its horror and remembered its

victims” (21).

“No one becomes a survivor either by virtue of being a Jew

or by the intensity of their absorption in the history and literature

of the Shoah,” cautions Michael Andre Bernstein (90). Neither, it

might be stipulated, does one become a witness, even though

every effort by a non-participant to know the Holocaust necessi-

tates some kind of surrogate witnessing, but what kind—witness as

spectator, as testifier, or both—and to what end? No doubt rela-

tives and especially children of Holocaust victims belong to a

special category of witness. “The Second Generation will never

know what the First Generation does in its bones,” writes Melvin

Bukiet, “but what the Second Generation knows better than

anyone else is the First Generation” (14). The heirs of survivors

may well be survivors of a sort, just as the perpetrators have as

their heirs the apparently growing ranks of Holocaust deniers, but

perhaps everyone else might better be thought of as second- and

third-generation bystanders.

Nevertheless, those determined to “witness” the Holocaust

through literature or other media have plenty of theories from

which to choose. In Dora Apel’s “secondary witnessing” (12),

Susan Gubar’s “proxy-witnessing” (23), and Irene Kacandes’s

“co-witnessing” (Hirsh and Kacandes 18), to take just a few

examples, one finds inventive and often compelling evidence of

the special demands made upon the reader by Holocaust texts.

What one also finds, however, is a preoccupation with making the

trauma one’s own that verges at times on narcissism. “I did not

have the privilege of going through the Hitler holocaust,” Isaac

Bashevis Singer wrote in qualification of his authority in a prefa-

tory note to Enemies, a Love Story (1972), and one might take

Singer’s wry self-assessment as a critique of the ardor with which


some scholars of the Judeocide pursue identification with the

victims and their memories (unpag.). “Memory envy,” Geoffrey

Hartman calls it, speaking of the strong undertow affecting artists,

characters, and audiences awash in an ever enlarging sea of

discovered, remembered, and invented testimony wherein the

boundary between the original and the surrogate experiences has

become elided (“Tele-Suffering” 120).

An acute instance, notes Hartman, is the case of Binjamin

Wilkomirski, who became first famous and then infamous when

his much-praised Holocaust memoir, Fragments (1995), was

discovered to be fraudulent.1 That Fragments elicited moving cor-

roboration from survivors, who recognized in it the fundamental

“truth” of their terrible experiences, underscored both the ambi-

guity of remembered witness and, among the reading public, a

seemingly insatiable passion for Holocaust testimony. It is no sur-

prise, therefore, that Wilkomirski’s bogus text features significantly

in recent scholarship. With its fragmented narrative and graphic

horrors, Fragments is a compendium of what has come to stand

for authenticity in Holocaust representation, writes Weissman, and

thus an extreme manifestation of our “fantasies of witnessing”

(213). Fragments is a parody of testimony, argues Robert

Eaglestone in The Holocaust and the Postmodern (2004), one that

feeds parasitically not only on the genre established by Primo

Levi, Elie Wiesel, and other survivors, but also on the principal

strategy of Holocaust fiction, which must steer a careful course

between “the demand of fiction that we identify and the demand

of the Holocaust that we cannot and should not” (132). For Levy

and Sznaider, the initial reception of Fragments proved that

the Holocaust has become “completely decontextualized and

turned into a personal trauma with which anyone can identify,” its

globalized code severed from history, while at the same time the

angry reactions to Wilkomirski’s hoax demonstrated that some

kind of boundary still exists between survivor memory and fictio-

nalized trauma (150). Or does it? In the view of Bernard-Donals,

what Fragments illuminates is the fact that the authority of

survivor testimony is “autonomous from history” (“Beyond” 198).

Because a survivor’s experience need not be attendant to or

congruent with historical events, except in a personal sense, false

testimony, no less than true, may produce in readers an effect that

“induces them to witness” by acting out a transference of the

trauma (“Beyond” 198).

Although far from resolved in theoretical terms,

Bernard-Donals’s distinction between the Holocaust as a set of his-

torical events and the Holocaust as a set of personal experiences is

unexceptional. More provocative is his view of the transferability


of trauma. To suppose that Fragments allows one to bear witness

may offer ammunition to Holocaust deniers, he acknowledges, but

insofar as “witnessing is a moment of forgetting, a moment of

seeing without knowing that indelibly marks the source of history

as an abyss” (214), there may be “a traumatic kernel wrapped

inside the narrative of destruction,” whether Wiesel’s or Binjamin

Wilkomirski’s, “to which neither we nor the writer has access”

(213). Such a view derives from the performative notion of “trans-

missible trauma” espoused by Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman,

among others—a notion, observes Amy Hungerford, purporting

that “survivors” (98) can be produced in the act of reading and

thereby creating “an atmosphere conducive to fraud” such as

Wilkimirski’s (111). Whatever trauma theory has contributed to

psychiatric or psychological conjecture about victims and survi-

vors (or, for that matter, perpetrators and bystanders), in the arena

of cultural studies it would seem mainly to have raised the stakes

of mystification. Now, what is unrecoverable, unspeakable,

unknowable—the authentic “kernel”—belongs not just to survivors

but also to everyday scholars, readers, and filmgoers. In this

respect, Fragments is a proof text of the voracious, but unfulfill-

able, post-Holocaust demand for new evidence of that which lies

hidden in the abyss of history, the black hole of memory. The

unimpeachable commandment “never forget” is thus transmuted

into the unimpeachable caveat “never remember.”

The rhetoric of “the unspeakable” and “the unknowable” has,

of course, a long history in Holocaust studies. “The unspeakable

being said, over and over, for twelve years,” wrote George Steiner

in 1959 of Nazi record-keeping (99). “The unthinkable being

written down, indexed, filed for reference” (Steiner 100). “By now

we know all there is to know. But it hasn’t helped; we still don’t

understand,” observed Isaac Rosenfeld in his 1948 essay “Terror

beyond Evil” (197). The fact that Elie Wiesel could say much the

same thing during his visit to Auschwitz with Oprah Winfrey in

2006—“What does it mean? . . . I have no answers”—tells us not

that Rosenfeld’s estimate was premature but rather that, despite

60 years of testimony, documentation, and interpretation, an

opaque incomprehensibility lies still at the event’s core (“Oprah”).

Despite all we know, it is not enough. “The people of the Book

[have] become the people of Holocaust books,” writes Thane

Rosenbaum in Second Hand Smoke (1999). “The canon of the

Shoah [is] now a loaded cannon, the fuse eternally counting down

with the firepower of memory and accusation,” and yet “the

mystery of madness and atrocity can never be found in books—or

even museums—because the questions themselves are unknow-

able, and the answers, even more so” (75–76).


It is therefore useful to distinguish, as Saul Friedlander has,

between common or collective memory about the Holocaust,

which provides coherence and forms of closure, and “deep

memory” (254), which “will defy any attempt to give it meaning”

(255). The most acute and, philosophically speaking, irrefutable

expression of the latter appears in Primo Levi’s view that it is not

the survivors whose testimony is recorded who are “the complete

witnesses” (83), but instead the “drowned,” those “who saw the

Gorgon, [but] have not returned to tell about it or have returned

mute” (84). Silence is thus the only avenue by which to approach

that which can be neither communicated nor known. The question

of unknowability2 may also be thought of as a corollary of belief

in the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust, whether in relation to Nazi

intentionalism (unlike other victims, Jews—all Jews—were a

singular, non-contingent target) or other instances of genocide (the

Holocaust, and especially the Jewish Holocaust, was qualitatively

different from, say, Stalin’s regime of murder or that of Pol Pot).

Likewise, moral judgments about the susceptibility of the

Holocaust to analogy or comparison may cast in metaphysical

terms. “If the trememdum could be reduced to its causes or

folded back into its antecedents,” according to Arthur Cohen’s

formulation, “it would have a conditional reality which would

diminish its stature as trememdum” (30–31). An event so singular

must by definition be trapped for all time in the deep memory of

history.

By the same token, as Berel Lang points out in Post-

Holocaust: Interpretation, Misinterpretation, and the Claims of

History (2005), because similar avowals might be made regarding

states of mystical ecstasy, for example, the rhetoric of unknowabil-

ity can “obscure the basic features of that event which, notwith-

standing its moral monstrosity, are clearly—if anything, too

clearly—recognizable and describable” (76). What is now recog-

nizable and describable about the Holocaust, the collective

memory adduced from an avalanche of information, also derives

from the visual arts, museums and memorials, and above all,

perhaps, from literature. Indeed, as Sicher notices, by the early

1980s Yosef Yerushalmi could venture that, despite the

Holocaust’s “having engendered more historical research that any

single event in Jewish history,” its image was now “being shaped,

not at the historian’s anvil, but in the novelist’s crucible” (xxi).

Yet it must also be noticed that Yerushalmi presented the

historian’s task in terms no less revealing for our understanding of

what constitutes Holocaust literature. The historian does not

simply “replenish the gaps of memory” (Yerushalmi 94–95)

created by an ongoing process of winnowing and forgetting; he


also challenges “even those memories that have survived intact”

(Yerushalmi 98). He must question not only “false” witness such

as Wilkomirski’s, that is to say, but “true” witness as well.

“A novel about Auschwitz is not a novel, or it is not about

Auschwitz,” wrote Wiesel in 1978 (Jew 234). This much-cited

aphorism concisely illustrates the mystique of witness Yerushalmi

has in mind, and no one has more fully embodied it than Wiesel,

who, through continual, self-corroborating acts of witness, has made

himself a “living myth” of the Holocaust (Weissman 81). Both Lang

and Weissman take note of the argument that erupted between

Wiesel and Alfred Kazin in 1989 after Kazin expressed doubt that

Wiesel had actually seen the events related in the famous scene in

Night (1960) in which three prisoners are hanged and the agonized

struggles of the last to die, a young boy, provokes Wiesel’s

anguished cry that God himself is hanging on the gallows. The issue

is neither the basis Kazin had for questioning Wiesel’s account nor

Wiesel’s affronted rejoinder, remarks Lang, but rather the implication

that survivor testimony need stand no empirical test. “Historical veri-

fication, although not a sufficient condition of testimony, remains a

necessary one,” Lang argues, “required in broad outline if not for

each detail” (79). Wiesel’s insistence that Kazin’s skepticism may

give credence to Holocaust deniers, adds Weissman, tells us less

about the truth of Night than it does about the “Wieselization” of the

Holocaust, which is to say the sanctification of survivor testimony

and, what is more, of particular survivors (51).

It takes nothing away from Night as memoir and eyewitness

account to recognize that it is also a piece of imaginative literature,

one demonstration of which can be seen, as Weissman shows, in

Wiesel’s rather different account of the crisis of faith provoked by

Auschwitz in his later autobiography, All Rivers Run to the Sea

(1994). In demonstrating that Night is as powerful a “novel” as it

is a “memoir,” one could just as well point to the ways in which

the Days of Awe sequence replaces the binding of Isaac with the

binding of the Jews (“Praised be Thy Holy Name, for having

chosen us to be slaughtered on Thine altar” [Night 67]) and God’s

selection (“on Rosh Hashanah it is written, on Yom Kippur it is

sealed . . . who shall live and who shall die,” reads the liturgy

[Gates 108]) with the demonic selection by Josef Mengele, who

writes down the numbers of prisoners standing as though at “the

Last Judgment” (Night 71). Held to a rarified standard of experien-

tial authenticity, in fact, we would be required to ask if the new

English translation of Night adopted by Oprah’s Book Club, which

re-Judaizes the text in several key passages,3 does not prove that

Wiesel, in the previous translation, read by millions, witnessed

falsely in the interests of reaching a gentile audience.


Of course, a decision to adopt a frame of reference familiar

to Christian, predominantly American readers made perfect sense

in 1960, just as it makes sense now to revert to what was presum-

ably Wiesel’s original intent and language in the far longer,

unpublished document in Yiddish from which Night, first in

French and then in English, was culled. Neither an overlay of

redemptive Christian symbology—a standard allegorical mode in

much American literature of the Holocaust—nor evidence that

some historical details of Night were altered for dramatic

effect falsifies Wiesel’s testimony. We need not go as far as

Bernard-Donals and Glejzer in speculating that “insistence upon

‘authentic’ memories . . . may replicate the [Nazi] logic that pro-

mulgated the Shoah by eliminating that which defies logic or

system” (11).4 Yet their formulation does usefully bridge the

distance between authenticity defined as incontestable testimony

and authenticity defined as the “holy grail” of unmediated witness

by those who come after (Weissman 131). The doctrine of

unknowability, it might be said, is the flip side of the Nazi coin of

zealotry achieved through prevaricating euphemism and gestures

of sacramental grandeur—and thus a means of relegating the

events to “an incomprehensible cosmos, of sacred and demonic

forces” (Hoffman 175), making us “faithful,” says Eva Hoffman in

After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the

Holocaust (2004), “to a terribilitas that we simultaneously declare

to be unimaginable” (177).

Hoffman’s critique of the cult of testimony coincides with

the approach of a “post”-post-Holocaust age when no living wit-

nesses will remain and the staggering project of collecting and

recording their first-hand testimony in memoirs and interviews

will come to a close. Already, perhaps, an anxious awareness of

this coming day has taken its toll on our sensibilities. The fre-

quency with which the Holocaust is, even today, described as

unknowable, notes Weissman, may have less to do with what the

victims suffered in the past than with our rising inability to feel

“horrified by ‘the horror’ in the present” (208). If a surfeit of

Holocaust knowledge has left us numb, however, it is also because

the globalization of that knowledge has merged the Holocaust with

other catastrophic events. If all victims are Jews, to recur to Levy

and Sznaider, then all the world is a witness. With Holocaust

images now embedded in a vast trove of global brutality, refracted

again and again in many media, we have all been made “involun-

tary bystanders of atrocities,” says Hartman, our experience of

“secondary trauma” derived not from events lost in the black hole

of deep memory but instead from the exhaustion of our capacity

for empathy (Hartman, Longest Shadow 152). It is ironic, but


surely inevitable, that such a crisis would be one byproduct of

late-twentieth-century “survivor culture,” in which intermingled

celebratory and psychiatric discourses arose to account for all

manner of trauma and “the act of testimony,” with which the

reader or viewer was invited to identify, was made heroic

(Greenspan 59). The exfoliation of victimhood has both enriched

and diluted the meaning of witness, just as it has both enhanced

and diminished the Holocaust. Collective memory, warns

Hoffman, is rapidly turning into “hypermemory,” leaving the

Shoah in danger less of “vanishing into forgetfulness” than of

“expanding into an increasingly empty referent” (Hoffman 177).

The very discourses of empathy and trauma that promise to

turn us into survivors, or at least witnesses, therefore make seduc-

tive what Susan David Bernstein refers to as “promiscuous identifi-

cation,” leaving us too little vigilant about “negotiating simulated

realities” and, in the case of literature, tempting us to assimilate

“the read subject into an untroubled unitary reading self” (142).

An arresting example of such problematic identification is drama-

tized in Emily Prager’s Eve’s Tattoo (1992), in which the gentile

title character invents various life stories for the Holocaust victim

whose identity she usurps by tattooing her camp number on her

own arm and through whose secondary impersonation she

proposes to keep the Holocaust alive by telling tales suited to the

individual needs of various interlocutors. “When the people who

experienced an event are no longer walking the planet,” she

declares, “it’s as if that event never existed at all. There’ll be

books and museums and monuments, but things move so fast now,

the only difference between fantasy and history is living people.

I’m going to keep Eva alive” (11). The predictable failure of Eve’s

project provides a salutary lesson in favor of what Bernstein calls

“dissonant” identification (S. Bernstein 158), a strategy for

approaching eyewitness or first-generation testimony that “unsettles

the fantasy of authentic mutuality” (S. Bernstein 159). Eve may be

an “anti-Icarus sucked into the dark, drawn by the lethal attraction

of a black hole” (181), as Sicher contends, but the fact that her

audiences identify not as one does with legitimate testimony but

rather as one does with “characters in novels,” Eaglestone points

out, makes Eve’s Tattoo an allegory of the allure, as well as the

risks, of spurious identification (111).

The prototype here would be Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young

Girl (1947), which prompted such an excess of identification on

the part of young Bernstein that she “kept late-night sentinels for

the return of Hitler” (S. Bernstein 147), but whose iconography is

now so entangled in stage plays, films, biographical studies, docu-

mentaries, critical editions, musical adaptations, and related


memorabilia that the original text has been emptied of its capacity

to witness. (“About the only thing we haven’t seen so far is Anne

Frank on Ice,” remarked Ian Buruma after a 1998 Broadway

revival [4].) What needs to be added to Bernstein’s account is that

literature itself may provide us with “dissonant” readings, as we

may see in the burlesque of promiscuous witness found, for

example, in Philip Roth’s dissection of Anne Frank hagiography in

The Ghost Writer (1979) or Rosenbaum’s Second Hand Smoke, in

which the estranged wife of the Nazi-hunter protagonist is

portrayed as having come to her own brand of Holocaust envy, as

well as philosemitism, through adolescent addiction to the Diary,

which prompts her to have meals brought to her in the attic “in

solidarity with her heroine” (142).

Such self-conscious replication of Holocaust texts within

Holocaust texts, whether satiric or not, may be thought of as a

variation on what Norma Rosen has designated, to cite the title of

her essay, “The Second Life of Holocaust Imagery.” The pheno-

monon is not specific to English, of course—the genre of

Holocaust literature is definitively multilingual—but any preva-

lence of such representations in English might be ascribed to its

being, from the outset, a “second-hand” language of witness.

Specifically, Rosen means that certain words and images became

charged by the Holocaust with connotations that rise up unbidden.

“For a mind engraved with the Holocaust, gas is always that gas,”

she writes. “Shower means their shower. Ovens are those ovens.

A train is a freight car crammed with suffering children.” Of

course, this kind of contamination from memory does not

always happen, she adds, “but when it does come, this unwilled

re-experiencing, this ‘second life,’ must not be turned away from,

imperfect though it may be” (“Second” 52). Michael Bernstein

objects that such a “clinically excessive identification” offensively

justifies claiming special moral insight into “the suffering of one’s

people” (54), and to the extent that Rosen promotes the fantasy of

unmediated witness, as Eaglestone maintains, this is surely right

(Eaglestone 35). Without setting aside that worry, however, one

can find in Rosen’s argument a different lesson.

We may return here to the imperishable trope of unknow-

ability, elevated to a high artistic principle by filmmaker Claude

Lanzmann, for whom the Holocaust’s uniqueness lies in the

permanent “unrepresentability” of what happened. One consequence

of Lanzmann’s ascetic logic, says Weissman, is to make Schindler’s

List (1993), which showed things that Lanzmann’s landmark docu-

mentary Shoah (1985) left largely to silence and evocation, “a form

of Holocaust denial” (162). Be that as it may, Lanzmann’s high

moralism is factitious not only because he employs a variety of


devices to “show” the Holocaust, including the miniaturized plaster

model of people dying in the gas chamber on exhibit at Auschwitz,

but also because he can assume his audience’s familiarity with

many of those things he does not show. By the time Shoah

appeared, “trains” and “cattle cars,” even the mere railroad tracks

leading to the death camps, carried into Lanzmann’s film an

immense visual vocabulary, encoded by many narratives, photo-

graphs, and documentary films, so that his self-regarding circum-

spection was effectively a narratorial act by means of which the

fantasy of “second-life” witnessing was set loose.

In this respect, Weissman spells out a very useful relationship

between Shoah and Schindler’s List, in which Steven Spielberg,

on behalf of his audience, studied the line between witness and

fantasy, the most revealing instance being the controversial scene

in which naked women are herded into a “shower” room and

sprayed—not with gas, as we fear, but with water after all. If the

ultimate point of reference for the unspeakable (and therefore the

unknowable) is what transpired inside the gas chamber, to which

no victim can testify and which no artist will attempt to depict,

Spielberg’s cinematic suggestion that the horror will be shown to

viewers “peeping” into a gas-chamber—the camera literally looks

through the peephole—accompanied by unbearable tension amidst

darkness and screams, may be as close as we can come to feeling

the horror and making it “eyewitnessable” (Weissman 176).

Because Spielberg’s sleight of hand also carries with it perpetrator

testimony such as that of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoss

about the agony of his own “witness,”5 the “peephole,” like the

train, activates the second life of Holocaust imagery—what James

Young speaks of as its “after-images”—in viewers already pre-

pared to witness events without having seen them.6

Such replication of Holocaust tropes, along with arch self-

awareness of the vicissitudes of witnessing, is a defining feature of

the most recent generation of Holocaust literature and art. One may

see it as a way to assess generational differences, as when Leslie

Epstein returns in King of the Jews (1979) to the problem of docu-

menting Jewish life and resistance in the Lodz Ghetto, particularly

the controversial role of the Judenrat under the pompous leadership

of Chaim Rumkowski. In reproducing aspects of Rumkowski’s life

and episodes from the Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, including quo-

tations from Rumkowski’s now searingly ironic speeches—for

instance, his proclamation that “Work Can Save Us” or his heart-

breaking plea to parents to turn over their children for transport, lest

the whole ghetto be liquidated—Epstein rebuilds in fiction a world

of chaos and terror raised to a high pitch. Black comic inventions

such as the intertwining of the final orders for transport with a


ghetto production of Macbeth, a penetrating reflection on

Rumkowski’s own blood-stained reign, allow Epstein to test the

moral fabric of authenticity by questioning the precision with which

eyewitness and historical accounts alone can provide the most com-

plete testimony. Whereas Hersey had to invent an archive, Epstein

can elaborate upon the real archive to demonstrate, as he noted in

subsequent commentary, that the Nazi effort to exterminate the

Jews, an attack on “the imagination itself,” on the people whose

“finite minds conceived of the infinite,” had failed (263).

Replication of the tropes of witnessing also provides a means

of delimiting the genre of Holocaust literature and, at least in

some key cases, the self-reflexive awareness of English as a trans-

lating medium. Alan Rosen’s analysis of Cynthia Ozick’s The

Shawl (1989), a work rich in attention to languages, memories,

and their intertwined representations, provides a useful example.

The “poison” of English on which the survivor Rosa Lublin, now

a madwoman living in Miami, “cracks her teeth” is set in the

novel against the Yiddish mocked by her cosmopolitan Polish

parents, who believed their veneration of Warsaw culture and

classical languages might save them from the ghetto and the death

camp (Ozick, Shawl 53). Not only is Rosa’s English, like her

Polish, now poisoned by the Holocaust, however, but the

Holocaust is conversely poisoned by English, as in the mock scho-

larly language of Dr. Tree, who views survivors as pathological

specimens best probed through his preposterous theory of

“Repressed Animation,” a Buddhist-inspired diagnosis of “non-

functioning” death camp inmates (Ozick, Shawl 37)—first of all a

“second-life” parody of the “drowned,” the musselmanner, but

also, by extension, of contemporary trauma theory. Yet, as the

only language available to Ozick, Rosen points out, English must

be added to the array of intertextual traditions (Yiddish, Hebrew,

German, Polish, Latin) on which she draws.7 As evidence he cites

a letter from Rosa to her niece Stella in which she—or, we might

rather say, Ozick—virtually quotes from Edgar’s desperate cry

upon encountering his blinded father in King Lear: “Once I

thought the worst was the worst, after that nothing could be the

worst. But now I see, even after the worst there’s still more”

(Ozick, Shawl 14). Allusions to Shakespeare serve effectively to

enlarge Ozick’s “vocabulary of suffering” (A. Rosen 137), even to

counteract “the parodic poison” of English, Rosen argues (138).

Yet, beyond the fact that “worse” following upon “the worst” is a

common motif in Holocaust testimony—in Night, for example—

there is a further allusion in Rosa’s quotation that must be taken

into account if we are to appreciate fully Ozick’s interlayering of

English texts and replication of Holocaust tropes.


As he enters his third summer in prison, charged with the

murder of a Christian child so that his drained blood can be used

for ritual purposes, Yakov Bok, the hero of Bernard Malamud’s

1966 novel The Fixer, suffers yet another in a long series of

torments and humiliations when a guard dumps a can of urine

over his head: “He thought that whenever he had been through the

worst, there was always worse” (264). Did Ozick think of King

Lear, or did she think of Malamud thinking of King Lear? The

point here is not that this comparatively minor scene in

Malamud’s careful fictionalization of the Mendel Beilis blood

libel case makes him the more proximate and relevant source.

Rather, the recuperation of The Fixer in The Shawl, a different

form of second-life allusion,8 stands as further proof of Rosen’s

compelling and original argument about the emergence of English

as a language in which the Holocaust, as well as its antecedents,

could be witnessed, even as it would also appear to testify to

Ozick’s appreciation of the earlier generation of American

Holocaust literature, The Fixer and Singer’s The Slave (1962)

being preeminent examples, in which indirection was a central

strategy for confronting the unimaginable.9

Indeed, that earlier generation should not be overlooked. Not

only did those writers provide the foundation for the postmodern

representations typically preferred by today’s critics, they also, at

times, anticipated the same intricacies of witnessing we are wont

to attribute to later writers. The prime exhibit is still Jerzy

Kosinski and The Painted Bird (1965), a novel that, it is easy

enough to see now, set forth many of the problems raised by

Wilkomirski and Fragments a generation later. Among other

things that he exploited, Kosinski took advantage of the fact that

English was still, by definition, something of a renegade language

in which to compose a narrative about the Holocaust—or, at any

rate, about the collapse of civilization under totalitarian rule.

Because English was still new to him, Kosinski claimed in a

revised edition of the novel, he could write “dispassionately, free

from the emotional connotation one’s native language always

contains”—an assertion that might appear naıve, rather than scan-

dalously calculated, had Kosinski not turned out to be a charlatan

of the first order (xii). But does that matter?

With confirmation that the book’s incidents were fabricated,

and moreover that Kosinski’s own family had hidden safely from

the Nazis and may even have acted as collaborators, the power of

his sadomasochistic fairy tale was wrenched into an altogether

different register. Where once endorsements by Wiesel and Arthur

Miller were taken to authenticate the book’s harrowing surrealism,

now discussion was required to treat it as a kind of anti-witness


forever compromised by Kosinski’s duplicity. Although his study

is a superb encyclopedia of contemporary cultural theorizing about

the Holocaust and the postmodern, Eaglestone dismisses The

Painted Bird in a footnote as “exploitative, misogynistic, and

pornographic” (111n). Well, yes. The numerous scenes of the boy

“peeping” at acts of torturous violence and sexual abuse are a

catalogue of depravity, but are they more depraved, asks Sicher,

than “the greater horror of a cold, calculated, bureaucratic system

of industrialized murder?” (87).

Yet there is a more important reason to reject Eaglestone’s

view. In destabilizing the border between trauma and titillation,

witnessing and voyeurism, argues Sharon Oster, Kosinski’s

“sexualized aesthetics of authenticity” pinpointed early on our

anxiety about needing to “see” the events, needing viscerally to

experience the horror, again and again (96). Testimonial witness

could show some part of the horror, but perhaps only literature

could reveal the tangled array of motives—fear, shame, guilt,

desire, cathexis, catharsis—exposed by witnessing it repeatedly.

The novel’s famous scene in which the miller, in a fit of jealous

rage, gouges out the eyeballs of the plowboy, is in this respect a

tour de force in explication of the charged, precarious relationships

between surrogate witnessing and surrogate remembering. The

scene, Kosinski would later say, is analogously about the violence

of having to see the Holocaust.10 More specifically, one may read

the scene—another allusion to King Lear?—as a meditation upon

the inevitable waning, and one day the end, of survivor memory

(“I wondered whether the loss of one’s sight would deprive a

person also of the memory of everything that he had seen before”)

and hence its displacement into the trickier secondary witness

of fiction (“Who knows, perhaps without his eyes the plowboy

would start seeing an entirely new, more fascinating world”)

(Kosinski 40).

We are brought back, then, to Touching Evil, in which

Norma Rosen took an even more radical approach to the problem

of witnessing the Holocaust. Late in the novel, as Hattie

approaches the painful ordeal of childbirth, gorged on testimony

from the Eichmann trial, she is seized by a vision, which her

friend Jean comes to share, of magically sucking back into their

wombs, and thus protecting until the danger has passed, all the

children who will perish in the Holocaust. What is more, in

turning themselves into a “Great Suctioning Ingatherer” (225),

winning a “vaginal shell game with the Einsatzgruppen—six

million cats in a hat,” Hattie and Jean would not just revive all

Jewish victims, it seems, but end exile, ingathering the dead into

the Zion of their American wombs (237–38).11


Rosen’s fantasy, the culmination of the novel’s devotion

to witnessing by extreme acts of identification, what she calls

“sideslipping” (Touching 131) empathetically through the

“membranes” separating one life from another, is bizarre and

potentially outrageous (Touching 88; “Second” 53). Her theme in

Touching Evil, she would later say, was what might happen to two

women “who truly took into consciousness the fact of the

Holocaust,” one in “the precise moment of sexual seduction,

almost of intercourse itself, so that everything should be open and

the appearance of penetration complete,” and another for whom “it

is the blood and guts of childbirth itself that brings the horror

home” (“Holocaust” 12). Insofar as it seems to seek analogies for

the Holocaust in seduction, rape, and the pain of childbirth (not to

mention the heartlessness of male obstetricians), the novel, as

Sicher maintains, is tendentious (92). Yet it is not so much the

Holocaust per se but knowledge of the Holocaust, witness of it and

witness to it, that Rosen means to analogize, for as Jean replies

when Hattie asks if God sees them—in the agony of her childbirth,

in their mutual fantasy of rescue—“isn’t it enough that we see

each other? Witnessing and being witnessed without end?”

(Touching 238).

Rosen believed that, in choosing non-Jewish protagonists, she

was not diminishing the Jewish specificity of the Holocaust, sub-

merging it in a dreamy universalism, but rather “Judaizing” their

suffering by “imprinting certain universal experiences with the

pain of the Holocaust” (“Second” 51–52).12 That proposition,

doubtless very American in its presumptions, is debatable. What is

certain, however, is that in her self-conscious focus on witnessing

mediated by previous witnessing, Rosen was a generation ahead of

her time. Touching Evil may or may not successfully coordinate

its twin arguments about maternal and testimonial “reproduction,”

but it does forecast the likelihood that witnessing the Holocaust

nowadays will catch writers, readers, and critics alike in a net of

tropes and representations referring as much to themselves as to

the historical event.

Notes

1. Fragments recounts the story of Wilkomirski’s purported survival of the

Birkenau and Majdanek death camps and life in postwar orphanages. When it

was revealed that Wilkomirski is actually Bruno Grosjean, an illegitimate child of

no known Jewish ancestry raised in foster homes, his pen name borrowed from

the violinist Wanda Wilkomirski and his knowledge of the death camps picked

up from visits as a tourist, Fragments went from being a revelation to being a


scandal. A thorough study, including the original English translation of the text,

is available in Stefan Maechler, The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical

Truth, trans. John E. Woods (2001).

2. In the term unknowable, I mean to include cognate terms such as unspeak-

able, unimaginable, indescribable, inexpressible, and so on. Sometimes, of

course, differences are detectable and intended by an author’s choice among

these terms, but quite often they are used interchangeably.

3. In the 2006 translation by Marion Wiesel (also, like that by Stella Rodway in

1960, based on the French original published in 1958), the “Exile of Providence”

becomes “the Shekhinah in Exile” (3), “Pentacost” becomes “Shavuot” (12), “if

he [Akiva Drumer] could have seen a proof of God in this Calvary” becomes “if

only he could have considered this suffering a divine test” (77), and “Because He

[God] kept six crematories working night and day, on Sundays and feast days”

becomes “Because He kept six crematoria working day and night, including

Sabbath and Holy Days” (67).

4. In this, Bernard-Donals and Glejzer appear to echo Giorgio Agamben: “If,

joining uniqueness to unsayability, they [those who assert the unsayability of

Auschwitz] transform Auschwitz into a reality absolutely separated from

language, they break the tie between an impossibility and a possibility of speak-

ing that . . . constitutes testimony; then they unconsciously repeat the Nazi’s

gesture” (157).

5. “I had to exercise intense self-control in order to prevent my innermost

doubts and feelings of oppression from becoming apparent,” contended Hoss. “I

had to appear cold and indifferent to events that must have wrung the heart of

anyone possessed of human feelings. . . . I had to watch hour after hour, by day

and by night, the removal and burning of the bodies, the extraction of the teeth,

the cutting of the hair, the whole grisly, interminable business. . . . I had to look

through the peep-hole of the gas-chambers and watch the process of death itself,

because the doctors wanted me to see it” (153–54).

6. It is possible, however, to go farther than Spielberg was willing to go. In the

filmed visit of Oprah Winfrey and Elie Wiesel to Auschwitz, when Wiesel avers

that he cannot enter the ruins of a crematorium and the vicinity of what was once

a gas chamber, he invokes unknowability by protesting, “I don’t want to see in

my mind what was going on,” and later, “the last minutes. I don’t want to know.

I don’t want to think about it.” Yet the film does want us to know, to think, and

to see. As we peer over the shoulder of an SS officer looking through a similar

peephole, this one drawn from actual documentary footage, Winfrey’s descriptive

voiceover proceeds to direct us through what is effectively a simulation of

gassing created through a photo and film montage of emaciated prisoners, simu-

lated Zyklon B gas filling a chamber, and Sonderkommandos working with

corpses in a crematorium (“Oprah”).

7. Rosen’s chapter must be read alongside the recent excellent interpretation of

intertextual, interlinguistic strategies in The Shawl by Hana Wirth-Nesher in Call

It English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature (2006).

8. Such “second-life” allusion is a central strategy in Second Hand Smoke,

a novel as much concerned with second-hand cultural effects as with second-hand


survivors and their memories. To cite just one example: when Mila offers her

breast to her baby Isaac, whom she has just tattooed with her camp numbers in

reminder of his ineradicable legacy, and he takes, along with her milk, the

“fateful kiss of second hand smoke” (Rosenbaum 240), the scene recuperates not

only the “black milk” of Paul Celan’s famous “Todesfuge,” which provides the

epigraph to The Shawl—“dein goldenes Haar Margarete/dein aschenes Haar

Sulamith”—but also, therefore, Ozick’s haunting inscription of it into Rosa’s

“dead volcano” of a breast, which gives “not a sniff of milk” and in which eros,

motherhood, and reproduction are extinguished (Shawl 4).

9. In The Fixer Malamud created an analogy for an American audience still

struggling to grasp the meaning of the Holocaust and answered the inexorable

logic by which Yakov Bok’s guilt is “inferred from the very frequency of the

accusations against the Jews” (121) with his commitment to resistance: “There’s

no such thing as an unpolitical man,” he thinks. “You can’t sit still and see

yourself destroyed” (299). Bok’s words are almost a quotation from The

Slave, (serialized in Yiddish in 1960–61 and translated into English in 1962),

where Singer employed a historical narrative set against the Chmielnicki

massacres of the seventeenth century to explore the millennial upheaval of the

Holocaust, substituting for the false Messiah, the Sabbatai Zvi, a nation created

through the force of Allied military prowess and American political

strength. Because The Slave, in its initial appearance, was coincident with the

Eichmann trial, Singer’s concluding invocation of militant Zionism also

added his voice to the swelling argument over the issues of Jewish resistance and

the “banality of evil,” while substituting for the messianic nation one created

through the force of military strength and political resolve: “Though for

generations Jewish blacksmiths had forged swords, it had never occurred to the

Jews to meet their attackers with weapons. . . . Must a man agree to his own

destruction?” (268).

10. “I remember a woman who told me she couldn’t read the book [once

she reached this episode]. And I said well, there are worse things, there were

worse things, there have been worse things in reality. Have you heard of

the concentration camps? Or gas chambers? And she said, gas chambers?

Certainly, this I understand very well, but gouging out someone’s eyes, how can

you explain something like that? And this is my point. The concentration camp as

such is a symbol you can live with very well. We do. It doesn’t really perform

any specific function. It’s not as close to us as eyesight is” (Kosinski, qtd in

Langer 175).

11. It is not clear why Rosen chose to represent the totality of the Nazi

genocide by the Einsatzgruppen, who employed firing squads and, eventually,

mobile gas vans to murder hundreds of thousands of Jews (as well as Gypsies

and Communist Party officials) in the occupied Soviet Union. The reference to

Dr Seuss also defies easy interpretation except that, just as the children’s

rainy-day boredom is relieved by the fantastic tricks performed by the cat in The

Cat in the Hat, so Hattie’s and Jean’s “ingathering” is a fantastic trick.

12. After first setting aside “The Second Life of Holocaust Imagery” for

reasons akin to Michael Bernstein’s, Cynthia Ozick came round to it when she

recognized that it is “not an argument for redemptive meaning, but rather for the

universalizing sanctification of memory” (“Roundtable” 281–82), a means of

“enlarging us toward mercifulness” (“Roundtable” 282).


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witness without end

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