Witness without End?

Eric J. Sundquist

In Norma Rosens 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 identies obsessively with the testimony of survivor witnesses brought forth in Jerusalem to name the crimes of the Nazi regime. The narrator, Jean, identies with a corpse-digger (43) who clawed her way to freedom from within a pile of dead bodies, while the pregnant woman, Hattie, identies 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 Jeans 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 Rosens prescient dramatization of the ways in which identication and witnessing, with their attendant problems of corrosion, voyeurism, projection, replication, and the like, were bound to become key themes in Holocaust studies in years to comeprescient 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 genocide 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-pitand 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/ajl032 Advance Access publication December 19, 2006 # The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

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 University Press, 2005. The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, translated by Assenka Oksiloff. Temple University Press, 2006. Sounds of Deance: The Holocaust, Multilingualism, and the Problem of English,

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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 University Press, 2004.

you with dirty pictures. However this experience marks Jeans subsequent witness to the Holocaust and launches one strand of the novels overdetermined argument about post-Holocaust reproduction, 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 epiphany, time and again. Contemporary critics, including a number in the cohort under review, rightly depict cultural productions of the late 1970sspecically, the television miniseries Holocaust in 1978 and the establishment of a commission to plan the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1979as propulsive events in the Americanization, and hence the universalization, of Holocaust memory. Even so, Rosens 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, perpetrators, 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 coverage 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 signicantly in English and through American media (108). Whereas English must at rst 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 corrupting power of Nazism. Lodged at the corners of the globe, rather than in the midst of Europe, as Alan Rosen writes in Sounds of Deance: The Holocaust, Multilingualism, and the Problem of English (2005), English escaped contamination (189). As the language of liberation, moreover, and soon the foremost 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 centurys 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 testimony of survivors and other witnesses that appeared in the initial

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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 Ringelblums diary, partially 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 ctional Noach Levinson and housed in Israel after being unearthed from the ruins, The Wall presents itself as excerpts from Levinsons 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 Ringelblums and Rumkowskis 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 worldthe uncertainties of eyewitness testimony derived from traumatic experience; the need for corroborating evidence; the question of rightly interpreting acts of resistance and non-resistance alikewhile 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 witnessable by an American, as well as a global, audience thus 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. Before looking more closely at this process, spelled out collectively in the books under review, it will be useful rst to orient ourselves to the contemporary moment. Todays scholars of Holocaust culture typically take one or another departure from Marianne Hirschs inuential concept of post-memory, in which the survivor generations memories what they recalled of their experiences and even what they are said to have repressedare 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 secondorder witnessing have become normative.

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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 unabatedthink 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 participate 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 necessitates some kind of surrogate witnessing, but what kindwitness as spectator, as testier, or bothand to what end? No doubt relatives 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 Apels secondary witnessing (12), Susan Gubars proxy-witnessing (23), and Irene Kacandess co-witnessing (Hirsh and Kacandes 18), to take just a few examples, one nds inventive and often compelling evidence of the special demands made upon the reader by Holocaust texts. What one also nds, however, is a preoccupation with making the trauma ones own that verges at times on narcissism. I did not have the privilege of going through the Hitler holocaust, Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote in qualication of his authority in a prefatory note to Enemies, a Love Story (1972), and one might take Singers wry self-assessment as a critique of the ardor with which

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some scholars of the Judeocide pursue identication 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 rst famous and then infamous when his much-praised Holocaust memoir, Fragments (1995), was discovered to be fraudulent.1 That Fragments elicited moving corroboration from survivors, who recognized in it the fundamental truth of their terrible experiences, underscored both the ambiguity of remembered witness and, among the reading public, a seemingly insatiable passion for Holocaust testimony. It is no surprise, therefore, that Wilkomirskis bogus text features signicantly 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 ction, which must steer a careful course between the demand of ction 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 Wilkomirskis hoax demonstrated that some kind of boundary still exists between survivor memory and ctionalized 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 survivors 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-Donalss distinction between the Holocaust as a set of historical events and the Holocaust as a set of personal experiences is unexceptional. More provocative is his view of the transferability

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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 Wiesels or Binjamin Wilkomirskis, to which neither we nor the writer has access (213). Such a view derives from the performative notion of transmissible trauma espoused by Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman, among othersa 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 Wilkimirskis (111). Whatever trauma theory has contributed to psychiatric or psychological conjecture about victims and survivors (or, for that matter, perpetrators and bystanders), in the arena of cultural studies it would seem mainly to have raised the stakes of mystication. Now, what is unrecoverable, unspeakable, unknowablethe authentic kernelbelongs not just to survivors but also to everyday scholars, readers, and lmgoers. In this respect, Fragments is a proof text of the voracious, but unfulllable, 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, led for reference (Steiner 100). By now we know all there is to know. But it hasnt helped; we still dont 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 2006What does it mean? . . . I have no answerstells us not that Rosenfelds estimate was premature but rather that, despite 60 years of testimony, documentation, and interpretation, an opaque incomprehensibility lies still at the events 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 repower of memory and accusation, and yet the mystery of madness and atrocity can never be found in booksor even museumsbecause the questions themselves are unknowable, and the answers, even more so (75 76).

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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 Levis 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, Jewsall Jewswere a singular, non-contingent target) or other instances of genocide (the Holocaust, and especially the Jewish Holocaust, was qualitatively different from, say, Stalins 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 Cohens formulation, it would have a conditional reality which would diminish its stature as trememdum (30 31). An event so singular must by denition be trapped for all time in the deep memory of history. By the same token, as Berel Lang points out in PostHolocaust: Interpretation, Misinterpretation, and the Claims of History (2005), because similar avowals might be made regarding states of mystical ecstasy, for example, the rhetoric of unknowability can obscure the basic features of that event which, notwithstanding its moral monstrosity, are clearlyif anything, too clearlyrecognizable and describable (76). What is now recognizable 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 Holocausts having engendered more historical research that any single event in Jewish history, its image was now being shaped, not at the historians anvil, but in the novelists crucible (xxi). Yet it must also be noticed that Yerushalmi presented the historians 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

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also challenges even those memories that have survived intact (Yerushalmi 98). He must question not only false witness such as Wilkomirskis, 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 Wiesels anguished cry that God himself is hanging on the gallows. The issue is neither the basis Kazin had for questioning Wiesels account nor Wiesels affronted rejoinder, remarks Lang, but rather the implication that survivor testimony need stand no empirical test. Historical verication, although not a sufcient condition of testimony, remains a necessary one, Lang argues, required in broad outline if not for each detail (79). Wiesels insistence that Kazins 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 sanctication 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 Wiesels 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 Gods 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 raried standard of experiential authenticity, in fact, we would be required to ask if the new English translation of Night adopted by Oprahs 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.

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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 presumably Wiesels original intent and language in the far longer, unpublished document in Yiddish from which Night, rst in French and then in English, was culled. Neither an overlay of redemptive Christian symbologya standard allegorical mode in much American literature of the Holocaustnor evidence that some historical details of Night were altered for dramatic effect falsies Wiesels 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 promulgated the Shoah by eliminating that which dees logic or system (11).4 Yet their formulation does usefully bridge the distance between authenticity dened as incontestable testimony and authenticity dened as the holy grail of unmediated witness by those who come after (Weissman 131). The doctrine of unknowability, it might be said, is the ip side of the Nazi coin of zealotry achieved through prevaricating euphemism and gestures of sacramental grandeurand 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). Hoffmans critique of the cult of testimony coincides with the approach of a post-post-Holocaust age when no living witnesses will remain and the staggering project of collecting and recording their rst-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 frequency 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 horried 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 involuntary 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

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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 seductive what Susan David Bernstein refers to as promiscuous identication, 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 identication is dramatized in Emily Pragers Eves 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, its as if that event never existed at all. Therell be books and museums and monuments, but things move so fast now, the only difference between fantasy and history is living people. Im going to keep Eva alive (11). The predictable failure of Eves project provides a salutary lesson in favor of what Bernstein calls dissonant identication (S. Bernstein 158), a strategy for approaching eyewitness or rst-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 Eves Tattoo an allegory of the allure, as well as the risks, of spurious identication (111). The prototype here would be Anne Franks Diary of a Young Girl (1947), which prompted such an excess of identication 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, lms, biographical studies, documentaries, critical editions, musical adaptations, and related

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memorabilia that the original text has been emptied of its capacity to witness. (About the only thing we havent seen so far is Anne Frank on Ice, remarked Ian Buruma after a 1998 Broadway revival [4].) What needs to be added to Bernsteins 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 Roths dissection of Anne Frank hagiography in The Ghost Writer (1979) or Rosenbaums 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 phenomonon is not specic to English, of coursethe genre of Holocaust literature is denitively multilingualbut any prevalence of such representations in English might be ascribed to its being, from the outset, a second-hand language of witness. Specically, 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 identication offensively justies claiming special moral insight into the suffering of ones 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 nd in Rosens argument a different lesson. We may return here to the imperishable trope of unknowability, elevated to a high artistic principle by lmmaker Claude Lanzmann, for whom the Holocausts uniqueness lies in the permanent unrepresentability of what happened. One consequence of Lanzmanns ascetic logic, says Weissman, is to make Schindlers List (1993), which showed things that Lanzmanns landmark documentary Shoah (1985) left largely to silence and evocation, a form of Holocaust denial (162). Be that as it may, Lanzmanns high moralism is factitious not only because he employs a variety of

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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 audiences 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 Lanzmanns lm an immense visual vocabulary, encoded by many narratives, photographs, and documentary lms, so that his self-regarding circumspection 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 Schindlers 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 sprayednot 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, Spielbergs cinematic suggestion that the horror will be shown to viewers peeping into a gas-chamberthe camera literally looks through the peepholeaccompanied 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 Spielbergs sleight of hand also carries with it perpetrator testimony such as that of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoss 5 about the agony of his own witness, the peephole, like the train, activates the second life of Holocaust imagerywhat James Young speaks of as its after-imagesin viewers already prepared to witness events without having seen them.6 Such replication of Holocaust tropes, along with arch selfawareness of the vicissitudes of witnessing, is a dening 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 documenting 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 Rumkowskis life and episodes from the Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, including quotations from Rumkowskis now searingly ironic speechesfor instance, his proclamation that Work Can Save Us or his heartbreaking plea to parents to turn over their children for transport, lest the whole ghetto be liquidatedEpstein rebuilds in ction a world of chaos and terror raised to a high pitch. Black comic inventions such as the intertwining of the nal orders for transport with a

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ghetto production of Macbeth, a penetrating reection on Rumkowskis 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 complete 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 nite minds conceived of the innite, 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-reexive awareness of English as a translating medium. Alan Rosens analysis of Cynthia Ozicks 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 Rosas English, like her Polish, now poisoned by the Holocaust, however, but the Holocaust is conversely poisoned by English, as in the mock scholarly language of Dr. Tree, who views survivors as pathological specimens best probed through his preposterous theory of Repressed Animation, a Buddhist-inspired diagnosis of nonfunctioning death camp inmates (Ozick, Shawl 37)rst 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 sheor, we might rather say, Ozickvirtually quotes from Edgars 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 theres still more (Ozick, Shawl 14). Allusions to Shakespeare serve effectively to enlarge Ozicks 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 testimonyin Night, for example there is a further allusion in Rosas quotation that must be taken into account if we are to appreciate fully Ozicks interlayering of English texts and replication of Holocaust tropes.

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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 Malamuds 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 Malamuds careful ctionalization 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 Rosens 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 Ozicks appreciation of the earlier generation of American Holocaust literature, The Fixer and Singers 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 todays 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 denition, something of a renegade language in which to compose a narrative about the Holocaustor, 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 ones native language always containsan assertion that might appear nave, rather than scandalously calculated, had Kosinski not turned out to be a charlatan of the rst order (xii). But does that matter? With conrmation that the books incidents were fabricated, and moreover that Kosinskis 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 books harrowing surrealism, now discussion was required to treat it as a kind of anti-witness

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forever compromised by Kosinskis 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 Eaglestones view. In destabilizing the border between trauma and titillation, witnessing and voyeurism, argues Sharon Oster, Kosinskis 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 motivesfear, shame, guilt, desire, cathexis, catharsisexposed by witnessing it repeatedly. The novels famous scene in which the miller, in a t 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 specically, one may read the sceneanother 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 ones 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 ction (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 Einsatzgruppensix 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 (23738).11

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Rosens fantasy, the culmination of the novels devotion to witnessing by extreme acts of identication, 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 themin the agony of her childbirth, in their mutual fantasy of rescueisnt 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 specicity of the Holocaust, submerging 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 Wilkomirskis 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

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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 unspeakable, unimaginable, indescribable, inexpressible, and so on. Sometimes, of course, differences are detectable and intended by an authors 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 speaking that . . . constitutes testimony; then they unconsciously repeat the Nazis 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 lmed 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 dont want to see in my mind what was going on, and later, the last minutes. I dont want to know. I dont want to think about it. Yet the lm does want us to know, to think, and to see. As we peer over the shoulder of an SS ofcer looking through a similar peephole, this one drawn from actual documentary footage, Winfreys descriptive voiceover proceeds to direct us through what is effectively a simulation of gassing created through a photo and lm montage of emaciated prisoners, simulated Zyklon B gas lling a chamber, and Sonderkommandos working with corpses in a crematorium (Oprah). 7. Rosens 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

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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 Celans famous Todesfuge, which provides the epigraph to The Shawldein goldenes Haar Margarete/dein aschenes Haar Sulamithbut also, therefore, Ozicks haunting inscription of it into Rosas 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 Boks guilt is inferred from the very frequency of the accusations against the Jews (121) with his commitment to resistance: Theres no such thing as an unpolitical man, he thinks. You cant sit still and see yourself destroyed (299). Boks 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, Singers 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 couldnt 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 someones 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 doesnt really perform any specic function. Its 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 ring squads and, eventually, mobile gas vans to murder hundreds of thousands of Jews (as well as Gypsies and Communist Party ofcials) in the occupied Soviet Union. The reference to Dr Seuss also dees easy interpretation except that, just as the childrens rainy-day boredom is relieved by the fantastic tricks performed by the cat in The Cat in the Hat, so Hatties and Jeans ingathering is a fantastic trick. 12. After rst setting aside The Second Life of Holocaust Imagery for reasons akin to Michael Bernsteins, Cynthia Ozick came round to it when she recognized that it is not an argument for redemptive meaning, but rather for the universalizing sanctication of memory (Roundtable 281 82), a means of enlarging us toward mercifulness (Roundtable 282).

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