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AlanL. Berger
INTRODUCTION
*An earlier version of this paper was presented at "Remembering for the Future: The
Impact of the Holocaust on the Contemporary World." International Scholars' Conference
held in Oxford, 10-13 July, 1988.
43
44 Alan Berger
Cohen's distinction between those who were literally and those who were
really present at the time of orienting events in the life of the tradition
establishes a liturgical and philosophical basis for writings by non-
witnesses.
This distinction is refined in the writings of Wiesel. On the one hand,
he insists on the singularity of the victims' experience. Works such as
"A Plea for the Dead" (1967), and "A Plea for the Survivors" (1977) bear
eloquent testimony to this view. Yet, on the other hand, Wiesel asserts
the necessity for all Jews to bear witness to the Holocaust. This witness
bearing constitutes, for Wiesel, the touchstone of Jewish and human au-
thenticity. He writes:
HolocaustLiterature
SecondGeneration 45
making the Holocaust into a metaphor and hence too "literary"and trivial.
In fact, the literary quality of second generation writings is not a primary
concern. Rather it is their psychological and theological quests for
authentic Jewish identity which make of them crucial barometers of the
post-Auschwitz American Jewish future.
These writings reflect constant exposure to various dimensions of
what Robert Jay Lifton terms the "death imprint." This imprint mani-
fests itself in psychological states which have significant theological reso-
nance. Psychologically, one notes the presence of depression and severe
anxiety, a tendency toward psychosomatic illness, and the long-term
effects of torture and starvation on survivor parents. Moreover, survivor
parents' child-raising skills are deeply effected by their own experiences
of death and deprivation. Wiesel has underscored one of the many para-
doxes engendered by the Shoah in observing that what children of sur-
vivors need to understand is "that the real children of the Holocaust are
their parents."'8
The theological implication of these works is more subtle, but no less
powerful. Although specifically describing the survivor parents in his
observation that this is the generation which knows most intensely that
"destruction can take place, that the sea will not be split for them, that the
divine has self-limited, and they have additional responsibilities,"19Irving
Greenberg's words apply equally to the second generation. Despite this
knowledge, second generation authors want consciously to be Jews and,
by this decision, carry on the messianic task of quarreling with God even
while awaiting Messiah. This is a type of practical theology expressed by
actions, e.g., living a Jewish life, rather than explicit theological formula-
tion. It is, moreover, attests Greenberg, the appropriate "theological lan-
guage for this time, more appropriate than those who go on speaking as
if God were visible and fully performing under the previous terms of the
covenant."20
Holocaust literature written by children of survivors displays its own
icons; parents' tales of the Kingdom of Night, or, the other side of the
same coin, silence about the past, photos of murdered siblings or other
family members, objects which once belonged to a relative consumed by
the Shoah'sflames, heightened personal awareness of contemporary evil,
and the parents' continued forms of suffering. The writings of the second
generation in fact bear witness to Wiesel's observation, made in speaking
to now adult children of survivors, that "... the responsibility of your
parents was solely towards the dead; yours will be towards us."21In fact,
the effect of the Holocaust on parenting skills is portrayed in many of
these works as distorting intergenerational communication; survivor
parents, because of their Holocaust experiences, embrace values which
clash with American culture. This frequently results in a "significant
contradiction between their (children's) public and private worlds."22Yet,
Second GenerationHolocaust Literature 49
Wiesel's The FifthSon boldly departs from his earlier works by imagining
how a child of survivors is transformed by tales of the Holocaust. Dedi-
cated to his own son, and to all children of survivors, the novel is a dis-
tillation of Wiesel's literary theology as it emerges in the Tamiroff family.
Rachel and Reuven Tamiroff are survivors living in New York with
Ariel, their second born only child. Ariel is enveloped by his father's
silence, worries about his mother's increasing withdrawal, and is a fasci-
nated auditor of Holocaust tales told by Bontchek, a survivor friend of
his father. The novel reverses Wiesel's long held literary pattern by
attempting to imagine what it would have been like for a witness to grow
up as a child of survivors. Ritually, the tale occurs during Passover,
reminding us of Cohen's argument: a time which intensely focuses Jewish
identity across the generations by commemorating the orienting event of
Exodus, and by its demand that the covenant be renewed. More recently,
there has emerged a liturgical addition to the Passover seder. "The Fifth
Child," a haunting prayer recited on behalf of the one who cannot ask,
represents the million and a half Jewish children murdered in the Shoah.23
Ariel becomes "fully Jewish" by assuming his parents' Holocaust legacy.
Ariel, whose father rarely spoke to him of the Holocaust and whose
mother was institutionalized, undergoes several stages in his quest for
post-Holocaust Jewish identity. Initially, he hears and is transformed by
Bontchek's tales. Subsequently, Ariel spends much time in the library
reading about the Shoah. He travels to Germany in order to kill the Nazi
responsible for murdering the European Ariel. Once at his destination,
however, the American Ariel does not murder, but rather, condemns the
Nazi. The novel concludes with the American Ariel, by now a professor,
teaching his students of the Shoah.
Wiesel's novel establishes several important principles for second
generation literature. First, the novel's appearance legitimizes this genre.
Wiesel, the best known and most widely read witnessing writer, now
contends that the next generation must bear witness. Next, Wiesel tells
not only of the Shoah but of its survivors' continuing survival. Survivors
continued to be ignored and humiliated after the war. Yet, these same
survivors are shown establishing new lives in a foreign culture. In addi-
tion, he casts children of survivors in a pedagogical role despite fully
acknowleding the vast gulf separating survivors from their children and
both of them from American nonwitnesses. Wiesel's theology is expressed
in the novel's argument against vengeance and for bearing witness.
50 Alan Berger
Memory and not violence will be the Jewish companion and means by
which Messiah is awaited.24Finally, the Holocaust, no less than Passover,
becomes the point of entry into Jewish history and identity for Wiesel's
child of survivors.
her mother "scared" her. The young teenager confides that frequently
before falling asleep she mentally "rolled her (mother) into a tiny ball
and threw her across time and the ocean into the Poland of 1942 .. ."
(p. 234). She understands neither why her parents spend hours arguing
over the chronology of the War, nor why "history wasn't finished abusing"
the Szuster family.
Rukhl and Yankl, on the other hand, teach their daughters to daven
(pray), and the parents continue to commemorate the Holocaust by
lighting yahrzeit candles (in memory of the dead). Whereas for Spiegel-
man, a portrait of his murdered brother became a central Holocaust
icon, for Finkelstein it is the omnipresent yahrzeit candle. She has
Brantzche observe:
We had a cabinet full of empty yurtsaht (sic) glasses, enough to hold
dozens of drinks at a banquet. To me, yurtsaht(sic) represented yet an-
other Jewish holiday whose celebration was whimsical and whose mean-
ing was indecipherable. I would not have been surprised to learn that
no one else on earth knew a thing about this candle, and assumed that
my father had designed a new holiday to remind us that we were Jews
(p. 133).
The yahrzeit candle is a silent yet omnipresent Holocaust icon.
Brantzche also is told things that children of nonwitnesses never hear.
Scraps of conversation reveal the horrors of the past and their continuing
hold on the present. In conversation with her father, for example, she
hears the following:
"Twenty-eight years ago today, the Nazis gassed my mother and four
sisters," Papa said. He set down the coffee cup. I thought how in a movie
Papa's hands would have trembled, but in real life they were steady.
"And?"I asked.
Papa looked me in the eye. "There is no and," he said. He rubbed the
stumpy thumb against his cheek (p. 134).
Finkelstein is telling the reader that literature written by children of
survivors, because of the intensely personal nature of their exposure to
the Holocaust experiences of their parents, makes a unique statement
about the Shoah's continuing effects.
The two sisters are consumed by a desire to know how their parents
survived. Reluctant to discuss their experiences in any systematic or di-
rect way, the elder Szusters do, nevertheless, provide clues to the ob-
literated past. In addition to the father's laconic comments, Mrs. Szuster
tells the girls a parable, on Shabbat (Saturday) about parents rescuing
children who have been eaten by a bear. To appease her daughters' cu-
riosity, however, the mother shows them old photographs. These photos
of murdered relatives, along with the endless yahrzeit candles and the
occasional parental references to their own losses, form part of the canon
Second GenerationHolocaust Literature 55
Yankl concludes this portion of his testimony with the direct assertion
that "My mother and father were Jews and I don't know how to be
anything else" (p. 182). This assertion bears striking similarity to the epi-
graph in Wiesel's A Jew Today where he records the saying of Dodye
Feig, his grandfather: "You are Jewish, your task is to remain Jewish.
The rest is up to God."36
Brantzche's Jewish identity derives from two sources; her own per-
ceptions, and specifically through her status as a daughter of Holocaust
survivors. Unlike Spiegelman, she appears firm in her Jewish identity.
Secretly following her older brother to a carnival, for example, she sees
him posing for a picture together with a member of the local KKK who
lets out a rebel yell. Mentally comparing this yell and the carnival to the
Szuster farm, Brantzche observes that the yell "balyhoos subjugation of
the loser, congratulates foreclosure of conscience, elevates immediate
expression, and is a triumph of all that is unsympathetic and godless in a
human being" (108). Against the chaos of the carnival, there stands the
order and dignity of the Szuster farm where conscience, contemplation,
and deliberation are the pillars of Jewish being in the world. Brantzche
at this point is obviously Jewish, but has not yet fully assumed her identity
as a daughter of survivors.
Finkelstein's Brantzche begins to comprehend her Holocaust legacy
when she reflects on her sister's traumatic death. It is only after experi-
encing this trauma that Brantzche can begin to fathom the meaning of
56 Alan Berger
Up until that moment, my parents' tales of survival had done little more
than fuel my self-emancipation fantasies of entrapment and escape. At
best, staying alive was a question of odds, of monitoring the whereabouts
of a predator, and side-stepping it in the nick of time. With Perel gone, I
had the sickening realization that survival meant coming out the victor
by chance, not by destiny or individual cunning. The Szusters were
merely like the other creatures on the farm-chickens, earthworms, dogs
-who, on suspending their vigilance for a second, succumbed to a
greater, more confident power (pp. 203-204).
Brantzche's former innocence, i.e., the feeling that she could escape the
tenuousness of the human condition, has begun to be replaced by a sober
maturity. She now realizes the common human vulnerability uniting her
with her parents. Her unwitting experience of tragedy sensitizes Brantzche
to the depths of holocaustal evil. She begins to understand, for example,
that Jews were murdered not for anything they did, but because they had
been born. There was, moreover, no escaping the bureaucracy of murder
which was everywhere abetted by an omnipresent antisemitism.
Brantzche's mature assumption of her identity as a daughter of
survivors is seen in her faithful auditing of the tapes of her parents'
depositions, sent her by another survivor. The act of listening is, itself,
described in terms befitting a ritual. The careful auditor responds to holo-
caustal tales both affectively and cognitively. Affectively, Brantzche ob-
serves that she listens to the tapes "the way observant Jews listen to their
rabbi's sermon on Shabbos (Saturday)." She also attempts to study the
Shoah. "I pore over the stories and their possible interpretations,"
Brantzche says, "just as yeshiva boys burn their eyes out over Pirke Avot
(Sayings of the Fathers are ethical maxims of the early rabbis, and form
part of the second century Jerusalem Talmud or Mishnah). In any case,
listening to tales of a witness makes of one a witness.
Summer Long-a-Coming portrays a variety of survivor images. In ad-
dition to her parents, Brantzche describes Lalke and Mendel Decher,
each of whom had lost their first spouse during the Shoah, and Sonia and
Labyl Kicher, with whom she stays after her own parents make aliyah
(emigrate) to Israel. Like Spiegelman, Finkelstein presents unsparing
portraits. Some survivors are angry at each other, others had been forced
by the Nazis to serve as policemen in the ghettos. Some survivors do not
speak at all of their experiences, while others, especially Sonia, tell endless
SecondGeneration
HolocaustLiterature 57
Going to stay with his sister and her fiance, a believing Jew, the boy
begins to find his own Judaic path.
Raphael's stories underscore the fact that the Holocaust destroyed a
Jewish world whose victims included the pious and the nonbelievers. His
Second Generation Holocaust Literature 59
NOTES
1. Elie Wiesel, "Talking and Writing and Keeping Silent," in The German
ChurchStruggleand the Holocaust,edited by F. H. Littell and H. G. Locke (Detroit,
1974), p. 269.
2. Elie Wiesel, The Fifth Son (New York, 1985). For a full discussion of this
text as a Holocaust novel see A. L. Berger, Crisisand Covenant:The Holocaustin
AmericanJewishFiction(Albany, 1985), pp. 68-79.
3. See my earlier study "Memory and Meaning," in Methodologyin theAcademic
Teaching of the Holocaust, edited by Z. Garber, A. L. Berger, and R. Libowitz
(Lantham [MD], 1988), pp. 171-189. For a penetrating study of this theme in
French second generation literature see the work of Ellen S. Fine, "New Kinds of
Witnesses: French Post-Holocaust Writers," in Holocaust Studies Annual, Vol-
ume III, edited by S. Pinsker and J. Fischel (Greenwood [Florida], 1985),
pp. 121-136.
Second GenerationHolocaust Literature 61
viding an insider's view of the conflict between European Orthodoxy and Ameri-
can Judaism. For further analysis of this novel see A. L. Berger, "Memory and
Meaning: The Holocaust in Second Generation Literature," pp. 177-179.
38. Lev Raphael, "The Tanteh," Jewish Currents(March, 1986), pp. 17-20.
Among Raphael's Holocaust writings the following are especially significant in
illuminating the complexity of the second generation's relationship to the Shoah:
"Mysterious Obsession," BaltimoreJewish Times(April 27, 1984), pp. 76-82;"Roy's
Jewish Problem," Commentary,Vol. 80, No. 3 (September, 1985), pp. 62-66; "Such
a Deal," Midstream,Vol. 33, No. 7 (Aug/Sept., 1987), pp. 15-18; and "Reunion,"
HadassahMagazine,(January, 1988), pp. 20-23.
39. Lev Raphael, "Listening to the Silence," BaltimoreJewishTimes(February8,
1975), pp. 66-69.
40. Certain second generation biographies of survivor parents represent the
triumph of hope over despair, while revealing a warm and healthy survivor
parent-child relationship. See, for example Michael Kornblit, Until WeMeetAgain
(New York, 1983), and the articles by David Lee Preston, "A Bird in the Wind,"
The PhiladelphiaInquirerMagazine(May 8, 1983),pp. 12-16and 28-30;and "Journey
To My Father's Holocaust," The PhiladelphiaInquirerMagazine(April 21, 1985),
pp. 20-27.
41. Greenberg, op. cit., p. 21.