Sounds of Defiance

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Sounds of Defiance
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Sounds of Defiance
The Holocaust, Multilingualism,
and the Problem of English
alan rosen
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University of Nebraska Press

Lincoln and London
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Acknowledgments for the use of previously published material appear on page 243, which
constitutes an extension of the copyright page.
Copyright 2005 by the Board of Regents of the
University of Nebraska. All rights reserved.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Set in Adobe Minion by Kim Essman. Book
design by Richard Eckersley. Printed and bound
by Thomson-Shore, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rosen, Alan (Alan Charles)

Sounds of defiance : the Holocaust, multilingualism,
and the problem of English / Alan Rosen.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn-13: 978-0-8032-3962-3 (cloth: alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-8032-3962-9 (cloth: alk. paper)
isbn-13: 978-0-8032-0528-4 (electronic)
isbn-10: 0-8032-0528-7 (electronic)
1. American literature20th centuryHistory and
criticism. 2. English languageSpoken English.
3. Holocaust, Jewish (19391945), in literature.
4. Speech in literature. 5. English languageSocial
aspects. 6. English languageStyle. I. Title.
ps225.r67 2005
810.9'358dc22
2005001442
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To Ruth with love, admiration, and gratitude
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contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction:
Everything Is All Right, or The Problem of
English Writing on the Holocaust
ix
xiii
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1950: English in the Aftermath

1. Evidence of Trauma: English as Perplexity
in David Boders Topical Autobiographies
21
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2. An Entirely Different Culture: English as

Translation in John Herseys The Wall
34
3. What Does He Speak?: English as Mastery in

Ruth Chattertons Homeward Borne
50
1960: Laws Languages, Eichmann, and After
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4. Please Speak English: Babbling in Philip

Roths Eli, the Fanatic
65
5. From Law to Outlaw: Borrowed English in

Edward Wallants The Pawnbroker
78
6. Laws Languages: Hannah Arendts Mother

and Other Tongues
94
7. Say Good Boy: Legitimizing English

in Sidney Lumets The Pawnbroker
112
8. Cracking Her Teeth: Broken English in

Cynthia Ozicks Fiction and Essays
124
9. The Language of Dollars: English as Intruder

in Yaffa Eliachs Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust
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1990: Two Generations After

10. The Language of Survival: English as
Metaphor in Art Spiegelmans Maus
157
11. Eaten Away by Silence: English as Elegy

in Anne Michaelss Fugitive Pieces
175
Conclusion:
In the Thick of the Fray, or English as
the Third Tongue
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Notes
191
Source Acknowledgments
243
Index
245
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p r e fac e
Not far from where I live in Jerusalem, a sign directs motorists to Yad
Vashem, site of Israels Holocaust memorial and education center. The sign
is clearly apropos: the memorial is just a five-minute drive or a twentyminute walk. For my purposes, however, what is crucial is not so much the
memorial as the sign that directs the visitor to it. This street sign, like many
if not most in Jerusalem, states its instruction in three languages: Hebrew,
Arabic, and English.
The first time I noticed this fact I was astonished and elated. I had already for some years been at work on the topic of the Holocaust and multilingualism, and this sign seemed to vindicate the focus of my work. Here,
in something so common as a street sign, multiple languages were bound
up with the Holocaust. But this self-flattering justification for my work
was only the first, and perhaps least important, level that the sign evoked.
More important was the complex inbreeding of the languages. Though the
sign denoted the name of the memorial in three scripts, the name of the
memorial itself is given in a single tongue, Hebrew. The name, Yad Vashem,
derives originally from the Bibles Book of Isaiah and translates literally as
a hand and a name. The story of how this name was chosen for Israels
memorial is too long to rehearse here. But what is striking is that the signs
apparent multilingualism was more exactly multiple transliteration. The
three scripts, at bottom, refer to the same monolingual designation.
The most astonishing feature of the sign was that it included Arabic.
There is really nothing novel in its being on the sign, for Jerusalem street
signs, catering to populations of Hebrew, Arabic, and English speakers
(or readers, or pidgin readers), commonly have the three tongues. But for
me the particular marvel of this sign was that it directs Arabic speakers
to Israels Holocaust memorial. Were there really members of the Arab
community who sought the way to the memorial? I would hope so. But in
a sense, it did not matter. For whatever the answer to the question regarding
Arab visitors to Yad Vashem, the sign announced to the Hebrew-speaking
community that such a memorial was also meant for both the Arab and
the Jewish communities.
Lest one think that I am projecting more onto the signs multiple tongues
(or scripts) than it warrants and I, for one, thought that I was going too
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Preface
far I recently passed by the same sign to find that the Arabic script had
been blackened over and was now illegible. There was, it seems, at least
one other person who had taken in the full meaning of what the Arabic
signified. Envisioning such a broad community that could be drawn to the
memorial was too much for the vandal to bear. I dont imagine that the
intent was to keep out this broader community so much as it was to protest
the symbolic inclusion that the sign, with its three tongues, legitimized.
Among the three tongues, Hebrew and Arabic have so far played the
primary roles in my narrative, which shouldnt come as a surprise. They
are the languages of the indigenous residents of the area, those who clearly
have the greatest stake in the demarcation of place, location, and memory.
But the sign displays a third tongue, English, the language of the visitor.
This book offers a commentary on the logic of its inclusion and chronicles
the evolving status of English writing about the Holocaust, an account that
begins with the period of the Second World War and concludes with the
1990s. The primary language of neither the persecutors nor the victims,
English has generally been viewed as marginal to the events of the Holocaust. I argue that this marginal status profoundly affects writing on the
Holocaust in English and fundamentally shapes our understanding of the
events. Specifically, I will show that writing in the immediate postwar period expresses anxiety about addressing the Holocaust in English; whereas
fifty years later, some works go so far as to celebrate the virtues of English
as a language of the Holocaust. 1
Each chapter highlights certain representative works psychological
and sociological studies, memoir, tales, fiction, and film and analyzes how
these works reveal and then arbitrate the special status of English. Although
I have included what I perceive to be a significant range of responses to the
Holocaust, I have in the interest of focus omitted other kinds, particularly
poetry and drama. 2 I also limit the contours of the study in another way:
the postwar English-language responses that I feature were produced in
the United States and (in the case of Fugitive Pieces) Canada. I deal, then,
primarily with what German translators refer to as Americanish.
I arrange the chapters chronologically, starting with the immediate postwar period (from 1946 to 1950) to recent publications (the 1990s) in order
to best narrate the transformation of the position of English over fifty to
sixty years. The story of this transformation will be at the forefront, accompanied by references to the roles of other languages (Hebrew, Yiddish,
German) and accomplished through the analysis of the individual texts. I
begin with a project conceived during the war and realized in its immediate
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Preface
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xi
aftermath then move through the postwar decades. Each reading builds on
what came before. Cultural trends, moreover, shape and limit the readings.
I could only make the arguments that I set forth by proceeding in this
fashion. Such an approach might seem obvious: an event grounded in
history would summon forth a historically minded analysis. But no book
on Holocaust writing has taken this approach. 3 Further, those books that
have attempted to chronicle English-language response to the Holocaust
have either overlooked early responses or have seen these responses as
exceptional rather than as representative. 4 By proceeding in this fashion,
I thus hope not only to revise the way that English-language writing has
been viewed but also to reconstrue the way Holocaust writing in general
should be approached.
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What happened with English-language writing on the Holocaust also
came about because of the sensational and disputed status of English in
the twentieth century. I thus also link my analysis of Holocaust writing to
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a number of developments in the postwar period: the growing amount of
writing on the Holocaust in English; the increasing prestige of English as a
global language; and, within the contexts of neocolonial and multilingual * 215.22847p
studies, the uncertain position of English that has emerged in this era. EngNormal Page
lish, as it has addressed the Holocaust, receives my primary attention; the
problem of English as a twentieth-century phenomenon plays a supporting * PgEnds: PageBr
yet significant role in my analysis.
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ac k n ow l e d g m e n t s
This book has benefited greatly from the counsel of friends and colleagues. Yisrael Cohen was the first to read through the manuscript; he
has, moreover, helped in countless ways throughout its coming into being.
His friendship is a sustaining light. David Roskies has been unstinting in
his encouragement of this project from the outset and has time and again
lent his erudition and intelligence to its betterment. His own work inspires
my own and sets an uncompromising standard for the scholarly writing
this subject deserves. Michael Shapiros generosity has been remarkable;
his comments on the manuscript gave me an extraordinary sense of what a
reader would care about. His friendship over the last several years has been
engaged, resourceful, and inspiring.
I am deeply grateful to Lillian Kremer and Nancy Harrowitz, who also
read and commented on the entire manuscript; they, too, reinforced the
sense that what it says hasnt been said before. I am in the debt of others
who read, commented on or in conversation shared their thoughts on
various stages of sections or chapters: Aaron Appelfeld, Steven Aschheim,
Michael Berenbaum, Alan Berger, Michael Bernard-Donals, Liora Bilsky,
Janet Burnstein, David Chack, Jrg Drewitz, Eli Feen, Yaffa Eliach, Rob
Franciosi, Deborah Geis, Elana Gomel, Tresa Grauer, Gershon Greenberg,
Bonnie Gurewitsch, Annette Insdorf, Sam Kassow, Bill Kolbrener, Michael
Kramer, Mordechai Leshnoff, Herb Levine, Naftali Lowenthal, Dan Michman, Lee Monk, Nehemia Polen, Joel Rosenberg, Alvin Rosenfeld, Murray
Roston, Jeff Shapiro, Robert Shapiro, Werner Sollors, Susan Suleiman, and
Hana Wirth-Nesher.
I have had the privilege of teaching this material in a number of undergraduate and graduate seminars and the participants therein contributed
vitally to its development. I particularly would like to thank Aden BarTura, Rachel Gwilly, Rita Horvth, Michal Levi, Yaakov Mascetti, and Jen
Sundick. I have also lectured on aspects of this material in the International
School for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem and wish to thank its staff for
fostering such a special and gracious environment: Stephanie and Ephraim
Kaye, Katherine Berman, and Zita Turgemann.
I presented versions of material included in Sounds of Defiance at various
locations and wish to thank the following for inviting me to do so: Robert
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xiv
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Acknowledgments
Ehrenreich and Paul Shapiro of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies,
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Michael Shapiro of the Center
for Jewish Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Hana WirthNesher, Literature of the United States in Languages Other than English,
the Modern Language Association; and Liora Bilsky of the Law and History
Forum, Tel Aviv University.
Thanks are due to a number of libraries: Special Collections, Research
Library, ucla; Eisenhower Library, Johns Hopkins University; Lilly Library,
Indiana University; Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum; Library of Congress; Yad Vashem; National
Library, Hebrew University; and Joseph Meyerhof Library, Baltimore Hebrew University.
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Many friends have given constantly; several deserve special mention:
Rachel Berman, Daniel and Beth Gordon, Bill Kavesh, Dov Leiman, Rabbi
Moshe Leiner, Harry and Debbie Looks, Rabbi Joseph and Reizel Polak, Jeff
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Shapiro, Barry Walfish and Adele Reinhartz, and Joel Walters. My mother,
Rosalie Rosen, has resourcefully provided relevant materials and shared
* 202.428
her thoughtful reflections on them.
Finally, my teacher Elie Wiesel nourishes my life and work constantly.

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My wife, Ruth, has been a partner in the books production. Her profound
scholarly gifts and keen intelligence have enhanced its content and style. * PgEnds: Pa
She and my children Shoshana Leah, Tzvia, Noam Dov, and Rina have
granted me daily blessings at a time when there were few to be had.
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Introduction
Everything Is All Right, or The Problem of
English Writing on the Holocaust
The worldwide spread of English is remarkable. There has been nothing like
it in history. Spanish and French, Arabic and Turkish, Latin and Greek have
served in their turn as international languages, in the wake of the mission
station, the trading post or the garrison. But none has come near to rivaling
English. The Economist, 1986
Besides, who, in what corner of the world, cannot string together a few words
of English? Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved
The Jewish Council of Warsaw, writes Emmanuel Ringelblum, shows

the least interest in its people. The best of the councils is Radom, which
often provides Jews in the forced-labor gangs with bread, medicine and
so forth. But in Warsaw there are sick Jews working who have not been
relieved. And Zabludowski says that everything is all right.1 Historian and
director of the Oneg Shabbes underground archive in Warsaw, Ringelblum
refers here to the difficult situation in Warsaw in October 1940 and to how
indifferent those in power Jews as well as Germans were to it. After living
under German occupation for a year, the Jewish councils were clearly under
duress. And things were to get worse. In mid-November 1940, a month
after Ringelblums stinging reproach, Warsaws Jews were incarcerated in a
ghetto, virtually sealed off from the rest of the world behind an eleven-foothigh wall. Aware of the demands on the councils even at the earlier stage,
Ringelblum nevertheless takes them to task because, as the comparison to
Radom makes clear, it was possible to do better.
What especially irks Ringelblum is that those who commanded authority
did not even acknowledge that something was wrong: And Zabludowski
says that everything is all right. Benjamin Zabludowski was a member of
Warsaws Jewish Community Council before the occupation and continued
to serve in that capacity. He was on close terms with the head of the council,
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Introduction
Adam Czerniakow (indeed, so close that he was known as Czerniakows

right-hand man). 2 Ringelblum, however, refers elsewhere in his notes to
Zabludowskis less than humane approach. 3 In the October entry cited
above, he clearly condemns Zabludowskis response as an irresponsible
whitewashing of an increasingly bleak situation; everything was clearly not
all right in Warsaw.
Interesting for what it shows of ghetto politics, I single out this exchange
because of the phrasing of the whitewash: Ringelblum writes all right
in English. What exactly moved Ringelblum to interrupt the flow of his
Yiddish text with the colloquial English phrase? We assume (but cannot be
sure) that he was quoting Zabludowski. Did the phrase stand out because
it was so exotic? Did all right capture Zabludowskis urbanity, portraying
him as not only ignoring the needs of the community but also doing so by
uttering it in foreign tongue as if this would attest to a worldly wisdom? Or
did Ringelblums use of the phrase emphasize Zabludowskis connection to
the all-rightniks, to those members of the Polish Jewish leadership who
believed that American philanthropy was enough to mollify all existing
socials ills? 4
It was rare for Ringelblum to import English into his notes. And his
sparing use of English was not exceptional in his milieu. But it was not at
all unusual for him to draw on Polish, German, and Hebrew, which appear
time and again. This linguistic capaciousness bears out Chone Shmeruks
assertion that Polish Jewry at the outbreak of World War II boasted a trilingual culture, wherein the majority of speakers had facility in Yiddish,
Polish, and Hebrew. 5 Once the Nazis had occupied Poland, German, a
language already having a measure of currency, became a regular addition
to the linguistic mix.
This mlange of languages was part of a larger historical inheritance.
European Jews have had a long history of multilingualism. There was,
first of all, the on-going relevance of ancient texts: the language of the
Bible was Hebrew; the language of the Talmud, Aramaic. Added to these
sacred tongues were the often multiple languages spoken in the various
regions where Jews resided. Jews also devised specifically Jewish languages
such as Yiddish, a Germanic language, or Ladino, a Spanish tongue that
were written using Hebrew script and transported to new regions when
communities were forced to migrate: in the medieval period, French and
German Jews, for instance, brought Yiddish to Eastern and Central Europe,
while Spanish Jews brought Ladino to Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkey after
their expulsion from Spain. Conveyed to Poland, Russia, Hungary, and
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Everything is All Right
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Rumania centuries before, Yiddish in these areas at the time of the Second
World War had some seven to eight million speakers most of whom had
some facility in other tongues as well. 6
Although many Jews were competent in a number of languages, as David
Roskies notes, in Jewish eastern Europe, linguistic choices were never
neutral.7 True generally, these choices took on added weight in the Nazi
ghettos: One wrote, continues Roskies, to transcend the reality of the
ghetto, to make sense of it through language, to communicate, to reach out.
Depending on the future envisaged, one wrote either in Yiddish, Hebrew
or Polish. In the tumultuous career of the ghettos, moreover, the future
envisaged often underwent change, compelling writers to switch from one
language to another: when the Great Deportation of Warsaw Jewry to Treblinka began in summer, 1942, diarist Abraham Lewin exchanged Yiddish
for Hebrew; poet Yitzhak Katznelson did the same when penning his elegy
to this devastation; 8 and chronicler Rachel Auerbach traded Polish for Yiddish. Such changes attest to facility and diglossia, the ability to maneuver
in more than one tongue, and to the changing need to do so in the tongue
that mattered most at a particular moment.
Page after page of Ringelblums notes bring home how choices were
never neutral. On May 7, 1940, for instance: Cafe Gertner is now Aryan.
[Yet] only Jews go there. The Jewish waitresses must try to pretend to be
Polish. Didnt answer me when I asked a question in Yiddish.Or a dramatic
exhortation in October of the same year: A Jew wearing a visor and with a
red kerchief at his throat cries at a Jewish woman who is speaking Polish to
him: In the Jewish streetcar one must speak Yiddish! Someone else shouts:
And Hebrew, Hebrew too! And in a more subtle yet no less charged scene
from the same period: An elderly lady wearing the traditional headgear
addresses Jewish children: You might speak Yiddish. Even the children
are caught up in the language wars. As adversity in the ghetto intensifies,
Ringelblum monitors its effects by noting its linguistic fallout.
His was not the only voice. Peretz Opoczinski, for instance, in his semiautobiographical, The Jewish Letter Carrier, chronicles the thankless
labors of a mailman in the Warsaw ghetto, the prestige he so ambiguously acquires, and the increasing devastation he witnesses as he climbs
the stairs in ghetto tenements. Often bringing money or promises thereof
from relatives in Soviet Russia, letters are the lifeline for the ghetto dwellers.
By the end of the story, when the Einsatzgruppen devastate Russias Jews,
letters no longer arrive, a development that also signals the death knell
for Warsaws Jews. Importantly, Opoczinski tells the story of these Jews
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through the languages they speak. One group favors Polish they were
intellectuals and read in the Polish-Jewish sheet, The Jewish Gazette. A second group privileges Yiddish: If the Hasid did differ from the intellectual
it was by the demand that the letter carrier speak Yiddish.9 The variety and
contentiousness of Jewish life, even (or especially) in such close quarters,
emerges through the different tongues they speak and those that they
dont.
In the ghettos of Eastern Europe, Jews continued to be enmeshed in
family and community life that, while subject to unprecedented deprivation
and danger, still bore resemblance to what had preceded it, as was true of
languages as well. Indeed, closing ranks in the ghetto held the promise that
Jewish languages, like Jewish culture in general, could get a boost. But the
concentration camps proceeded according to different criteria, linguistic
and otherwise. Two things did however remain the same: the centrality of
linguistic facility and the marginality of English.
Primo Levis essay, Communicating, lays out the terrain. 10 Levi chronicles how in Auschwitz knowledge of one or another language often made
the difference between life and death. Since commands were issued generally in German and since survival depended on an inmates capacity to
readily carry out commands, those who knew German fared best, those
who didnt fared worst:
We immediately realized, from our very first contacts with the contemptuous men with the black [SS] patches, that knowing or not knowing
German was a watershed. Those who understood them and answered in
an articulate manner could establish the semblance of a human relationship. To those who did not understand them the black men [again, the
SS] reacted in a manner that astonished and frightened us; . . . whoever
did not understand or speak German was barbarian by definition; if he
insisted on expressing himself in his own language indeed, his nonlanguage he must be beaten into silence and put back in his place, pulling,
carrying, and pushing, because he was not a Mensch, not a human being. 11
According to Levi, an absolutist linguistic chauvinism fueled this policy:

for the persecutors, German was language, other tongues simply nonlanguage. With brutal irony, the Nazis not only dictated what had to be
done, they also dictated the medium. 12
Levi shows how this wartime classification carried over into the postwar
period:
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In Auschwitz to eat was rendered fressen [ . . . ] For go away the expression hau ab was used, the imperative mode of the verb abhauen; in
proper German, this means to cut, chop off, but in Lager jargon it was
equivalent to go to hell, get out of the way. I once happened to use
this expression (Jetzt hauen wir ab) in good faith shortly after the end
of the war to take leave of certain well-mannered functionaries of the
Bayer Company after a business meeting. It was as if I had said, Now
lets get the hell out of here. They looked at me with astonishment: the
term belonged to a linguistic register different from that in which our
preceding conversation had been conducted and is certainly not taught
in foreign language courses. I explained to them that I had not learned
German in school but rather in a Lager called Auschwitz; this gave rise to a
certain embarrassment, but since I was in the role of buyer they continued
to treat me with courtesy. 13
In Levis retelling, the idiom that the camps had coerced comes back to
haunt the well-mannered functionaries once the camps no longer exist.
And, significantly, Levi went further in having the wartime idiom continue
to act as postwar provocation: I later on realized also that my pronunciation [of German] is coarse; but I deliberately have not tried to make it more
genteel; for the same reason, I have never had the tattoo removed from my
left arm.14 What began as a means of subjugation a stigmatizing linguistic tattoo became a strategy of commemoration. His coarse mode
of expression brought the life of the camps indecorously into everyday
dealings. Once that happened, every word he spoke in German, even the
most refined, bore the mark to extend Levis analogy of the tattoo of
the camp.
For Levi, vocabulary and pronunciation serve as organic artifacts of what
happened in the camps, provocatively carrying with them the memory
of that experience from the time during the war to the time after. And
the notion of a linguistic tattoo will play a role later on, articulating as
it precisely does the special iconic powers lodged in an accent. Others
have emphasized the strange nature of the language spoken in the camps,
whether in terms of a protective language, a code spoken by the inmates
to elude detection by the guards, 15 or a mongrel language cobbled together
to enable communication between those who did not share a common
tongue. Having its genesis in the lethal conditions of concentration camps,
thislager jargonhas been termed by Sander Gilman adiscourse of death:
It consisted of fragments of the language of the murderers, combined with
bits and pieces of the languages of the victims and some words that were
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created only in the camps themselves.16 As the concentration camps gave

rise to special codes of behavior, they also created the need for inmates to
invent a language of their own.
At least one commentator has argued with, to my mind, only partial
success that the nature of the lager jargon is fundamentally at odds with
that of any normal tongue. A ghostly hybrid of the languages belonging to
both murderers and victims, this discourse of death resists, according to
Sander Gilman, being narrated by purer languages. Whereas Primo Levi
views the coarse artifacts of language as transportable from the setting of
the concentration camps to that of postwar society, Gilman maintains that
there is a gap dividing these realms that cannot be breached. Strikingly,
Gilman articulates this position by setting Levi against himself. Levis Italian, emblematic of the languages of European culture, narrates his experience from a falsifying distance: The language of the camps, the language
that signified the powerlessness of the individual, Gilman notes, vanishes
in the post-war retelling of the account of the camps. The need to remember an intact world in the camps undermines the ability to remember the
dislocation of language.17
The languages of culture overwhelm the language of the camps, making
it impossible to recover the lager jargon and the world that gave rise to
it. This falsifying impulse comes about because the postwar world wants
to believe that the concentration camps belonged to a different world (or
history, or culture) than those they currently inhabit. Hence, every language is going to be unfaithful to the camp experience, taking what existed
solely in fragments and rendering it in a medium that is intact. What one
sees (or reads) then is the Holocaust filtered through civilized discourse,
the Holocaust, as it were, according to the coherence of a single cultured
tongue.
The notion that language inevitably insulates the reader from horror
leaves a number of questions: Why is it that the postwar reader cannot
tolerate the camps fragmented discourse? If the fundamental impulse is to
turn away, why should an author or reader be inclined to confront horrible
scenes and brutal episodes at all? Gilman does not address these issues,
but his analysis implies that the reader both wants and does not want
to confront such scenes. Guided by this ambivalence, the postwar reader
confirms that his world is fundamentally different than the world of the
camps.
The extremity of this judgment foreshadows Lawrence Langers censure
of writing about the Holocaust for its aesthetic shaping of experience.
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Langer, too, believes that conventional narratives insulate readers, letting

them rest easy with the conviction that the Holocaust can fit into normal
categories of experience. 18 Gilman differs in that he claims the interplay
of languages rather than the conventions of narrative can best reveal the
insulating reflex. He is thus particularly helpful in locating literary response
to the Holocaust in a plurality of languages. The notion, moreover, that the
camps (all camps? certain ones?) brought about a dislocation of language
gives the descriptions of lager jargon a broader significance, establishing a
connection between the special linguistic culture created during the Holocaust and the effort to recount or represent in its aftermath what had
happened. This step is clearly an important one to make and one that
I take up in my study. Nevertheless, by positing an inherent need to remember (and thus recount) a reality different from (and contrary to) what
happened, Gilman assumes more than he demonstrates. All languages are
not equally transgressive of the reality of the Holocaust; Yiddish has a
different relationship than does French, Hebrew than Italian, German than
English, and so on.
At bottom, Gilman sets forth a linguistic argument, averring that any
literary language will possess a unity and coherence that communication
in the camps, with its basis in an improvised language of fragments, could
not command. Literary language implies culture, fragments denote the
opposite thereof. Yet the severity of this formulation undermines the possibility that the languages of culture and I am particularly concerned
here with English can develop strategies to overcome the gap between
the discourses of death and of life. The division between the two realms,
as Levis linguistic tattoo implies, is not absolute. And the languages of
culture do not all occupy the same position in relation to the Holocaust.
This becomes clear when considering the particular situation of English.
Y You Know English?

One of the languages of European culture, English occupies a specifically
marginal position in relation to the Holocaust. A language of neither victim
nor perpetrator, English appeared rarely in the main arenas of Holocaust
life because English-speaking countries, although fighting on the side of
the Allies, were not caught up in the matrix of ghettos, deportations, or
concentration camps. 19 Another reason was that, in those countries at the
center of the catastrophe, English was not one of the languages essential to
commerce or culture. In elaborating the multilingualism of Polish Jewry,
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for instance, Chone Shmeruk quotes a memoir that comments on what

qualified as a foreign tongue:
Father, who went only to heder, since there was no money for the Yeshivah,
knew five languages: Hebrew, Yiddish, German, Polish, and Ukrainian,
although he apparently could not write Ukrainian. No one thought of
this as anything extraordinary. I would even venture that no one even
noticed. True foreign languages were French and English. If you had
asked my father before World War I, he would certainly have answered
that he knew no foreign language. 20 (emphasis added)
To a degree, English became less foreign as the war went on, and it became
clear that hope for victory lay largely (if not exclusively) with the British
and Americans. As ghetto dwellers tried to hold out until better times,
the study of English came more into fashion. Everyone is assiduously
studying English, writes Ringelblum in early 1942, in preparation for
emigrating after the war.21 Dreaming of a life of freedom in the expanses
of postwar America, ghetto dwellers did what they could to get ready for
that eventuality. But the enthusiasm for learning English, coming in the
midst of the war and acting as a spur to hope in a time of despair, testifies
to the general insignificance of English in the preceding period. It was
because so few knew English well that so many had to study assiduously.
A latecomer to the ghettos, English had as little significance in the concentration camps. Indeed, the inconsiderable number of those who knew
English emerges in reports of exceptional attempts on the part of camp
personal to locate accomplished speakers. In these cases, out of hundreds
of candidates, not even a handful qualified as possessing a rudimentary
mastery of the language. In two later chapters, I take detailed note of the
implications of such isolated situations where English became important
enough to induce camp personnel to seek out fluent speakers, yet there
were frightfully few who fit the bill. 22 The absence of English from the list
of languages making up the lager jargon, moreover, confirms its general inconsequence. Primo Levi specifies German, Polish, Yiddish, Silesian dialect
(of German?), and Hungarian as the essential the lager jargons essential
constituents. 23 Others add Russian and Ukrainian to the mix. 24 No list that
I am aware of includes English. It was truly a foreign language and hence
one not generally known, or worth knowing.
If English on rare occasions rose to prominence, it was the exception
to the rule. Thus, when it came to writing about the Holocaust few had
reason to believe English was one of the languages of literary consequence.
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There were, to be sure, some who by inclination or default chose to write in

English. But they were the minority, largely because the languages deemed
primary were German,Yiddish, Hebrew, and Polish. From the outset, translation into English played an important role; I will try to show how, at least
in one case, translation was not only essential in acquiring basic information about the Holocaust but also inspired a major work in English.
Eventually, many key works were translated, a development that while
crucial in circulating classic works only reinforced the tertiary position
of English-language Holocaust writing. Even when a lot more had been
written, the marginal position of English in giving expression to what was
essential of the Holocaust was not, at least until recent times, held in doubt.
This view of English is nowhere so clear as in a place one would think
least likely to find it: an anthology of excerpts translated into English from
major diaries and memoirs, most of which had originally appeared in
Yiddish. Presenting these writings to an English-speaking audience in the
late 1960s, the editors introduction to the Anthology of Holocaust Literature
does everything possible to ensure that the reader does not get the wrong
idea about the position of English. 25 For whatever its accomplishments,
English stands, as it were, in the shadow of the primary languages. The
Book of Books, out of the depths of the Sacred Martyrdom, writes Israel
Knox, one of the volumes editors, will not find its first and original home
in English or French or Russian, but in Hebrew and Yiddish. Even though
some languages can serve testimony better than others, he continues, no
item was included or excluded [from the anthology] solely because of
language. Yet when Knox notes that works in languages other than the
primary ones have been included out of a wish to be comprehensive
and representative he does not refer to English: There are items here
from the French and German and Russian and Polish. To be sure, he goes
on to note that the sensitive and perceptive reader will be able to distill
the essence from an English translation. But at best, English plays only a
secondary role.
Knox makes stunningly clear that a hierarchy of languages defines writing on the Holocaust, and that Yiddish, for evident reasons, stands at
the summit of the linguistic mountain because in the editors view, the
Holocaust was predominantly the destruction of Eastern European Jewry.
Hence,the essence of this civilization, its inner melody, its pervasive traits,
achieved their crystallized expression in Yiddish.26 But Knox knows that
the Holocaust, if devastating to Eastern Europe, extended beyond as well,
engulfing most of the continent and stretching to North Africa. In order to
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be accurate, the anthology, whatever its bias, had to take into account other
regions, which meant drawing on sources penned in languages other than
Yiddish: Well, then, one of the features of this anthology is that it consists
of selections from a large variety of books composed in many languages.27
Knox thereby steers between a claim that Yiddish is the only language that
can do justice to the Holocaust and an empirical recognition that victims
have written about the Holocaust in many tongues.
Knox also links the problem of languages to the shift in focus in the 1960s
from the executioners to the victims and to the victims alleged passivity or
complicity. This shift, often associated with the works of Hannah Arendt,
Raul Hilberg, and Bruno Bettleheim all of whom, though German- and
Austrian-born, wrote their controversial works in English, sparked acrimonious rebuttals among those who believed that the victims had been
maligned. 28 Clearly the victims defender, Knox views language as key:
What [record] there is of this [spiritual and physical resistance on the part
of the victims] is mainly in Yiddish and partly in Hebrew, and the accusers
who would sully the memory of the Six Million, rely chiefly upon nonJewish sources and have apparently little knowledge, if any, of Yiddish and
Hebrew.29 What one believes depends on the languages at ones disposal.
Further, the accusers choice of English as the medium of indictment may
have made it more difficult to take seriously English writing on the Holocaust. I will discuss this debate in greater detail in chapters that follow.
For now, it is important to note that Knox implies that this anthology
comes to set the record straight, making Yiddish sources (albeit in English
translation) available to those who might otherwise be forced to pass them
by.
The anthology thus cuts two ways. Even as the collection conscripts
English to help redress the wrongs committed against those who have
been maligned, English is decidedly kept in its place at the edge of the
Holocaust. It stands far removed from the essential languages; it does not
even make it into the catalog of tongues ancillary to those essential ones.
Yet, if English was rarely found among the primary sources, it did early
on play a significant role in secondary ones. Particularly noteworthy is
its disproportionate role in the writing of comprehensive histories of the
Holocaust. The remarkable fact, comments Jacob Robinson, is that out
of eleven volumes attempting to give a broad picture of the Holocaust,
not less than eight were written originally in English.30 These included
such important works as Gerald Reitlingers The Final Solution (1952) and
Raul Hilbergs The Destruction of European Jewry (1961). 31 Together these
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two works combined to give Hannah Arendt the basis that she required to
produce in English yet another attempt at a broad picture, a project whose
linguistic complexity I will trace in a later chapter. Robinson does not
speculate on what gave writing in English an exceptional capacity to render
the broad picture. Was it, perhaps, the marginal position of English that
provided a vantage point from which to survey the events? Did the fact that
English played such a minor role in the events themselves and therefore
that little documentation existed in English give it the leverage to stand
back from the morass of harrowing detail? If so, then the inconsequence
of English as a primary language finds its complement in the significance
of English as a secondary one. 32
Being outside the inner circle of languages has offered its own distinct
possibilities. Yaffa Eliach has speculated, for instance, that writing in a
new language can buffer the survivor-writer from the trauma, a proposal
seconded in the same forum by Israeli author, Jonat Sened. Both Eliach
and Sened consider such an enabling barrier from the perspective of the
survivor who writes about the Holocaust and who, when writing, is in
thrall to a constant searing pain: Those who were there, comments
Eliach, and who held the white hot iron in their hands, their pain is still
felt in everything they write.33 Implied in Eliachs and Seneds remarks is
the proposition that language, too, carries with it the white hot iron, that
perceptions and memory funneled through the language in which the pain
was experienced sharpens the pain. Language itself is the vehicle, if not the
agent, of that which is searing. Language thus bears within it intolerable
memory, a proposition that recalls Gilmans idea of the unassimilable nature of lager jargon. For Gilman the turn to a new language falsifies the
reality; for Eliach and Sened it enables the writer to do more justice to the
reality that was. Eliach writes,
Perhaps it is just that fact writing in a new language which is highly
significant for one who tells about the Holocaust. For sometimes the
language stands between the writer and the horrors of the Holocaust, in
that it permits him to grapple with the Holocaust in a language other than
that in which he experienced it. Consciously, or perhaps unconsciously,
the new language has the power to attenuate slightly the fiery pain. 34
As Eliachs phrasing suggests, survivors who attempt to recollect their

experience undoubtedly feel the pain. But readers feel it almost as surely:
We feel the flame of the pain in their words, in their punctuation, in their
silence.35 Therefore, the neutrality that Eliach envisions serves authors and
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readers, both the ones who went through the events and the ones who did
not. To be sure, adopting a new language was often for reasons that are
more pragmatic. The choice of language often depended on the country
in which the survivor had settled and that had become the audience most
natural to address. Eliach herself, for instance, has said that her decision to
write Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust in English was motivated by her wish
to make them accessible to her American students. 36 And yet, in tandem
with the pragmatic concerns of readership, one wonders if her decision also
provided a buffer against the almost suicidal forces that, as she describes
them in her preface to the volume, were latent within the tales that she
heard and rendered. 37
If Eliach and Sened speak about adoption of a new language in general,
James Young comments on how English in particular has played this role.
Speaking of oral testimony, Young notes that many survivors have chosen
after the war to speak and to tell their stories only in English, which they
regard as a neutral, uncorrupted and ironically amnesiac language. Having
experienced events in Yiddish, or Polish, or German, survivors often find
that English serves as much as mediation between themselves and experiences as it does as medium for their expression.38 Young posits this choice
of English as deliberate survivors have chosen to give up their native
language and adopt a new one. Their use of English, in other words, is
not simply a matter of audience or context; the only account that they
give, according to Young, is in English. Indeed, if the neutrality of English
were not available, the story might well not have been told at all. The
choice of English is on some level counterintuitive. If what survivors try
to do is to recount their memory of what took place, it seems illogical to
use the medium that, in Youngs characterization of English, is ironically
amnesiac, a medium that itself is lacking in the very memory that they are
attempting to retrieve. But it is exactly this balance being struck between
medium and message between that which is neutral and uncorrupted
and the memories themselves, which are traumatic that makes recounting
them in English so attractive.
Not all critics agree that the special outsider status of English protects
or mediates memory. Sidra Ezrahi has delineated the special status of
English as being its remoteness from the events. In contrast to Yiddish
and German, English was an outsider, and hence marked with purity
and autonomy. Yet Ezrahi argues that even the adoption of the English
language could not provide a shield against private memory (emphasis
added). 39 The searing pain that Eliach refers to is here taken for granted;
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the memory of loss on this scale generates intense suffering. Ezrahi differs
in that she believes no language can provide a sufficient barrier; no language
is neutral enough, outsider enough, amnesiac enough. Even if one allows
for this qualification, English still claims a distinct position. If any language
could have done it, Ezrahi implies, English would be the one.
Being outside the events did not, of course, necessarily make English
neutral. As a main language of the Allies, English was associated with
defiance, as Jakob Lind puts it, and therefore with a different hierarchy
of values, values presumably informed by the democratic ideals associated
with English-speaking countries. 40 Wartime English is thus a fusion of
military and liberal idiom. The Allies were the liberators; the language they
spoke, even when not understood, carried a message of defiant hope. Yet
even this heroic dimension has its downside. When in Art Spiegelmans
Maus a Polish kapo speaks of wanting to learn English for its worth, he
has in mind the capacity of English to raise his value in the eyes of the
future rulers: Britain and America.
The status of English in relation to the events of the Holocaust stands
in striking contrast, of course, to the position of English from a global
perspective. As the epigraphs suggest, English in the postwar years has
become the international language, playing a more vital role in world
affairs than any other. 41 Indeed, some view the position of English as a
global tongue without parallel in history. The ascendancy of English is
often linked to the growth and expansion of media and technology, which
has, in turn, increased the number of speakers of English. Yet the special
status of English derives not so much from the sheer number of speakers
of English as it does from the political and economic dominance that
English has acquired. Linguist David Crystal puts it sharply: During the
twentieth century, this world presence [of English] was maintained and
promoted, almost single-handedly, through the economic supremacy of
the new American superpower. And the language behind the U.S. dollar was
English.42 This partnership between English and American capital will be
emphasized when in a later chapter English is dubbed the language of dollars, the association meant to be less positive than Crystals formulation.
What English was in 1950 is different than what it became in the 1990s:It
has all happened so quickly, writes Crystal. In 1950, any notion of English
as a true world language was but a dim, shadowy, theoretical possibility,
surrounded by the political uncertainties of the Cold War, and lacking any
clear definition or sense of direction. Fifty years on, and World English
exists as a political and cultural reality.43 Crystal actually sets out a two-
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stage evolution: the first, encompassing the entire postwar period, derives
from developments in international relations, media (press, advertising,
broadcasting, motion pictures), international travel, international safety,
education, and communications. Groomed for international affairs by the
British Empire and animated anew by its collaboration with the American
dollar, English was at the right place at the right time. The second stage
began in the 1960s, set in motion by movements for political independence
on the one hand and the electronics revolution based in the United States
on the other. While the two-stage model is intriguing, most important to
note is that the ascendance of global English occurs in the period directly
following the Second World War, as if English were the thing needed to
console the world in the aftermath of its worst debacle. Crystal, for his part,
does not explicitly link the English-language revolution to the Holocaust
or even to the war (although others do). But he implies such connections.
The way the history of the English language is told, says linguistic historian Dick Leith, can be viewed as a story with heroes and villains and
a narrative shape implying the interests and motives of the one who tells
it. 44 Seen in this light, Crystals narrative of massive change plots a story
of English that celebrates its heroism, a Bildungsroman wherein the young
protagonist, having been overzealous in its youth, finds that such excesses
have provided the expertise and connections that can do much to save the
world. To be sure, Crystal is admirably aware of the dangers courted by
playing a starring role. But in the end, what appear to be dangers are either
false alarms or, if real, can be averted.
Others view global dominance less charitably. Rather than something to
celebrate or extend, the enthronement of English as the lingui universi, in
Domna Stantons terms, gives rise to worrying questions: What should we,
what can we, do about it?45 Thewethat Stanton, a scholar of comparative
literature, refers to is chiefly her colleagues in the field; but the problem she
identifies with global English transcends the academy.
To some degree, Stantons description of the English-language success
story matches Crystals: the English language holds today the preeminent
role in imparting and storing knowledge and information; it is, moreover,
the language of the media.46 But if for Crystal this preeminent role qualifies English for world service, for Stanton it points to shrewd and even
questionable manipulations of power: Intimately connected to military
and economic power, the dominance of English is an emblematic case of
Foucauldian power-knowledge. English dominance thus enables massive
co-optation at a level difficult to know about or control.
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15
Crystal and Stanton initially share the term global to characterize the
current status of the English-language. But Stanton switches terms in order
to refine the particular nature of domination. Even more than a global
language, English can be viewed as an imperial tongue.47 Global merely
implies numbers; imperial what it does with the numbers it has. English
is not the most widely spoken language in the world Hindi and Chinese
are but it is the elite language that other language speakers aspire to
master, as an indispensable means of access to cultural and other forms of
capital. Mastery of English by those for whom it is not a native tongue
provides the tools for mastery of the worlds most important resources.
Imperial English is thus a means to rule rather than be ruled. As such, it
widens the gap between the have and have-nots.
It also, Stanton claims, turns speakers against what is native to them: the
enthronement of English leads to the internalizing of the norms, modes of
thought, and cultural assumptions necessarily embedded in English, which
cause cultural deracination and alienation.48 Increasing the circulation
of English may unite the globe, but it does so at the expense of what
is familiar and local. Native languages and mother tongues thus suffer
badly. Important for what follows, the dominance of imperial English,
Stanton avers, is sustained by the explicit or implicit devaluation of other
languages, making it seem as if they are no longer necessary or vital. 49 In
Stantons scenario, English unifies on one front while increasing division
on another. Hardly noble in its motivation, English is a protagonist pushed
by ambition and self-interest, and more than a touch of megalomania.
English strives to be everywhere and to do everything simply because no
other language can ostensibly do it quite as well. Because of its need to be
at the center, the English language as protagonist demands exclusive love
and casts withering aspersions on former or potential rivals. These two
contrasting stories of English in the postwar period play themselves out in
English-language writing on the Holocaust. There we will see that English
is savior and oppressor, both the medium that can thwart terrible evil and
also the one that takes on many of the characteristics of an oppressor.
The English of the United States has been pivotal in fashioning English
into a global tongue. Yet its position in the United States itself, particularly
during this same period, is hardly clear but rather contested, uncertain,
and undergoing transformation. In American letters, scholars have noted
the almost exclusive attention given to English-language writing in recent
accounts of literary history and have attempted to redress this predicament
by attending to American literature written in languages other than English.
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Introduction
According to this view, works written in America in Spanish, French Creole,

Chinese, Norwegian, and Yiddish, among others, are crucial inclusions in
the canon of American literature. 50
This realignment would be only proper given the contentious history of
language and literature in America. According to Marc Shell, for America
to cultivate a foreign language is not something new but rather integral to its polyglot history: Since 1750, there had been a dialogue about
whether there should be only one official language and which language
that should be: English or one of the foreign, that is, non-English languages, whether ancient or modern. That dialogue, barely recognizable,
was sometimes expressed in the form of literary debates about whether
the American language itself was not essentially a foreign that is, nonEnglish language.51 Exactly where English stands in relation to America
is thus historically unclear. Greek, Latin, Hebrew, German, Dutch, English,
and others have been contenders to be Americas official language a
position that has yet to be filled. Seen in this light, to integrate writing in
other languages into the American literary cannon is not so much radical
as conservative, an attempt to reveal the true history of American letters
when viewed under a multilingual rubric. While those who propose this
revision assert that works in English should remain integral to this canon,
the precise cultural position of English is left unclear; one cannot take for
granted that English is the language that essentially represents American
literature.
In the past few decades, writing on the Holocaust has turned with increasing frequency to English, reaching a point where in most types of
literary production the majority of material on the Holocaust appears in
English. Moreover, paralleling this escalating production, claims have even
been advanced that English is the preferred language in which to write
about the Holocaust. The uncertain position of English in the United States
and its importance in Holocaust literature pull in contrary directions. In
the first instance, English, formerly entrenched as the primary tongue of
America, has been deposed from a singular position of authority; in the
second, English, an outsider to the Holocaust and the responses to it, has
been conscripted as a central language. English has been recruited to tend
to the Holocaust at the same time that its preeminent stature in American
letters has been challenged.
It is the intersection of these forces that provides the context for the
present study. In the chapters that follow, I examine how a specific set of
English-language writings on the Holocaust make sense of this outsider
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tongue through many of the concepts outlined above: marginality, neutrality, purity, heroism, even globalism and imperialism. These writings,
in turn, not only draw on but also shape these evolving conceptions of
English in terms of the Holocaust. The starting point for tracing this process is the work of David Boder, who was himself a Johnny-come-lately to
English, Boder nevertheless produced what is arguably the greatest work
on the Holocaust to appear in English in the decade after the war. Based on
testimony in a medley of Jewish and continental languages, Boders work
appeared in English mainly to reach the American audience that was closest
at hand. But having chosen English as the medium of his testament, Boder
used it in ways that dramatize the process by which English established for
itself a place both inside and outside the Holocausts domain.
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chapter 1
Evidence of Trauma
English as Perplexity in David Boders
Topical Autobiographies
Of Divergent Tongues: English as Perplexity

In summer 1946, psychologist David Boder and his staff traveled to Europe
to interview victims of the Holocaust who were in the displaced person
camps and what he called shelterhouses of Europe. Boder, a Latvian
Jewish migr, who at the time of the project was on the faculty of Illinois
Institute of Technology, carried out 109 interviews. Seventy were eventually
transcribed, resulting in a manuscript of over thirty-one hundred pages.
Boder undertook the trip because he felt that it was imperative to interview
the victims-survivors while their memories were fresh and, in addition, to
let them tell their story in their own language.1
Paying scrupulous attention to the victims language meant, of course,
confronting a plurality of languages, a multilingual challenge that moved
Boder to develop a new interview technology:
It seems impossible to assume that there were or are enough newspaper correspondents versed in the languages of Russian, Polish, Jewish,
French, Latvian, Lithuanian, Dutch, Flemish, and even German sufferers
in concentration camps . . . so that such reports could be recorded with
sufficient detail and precision for contemporaries as well as posterity by
the usual paper and pencil method of interview.
Since paper and pencil interviews were out of the question, Boder continues, the exact recording of their tale in their own voice seems the nearest
and most feasible alternative, which is how Boder accounts for his innovative use of the wire recorder (a 1940s forerunner of the tape recorder)
to conduct the interviews. Forced by circumstances to record, Boder later
speculated that the art of verbatim recording of person experience would
take its special place in the fields of psychology, anthropology, and literature. 2
[21], (3)
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Yet Boders emphasis on language and languages derives not only from
postwar necessity but also attempts to be faithful to the circumstances of
the victims during the Holocaust:
I endeavored to keep the material [of the transcript] as near to the text of
the original narratives as the most elementary rules of grammar would
permit. I kept in mind that most of the displaced persons had spent their
time of imprisonment in camps among inmates of divergent tongues and
dialects. For years they had been deprived of all reading matter (even
prayer books), of religious services, of radios, and often of opportunities
to talk with others in their own tongue. It is no wonder that their language
habits show evidence of trauma. Moreover, the emotional states aroused
by the recollection of episodes of such unparalleled stress definitely contribute to the peculiar verbal structure and the discrepancies in time and
place found on occasion in the narratives. 3
[22], (4)
Lines: 63 t
Just as Levi never tried to refine his coarse Auschwitz-acquired German
pronunciation, so Boder does not attempt to smooth over the peculiar
13.4000
verbal structure of the interviewees in his transcripts. For both, preserving
the scars of language leads one as nearly as possible to the events themselves.
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Given Boders stress on original languages, what role does English, outsider to the events, play? One role is clearly pragmatic: living and working * PgEnds: Ej
in the United States and funded by institutions there, Boder knew that his
immediate audience was primarily English speaking. Hence, the interviews
[22], (4)
were, and have always been, printed only in English. 4 Yet this English-only
memorial was clearly not Boders ideal: The work is far from completed,
he wrote in 1957, noting that the transcription of all the interviews in their
original languages as recorded remains a task for the future.5 His death
four years later kept Boder from completing the envisioned task.
But English plays a subtler role within the interviews themselves. In
the midst of the German, Yiddish, or Russian language interview, English
occasionally erupts, marking, in Boders words, a profound perplexity.
The example I want to consider is a transcript of an interview in Yiddish (in
1946) with Udel Stopnitsky, thirty-one-year-old Polish Jew, who describes
the entry of the Nazis into his town, Bedzin, and the terrible carnage that
ensued:
stopnitsky : So right away, the day when [the Germans] marched in, they
took one hundred and seventy Jews and shot them.
boder : Where?
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stopnitsky : In Bedzin.
boder : Did you see it?
stopnitsky : I have not seen it, but afterwards when we came outside we
saw Jews sitting in poses like it would be Saturday night, they were sitting
[in] their silk coats, with their heads/here one word not clear/leaning
against the wall and in such a pose they were shot.
boder : So that you did see?
stopnitsky : Yes, I have seen it.
boder : One could see that they were shot?
stopnitsky : Shot, not once but several times shot.
boder : Yes?
stopnitsky : They were shot with so much suffering that one could not
call it normal suffering. Entire pieces of flesh were torn away.
boder : H-um, and who buried them?
stopnitsky : The official Jewish undertakers.
boder : The official Jewish undertakers.
stopnitsky : The official Jewish undertakers had to bury some hundred
seventy Jews.
boder : They buried a hundred seventy Jews?
stopnitsky : Yes.
boder : Where were they buried?
stopnitsky : In the cemetery, under/one word is not clear/[the] highway
which/cemetery/exists until this day.
boder : Were they buried in separate graves?/the interviewer inquired
whether they were buried in individual graves but S. interpreted the word
as separate graves/
stopnitsky : In separate graves, four graves, women separately and men
separately.
boder : Oh, in two graves?
stopnitsky : No, in four graves, two for the men and two for the women.
In Boders next comment he unexpectedly switches from Yiddish to English:

So they did not bury everyone separately [Man hat nichts begraben jenem
eintzelem] in a nice . . . (emphasis added)
Boder never does complete this sentence. However, the transcript continues
with Boders third-person editorial reflection on his slide into English:
the interviewer unexpectedly said these last three words in English; as in
so many cases the interviewer could not help becoming perplexed by the
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story[,] which accounts for not having heard about the four graves when
he mentioned them first, and also accounts for forgetting himself as to
the language he was to use. 6
Perplexity is Boders way of describing the force of Stopnitskys account,

one so strong that he, the interviewer, loses the thread of language, as
it were. Indeed, Boder writes as if he were aware that perplexity would
one day come under attack. 7 Yet by focusing her reading the Holocaust
project on eliminating perplexity, Inga Clendinnen inadvertently shows
why Boders emphasis on perplexity is crucial: I have, states Clendinnen
in a study published forty years after Boders, written neither for specialists nor for those for whom the Holocaust was a lived actuality, but for
perplexed outsiders like myself, who believe with me that such perplexity is
[24], (6)
dangerous. In the face of a catastrophe on this scale so deliberately inflicted,
perplexity is an indulgence we cannot afford. For Boder, in contrast, it is
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not a question of whether or not one canafford to be perplexed; he simply
wishes to chronicle what happened in an intimate attempt to follow Stopnitskys unbearable story. It may be that Boder is perplexed into English, in * 20.2000
particular, as a kind of screen, a kind of not having heard registered in the

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the horror of the past and enter a different idiom.
Yet that is not how Boder himself expresses it. He refers to the eruption
[24], (6)
of English into the interview specifically as forgetting himself as to the
language he was to use. The phrase, forgetting himself, suggests not so
much an escape to a different era or world as it implies a blurring of time in
a moment when boundaries became brutally unclear. This sense of unclear
boundaries is of course what is inherent in Stopnitskys account of the
Bedzin massacre: the carnage is so great that it is impossible to bury each
person in an individual grave in a place where the boundaries are carefully
marked, a state that the English word nice precisely conveys: the normal,
identifiable, honorable, customary. 8 As Stopnitsky attempts to make clear,
however, the times no longer allowed for such niceness.
Hence, the English phrase that surfaces here is terribly at odds with the
circumstances at hand. To be sure, some critics would argue that since
all language fails in the face of trying to recount such ordeals, English
would surely fail as well. I am not, however, arguing along these lines but
rather suggesting that the impropriety of English at this moment both
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as an unsolicited response to perplexity and also as a medium strikingly

inappropriate to the situation on which it seeks to comment is what
carries weight.
Somebody Who Knew English

Boder knew that a phrase of English surfacing at a sensitive moment signaled a telling interruption. Its impropriety called attention to itself. Boder
in his role as commentator felt moved to account for it. But through the
course of the interviews that took place over a period of some two months,
English was generally on the margins. German, Yiddish, Russian, Spanish,
French, and Polish took precedence. Yet Boders multilingual sweep was
so great that English, too, had its day: three of the seventy transcribed
interviews were conducted in English. 9
In one remarkable case, English is not only the medium but the subject
of the interview. English enabled Nelly Bundy, a native of Austria, to survive
Auschwitz. That English could play such a role at all is instructive. Indeed,
the Bundy interview marks one of the first points at which English first
claims a position within the matrix of the Holocaust. 10 It does this in a
way wholly mysterious and elusive. In Bundys account, English is both
on the scene and not, central to her story while never truly putting in an
appearance. Predictably, its rarity will be the source of its lifesaving power.
Bundy was married to a Czech Jew who, as a member of the Czech army,
was stationed in France. She and her three children traveled to France
in 1940 to be close by him. Her husband was deported to Auschwitz and
perished there in 1942; the children, in hiding with a nanny in the French
countryside, were able to stay out of harms way. Bundy herself was eventually arrested, was imprisoned in the French concentration camp of Drancy,
and then was deported to Auschwitz in June 1943. The emergence of English
on the scene coincides with her arrival at Auschwitz. As Bundy recounts, a
German pilot wanted to learn English and, of the three Birkenau candidates
who were considered as instructors, Bundy was the one chosen:
bundy : Jus . . . when we had arrived, even before we were tatooed [sic],
there was a young Nazi. He was quite a boy. He came to ask for somebody
who knew English.
boder : Ja . . .
bundy : We were three, and he took down our names; and he chose me
afterwards. And so I was removed from there, and I came to Auschwitz to
the Staatsgebaude.
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boder : Yes . . .
bundy : . . . to be . . . to be working in the office. 11
Because of her proficiency which, at points in the interview, she belittles

Bundy was transferred from Birkenau to Auschwitz, from extreme deprivation to decidedly more livable conditions. As it turned out, the German
pilot who had requested the lessons and arranged for Bundys transfer
never showed up:
boder : Ja . . . They wanted somebody . . . take English lessons. All right.
bundy : Yes. One of the Nazis wanted to take English lessons.
boder : Yes . . .
bundy : He never did afterwards, but anyway I was working in the office. 12
The capacity to speak English thus saves her life, for she moves (or, in
Bundys chilling locution, was removed) from Birkenau to Auschwitz
a short distance, as Bundy notes, of a few kilometers. To be sure, this was
a short distance, but the change of location also meant a change of status
that brought with it a crucial set of privileges:
bundy : . . . personally I had had a relatively good time in Auschwitz, you
see working in the office.
boder : Yes. I mean, relatively good conditions.
bundy : Conditions, yes. I had a . . . when I was in . . . eh . . . the office, I
had a bed for myself. We had a . . . a shower room. We had showers twice
week.
boder : Yes . . .
bundy : They were . . .
boder : Warm showers?
bundy : Warm shower, yes.
boder : Yes . . .
bundy : There was . . . ah . . . hot water to wash oneself with.
boder : Ja . . .
bundy : Whereas in Birkenau there was no water at all. When we came home
from the . . . outdoor /off camp/ work, we were . . . we were dirty and
thirsty and everything; and there was no water, neither to drink nor to . . .
to wash ourselves in. 13
That English could wield such power in Auschwitz is difficult to imagine,

and Boder registers, in his mild way, incomprehension: Why, he asks,
did they need English there?14 Simple as his question seems, he formulates it rigorously. For Boder seeks an institutional explanation: why did
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they (presumably the Nazi camp administration) need English there

in Auschwitz, a place so distant from where English might be useful. Why,
in other words, did camp officials give importance to a language that had
so little currency among the population of the camp and hence played no
apparent role in its administration? However, Bundy is not gripped with the
same degree of bewilderment as Boder and responds on a more mundane
level: Well, he [the boy?] had a pilot /word not clear/ who wanted to take
English lessons. For Bundy, the whim, whatever its motivations, is reason
enough.
But Boder still cant fathom that the simple desire to learn English could
have such leverage. He again seeks an answer that will show that an administrative need set in motion the chain of events:
boder : He didnt . . . they didnt need you as a interpreter there?
bundy : No, but anyway I was . . . safe, so . . . 15
In moving from he didnt to they didnt (with the pregnant pause between), Boder reconsiders just whose need it is that occasions the search for
an English teacher. Learning English in Auschwitz makes sense if Bundy had
to serve as an interpreter; perhaps she would be enlisted to translate during
interrogation of prisoners who spoke English. But the Nazis apparently
had no wish to exploit Bundys knowledge of English to help them with the
war effort: No, replies Bundy, and then adds, but anyway I was . . . safe,
so . . . Hence Boders effort to put the pieces in place falls short. English
evidently had no place in running the camp, and its pivotal eruption into
Bundys story has no clear explanation.
Indeed, Boders frustrated attempt to pinpoint the role of English in
Auschwitz confirms its marginality. Accordingly, Bundys story reads almost like a fairy tale: We were three, and he took down our names; and
he chose me afterwards. We, our, me: chosen out of the magical three,
whisked away out of danger to meet the redeeming knight, having arrived
to find that he never appears Bundys knowledge of English lets her enter
a different order of experience.
Although Bundy recounts her ordeal in Auschwitz for some twenty pages
before she comes to talk of her English lessons, she evocatively backtracks
when she finally does. The summons for an English tutor occurs just when
we had arrived, even before we were tattooed. The search for a tutor could
not have been initiated at a more propitious moment. Had the messenger
been sent an hour earlier or later, Bundy would have lost out. To be sure, her
knowledge of English does not work its magic immediately: she is initially
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compelled to spend time in Birkenau, under dreadful conditions. But her

account makes clear that her deliverance because of her competence in
English was set in motion as soon as she set foot in the camp. Hence, her
arrival took place under the sign of English, so to speak.
More suggestive yet is Bundys gauging the summons in relation to when
we were tattooed. She indeed mentioned several times that tattooing was
thefirst thingupon arrival:The first thing to be done was to be tattooed.
But, as we now come to learn, tattooing wasnt precisely the first thing;
determining who was proficient in English preceded it. Bundy thus suggests
the urgency of the search by indicating that testing of English competence
usurped what usually was first in the camps admission routine. The search
for English displaces the standard induction rituals. Momentously, the
branding ritual particular to Birkenau and Auschwitz gave way in this case
to locating the speaker of a marginal tongue. Bundys phrasing suggests
that it was important for her that the asking after those competent in
English and taking down the three names took place even before the
arriving prisoners were tattooed. At this point, the prisoners had not yet
been turned into numbers. Indeed, measuring English proficiency was the
prisoners only experience before they were tattooed, before they were in
other words stripped of their names and branded with a number. The initial
episode related to English language competence took place in the singular
liminal moment when the prisoners resided in Auschwitz but still retained
their names. It is as if, standing at the threshold of the camp, the search for
English, propelled by some unknown desire to learn the language, had to
occur before Auschwitz could completely, and irrevocably, absorb them.
Bundys association of language and tattoo bears further attention. We
recall that Primo Levi linked his indelible tattoo with the idea of a language
(in his case, a coarse German) emanating from Auschwitz. Bundy also
speaks at length about her tattoo. She dwells particularly on the details of
its postwar removal, showing Boder her scar, describing the operation by
which she had the tattoo removed, and in response to Boders question if
many chose to have such an operation, replying,No, almost none of them.
More than most, Bundy implies that the tattoo stigmatized her rather than,
as in Levis case, those who did the tattooing. Indeed, the fact that the tattoo
continues to stigmatize even after it has been removed becomes clear at the
conclusion of the interview, when Boder asks Bundy what she would wish
for that would make life again tolerable. Bundy lists several things, then,
in Boders words, glancing at a horrible scar on her left arm produced by
most clumsy surgery for the removal of her tatoo, she added, I want some
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jewelry. She wanted it not so much for ornament as for concealment;

some jewelry would cover over what cant be kept hidden. It may be
this shameful awareness of the tattoo and its residual scar that accounts for
Bundys particular phrase:even before we were tattooed might demarcate
a time before the experience that has left her damaged and scarred. In
other words, Bundy being sought for her English prowess even before
perhaps especially before the disgrace that the tattoo symbolized meant
that English, too, was shielded from such contamination. And accordingly,
the English uncontaminated by the ordeal of Birkenau contains the power
to extricate Bundy from its lethal conditions. 16
That Bundy never instructs the pilot in the English lessons for which
she was removed from the perilous conditions of Birkenau deepens the
enigma. Something is left incomplete. Were she to have given English
lessons, she would also have found out why exactly her student had gone
to such trouble. But since he never did show up, she (and we) are left in
the dark.
How can English be so important in the currency of the concentration
camp that the desire to learn it can be important enough to alter the
camps usual routine? The aborted lessons imbue English with mystery,
leaving unexplained why it of all languages should have been the object of
such desire and yet been spurned so casually and, most profoundly, why
should it have saved a life. The power to alter routine combines with the
mystery as to what gave it such power.
The mystery of English carries over into the interview itself. Why did
Boder (or Bundy, or both) choose English rather than German (the language Boder employs most often) as the language of the interview? Bundy
was, after all, Austrian by birth. Perhaps the choice of English implies a
rejection of German, a tacit agreement that the language of the persecutor,
unless necessity demands it, should be foregone. Yet the question regarding English is more pressing because, while Bundy clearly has facility, there
are points where she displays and more importantly, remarks on her
incompetence in English. Searching for the proper words to describe the
primitive sleeping arrangements in Birkenau, for example, she stumbles:
They were . . . they were three . . . three I dont know. My English is
not good enough for that. The English that was good enough to have her
chosen, removed, and ultimately saved is not good enough to describe the
tiers of platforms that served as bunks for the prisoners in Birkenau. The
tension between her competence in the camp and her (at least professed)
incompetence outside it quietly punctuates the interview.
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Tellingly, Boder does not note here, as he does in his preface to the
interview in English with Bella Zgnelek, that the interviewee proudly insisted on speaking English.17 Aware that Zgnelek is only twenty-two years
old, Boder appears to share her pride in her relative mastery of English:
Considering that she learned it only in school, Boder explains, before
her imprisonment in a concentration camp, which lasted for several years,
she was doing indeed very well. Here Boder places English in a context
where it was learned, for how long, at what age. He even accounts for
what might have helped Zgnelek refine her skills further: Of course, her
present job with the JDC [Joint Distribution Committee], an American
organization, must have given her ample opportunity for improvement.
Such opportunity should not, however, lead those who are listening to
assume that her English will be perfect. And strikingly, Zgnelek, wishing
to convey her feelings at the end of interview with particular eloquence,
leaves off with English and switches to Polish. 18 Yet in a certain sense, the
abandoning of English reinforces Boders initial appreciation of Zgneleks
choice to conduct the interview in her newly adapted tongue. Choosing
English after what Zgnelek endured affirms life in the present; switching
briefly to Polish to convey her bitterness over what she has lost is a marker
of the past.
In Bundys case, English is chosen without fanfare. It is as if the mystery
of English that she reports on as so crucial to her own survival silently
moves Bundy and Boder to opt for English in the interview as well. To be
sure, they never refer to this link between the role of English in the camp
and its role in the interview. Nevertheless, by conducting the interview in
English, Boder and Bundy nevertheless pay tribute to the medium that
enigmatically saved Bundys life.
In Boders massive corpus, this is the only occasion where English has the
power to determine life and death. But that English should, even once, play
such a role is surprising, in that it reverses the usual hierarchy of languages.
That English should have its day in the very epicenter of the events is that
much more surprising. On some level, the peripheral status of English
accounts for its leverage here. Bundys life becomes valuable because she
possesses such a rare skill; few knew English, we sense, because English was
generally not worth knowing.
In Bundys story, English rises to the surface, rescues her, and then, like
a modest hero, retreats into the background. When we look at the role of
English in Art Spiegelmans Maus, we will once more see English play such
a role in Auschwitz-Birkenau. But in that case English will work its magic
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again and again, ransoming a life not in one camp but several. In Maus,
furthermore, the magic of English will not be hidden from view; we will see
exactly how, with whom, and for what reasons English wields its leverage.
Finally, as in Bundys self-conscious tale, in Maus the story of the power
of English will be told in an English thick with error. Hence, the tension
between the competent English that saves versus the incompetent English
that recounts the events will return. At that point, Vladek Spiegelmans
story in Maus will intertwine with Bundys, each illuminating the other.
Awkward as They May Sound

Boder renders all of the interviews that he transcribed into English, believing that a monolingual audience was all that could be hoped for in
America of his day. Above all, the quest for transparency dictates how
to present the material. But having submitted to this necessity, Boder reimports opacity back into his interviews by way of verbatim translations
translations that purposefully introduce language that he calls awkward
into the translated English texts.
Boder made clear that he was deliberately keeping the English ungrammatical. He was also aware that he would need to justify retaining this
awkwardness. He argues the propriety of this strategy in his correspondence with the Jewish Publication Society, prospective publishers of the
book version of Topical Autobiographies:
The manuscript has been read by a number of non-Jewish readers from
the English Departments of the Illinois Institute of Technology and of
the University of Chicago and the consensus of opinion is that the original recording should not be altered and that my verbatim translations,
awkward as they may sound, greatly enhance the effect of the material
in this respect they differ apparently with the viewpoint of Mr. [Maurice]
Samuel, who has so greatly Anglo-Saxonized the beautiful writings of
Perez [I. L. Peretz]. 19
Boder knows what he is up against. His wish to keep the English awkward
went against prevailing standards when dealing with Jewish literature. But
Boder also knew that he was dealing here with a different order of experience and that the standards, unlike those of literature, were not beauty or
eloquence. One had to turn to other criteria besides beauty.
In truth, Boder was not proposing a text teeming with mistakes and
distortions. Truly fractured English in Holocaust writing would surface
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only decades later in works by Cynthia Ozick and Art Spiegelman. In comparison with these, Boders verbatim translations are quite mild. But Boder
believed that misshapen language was crucial to the message the dps had
tried to convey. Awkward English, translation though it may be, came closer
to reproducing the evidence of trauma that shaped language in the concentration camps. To his mind, moreover, there was no conflict between
being true to the traumatic dimensions of the event and representing it
to a reader. He was convinced that the awkward-sounding English would
enhance the rhetorical effect. Indeed, he drew on the opinion of the most
objective readers he could think of non-Jewish English professors to
back up his own intuitions. Such support, however, was evidently not persuasive. Despite Boders diplomatic correspondence, his intransigence on
the English-language issue may have been one of the reasons why the Jewish
Publication Society decided not to publish the book. When he eventually
brought out the book with University of Illinois Press, the Yiddishisms, as
Boder refers to them, remained.
Boder, then, tries to steer a middle course, submitting to the necessity of
English translation while simultaneously incorporating into the English a
peculiar verbal structure. He makes English read as if it was not originally
English which it wasnt. He thus makes the English go beyond itself and
reflect the languages that it supplants. Having translated everything into
English, the original language, at least in principle, continues to shape (or
distort) the English that replaces it.
Only at one point does Boder resist the imperative to translate. Significantly, this concerns a word emanating not from the interviews but from
Boders own Hebrew addition: I am tempted, writes Boder to his friends
Francis and Maggie Coughlin in 1957, to enclose the four pages of the
addenda to volume XVI. The three kriptic [sic] letters at the end are the
Hebrew word Khazak meaning be strong and they are imprinted at the
end of each book of the Torah.20 It is not clear if Boder sent the Coughlins
the addenda or, for that matter, why he might have hesitated to do so. But
he did conclude the three-thousand-plus pages of Topical Autobiographies
with the three kriptic letters cryptic because they are written not only
in a language but in a script different than that of English.
Why did Boder here import the foreignness that elsewhere he took so
much trouble to weed out? Perhaps he could run the risk of alienating
the reader because khazak in the Hebrew appears inconspicuously only
on the final page of an immense text. Yet Boder also deals here with a
different order of foreignness. It is not the foreign language testimony
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that he retrieves; khazak derives from a source other than that of a dp. He
rather adds a Hebrew word that itself stands outside of the languages that he
used for the interviews. It is as foreign to most of the interview languages
as it is to English. The addition of khazak, moreover, does not attempt
to communicate new information. By concluding Topical Autobiographies
with the word khazak, Boder means to clarify the status of the project.
Although presented as the work of an academic psychologist, Boder signs
it, as it were, with the signature of Torah. At least for those conversant
with Hebrew and the rituals of Jewish life, its concluding word transforms
Topical Autobiographies from simply an academic work to a work of liturgy.
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chapter 2
An Entirely Different Culture

English as Translation in John Herseys
The Wall
Engaged in a heroic effort to salvage memory through an acute sensitivity

to language and languages, Boder was a scholar-clinician writing mainly for
colleagues. 1 In contrast, John Herseys The Wall, first published in 1950, was
a best-selling novel, using conventions of the family saga, among others, to
chronicle the annihilation of Polish Jewry. 2 Yet for Hersey, too, multilingual
issues and the status of English play a pivotal role.
Hersey had already by the late 1940s made a name for himself as a novelist
and journalist. Born in China to parents who were Christian missionaries,
Hersey spent his first eleven years there. His relation to American letters,
suggests Werner Sollors, thus has similarities to that of an immigrants. 3 Yet
from early on he pursued a career as a writer. He was a correspondent for
Time and Life; received a Pulitzer Prize for his novel, A Bell for Adano; and,
in 1946, published a long essay, Hiroshima, based on interviews with six
survivors of the atomic bombing of the city. The essay appeared as an entire
issue of the New Yorker, was widely excerpted and discussed in editorial
pages, broadcast on radio, and even distributed at no charge to Book-ofthe-Month Club subscribers. It was published as a book simultaneously
in England and the United States at the end of 1946 and later included
in Herseys collection, Here to Stay (1963). Chronicling Japans devastation
intensified Herseys resolve to address the fate of the Jews in the Holocaust. 4
Based in Moscow at the end of the war, Hersey had in the spring of 1945
visited several concentration camp sites and the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto
(which he later referred to as a Sahara of downcast bricks). 5 Having
decided to write a book on the ghetto, Hersey was eager to proceed but
nonetheless daunted by the question of languages: Soon I found that there
was a tremendous amount of material about Warsaw and other ghettos
written in Polish and Yiddish . . . all sorts of testimony. None of this had
been published in English, and it appeared that little of it would be.6
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Herseys sizing up how to approach the task before him was thus allied
with his realization that English was and would likely remain a language
foreign to the events.
Intensely Moving English

Faced with the difficulty of obtaining material in English, Hersey took some
unusual steps. First, he hired two researchers Lucy Dawidowicz, who
would later become a noted historian, and Marc Nowogrodski, a Polish
Jewish survivor who, in addition to their skill in dealing with historical
materials, translated Yiddish and Polish into English. 7 But this step was
only the beginning. Hersey hit upon the idea of having the translators
dictate their translations into a wire recorder the same kind of machine
that Boder used to record the testimony of the dps. For Hersey, however,
the wire recordings were not meant to result in verbatim translations of
the original languages; it was not exact reproduction that he was after. The
technique rather enabled English to come into its own. This is how Hersey
recollected the process a few years later:
In the end we stumbled on a wire-recorder, and found that both the
translators were so deftly bi-lingual that they could read directly from
the foreign text onto the machine in rapid and, I can tell you, intensely
moving English. 8
It is because the translators were between linguistic worlds are so

deftly bi-lingual that such a project could be carried out. But, as Hersey
emphasizes, it was also the effect of their reading, of their dramatization
of the texts, which gave the project its greatest benefit. The dramatization
renders the foreign text into a rapid English, an English that, as Hersey
explains, goes a long way toward telling the story that he himself wants to:
For weeks, for months on end, I heard those two people tell me about
the ghetto. And because they skipped, and summarized, and retold, and
dropped in interjections, what they told me was filtered away from the
documents. They were the storytellers. It cost me very little in the way of
fantasy to seem to experience the astounding story they passed on. 9
For Hersey, documents are inert, unyielding. The English in which the
translators read overcomes the inertia of the document. Strikingly, the
reading acts, in Herseys evocative word, as a filter, a device that takes away
whatever it is in the document that blocks apprehension. Hence, translation
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into English makes the events truly accessible. Translation is not only the
rendering of something from one language into another (if it is ever only
that), translation is also dramatization, the capacity to imagine, the ability
to compose a narrative. Rather than functioning as a poor substitute for
an another language, English serves as a necessary mediating step:
Why was this technique fortunate? When it came time for me to absorb
the material, I did not see it as documentary matter, which I would have
retained by visual memories; instead, I heard it as felt experience. 10
In a formulation reminiscent of Walter Benjamins, Hersey positions himself as one who receives a story steeped in experience. To be sure, Hersey
always maintains a sense of what he is doing as tertiary, as being twice
removed. But what began as a problem of access becomes a fortunate
(and crucial) step to storytelling. Had there been material in English, one
gets the sense that Hersey would have been less able (and hence less likely)
to make a novel from it.
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The Task of the Translator

It comes as something of a surprise, then, when the fictional editor of The
Wall laments the problems posed by translation into English.
Their [the translators] task was very difficult: they had to try to convey
in English the life of Eastern European Jews without falling into the colloquialisms, word orders, and rhythms which, as taken over and modified
by the American Jewish community, have become part of an entirely
different culture: the connotations would have been misleading. 11
This cautionary reflection comes at the conclusion of the editors prologue

with which Hersey opens the novel. Modeled on the format of Emmanuel
Ringelblums wartime log, The Wall is ostensibly a collection of notes discovered beneath the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto soon after the war ends. 12
The prologue chronicles the discovery and editing of the notes, including
their translation into various languages and the transfer of the manuscript
to various postwar archives.
Along with the caution expressed, the prologue also attests to a positive
dimension of translation into English. Indeed, the English edition of the
notes will be the first edition published. Both the original Yiddish and
an earlier Polish translation were unattractive to publish because of their
wordage and because they are, in their raw state, rather chaotic.13 Slimmed
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down and shaped up, the English edition has the honor of bringing Noah
Levinsons notes to the public. This progression does not mirror the fate
of Ringelblums. As we have seen, very little was available in English in the
late 1940s. It would be only in 1956 that a segment of Ringelblums notes
appeared in English and 1958 before an abridged book-length translation
was published. But in Herseys reworking, English is the language in which
the notes can be ordered and thus read.
Hersey, moreover, had clearly not lost sight of the significant role played
by his translators; the fictionalized translators who faced such a difficult
task nearly match those who labored so deftly on his behalf. Mendel
Norbermann and Mrs. L. Danziger, the Levinson archive translators have
the same initials as Nowogrodski and Dawidowicz, lost relatives in the
ghetto as did the actual translators, and thus have a special intimacy with
the subject. Hersey plainly wanted the echo to be heard.
Yet he distinguishes the fictional translators from his own by representing
the task of translation as a problem. Writing in English about an event
in which Yiddish-speaking Jews play the central role, Hersey was clearly
tempted to make his English sound Jewish. This would have authenticated
the voices, rendering them European. But Hersey was also aware that doing
so would not so much authenticate as mislead. Those Yiddishized voices,
bred in America, would not reflect the voices of the Jews of the Warsaw
ghetto. They could, however, lead some readers to think that that is what
they were hearing. For this reason, Hersey resisted the temptation and
virtually excluded dialect from the novel.
Hersey didnt resist in his first story on the Holocaust, A Short Wait.
Published in 1947, some three years before The Wall, the story recounts a
postwar encounter in New York between a survivor and her American (or
Americanized) relatives. The story begins with a mild twisting of English, a
strategy meant to emphasize the foreignness of the survivor and the English
she tries to affect:
When Luba finally managed to board a cab, she pronounced for the driver
the words she had rehearsed several times:Park Avenue, five hundred and
sixty-one. The driver started up his taxi without hesitation, and Luba was
pleased, for it was one thing to affect English in Prague and another to be
able to have it understood in New York. 14
English here, too, presents a problem, though one that comes from the
other, Europe-to-America, direction. Can the English that was learned on
one continent actually prove effective on another? It can, and the story
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thus begins by chronicling the successful journey of English from Europe

to America from rehearsal, as it were, to understanding. But the problem
of English betrays a deeper problem, implying the gulf between the Jews
of Europe and those of America. The alienation between the two communities turns out to be the central issue in the story. Luba sent a letter to
America during the war appealing for help but never received an answer.
She interprets the silence to mean that her relatives in America did not
care what was happening to her and, more generally, that American Jewry
had no time to give to the tragic fate of their brethren in Europe. Hence,
even when Luba speaks English upon her arrival, she still speaks it as a
European, indicating her status as a stranger in a strange, and estranging,
land. When, with The Wall, Herseys narration moves from America to
Europe, from postwar reckoning to wartime perplexity, immigrant English
will no longer work.
Yet abstaining from dialect in The Wall was not enough. Hersey therefore
uses the editors prologue to reflect on the process of writing in English and
transforms what had been in actuality a fortunate event into a difficult task.
Why would Hersey be moved to preface his novel with these reflections on
the task of translation? Construing translation in the novel as difficult
helps preserve the distance between the novel that he writes and the events
it describes. Without maintaining such a distance, without writing in an
English that resists the strategies of dialect,the connotations, as his editor
says, would have been misleading.
So much part and parcel of American life, English threatens to mislead,
to give false impressions, to take the experience that it knows best and
universalize it, not revealing but obscuring what actually happened. 15 At
the outset of his six-hundred-page novel, Herseys remarks suggest that
setting and medium are painfully mismatched, that English itself the
English on which Hersey himself depends is a source of great anxiety.
Having fashioned the novel by means of translation, Hersey nevertheless
wants the reader to know the problems that English translation or original
necessarily engender.
The Jewish Police, or Multilingual Crossings

Once begun, however, The Wall endeavors to reconstruct life in the ghetto
in meticulous detail. The reconstruction includes many ghetto institutions
that were created to replace services the Polish government no longer provided. Strikingly, Hersey dramatizes the essential role of languages in the
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novel in connection with one of the most controversial of these institutions

the Jewish police.
Because the Judenrat and, to an even greater degree, the Jewish police
were forced to carry out the will of the enemy, both were considered suspect.
While the Judenrat worked mainly behind closed doors, the police often
acted in full view of the ghetto population and, in some circumstances, resorted to physical force to achieve their goals. Eventually, they even worked
together with the enemy to round up the victims slated for deportation to
concentration camps and killing centers. Members of the Jewish police justified their role by arguing that they limited the violence and, if they refused
to participate, the number of victims would [have been] much higher.16
But most ghetto dwellers thought that the police performed these horrible
[39], (6)
actions to gain exemption from deportation or to receive privileges. As one
historian summarizes, It is common knowledge that no member of the
Judenrat and no Jewish policeman in any ghetto ever had the confidence
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of the population. Leading members of both the Judenrat and the police
were assimilated or converted Jews who in pre-war days had separated from * 21.20001pt
their people. With no conception of Jewish problems or of Jewish strivings,
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most of them acted out of ignorance as well as selfishness.
Hersey shows not only the ignorance and selfishness of these tragically
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compliant institutions, but also the hatred aroused toward them. When
armed resistance first comes on the scene in The Wall, it begins with the
[39], (6)
assassination of leaders of the Judenrat and of the Jewish police. Nonetheless, Hersey consigns one of the novels heroes, Dolek Berson, to periods
of service with both the Jewish police and the Judenrat. To be sure, Berson
puts on the garb mainly to elucidate the problems with these institutions.
From the beginning, he recognizes that the power he wields as a member of
the police comes at an exorbitant price. But that recognition is not enough
to get him to resign.
Such a level of understanding arrives only by way of a multilingual scene.
Berson is stationed at one of the crossing points in and out of the ghetto
when a group of Jews begins to walk past. He then addresses them in the
rather harsh tone of Yiddish that had become his habit while on duty:
Stop here for inspection, please!
A short man at the head of the group turned toward Berson, and Berson
recognized the miserable gnarl that serves Fischel Schpunt for a face.
Schpunt, in German:
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I beg your pardon, I am meshummed a convert. I dont speak

Yiddish.
A titter could be heard in the group. Berson says he thought he remembered having heard Schpunt speak Yiddish but realized he might be
mistaken, so he said in German:
Inspection here before the gate.
Schpunt, politely, speaking this time in Polish:
Excuse me, I was born and raised right here in Warsaw Ceglana
Street all my life. My German is rusty. Excuse me.
Dolok [Berson] heard open laughter in the group of men who had
been following Schpunt, and who had now fallen back in an audiencelike semicircle. Berson blushed and said sharply in Polish:
Your documents.
Schpunt began fumbling hurriedly and humbly in his pockets. He
asked in German:
Do you mean my work card? Or my ration card? Or my Judenrat
pass? 18
Fed up, Berson sends them on their way. But the multilingual gag (Schpunt
serves regularly as the character who perpetrates such jests) has a more
lasting effect on Berson himself. For he immediately leaves his post and
runs to the Judenrat, where he throws his [police] insignia on the desk
and resigns from the force. Later in The Wall, when we see the kind of
terrible compromises that the Jewish police are compelled to make, we
understand that Bersons resignation was momentous. Indeed, his alter
ego in the novel, Stephan Mazur, remains in the force and eventually, in
order to save his wife and himself, feels justified in rounding up Jews for
the deportation center (including, as it turns out, Bersons wife). Bersons
resignation early on spared him from pursuing a similar course.
Why is it that Hersey casts Bersons epiphany through a play of languages?
Language here is closely aligned with identity the scene is one of inspection, the demand is made for documents, the case is complicated by the
reference to conversion. But in spite of Bersons facility he conducts the
interrogation ably in three languages he cannot get language to perform
the policing task that he would like; confirmation of identity remains out
of his grasp. Moreover, the kaleidoscopic swirl of languages is meant to
ridicule Berson. He can order and demand all he wants, but he cannot
control the language that responds to his commands. Hence, the incessant
movement of languages suggests that language cannot be policed. Indeed,
the inability to do so brings home the folly of policing per se.
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To be sure, English is not directly at issue here; the languages that trip
Berson up and have him stumble (or run!) toward insight are those of
the victim, persecutor, and Polish bystander, not the outsider. But that
anxieties around languages become the medium through which The Wall
narrates such a crucial moment arguably the crucial moment in the novel
suggests a more general anxiety about locating the proper language of
narration. And so the failure of multiple languages to establish identity
points back to the specific problem of using English. That this crucial
episode revolves around satirizing languages in their effort to communicate
salient information hints at the potentially ridiculous position of English
in trying to, in the words of the prologue, convey an entirely different
culture.19
[41], (8)
Schpunt, or Multilingual Conversions

Hersey usually glosses foreign words. But names generally remain without
a gloss and thus are one of the elements that do not submit to translation.
Fischel Schpunt, the clownish antagonist in the border crossing episode, is
a case in point: His name is Yiddish for bung, a stopper, something that
plugs up the opening of a barrel or cask. Schpunt is hence the one who
keeps things from pouring out of the container, the instrument for keeping
the contents in, or letting them flow out. In the broader perspective of the
novel, he is able to keep a check on the immense pressures generated as
a result of the ghetto persecutions. As in the case of mocking of Bersons
policing efforts, Hersey typically makes Schpunt accomplish this task by
provoking laughter, which in this scene is directed at Berson. But Schpunts
masquerade as a convert elicits a milder laughter as well, for he, among
Herseys characters, is least ambivalent about his Jewish identity. As such,
he is an unlikely candidate for conversion.
This repartee associated with conversion can be compared to its role
in the ghetto more generally. Least attached to the Jewish community,
converts were most likely to receive positions of power or special privileges.
Conversion within the ghetto, moreover, served as a way to gain such
privileges. It thereby was taken as a flagrant symptom of the Polonization
of the ghetto about which Hillel Zeitlin and Emmanuel Ringelblum, among
others, write with such bitterness.
Hersey incorporates conversion but tones down its negative connotations. The Walls main example of Jewish converts to Christianity, Jan
Jablonski and his son, Wladislav, resign themselves to incarceration in
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the ghetto, even though they have no ties to the Jewish community or
to Judaism itself. Their relation to the Jewish community is not so much
opportunistic as it is tragic. Moreover, Jablonskis prewar disaffection with
Judaism is of a piece with that of the novels heroes, Berson and Levinson, both of whom, hailing from religious families, break with them. In
their case, the ghetto compels a return to Jewish life. In the Jablonskis,
where conversion made the break more absolute, the ghetto does not effect
such a return. Significantly, Hersey marks the distance that separates the
Jablonskis from the Jewish community by reference to the inaccessibility
of a mother tongue: the father remarks that his son has been brought up
Polish in every way. He cannot speak a word of Yiddish.20 Lacking the
language of their native element emphasizes how isolated they are.
Inability to speak the language of the Jews thus measures the converts
distance from the community. But the passage above illustrating Bersons
epiphany complicates the converts linguistic position. The only nonEnglish word appearing in the passage is the Yiddish word meshummed,
which Hersey (or his character) translates as convert. Hersey thus begins
the series of multilingual pranks by having Schpunt use a Yiddish word
to account for why he cant speak Yiddish, which clearly contradicts his
stated ignorance. On top of this, Schpunt, having converted from being a
Jew (a meshummed is an apostate), could well have spoken Yiddish. His
leaving the faith would not have had any effect on his ability to speak his
native language, no more than changing the citizenship would cause ones
mother tongue to vanish. Though Schpunts gag invokes religious boundaries as demarcations for who speaks what languages, Yiddish would in this
case have crossed the boundary between Jew and non-Jew. Schpunt hence
reasons cogently (certain groups speak certain languages) but absurdly
(leaving a group does not automatically nullify the capacity to speak a
language).
Herseys own translation of the passages single non-English word further complicates these multilingual entanglements. As mentioned above,
the more precise translation for meshummed is apostate one who has
left the Jewish faith. Hersey employs meshummed this way earlier in the
novel when Levinson first refers to Jablonski: this man was a meshummed,
a convert, and notes that Jan Jablonski, ne Isaac Zeligstein, had become
converted to Catholicism in 1921.21 The connotation of apostasy in this
initial reference is clear but in the border-crossing episode is less so. By using convert, the more general term for moving from one faith to another,
Hersey leaves the reader unsure how exactly to negotiate the passage: Is
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Schpunt speaking absurdly, offering a nonreason for his inability to speak

Yiddish? Or is convert here meant to imply that Schpunt is a convert not
from but to Judaism and hence, more plausibly, would not have facility
in Yiddish? Did Hersey, in other words, by choosing meshummed instead
of ger the Yiddish word that refers to a convert to Judaism make an
error himself (replicating perhaps both Schpunt, comically, and Berson,
satirically) in negotiating these multilingual intrigues?
Leather Boxes and the Problem of English

A stopper that contains what could dangerously spill out, Schpunt is associated with one of many containers with which Hersey fills The Wall. Indeed,
the wall enclosing the ghetto is the dominant symbol of a container: In
hard fact, there was nothing left of the ghetto except the encompassing
wall. In Herseys vision (but not in the hard fact of history) the encompassing wall remains as testimony to what the Jews of Warsaw endured.
Hersey joins this concrete dimension to an artistic one. In addition to forming the barrier between the inside and outside of the ghetto, the wall also
symbolizes fabrication. As the Jews of Warsaw unwittingly take part in constructing the ghetto wall, Hersey constructs (in this case, quite deliberately)
the novel bearing the name. Indeed, in the opening section of the novel,
while Warsaws Jews still live freely but with the ongoing rumor of being
compelled to live in a ghetto, Hersey describes the act of constructing the
wall. Many of the novels key figures are among the bricklayers; several pivotal scenes relate directly or indirectly to the walls erection. The direct link
between bricklaying and writing comes by way of the character Mordechai
Apt, who is admonished by his father: You are a writer, not a . . . not a
hodcarrier!. 22 As it turns out, Apt is both. The parallel between the ghetto
wall and the novel entitled The Wall appears, moreover, in the specific
way they are constructed: The occupation authorities are building this
wall as they do everything else section by section, episode after episode,
separately, without apparent sequence. . . . Yet I think we are going to wake
up one of these mornings, hear a loud click in the sky, and see all these
puzzle-parts fall into place around us.23 To describe the building process
as taking place episode after episode sounds more like the unfolding of a
novel than it does the stacking of bricks to make a wall. The analogy is hard
to miss. The terms that Hersey uses to describe one are meant to evoke the
other.
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Indeed, Hersey decided on the diary form to create the literary illusion
that entries were without apparent sequence:
Levinson never had time to go back over what he had written and revise
it. In fact, he chose not to . . . the rule I set myself long ago that I should
never destroy anything from this record: the principle value of these
jottings for later use will be as a guide to the reactions of the moment.
We can be glad of this rule, continues the editor, for it gives us an

opportunity to see the shifting opinions, the inconsistencies, the resourceful self-delusions of a man in final difficulties.24 Giving the texture of
moment-to-moment existence, adherence to the rule also permits the wall
and the novel to share essential structural features. Hersey makes the novel,
like the wall, appear chaotic in form but actually methodically planned and
carried out. Even on the level of form Hersey was determined to link his
commemorative artistic enterprise with the plight of Warsaws Jews. Just
as they were compelled to erect a encompassing wall, Hersey constructed
an artistic replica the structure of which mirrors it.
Complementing Herseys focus on the wall, the novel highlights other
metaphors of containment, wherein boxes and receptacles protect and give
meaning to what lies within. The opening paragraph tells of a search party
[that] found the Levinson archive buried in seventeen iron boxes.25 Out
of these strongboxes buried beneath Warsaws ruins comes the book we
are reading. The book itself is thus linked to the protective dimension of a
box. 26 There are many more such images. Early on, Levinson is invited to
give a housewarming speech for one of Warsaws new families. His point
of departure is the concept of a box: What is a home? Is it just a box to
contain furniture and people?27 He will go on to demonstrate that it is not,
that a home is constituted by the atmosphere created by the people who
live there. Beginning with the premise that container and contained are
two discrete entities, Levinson clarifies how their relationship is necessarily
interdependent. This realization finds expression in the next chapter where,
during a Nazi raid on a makeshift synagogue, the tefillin Schpunt wears as
he prays and dances serves as the emblem of resistance:In that little leather
box, comments Levinson, was housed our monotheistic faith;
The words, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one God. And thou shalt
bind these words for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets
between thine eyes. This our religion, which sets us apart, which keeps
us erect in the face of no matter what affronts, which even maintains the
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spirits of those who profess to be faithless, our very Jewishness, the whole
incredible nightmare we are experiencing now all this bounced up and
down before Schpunts eyes and ours. 28
With pointed allusion to the housewarming speech, Hersey invokes a box

specially crafted to house the scriptural words articulating the essence of
Jewish faith. In this case, the box is made for no other purpose than to hold
these words. The sense of interdependence between box and what is kept
within, between container and contents, could hardly be greater. Eventually,
Levinson conceives of his role under the rubric of this metaphor: What a
receptacle I have become! Because I listen patiently, because I ask penetrating questions in a sympathetic tone of voice, people have begun, not only
to trust me, but also to use me as a vessel into which to pour their anxieties
and privacies.29 Imagining himself a vessel for the ghetto dwellers words,
Herseys archivist also becomes a container. Levinsons metaphor is the
bridge by which the entries in the diary take on the character of contents
within a container. Indeed, what the people pour into him constitutes for
the most part the notes he sets down.
Hersey further refines the relationship between container and contained
when, in part 4, two ghetto dwellers who are obliged to cart off the contents
of empty apartments find a rosewood box containing a letter composed
as a final will and testament. The box symbolizes the familys children
who couldnt be born; the letter inside the box explains the legacy bound
up with it: I leave this box, representing those [unborn] children; in it
I leave the memory of the Farbszmuls. If you be a German who takes
this box into your home, you must know that you have taken Jewishness
into your home, you have adopted the Farbszmuls, forever and ever.30
Importantly, this episode occurs almost directly after the ghettos emissary,
Slonim, has secretly visited Treblinka and sent back a report confirming the
unbelievable rumors concerning the mass murder of Jews. The discovery
of the rosewood box thus takes place at the dawn of a new, even more,
terrible era. At this stage, when the objects of murdered Jews are plundered
to enrich Nazi coffers, Hersey fashions the box into an article of perpetual
defiance. The evolution is important to note. Even an ordinary box now
carries the message of Jewishness previously housed in the tefillin; what
is inside the box is the meaning of the box itself. Container and contents
together bespeak the persistence of Jewishness in the face of all efforts to
vanquish it. At the novels conclusion, the string of images strongboxes,
home, tefillin, rosewood box culminate in the culvert, the sewers that
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serve as the attempted means of escape from the destroyed ghetto in May
1943. There the intense constriction of space enables an equally intense
focus of discussion, where everyone was talking about one question: What
has made our lives worth living?31 Nervously biding time in the sewers as
they await passage to safety, Herseys characters, enduring containment of
an unprecedented intensity, are elevated by a heightened sensibility.
Himself the fabricator of a wall, Hersey figuratively participates in the
task that the Jews were compelled to participate in literally if unwittingly.
From the Nazis point of view, the wall was meant to incarcerate; from
Herseys, it liberates. By including so many other containers that resist the
Nazis, Hersey also allows the wall to take on a set of similar associations,
the enclosure allowing for the release of what is within. Herseys emphasis
on the encompassing nature of the wall reverberates in his frequent use of
other words featuring the prefix en encircle, encase, enclose. This
prefix, coming by way of the Latin into English, has the sense of to put
something into or on. The prefix thus is emblematic of the institution of
the ghetto a place the Jews were (brutally) put into. The en also reveals
Herseys concern with the relation between what is put in and structure
which contains it.
One of the containing elements is the English language itself. Posing
as a translation, Herseys English gives form and shape to experience that
borders on what he refers to as the subhuman. Strikingly, the etymology
of the word English invokes the notion of containing and even constricting. English derives from angle (hence the Anglo of Anglo-Saxon), the
Angles being the specific group of people who settled in the district of
Holstein. The name was bestowed upon these people because the districts
shape was that of an angle. This being between or within a confined space
has other associations: a bend (as in the shape of a fishing hook, whence
comes to angle, to fish) or to compress or fold. In the final association,
a sense of devastating constriction takes over: angle, bend, fold lead
to the connotation of strangle apparently the breathless eventuality
that ensues when the space within the angle becomes intolerably small or
tight. Ultimately, the etymology of English (a yet different way of telling
its story) has acquired lethal connotations, bearing overtones not so far
removed from that of the ghetto itself.
If English bears within its own story a hint of intolerable constriction,
the ghetto enclosed within the wall serves for Hersey as the decisive emblem of the Holocaust. Indeed, the wall over against the fence the ghetto
over against the concentration camp marks the kind of Holocaust rep-
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resentation that Hersey chose to chronicle. Hersey wrote, reflecting on his

approach to the subject,
For a long time, I thought I would write about one of the great concentration camps. Early in 1947, I had extended, intensive conversations,
for several days running, with an alumnus of Auschwitz, an iron-hearted
man who had clawed his way over the backs of his fellows until he had
reached the eminence of camp officialdom, as a hated, but secure, Kapo.
A few weeks after those talks, and after having done further reading, I
concluded that the people in the concentration camps had been degraded
by their experience to a subhuman, animal level; whereas in the ghettos,
the people had lived on as families to the very end, and had maintained
at least vestiges and symbols of those things we consider civilization
theaters, concerts, readings of poetry, and the rituals of everyday human
intercourse. I resolved to try to deal with the ghetto. 32
Herseys swing from one setting to the other actually took place over several
years. Although he visited Warsaw and Lodz in 1945, visits to concentration
camp sites were, he notes, probably more important in the genesis of [The
Wall]. For a time, what he witnessed at the camps loomed as the subject
about which he would write. This prospect led to Herseys conversations
with the camp alumnus. But the encounter seems to have steered him away
from viewing the camp as the appropriate subject. Inclined at first to the
most dehumanizing venue, Hersey ended up turning back to the ghetto
and its humanity. If the camps epitomized total discontinuity with life
before the war, the ghetto maintained a vestigial continuity, what Hersey
described evocatively as a kind of mimicry of pre-ghetto urban life.33
In addition to summarizing his own path to composing The Wall,
Herseys remarks on his progression from camp to ghetto points to the
problem shadowing a recent attempt to theorize Holocaust literature under the rubric of traumatic realism. Indeed, Michael Rothbergs eloquent
analysis takes as its departure point the image of barbed wire, a frequently
reproduced and cited piece of the camp world. More specifically, Rothberg wants to show how survivor and scholar Ruth Kluger in her memoir
transforms barbed wire . . . into a tool for prying open the multiplicity of
relations within the camps.34 Yet Herseys deliberations reveal an assumption in Rothbergs study that is never subjected to scrutiny. Rothbergs
subtle analysis aside, his emphasizing barbed wire already presupposes
that the Holocaust begins (and, in a way, ends) with the concentration
camps. Such an approach filters out the experience of the ghetto, implying
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that whatever took place there, however noteworthy for chronicling the
full history of the Holocaust, does not figure in formulating its terms
of representation. Indeed, Rothbergs study, pivoting on two memoirs of
Western European writers (written, one might add, in Western European
languages), can almost not help but exclude the phenomenon of the ghetto,
the institution that was limited to the cities and towns of Eastern European Jewry. The literature that emerged from numerous ghettos and that
chronicles the special aspects of life and death within their confines, plays
no role for Rothberg in configuring the nature of trauma in relation to the
Holocaust.
Herseys and Rothbergs contrasting strategies are, moreover, representative of a broader line of contention in approaching Holocaust writing. As
Alan Mintz has recently expressed it, The very notion of the concentration camp as the prototypical site of Holocaust literature is put in question
by the constructivist model.35 Mintz goes on to explain the constructivist
model and why focusing on the concentration camp often has unexamined
constraints:
In its critique of this notion, the constructivist model asserts that, although the world of the camps does indeed occupy the ultimate station
on the continuum of horror, what it has to tell us about Jewish behavior during the Holocaust is contingent on and, in a number of crucial
respects, less interesting than behavior in other venues. 36
The other main venue that Mintz juxtaposes to the camps is the ghetto.
Drawn to write of the camps, Hersey nonetheless opted at an early
juncture for the ghetto, intuiting that the wall (in contrast to the barbed
wire fence) would be precisely the symbol needed. Having interviewed
survivors of concentration camps, he nevertheless set aside those tales as
featuring a subhuman form of society, one seemingly outside the ken of
the novel. Hersey was of course not shy about rendering the extreme. 37 For
the author who had provided an explicit portrait of nuclear devastation to
draw back from the camps says a great deal about the camps in terms of
representing the extreme.
Eventually, Hersey would publish essays based on the interviews he had
conducted. Appearing in a 1963 collection, Here to Stay, their belated publication indicates that times had clearly changed enough both in Herseys
sensibility as well as his readership to air what had been previously overwhelming. Yet even here there is a trace of Englishs shortcomings: I met
[the interviewee], still in the enclosure of the Klooga Camp, in Tallin,
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Estonia, about a week after the culminating events of this story, and he
and a couple of his friends laboriously told me about them with the help
of a Polish-English dictionary.38 Strikingly, the story cant be told without
the accompanying comment on how English both serves and doesnt as a
medium. And it is intriguing to consider that laboriously refers not only
to the difficult work of describing camp life and conditions but also to
the onerous task involved in picking through a dictionary to hit upon the
correct word for their ordeal. Herseys syntax, moreover, leaves unclear who
exactly was helped by the dictionary, the interviewer or the interviewees.
What we are left with is the image of a dictionary playing the role of a
midwife, the role that eventually Herseys distinguished translators took
over. Although the on-site interviews have their own story to tell, Herseys
lasting contribution remains his earlier effort in The Wall to let English
serve as a receptacle for holding the contents of a ghetto, even when the
tragic events described constantly threaten to spill over.
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chapter 3
What Does He Speak?

English as Mastery in Ruth Chattertons
Homeward Borne
Having newly arrived in America, the survivor protagonist of John Herseys

storyThe Short Waitwas filled with anxiety at the prospect of meeting her
American relatives. The rendezvous was presented as a clash between past
and present: Will those relatives who were indifferent to her fate during the
war be more forthcoming in its aftermath? The story thereby explores the
collision of cultures, the gap between the trauma sustained by one community (the European Jews) versus the normality enjoyed by the other (their
American counterparts). The anxiety that she experienced also pertained
to her command of a foreign tongue: Will her European-rehearsed English
enable her to make her way in America? Writ large, Herseys story examines
more generally whether the resources that the European Jew transports to
her new home, including the rehearsed but untested tongue, will build
a bridge between one community and the other. But Ruth Chattertons
Homeward Borne flips the focus, the immigrant not guiding the narrative
but instead embodying the strange world that America must confront.
In Chattertons novel, the character filled with anxiety is the native-born
American, unsure of what or whom she will encounter. Strikingly similar
scenes give rise to the anxiety. In both cases, the protagonists journey to
New York in order to meet for the first time those who eventually will
become part of an extended family. But if in Herseys story the anxious
protagonist worries about her own English, in Chattertons she worries
over that spoken by an orphaned boy adopted by American parents.
The limits that English faces thus become even more pronounced when
the Holocaust reaches, as it were, American soil. Homeward Borne, published like Herseys The Wall in 1950, serves as an example of postwar fiction
where small-town America is compelled to deal with survivors of the war
and with the languages that they do and do not speak. In Chattertons tale,
a New England woman, Pax Lyttleton, decides to adopt a boy orphaned in
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the Holocaust and, in doing so, tries to respond to its enormous suffering.
The novel thus explores why a blue-blooded American would act so eccentrically as to bring into her pastoral surroundings such a child and, along
with him, the specter of the Holocaust itself.
Chattertons decision to write a survivors tale suggests the seriousness
with which the Holocaust was taken even at this early postwar juncture.
In contrast to Herseys sense of obligation to put into words what he as
a reporter had seen and heard, Chatterton herself had no special reason
to chronicle such a story. Born in New York at the close of the previous
century, she had at a young age achieved renown as a stage actress and
eventually as a film celebrity. Having written a play earlier in her career, she
turned in earnest to writing in the 1950s, publishing four novels before her
second career was cut short by a brain tumor in 1961. 1 Homeward Borne
was her first novel; this initial effort to master the conventions of the genre
perhaps impelled her to make language a central theme in the novel.
Dorothy Bilik has discussed Holocaust literature in the context of immigrant issues, particularly contrasting writing about the immigrant-survivor
with earlier chronicles of immigration. Language figures as a persistent
subtopic, serving as a crucial measure of distinguishing the two periods of
immigration. The immigrant novels written in the wake of the Holocaust
differ from earlier works, writes Bilik:
They focus on the preservation of cultural identity that is implicit in the
retention of fragments of Yiddish and Hebrew; they do not chronicle the
inevitable loss of language and the acculturation that it prefigures. 2
Earlier to later thus moves from inevitable loss of language to retention

of fragments from a more or less deliberate erasure of all traces of native
tongues to a tentative conservation of something of them. Strikingly, in
neither case is a language preserved in toto. The best that can be done is to
hold onto fragments, a formulation that, as I will soon suggest, is resonant
in the context of Holocaust writing.
Both prewar and postwar immigrants shared issues of language dislocation, the ordeal of acquiring the language of a new home and the
implications for the continued relevance of previous tongues. But in the
case of immigration in the wake of the Holocaust, Bilik does not consider
the radical language dislocation of the concentration camps that preceded
immigration to America. More specifically, immersion into the lager jargon of the camps was its own form of immigration, coming as it did at
the end of a devastating journey from ones home and imposing upon the
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inmate an unknown language the mastery of which was often the key to
survival. The absence of the camps in the literature that she reviews is a
feature of American writing on the Holocaust. But its absence from the
literature is paralleled by the absence from Biliks own assessment of the
linguistic legacy of the camps. The lacuna of the legacy thus distorts the
way of conceiving the relation between language and immigration. For as
Homeward Borne shows, the legacy is not simply holding onto a mother
tongue in the face of pressure to relinquish it but rather locating a self in
the midst of multiple contending languages.
Bilik also connects the movement from inevitable loss to retention of
fragments to a shift in focus from child to adult, a claim that Homeward
Borne shows to be problematic. According to Bilik, Henry Roth, in Call It
Sleep,
uses these various parts of his protagonists linguistic environment to
convey the pattern of language disassociation and acculturation that was
central to the immigrant experience of that time. Post-Holocaust immigrant fiction treats the linguistic experience quite differently.
Here the immigrant survivor is depicted as an adult with deeply embedded

language habits and an established mother tongue that he seeks to retain
rather than relinquish. 3
This shift from child to adult signifies a parallel shift in terms of languages from linguistic limbo to deeply embedded language habits. Thus
the distinctive feature of postwar immigrants is their command of a tongue
or perhaps, more in line with Biliks phrasing, of their being constituted
by it. Bilik somewhat waffles between terms of agency (seeks to retain)
or of subjection (habits), making it difficult to see how much control an
immigrant has over the fate of their native languages. Bilik posits an adult
as the postwar norm and places the association of language and children
in the background. To be sure, she argues the priority of the adult even
as she brings Elie Wiesel and Jerzy Kosinski two authors whose initial
works focus on children as important writers in this literature. In the
case of Homeward Borne, however, we see a child refugee placed in greater
linguistic limbo than was his earlier prewar counterpart. Indeed, this child
has no language to retain.
Committed to a model of stability, Bilik nevertheless attempts to integrate a notion of fragmentation. Hence, she conceives of fragments as
an artistic strategy, a means to show a retention of tradition through a
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disturbance of standard English dialogue. The concept of fragments has to

do with the imprint of the mother tongue on the adopted one, with showing
the residue of what is left, what is purposely held onto. But having excluded
the special linguistic circumstances of the camps the immigration before
the immigration, as it were from her equation, Biliks formulation cannot
factor in a more complex model of immigrant languages. This is at least
partially connected to her positing the paradigm of the survivor as an adult;
the idea of multilingual fragments defining the essence of the immigrant
remains locked into an earlier stage of writing about immigrants.
Bilik several times refers to the mythic substratum of the Tower of Babel
to anchor the connection between language and immigration. But she
tellingly uses it for conflicting purposes. On one hand, immigration mirrors
Babel by moving from one language to many: One aspect of Diasporal life
frequently depicted in immigrant literature is the linguistic dislocation
involved in the loss of mother tongue and the need to learn other tongues.
Loss of linguistic unity is prefigured in the biblical myth of the Tower
of Babel with its movement from a universal language to a multiplicity
of languages.4 Immigration is itself a kind of replaying of Babel, with
the confusion of multiple languages serving as the punishment. On the
other hand, immigration invokes the reverse of Babel, moving from many
languages to one: In part the linguistic acculturation is a reverse of the
biblical myth of Babel, with the diversity of the immigrantslanguages being
exchanged for the unity of American speech.5 To be sure, Biliks picture
of Americans speaking only one tongue is overstated. Yet this reworking of
Babel powerfully sees unity as a cursed condition where the one is the many
and the necessity of speaking a single tongue similar to the punishment of
speaking a multiplicity.
Much of immigrant literature centers on the enormous transformations
that the immigrants changes of milieu require of and render upon them.
By focusing first on the native born and only secondarily on the immigrant
himself, Chatterton complicates all issues, including those of language.
Strikingly, the heroine recounts her own family history through the prism
of language. Specifically, she associates her fathers multilingualism with
harboring questionable religious leanings:
Hed studied [ancient religions] in their own languages, Pax continued.
You see, he was completely familiar with all the Far Eastern languages and
their various dialects. Im afraid Father didnt live his life in this century.
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He lived it in those thousands of years before our Christian God was ever
thought of.6
For the father, arcane languages give one access to unconventional, heterodox knowledge. Unlike her father, Pax does not have a yearning to
become familiar with Far Eastern languages. But the prospect of learning
these languages does begin Paxs education about Jews. Questioning her
mentor, Phillip, about them, he informs her the Semitic languages possess
records of great antiquity. In other words, its about as far back as you
can go.7 History is thus indebted to Semitic languages for providing a
starting point; they serve Pax in a similar capacity. For if Phillip, playing
the philologist, takes particular pains to assign Semitic tongues to various
peoples Arabic, Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic the young Pax links
the Semitic languages specifically with Jews. Hebrew, she interrupted.
Thats Jewish, isnt it?
Identifying the language of Jews leads her to try to identify Jews of the
present. The only Jew she has heard about, however, turns out to be a
Catholic: Papa Leclerc, the towns soda jerk, was called a dirty old Jew
because he was stingy. Having no Jews per se, the town of Mapleton is
moved to invent one. But Pax doesnt stop there; she will not be satisfied
until she is given the basis by which to recognize who truly is a Jew: would
I know a Jew if I saw one? a question posed in association with classifying
ancient tongues and their modern speakers. The issue will not be so much
one of seeing as of hearing of coming to know what languages are (and
are not) spoken by Jews who emerge from the Holocaust.
This language lesson thus sets in motion a chain of associations tied
to Jews and Judaism: the invented Jew, the actual Jew, the European Jew.
In Chattertons scheme, each is bound to the other. The interest in real
Jews culminates in Paxs tragic romance with Jake Felder, the single Jewish
student at the college of which her father served as president. The combat
death of Felder leads to a concern with the murder of European Jewry and
with what she might do in response to it; her response is to adopt Jan, the
Polish Jewish child survivor.
Set in motion by her attempt to grasp the mysterious identity of speakers
of Hebrew, Paxs initial meeting with the boy, Jan, both situates and satirizes
English:
Standing in the doorway, the mouthorgan still in his hand, was the brownhaired boy she had seen in the surgery.
For a moment Pax didnt move. Then she said quietly, Hello.
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The child didnt answer. He stood there looking at her soberly. Mrs.
Harris leaned forward and spoke to him in a strange language.
Swiftly Pax turned to her. Doesnt he speak any English?
Did you really think he would? Mrs. Harris laughed gently. 8
Chattertons heroine, representing the insularity of rural America, fantasizes that English should be enough, that English is beyond doubt a global
tongue. 9 But reckoning with what happened in Europe begins through
Paxs recognition that English is not universally accessible. Even on American soil, English can fail to get through. And while Mrs. Harriss chiding
Did you really think he would? emphasizes Paxs naivet, we later hear
that Phillip, the novels wise man, harbors the same fantasy regarding the
global sweep of English: You know, Pax, weve both been utter damn fools.
Neither of us had the sense to realize that the boy wouldnt speak English.
Even though Phillip impugns himself and Pax as utter damn fools, it is by
no means clear that anyone in their New England village would have had
the sense would have, in other words, been able to conceive of those who,
no matter where they may reside, had no facility in English. For the village
dwellers, the world speaks English, even within concentration camps.
If English is fraught with a sense of naivet and imperial reach, German
carries powerfully divergent associations. For the boy, German is the language of the persecutors the hated language. When Jan hears it spoken,
his expression on his face changes to horror, and he runs away. Yet in
Homeward Borne, German is the one foreign language that Americans
know, even know well. 10 It is, for instance, the language that Pax first tries
to use to communicate with the boy. And Phillip speaks German fluently.
This mastery of German, however, does not make communication easier
and thereby minimize the gap between the insular Americans and the boysurvivor to whom they play host. Inversely, the greater the facility with
German, the more does it evoke the tongue spoken by the Nazis. 11 Indeed,
it is when Phillip gives voice to his fluent German that Jan runs from him.
That German circulates easily among Americans cuts two ways. On one
level, its presence reinforces the Cold War assumption that America and
Germany are allies with common interests. Yet on another level, German
evokes the Nazis and their inhumanity. That the speakers of this stigmatized
German are benign Americans suggests that the Nazi presence has a hold
even among its antagonists. Indeed, Chatterton demonstrates the continued influence of the German Nazis most clearly in Paxs husband, who
brings virulent racism back with him from his tour of duty in Germany.
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This negative portrait of Germany appears to go against the grain of the

Cold War representations of a benign Germany that dominate American
writing about the Holocaust in the postwar period. 12
A Few Words of Many Languages

Horrified by German and unfamiliar with English, Jan, the boy who came
of age in a concentration camp, is fluent in no language. According to the
social worker, Mrs. Harris, he knows a few words of many languages
mostly the Slavic ones, I should judge. Yiddish, of course.13 Chatterton
intimates the perverse nature of concentration camp life through the fragmentation of language. Others have made this case. As we recall, David
Boder hoped to understand better the legacy of the Holocaust by taking
note of the evidence of language:
I kept in mind that most of the displaced persons had spent their time
of imprisonment in camps among inmates of divergent tongues and dialects. For years they had been deprived of all reading matter (even prayer
books), of religious services, of radios, and often of opportunities to talk
with others in their own tongue. It is no wonder that their language habits
show evidence of trauma. 14
But Boder was here thinking of adults, of those who had already formed
language habits. These speakers, suffering what Boder referred to as
deculturation, returned in the postwar period to speaking the language
that they had at the wars beginning. But there were abnormalities that
persisted. It is this evidence that Boder was after.
Sander Gilman, too, in speaking of the lager jargon as fragments and
bits and pieces, was focused on the adult concentration camp inmate.
A special case, however, were the children who came of age in the camps.
Lacking parents and the routine of school, they also lacked a tongue of their
own. Tellingly, it is the through the example of a young child that Primo Levi
demonstrates the particular tragedy of language in the camps: an extreme
case of necessary and failed communication: that of the three-year-old Hurbinek, perhaps born clandestinely in the Lager, whom nobody had taught to
speak and who had an intense need to speak, expressed by his entire body.15
The case is more complex than Levis summary might lead one to think.
As his expanded discussion in The Reawakening shows, the boy to a certain
degree overcame the initial neglect. To be sure, at first he was capable of only
inarticulate sounds. But even in the course of Levis short vignette, the
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boys relation to language evolves: he could, we find out, say a word. . . .

It was not, admittedly, always exactly the same word, but it was certainly
an articulated word; or better, several slightly different articulated words,
experimental variations on a theme, on a root, perhaps on a name.16 He
was not, then, altogether without language. Levi emphasizes the disregard
for, the curious and tragic predicament of a child who had no one to nurture
him. Once care is forthcoming, however, language is as well. Yet for this
child such kind solicitousness arrives too late. For one thing, despite all
his effort to make himself understood, his language remains opaque: Everybody listened to him in silence, anxious to understand, and among us
there were speakers of all the languages of Europe; but Hurbineks word remained secret. Levi pictures an ideal audience: attentive, good-willed, and
versed in all the languages. But such an audience can only bear witness to
mystery, to an utterance without meaning. In Levis moving chronicle, the
child in the camp, warped by privation, invents a language of his own. He
never, however, has an opportunity to enter the realm of shared language.
Perhaps Benjamin Wilkomirskis intuitions led him, when choosing how
to begin his (fabricated?) story some forty-five years after Chattertons,
to proceed in a similar direction: I have no mother tongue, nor a father
tongue either. My language has its roots in the Yiddish of my eldest brother,
Mordechai, overlaid with the Babel-babble of an assortment of childrens
barracks in the Nazis death camps in Poland.17 It is precisely this lack of
mastery of any language, and only fragments of many, that defines a child
who, according to Wilkomirski, grew up in the camps.
Although the Babel-babble enabled survival, Wilkomirksi dubs it gibberish, a characterization he uses to distinguish the non-language spoken
in the camps from actual languages spoken outside them. Hence, this
gibberish, as he terms it, had no value except within the camps; whatever
was learned could simply be abandoned thereafter: So it was no great
loss, as Wilkomirski reports, that I more or less forgot this gibberish
which lost its usefulness with the end of the war. Left in a linguistic
vacuum, Wilkomirski eventually develops fluency in several languages. But
the lack of a native language and survival on the basis of a composite
one had its own postwar consequences: The languages I learned later on
were never mine, at bottom. They were only imitations of other peoples
speech. Able to command much more than fragments and no longer
compelled to converse in gibberish, Wilkomirski nevertheless conceives an
eternal distance from language, a lack of mastery not in terms of fluency
but rather in terms of intimacy and ownership.
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As the social worker in Homeward Borne itemizes the fragments that

make up the boys linguistic heritage, Chatterton implies a history of Babelbabble: the boy speaks,
A few words of many languages mostly the Slavic ones, I should judge.
Yiddish, of course. She paused as she saw the consternation on Paxs face.
These children learn very quickly, Mrs. Lyttleton, she said. I shouldnt
worry too much if I were you. Hes already picked up a few words of
French in the Distribution Center, I suppose and he knows quite a few
phrases of German. The poor little devil has probably heard plenty of it,
God help him! Then she smiled. He speaks quite a lot of Polish.
Oh, dear! said Pax. 18
The reference to the childs special gift for acquiring languages is meant to
calm Pax. But the inventory of tongues does the opposite. So even when she
learns that he speaks more than a few words of a language, this information
provokes Paxs exclamation revealing her sense of just how foreign is the
world that the boy inhabits.
Even later when Jan comes to learn enough English to attend school and
make friends, he still at crucial moments reverts to the mlange of foreign
tongues. An anti-Semitic incident at school, for instance, moves Jan to
burst into sounds [his classmates] didnt know. Polish, German, Yiddish
spilled from his lips. Then, just as suddenly as he had begun, he stopped.19
When attacked, Jans response shows that a multilingual mix still defines
who he is.
Within the terms of Chattertons novel, the capacity to speak many languages can indicate either a cultural surplus (Paxs father) or a cultural lack
(Jan). In both cases, there is a sense of living at the extremes of history as
it is known. In the case of her father, his knowledge of arcane languages
allows him to dwell in a period before the Common Era. In the case of the
boy, his multiple languages are a symptom of the end of that era. The boys
many languages thus parody the antiquarians philologist project, whereby
the scholar develops a repertoire of languages in order to reconstruct the
past. In contrast, the few words the boy speaks bear witness to a past that
has come apart.
Tragic Mastery
English as mastery has two facets: one is the sense of achievement, the
learning that ends with developing a competence that testifies that one has
mastered the language. In this way, mastery refers to a skill. The second
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association of mastery is with domination, with a sense of superiority,

triumph, and conquest. The mastery of a language and the skill with which
one speaks it serves as an index to power. Both cases have implications
for the foreign speaker of English. The first sense of mastery chronicles
the stages of progress by which the foreigner acquires the new language; it
narrates, in other words, a linguistic Bildungsroman. The second addresses
the imperial status of English, both its actual dissemination as well as the
fantasies that attend it.
Homeward Borne interweaves these two dimensions of mastery. Focusing
on the significant fragments of multiple tongues, the novel also chronicles
Jans progress in learning English, representing first his broken English,
eventually his tentative facility, and finally his mastery of it. Strikingly,
command of English terms relevant to his own traumatic past marks his
attainment of fluency. At one point, Jan asks Pax why her husband, Robert,
has remained in Germany even though the war is over:
Why he is in Ger-r-rmany so long time? He is in he hesitated, then
proceeded very slowly con-cen-tr-r-ra-shun camp, no?
Her heart missed a beat. It was the first time he had ever used that
word. She wondered where hed heard it in English. 20
First-time use clearly indicates an achievement. But Paxs response also

suggests that the boys accomplishment rests on being able to invoke a
word that in English is used so rarely. This puzzlement about where hed
heard it intimates, moreover, that terms special to Nazi persecution are,
at least to Paxs mind, still mostly foreign to English. 21 Accordingly, Chattertons orthography, writing concentration phonetically to convey Jans
struggle, renders it not quite a normal English word, but rather something
malformed.
Eventually, however, Jan masters English, an accomplishment marked
by his ability to pun. 22 In keeping with the integral role of language in the
novel, Jans coming to master his new tongue forms a turning point in the
plot. Paxs husband Robert has finally returned from his stay in Germany
and has brought back with him a number of souvenirs, including a foot
locker containing the bulk of them. Having misplaced something that he
thought was secure within, Robert questions the lockers dependability. Jan
uses this as his cue: Foot locker-r, said Jan softly. Do not people ever-r
lock foot locker-rs?23 The play on locker-lock not only confirms his
mastery but also hints at self-destruction. For the unlocked locker has
enabled Jan to steal a gun, the weapon as it turns out that Jan uses to shoot
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himself. The theft of the gun from the unlocked foot locker thus makes
possible an act of desperation undertaken to prevent his expulsion from
Paxs house and his return to the orphan existence with which the novel
began. Instead, he opts for suicide as a way to forestall the unwanted end.
At the novels conclusion, the boy, having survived the attempt to take his
own life, faces a future nearly as uncertain as his past. Both language and
action here bespeak control, the attempt to master ones fate. But the point
at which English is mastered is also the moment at which destruction takes
over.
Chatterton ends by demonstrating a radical suspicion of the language
in which she writes her novel about the Holocaust. Intriguingly, her plot
pivots around the protagonists increasing skill with his new language, only
to have his command of it implicated in his failure to fit in. Mastery of
English brings not eloquence but rather a sense of despair. At this point,
Jan can finally speak the English that others originally (but mistakenly)
presumed that he could. Yet when reality catches up with fantasy, when
English penetrates the recesses of a survivors consciousness, facility does
not enable him to participate in the life of the community. It rather moves
him to realize his distance from it. In the case of Boder and Hersey, English
tried to venture into the domain of the Holocaust, and understandably (if
significantly) expressed anxiety about such an enterprise. But on American
soil, among the rural splendors of New England, English would seem to
have cause to feel at home, to be in its element. It is however nothing of
the sort.
Writing in the late 1940s, Chatterton in Homeward Borne represents the
challenge that the Holocaust poses to American sensibility as a function of
the crisis English faces when attempting to assimilate these events. Homeward Borne tests out two possibilities: the first is that there is no problem,
simply because everyone speaks English. Hence there is always a shared
basis of experience, even between those New England Protestants and
Polish Jews whose circumstances differ radically. Chatterton entertains,
then demolishes this colonialist fantasy of imperial English. This two-part
movement is the first step to making room for the unfamiliar (what Phillip
refers to as the monstrous) events of the Holocaust. The second possibility is for the foreigner himself to acquire a mastery of English. Yet once
he obtains mastery he knows how truly different his experience is. For
Chatterton, English signifies either the illusion of a completely transparent
understanding or the recognition that there is none at all.
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What Does He Speak?
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61
As we have seen, by the end of the 1940s, major efforts were underway
to come to terms with the Holocaust. Psychologist Boder had recorded a
wealth of testimony and was in the process of transcribing and circulating
it: a major university press had published a first sample. Hersey, an increasingly important figure in American culture and letters, had written a huge
work detailing both losses and resilience; the novel would become a best
seller. And actress Chatterton, turning to the written word, had felt a call
to bring the specter of the Holocaust to America.
English had already been put to the test. During the war years, English
was on the edge of the events; it mainly nurtured a dream of life in the
aftermath of the war. Once the war was over, English, like other languages,
took to chronicling what had happened. But, as Boder, Hersey, and Chat[61], (12)
terton show, to resort to English presented a cluster of problems. Each
author makes transparent the struggle that English went through to try
to find a foothold. Their strategies also overlap when, against the grain of
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expectation, they place English in the foreground. Yet the more that English
is brought into the limelight, the more this prominence draws attention
to the uncertain position of English. Nothing dramatizes this uncertainty * 166.40004p
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to be able to remove a Jewish women from the terrors of Birkenau.
In the decades to come, the problems remain. Indeed, as we will see, * PgEnds: PageBr
English will be directly taken to task as it attempts to address the Holocaust.
But in the years ahead, English-language writing, inspired at least in part by
[61], (12)
its increasing global prestige, also becomes more ambitious in its efforts to
find an uncompromised position from which to speak about the Holocaust
and in the name of its victims.
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chapter 4
Please Speak English

Babbling in Philip Roths
Eli, the Fanatic
Philip Roths 1959 story, Eli, The Fanatic, published nearly a decade after
Chattertons Homeward Borne, also charts the legacy of the Holocaust by
way of an immigrant survivor clashing with the insulated culture of Protestant America. But Roth shifts the coordinates in three important ways.
First, the setting is not rural New England but suburban New York, not in
other words the heartland of Americas origins but the trendy boundary
area between city and country living that defined postSecond World War
American life. Second, the survivor arrives not alone but in community.
And third, Roth makes the clash take place not between Christian and Jew,
but between one set of Jews and another.
The linguistic fantasies projected by the American Jewish community
shift accordingly. The suburban Jews dont foolishly believe immigrants
can speak flawless English; they wrongly believe they cannot. Moreover,
although Yiddish is conspicuously on the scene, the Jews of suburbia nevertheless presume it to be a dead language an assumption nowhere to
be found among Chattertons New England gentiles. Ultimately, the story,
written in English, takes the side of Yiddish, and hence makes English a
problem in several ways.
Mysterious Babble
The story relates the attempt of the acculturated Jews from the New York
suburb of Woodenton to expel from the community a group of European Jews who, maintaining traditional codes of dress and behavior, have
recently set up a yeshivah. Roths antihero, Eli Peck, is a lawyer hired by the
community to use legal measures to evict the yeshivah. 1 He endeavors to
accomplish this through persuasive legal argument, both through a series
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of meetings with the head of the yeshivah, Leo Tzuref, and by sending him
a number of pointed letters. 2
The first meeting sets out the linguistic parameters. Initially, English
seems solid enough for both parties Peck, the American lawyer, and
Tzuref, the European immigrant. But soon Eli is (or imagines himself
to be) outnumbered, the community of those who speak Yiddish (or, in
the narrators freighted term, babble) far outweighing those who speak
English:
Some children ran under the open window and their mysterious babble
not mysterious to Tzuref, who smiled entered the room like a third
person. 3
There is ambiguity in the passage whether the babble spoken is mysterious or not. Able to move from outside to inside, the language is dubbed
mysterious by those for whom it is unfamiliar and incomprehensible. Designated as such by an aggressive narrator, mystery would seem to carry the
day. But Roth provides an alternative perspective, one that takes what is
mysterious and shows it to be smilingly familiar.
At first only appearing on the margins of the story, Yiddish quickly
becomes central. Indeed, by referring to Yiddish as an interloping third
person, Roth personifies it, attributing human agency to language. He
more specifically casts it in the role of a character, indeed in one of the
starring roles. 4 For if the story opens with Eli the lawyer facing-off against
Tzuref the headmaster, Yiddish quickly joins the fray, contesting from the
outset the right of English to set the storys terms.
Yiddish acting as a character erodes what Eli at first takes to be his
professional native-born advantage. He attempts to compensate for his
weakened position by conjecturing about his adversarys problem with the
English language:
Yes, thats what residential means. The dps English was perhaps not
as good as it seemed at first. Tzuref spoke slowly, but till then Eli had
mistaken it for craft or even wisdom. Residence means home, he
added. 5
But the reader knows better, aware that Eli has made English a problem
even though it is not. Operating on shaky legal ground, Eli hopes that his
command of English especially the English terms associated with place
and domicile will prop up his spurious position. Yet the problem resides
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not in the immigrants skill with English but rather in the natives Orwellian
manipulations of it.
English becomes an issue when the interlocutors debate whether the
yeshivah is a home, something permissible to establish and maintain in
a residential area. Eli speculates that what prevents closure on the issue
is semantic, an inability to clarify the terms for home. Yet behind the
semantic issues lies the unconventional family that resides in the yeshivah:
multiple children, uniformly male occupants, and the absence of a wife.
In the storys terms, the Holocaust has bequeathed a grotesque family
absurdly monstrous in size and perversely uniform in gender. In Woodentons twisted vision, the Holocaust not only destroyed families, it also
created abnormal ones. Eli thus finds it impossible to fathom how the
building that houses such a family can constitute a residence:
So this [says Tzuref] is my residence.
But the children?
It is their residence.
Seventeen children?
Eighteen, Tzuref said. 6
Too large to begin with, the unnatural family grows in size even as they
speak. Indeed, the conversation wherein Eli attempts to clarify basic terms
to define and pose limits ends with an increase in numbers, as if the
conversation itself were an act of illicit procreation.
It was exactly this kind of monstrous family that zoning ordinances
of the 1950s were devised to keep at bay. In general, community groups
usually invoked zoning ordinances first introduced in the 1920s but increasing popular in the 1950s to protect single-family residences, restrict
the intrusion of lower classes, and prevent the erection of multiple-family
dwellings. Regardless of what zoning may be in theory, wrote one analyst, who attempted to expose the full story behind zoning, in practice it
has become the chief means of protecting and isolating the single family
residence.7 Zoning ordinances were thus established and fortified as the
single-family residence was evolving into a premier American value, and
they helped to ensure its success. Put forth as a way to achieve the goals of
urban planning, zoning actually served as a legal means of discrimination,
keeping out those who did not fit the single-family profile. Roth could
count on these resonances when he has Eli in urbane legal parlance inform
Tzuref, Its a matter of zoning.
A tactic of polite discrimination on the American front, the word zone
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has a yet more sinister association hailing from the Cold War period: the
Gulag. Elana Gomel notes:
Originally, the Zone was the legalese for the places in the North [Siberia]
where troublemakers were exiled. Eventually the prisoners in the Gulag
picked up the expression, calling the camps the small zone and the rest
of the country the big zone, in a mocking inversion of the Soviet-speak.
The expression was known in the 1930s but became part of the unofficial
vocabulary only in the 1950s. 8
Coming into regular use in the same period that Eli, the Fanatic appeared,
the Soviet associations of zoning eerily parallel the diabolical penal connotations that it takes on in Roths story.
[68], (6)
Owning English
At a second meeting, Tzuref appears to concede to Eli his mastery of English.
Tzuref summarizes his yeshivah partners pitiful predicament, enumerating the losses heaped upon the gentleman, whose abnormal behavior
obviously represents the trauma of the Holocaust:
But I tell you he has nothing. Nothing. You have that word in English?
Nicht? Gornisht?
Yes, Mr. Tzuref, we have the word.9
As the native speaker, Eli becomes pegged as the owner of English, representing a community of English speakers: You have that word in English?
Ostensibly relinquishing to Eli the authority to judge what English has or
doesnt, Tzuref in practice lets English slide into Yiddish; in a extraordinary narrative sleight of hand, nicht and gornisht become incorporated
into the English language. And the twisting of English that enables these
Yiddish words to enter perhaps here, too, like a third person works in
reverse as well. For it is English that, making room for what seemingly does
not belong, metamorphoses into Yiddish. Such a transformation signals
the movement to a different register, one better able to count the losses
suffered by the Jewish community as a whole.
To be sure, its neither nothing nor nicht that provokes the ire of
Woodentons non-Jewish Jews but rather what remains of the gentlemans
European life the hat, clothing, beard, walk, bearing, and face. But what he
doesnt have also extends to language: Roth makes the gentleman silent as if
his language was one of the things along with wife, baby, and community
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69
that was taken away. This muteness contrasts pointedly with the other
members of the yeshivah. Unlike Tzuref, he doesnt give voice to the dps
English. And unlike the children, he doesnt speak a mysterious babble.
For the Jews of Woodenton, the gentleman has no language at all; he is, in
Hana Wirth-Neshers phrase, the mute Holocaust survivor and, as such,
serves as a cipher for the unspeakable. For them, his is truly a dead
language.10
But a moment of epiphany comes when Eli discovers that the gentleman
indeed speaks, that his presumed defining silence is actually projected on
him by Woodentons Jews. As Tzuref tells Eli,
He shops two, three times a week, he gets to know [Woodentons Jews].
He talks to them?
He sees them.
And he can tell which is my wife?
They shop at the same stores. He says she is beautiful. She has a kind
face. A woman capable of love . . . though who can be sure.
He talks about us, to you?
You talk about us, to her?11
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The silence so much a part of the gentleman of the survivor who had lost
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all, including, apparently, the capacity to speak does not ultimately define * PgEnds: PageBr
who he is. Only if viewed through the prism of English does the survivor
appear mute. If one relinquishes a hold on English, one finds that he can,
[69], (7)
and does, speak with the best of them. 12
Strikingly, Eli learns that the gentleman talks by hearing that he tells
stories, a fact reported in such a way (He talks about us, to you? You
talk about us, to her?) as to emphasize how much the gentlemans talking
mirrors that of the lawyer himself. What is told in English has its mirror
in Yiddish and vice-versa. Finally, not unlike the narrator of the story, the
gentleman, too, reports on the everyday doings of Woodentons Jews. If
English is the language of talking to, Yiddish is the language of talking
about. There is a Yiddish story unfolding even as (and parallel to) the
English one that we read, a story that, narrated by one who has absolutely
nothing, has beauty and love at its center.
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Counting Hats
For Roths story, too, there is a Yiddish shadow. Of all that flies in the face
of Woodentons Jews, one thing upsets them most: the gentlemans hat.
There he was, wearing the hat, that hat which was the very cause of Elis
mission, the source of Woodentons upset. The towns lights flashed their
message once again: Get the one with the hat.13
Like Roths story, Sholem Aleichems Yiddish tale, On Account of a Hat,

deals with a crisis of lost identity. And as its title indicates, in this story,
too, a hat is ostensibly the villain the cause, the source of the conflict in
the story. Returning home for Passover, the hero falls asleep while awaiting
his train, losing his head covering. Upon waking, he mistakenly grabs and
puts on the hat of a Russian official, a sign of importance that garners him
innumerable privileges. When he finally learns that he wears not his own
but rather the officials hat, he returns to the station, missing the train and
Passover with his wife and family.
Published in a cycle of stories written between 1917 and 1925, On Account of a Hat remained almost unknown, occupying a marginal position
in Sholem Aleichems oeuvre. 14 That changed only in 1954, with the publication of Howe and Greenbergs A Treasury of Yiddish Stories an anthology
it was hoped would bring the literature of European Jews to a new audience
in the wake of the decimation of the bulk of Yiddish readers. Translated by
Isaac Rosenfeld, On Account of a Hat was given a prominent position in
the collection indeed, it is one of three opening stories from the Fathers
of Yiddish that introduce the numerous selections of Yiddish prose writing
that follow. Judged to be a foundation of Jewish storytelling, the story went
on to achieve renown in its adopted tongue. 15
Writing in the late 1950s, just a few years after the anthologys initial
publication, Roth was in a perfect position to harness the effects of the
storys new acclaim. Yet he turns the Yiddish story inside out. To be sure,
in both stories the hat in question does not fit in. In the earlier story, the
protagonist could not imagine himself wearing the hat of a Russian official;
even the pretense of a Jew claiming a distinguished place in general society
is too much to bear. In Roths version, the hat also makes it impossible
for the one who wears it to find a place in society at large. But where in
the earlier story wearing the hat meant becoming decidedly less Jewish,
in Roths, donning the hat transforms Eli into a vicarious member of the
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71
yeshivah community into more of Jew than the Woodenton community

can endure.
Roth thus moves Sholem Aleichems crisis of identity fable in the opposite direction. The crisis of identity is not whether one can leave the
community but whether, and how, one can enter it. Yet whatever inversions Roth performs, his debt to the earlier story is clear. Behind his own
story lies the Yiddish one, freshly adapted, to be sure, but nonetheless
serving to define the issues and to provide the props with which they can
be addressed. Yiddish tales are hence shadowing Roths story inside and
out, informing the English and suggesting its limitations. If Roth adapts
and rewrites one fable, casting it in American postwar garb, the gentleman
tells his own Yiddish story of beauty and kindness within the interstices
of the English one. The gentleman thus serves as Roths artistic double, a
kind of omniscient narrator (yet another version of the third person) who,
like Roth himself, construes the everyday affairs of Woodentons Jews into
a romance. Viewed simply as mute in the context of English, as a passive
cipher made to embody the unassimilable features of the unassimilated Jew,
the shift to a Yiddish context liberates his voice a voice that, significantly,
talks about. When the gentleman is shown to have a voice, a language,
and a capacity to create narrative, his muteness thus is understood as a
construction created by and within English a language that has no room
for Yiddish and for the stories, beautiful or bleak, that it has to tell.
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Yiddish Rhythms
Having arrived within a few years of the end of the war, at least one of
Roths survivors speaks a surprisingly idiomatic English: May and its like
August, says Tzuref, his mastery of New Yorks seasonal patterns mirroring
his command of idiomatic ones. 16 Clearly, Roth doesnt opt for dialect to set
his survivors apart from the natives. Indeed, the colloquial English makes
it difficult to see Tzuref as a foreigner, as someone who doesnt belong. He
speaks as much as an American as anyone, and his facility suggests why
Roth might have changed the original reference to Tzuref as foreigner
to dp in the storys emended version; foreigners speak with an accent,
Tzuref does not. 17
Roth surely was aware that this fluency strained mimetic credibility.
Indeed, Roths wish to flaunt the imperatives of accent goes hand in hand
with the changes to the time the story is set in the successive editions.
The earliest published version of the story sets it in 1953 (Tzuref dates
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his incendiary notes 5/8/53 and 5/10/53). 18 It is plausible (though not

probable) that, some eight years after the war, immigrants could have shed
their accents. But Roths revised version the one that forms the basis
for every critical reading of the story moves the date back five years
to 1948, heightening the sense that a thick accent would carry the day. 19
Nevertheless, in this version, too, Tzuref, having arrived in America no
more than three years before, continues to speak the same flawless English.
The speech of Roths survivors there is here not just one represent
every option except for an accent. Tzuref s English vies with that of the
natives; the childrens babble makes them unintelligible but articulate; and
the gentleman is subarticulate. One is either conversant in English or not.
There is no middle ground, no being caught between cultures a liminal predicament that, according to Kathryn Hellerstein, epitomizes how
Roth uses Yiddish inflection elsewhere. 20 Despite covering a wide spectrum
of fluency, the three different kinds of survivors nevertheless include no
accented speaker.
Tellingly, Roth may have withheld an accent from the yeshivah Jews
in order to bestow it on the non-Jewish Jews of Woodenton: The Jews of
Woodenton,writes Jay Halio,are real enough. Though they speak English,
they talk like Jews; Saul Bellow, for one, picked up the Yiddish rhythms that
characterize their speech.21 To Halios mind, Bellow, who in a review of the
story referred to the accent of a single Woodenton character, did not go far
enough; Halio himself believes the circle of Elis associates who speak with
an accent is considerably larger. 22 More importantly, Woodentons nonJewish Jews speak with Yiddish rhythms rhythms, in other words, of the
language they refer to as dead. 23 The Yiddish language, then, returns from
the dead and in so doing works its own revenge. For the community who so
much wants to overcome the marks of difference that distinguish the Jews
from non-Jews still talk like Jews.Talk here becomes the inheritance of
Jewish Europe that is beyond control, an indelible aspect that assimilation
cannot reach. In this assessment, although Yiddish is marked as a dead
language, its rhythms continue to live, drawing the Jews of Woodenton
closer to their Yiddish-babbling neighbors even as they push them further
away.
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Babble Redeemed
Late in the story, Roth intensifies the inroads that Yiddish makes into the
terrain of English by reconfiguring English as babble. English, in other
words, becomes transformed by apparently being made into less of an
articulate tongue.
The crucial episode takes place at the sartorial denouement of Elis crisis
of identity. Having exchanged clothes with the gentleman trading a green
up-to-date suit for the gentlemans dark, sober one Eli, draped in black,
pays him a visit. Having gone as far as he thinks he can go he felt that
he was one person wearing two suits whats left unchanged is language.
Indeed, Eli wants his opposite number not only to speak but to do so in
English: Please . . . please, Eli said, but he did not know what to do. Say
something, speak English, he pleaded.24 Anxious for English to surface
from nowhere, Elis pleas nevertheless go unanswered, but they tip the
scales. Unable to command a tongue that will link them, Eli sees his own
language turn to babble, to an approximation, one might conjecture, of the
mysterious babble that he heard at the storys beginning:
He was talking to himself, yet how could he stop? Nothing he said made
any sense that alone made his heart swell. Yet somehow babbling on, he
might babble something that would make things easier between them. 25
First heard as a disruptive force, a third person that enters from without,
babble is here redeemed. Initially designating a language mysterious and
incomprehensible, babble now, represented by Roth as a heart-swelling
English without any sense, becomes the key to comprehension. Eli can at
this point abandon the lawyers sense-making English and turn toward the
babble that makes the heart swell a language of compassion that can
enter the world that the gentleman has lost.
English as the Language of Law

It is questionable whether a reformed and recast English ever fully sloughs
off its legal diction. To find a way to address the Holocaust, English had
to become virtually another language. Roths story is clearly about this
linguistic metamorphosis. But it is also about the position of law in attempting to formulate a response to the Holocaust, a response in which
English plays a major role.
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Another exchange between attorney Peck and headmaster Tzuref shows

English to be inextricably linked to the law. Tzuref again appoints Eli the
custodian of English in order to emphasize its (and Elis) insufficiencies:
You have the word suffer in English?
We have the word suffer. We have the word law too.
Stop with the law! You have the word suffer. Then try it. Its a little
thing.26
Opposing suffering (and the connotations of compassion that it implies) to

law, the dialogue recalls oppositions that stand at the center of The Merchant
of Venice. There, too, in the trial scene where Shylock claims his pound of
flesh, law attempts to exact inhuman payment, while the compassion that
responds to suffering attempts to mitigate its claims. Shakespeare, following
in the footsteps of Christian theology, aligns law with the hard-hearted Jew
and mercy with the softhearted Christian. Indeed, the resolution of the
trial comes when Portia, symbolizing the merciful Christian, wins the case
by making a mockery of the law. Law is shown to serve as a questionable
means to an unjust end.
In Eli, the Fanatic, Roth shows law epitomized in the figure of Eli,
the lawyer in a similar light. As with Portias petition for mercy, Tzuref s
exhortation, Stop with the law! tries to show its limits when dealing with
human anguish the anguish in this case not of a Christian martyr but
of a community of Holocaust survivors. Hence, Roths layering of this
clash between law and suffering based on the prototype of Merchant brings
surprising results. The modern Jews, who turn to the law, are associated
with Shylock; the yeshivah Jews, who invoke suffering and compassion,
parallel Portia and the Christian community. Indeed, Tzuref summarizes
his position in a phrase that could easily be intoned by the arch-Christian
figures in Merchant: The heart, Mr. Peck, the heart is the law! God! Roth
uses Yiddish speakers who mime Christian postures to criticize what is
commonly taken as the stereotypical Jewish view.
The interplay between law and suffering in Roths story dovetails with
recent reflections on their essential role in representing the Holocaust.
Specifically, Shoshana Felman has argued that the opposition between law
and suffering is crucial to understanding the Holocaust. For Felman, two
works, Hannah Arendts Eichmann in Jerusalem and Claude Lanzmanns
Shoah, together articulate the central issue:
It is not a coincidence if the two works that have forced us to rethink
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the Holocaust were . . . on the one hand, a trial report and, on the other
hand, a work of art. We needed trials and trial reports . . . to demarcate a
boundary around a suffering that seemed both unending and unbearable.
Law is a discipline of limits and of consciousness. We needed limits to
be able both to close the case and to enclose it in the past. Law distances
the Holocaust. Art brings it closer. We needed art [i.e., the film by Claude
Lanzmann, Shoah] the language of infinity to mourn the losses and to
face up to what in traumatic memory is not closed and cannot be closed. 27
For Felman, the contrast between the two works creates the framework
necessary to gauge the appropriate response. In the case of Eli, the Fanatic,
however, the tensions of art and law exist not in two different works but
within one. Roths story entwines law and art; the story could not be what it
is without both playing a vital role. This duality, moreover, devolves upon
language. English is both the language of law and the language of art, its
dual status showing the limits of each.
Felman examines how the Eichmann trial and Arendts response to it
produced a watershed in considering the Holocaust. Her focus, in other
words, is on the trial and its aftermath. Yet Eli, the Fanatic, written at
the end of the 1950s, comes at a point just before law and the courtroom
become in the trial of Eichmann and those trials of Nazi war criminals
that follow in its wake crucial vehicles for arbitrating the memory of the
Holocaust. Hence, the function of law in Eli, the Fanatic differs notably.
The law is not used to prosecute those who committed crimes but to put the
victims of the Holocaust out of sight. In order to do this, the law conscripts
the apparently neutral term of zoning. But the term is nonetheless used
to try to evict the dps.
This use of the law harks back to its perversion during the period of the
war. One hesitates at the thought of comparing the legal methods that Eli
employs with those used by Nazi Germany. But Eli is clearly worried about
such a comparison when he writes to the yeshivah headmaster: I am not
a Nazi who would drive eighteen children, who are probably frightened
at the sight of a firefly, into homelessness.28 Trying to convince Tzuref
that his actions will not have dire consequences, Elis declaration suggests
that his efforts to evict the yeshivah to have them go away could
be viewed as a shadow of World War II. And there are other ways his
apparently benign tactics recall those used by the Holocausts perpetrators.
In an earlier letter, for instance, Eli argues that the moderation of extreme
practice of which the insularity of the yeshivah is the exemplar not only
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is the key to harmony in Woodenton but also would have prevented the
friction in Europe that ended in the Holocaust. Eli speculates,
Perhaps if such [harmonious] conditions had existed in pre-war Europe,
the persecution of the Jewish people, of which you and those 18 children
have been victims, could not have been carried out with such success in
fact, might not have been carried out at all. 29
Elis speculation takes the local antagonism of suburban politics and gives it
a historical context and mission. From this perspective, suburban American
life, filtering out extremes, does nothing less than correct the conditions of
pre-war Europe. Yet the yeshivah members, by ostensibly introducing into
suburbia the malignant conditions of Europe, risk activating the fanatical
sentiments and reactions that led to the persecution and murder of millions
of Jews. The yeshivah thus seems to operate at cross-purposes. Hoping
to find a refuge from persecution, the yeshivah members are accused of
instigating the very animosity from which they aimed to escape.
Elis legal brief contains the premise that America differs from Europe in
the methods that it uses to resolve group or ethnic conflict. But his proposal
shows how similar the European and American methods might actually be:
Therefore, Mr. Tzuref, will you accept the following conditions? If you
can, we will see fit not to carry out legal action against the Yeshivah for
failure to comply with township Zoning ordinances No. 18 and No. 23. 30
Just as the persecution of Jews was carried out with success, so Eli indicates that legal action which his own rhetoric is trying ostensibly to
circumvent is within the power of the Woodenton Jews to carry out.
The shared rhetoric makes the case against Eli. Notably, legal action itself
becomes identified with the persecution of Jews. Accordingly, lawyers and
legal parlance become the means through which the demonic past can
return. Invoked by Woodenton Jews as if they were part of a natural order
of things, zoning ordinances are shown by Roth to be elements of a legal
discourse that masks the threat of force with the veneer of civility.
Moreover, Eli Pecks legal discourse creates a bond among Woodentons
Jews: But this is a matter of zoning, isnt it?, queries Ted Heller. Isnt that
what we discovered? You dont abide by the ordinance, you go.31 Law and its
ordinances indeed make things clear, demarcating limits and boundaries.
Yet Ted primarily makes clear the violence that underlies the legal code:
you dont abide . . . you go. Not conforming to the rules leads to nothing
less than banishment from the community. There is no in-between.
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Teds appeal to the legal code also reveals another level on which language
and law collaborate. As Eli had echoed the persecutors of Europes Jews, so
Ted echoes Eli. Its a matter of zoning, Eli had informed Tzuref at their
first conference, parroting legal expressions that had become formulaic
in American 1950s suburbia. Hence, the language of law becomes its own
form of legal action, decreeing what is the case rather than arbitrating
a solution. Elis wife, who most often expresses herself in psychoanalytic
jargon, articulates how popular will and law collude: Eli, I didnt bring
up moving [the yeshivah]. Everybody did. Thats what everybody wants.
Why make everybody unhappy. Its even a law, Eli.32 Law confirms what
everybody desires. And the terms of law are what everybody, including Elis
wife, appeals to. In this case, Elis censure of his wifes attempt to commandeer legal parlance points to the disturbing ubiquity of legal discourse in
the language everybody speaks: Dont tell me, Eli complains to his wife,
whats the law.
Elis admonition demonstrates just how far legal discourse has seeped
into Woodentons community and into English. Yet, English is both the
language of law and the language of art, the language that speaks against
survivors even as it strives to become one that can speak on their behalf. In
the next few years, the relation between English and the law will undergo
a transformation, the association with the law being one way English will
try to forge a compelling neutrality. At this stage, however, it serves the
unbending will of the law. Only as babble can English free itself from the
arrogance of justice.
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chapter 5
From Law to Outlaw

Borrowed English in Edward Wallants
The Pawnbroker
Edward Wallants The Pawnbroker follows on the heels of Philip Roths

story. 1 Written in the late 1950s, Wallants novel like Roths story is shaped
by the flight from the inner city to the suburbs. But if Roth cordons off
both the Jews and his story from the city, Wallant maintains a focus on the
city even, or especially, while taking stock of the zones of suburban culture.
Indeed, Wallants protagonist, Sol Nazerman, links the multiple layers of
suburban residence and urban business, shuttling between one and the
other. In essence, however, he is a Jew who has remained in the city that
other Jews have fled. Pawnbroking, already by the early 1960s an institution
on the way out in the inner cities of the Northeast, serves as a last bastion,
the emblem of an ambiguous (even stigmatized) Jewish presence in a place
no longer home. 2
Published in 1961, in the shadow of demographic and economic upheaval, The Pawnbroker also appeared precisely as the attention of the world
was seized by the Eichmann trial held in Jerusalem from April to December
of that year. Adolf Eichmann was one of the SS figures that coordinated the
destruction process. He was captured in 1960 and brought to trial in spring
1961. His trial thus served as the occasion for a vast audience to learn more
about the events that comprised the Holocaust, about the persecutors who
carried out the carnage, and about the victims who suffered at their hands. 3
I will comment in the chapter that follows on the trial, as delineated
in Hannah Arendts trial report, and the language issues that it raised,
arbitrated, and bequeathed. But it is important to note in this context
that Wallants novel comes at the Holocaust from the opposite end of the
spectrum; its focus is not on the persecutor but on the victim. 4 In this
sense, The Pawnbroker continues the emphasis on what came before, while
at the same time revolutionizing it. Homeward Borne and Eli, the Fanatic
dramatized the effort to keep the Holocaust at arms length, the first by
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attempting to absorb the single survivor into the roomy accommodations

that pastoral America seemed to offer, the second by creating zones that
would remain free of survivors and of the losses that they evoked. In both
cases, the point of view of Americans serves as the standard; survivors serve
as foils for Americas reluctantly coming to terms with the destruction of
European Jewry. In the first case, the ostensible motivation is philanthropic;
in the second, legal. In the first, the fantasy is that everyone speaks English,
in the second, that no one does.
In The Pawnbroker, a survivor becomes the benchmark. From the opening words His feet crunched on the hard-packed sand the novel
revolves around the actions of Sol Nazerman, a Polish Jew, who alone of
his immediate family survived the war. He comes to New York by way of
Paris, lives with his sisters family in the suburbs, visits a fellow survivor in
the Bronx, and runs a pawnshop in Harlem. The novel unfolds over three
weeks in August 1958, a period leading up to the fifteenth anniversary of
his familys murder. As the anniversary approaches, intolerable memories
of what he witnessed intensify. Wallant chronicles the increasing difficulty
the protagonist faces in warding off such memories even as his efforts to
do so become more desperate. 5
As we will see, the English that Nazerman speaks neither halting nor
mute is linked directly to the struggle he undergoes. Akin to Roths
refugees, Wallants central figure speaks without an accent: When it gets
quiet, late tomorrow afternoon, maybe well go over a few things, Sol
tells his assistant in a breezy idiom reminiscent of Tzuref s. 6 Yet because
the story of the Holocaust is told through the survivor, Wallants strategy
of withholding an accent implies more than Roths. There are, first of
all, accented speakers against whom one measures the protagonist. Sols
counterpart, Tessie, survivor and wife of his friend, speaks with Yinglish:
So I took in one little movie, so I bought one little house dress I shouldnt
walk around with holes showing. Its a crime?7 Her father, Mendel, about
whom more will be said, speaks a fractured English, an idiom meant to
match the splintered life he suffers in the New World. These are Nazermans
true contemporaries, Jewish refugees who, like himself, lived through and
suffered losses in the Holocaust. In contrast to Nazerman, however, their
speech still bears the memory of Europe.
Yet Wallant extends such cadences even to those remotely connected to
the Old World. Nazermans sister, Bertha, who arrived in the United States
years before the war, speaks an English decidedly more inflected than that of
the protagonist: And you, the big picture drawer, my artiste, she bitterly
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teases her son in the choppy cadence of an migr. Sol came after the
war, and yet his English bears almost no trace of such a legacy. To be sure,
Wallant risks credibility in order to suggest the pawnbrokers cosmopolitan
background, a verbal facility appropriate to a professor versed in languages
for whom English comes easy and is spoken with precision. And yet the
willingness to strain mimetic credibility, as we will see, goes beyond the
crafting of academic credentials. 8
Instead of indicating that a speaker is a foreigner, an accent in The
Pawnbroker is a sign of being at home. Nazermans sister contemplates how
well her husband passes: Selig, she exults, had a delightfully Midwestern
accent, so American. If the pawnbroker lacks an accent, his brother-in-law
cultivates one. But accent here is not a sign of coming from elsewhere, a
mark of a stranger. 9 It is rather the proof of integration, of being at one with
the majority culture. Reversing the usual expectations, Wallant makes an
accent the sign of having reached an imperceptible level of acculturation,
of speech testifying self-consciously to overcoming foreignness. This cultivation of accent for Selig complements precisely Nazermans eradication
of an accent: in the first case, accent confirms acculturation; in the second,
its absence emphasizes estrangement.
Surrounding his protagonist with figures who cultivate or maintain some
version of an inflected English, Wallant gives accents most blatantly to the
black characters who frequent the pawnshop: You a hard man, Mistuh
Nazerman, no two ways about it, comments one of Nazermans regulars.
Well, God pity you . . . he dony judge after all.10 Influenced by a tradition
of urban realism, Wallant clearly uses dialect to indicate the poverty and
lack of education that were the fate of residents of Harlem in the 1950s. 11 Yet
the English of these figures, too, plays a role beyond the mimetic. Against
the resonance of black English, Nazermans phrasing sounds that much
more calculated and precise: I am obligated to list all the items taken
for pawn, Nazerman informs a customer trying to unload stolen goods.
Just as Nazerman attributes keeping track of merchandise to a unseen but
demanding ledger of rules, so a similar set of obligations shapes his carefully
modulated English.
Helping to draw sharper contours around Nazermans English, black
dialect plays an additional role. These characters serve as a choir, their
comments illuminating what can and cannot be said about what Nazerman
has gone through. 12 Indeed, the words that form the thoughts of the first
(black) man in the novel to encounter Nazerman try to encapsulate the
uncertain depth of Nazermans pain through the compressed idiom of
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black dialect: That man suffer! Notably, the novel returns to these words
at its conclusion, this time letting them be spoken rather than thought:
No, man, that man suffer.13 Brooding on these words throughout, the
novel takes them as the most resolute attempt to come to terms with the
plight of the Jewish survivor. Indeed, the phrases evolution from thought
to speech parallels Nazerman own evolution from repression to expression,
from private suffering to public mourning. And yet it is as if the English of
the black characters, emerging out of their own suffering, comes up short
when faced with his. 14
Accents thus serve as shorthand memory, identifying the community
to whom one belongs and embodying the memory of privation. For Nazerman, accordingly, the eradication of an accent signals the eradication
of memory. This tallies with the kind of survivor that Wallant fashions.
All of Nazermans energies are spent attempting to suppress memories of
the past. Indeed, the form and plot of Wallants novel pivot around the
unwanted recall of these memories and the protagonists attempt to keep
them at a tolerable distance, to keep them deeply buried. Walking to the
pawnshop,
he allowed himself a moments recall of his troubled sleep. Not that he
could remember what he had dreamed, but he knew the dreams were
bad . . . lately they were occurring more frequently . . . Agh, he said
aloud, and shrugged, to throw dirt over the introspection. 15
Increasingly besieged as the anniversary of his familys death draws closer,

Nazerman struggles against the calendar, making light of the memories that
threaten to overwhelm him. To speak without an accent is thus of a piece
with Nazermans obliteration of the past. His English is a tongue without
memory; it locates him neither in place nor culture nor community.
For Nazerman English, strangely shorn of accent and inflection, turns
into a traumatic language symptomatic of atrocity and its aftereffects. This
is clearly a different stage that what we found in Eli, the Fanatic. In
Roths story, English, the language of law, recapitulated the abuses to which
the victim had been previously subjected. Ostensibly reflecting the law,
the terms invoked by lawyer and laymen alike actually perverted it. Only
when it yielded to its Yiddish shadow to the babble that Eli learned to
invoke did English speak on behalf of the victim. For his part, Wallant
moves English in an opposite direction. In order to represent the survivors
predicament, English surrenders to no other tongue. Wallant rather lets
it do what it couldnt possibly: speak flawlessly, precisely, idiomatically,
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and without inflection. In this way, impeccable English ironically serves

as a language of trauma. For if trauma refers to the condition by which
an intolerable past can be recollected only indirectly, Nazermans English
labors to filter out all trace of his former European life. Speaking as no
native ever did, Nazerman converses in a deftly fluent English that leaves
no room for the past to enter.
Wallant further conveys the significance of this denatured English by
pairing Nazerman with Murillio, the organized crime boss who uses the
pawnshop as a front for illicit moneymaking. Allies in crime, Nazerman and
Murillio are both European migrs who have established themselves anew
in America and who share a contempt for the Europe that they left behind.
Pointedly, what intrigues Nazerman about Murillio is his voice, invariably
characterized as cold, monotonous, recorded, or phonographic. Ultimately lacking human quality, [Murillios] voice, we are told, seemed to
have nothing to do with his face.16
Murillio himself seeks an authentic voice. An aficionado of opera, he
listens with fascination to the marvelous voice of the ancient [phonograph] record. Yet the beauty that such a voice evinces is also the emblem
of emptiness: for him, beauty ran to the edge of a sheer cliff; beyond that
edge was a peculiar emptiness, which sometimes echoed with dim and
lovely voices.17 This emptiness reaches a climax when Murillio, joins in
with a favorite aria: Cielo e mar, he sang softly with the dead man.18
Murillios voice, severed from a past and a present, sings both operatically
and as if dead, a fitting conjunction of disembodied qualities. Moreover,
Murillios fascination with operatic voice matches Nazermans fascination
with Murillios, as if the beauty of operatic singing could somehow resurrect the life he had lost. But the beauty of the operatic voice a beauty
built on transcendence of the natural voice is at bottom the other side
of Murillios phonographic voice, a voice which complements Nazermans
unnatural English. For Murillios is constructed entirely out of artifice, an
artifice emptied, as it were, of the past. A voice of the present severed from
a past, Nazermans English, too, has nothing to do with his face. 19
Speaking and Reading

If Nazerman speaks his adopted tongue without an accent, he never reads
in English. Reading, which a plays a key role in how Wallant represents
trauma, always takes place in a foreign tongue. Wallant no doubt emphasizes Nazermans polyglot reading to enhance the intellectual persona
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behind the pawnbroker facade. Reading in a foreign language not foreign to Nazerman, as the coy narrator of Eli, the Fanatic might say
also suggests the degree to which he continues to be shaped by European
culture even as he expresses his contempt for it. Yet reading only in continental languages divides the world into two realms: past versus present,
culture versus life, private versus public, reading versus speech. This radical
diglossia defines the kind of divided world that this survivor inhabits.
Nazermans favored texts consist of classics of nineteenth-century European culture. He reads in Russian, German, and French, and the books
include Stendahls memoirs, a novel by Tolstoy, and stories by Chekhov. The
languages are tied on the one hand to his Eastern European life and, on
the other, to his vocation of professor at a Polish university. True to form,
in the only instance where he reads an English-language book (Herbert
Spencers Genesis of Science), Nazerman makes it clear that he did not read
it in the original: I read it in the German when I was in Paris, while I was
waiting for a visa.20 Even en route to America, Nazerman can only read in
the languages of continental Europe.
Reading in foreign languages points in two directions. First, it represents
fantasies of wholeness arising out of a nineteenth-century Europe that tells
of life before the convulsions of the Holocaust. By means of such reading,
Nazerman can once again enter an era innocent in comparison to his own.
Yet reading in the original language suggests a deeper level of personal
retrieval, a process whereby Nazerman can read these books as he once did,
recalling the experience of reading that he once had. The experience of
re-reading Anna Karenina, for instance, leaves him relaxing in the familiar
words he had read several times since his youth.21 The act of reading itself
becomes the symbol of a pre-Holocaust Europe; what Nazerman does in
the privacy of his room is to re-read, to impersonate as closely as possible
the reader that he was before his losses.
But the process is double-edged. Although his reading retrieves a preHolocaust Europe, it also leads to the dreams that rehearse its destruction.
This reading activates a symbolic language of which the dreams that invariably follow are the continuation. So the reading both transports Nazerman
to a time before the Holocaust and acts as a bridge to its events, to Nazermans subconscious recollection of them, and to the readers confrontation
with them. Reading in European tongues, Nazerman must leave behind
English in order to reach a point where memories of his former life can
surface. If conversing in English effaces memory, continental languages
serve to retrieve it.
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Rejecting English in favor of European tongues, Nazerman almost always

reads in private. Indeed, he never reads books in the pawnshop as if that
realm cannot tolerate what his reading evokes. Most often, he reads before
going to sleep, in his room in his familys suburban house. Sols reading
thus serves as a transition between waking and sleeping, a corridor between
one kind of mental activity and another. This is most clearly the case in
terms of dreams dreams that Nazermans reading elicits. Every time Sol
reads, he dreams (though not every dream is preceded by reading). And
it is through these dreams, printed in italics and appearing at intervals
in the course of the novel, that Wallant narrates Nazermans Holocaust
experiences. Nazermans reading and especially reading in an original
language initiates a process of retrieval that culminates in dreams of
atrocities and loss.
Reading and dreams are thus linked by their connection to privacy.
Giving some measure of comfort in an otherwise grim existence, reading
also brings to fruition Nazermans quest for privacy. Indeed, the quest for
privacy is vital from the outset. Nazerman agrees to become a pawnbroker
and to serve as a front for an organized-crime operation in order to make
enough money to acquire privacy the one commodity, we are told,that
he still values.22 Having lost home, family, and profession, Nazerman holds
onto this single value a value realized most emphatically when he reads
in the solitude of his room.
Significantly, Nazermans private reading is modeled on that of his father:
His father sat against a stone in his inappropriate black suit and Yalmalka
[sic], lost in his study of a book. . . . His father looked up and smiled absently,
a little embarrassed at his idyllic setting, a white-faced, withdrawn man
whose natural habitat was the easily regulated climate of the printed page. 23
When Nazerman himself takes refuge in non-English-language books, he

mirrors his fathers withdrawal, a taking leave of the natural world in favor
of a different habitat. This portrait of his father as the white-faced reader
takes place within a dream, the movement from reading to dream being this
time reversed. Reading is here conceived as its own kind of insular activity,
the printed page creating a world that makes its own claims upon the reader.
For Nazermans father, the study of traditional Jewish texts could transport
him to this alternative world; for Nazerman himself, it is immersion in the
language in which he once read that can accomplish it. Emulating with
secular texts what his father did with sacred ones, Nazermans languages
are imbued with the power to summon memory.
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The other consequential father in the novel, Mendel, Tessies father, serves
as the character upon which the camps have left the clearest imprint, which
is shown by his poor physical condition, his immobility, and his language.
Mendel speaks the only sustained Yinglish in the novel, a language accented,
broken, and porous. But like the boy in Homeward Borne, his broken
English is occasioned not simply by the confrontation of a refugee with
an unmastered foreign tongue. Such fractured language rather serves, in
Boders phrase, as evidence of trauma that was endured. Mendels speech
is broken because his body is broken. The broken speech issuing from
a broken body differs from the childs in Chattertons novel, for Wallant
doesnt imply that Mendel speaks as he does because he was immersed in
mlange of foreign tongues and deprived of his own. His tortured English
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represents not a fragmented culture but a ravaged body.
Indeed, the first reference to his speech shows the essential mixing of
languages: the old man called out a complicated Yiddish-Polish curse.
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That is Spanish, Pa, not German, she told him in a dull voice.
They are all Deutsch, he roared, then, in a sly, vicious tone, You are
not mixing the fleischica dishes with the milchik?
No, Pa, everything is kosher, she said wearily. 24
Mendel first of all confuses Spanish with German, the hold of the past
meaning that any language not his own is the language of the persecutors. In
response to Tessies attempt to distinguish between what was then and what
is now, Mendel asserts that such distinctions are meaningless: They are all
Deutsch, an assertion that leaves the reader unsure whether he is referring
to language, people, or both. But the force of Mendels claim is sharpened
by splicing it together with a discussion about the laws of kashrut, of
keeping meat and milk products and utensils separate. Wallant layers an
insistence on maintaining ritual distinction onto inability to distinguish
between languages his own and those of others.
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Oration and Commemoration

It is, however, through the fusion of reading and speaking that Wallant
stages the confrontation of American culture with the Holocaust. The first
character who enters the store pawns a keepsake that he won by reciting
Poes The Raven in an Oratorical Contest. Emblematic of the legacy
of nineteenth-century-American culture, the trophy, a bust of shiny yellow metal on a black lacquered base, was designated the Daniel Webster
Award.25 Webster, lawyer, politician, quintessential orator of nineteenthcentury America, and Edgar Allen Poe, poet, storyteller, and essayist from
the same period, thus combine to mark the initial pawnbroking transaction. The oratory memento extends The Pawnbrokers focus on speaking.
Reference to Poes poem, for its part, activates a second set of relevant
associations. A fixture in high-school English classes of the period, The
Raven, emblematical, as Poe himself wrote, of Mournful and neverending Remembrance, is immediately relevant to the survivors predicament. For Nazerman, too, assuredly confronts memories that are neverending. 26
The clear resonance between the two mournful predicaments does not
end there. Faced with interminable remembrance, the protagonist of The
Raventries to escape from it:vainly,he confesses,I had sought to borrow
/ From my books surcease of sorrow. If, as Poe says, the poem is about
never-ending Remembrance, the obsession with a dead lover Poe
frames the action as an attempt to end such an obsession: to borrow . . .
surcease of sorrow. Anxious though he may be to bring such memories
to an end, the protagonist reports (vainly I had sought) that the project
fails. The Raven thus forms The Pawnbrokers prototype for the quest
to end interminable mourning by reading great works of Western culture. In rhyming borrow and sorrow, Poe also suggests the tie-in of
pawning and mourning that Wallant develops at length. Books and hence
culture become the means by which grief can be ended; borrowing is
the action through which culture attempts to put tormenting emotion at
a comfortable distance. If Wallant replays the attempt to test culture in the
wake of unbearable grief, he also, by featuring the pawnshop, literalizes the
idiom of borrowing in a way that intensifies, and eventually transforms,
the grief.
Destined to be the victim of a sorrow beyond comfort, Poes grieving
student faces greater obstacles:
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Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping. 27
Who for Wallant is the tapping raven? It is, first of all, Nazerman. In response to the customers claim that the statue is made of gold, the Pawnbroker responds: Plate, and confirms his professional assessment by tapping
Daniel Websters shiny skull.28 The tapping of the raven is transformed
into a means of establishing substance, of gauging how appearance covers
over a less valuable interior. The gesture characterizes Nazermans stance
in relation to culture, particularly that representative of Europe: culture
is the veneer covering over wreckage. Indeed, in Nazermans irreverent
assessment, the treasures of Europe redound not with age, as his sisters
circle would have it, but with a stink.29 The tapping raven thus becomes
the measure not only of what an individual mourns but also of what a
culture has lost.
The raven of course not only taps but also speaks, and one of the central
conceits of the poem, as Poe indicated inThe Philosophy of Composition,
his extended gloss laying out the process of writing The Raven, is that the
refrain should be spoken by a non-reasoning creature capable of speech.
The voice that utters Nevermore, in other words, had to issue from a
non-human (i.e., non-reasoning) source. I did not fail to perceive, Poe
comments, that this difficulty arose solely from the pre-assumption that
the word was to be so continuously or monotonously spoken by a human
being.30 Poe thus links the key word in the poem to the problem of human
speech. What kind of voice, Poe asks, can speak inhumanly? It is a question
that Wallant has assuredly asked when considering his own protagonist.
Trying to solve a different problem in an earlier era, Poe casts a bird (originally a parrot, eventually the more melancholy raven) as the speaker of
the one-word refrain. Yet this reduced, non-reasoning speech has its own
power. Broken, impoverished, repetitive speech thus defines the nature of
oratory a speaking wherein nothing is held back and where every word
carries immeasurable weight.
This inhuman, monotonous speaking leads in two further directions:
to madness and to race. The raven gains its name from its call (imitative
of harsh sounds, rattle, crackle, so named for its loud cry) and bears
within its name the speech of the mad: to rave means to speak wildly
or incoherently, as a delirious or demented person does. The ravens nonreasoning speech recalls then speech that is anti-rational, uncontrolled
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because uncontrollable. Wallant releases the madness latent in the ravens

inhuman speech when Schneider, the orator-writer who pawns the trophy,
pressed his starved face against the [pawnshop] bars like a maddened
bird. Although the hungry artists speech never lapses into incoherence,
it does verge on the wild, moved there by his indignation that his pawned
voice should bring such a small sum in return.
The broken speech of a black bird also and certainly for Wallant
invokes the specter of race, the blacks who are the predominant Harlem
pawnshop customers aligned here with the tapping raven. Decades before
postmodern criticism turned to Poes poem with an eye toward issues of
race, Wallant intuited that The Raven was powerfully bound up with
master-slave relations. One of Poes works most resistant to readings invoking race, the poem has only recently been considered in this light. As
Betsy Erikka has argued, The Raven invokes a racist legacy which sees
even the best achievements of blacks as merely imitative and derivative
of white culture. At issue is not only the prospect of black domination,
but also . . . the question of black intelligence. In this reading, the black
birds reduced repetitive speech signifies the alleged inadequate intelligence
of blacks. 31 And yet in Wallants novel the black customers who perform
this tapping mission endeavor to penetrate the pawnbrokers isolation and
bring him to fellow feeling for humanity at large. For Wallant, linking
Poes ungainly bird with a black choir has not dehumanizing but rather
humanizing properties. Black dialect thus fuses with the ravens broken
speech to challenge the position of privacy that Nazerman has claimed as
his own.
Busy writing a great, great play, the customer Leopold Schneider, the
only writer in a novel full of artists and musicians, stands in for Wallant. 32
Importantly, in the novels first pawnshop transaction, the writer gives up
the oratory award he won for reciting The Raven, for speaking better
(more movingly? more compellingly?) than any. In a kind of Faustian
bargain, the writer pawns his voice in order to write. 33 Voice here implies
a blind adherence to tradition, a recitation, as it were, of what has come
before in lieu of what is new and innovative. Alluding to pivotal figures
at a critical juncture of nineteenth-century-American letters, Wallant was
trying to show how the problems he faced were interwoven with those of
American history and yet also were new. In a certain sense, he was replaying
the deal made by his protagonist, exchanging a native and natural voice for
one artificial and foreign.
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By the end of the transaction, Schneider fully takes on the ravens associations. He leaves the store with the awkward tread of a huge, ungainly
bird,34 ungainly being one of the epithets that Poe uses for his raven
(much I marveled this ungainly fowl). With it, Poe conveys the sense of
ominous threat. While the raven never leaves, Schneider does, at least for a
time, but the oratory award remains behind as his surrogate. Emblem of
the failed effort to suppress memory of loss to borrow surcease of sorrow
the statue eventually proves too much for Nazerman to bear, and he moves
it out of sight; indeed, he shoved it into a low, dark shelf where the light
never reached.35 Nazermans gesture, a calculated mixture of deliberation
and force, shows just how loaded with significance the trophy is. Just as he
must increase his vigilance over the past as the anniversary of his familys
death approaches, so he must take the award out of the light, onto a dark
shelf mirroring his own darkened because it is intolerable past.
But the award doesnt stay shelved for long: [Nazerman] looked up
from the phone to see [his assistant] Ortiz studying the engraved plaque
under Daniel Websters bust.36 Bringing what was intended to be hidden
from light back into it, Ortiz serves as a gadfly or, in terms of Poes poem,
a raven, attempting to enter and inquire into Nazermans repressed past.
Bust of Webster in hand, Ortiz also indulges in his own oration, musing on
the difference between the life and suffering of Jews and blacks:
Niggers suffer like animals. They aint caught on. Oh yeah, they suffer.
But they do it big, they shake up the worl with they sufferin. 37
The contrast turns on what to do with suffering, with its meaning, effects, and influence. People can suffer like animals without a means
to articulate the cost of suffering, without the artifacts of culture to bear
witness to its significance. Or they can suffer big, can make the fact of
suffering have consequences not simply for their own group but beyond it
as well. Framing his case in dialect, Ortiz makes Webster speak, as it were,
in a different key. Nazerman himself teases out the implied connection:
You tell them, Ortiz, go spread the word. You have it all figured out, a
regular professor is what you are. 38
Sarcastic though his comments may be, Nazerman grudgingly acknowledges through them that Ortizs oration attempts to set forth a program
that can endow black suffering with a voice. The exchange concludes when
Ortiz, made aware that the workday has ended, put Daniel Webster down
regretfully. The symbol of Websters oratory thus animates the discussion,
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moving Ortiz to expound on what blacks can learn from Jews regarding
commemoration how to shake up the worl .
Writer Leopold Schneider reappears late in the novel, on the anniversary
of the death of Nazermans family, again the pawnshops first customer
of the day. Initiating the series of transactions on the first and last days,
Schneiders reentry keeps oration at the forefront of the novels concerns:
Do you remember me, Schneider? The oratory award?
Yes, I remember, Sol answered, taking his hands cautiously away from
the counter.
You still have my award, you havent sold it?
I have turned down some fine offers for it.
Well, Ill be in for it in about a week. I have something pending.39
Identifying himself by means of the pawned award, the playwright is anxious that the trophy hasnt been sold out from under him. Yet the dialogue
makes clear that it is the kind of commodity no one wants. The epitome
of sentimental rather than monetary value, Daniel Webster is a pawned
object that arouses no desire.
It is not the writing of poems or plays that won the prize; it is rather reciting
the poem for an oratorical contest. It is through speaking that the prize
is won. This emphasis on the speaking voice has behind it the celebrated
oratory of Daniel Webster. Indeed, Websters renown as a master of oratory lasted well into the twentieth century, a renown acknowledged and
reinforced again in the decades preceding The Pawnbroker in history and
legend alike. At times, one blended into the other: Webster, according to
Samuel Morison and Henry Steele Commager,was the most commanding
figure in the Senate, a swarthy Olympian with a crag-like face, and eyes that
seemed to glow like dull coals under the precipice of brows. It has been said
that no man was ever so great as Daniel Webster looked. . . . He carried to
perfection the dramatic, rotund style of oratory that America learned from
the elder Pitt.40 For its part, Stephen Vincent Benets drama, The Devil and
Daniel Webster, makes Websters rotund oratory potent enough to triumph
over Scratch, Vincent Benets down-home term for the devil. 41
Forceful in the Senate and in overcoming legendary opponents, Websters most lasting contribution is particularly apposite to Wallants concerns. As historian Kenneth Shewmaker remarks, Webster did no less than
establish the tradition of commemorative oratory in the United States.42
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Adept at polemic and argument, Websters most considerable achievement

was using his consummate skill to commemorate what were deemed to
be consequential historical events. His special legacy was how to bring
the powers of voice to recall and give meaning to occasions defined by
loss and grief. In a certain sense, his interest, too, was in mournful and
never-ending remembrance.
His goal, as his put it in his Plymouth Oration of 1820, was to transmit the great inheritance unimpaired, an intent powerfully realized in his
Bunker Hill monument address, spoken in 1826 on the fiftieth anniversary
of the Revolutionary War battle:
You are now where you stood fifty years ago, this very hour, with your
brothers and your neighbors, shoulder to shoulder, in the strife for your
country. Behold, how altered! . . . The ground strowed with the dead and
the dying; the impetuous charge; the steady and successful repulse; the
loud call to resistance; a thousand bosoms freely and fearlessly bared in
an instant to whatever of terror there may be in war and death; all these
you have witnessed, but you witness them no more. All is peace.
Alluding to carnage that was, Webster works through it by stressing that

the past is past. Websters role as the figure who fine-tunes oration to
commemoration culminates in his eulogy for John Adams and Thomas
Jefferson, both of whom died on July 4, 1826:
This is an unaccustomed spectacle. For the first time, fellow-citizens,
badges of mourning shroud the columns and overhang the arches of this
hall. . . . It is right that it should be thus. The tears which flow, and the
honors that are paid, when the founders of the republic die, give hope
that the republic itself may be immortal.
If the death of legendary figures threatens to rupture the nations continuity, Webster conceives of mourning as the sign of the nation proceeding
unimpaired. Indeed, tears seemingly demonstrate an enduring care for
the ideals for which the men stood. Yet Webster turns to a refrain that also
drives home the fact of loss:
Adams and Jefferson are no more; and we are assembled . . . to bear our
part in these manifestations of respect and gratitude which pervade the
whole land. Adams and Jefferson are no more. (emphasis added)
In a style reminiscent of The Raven, the refrain of no more antecedent

to Poes Nevermore comes to counter false hope. Webster apparently
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viewed his task as bringing sobriety to a nation wishing to be founded not

by men but gods. An initial order of business was to insist that the nation
confront death straight on.
If the bust of Webster implicates the Holocaust obliquely, it also connects
to it directly by means of the calendar. Although the calendar dominates The
Pawnbrokers narrative the climax takes place on August 28 in chapter 28,
a mirroring of the date in novelistic structure that makes clear the parallel
between the two it is only through the oratorical award that we learn
the year in which the action unfolds. It is an award for oratory, said the
wild-haired young man, I won it in a city-wide oratorical contest nine
years ago. The busts inscription reads 1949, placing the action of the
novel in August 1958. The two weeks over which the events of the novel
unfold move toward the fifteenth anniversary of his familys death. From
here, then, it is possible to infer the date on which Nazermans family was
murdered: August 28, 1943. In actuality, Wallants dating takes some liberties
with the chronology of Polish Jewrys destruction, the greater part of which
was carried out approximately a year before this. But on a symbolic level
the date places Nazermans personal tragedy at a point representative of
European Jewrys overall demise. What is of the essence, however, is how
we come to learn of the date. The commemoration of Americas legendary
orator in the award given in his honor thus becomes the vehicle to date
the murderous events that define Nazermans loss. So subtle is the allusion
to the date that one wonders how intended was Wallants reference to it.
But whatever the degree of deliberation, the way the oratory award serves
as a magnet is crucial in gathering together the associations pertinent to
commemorating the almost never-ending grief that is the novels focus.
The pivotal role of American oratory deepens the cultural implications of
the novels preoccupation with speech in general and English in particular.
The confluence of Webster and Poe provides an opening, an alternative
tradition of oratory in which broken speech is fitted to commemorate the
disasters of history. Making use of Americas cultural legacy, this legacy
(in Wallants reading of Poe) nonetheless itself tells a story of the failure
of culture. In the terms The Pawnbroker sets forth, if reading serves as an
emblem for culture, it also leads to dreams of unbearable horror. It is thus
through the idiom of America that Wallant seeks a voice to address the
Holocaust. The sterilized English of Nazerman points to one kind of outer
limit; the broken speech of his choir leads in another direction, one that
will play a pivotal role in the decades that follow.
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Nazermans amnesiac English derives from Wallant, the native English

speaker, imagining what it is to be translingual, to speak in a foreign
English that provides a refuge from memory. This strategy has at least
near analogies. When an actor wishes to play a drunkard, says Konstantin
Stanislavski, he plays a drunkard trying to act as if he were not drunk.
Closer to the orbit of language, Shakespearean actor Patrick Stewart relates
that when he performs the role of Shylock, he does not (as most do) inflect
his English with a foreign accent. The outsider, as Stewart refers to Shylock,
will endeavor to speak a more proper English than an Englishman.
Nothing could provide a better example of the costs of correct speech, as
Hannah Arendt elaborates them in the following chapter, than Nazermans
flight from memory in language. His predicament testifies that a mother
tongue cannot be abandoned without losing what is essential. Arendt herself, closer in many respects to Wallants hero than to Wallant himself, will
try to fashion an English that neither disguises origins nor speaks only to
America.
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chapter 6
Laws Languages
Hannah Arendts Mother and
Other Tongues
In the late 1950s, English had to first divest itself of its associations with
the law in order to speak on behalf of the victims. Thus the not-so-fanatic
Eli sheds his legal English at the same time that he sheds his constricting
garments. But in Philip Roths story, English never recovers from providing
a legal screen with which to persecute the dps. Hence, it cannot become
the victims tongue; if anything, its nonsensical shadow, babble, can. With
The Pawnbroker, the victim comes to speak English but is burdened with
an idiom cruelly divested of associations. His is an unaccented English
drained of memory and estranged from culture, a neutered, but not yet
neutral, tongue. It fell to Hannah Arendt, German Jewish political thinker,
to endeavor to make English into a universal language of the Holocaust. In
Arendts report on Adolf Eichmanns trial, English becomes reunited with
the law, an alliance that brought both new possibilities and an ambiguous
legacy. At the same time, Arendt also articulated the importance of accent,
a prescient gesture that points to the direction English would take in the
decades that followed.
The Eichmann trial, which took place from April through December of
1961, and Arendts report on it, which was published some two years later,
have generally been viewed as watershed events in setting forth the terms in
which the Holocaust has been addressed. Nazis had been put on trial before,
most famously in Nuremberg soon after the end of the war. But numbers
of important Nazis were absent from Nuremberg; Eichmann was one of
them. Although apprehended after the end of the war, he had managed
to escape and, like many of his notorious colleagues, to make his way to
South America. Indeed, it was in Argentina in 1960 that Israeli agents found
and arrested him. Preparations for the trial took approximately a year; the
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proceedings, which were held in Jerusalem, lasted eight months; an appeal

was eventually rejected, and Eichmann was executed in 1962.
Arendts report on the trial, first published in the New Yorker in 1963,
was one of hundreds of publications that appeared in response to Eichmanns apprehension and trial. 1 Of all these, however, it was (and has
been) Arendts that, embroiled in controversy, has dominated the discussion. A political philosopher by training and profession, Arendt had already
written a lengthy and influential treatise on the nature of totalitarianism,
a study that included a substantial analysis of Nazi Germany. 2 She was,
furthermore, herself a refugee from Hitlers Germany, having first immigrated to France in the 1930s and then, in 1941, to the United States. 3 Having
observed the events from the safe haven of America, Arendt felt that Eichmanns trial would allow her a closer, more intimate confrontation with
the evil perpetrated by the Nazis. Her motivations for reporting on the trial
were thus both personal and professional.
Soon after the New Yorker articles appeared, Arendt incorporated them
into a book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. 4
Arendts analysis provided an overview of the destruction of European
Jewry while simultaneously assessing the scope and nature of Eichmanns
role in the destruction. Yet the report infuriated many of its readers. Two
aspects of Arendts analysis were deemed especially egregious. First, she
charged the Jewish victims (or their leadership) with wholesale complicity
in their own destruction. Second, by characterizing Eichmanns actions as
small-minded, she seemed to imply that his crime was less horrible. On
top of being accused of missing the mark in her analysis of the victims and
perpetrators, Arendt was also castigated for the ostensibly flippant tone in
which she wrote about events of the most tragic seriousness. 5
Critics have drawn attention to the key role that language plays in
Arendts analysis of Eichmanns crime. Indeed, Arendts coining the phrase
the banality of evil to describe the specific character of Eichmanns crime
relates fundamentally to issues of language. Shoshana Felman has recently
elaborated what she takes to be the crucial nature of this connection: Eichmanns moral failure derives from a superimposition of a borrowed (Nazi)
language . . . on this absence of subjective motive.6 It was a combination
of totalitarian language and, in Arendts phrasing, banal initiative that defined this form of evil. Language was thus at the heart of Arendts diagnosis of the nature of Eichmanns transgression: Eichmanns continued
impersonation during the trial (his autistic ventriloquism) of technocratic
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Nazi language, Felman continues, is what incriminates him above all in

Arendts eyes.7
I will later take up the implications of this particular characterization of
Eichmanns evil. But if language is crucial for understanding Eichmann, it
is also, I want to argue, crucial for understanding Arendts influential report
about him. Indeed, the prominence Arendt gives Eichmanns impersonation serves as a cue for my analysis of Eichmann in Jerusalem. For it is
clear that Arendt views not just Eichmann but the orchestration of his trial
through the prism of languages. I thus want to link Arendts comments
on Eichmanns language to her acerbic comments on the role of other
languages, particularly German, in the trial. Moreover, making language
the prism emerges, I want to suggest, out of the complex role of languages
particularly, but not only, German and English in Arendts own life
and career: the continued meaning of her mother tongue on the one hand
and the distance and infelicity of English on the other. This interplay of
languages in Arendts career and commentary leads ultimately to more
general considerations of the role of Eichmann in Jerusalem in establishing
English as a language of the Holocaust. For while Arendt in her report forges
English into a universal language for addressing the Holocaust, English is
to a certain degree also the mark of her undoing.
Simultaneous Transmission: The Trial and Its Tongues

In her original New Yorker article, the opening page refers only once to
Eichmann by name. 8 In the book, Arendt deleted even that single reference.
Instead, Arendt begins by viewing the trial through the prism of languages.
Indeed, the report opens by referring to the languages that are spoken and
the translations that accompany them:
Directly below the judges are the translators, whose services are needed
for direct exchanges between the defendant or his counsel and the court;
otherwise, the German-speaking accused party, like almost everyone else
in the audience, follows the Hebrew proceedings through the simultaneous radio transmission, which is excellent in French, bearable in English,
and sheer comedy, frequently incomprehensible, in German. 9
Taking place in Jerusalem, the official language of the trial is Hebrew.

But since Eichmann and his lawyer cannot understand Hebrew, German
translation is necessary to allow them to participate in the trial (Arendt will,
as we will come to see, question the basis on which Hebrew was chosen
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as the official language). Translation into German within the courtroom

suffices for the exchanges between the principals. But the trial was also a
global media event. Hence the proceedings require a battery of languages
to make them accessible to the world at large.
Setting the stage of Eichmanns trial according to its multiple languages is
crucial because the proceedings of the trial, according to Arendt, are hostage
to the language in which they are reported. Whereas one language may be
faithful to the extreme, another can apparently distort the trials nature,
rendering it incomprehensible. The stakes are considerable. Depending
on the specific language, the trial report can be understood, or not.
The reliability, tone, and transparency of translation are symptomatic
of the trial itself. Just as the translations range across a spectrum of competence, so do the trials participants. Arendts analysis not only relates the
case against Eichmann but also evaluates the competence of those centrally
involved in prosecuting the case. Her sarcastic assessment of the prosecutors blundering, for example, is as much a part of the report as is her
assessment of Eichmanns crimes. 10 And just as the tone of the translations
ranges from one extreme to the another, so does the disposition of the
protagonists in the court from the judges sober demeanor to Eichmanns
disturbingly comic one. This multiplicity, then, makes clear that there is
no single trial, as it were, to report. What the world will know of the trial
depends on the language through which it is filtered. In a sense, Arendt
tried to listen to and report on all of them simultaneously.
It is telling, moreover, that the languages of transmission are Arendts
main tongues, suggesting that she herself, acquainted with the scales of
accuracy and comprehension, can make her way through each. But this
is only half the story. The other half is that the official language of the
trial, Hebrew, is one that is in more ways than one foreign to Arendt. 11
Even though she sits in the courtroom in Jerusalem, she still like those
throughout the world depends on the simultaneous transmission to follow
the full proceedings. This dependence on the version of the trial that the
world outside the courtroom hears emphasizes that she, too, remains an
outsider, a reporter coming from abroad. Yet she is also in the courtroom
and thereby has direct access to the German-language response of the
defense. Her being neither quite inside nor outside will move her to characterize the official language as less reliable than the unofficial ones as if
the Hebrew spoken in the courtroom has little to do with, or even works
against, the pursuit of justice. Thus in the early days of the trial she can
write to her friend, the philosopher Karl Jaspers, about Die Komodie mit
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dem Hebraischen, wo alles deutsch kann und deutsch denkt (the comedy
with Hebrew, where everyone knows German and thinks in German). 12
Arendt implies that Hebrew is only used for ceremonial purposes. Since
everyone knows German an exaggerated claim, to be sure the trial could
be more expeditiously conducted in the language that everyone, including
the defendant and Arendt herself, understood. The unofficial languages
are thus truer, or less given to sham, than the official one. So in Arendts
estimation, her unofficial narrative of the trial documented in Eichmann
in Jerusalem will be truer than the official one presented in the court.
Everyone Knows German

Arendt characterizes the official language, Hebrew, as taking part in a
comedy, because it plays a role in making the trial into theater. In her view,
if one looks beneath the surface, one finds that everyone knows German
and thinks in German. For Arendt, German sets the standard, serving
as the main unofficial language. Yet in the simultaneous transmission
the version of the trial that is broadcast to the German-speaking world
German, of all the languages, clearly suffers most. Indeed, German is
so poorly rendered that it transforms the trial from a sober attempt at
judicial reckoning to sheer comedy. For opposite reasons, both Hebrew
and German earn the epithet comedy. The prism of language, then, can
invert the tone of the trial and import comedy where one would least
expect it.
That German is the language so badly compromised has several implications. First, Arendt accounts for the violation of German in political
terms:
It is among the minor mysteries of the new State of Israel that, with its
high percentage of German-born people, it was unable to find an adequate translator into the only language the accused and his counsel could
understand. For the old prejudice against German Jews, once very pronounced in Israel, is no longer strong enough to account for it. Remains
as explication the even older and still very powerful Vitamin P, as the
Israelis call protection in government circles and the bureaucracy [sic]. 13
The intrusion of the political into the trial therefore begins with the violation of German, making it no longer a reliable source. Arendt also
associates this contamination of German by political forces with other key
issues. The ill treatment of German takes place because of the absence of
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German as a mother tongue the translator was apparently not one of

the high percentage of German-born people. Arendt thus intimates that
the absence of a mother tongue can make something incomprehensible, a
position that as I will later suggest has broader implications for her manner
of configuring the trials languages. Conversely, the need for an adequate
translation into German arises because of the monolingual limitations of
Eichmann and his lawyer (the only language the accused and his counsel
could understand). Nonnative German, on the one hand, and monolingual dependence, on the other, converge to create sheer comedy borne
out of political intrigue.
The specific term Arendt uses to refer to the bad German is also striking: incomprehensible. The German language report is so poor that it
falls below the threshold of an even basic understanding. But incomprehensible has another set of associations for Arendt in dealing with the
Holocaust. According to Mary Dietz, Arendt believed the Holocaust to be
an incomprehensible crime and that its nature as incomprehensible was
at the forefront of Arendts inquiry. What does it mean to comprehend
what is historically incomprehensible? Spoken or unspoken, this question
lies at the center of Arendts thinking about the Holocaust and the fate
of European Jewry in the twentieth century.14 Given Dietzs assessment,
based largely on Arendts writings from the 1950s, the connection of incomprehensible with the faulty German translation is arresting. For the
opaqueness of the German comes to mirror the opaqueness of the event
itself.
Political factors thus contrive to make the report of the trial in German
unreliable. But Arendt also views German as playing a diametrically opposite role, ensuring legal sobriety. This can take place, first of all, because the
judges (who, in contrast to the translator, were all German-born) do speak
German. They were thus not dependent on the translation from German
(as spoken by the defense) to Hebrew (the trials official language). Tellingly,
Arendt imputes considerable moral weight to the fact that the judges let
German play a role in the trial:
[The judges] are so obviously three good and honest men that one is not
surprised that none of them yields to the greatest temptation to playact
in this setting that of pretending that they, all three born and educated
in Germany, must wait for the Hebrew translation. 15
They demonstrate their honesty and goodness by showing that they understand German, the public display of which thus ensures their integrity.
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Their refusal to pretend that translation is necessary overcomes the greatest temptation to playact.For Arendt, this refusal to posture to pretend or
playact carries immense implications. For her analysis of the trial pivots
on the conflict between those who stand for justice, mainly represented by
the judges, and those who endorse a show trial, represented by the chief
prosecutor and the prime minister. Hence, this acknowledgment of German places the judges on the side of justice rather than that of pretense and
theater. Arendt emphasizes this even more in the case of Moshe Landau,
the head of the court. That he uses his German mother tongue16 as if it
were the chosen language of the trial demonstrates his independence and
his attempt to counter the show trial that, according to Arendt, the state of
Israel wishes to promote. In the Jerusalem trial, then, it is German that can
keep extralegal considerations at bay.
German thus operates on at least two, at times contradictory, levels. On
the one hand, broadcasting to the world a version of the trial proceedings
that is sheer comedy, the German language transmission is associated
with an intrusion of political factors that risk distorting the trial. On the
other hand, being clearly aligned with the resolute independence of the
judges, German symbolizes the commitment of justice to seek a verdict
without submitting to political pressure. From the beginning, German is
both the symbol of the political and the symbol of justice, the two forces
that to Arendts mind compete to determine the course and outcome of
the trial. 17
Yet German also has another, more integral role in the trial: it is the language
of Eichmann. What this means is that even though Arendt initially casts
German in a neutral position (as one of the languages reporting on the trial)
or in a ethically privileged position (as the language by which the judges
can best conduct many aspects of the trial and thus show themselves as free
from political suasion), German is most central to the trial because it is the
language spoken by the notorious defendant. It is, moreover, the language
that he employed to carry out the crimes. 18 Arendts preoccupation with the
role of languages in orchestrating the trial thus had to come to grips with
the specific role of German as the language of the perpetrator. Arendt met
this challenge head on, arguing that it was precisely Eichmanns relation
to the German language that made it possible for him to carry out the
Holocaust.
Arendt formulates the problem first as a fight: Eichmann carries on a
heroic fight with the German language, which invariably defeats him.19
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What Arendt terms heroic is actually meant to be antiheroic, since Eichmann loses his fight in the sense of using words and phrases inappropriately. 20 Eichmanns incompetence points Arendt in two directions: first, she
wants to argue that his mistakes are funny, ludicrous. Arendt is aware
that the topic of which she writes is not funny in some trivial sense and
that it takes a certain unusual perspective to see it in this light, that one can
see that the horrible can be not only ludicrous but outright funny.21 But
the comic frame, set in motion by Eichmanns bungling of German, offers
a proper lens to view the kind of criminal he is.
Arendt has, we recall, spoken previously of the association of German
and comedy at the trial: the transmission of the trial in German to the
outside world was conveyed so poorly that Arendt referred to it as sheer
comedy. Here again, Eichmanns ineptitude in German leads Arendt to
invoke the comic frame. The two cases share the fact that they report on
tragic events (what Arendt refers to as the horrible) with a language and
register that cannot do justice to them. Yet it is striking that Arendt uses the
rubric of comedy to bring together the two mishandlings of German. 22 At
first glance, the two cases seem far more different than similar. In the case of
the transmission to the world, a representative of the Israeli court reports
on the proceedings as they unfold, using the language of the perpetrator
and of the judges. In the case of Eichmann, the comedy occurs when he
attempts to sincerely represent his own actions but instead, according to
Arendt, unwittingly uses language that does not match the horrible events
of which he speaks.
This sense that the official version of the trial evokes the comic gains
power when we recall that Arendt had referred to the comedy in Hebrew,
meaning the comedy that was enacted by way of making Hebrew the official
language of the court. This elevation of Hebrew to premier status took
place in spite of the fact that, as Arendt asserts, everybody knows and
thinks in German. Hence, the trial could have proceeded more effectively
had German been the language of the courtroom, a gesture that would
have also placed the prosecution and the defendant on a similar linguistic
footing. Indeed, Arendts animus against Hebrew may have partially issued
from the separation of prosecution and defendant that the centrality of
Hebrew caused and, at least symbolically, the separation of those who were
Jewish and those who were not.
In the case of Hebrew, however, Arendts invoking the comic frame has
not so much to do with incompetence as it does with appearance and
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reality, sham and substance, theater and courtroom. 23 That Hebrew was
given a position that it did not, to Arendts mind, really deserve, cast it in
the role of an arrogant intruder, its pompous usurpation of the stage of a
piece with Arendts skeptical assessment of the trial as orchestrated by the
state. The comedy that Eichmann enacts thus takes place within a series of
comic episodes, all of which are implicated in Arendts assessment of the
proper role language and languages should play in the trial.
Arendts insistence on a comic tone shares features with a comic response to the Holocaust as formulated by Terrence Des Pres: in such an
approach, pity and terror are held at a distance, and this is not, finally, a
bad thing . . . by setting things at a distance it permits us a tougher, more
active response. We are not wholly, as in tragedys serious style, compelled
to a standstill by the matter we behold.24 Although Des Pres takes for his
examples exclusively literary works (by Borowski, Epstein, and Spiegelman)
that focus on the victim, the aspects of distance and toughness especially
dovetail with Arendts iconoclastic reporting of a notorious persecutors
trial. If so, Arendts designation of levels of linguistic comedy carry mixed
signals, faulting German and Hebrew for distorting the events yet turning
to the comic as a means of obtaining distance and a tougher that is,
less partisan response. As we will see, the distance obtained finds its apt
linguistic correlative with the English in which Arendt actually writes her
trial report.
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The (German) Language Remains

If Eichmanns defeat at the hands of German, as it were, accounts for his
particular brand of evil, German nevertheless, in Arendts view, escapes
from the encounter intact. Indeed, the German language is one of the few
entities that maintains such integrity. In an interview given shortly after
the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt emphasizes that German,
her mother tongue, continues to provide her with a link perhaps the only
link to pre-war Germany. When you come to Europe, asks interviewer
Gnther Gaus,what, in your impression, remains and what is irretrievably
lost? Arendts response insists on the singular importance of language:
The Europe of the pre-Hitler period? I do not long for that, I can tell
you . What remains? The language remains.25 The language that remains
is German, and it is the thread of language the continued vitality of
German that connects pre-war and postwar Europe. Indeed, the notion
of remaining, of holding steady despite all changes, has a double aspect.
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First, the language itself neither suffered from nor was implicated in the
crimes that the Nazis perpetrated. It wasnt, as Arendt puts it forcibly,
the German language that went crazy.26 Individuals and even a nation
might have gone crazy, might have violated the norms of civilization. But
the German language was not complicit. Such a view runs counter to that
expressed by George Steiner a few years previously, where Steiner tied the
history of the German language inextricably to the specific attributes of the
German nationalism responsible for the Holocaust. According to Steiner,
moreover, the officialese that the Nazis nurtured damaged the language to a
degree that it continued to be scarred in the postwar period. 27 For Arendt,
however, the language managed to escape, providing the last refuge that
Europe had to offer. 28
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taining a relation to the mother tongue that, in Arendts estimation, not
everyone so scrupulously tended: People can forget their mother tongue.
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Thats true Ive seen it, she testifies, giving a sense that she, in a different
way than Eichmann, had to carry on her own fight not with, but on behalf of, the German language. According to Arendt, this act of conscious
preservation has particularly high stakes: There are people who speak the
new language better than I do. I still speak with a very heavy accent, and
I often speak unidiomatically. They can all do these things correctly. But
they do them in a language in which one clich chases another because the
productivity that one has in ones own language is cut off when one forgets
that language.30
What is at stake is nothing less than the moral quality of thought and
expression. This Arendt signals by invoking the notion of clich, the same
notion that characterized Eichmanns (and Germanys) pathology and
abetted the lethal, if banal, transgressions that he (and they) committed.
Forgetting ones language was another way that the reification to which
the term clich points could take hold. Faithfully preserving German, on
the other hand, despite the unpolished veneer of accent and the occasional
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malapropism that were the side effects of such loyalty, kept Arendt lucid.
I have always, Arendt declared to Gaus, consciously refused to lose my
mother tongue.31 This refusing to lose or to let go was more than simply
maintaining the ability to speak or read a native language. It was rather
making sure that German continued to inform what she wrote and said,
even when, paradoxically, she was conversing in a foreign tongue. 32
The stake that Arendt had in German is thus clear and also accounts for
her highlighting the judges determination to use German, their mother
tongue. Indeed, their decision to acknowledge German as a legitimate
language of the court conveys that the language remains, that, despite
everything, German can continue to be employed to establish truth. Hence,
Arendts appreciation for the judges recourse to German comes because
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their position so closely mirrors her own. It is perhaps for this reason that
Arendt, speaking appreciatively of Judge Landaus German interventions
during the trial, notes that it was his mother tongue. Landau, in other
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words, treated the language with the care that Arendt continued to feel
toward it. This sentiment went against what might have been expected. As
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tance from the perpetrators. Nevertheless, they persisted in using German
when needed and, just as significant for Arendt, they refused to distance
[104], (11
themselves from it, to confer a second-class position on the language. For
them, too, the language remained.
The judges acknowledgment of their mother tongue as a civilizing force
was especially important in light of the role German, according to Arendt,
had played in Eichmanns crime. But the German against which Eichmann
carried out his heroic struggle was not the German of the honest judges or
of Arendt. Indeed, their use of German to further the cause of justice shows
how far Eichmann was from being a representative speaker of German. To
be sure, Germany shared his propensity for clich, and in this way he represented the average German as well as the fanatic Nazi. But he was alienated
from the German language, an entity that, for Arendt, was different and
separate from the nation. Indeed, from a certain perspective, he did not
speak German at all but officialese, a language made up exclusively of
clichs. 33 It was exactly this officialese that the mother tongue of Arendt
and, presumably, of the judges opposed.
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You Write in English Now?

Celebrating German and chastising Hebrew, Arendt nevertheless wrote
about the trial in yet a third language, English. Arendt had little facility in
English when she immigrated to the United States in 1941. But soon after her
arrival, she arranged to learn English by studying it intensively, spending
several months away from her home, husband, and New York to expedite
the process. 34 Later that year she wrote her first letter in English, a proposal
to Theodore Gastner to write an essay for a scholarly journal edited by
Arendts friend, Salo Baron. By the mid-1940s, Arendt was writing essays
regularly in English, and at the end of the decade published in English a
major treatise, The Origins of Totalitarianism. By the time she wrote her
report on the Eichmann trial in the early 1960s, she had made it the primary
language in which she wrote.
Despite being a seasoned commentator in English, Arendt nevertheless
remained tentative about expressing herself in her adopted tongue. In the
interview with Gnther Gaus from this period, Arendt, in response to
Gauss query, reflects on her relation to English. Having mentioned that
Arendt writes in English, Gaus pursues its implications: I wanted to ask
you that. You write in English now? Arendt confirms this but also qualifies
what such writing means: I write in English, but I have never lost a feeling
of distance from it.35 Having used English as her main tool of critical
analysis for several decades, Arendt nonetheless emphasizes the sense in
which her mastery of the language is incomplete. To make clear that the
distance she is referring to is not trivial, she goes on to measure what English
means in contrast to her mother tongue: There is a tremendous distance
between your mother tongue and another language.Arendt elaborates her
relation to English as a general precept in order to suggest that, no matter
the degree of accomplishment, the adopted tongue will never have the same
intimacy for the speaker as the native one.
Voicing this common appreciation for the distinctiveness of the mother
tongue, Arendt seems not so much to be apologizing for what she is unable to do in English as to deepen the perplexity implied in Gauss initial
question a question, we recall, put in German in an interview slated to
appear on German television. Between the lines of this question, one hears
Gaus probing the reason why Arendt would forego her mother tongue in
deference to an adopted one, indeed not to her second, French, but a third
language? In response, Arendt returns to the issue (or strategy?) of distance
and how that distance affects her writing: I do things in German that I
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would not permit myself to do in English. That is, sometimes I do them in

English too, because I have become bold, but in general I have maintained
a certain distance.36 If German as mother tongue allows Arendt complete
freedom of expression, English as adopted one places certain constraints;
it compels Arendt to limit that freedom. There are times where she uses
English as she does German where she momentarily forgets the tremendous distance that defines the separation between adopted and mother
tongue. There are times where the two do take on a kind of identity. At
these moments, English goes beyond the limits that Arendt has set for it. If
distance was the norm and the defining feature of her relation to English,
Arendt also, moved by what she called boldness, chose on occasion to treat
English as she did her mother tongue. But such confusion of roles was rare.
This mixture of tentativeness and boldness shaped aspects of Arendts
writing and thinking and impelled her, at times, to turn for help to native
English speakers. Among these, Mary McCarthy looms as pivotal. Arendt
and McCarthy, popular American author of fiction, memoir, and essay,
met in the 1940s and cultivated an intimate friendship for the remainder of
their lives. During these years, they regularly read and critiqued each others
work. Importantly, McCarthy, whose mother tongue was English, edited
and, in Carol Brightmans phrase, Englished some of Arendts writing. 37
Strikingly, McCarthys intimacy with and respect for Arendt did not
prevent her from taking issue with Arendts English. From the outset,
McCarthy thought it her prerogative to point out Arendts errors, a task
McCarthy performed at times with inflated rhetoric. In the first letter,
mainly dedicated to praising Arendts The Origins of Totalitarianism, McCarthy draws attention to Arendts grammatical lapses: there are a few
barbarisms, such as the use of ignore to mean be ignorant of that are of
no consequence but might be corrected in another edition.38 McCarthy
evidently thought that there was no dissonance in referring to grammatical
errors as barbarisms when commenting on a book devoted to totalitarianism. McCarthy most likely invoked such strident terms to display for
Arendt her command of English and to demonstrate her own intellectual
credentials.
McCarthys reservations regarding Arendts inexact English eventually
became more significant. In what has become an influential challenge to
Arendts formulation of the notion of evil, McCarthy criticized Arendts use
in a lecture, Thinking and Moral Considerations, of the word thoughtlessness to describe the state of mind that accompanies and gives rise to
acts of evil. Although the letter in which McCarthys comments appear was
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written in 1971, it addresses issues directly linked to Arendts formulation of

the notion of the banality of evil and are therefore worth quoting at length:
I have one objection to your vocabulary. Thoughtlessness. It doesnt
mean what you want it to mean in English, not any more; the sense
you are trying to impose on it is given in the big OED as Now Rare.
And it seems to me a mistake to force a key word in an essay to mean
what it doesnt normally, even when the reader understands what you are
trying to say with it. Not to mention the cases when the reader will fail to
understand and read it as heedlessness, neglect, forgetfulness, etc. 39
What McCarthy calls attention to here is no longer a matter of grammar. 40

At issue now is at the conceptual center of the argument. Arendt uses a
word that, according to McCarthy, cannot work to clarify the argument
Arendt wishes to make regarding the danger inherent in the inability to
think. Surprisingly, the question is not at bottom one of understanding.
Even when the reader understands, McCarthy remonstrates, the word still
does not belong in the essay. She issues this judgment because Arendt, in
McCarthys powerful phrase, force[s] thoughtlessness to mean what
it doesnt normally as if Arendt had resorted to an act of linguistic aggression to carry home a point about the moral failures that led to much
more costly acts of aggression. This inexact use of a key word is likely
one of those instances that Arendt had referred to as a becoming bold,
a willingness to use English in ways that she would usually only reserve
for her mother tongue. Indeed, one wonders whether Arendt, in a gesture
similar to that of her teacher Heidegger, was deliberately drawing on the
meaning of a word that came from an earlier period, believing that its
being now rare in current usage would not hinder understanding but
rather facilitate it. But McCarthy was not sympathetic to such linguistic
boldness, protesting later in life against what Hannah was trying to do to
[the English] language a kind of violation that it wouldnt take.41 The
degree of violation that either author or editor felt English could take is not
entirely clear. When Thinking and Moral Considerations was published
in 1971, Arendt, apparently responding to McCarthys censure, had removed
thoughtlessness and replaced it with a curious, quite authentic inability
to think.42 But Arendts boldness would not let the issue rest. For when
Arendt integrated the material from her lecture into her final opus, The Life
of the Mind, thoughtlessness reappeared. Moreover, although McCarthy
had so resolutely taken issue with Arendt, she chose when editing (and
Englishing) The Life of the Mind to let thoughtlessness stand. 43
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Drawing on McCarthys strictures, Seyla Benhabib is one of the few

critics who has addressed the implications of Arendts violation of English
in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Indeed, Benhabibs analysis implies that forcing
English to mean what it doesnt normally may have had a significant
role in alienating readers of Arendts report. Benhabibs broader discussion
locates the contention around issues of narrative and, more specifically,
how Arendt failed to find the kind of narrative and narrative voice appropriate to the subject of the Holocaust. But Arendts failure, Benhabib
claims, was only a more dramatic instance of what occurred generally in this
period: Hannah Arendt was punished by the Jewish community precisely
because she, like so many others who were also Holocaust survivors, had
not found the right public language, the right dictum through which to
narrate past sorrow, suffering and loss.44 In this account, Arendt is a victim of her time. There was in the early 1960s no forum for survivors to tell
their story without encountering resistance from the audience. Benhabib
suggests moreover that the resistance came more from the Jewish than nonJewish community, a contention only partially borne out by contemporary
reactions to Eichmann in Jerusalem.
In seeking a narrative voice, Arendt was groping to find both the right
dictum and the appropriate subject position. (That Arendt, according
to Benhabib, had found it before in earlier writings makes explanation
more difficult as to why she this time felt so much at a loss.) In any case,
Arendts boldness with English contributes to this abandonment of an
appropriate narrative voice. Specifically, Benhabib turns to McCarthys
censure of Arendt for trying to make English do what it was not meant
to. Benhabib takes seriously both Arendts transgression and McCarthys
strictures: Arendt forced the English language into a procrustean bed to
convey her own complex, and perhaps even ultimately confused, reflections
on the issue of personal responsibility under dictatorships.45 Benhabibs
gloss on McCarthy suggests that the violation may have been more a symptom than confusion, a gesture that reflects the disturbing issues that Arendt
was trying to make sense of. That Arendt may have forced her adopted language to perform in ways that were beyond its capacity and that resulted
in its distortion has an eerie echo of a victim-perpetrator relationship, of
one side compelling the other to engage in activities that cannot help but
debase.
Benhabib also views these violations in the larger context of Arendts
project. With these concepts Arendt was attempting both to revise her own
thoughts about evil that she had set forth in The Origins of Totalitarianism
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109
and to counter conventional notions of thinking about evil in the Western

tradition of philosophy. Given Arendts effort to revise and innovate, the
concepts thus carried a special burden. But the terms Arendt used confused
rather than clarified her position. Indeed, the terms were, according to
Benhabib, greatly misleading her own terminology here recalling that
of Herseys fictional translators who, we recall, were concerned lest their
translation from Yiddish to English would mislead. Although in the case
of Hersey the concern centers on importing cultural biases and in the case
of Arendt on conceptual clarity or confusion, the problems voiced by both
focus on the way that rendering crucial issues of the Holocaust into English
could represent the Holocaust in a manner that falsifies.
The nuanced violations of which Arendts English was said to be culpable
may even have shaped the famous exchange between Arendt and Gershom
Scholem. The two had been friends for many years, the friendship persisting
despite heated disagreement on a substantial number of crucial issues. 46
But Eichmann in Jerusalem brought these disagreements to a head. Repelled
by both the style and content of Arendts analysis, Scholem felt it was
incumbent upon him to set the record straight. Arendt replied in turn. The
exchange was published not long after. 47 It did not, however, clear the air
and Scholem ended the friendship.
One of the problems that, according to Scholem, tainted Arendts report was the tone that she employe[d] so often in the course of [her]
book. Strikingly, Scholem, writing in his native German, calls upon English to specify Arendts transgression : Fur den Stil der Leichtherzigkeit, ich
meine das englishche flippancy, den Sie nur allzu oft in Ihrem Buche dafur
aufbringen, habe ich keine Sympathie (For the tone of lightheartedness,
well expressed by the English flippancy, which you employ so often in the
course of your book, I have no sympathy). Scholem intuits that it takes
an English expression the only one that he uses in his response to
capture the nature of Arendts inappropriate approach to the subject. It is
as if the particular tone that she takes toward matters profound, set forth
in her English, can only be characterized by an English word. Scholems
concern with the gap that divides tone and subject matter a concern
that moves him to rupture his German prose and import an English word
mirrors Arendts own preoccupation with the comic dimensions of the
trial, which in each case pointed out how a misalignment of language and
subject matter was consequential.
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A Certain Distance: Writing in English

Whatever boldness Arendt attempted to interject into her use of English,
she contrasted, as we recall, the liberties that she permitted herself to take
with German over against the restraint imposed upon her by her distance
from English . Yet it may have been this distance that made English the
appropriate language in which to pen her report on the Eichmann trial.
To be sure, Arendt, living in the United States, had by this time chosen
English as the language in which she predominantly wrote. It would in that
sense have been more of a surprise and perhaps more consequential
had she turned to German or French (the languages that she knew well but
didnt generally write in) to review and analyze the trials proceedings. As
we have seen, however, the issue of languages was at the forefront of her
concern from the beginning of her arrival in Jerusalem (attested by her
correspondence to Jaspers) and from the opening pages of the report itself.
Neither the nature of Eichmanns crime nor even the struggle over how
to conduct the trial occupied Arendt as much as the languages through
which the proceedings were transmitted, translated, defended, and judged.
Indeed, the drastically different versions of the trial that were reported to
the world were among her initial observations. The immense variability of
this reportage was thus in her awareness as she drafted her own report.
Writing in English made Arendts book what it is in several ways. To
begin with, Arendt implicitly placed herself in line with two historians,
Gerald Reitlinger and Raul Hilberg, who themselves had written major
historical works in English on the Holocaust. Clearly,Arendt drew on a wide
a range of primary and secondary sources in the languages to which she
had access. It is nevertheless these two to whom she turned most frequently
to document or (more clearly the case with Hilberg) to interpret the facts
of the case. 48
Eichmann in Jerusalem also attempts to argue the case from the legal
point of view and to insist, moreover, that the courtroom should be guided
by legal rather than national, ethnic, or political concerns. Arendts belief
that the court itself, in spite of the judges resistance, had been subjected to
a show trial moved her to highlight what the trial had left out and to write
the report in a tone that would provide a clear alternative to the official
version as represented by Gideon Hausner. As one critic puts it, Arendts
effort aimed to counter Hausners narrative based on traditional patterns
of Jewish history with a narrative based on universal concerns. 49 English
helped her subvert these claims. Standing outside the languages of either
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111
the prosecution or the defense, English offered a position of neutrality,

an appeal to universal sensibility beyond parochial interests (including, it
might be said, her own loyalty to German) that attempted to lay claim to
the court. 50
Law, as Shoshana Felman has argued, distances the Holocaust. It
achieves this distance by demarcating a suffering that seemed both unending and unbearable.51 Maintaining what she referred to as a certain
distance from the language in which she wrote, Arendt would thus seem
to have found in English the perfect vehicle by which to reinforce laws
propensity to place distance between trauma and its aftermath. She had in
fact designated it as the language of interdiction, the one in which she would
not permit herself to do what she could in her native tongue. The very fact
that it was not her mother tongue conferred on it a specific set of limits.
Definition, restraint, proscription were essential facets of Arendts relation
to English. The traits of law thus inhered in the English that Arendt wrote,
reinforcing her efforts to lobby for a sober legal assessment of Eichmanns
case. But the English in which she wrote was not fully in sync with her goal.
Refusing to honor the limits that she had set for herself, Arendt coined
phrases and terms that puzzled and, at times, even enraged her audience.
She thus compromised the distance that she had sought to maintain. Striving to render English into a sober legal language that would compel all
communities to take account of the implications of the Holocaust, Arendt
at crucial places violated conventions of English. The result was that she
often alienated those readers to whom she was closest. At bottom, her
struggle with English was likely the other side of her refusal to let go of an
accent. Insistent that her spoken English would remain that of a foreigner,
her writing also remained thus.
This dual legacy points to a new emphasis within English writing on the
Holocaust. Yet I first turn to the film adaptation of Wallants The Pawnbroker. Released after of Arendts report and while the controversy over it
still raged, the changes the film wrought upon the novel best show the new
challenges faced by English in the wake of Eichmann in Jerusalem.
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chapter 7
Say Good Boy

Legitimizing English in Sidney Lumets
The Pawnbroker
In its fusion of multilingual strategies with avant-garde film technique, the

changes it renders on the novel, and the issues it raises in its own right,
Sidneys Lumets film adaptation of The Pawnbroker (1965) advances the
discussion of English in relation to the Holocaust. Not only does the film
integrate accent as an important dimension, but it also incorporates rival
languages, making English vie for legitimacy. Moreover, several aspects of
the film, including its approach to victim and persecutor, attest that it came
in the wake of Arendts report. Finally, director Lumets career was launched
in the Yiddish theater, a linguistic point of departure that arguably enabled
him to test in ways different than Wallants the capacity of English to deal
with the Holocaust.
As Wallants protagonist approaches his place of business, it is the special
pawnshop sign that brings home to Nazerman the cruel twist of fate he has
suffered:
But when he got to the store, he could not resist a grimace at the sight of
the three gilded balls hanging over the doorway. It was no more than a
joke in rather poor taste that had led to this. Still, he could never evade
the foolish idea, each morning when he first looked at the ugly symbol
of his calling, that the sign was the result of some particularly diabolic
vandalism perpetrated during the night by an unknown tormentor. 1
In the film adaptation of The Pawnbroker, the three balls of the pawnshop
sign, the ugly symbol of the profession, continues to hover above the
Harlem shop. But the storefront also displays something not in the novel:
descriptions of merchandise appear in both English and Spanish, conveying
the bilingual nature of the Spanish Harlem of the 1960s. In contrast to the
novel, the film overtly draws on these multiple languages, leaving English to
compete for a legitimate place in representing the present and remembering
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113
the past. Not only do Jerusalem streets display multilingual signs bearing
mixed messages. And as in the case of the sign giving directions to Yad
Vashem, vandals play a role in giving the sign its burdened connotations.
Like most adaptations, the film version of The Pawnbroker, which was
begun in 1961 and released in 1965, modifies some elements of the novel
while leaving others intact. 2 The focus on a survivor surely remains, as does
the pawnshop that serves as a front for organized crime. Yet the film revises
the role of English in relation to the Holocaust in three telling ways. The
first posits an explicit relation between legitimacy and English. The second problematizes the relation between English and the representation of
memory. And the third, responding to the claims of mimesis by conferring
an accent on the protagonist, alters the conception of traumatic English.
The issue of legitimacy arises in connection with Jesus Ortiz, the pawnbrokers assistant. Described as a Negro in the novel, he is transformed
in the film into a Puerto Rican, a transformation that activates issues of
language as well as ethnicity. Indeed, these issues are present from the
outset. Jesuss first appearance in the film shows him outlawing Spanish in
favor of English:
mrs. ortiz: Ahe esta tu Jefe, Jesus (Theres your boss, Jesus).
jesus: No Spanish, mama, no Spanish, English. 3
Demanding that his mother forsake her native Spanish and speak the
tongue of the future, Jesus associates English with legitimacy, with going
straight.
No more, Mama! No more stealin, no more numbers no more peddlin
no more nothin. Strictly lee-git. ok? 4
Just as he gives up illicit ways of making money and aims at licit and
respectable business, so English will assist him on that path, a path that
ostensibly demands aggressive acculturation. 5
That Ortiz would have English at his command, let alone demand it
of his mother, was not to be taken for granted in this period. The shift
to a new language, wrote Daniel Moynihan and Nathan Glazer in their
influential 1963 study, has been peculiarly difficult for the Puerto Ricans.
We can only speculate about the reasons why Jews and even Italians, coming
into the city at roughly the same ages, with much less formal knowledge of
English, should have made a rather better linguistic adjustment.6 Although
both Glazer and Lumet yoke linguistic facility to social legitimacy, Glazer
emphasizes the disability of Puerto Rican youth while Lumet, especially
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by way of Ortiz, stresses the multilingual resourcefulness of that youth.

Indeed, Ortiz is the only figure (Puerto Rican, Jewish, Italian, or otherwise)
in the film who is shown negotiating multiple languages. His declaration
on behalf of English thus has behind it the apparent failure of a community
to master what others already have acquired.
English initially, then, has the upper hand. But if Jesus decrees against
speaking Spanish, the film counters by presenting scenes of unsubtitled
Spanish dialogue. Not to include subtitles was no casual decision on the
part of the filmmakers. Indeed, the shooting script is emphatically clear in
its instructions, issued in capital letters: NOTE: THIS SCENE IS TO PLAY
IN ITS ORIGINAL LANGUAGE (SPANISH). DO NOT TITLE OR DUB.
The film thus issues a decree to match Jesuss own, placing English out of
the picture much the way that Jesus attempted to do with Spanish. Hence
English is no longer the sole standard of legitimacy; it must give way to
other languages, a tactic that compels the English-speaking audience to
recognize the limitations inherent in the mastery of English.
The Spanish dialogue scene itself turns around the issues of language.
Shown taking a bath, Jesus converses with his mother in Spanish. Beginning
as casual talk, the dialogue evolves into a language lesson, in which Jesus
teaches his mother how to say in English good boy. In contrast to the
opening scene, Jesus now no longer simply decrees that his mother his
mother speak English. Instead of rejecting the minoritys language in favor
of the official one, Jesus works for change from within, speaking Spanish
while teaching his mother English. By resisting subtitles, the film both
legitimates the Spanish that they speak and holds at bay the English that
threatens to be the measure of everything worthwhile. Indeed, the English
phrase that Jesus uses to conduct the language lesson I am a good boy
refers more to the ideal than the actual, the good boy that he hopes to
become rather than the unreliable boy he is and will be. Moreover, his
mother initially confuses the phrase good boy with good-bye:
jesus: Say good boy.
mrs. ortiz (spanish): Oh, its the same when you say good-bye?
jesus (spanish): No, its another thing. 7
Despite Jesuss common-sense declaration (No, its another thing), we are

invited to hear the play between the phrases as intimating the tragedy that
will ensue when Jesus attempts to live up to his ideal and protect Nazerman
from a gunman; the final good-bye will come when Jesus endeavors to
be the good boy. 8 The language lesson thus serves as a lesson in reading
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English, not only (or mainly) in distinguishing words that sound alike
but in discovering the interplay between them. What would have remained
simply another thing if viewed solely within English parlance takes on other
connotations when perceived from the estranging distance of a foreign
speaker.
The film version thus makes language into an explicit arena of struggle.
The consequences for English are twofold. On the one hand, it serves as a
tool for obtaining legitimacy and for leaving behind the illicit activity that,
because of the danger associated with it, threatens to cut off life almost
before it begins. If it is the son who wishes that his mother conform to
the English of the majority culture, it is the mother who urges the son to
take the straight path. Both share an aspiration to middle-class security,
and English is apparently one of the means by which such a station can be
reached. On the other hand, the film also, by allowing Spanish to be spoken
without the mediation of subtitles or dubbing, delegitimizes English as the
taken-for-granted tongue of the film and of the country that produced it.
The films nonnative speakers of English, moreover, are the ones who
illuminate the latent connections within their adopted tongue, juxtaposing phrases (good-bye and good boy, for instance) that would have
escaped detection by a native speaker. English seen through foreign eyes
thus corresponds to the dominant element of the films visual style. For the
juxtaposition of seemingly unlike elements in order to reveal more fundamental connections parallels the technique of montage Lumets use of
which, according to Annette Insdorf, defines the special filmic character
of The Pawnbroker. 9 The analogy can also work the other way. From this
angle, montage the radical technique of editing that attempts to provide
a correlative for the protagonists terrible struggle with traumatic memory
corresponds to English as seen through foreign eyes. It is hence English
made foreign that serves as the structuring principle for Lumets conception
of trauma.
Having challenged the taken-for-granted position of English, the film deploys other languages with even greater cunning. More precisely, Lumet
takes over the novels strategy of using foreign languages as the media of
memory. But he alters it in two ways. First, he shifts the scenes of memory
from dreams to hallucinations; it is no longer the private realm of the
bedroom and sleep that prompts the otherwise repressed memory. In the
film, events in Nazermans present life trigger relevant associations of the
past. This shift means that reading no longer plays the role that it did in the
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novel. Lumet eliminates reading as a habit and theme by means of which

Nazerman in the novel continued to absorb the culture of Europe and
to retrieve the self he once was. Freed from the book, traumatic memory
now enters unmediated by culture. Hence, the film sharpens the division
between present and past, between Nazerman the pawnbroker and Nazerman the professor. The disappearance of reading from the film version
also correlates with the shift in media. Whereas by way of repeated scenes
of reading Wallant drew attention to novelistic issues that he himself faced,
Lumet, moving from literature to film, could afford to excise this selfreferential literary dimension.
Displaced from scenes of private reading, languages nevertheless reenter
the film in a bolder fashion. Appearing without dubbing or subtitles, the
scenes of Holocaust memory appear almost exclusively in tongues other
than English, or without language at all. Moreover, until the final moments
of the film, English remains a language only for the present. Lumets conception of memory pivots on the technique of the flash cut or flashback. The
technique gained notoriety in the 1950s in association with the French New
Wave, and in particular with Alain Resnaiss 1959 production, Hiroshima
mon amour. 10 Although many reviewers had no doubt that The Pawnbroker
borrowed its use of flashbacks from the French avant-garde, Lumet himself
rejected such an association, instead positing an American lineage deriving
from director John Ford. 11
Whatever the techniques origin, the scenes of memory the flash cuts
that may or may not be borrowed from the French avant-garde are radically inarticulate. 12 The opening scene establishes this pattern: filmed in
slow motion, the scene shows a family picnic children, wife and husband,
grandparents taking place in a pastoral setting. Graceful at play, content with rest, busy with menial tasks, those in the scene are nonetheless
strangely bereft of dialogue. Indeed, this strange sense of soundlessness
an echo, as it were, from the period of silent films 13 is brought home
when the woman calls and waves to the man: we paradoxically see the call
but hear nothing. This voicelessness, moreover, becomes symbolic of the
scenes relation to the rest of the film. 14
It is the next scene a second family gathering in the backyard of a
suburban home that introduces the flash cuts of memory, the technique
most reminiscent of European art cinema. Prompted by a remark about
an upcoming anniversary, Nazerman briefly recalls the woman, his wife,
from the first picnic scene. Significantly, the recollected fragment is that
of the soundless call of the woman. Indeed, the soundless call becomes
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emblematic of the flash cut technique: appearing on the screen barely long
enough for the eye to register, the fleeting image is incapable simply
because it is too brief of producing articulate sound.
Once the film brings the viewer into the city itself, the trope of inarticulate memory goes in two directions: toward the animal and toward
the foreign. Leaving the pawnshop, Nazerman hears the barking of a dog,
which triggers the memory of a barking German shepherd that, with a
guard in pursuit, chases after a concentration camp prisoner. The barking
continues, soon accompanied by German commands without subtitles
and eventually the dog pins the prisoner on a fence. It is striking that
the operation of a trigger based on the principle that something from
the present can recall something analogous from the past is introduced
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here by sound and, moreover, by an aggressively nonverbal sound. 15 The
strategy suggests that the present and past are connected by that which
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vey more sound than sense, implying a malevolence intensified by being
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with the merely animalistic. 16 Thus, although in this scene memory begins
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to speak it is no longer uncannily soundless it does so without being
conventionally articulate or comprehensible.
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Up to this point, these flashes of inarticulate memory have surfaced in the
suburbs or on the city streets. The next scene returns to the soundlessness
of the opening but integrates the eruption of memory into the arena of
the pawnshop. Tellingly, an object of pawn a fake diamond engagement
ring acts as the trigger. The specific flash cut here, showing a German
guard taking rings from hands outstretched on barbed wire, creates a kind
of tableau of plunder; emptied of sound and word, memory exists as a
monument, a ritualized violation of European Jewry that says nothing,
however, about its relation to the one who remembers.
Indeed, the plundering of the rings is the single extended memory sequence in which Nazerman himself does not appear. The sequence thus
suggests a memory so general, so undistinguished by personal violation,
that it can be detached from the agent of memory. Anonymous and detached, it likewise remains soundless and, as such, inarticulate. In contrast,
the memory sequence that follows, showing Nazermans wife serving as
a prostitute in a Nazi concentration camp brothel, focuses on a scene of
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extreme personal violation. 17 The sequence is set in motion when Mabel

Wheatley, the black prostitute girlfriend of Ortiz, pays an after-hours visit
to the pawnbroker, hoping to make extra money by offering him a private
session.To further spark his interest, the prostitute undresses, and the sight
of her naked body eventually triggers the memory of Nazermans wifes
ordeal of prostitution. The violation is, moreover, made more terrible by
the fact that Nazerman himself, by requesting information about his wife
and her whereabouts, has induced the Nazi guard to take him to witness
her humiliation at the hands of the SS. Yet the scene never gives voice to
Nazermans inquiries. As with the preceding memories, this one, too, is left
inarticulate, the soundless gestures of most of the actors alternating with
the Nazi guards single insistent question in German (without subtitles):
Wilst du was sehen? [Do you want to look at something?].
Here again, left without subtitles or translation, the German remains
incomprehensible and thus barbaric, the tongue of the persecutors that accompanies opaquely the tortures they inflict. The film further nuances the
effects of the incomprehension. Once naked, Mabel repeatedly commands
Nazerman to Look . . . Look . . . Thats it. . . . Look, believing that looking will increase the likelihood that he will accede to a deal. To be sure, on
one level the command to look only serves to drive Nazerman deeper into
the past. But on another level, Mabels command to look nearly approximates the German Wilst du was sehen? Here the opacity nearly gives
way, almost permitting memory to speak in the English of the present.
It is nevertheless the nearness of translation that reminds the audience
that memory continues to operate exclusively in a foreign language (or a
language foreign to the film), further underscoring the opacity of German
as a figure of memory. 18
Indeed, in the final flash cut, memory will claim English and emerge as
articulate. 19 But before that can happen, The Pawnbroker will take up, and
ultimately reject, a different mode of representing memory.
The different mode of memory comes by way of Nazermans visit to
Marilyn Birchfield, the social worker who has tried with little success to
strike up a friendship or romance with the pawnbroker. The scene is original to the film, and it is here that Nazerman for the first, and only, time
openly alludes to memories of prewar Europe We had . . . we had . . . a
river in Germany and attempts, if tentatively, to recount what happened
during the war. But what started as a narration of memory quickly becomes
inhibited:
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Its just that there have been memories that I had, well, I thought that I
had pushed them far away from me and they keep rushing in, and then
theyre words, words that I thought I had kept myself from hearing . . .
and now they flood my mind . . . 20
On the edge of disclosure, memory is disabled not by lack but by surfeit, by

too much too fast. 21 Indeed, the sequence moves from memory to words
to flood. Strikingly, it is through the metaphor of water that memory is
overwhelmed, as if what was told We had a river in Germany takes
over, disabling articulation through speed (rushing in) and excess (flood
my mind). And yet, paradoxically, English here can begin to speak about
memory even while memory itself is, as it were, kept at bay.
The scene also plays off a previous encounter. In an earlier meeting
of Nazerman and Birchfield, she confides to him her memory of loss, an
attempt to make her situation analogous to his own:
There was nothing wrong until one day I discovered that Id acquired
a most excruciating malady . . . loneliness . . . and one day there was a
young man . . . we fell in love . . . we got married he died like that.
His heart just stopped. And I found out that loneliness is the normal state
of affairs . . . for most people. 22
On the balcony of her apartment, it is his turn to tell of loss, to make a

gesture that mirrors hers. But he not so much tells as withholds, informing
her not what happened but what didnt: What happened? I did not die.
Constrained by its own idiom, Nazermans awkward attempt to relate
the memories of the war and his commentary on memory itself allows
English, nevertheless, to emerge as a language of memory in the flashback
to the deportation by trains that follows his scene with Birchfield. Leaving
the apartment, Nazerman boards a subway and proceeds to walk silently
as he looks for a seat, during which time the camera grotesquely pans
the accompanying passengers. The crowded subway car soon triggers flash
cuts to the crowded boxcar in which Nazerman and family were deported.
And here, finally, memory becomes articulate: Nazerman and his wife call
to one another in English trying to save the life of their son. To be
sure, there are other reasons why English is here conscripted into this
role. Mimetically, it would be appropriate to use German since those in
the freight car are, we assume, like Nazerman, German Jews (the film, we
recall, changed Nazerman from a Polish to a German Jew). But German has
already been associated with animality and barbarism and thus would be
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difficult to hear as a language of the victim. So the film instead inverts the
terms that it has used up till now: the present, the subway car that triggers
the memory, is soundless; the flashback itself brazenly borrows the English
of the present to represent the past. The inversion suggests that, with the
terrible death of his son the incident that most profoundly marks the
train scene the past has taken over, supplanted, even erased, the present.
Eventually, the losses of the present succeed those of the past, with the
death of the assistant, Ortiz, following hard upon that of the son. The logic
of inarticulate memory nevertheless accounts for the silent scream that
is, at the films conclusion, Nazermans reaction to the assistants death.
Generally viewed as an unprecedented gesture, the specific form of this
scream, rather, proceeds directly from the strategies of memory, utterance,
and silence pursued throughout the film. For just as the English from the
present has in the train scene taken over the past, so the soundlessness
from the past from the realm of memory here takes over the present,
forming the idiom of grief. Nazermans silent cry, moreover, alludes to the
soundless call of his wife, enfolding his loss of her into his present grief
it is, after all, the anniversary of her death, the reference to which set in
motion the initial flash cut of the film. This layering of a mans cry over
a womans enters in another way: The voiceless cry over the body of the
boy at the end, writes Stanley Kaufmann, is presumably modeled on the
celebrated similar moment of Helene Weigel in the Berliner Ensembles
Mother Courage.23 This choir image of male and female voices, seeing the
male not weakened but strengthened by feminization, goes in a direction
counter to previous interpretations of The Pawnbroker that have assumed
feminization implies weakness. 24 If Kaufmann is correct, German, formerly
bearing only associations of the barbaric, reenters the film in a new elegiac
guise. At this moment, then, the films idioms of past and present fully
merge; the death of Nazermans assistant bears witness to the perils of
teaching, even as memory his own, his wifes, Europes, the films speaks
through his voiceless cry. 25
English cannot match the horrible silent scream that serves as a final
comment. But it has gained a great deal. Excluded initially from the memory scenes of Holocaust Europe, English finally edges its way in. The specific
way that it does from within a train as victims are deported to the camps
is significant in several ways. In Wallants novel, the scene of deportation
came first among the memories; the memories that follow unfold according to the chronology of events. In Lumets version, the deportation comes
nearly last, placed so as to lead into the death of the pawnbrokers assistant
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shortly after. The film thus replaces chronological logic with a thematic one,
favoring metaphor over metonymy. In the novel, the loss of the son is the
first blow; other numbing losses succeed that initial one until Nazerman,
as a member of the Sonderkommando, is compelled to confront his wifes
remains.
In the film, the death of the son in the train precedes the death of the
symbolic son in the pawnshop. The traumatic logic by which the present
recapitulates the past is made immediate through the effects of montage.
And yet even with this entry into the events of the Holocaust, English
still remains outside the epicenter, never as it were reaching the camp.
This culminating scene thus replays in miniature the equivocal position of
English that we have witnessed throughout. Finding expression en route to
a final destination, English here is both inside and outside the Holocaust.
Even when the victim invokes English to lament what has been lost, the
scene leaves traces of its estrangement. For this reason, in the closing scene
dramatizing the death of Nazermans assistant, English yields to silence, a
less ambiguous medium for the expression of anguish.
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After Arendt
Ambiguous though it may be, the English spoken by the films protagonist
is no longer the neutered version found in Wallants novel. In Lumets film,
his accented English rather shows him for the foreigner he is. Arendt had
already made an eloquent case for the custodial role an accent plays. For
her, speaking English poorly can be a sign of a stronger connection to
the place of origins and to the creative wellsprings of thought. Mastery,
in contrast, points to sterility, a susceptibility to clich which, for Arendt,
is the antithesis of vibrant thinking. In her own way, she was marked by
(and articulated the value of) a linguistic tattoo. Whereas for Primo Levi the
linguistic tattoo referred to the coarse language he had learned in Auschwitz
and refused to refine thereafter, for Arendt it designates the mother tongue
that, even when not spoken, continues to inflect the English she speaks.
There is no indication that Lumet was familiar with Arendts advocacy
on behalf of a heavy accent. But Arendt was herself giving voice to the
counterpart to Wallants experimentation with an English shorn of accent.
In the novel, we recall, Nazerman spoke an English pruned of origin and
association. He was a man with no allegiances, especially to his past life,
and the English he spoke was in accord with his effort to eradicate his
past. Wallant, in other words, forged out of a neutral English a traumatic
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language that bore witness to the consuming task of repression. Nazermans

English, antimimetic to the extreme, reflected in its artifice the depth at
which those memories lay. The only means for them to surface was by way
of dreams, sequestered in the realm of sleep from contact with everyday
life. Envisioning memory at an insurmountable distance during waking
life, the novels presiding metaphor for the voice was inorganic, as if a
machine manufactured it.
Bearing the same memories, Lumets filmic protagonist, nevertheless
speaks with an accent. The accented voice lets his origins show through.
Moreover, rather than eradicating reference to the past, his voice brings the
past to bear on the present. Instead of reflecting the repression of intolerable memory, Nazermans accented voice thus works against the notion of
wholesale repression. Here, too, accent, as Arendt so vigorously asserted,
becomes the marker of the proximity of the past to the present. This strategy
accords with the films substitution of hallucination for dream as the chief
vehicle of recollected trauma, wherein the memories of deportation and
the camps surface not at night but during the day, are not confined to sleep
but erupt into the events of everyday life. Having a Harlem brawl trigger the
memory of his friend being mauled to death by camp dogs, Nazerman is so
overwhelmed by the recollection that he almost runs down a pedestrian.
Whats wrong with you, you moron, admonishes the stunned pedestrian,
unaware that the eruption of the past horror into the present has momentarily blinded Nazerman to everything in his path. 26 The afflictions of
memory here lie virtually at the ready. On the surface rather than beneath
it, the losses are if anything too easily recollected. They demand no dream
work, but are set in motion by the random perception of like gesture or
event.
The shift again finds parallel expression in the change rendered on the
crime boss, Nazermans alter ego. Indeed, no other character in the film
adaptation undergoes such a radical alteration. For Wallant, the crime figure who pulls the strings is the Sicilian immigrant, Murillio. Like Nazerman
he, too, is an outsider, a European who has little connection to the people of
color whose lives he manipulates to make his fortune. And like the pawnbroker, Murillio also surrounds himself with relics of European culture (his
apartment, for instance, is bedecked with a cherished collection of secondclass European paintings). In the novel, then, the chain of exploitation,
from the syndicate chief to the pawnbroker to the mainly black population
of Harlem, replicates that of European colonialism. For Lumet, however,
the agent of oppression comes not from without but from within, not from
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123
a white European but from a black American with the surname Rodriguez
from one, in other words, who himself comes out of Harlem. In terms
of the film adaptation, the change from the white European to the black
local is remarkable, for no other character undergoes a change of name or
a radical alteration of ethnicity.
This shift revises the victims relation to his own victimization. In the film
version, blacks are made complicit in their own exploitation and persecution. Moreover, Rodriguez is the most brutal figure in the film, outshining
others, including Nazerman, in the fear he inspires and the power he wields.
Finally, Rodriguez not only heads the operation but supplies the ideology
that carries it forward.
The substitution of Rodriguez for Murillio can thus be viewed as coming
in the wake of Arendts Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she argued, most
famously and controversially, that the complicity of European Jewry during
the war played a crucial role in their own destruction. 27 Seen from this
vantage point, the films representation of the victim appears to incorporate
Arendts claim, making the victim an important cog, if not in his own
destruction then in his own persecution. But, if I am correct in situating
the shift of villain from exotic to local (from Sicily to Harlem, from Europe
to America), I would also argue that, by universalizing Arendts thesis
that is, by making the victim/victimizer dynamic apply not only to Jews
but to blacks Lumet also qualifies Arendts claim. For the film implies that
groups of victims generally have members who are willing to collaborate
with the persecutor and even go them a step better. Whereas Arendt (and,
perhaps even more explicitly, the noted historian Raul Hilberg 28) accounts
for the alleged complicity of European Jewry by positing a particular Jewish
mentality or propensity for such behavior, the film suggests that whatever
the Jews did, they did as any victim would have done and does. 29
The films modifications also affect the villains voice. Whereas in the
novel Murillios recorded, disembodied voice mirrored Nazermans disconnected one, Rodriguez speaks in the passionately belligerent tones of a
heavy, the kind of role with which actor Brock Peters had already become
associated. 30 Indeed, Rodriguezs voice, like that of Nazermans in the film,
reflects the locale from which he comes. In this way, Lumet substitutes a
mimetic approach for Wallants rigorously antimimetic one and makes the
English of both victim and persecutor attest to place of origin. Having in
the novel reached the extreme of neutrality of a tongue cleansed of associations the English of the film reclaims the accent as a guiding principle.
In Cynthia Ozicks hands, it will become even more than that.
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chapter 8
Cracking Her Teeth

Broken English in Cynthia Ozicks
Fiction and Essays
Thirty some years after directing The Pawnbroker, Sidney Lumet directed
Cynthia Ozicks The Blue Light, a stage adaptation of Ozicks stories, The
Shawl and Rosa.1 The distance between film and play was not far. In both
cases, the protagonists were Jews who had lost children in the Holocaust
and who, having immigrated to America, were ambivalent at best about
the life they were compelled to live out. They differed radically however in
their view of the Europe they had left behind. Whereas Nazerman rejected
Europe as the standard bearer of culture, Rosa fetishizes it. Like Arendt, Ozicks heroine believes that European culture, bearing the legacy of ancient
Greece and Rome, continues to transmit the most formidable teachings
expressed in the most sublime idiom. 2
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Rosas Mother Tongue

Predating the stage version by a decade, Ozicks two stories on which the
play is based are better known. Rosa was first published in the New
Yorker magazine in 1983; The Shawl had previously appeared in the same
magazine some three years earlier. 3 The stories were eventually published
together in book form, titled The Shawl, in 1989. 4 Strikingly, in the book
there is, as far as I can determine, a single change from the original magazine texts: Ozick added as an epigraph the final two lines of Paul Celans
renowned poem, Todesfugue.5
One of the most interpreted of literary responses to the Holocaust,
Celans poem elliptically represents persecutors and victims in a symbolic
concentration camp setting. The addition of lines from such a well-known
literary work clearly mobilizes a whole set of associations. For my purposes,
however, the epigraph engages the story in two specific, and related, ways.
First, when Ozick quotes from the poem, she includes only the original
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German, a strategy that filters the stories featuring Jewish victims and
survivors through the language of the persecutors. Additionally, in a text
meant for English-language readers, the omission of the English translation
of the epigraph seems pointed. It is made even more so by the fact that, as
the acknowledgments of The Shawl show, the lines are culled from Michael
Hamburgers bi-lingual, German-English edition, The Selected Poems of
Paul Celan. 6 Clearly referring to an edition with an English translation but
quoting only the original, the author wanted solely the German to appear.
Though the English is omitted, then, it continues to shadow the German,
almost in the same way that in the story, Rosa, it shadows Polish and
Yiddish.
Second, the decision to include the German original is also important
because Celan is renowned for attempting to write about the Holocaust
in the language of the persecutors, a choice he made even though he was
capable of writing in other tongues. Celan explained his choice to write
in German as choosing to write in his mother tongue, the only tongue,
he said, in which a poet can express ones truth.7 Echoing Celan, Rosa
makes a similar, and similarly equivocal, claim well on in the story: I read
only Polish, she told him. I dont like to read in English. For literature you
need a mother tongue. 8 While Celan invokes mother tongue in relation
to writing and Rosa in relation to reading, they share the bias that, in
spite of the questionable associations that inform the mother tongue, they
continue to see it as the medium which is necessary to negotiate culture.
By affixing Celans well-known lines, Ozick already begins the story filtered
through a multilingual lens, a lens that ironizes mother tongue: Celans
German, Rosas Polish and, we might presume, Ozicks English.
But even though both Celan and Ozicks character Rosa favor a mother
tongue, the two stand at opposite ends of the spectrum in their relation
to it. For Celan, the choice is noble and crucial, an act of resistance, of
entering into the maelstrom of the Holocaust in order to confront it more
authentically. So although Celan characterizes his choice of language as
a private affair, something he is compelled to do because as a poet there
is no other choice but to write in a mother tongue, his choice of German is nonetheless interpreted as a paradigmatic strategy of the victim. 9
John Felstiners interpretation of Celans choice of German, for example,
mixes both fatalistic and strategic elements: With his world obliterated,
he held fast to the world that was both his and the murderers literally
all he had left. Insofar as it was language that had been damaged, his verse
might repair that damage.10 Felstiner implies an act of resistance in that
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by holding fast Celan refuses to allow the murderers to set the terms;
Celan would not abandon what he had left simply because the murderers
also claimed German as their own. This refusal to abandon what belonged
to him resonates with Arendts holding fast to German. Yet whereas Arendt
justified her continued embrace of German by asserting that the language
neither went crazy nor suffered from its manipulation by the Nazis, Celans
project takes as a given German as a deformed legacy of the Nazi years. His
verse might thus repair what had been damaged. Celans turn to the mother
tongue is thus pictured as the response of one who, despite the losses that
he suffered, chose to act out of a spirit of generosity, or, in a more skeptical
assessment, held fast to German not so much to repair the language as to
use it as a medium to confront the pathologies of the German culture of
which it was a part. 11
This spirit of generosity or of cultural critique stands at the opposite end
of the spectrum from that of Ozicks character. Rosa, too, claims that the
mother tongue has exclusive rights and privileges, especially in relation to
literature. For literature, says Rosa, echoing Celans famous injunction,
you need a mother tongue. Such a declaration here, however, is neither
noble nor incisive but obsessive and pathetic. In Ozicks rendition, holding
fast to Polish as the chosen medium of literature dramatizes the folly of
assimilation, of believing that immersion in the vernacular language could
ratify ones identity as a Pole. If the celebration of Polish by a Jew before
the war was tinged with betrayal, then continued celebration after the war
is one of the marks of insanity.
Such postwar immersion doesnt have to be framed as pathological. Zygmunt Bauman describes two postwar Polish-Jewish writers, Adolf Rudnicki
and Julian Stryjkowski, whose allegiance to Polish (and writing in Poland)
is meant to place a Celan-like claim upon their readers: Stryjkowski writes
of the dead for the sake of the living. The memory of the nation that
disappeared [i.e., the Jews of Poland] must live in the memory of the
nation that survived.12 It is by means of the Polish language that Baumen
sees Stryjkowski carrying out this task: Let the self-same Polish language,
which lured the dead with its splendor and yet proved a cage to many,
become their permanent and secure shelter now that they are no more. Let
them enter through this language the enchanted land they once lived in
without being a part of.13 Strikingly, Baumens description of this haunting of Poland through its language suggests that pre-war Poland Jewry
was already fated to disappear those who were lured were the dead.
But the process he characterizes is akin (if not identical) to that of Celan.
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These writers specifically intend for the language of a nation that sought,
actually or symbolically, to banish its Jews to testify to their continued
presence. Hence, they fashion the vernacular language into a Jewish one.
The inversion of Polish becomes yet more pointed: the language that often
played a vital role in Jewish acculturation and, at least in some cases, to
rejection of their own culture becomes a vehicle for sustaining it even,
as Bauman puts it, when they are no more. Yet Ozick comes at the issue
of Polish after the Holocaust from a different angle. If these two writers
have forged Polish into a language that responds to the tragedy of Polish
Jewry, Ozick wants to show the folly implied by such a choice. Holding
fast to Polish in the wake of the Holocaust is not so much a response as an
evasion.
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Polish and Poland

Emmanuel Ringelblums reflections in May of 1942 point to both sides of
the Polish language issue. The predominance of Polish in the ghetto serves
as the occasion for considering the Jews and the Polish language: The
Jews love to speak Polish. There is very little Yiddish heard in the streets.
Ringelblums observation regarding the love and use of Polish by Warsaws
Jews goes against what one would have expected. Insulated in the ghetto
and no longer obliged to conduct affairs with non-Jewish Poles, these Jews
might have embraced Yiddish to an even larger degree than previously. But
according to Ringelblum and other observers, they did not. Ringelblum
offers two contrasting explanations. The first figures Polish as the Jews
language of resistance: you [Nazis] have thrown us into a Jewish Ghetto,
but well show you that it really is a Polish street. To spite you, well hold on
to the very thing you are trying to separate us from the Polish language
and the culture it represents.14 If the ghetto distinguishes between Jew and
Pole, indicating that Jews are not members of the Polish nation, then by
speaking Polish rather than Yiddish Jews show that indeed they belong to
the Polish nation.
But Ringelblum himself sees the phenomenon not as resistance but as
assimilation, not as a declaration but as a sign of further capitulation:what
we see in the Ghetto today is only a continuation of the powerful linguistic
assimilation that was marked even before the war and has become more
noticeable in the Ghetto.15 The ghetto in other words did not stimulate
any special resolve on the part of the Jews or provoke them to speak Polish
to resist the special measures that the Nazis introduced against them. The
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love of Polish is simply the outcome of assimilation of Jews into the Polish
landscape, with the corollary that Jews were rejecting Yiddish and Jewish
culture even as they assimilated Polish. Living in the ghetto makes clear a
trend that was already in motion: So long as Warsaw was mixed, writes
Ringelblum, voicing now his own view of the matter, with Jews and Poles
living side by side, one did not notice [the large number of Jews who
spoke Polish] so acutely; but now that the streets are completely Jewish,
the extent of this calamity forces itself upon ones attention. As if the Jews
didnt have enough to worry about, Ringelblum suggests that speaking
Polish is the sign of yet another calamity. Both interpretations construe
speaking Polish as Jews demonstrating their adherence to Polish nationality
and culture. But one interpretation presumes a decided response to crisis,
the other an indifference to it.
Ringelblum was exceptional in noting both positions, even if he was
clear about the one to which he subscribed. 16 Most commentators on the
Polish issue came down on one side or the other. Shmuel Stupinski believed
that speaking Polish could decrease contact with the Nazis: It all began
with pretending not to understand German, people preferred it this way, it
was more convenient. So Jews started to speak Polish so they could answer
when spoken to by a German nie rozumiem ([we] dont understand). This
way one wanted to isolate himself from the enemy.17 Speaking Polish is
again a strategy taken up to resist the enemy, in this case by making believe
that one knew nothing of the enemys language. Such ignorance would
make it less likely the enemy would make unwanted demands of a Jew. In
this formulation, speaking a foreign language might allow one to pass as
a non-German speaker, something that perhaps a Yiddish speaker might
not be able to do. Others refused to see speaking Polish as anything but
Polonization, a capitulation to a culture foreign to the Jews. Hillel Zeitlin
was unsparing in his criticism of Warsaws Jews: Within the ghetto walls
a Jewish culture of our own, a Jewish life, could emerge, but Jews are a
contrary people. They speak Polish with such ardor. Polish has become the
holy language of the ghetto, the holy tongue of the ghetto Jews.18 Like
many, Zeitlin viewed the sequestering of the Jews as an opportunity to
cultivate a Jewish life, a life governed by Jewish institutions, calendar, and
languages. Yet the Jews did not seize the opportunity. Indeed, incarceration in the ghetto increased identification with the non-Jewish world, an
identification particularly apparent in the ardor for the Polish language:
This is something simply paradoxical. They packed [us in] so they could
forcibly isolate us from other peoples, cultures, and languages. Yet we insist
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on speaking a foreign language and spit on our own language, on our

own cultural and spiritual values.19 Whereas one group conjectured that
speaking the foreign language of Polish was an act of resistance, Zeitlin,
like Ringelblum, sees it as outright rejection of a Jewish tongue.
While most historians assume that Polish Jewry continued in the interwar period to speak predominantly Yiddish, they also claim that most
Jews in interwar Poland knew some Polish. Yet it is difficult to find out the
extent and the implications of such knowledge. Michael Steinlauf puts it in
the following way: it is possible to say that by the interwar period the vast
majority of Jews knew some Polish, many were fluent in Polish and well
acquainted with Polish literature, and numerous Jewish writers and artists
were hardly indifferent to Polish culture. However, cultivation of Polish
could easily, Steinlauf also implies, result in stigmatization: for a writer to
begin to write literature in Polish often marked his departure from Jewish
society and his identification as a Polish writer of Jewish origin. 20 The
lines were both fluid and rigid. Jews knew and could know Polish. But it
was only on the way out of Jewish society that one decided on Polish as the
language of choice.
Rosa focuses on what Chone Shmeruk refers to as the thin stratum:
in Poland before the Second World War, there was a thin stratum of
Polish intelligentsia of Jewish descent, including renowned Polish writers,
who were totally assimilated into Polish culture and identified themselves
as Poles.21 In terms of cultural history, Shmeruk believes that this thin
stratum is in fact, of very minor interest, and only as an extreme. In
contrast to Shmeruks assessment of the negligible interest of this group
for a cultural profile of interwar Polish Jewry, Ozicks novella focuses on
a member of this marginal group, implying that the extreme serves as
representative.
Ozick was clearly drawn to contemplate the position of the assimilated
Polish-speaking Jew. She wrote Rosa in the same year that she reviewed
the first translation of Bruno Schulzs The Street of Crocodiles from Polish
into English. Schulz was a Polish Jewish writer and artist who was murdered by the Nazis in 1942. 22 His career brutally cut short, he had however
published a number of collections of phantasmagoric stories. In her review Ozick characterized Schulz in a manner that resonated with her own
fictional character: Schulz was an assimilated Polish-speaking Jew, not so
much a Jew as a conscious Pole. In the Schultzs case, however, his being
a conscious Pole does not sever his connection with a certain tradition
of Jewish writing. For Ozick, Schulz was one of a few key Slavic Jews who
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were preoccupied with the underside of modernity: nihilism. She would go

on to explore Schulzs legacy in her novel, The Messiah of Stockholm. The
figure of Rosa can be construed as Schulzs alter ego particularly in terms
of her fervent devotion to Polish letters.
Unlike the portrait painted of the ghetto, where inhabitants turned to
Polish far more than they had before, Rosa makes no shift; her passion for
Polish is in no way opportunistic. Indeed, her absurd constancy provides
one significant dimension of the story. The other dimension is her accent.
Accents Matter
Even though the unaccented English spoken by Nazerman in Wallants

[130], (7)
novel is an essential dimension of his character, Nazerman in the film is
outfitted with an accent. And the accent he gains (and the cauterized English he loses) comes despite (or because of) the fact that the film Nazerman
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is molded into a more assimilated German Jew than his Polish counterpart
in the novel.
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Clearly, literary and filmic accents have their rhetorical as well as mimetic
purposes. This insight is one of the virtues of Kathryn Hellersteins study

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Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth in mid-century, Hellerstein celebrates Ozick as an author who has integrated Yinglish into her
[130], (7)
writing without bowdlerizing it. Whereas for Philip Roth and Malamud,
Yiddish figures as a spectral presence of the constraining, delimited, stultified past, for Ozick, Yiddish has a living presence since she allows a
greater range of Yiddish to echo in her prose.23 It is ironic, then, that the
dominant voice in these Holocaust stories is not Yiddish but Polish as if the
voice that speaks in the aftermath of these events cannot quite echo what
came before.
With Ozicks stories, accents come to be the measure of the destruction
of European Jewry. English is thereby transformed again in the process, not
into heartfelt babble or a denatured tongue but into a tongue foreign to
itself. This process will reach its denouement in Spiegelmans Maus, where
the survivor alone earns an accent by which to relate in broken English the
story of his Holocaust. But when Ozick represents English as a poison,
as something on which one cracks teeth, it will achieve a brokenness (as
well as a capacity to break) that is well on its way to becoming a language
fit to recount the Holocaust. 24
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Why Accents (Do Not) Matter

Arendt argued that accent indicates that a speaker is in touch with vital
sources of thought and language. Conversely, the erasure of accent, to
speak like a native (or perfectly) suggests that one is out of touch, is cut off
from such sources and is prone to the devastating effect of clich. 25 What
for Arendt remained an implicit critique of passing is for Ozick an explicit
meditation on the cultural implications of accents and their detractors.
Whereas for Arendt the attempt to eradicate accent came from the speaker,
for Ozick outside forces work to remove the telltale accent and to eliminate
an alleged threat to the well-being of the nation as a whole. But Ozick
shows how misguided such attempts are.
Ozicks essay, The Question of Our Speech, illustrating two twentiethcentury attempts to establish a standard for spoken American English,
dramatizes the assault on accent. 26 One episode pits Henry James against
Ozicks immigrant mother. 27 In an address that bore the name, The Question of Our Speech, James shared his concern about the problem that
English faced given the masses of immigrants who would roughly handle
the English that they had only begun to learn. English in such crude hands
would become a vehicle of promiscuity. If James configured these threats
by groups of people a hundred million Ozick counters them by scaling down the threatening specter into the figure of her mother as a child
immigrant, a linguistic armageddon. According to James, the threat to
English and to the values that it promotes comes from accented English.
The threat looms especially great because of the special orphaned
predicament of the English language. In Jamess view, English on American
soil is itself a forsaken immigrant. No other language, moreover, shares its
foundling status. Alone and adrift, it faces a singular test. This foundling
status of English clearly moves James to worry, in almost parental fashion,
for the fate of English. Tellingly, only at the point in his essay when he
comments on the orphaned status of English, does James refer to it by
the epithet mother tongue, as if to complement the childlike nature
of the language with the parental metaphor. Cultural policeman, social
hygienist, self-assigned chaperone rolled into one, James sees the masses of
new, nonnative speakers of English compromising its already sorely tested
virtue. 28
Yet Ozick argues that the attempt to police the values of society by
regulating speech is misguided. Preference for one form of speech is a convention subject to time and place; what is deemed correct by one generation
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is attacked by a succeeding one. The second episode related in the essay, in

which a young Ozick is compelled to undergo speech training to remove an
undesirable Bronx accent, brings home the folly of policing the accents of
children. To focus on accent as a measure of culture is misdirected; Ozick
argues that accents serve as no index of a communitys relation to culture
and language. Moreover, elimination of an accent leaves the speaker, as
Ozick refers to herself, as owning a sort of robots speech.29 Mechanized
in a way reminiscent of Nazermans, robotic speech evokes no obvious
native country. Implied in native country is both the neighborhood in
which Ozick grew up and also the foreign lands that continued to leave
traces in the speech of immigrants. Indeed, the clinicians (Ozick, recalling
their zealousness, dubs them missionaries) saw her speech as tainted
with foreignness, and it was the remnants of that foreignness they meant
to wipe away.30 Believing that speech was the measure of civilization and
that remnants of foreignness threatened its claim to civility, the clinicians
did away with them.
Unsparing in showing the arbitrary criteria by which accents are maligned, Ozick doesnt address, however, the fact that the episode of speech
training occurred in 1941 (born in 1928, Ozick relates that she was thirteenyears-old when her speech was doctored). The pathologists were in effect
cutting off the last bonds of linguistic kinship with Europe during the
initial phrase of the Final Solution. What might be viewed as imperialist
under any circumstances thus takes on more disturbing tones when seen in
its historical context. Moreover, in 1941 the United States was still officially
neutral and was continuing to debate its obligation to enter into what was
considered to be a European conflict. In other words, its own uncertain
connection to Europe, articulated most strongly in the isolationist sentiments voiced by Charles Lindbergh and others, was mirrored in the efforts
to eliminate the foreign remnants ostensibly marring the vocal patterns of
Americas children. 31
From the Idiom of Silence to the Idiom of Languages

The complex significance of accents is played out forcefully in the two
Ozick stories that most directly represent the Holocaust. InThe Shawl,the
protagonist, having shepherded both child and niece through the privations
of a death march and concentration camp, is compelled to watch helplessly
as a Nazi guard murders her daughter. The second story, Rosa, returns
to the protagonist some thirty-five years afterward, as she tries to eke out
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a survivors life in Miami. If, as we will see, Rosa comments directly on

the poetics of accents, it in turn is linked inextricably to its companion
story. Seen in this light, the two stories proceed from muteness to linguistic
chauvinism.
In The Shawl language exists without a formal identity. The characters
speak little, and what they do say isnt labeled as one tongue or another. Just
as in The Shawl there are no countries, cities, or nationalities referred to,
so there are no languages specified. This reticence is directly connected to
the storys amorphous setting and its fairy tale narrative strategy of lacking
coordinates of time and space. The reader knows that the characters are
made to endure a death march, and are incarcerated in a concentration
camp. But the story doesnt indicate when or where these events take place.
Nor do we know the language in which the characters exchange the few
words that they do. Finally, speaking at all has a lethal dimension: it is
when Magda, the child who has become mute, regains a voice and howls
that she is discovered and killed. Her mother must in turn become mute in
order not to scream in response and bring upon herself the same fate as her
daughters. The storys focus on a young childs emerging speech intensifies
the sense of language operating before its entry into a multilingual world.
The story, then, sets forth Ozicks version of the discourse of death, not
in this case so much a universe defined by linguistic fragments as one
unknowing of multiple languages, a reduced linguistic universe that, set as
it were before Babel, rests teetering on the edge of muteness.
The second story changes this strategy. Here Rosas postwar New World
setting is brimming with multilingualism; languages, accents, scripts constantly shape the events of the story. Language, moreover, is a bone of contention. Some languages ostensibly are valued more than others. Whatever
language one speaks, writes, or reads is charged with positive or negative
connotations. If, according to David Roskies, in Jewish Eastern Europe,
no language was neutral, so is contention of languages also the order of
the day in Ozicks Jewish Miami. Indeed, nothing defines Rosa so clearly
as her antipathy toward Yiddish and English on the one hand and her
championing of Polish on the other. Within the terms of the story, the
elevation of Polish can only come at the expense of Yiddish and English.
This hierarchy of languages, finally, emerges from the relation between the
two stories. The muteness in the first story prompts the chauvinism in the
second as if Rosas exclusive loyalty to a mother tongue were an attempt
to compensate for what could not be said within the story as well as
by the protagonist in the first. Hence, a legacy of the Holocaust is the
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diminishment of linguistic resources and resourcefulness, the clinging to a

mother tongue even when such loyalty seems patently misguided.
The Shawl and Accent

Rosa and her doting companion Persky first meet and strike up a conversation when Persky comments on Rosas accent: Excuse me, I notice you
speak with an accent. Rosa accounts for it by noting that she was born
somewhere else, not here.32 From that moment forward, accent attests to
origin and circumstance. Never at home in postwar America, Rosa has no
trouble laying claim to the accent that marks her as foreign; for others,
however, accent is a stigma that they attempt to eliminate. This is the case
with Rosas father, who spoke Polish so that every syllable struck its target.
To speak without an accent was mark of belonging to the majority culture,
of leaving behind the distinctive Jewishness that set one apart. Yet Ozicks
cautions in The Question of Our Speech regarding robotic speech cue
the reader to the fact that the elimination of accent leaves one without
a sense of place. Rosas judgment is hence as skewed as the missionary
clinicians who wished to uproot Ozicks local speech.
Yet the meaning of accents moves in a second, antithetical direction.
Accents in this case denote not imperfection but witness, a refusal, a la
Arendt, to eliminate the foreign remnant. Importantly, accents here refer
not to Polish but English. In response to Rosas disclosure that she is from
an educated family, her companion Persky observes nevertheless that her
English aint better than what any other refugee talks.33 Rosa hopes to
call on class distinctions to distinguish herself from Persky and reclaim lost
prestige, but broken English blurs these distinctions and indicates a persons
essential status as a refugee. According to Rosa, broken English is not a
sign of incompetence of being not better than but rather a symbol
of oppression against which she has taken revenge: Why should I learn
English? I didnt ask for it, I got nothing to do with it.34 Rosa construes
English as the language that should not be learned. Hence, the English
that a refugee talks remains broken out of protest, a pointed rejection of
what fate has thrust upon her. What Persky understands as a matter of
circumstance, Rosa reinterprets as a matter of choice.
And, strikingly, accents that bear witness resist the attempt to uproot
them. Rosas alter ego, her niece, Stella, has claimed English as her own, a
strategy that Rosa understands to go against the grain of witness, to act as
if not there.35 Able in dress, behavior, and even language to eradicate the
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evidence of being there, Stellas accent, like the Yiddish rhythms of the
non-Jewish Jews of Roths Woodenton, will not similarly yield: No one
could guess what hell she had crawled out of until she opened her mouth
and up coiled the smoke of accent.36 In contrast to what could be made to
appear American, Stellas accent marks her as being from somewhere else.
But the connotations of accent shift decidedly here. Evidence previously
that one was born somewhere else, the mark of a refugee, an accent now
specifically testifies to having gone through a concentration camp, a hell.
Indeed, the imagery couldnt be plainer: accent is as much a synecdoche
of the concentration camp as is (or was) the smoke from the chimney
of the crematoria. In Rosas fantasy, accent reveals the survivor with the
exactitude of an Auschwitz tattoo reference to which, tellingly, is nearly
absent from Ozicks stories. Indeed, Ozicks shocking image recalls Primo
Levis unrefined German spoken in such a way that the idioms of the
camp would continue to resound disturbingly. Whereas Levi cultivated
the effect, however, the accent that Ozick (and Rosa) imagine betraying
Stella eludes her determined attempt to suppress it. And if Levi equated
his preservation of Auschwitz-inflected German with the memorializing
dimension of his tattoo (my pronunciation is coarse; but I deliberately
have not tried to make it more genteel; for the same reason, I have never
had the tattoo removed from my left arm), Ozick removes the image of
the tattoo from her stories and replaces it with an ineradicable accent. The
crucial word enacts this shift: crawl as the action by which Rosa describes
Stellas emergence from the camp infantilizes her, and it also bears within
it (craw or throat) an allusion to the mouth that gives voice to the
smoke of accent. Both connotations, moreover, suggest a flexed upward
movement: as Stella crawled out of hell, so does the accent coil up out of
her throat. Finally, the etymologies of crawl (scratch) and craw (throat)
suggest the divergent connotations between tattoo and accent, the first
referring to inscription and the second to utterance. Accent thus emerges
as the inadvertent testimony, that which lingers even when all other traces
have disappeared.
That English receives endorsement as a broken, accented language places
it at one end of the spectrum of Diaspora languages. At the other end of
the spectrum is Polish, the language of mastery and eloquence, the mother
tongue. Unlike Polish, English acquires authority not through mastery. Its
power lies rather in its being despised and rejected. Importantly, it shares
this scorned position in the story with Yiddish.
Yiddish fares badly because of Rosas parents snobbish enlightenment:
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How her mother despised those sounds, her father, like her mother,
mocked at Yiddish. And these sentiments shaped their daughters fantasies: conjuring early twentieth-century Warsaw, Rosa imagined what
bitter ancient alley, dense with stalls, cheap clothes strung on outdoor
racks, signs in jargoned Yiddish.37 Both Yiddish and English, languages
of signs and newspapers rather than literature and high culture, stand for
unwanted worlds, Yiddish, for its part, associated with some ancient alley,
English with the frivolous. and light-minded new world. 38
Linked to Yiddish, English is nevertheless taken to task by Ozick both
in terms of high and low culture. The parody is particularly sharp when
it comes to scholarly writing on the Holocaust, where Ozick dramatizes
its clumsy attempts to fashion a vocabulary (survivor) and to draw on
social scientific categories, in this case that of the scholar of social pathology
James Tree:
For some months, teams of medical paraphrasers have been conducting
interviews with survivors, to contrast current medical paraphrase with
conditions found more than three decades ago, at the opening of the
camps. 39
In such guise, the presumed neutrality of English the use of technical and
professional jargon comes across as brutally irreverent and is made more
so because the findings the research sets forth that the Holocaust has left
a legacy that deforms the current conditions of victims lives dovetail
with Rosas own convictions. The gap between researcher and victim is
hence not in what but in how it is said. In dramatizing Rosas outrage at
the misrepresentation of her experience, Ozick chronicles the split between
academic research and victims experience that shaped the 1970s and that
galvanized the move to redress this split through the turn to testimonies of
the victims.
Having shown the inadequacy with which English writes of the past,
Ozick must find a different way to layer her own English writing with
authority and significance. The project of overcoming the limits imposed
by English had long been pursued by Ozick. For a time, she envisioned
that Jewish writers could revolutionize the English in which they wrote,
shaping it into a new Jewish tongue. Here, too, English was paired with
Yiddish; indeed, the English of Ozicks conjuring, suffused with Jewish
sensibility, vision, and vocabulary, was deemed the new Yiddish. Like
Yiddish, this English could become the necessary instrument of Jewish
life in the Diaspora. 40
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Rosa may, in part, attempt to realize this vision. But the story uses a
different strategy to layer English writing with authority and significance.
Ozick achieves this first of all by breaking the language, creating an English
poisoned by contact with the Holocaust. She then turns to an archEnglish source Shakespearean tragedy to find a vocabulary for suffering.
It is principally by means of English intertexts not, as has been previously
advanced, Latin or Italian, German or Yiddish that the stories find their
reconciliation with English. 41
The turn to Shakespeare is not as strange as one might imagine. Ultimately, King Lear tells of a parent who grieves to death over a child who
has been murdered, thereby serving as a prototype for Ozicks rendering of
a grief-stricken parent disabled by loss. Ozick mines Lear to reckon with
the proposition of increasing torment. Appositely, in an English letter to
niece Stella, Rosa echoes famous Shakespearean lines on a transformed
knowledge of suffering: Golden and beautiful Stella, she wrote to her
niece. Where I put myself is in hell. 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. 42 In King Lear, Gloucesters son Edgar gives voice
to these sentiments when he first encounters his blinded father: O gods!
Who ist can say I am at the worst? / I am worse than eer I was. . . . And
worse I may be yet. The worst is not / So long as we can say This is the
worst. 43 In both cases, the loss of almost everything precious leads one to
believe that suffering has reached a limit. But the sufferer regrettably learns
that what was thought a limit is not. That Edgars lines find their way to
Rosas pen is in several ways a surprise. First, that Rosas Miami hotel room
could be worse than what has come before conveys at the beginning of
the story the intensity of Rosas painful predicament. Second, even Rosa,
whose English is described as crude, writes lines from Shakespeare. By
having Shakespeares English shadow Rosas, Ozick displays an English in
which allusion enters effortlessly.
Other allusions to Lear appear in the story. Describing Stellas past as
no one could tell what hell she had crawled out of calls to mind Lear
referring to his own future as heunburdened crawl[s] toward death.More
significant is how Lears plaintive cry becomes that of the child Magda:
Every day Magda was silent, and so she did not die. Rosa saw today that
Magda was going to die. . . . Magda, in the sunlight, swaying on her pencil
legs, was howling.44 Such a cry of grief has been attached to Lear since
he walked onto stage carrying the murdered Cordelia in his arms and
registering the depth of his (and the worlds) loss with Howl, howl, howl,
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howl! . . . Shes gone forever. / I know when one is dead and when one
lives. / Shes dead as earth.45 Ozick transports the force of Lears fourfold
howl to the site of a concentration camp and reassigns it as well, letting
it be sounded not by a grieving parent but by the victim herself. If Lears
howl comes in the aftermath of Cordelias senseless murder, so Magdas
is heard in anticipation of it. Uttered by the victim before the final blow,
the childs howl, already laden with Lears woe, becomes the marker of
inevitable death. What the coiled smoke of accent does to elegize loss, the
howl serves to denominate the moment thereof.
Shakespeares tragic idiom thus sharpens the English that in signs, newspapers, and scholarly treatises slides mercilessly toward the shallow and
frivolous. As if the galvanizing force of allusion to Lear were not enough,
Ozick layers onto the prototype of grieving parent the mad desperation
of Othello. It is hard to miss the parallel. The storys central episode finds
Rosa obsessively searching the streets of Miami Beach to retrieve a pair
of missing underpants. As it turns out, the underpants were never lost or
taken. But by showing Rosa in the grip of an obsession associated with
sexual violation, Ozick suggests that the violations suffered during the war
continue to leave their mark on the most private facets of Rosas postwar
life.
The link to Othello is made clear because Rosas conviction that her
underpants have been stolen commences with a handkerchief: On the
floor there was something white, a white cloth. Handkerchief. He picked it
up and stuffed it in his pants pocket.46 Escorted to a cafeteria lunch by her
newfound companion Persky, Rosa notes what seems an innocuous gesture.
Only later, when she cannot find the missing garment, does she presume
the object Persky handled to be her underwear. As Desdomonas purloined
handkerchief becomes the means by which Iago convinces Othello that he
has been sexually betrayed, so the handkerchief here persuades Rosa that
Persky, ostensibly the perfect gentleman, is actually a sexual pervert taking
advantage of Rosas good will. But both Othello and Rosa make more out
of the handkerchief than is warranted, attributing violation and duplicity to those who are full of good intentions. Borrowing on Shakespeares
handkerchief, Ozick shows how monstrous projections of sexual perversity,
which in Othellos case are cultivated by the wicked Iago, have their basis for
Rosa in the wartime violations that she was compelled to endure. Parody
constantly threatens to diminish Rosas tragedy; allusion to the wayward
passions of Shakespeares tragic heroes removes the parodic poison from
Ozicks English, even if not from Rosas own.
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chapter 9
The Language of Dollars

English as Intruder in Yaffa Eliachs
Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust
In many respects, Yaffa Eliachs Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust resurrects

David Boders partially realized project. Conducting interviews with survivors in a variety of languages, Eliach like Boder viewed the project under
the rubric of literature. Moreover, the motivation to interview survivors
was driven, again as Boder, by the determination to give the victims their
own voice. But the stakes were if anything higher. Following Boder by
some thirty years, Eliach was attempting to challenge what had become by
the 1970s the dominant paradigm of addressing the Holocaust: the use of
German-language documentation written by the persecutors. In contrast,
the victims testimony counted for little. Eliach hoped that giving the victims a voice would revise that paradigm. And yet she, again like Boder, felt
compelled to publish the stories that issued from the interviews exclusively
in English. When it came to the English of her text, however, Eliach chose a
different approach from that of Boders. Whereas Boder was committed to
keeping the English idiomatic (as near to the text of the original narratives
as the most elementary rules of grammar would permit), Eliach chose an
alternative strategy of representation.
Drawing on a variety of languages, Eliach and her students at Brooklyn
College interviewed Jewish survivors of the Holocaust from approximately
1974 to 1981; Eliach then translated, edited and rewrote the material of the
interviews into a unified form in eighty-nine tales. She arranged the tales
in four sections, the first three narrating events that took place during the
Holocaust, the final section, its aftermath. Most are set in Poland, Russia,
Germany, and Austria with a smaller number in the last section taking place
in postwar America.
Although Eliachs project progresses from a multilingual universe to a
monolingual one, it makes explicit its foundational ties to multilingual
traditions even while enshrining an English-only narrative. And, while
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seeming to yield to the trend of writing in English about the Holocaust,

Hasidic Tales stages scenes of linguistic exchange that interrogate the status
of English and incorporate its unstable position into the representation of
the Holocaust.
More Than Nine Languages

In the foreword to Hasidic Tales, Eliach makes multilingualism a key programmatic feature: The original interviews were conducted in more than
nine languages and numerous dialects.1 While Eliach never fully explicates the significance of the multilingual basis, the multiplicity of languages appears to empower the tales, positing a kind of primal linguistic
verisimilitude to counteract the dislocated venue (America) and language
(English) in which the tales have ultimately been rendered. In other words,
given that America lies at such a geographic and cultural distance from
the setting of the Holocaust and given that English was a language neither
of victim nor persecutor, the plethora of languages, Eliach implies, may
restore some sense of place and hence may facilitate a connection to the
people who endured the atrocities. Whatever distance has been traversed
from that time and place, and in spite of the American veneer, Eliach wants
to emphasize that her English reworking of the tales has not compromised
the voices of those who relate them.
Indeed, Leon Wieseltier, noting the special contributions that Hasidic
Tales of the Holocaust makes to the literature of the Holocaust, speaks of
restoring the vital context of Eastern European life: Eliach has recovered
the destruction of the Hasidim of Poland as it was for those who were
being destroyed, and she has done so because she knows who they actually
were. She knows their philosophical and social and religious particulars,
and how they appeared in adversity.2 The more than nine languages goes
hand and hand with this project of recovery. Moreover, Eliachs reference
in her foreword to the plethora of languages probably makes more of the
languages than the archive of interviews actually warrants; though many
languages were involved, most of the interviews were conducted in Yiddish
and English. 3 That the actual number of interviews in languages other than
English may have been quite small makes Eliachs attention to the issue of
languages that much more telling. 4
According to Michael Berenbaum, this attention to the original languages shapes Eliachs strategy of representation: In Hasidic Tales, Berenbaum suggests, each tale is beautifully written and has narrative vitality.
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Yiddish and many other foreign tongues are captured and transmitted in
a literate English that carries a trace of the original language but does
not read like an awkward translation.5 In noting the creative interplay
between English and the original languages, Berenbaum is here clearly
praising Eliachs balancing act, her ability to fuse Old World with New
World, to devise an English that can carry a trace without being itself
made less literate presumably less beautiful, less aesthetically pleasing,
less readable. The stakes of Berenbaums praise for Eliachs synthesis are
heightened when we note that he uses decidedly colonialist terms to characterize her achievement: the original languages are captured in English;
if they werent quite so domesticated, the foreign tongues could impair her
English, undermining the aesthetic effect.
Berenbaum (and, perhaps by implication, Eliach) is not alone, of course,
in fearing what can happen to English if a foreign language (particularly
Yiddish) leaves too much of an imprint. Kathryn Hellerstein, for instance,
in the course of chronicling the Yiddish voices in American literature, has
chastised such notables as Bernard Malamud and, as noted before, Phillip
Roth for what she regards as the unseemly manner in which they Yiddishize
their English. 6 Closer to the Hasidic orbit, Arthur Green has emphasized
how he was at pains to steer clear of accent when rendering into English
the homilies of a great Hasidic leader, R. Menachem Nahum of Chernobyl.
In Greens English rendition, the hasidic master speaks without a Yiddish
accent. He is thus liberated to address his English-reading audience with
the message that truly concerns him, that of religious enthusiasm and the
spirit of revival. . . . [T]oo rigid an attempt to preserve the original voice of
the Yiddish/Hebrew source would lead to a borscht-circuit parody, utterly
belying the authors great seriousness of tone.7 Accenting here is understood to vulgarize, to contaminate the English, wrenching it inexorably
from its appropriate rhetorical register. Indeed, Greens purifying strategy
describes Eliachs as well: even with her desire to celebrate the multilingual
universe out of which the tales emerge, in rewriting the tales she too opts for
an English without an accent, that which would testify most conspicuously
that the speaker hails from elsewhere. 8
Eliach also connects multilingualism with genre and gender, two of the
most important dimensions of her project, and dates the connection back
to the beginning of the Hasidic movement in the late eighteenth century:
Since most of the [early Hasidic] tales were written in Yiddish, which was
the vernacular, as opposed to Hebrew, the language of scholarship, they
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attracted many women to Hasidism and made Hasidic tales best sellers
of their time. 9
For those unfamiliar with the history of Hasidism (and the historiography
thereof), Eliachs emphasis on the connection of Hasidism and women
seems far-fetched. Hasidism today is rarely viewed as the champion of
womens participation in central facets of religious or social life. As part of
the ultra-orthodox wing of Jewish religious observance, it rather appears
to keep women in the background with all of the main religious functions,
at least in the public sphere, devolving upon men. But Eliachs view of the
special draw that Hasidism had for women follows a well-established line
of scholarship on the Hasidic movement that found its most important
expression in the work of S. A. Horodezky, a twentieth-century Israeli
scholar, who claimed that Hasidism revolutionized the role of women in
Judaism. According to Horodezky, Hasidism elevated womens spiritual
experience, made writings (particularly in Yiddish) available to women,
and provided opportunities for women to serve as spiritual leaders of
Hasidic communities. 10 These claims, including the one concerning the
pivotal role of Yiddish writing, have been pointedly challenged, although
the main rebuttal came some years after Eliach published her collection. 11
But even in the wake of criticism that voiced skepticism about the central
role of Yiddish, other scholars have continued to assert the connection
between publication in Yiddish and the audience of women. 12
For her part, Eliach clearly overstates the case: Hasidic tales were generally published both in Yiddish and in Hebrew, occasionally in bilingual
editions, more often under separate covers. 13 So the opposition between
Hebrew and Yiddish that Eliach invokes most of the tales were written
in Yiddish, which was the vernacular, as opposed to Hebrew, the language
of scholarship is not strictly accurate. And the exact audience of Hasidic
literature (or literature about Hasidim) in Yiddish has been (and continues
to be) the subject of controversy. 14 But for our purposes, what is crucial is
that Eliach views multilingualism at the center of the history the collecting
and editing of Hasidic tales that she carries forward.
Assuredly, Eliachs provocative observation regarding the historical role
of women in Hasidism bears specifically on the nature and evolution of
her own collection. Eliach claims and the stories bear this out that this
particular collection of Hasidic tales is special because not only Hasidic
men but Hasidic women, too, are often protagonists and play a major
role here, not merely because they are the daughters, sisters, or wives of
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Hasidic personalities but because of their own faith, convictions, and moral
courage.15 Hence, Eliachs book intensifies what she takes to be the Hasidic
movements foregrounding of women, a prominence that was catalyzed by
the importance of the vernacular Yiddish. But the pivotal role that women
assume is not simply a shift of focus on Eliachs part (though it is likely
that too). Women assume these roles in the tales because, in the terms set
forth in Hasidic Tales, the Holocaust precipitated a set of unique conditions
wherein the usual hierarchies were under siege, the common institutions
of authority rendered powerless or paralyzed.
Indeed, in the collection women often replace rebbes as the source of
decision and wisdom. In The Vision of the Red Stars, for instance, the
tale begins by having Rebbetzin Bronia Koczicki, on the advice of the
Radomsker Rebbe, prepare to join her husband in Warsaw, even though
to go to Warsaw in 1941 went against her own sense of what was best.
At this point in the story, traditional hierarchies are still firmly in place,
indeed remain unchallenged. For who was she, she thought to herself,
to question a [rebbes] advice? But soon questions do arise. After telling
how she dreamed a horrible dream, the tale ends by describing how Bronia
reversed her decision, refusing to go to Warsaw and concludes by quoting
her words: At times one must follow ones own dreams.16 Subsequent
tales show that Bronias refusal to go to Warsaw was an important step in
her surviving the war; her husband, trapped in Warsaw, did not. Hence,
the intuitive wisdom of a personal dream comes to supplant the learned
authority of a rebbe. By 1941, the tale suggests, the usual coordinates can
no longer be followed; that shift is signaled by the elevation of womens
experience over the words of male authority. 17
To be sure, multilingual issues are not always conspicuous in these
episodes, though, as we will come to see, they are forcefully present in
many. But already linked by Eliach in her foreword to the prominent role
of women in the Hasidic movement, the issue of languages shadows the
female protagonists of the tales even when the issue itself remains on the
margins.
The unusual role of women in Hasidism generally and in Hasidic Tales
specifically bears on Eliachs own role in the process of obtaining the tales,
for Eliach associates the breakthrough that enabled the project to come
into being with her own role as a woman:After the students [who were Hasidim] established my credentials I faced no difficulties within the Hasidic
community. For a woman, that was an important breakthrough which
opened many doors.18 The breakthrough might well have occurred be-
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cause, though a religious Jew, Eliach herself is not a Hasid and thus is not a
member of the communities from whom she hoped to obtain her material.
Nonetheless, it is a breakthrough chiefly because she, a woman, managed
to interview Hasidic men something that most women would not be
permitted to do, given the practice of many ultra-orthodox men of not
conversing with women who are not family members. 19 Her own breakthrough then mirrors the breakthrough of the women who are protagonists
in the Hasidic tales. In both cases, women who regularly follow certain
rules that orchestrate dependent behavior instead act independently, even
iconoclastically. In one case the Hasidic women during the time of the
Holocaust become the subject of chronicles; in the other case Eliachs
she herself serves as the chronicler. 20
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The Interview as Urtext

It took a breaking through, then, to circumvent conventional barriers that
would have impeded the collection of material. Only by means of these interviews could Eliach chronicle the fate of Eastern European Jewry through
the medium of the Hasidic tale. The collection is clearly a synthesis between
interview and tale, a synthesis that rests on a creative interplay between a
plurality of continental languages on the one hand and English on the
other. Indeed, the interview distinguishes Eliachs book from most other
collections of Hasidic tales, collections that have usually compiled the material from pre-existing oral or written sources. 21 Here, interviews serve as a
basis for the tales, supplying the larger urtext out of which the tale emerges
and from which it derives its authority.
One important assessment of Hasidic Tales has entirely missed its composite nature, preferring to treat the collection exclusively as legend.22
But for a variety of reasons, the interviews are anything but. Eliach and her
students conducted the interviews from 1974 to 1981, years that marked the
onset of a serious role for survivor interviews in Holocaust research. 23 Indeed, Eliachs interviews, among the earliest of their kind, served a definite
polemical task. In the early 1970s, research on the war years was dominated
by historians whose inquiry was exclusively based on Nazi documentation. Eliach established her Center for Holocaust Studies, Documentation
and Research in order to undertake the kind of work that would counter
the prevailing paradigm. According to Bonnie Gurewitsch, archivist of
the center, Documentation available . . . did not reflect the experiences
of either survivors or liberators, but rather the German perspective of the
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executioner. It was clear that there was a need to seek out eyewitnesses who
could testify to the experiences of the victims, as well as of the liberators and
other bystanders.24 The interviews were meant to challenge the monolithic
position that historians gave to Nazi documents, offering instead the voice
and experience of the victim. 25 This task was hardly simple. As Daniel Goldhagen has claimed, the skepticism with which historians of the Holocaust
treated the testimony of victims was or perhaps still is considerably
greater than historians generally bring to witness accounts of other events
of collective trauma. 26 In the face of such skepticism, it was important
to emphasize through every means the intimate link between victim and
event. Hence, as the interview attempted to wrest a place for the voice of
the victim, we can understand Eliachs insistence on the importance of the
languages and dialects of those victims, languages that were part and parcel
of the events of the Holocaust.
Eliachs efforts helped to set in motion a focus on the interview in Holocaust research that culminated in the 1980s and 1990s with projects devoted
to systematically interviewing Holocaust victims. Seen in this light, the
Fortunoff Video Archive Project at Yale University and Steven Spielbergs
Shoah Foundation, leaders in this domain, pick up from where Eliach left
off. 27 And yet, as pointed out in the beginning of this chapter, it is more
appropriate to look back to David Boders 1946 Topical Autobiographies
to find a similar spirit. Boder and Eliach have at their core the quest for
fidelity through language. And yet in both, paradoxically, there remains a
gap between the languages of testimony and the English that narrates that
testimony. This gap has several implications. First, the English in which the
stories are told remains accountable to the primary languages; Boder and
Eliach keep before their reader through stylistic traces, through insistent reference to primary sources and their importance the awareness that
English serves to translate not only language but experience. And second,
the gap between languages of testimony and English narration generates a
special kind of linguistic elegy: whatever traces there may be in the literate
English that Eliach pens, these traces also intimate what has been erased;
they convey, in Hana Wirth-Neshers telling phrase, the felt presence of an
absent source language,28 languages that indubitably fuel the tales but that
also exist solely as echoes. In this way, the echoes of these languages register
linguistic losses and memorialize the brutal elimination of an audience for
whom the primary languages would have been enough.
This gap, then, defines the multilingual condition of Hasidic Tales of
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the Holocaust. As we will see, Eliach, for her part, conscripts a formidable
range of strategies in the tales in order to draw attention to as well as to
circumvent it.
Perfect German: Languages in Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust

While multiple languages circulate mainly in the urtext of Hasidic Tales,
the issue of languages also infiltrates the tales themselves in surprising and
ironic ways.
In the first three sections of Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust, languages not
only enable survival but also place one in peril. Paradoxically, facility in
German either made it possible to pass or allowed for intimate connections
with the enemy that proved essential in saving life. Assuredly, for readers of
Holocaust literature this paradox is well known, receiving its most moving
expression, perhaps, in Primo Levis essay, Communicating. There, as we
recall, he details how surviving in Auschwitz was crucially dependent on
ones knowledge of German; those who lacked such knowledge or who
spoke a language unrelated to German fared poorly because they simply
could not understand what was asked of them. 29
Eliachs tales drive home this point and also add to it. In one set of stories
Honor Thy Mother and God is Everywhere . . . But . . . the special
Berlin ring of Bronia Koczickis German is a crucial factor in survival. 30 In
one instance, while Bronia masquerades as a non-Jew, German soldiers are
so impressed with her conversation that, even though they pride themselves
on their ability to sniff out Jews, they never suspect her but instead
compare Rebbetzin Bronia and her young son to of all things a beautiful
madonna and child.31 In another instance, this time recognized as a Jew,
Bronias perfect German is able to bring admiration from members of
the Gestapo and to help procure their collaboration in saving her nieces. 32
Strikingly, even when she is known for the Jew she is, her German convinces
Nazis that Jews are not what anti-Semites claim they are. In disguise and
out of it, Jews are able to use German for their own purposes, making the
lines of demarcation between German and Jew that much more difficult to
trace.
German again plays this salvific role in the tale where it figures most
prominently, For the Sake of Friendship. Forced into hiding, Rabbi Israel
Spira a great Polish Hasidic leader, often referred to as the Bluzhover
Rebbe, who is a central figure in Eliachs collection happens to overhear a
conversation in German, remembers the beauty of the German language,
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and recalls his own facility and the friendship with a German that it garnered him in the prewar days. Compelled to visit the nearby Gestapo office,
the rabbi comes face-to-face with the same friend of prewar days who,
recognizing the rabbi, does everything in his power to help him survive.
In terms of the fate of the victim, the rabbis perfect command of the
German language thus forged the friendship that now enables survival;
in terms of Eliachs narrative strategy, the chance hearing of a German
conversation sets in motion the recollection that links past and present,
providing the reader with a sense of ironic continuity wherein the German
spoken casually in the prewar period comes during the war to mean the
difference between life and death.
For German to play such a role also suggests its durability in the midst of
the Holocaust, a virtue commentators have often questioned. We recall that
George Steiner, among others, has asserted that the Nazis debased German
during the time of the war to a degree that rendered permanent damage.
To be sure, Eliach is not unaware of this side of the equation. Indeed, the
Bluzhover Rebbe reflects on how strange it is to hear a German spoken
without orders, without commands as if that kind of imperial German
is all that may be left. 33 But in the polyglot world of The Tales, the offense
that the Nazis committed against German does not corrupt the German
language per se.
This complex representation of German as salvific also implies the rewards of acculturation, the benefits of Jews being able to speak with fluency
the languages of the non-Jewish world. Such a facility is usually, of course,
associated with Jews who championed Enlightenment principles, seeing
integration or assimilation into non-Jewish society as the preferred goal.
Clearly, such assimilation was not the aim of the Hasidic Jews who figure
centrally in Eliachs tales. It is thus all the more powerful that these Jews, too,
benefit from such linguistic facility, suggesting that in terms of languages
the usual oppositions between enlightenment and tradition, between secular and religious are not in effect. It suggests, moreover, that salvation,
when it comes, sometimes comes by the apparatus of acculturation, commandeering the very tools that seem to run counter to the Hasidic spirit. 34
The Language of Dollars: English and the Holocaust

In the first three sections of Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust, then, non-English
languages work ironically to further the possibilities of salvation or imperil
them. Fittingly, it is only in section 4 of the volume the section devoted
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to the postwar period that English comes to be an active character in the

process of representation. Indeed, the first tale in section 4, The Plague
of Blood, takes up issues of identity, otherness, and language through the
prism of immigration and the shifting position of English. Arriving in New
York in 1946, the Bluzhover Rebbe is met by an American Jewish soldier,
who
pointed out with great pride the Statue of Liberty, which welcomes the
immigrants to shores of freedom. He told the rabbi: On its pedestal is an
inscription written by a Jewish-American poet, Emma Lazarus: Give me
your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
The gi translated the words into Yiddish for the rabbis benefit. 35
By framing the tale in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, Eliach sets the
arrival of Holocaust survivors in the context of classic scenes of welcome
to America. Yet, making explicit the irony of the scene, Eliach notes how
the rebbe reinterprets the poem to bring out the distinctive tragedy of the
Holocaust. Survivors are tired, poor, and yearning for freedom. But the
few survivors who now come are no longer masses.36 We are remnants, a
trickle of broken individuals who search for a few moments of peace in this
world, who hope to find a few relatives on these shores. For we survived,
One of a city, and two of a family, concludes the rebbe, quoting the book
of Jeremiah and thus linking the fate of the survivors of the Holocaust to
the fate of the survivors of the destruction of the first temple almost twentyfive hundred years before. 37 The rebbe uses the words of the ancient text to
undercut the modern one, invoking the voice of prophetic lamentation to
challenge that of liberal optimism. 38
This scene is particularly striking in terms of language. For Eliach makes
sure to emphasize that the American soldier who serves as the rebbes guide
translated Lazaruss words into Yiddish for the rabbis benefit. The immigrant himself, Eliach shows us, cannot read the words that are meant
to describe his plight and that serve as his welcome to America. The immigrant, in other words, faces an opacity, an English motto that, at least
for many like the rebbe, is simply a foreign language. In this immigrant
encounter between Holocaust victim and American icon, the English that
is designed to appeal to foreigners is itself rendered foreign, in need of
translation. In the context of current developments in multilingual America, Mary Louise Pratt has proposed,expunging the term foreign to refer to
[American] languages other than English.39 The notion evoked by Eliach
of making English itself foreign constitutes a yet more radical revision of
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Americas languages, not so much reclaiming other languages as estranging

English.
And yet it is when Lazaruss words are made foreign that they can be
interpreted properly. By means of the intertextual commentary of the rebbe
through Yiddish translation, set against the Hebrew text of the prophet
Lazaruss English words are reread, thereby proclaiming the distance that
lies between the masses envisioned some years earlier and the isolated
individual who now arrives in the wake of the Holocaust. 40
The surprising opacity of the statues iconic poem hence generates a
fitting response to the legacy of the Shoah. In a later postwar tale, To
Marry a Baker, English is made, not foreign, but rather intimate with
Holocaust-era Europe. The heroine of To Marry a Baker is a survivor,
Tula Friedman, who has a talent for languages and also for telling stories.
Seated with Eliach at a bar mitzvah party in Brooklyn, Tula is moved to
tell how, while in Auschwitz, her ear was damaged: She recalled the event
blow by blow, in German, Yiddish, Hebrew, and English, telling it in the
appropriate language with direct quotations, describing various episodes
related to that beating and its aftermath.41
Strikingly, Tulas mode of recounting events of the Holocaust is resolutely mimetic, and it is the multiplicity of languages at Tulas disposal
that enables this uncompromising fidelity to the reality of Auschwitz. 42
Even more astonishing is that English is given a role equal to that of the
languages central to the Holocaust (German, Yiddish, Hebrew). On some
level, this goes against the mimetic grain: few in Auschwitz knew English; it
rather remained on the periphery of events. But here, in this listing, English
claims a spot for itself as a language of the Holocaust.
There is also a self-reflexive dimension at work in this tale: Tulas linguistic and narrative prowess clearly resembles Eliachs own. And yet her tale
inverts Eliachs representational strategies. Able to invoke any language she
chooses, Tula does what Eliach cant do in America: she presents the tales in
the multiple languages in which they were originally experienced. Nevertheless, the fact that English can assume a place among the most formidable
of the languages of the Holocaust strengthens Eliachs own compensatory
project, making it appear natural for these tales set in Europe to be written
in English.
Tulas extraordinary multilingual performance serves as a prelude to the
defining event of the tale. As bread is delivered to the tables, Tula reminisces
how in the camp she would dream a lot about bread; even dream of
marrying a baker so there would always be an abundance of bread. Other
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survivors at the table confirm the value and obsession with bread, even
though they choose not to eat from the bread in the basket before them on
the table. Yet as the waiter attempts to take the apparently unwanted bread,
he is asked to leave it: There is nothing more reassuring in this world, says
yet another survivor, than having a basket of freshly baked bread on the
table in front of you.43
Bread here serves as a sign of a normal world; superfluous but necessary,
its fixed presence at the table testifies to the abundance that America provides compared to the deprivation from which the survivors have come.
Indeed, Tulas dream of marrying a baker is never literally realized but
is symbolically enacted in her marriage to America, to the baker that
provides abundance and normalcy. English enters the story in a similar
manner, a language whose very presence provides reassurance of Americas
power, its inclusion in the list of Tulas eminent languages paradoxically
signaling the distance that lies between present day America and Europe of
a generation past.
If The Plague of Blood, set in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty,
on the liminal border between America and Europe, shows English to be
foreign and only able to register the force of the Holocaust through the
filter of Yiddish and Hebrew and To Marry a Baker, set firmly on the soil
of America, claims for English unconstrained powers to represent these
events, the final tale I will consider, God Does Not Live Here Anymore,
set outside America and on the terrain of the Holocaust, represents English
as having both extraordinary powers and definite constraints. It is also the
only tale in which English is explicitly viewed as a problem.
Eliachs title of the story focuses on displacement, and accordingly, the
tale conveys a sense of quest for the proper place(s) and language(s) with
which to address the Holocaust. Set in Cracow, Poland, in 1979, in the
context of an official visit by President Carters commission on the Holocaust, the events of the tale unfold on the evening of Tisha BAv, the time
designated in the Jewish calendar for commemorating by rites of collective mourning the destruction of the Temple. But, in postwar Cracow,
mourning becomes electrifying. A member of the American contingent,
Miles Lerman, speaking in English, interrupts the traditional service and
proposes instead to put God on trial for the damage rendered in the Holocaust. 44 The scene is linguistically surreal: a former Polish Jewish partisan
who now lives in America returns to Poland and instead of speaking Polish
or Yiddish, the tongues of postwar Cracow, or Hebrew, the language of
prayer, pleads his case against God in English.
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Assuredly, Lerman invokes English here to permit the members of the

presidents commission, made up of a number of native-born Americans,
to understand what he says and to follow the proceedings of the case against
God. But that the Americans appropriate the synagogue to carry out their
own agenda reinforces the invasive associations around the unlikely use of
English. That Lermans English protest, moreover, arises within the context
of an official United States delegations visit gives the prosecution of the case
an American seal, as if judgment can be exacted only under the jurisdiction
of American authority.
Eliachs narrative delicately negotiates the subversive events and the association with English. She lets Lerman set forth the argument, as he replaces
the Echah /How with which the Book of Lamentations begins with his
own human (and English) How: how could you [God] stay here [in
Cracow, in Poland, in Europe, in the synagogue?] when next door are
Auschwitz and Plaszow? (emphasis added) 45 If the questions are to the
point, Eliach shows that the English in which he voices them is distinctly
foreign, distinctly out of place, even opaque: The holy ark remained
sealed like the faces of the old people, remnants of Cracows Jews, listening
to the foreign language that they did not understand.46 That the native
audience cannot understand what is being said in their own milieu hints at
the linguistic absurdity of Lehrmans endeavor. Moreover, Eliachs simile,
likening the holy ark containing the Torah to the uncomprehending faces,
intensifies the skepticism around English, implying that English does not
partake of holiness but rather belongs to the realm of the profane.
At the end of the tale, the profane and intrusive nature of English becomes clear as Eliach quotes one of the Cracovian Jews asking her, What
did your American friend say in the language of dollars?47 English now
becomes explicitly characterized as inappropriate, a language of the street
and market rather than of the synagogue and religious court. 48 The opacity
of English comes out of a misapplication, a confusion of registers. Out of
place and misapplied, English cannot, according to the terms of the tale,
address properly the terms of Gods displacement. For Eliach gives the
Cracovian the final word, responding to Lermans accusations: God did
not stay in one place and the people go to another; God is with the people,
displaced from the synagogue that they once shared.
Burdened with associations of the profane, the market, and the absurd,
English appears at best intrusive, at worse fallacious. Trying to usurp the
stage in an arena central to Jewish life (the Rema synagogue) and to the
legacy of the Holocaust (Cracow and Auschwitz), English is put in its place,
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reassigned to the margins. To bring the terrible events of the Holocaust to

America and render them in English may be one thing, but to try to take
English, even (or especially) under the auspices of the American president,
to the site of the Holocaust itself, is quite another. In Eliachs tale, then, the
question of Gods place is displaced onto the question of English. Moreover,
this tale, perhaps more than any other in the collection, leads us to wonder
about Eliachs English as well, to feel the irony of Eliachs mobilizing English
to encompass the many languages in which these tales were told.
And yet there is a way that the nature of this tale vindicates, at least
to some degree, the use of English to address the Holocaust: the very
rapscallion nature of English may well enable it to defy traditional modes;
of all the languages at his disposal, in other words, Lerman may have chosen
English as the language most apt to pose questions that go against the
grain. Its very intrusiveness, its coming from the outside geographically,
culturally, religiously may have energized Lehrmans defiant questions,
having them, at least to some ears, dwarf any answers that can be supplied.
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Hasidic Tales is not, as we have seen, the only work that problematizes the
relation of English to the Holocaust by emphasizing multilingual strategies.
But no other work, as far as I am aware, demands that English assume so
many contrasting positions in relation to this event positions of weakness and strength, of opacity and transparency, of dependence on other
languages and assertions of independence from them. These three tales
play out a variety of options whereby English is estranged, wrenched out
of, or freed from its taken-for-granted roles. Notably, the tales accomplish
this by progressively taking English through a journey into and out of
America, from immigrant to resident to ambassador. On the face of it, this
dynamic makes English increasingly into a language authorized to engage
the Holocaust. But at each point English is made to do something more,
or less, than it was expected to; and this inflation or deflation thematizes
the anomalous role of English in relation to the Holocaust.
Finally, in terms of American literary history, Hasidic Tales is remarkable
as a uniformly English-language text that displays so incisively the multilingual context that makes possible such tales. For Hasidic Tales simultaneously conforms to monolingual pressures and contests them, eliminates
a play of languages only to filter them back in. On one level, then, Hasidic
Tales of the Holocaust both allows for, and in some ways invites, the fantasy
of an America fully at home with English an English, moreover, that is
spoken by everyone (or almost everyone), everywhere, and that is prepared
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to address any experience imaginable, including the Holocaust. On a second level, however, Hasidic Tales exposes the compromised postures that
English assumes in its quest to master every experience and dramatizes its
uncertain that is, shifting, decentered, opaque, misaligned status.
English is dubbed the language of dollars at the end of a process. Roths
babble inaugurates it; Eliachs intruder brings it to a close. If according to
David Crystal, in the 1950s world English was a dim, shadowy possibility,
the journey of English from the late 1950s through the 1980s witnesses
its emergence from the shadows. Yet as English gains strength, it also is
brought face-to-face with its limits.
Indeed, other languages most often Yiddish, sometimes German, occasionally a welter of otherlanguages and dialects constantly challenge the
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position of English. Further, English itself, the dominant language, voices
this challenge, either through satire or by being transformed into something
like another tongue. Moreover, even when English is spoken without an
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accent, it sounds unnatural. Yet only in the next era does English, coming
full circle from the pawnbrokers anesthetized idiom, become a tongue
foreign to itself and thereby earn the right to recount the Holocausts most * 243.20006p
forbidding details. This is what Spiegelmans Maus so deviously undertakes

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chapter 10
The Language of Survival

English as Metaphor
in Art Spiegelmans Maus
Thus far, English has had both more and less to do with the Holocaust than
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most of us previously imagined. There has been more because English had
from early on a substantial role in representing the events. Even when the
story was told in one of the languages proximate to the events, other factors
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made publishing in English necessary. Eventually, English offered itself as a
neutral tongue, granting distance, conferring objectivity, and constituting a

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reasons. An adopted tongue enabled them to relate what happened with
a buffer. At the margins of the events, English could, when called upon,
[157], (3)
fulfill this role more than adequately.
But what would happen if English were not at the margins? This possibility is one of the extraordinary dimensions that Art Spiegelmans survivors
tale, as he refers to it, ushers in. For Spiegelman emphasizes the extraordinary role English plays in aiding the survival of his father, Vladek. Indeed,
time and again, in Auschwitz and in Dachau, English plays such a role.
At the epicenter of the terrible events, English has the power to shape
destiny. This clearly reverses the equation, placing English squarely in the
center. But the implications, as Spiegelmans work shows, are still greater.
For the prominence of English in the chronicle of events implicitly directs
attention to the fractured English in which the survivors story is told and,
more generally, to the complex significance of language and languages in
representing the Holocaust.
Mauss exceptional concern with English operates on at least three levels.
First, in Vladeks biography, his knowledge of and competence in English
is important both for initiating his relationship with his future wife, Anja,
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and for aiding or determining his survival while in concentration camps.

Second, Spiegelman presents Vladeks narrative of survival in immigrant
English, rife with errors and neologisms. In contrast to the biographical
events recounted, Vladeks English here is noteworthy not because of competence but rather because of incompetence. Third, the fluent English of
virtually all other characters (even those who, like the psychotherapist,
Pavel, are also immigrants) frames and envelops both Vladeks biography
and his Holocaust narrative, establishing English as the dominant language. These three levels interrogate the status of English as a language
of the Holocaust and, consequently, as a language (un)fit to recount the
Holocaust.
Intervening in the complex, even antithetical, legacy of English as a language of the Holocaust, Spiegelmans Maus makes the position of English
itself a theme. Indeed, this self-reflexive investigation of English begins with
the title. On first hearing, the title would seem to be in English, the word
maus (mouse) paralleling the audacious animal imagery Spiegelman uses
to represent the Jews. But while the title is phonetically English, Spiegelman
actually writes (draws?) it in German, a gesture that not so much eliminates
the English as, I would suggest, contaminates it, associating it with, rather
than opposing it to, the essential languages of the Holocaust.
This strategy would seem to endow English with an authority that it
previously lacked. There are, however, several ways that the association not
only confers authority but provokes suspicion. First, the title links English
with German, the language of the persecutors, thus implicitly associating
English with the debate regarding the fitness of German as a language
of representing the Holocaust. And second, the devious German title estranges the English, making it, for the American reader, not only curious
but foreign, rendering the once familiar and comfortable into something
strange and disconcerting. 1
Spiegelmans choice of title suggests the complex ways he reformulates
the issue of representing the Holocaust in English. On the one hand, he
challenges its legacy of purity, moving English from outside to inside the
Holocaust. On the other hand, by positing English as foreign, Spiegelman
frustrates the American audiences sense of familiarity, moving the reader
in a sense from inside to outside the Holocaust.
This chapter will elaborate the strategies that Spiegelman employs
throughout Maus to effect his reformulation and revaluation of English.
Admittedly, to foreground the verbal dimension of Maus appears perhaps
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159
to miss what is most singular about its approach to the Holocaust: the
drawings. But as these preliminary comments suggest, this graphic novel
compels attention to its words.
The Language of Secrets
English becomes a subject in the first represented conversation between

Vladek and Anja. Vladek reveals to Anja that he has deciphered the private
conversation in which Anja and her cousin praise Vladek. 2 They speak
in English to protect their secret; Vladeks capacity to understand English
comes as a surprise, displaying not only his hitherto hidden capacity to
negotiate English but also his access to the secrets that in this case were
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conveyed by means of English. English thus initially takes on a number of
striking associations. As a language of secrets, English signifies a language
spoken to prohibit understanding, specifically the understanding of the
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one who is being spoken about.
Vladek discloses to Anja that he knows English by uttering the word

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stranger: You know,Vladek lectures Anja,you should be careful speak
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stranger, that he can understand as well as she can. In its first appearance,
English is the language that invokes the notion of stranger to declare the
[159], (5)
power of knowing. One hears an echo of this invocation when at the conclusion of Maus I, Vladek tries to heal the breach between himself and his
son:You should visit here more often dont be such a stranger.3 Intuiting
that the loss of Anjas memoir will estrange his son, Vladek returns to the
expression that first established the bond between husband and wife a
bond revealed through knowing English.
By letting on to Anja that he is an English-speaking stranger, Vladek
demonstrates the failure of English to be a language of secrets. One might
have believed that it is possible to own a language, to have it available to
one group and not another. But Vladek breaks down the barrier, suggesting
that it is impossible to define and delimit the group who will have access.
Indeed, what happens in the incident in English will later occur with Yiddish. That English cannot serve here as a kind of secret code provokes
suspicion when there is an attempt to deploy Yiddish as a secret language.
The reader is led to suspect that using a language as a secret code will once
again fail. Additionally, the most explicit attempt to encode a language
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when a passerby greets Vladek with the Hebrew word, Amcha is met
with suspicion by Vladek for the very reason that he himself assumes that
language cannot be exclusively owned. Outsiders can always penetrate the
society of those who speak a language. Thus, even the utterance of a Jewish
language is no guarantee that the speaker is Jewish. The role of English
in Vladek and Anyas romantic encounter thus establishes what becomes
the norm in Maus generally: strangers use foreign tongues to access secret
information and to wield it in crucial ways.
The associations around secrecy, resistance, and access also address the
complex relation of Vladek and Anja as presented in Maus. For in this initial
encounter, Vladek understands (or at least in his recounting suggests an
understanding of) certain information that Anja would prefer he did not
[160], (6)
know. Whereas Anja resorts to English to deflect his understanding, Vladek
employs it to appropriate a sensitive cluster of thought and feeling not his
own. This dynamic parallels the ongoing issue of Vladeks belief that he
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has full access to Anjas story, a belief put in doubt repeatedly by Arts
counterbelief that Anjas memoirs would give another, alternative version

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to the events his parents lived through.
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etrable. In essence, English on this level suggests a fantasy of complete
mastery. Indeed, it is a fantasy that accumulates economic, political, and
[160], (6)
psychological associations as the story unfolds.
Tellingly, the discovery that Vladek understands English (and hence
understands the appreciation that Anja feels for him) steers their initial
conversation to further consideration of the role of English in their lives,
considerations this time dominated by economic and class issues. To Anjas
question, Did you study it in school? Vladek responds, I had to quit
school at about 14 to work, a reply that sets out sharply contrasting class
assumptions and realities. 5 In presuming that English is learned in school,
Anja is guided and constricted by her upper-class sensibility, a sensibility that takes for granted the leisure and resources for children to attend
school. Vladeks motivation for learning English I always dreamed of
going to America continues to suggest contrasting class orientations. 6
Whereas Anja acquires her English as part of a secure life lived in a land
of plenty, Vladek acquires his based on a dream, a fantasy of secure life
in a different land of plenty, America. The dream of America, while never
spelled out, implies a society redeemed by an alternative social vision a
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vision of radical social mobility and opportunity, in other words, where a

child would not have to quit school in order to support a family. Such a
dream also, of course, offers an alternative to the social stratification that
so powerfully governs the contrasting methods by which Anja and Vladek
have acquired English.
To be sure, Anja has her own revolutionary dreams linked to languages
and secrets. Working surreptitiously for the communists, Anja translated
secret documents, ostensibly meant to help the class struggle, into German.
When the Polish police discover Anjas complicity, she almost ends up in
jail. For Anja to put her linguistic aptitude at disposal of the communist
cause is more than Vladek can bear, and it nearly ruins their marriage. If
Vladeks cleverness with English reveals class distinctions, then Anjas skill
[161], (7)
with language acts to reverse them or even to do away with them altogether.
Although Vladek and Anjas courtship weathers the stormy episode, the
incident nonetheless also early on associates German with disruption, risk,
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and incarceration with what will be in store for them, in other words,
once the war breaks out.

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If for Anja German places the family at risk, for Vladek it eases his
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beaten for putting up resistance. But by speaking German, he finds a way
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out: I answered [the soldier] in German and his partner stopped him
from beating me.7 Spiegelman makes the connection between language
[161], (7)
and well-being explicit he answered him in German and his partner
stopped as if speaking German (and, in Primo Levis terms, moving
from non-language to language) made Vladek human in the eyes of his
captors. In this case, even before one enters a concentration camp, German
has the power to arbitrate life and death.
Signifying risk but offering refuge, German cannot help but play a role in
Vladek and Anyas saga. But its significance clearly pales to that of English.
What exactly English stands for in Maus is ambiguous and complex, partaking of the associations of Vladeks American dream but going beyond
it as well. At this stage of Maus, English is not yet a language of survival.
Rather, the first meeting between Vladek and Anya represents English as a
romantic language of secrets and of deciphering them, as well as a property
that is acquired through various kinds of labor. Indeed, it is through the
speaking of, and the speaking about, English that one sees class as a key
factor in accounting for experience and perception in Maus. Moreover,
it also becomes the site in which fantasies of mastery on the one hand
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and transformation on the other are entertained and played out. These
fantasies will continue to operate when in three remarkable episodes in
Maus II English becomes the language of survival and the language of the
survivor.

Early in Maus II, English returns to the foreground, serving as a form of
knowledge that can generate extraordinary transformations. And in the
context of the concentration camp, this power to transform can determine survival. After deportation to Auschwitz and separation from Anja
upon arrival, Vladek tries simply to remain alive. Faced with little food,
insufficient clothing, and a constant threat of brutal death, relief comes
in an unexpected manner. The kapo of Vladeks barracks decides to find
a tutor in English, and after examining the proficiency of the candidates,
the kapo deems Vladek the best qualified. 8 During his two-month tenure
as the kapos tutor, Vladek is able to eat and dress well and to obtain the
kapos protection. Because a Polish kapo is interested in bettering his own
circumstances, English becomes the key to survival.
English has such leverage because of, in the kapos word, its worth.
The kapo wants to learn English because it will stand him in good stead
with the Allies when the war is over. In the hiss view, language is generally
a means to improve social status, and English is the specific instrument to
achieve that end in the future, having the capacity not only to aid survival
but also to secure privileged status in the society one inhabits.
This view of the worth of English suggests that it is not pure, that it
does not inhabit a place outside of camp society, but rather, like other
commodities, it is subject to the particular logic and laws of camp life.
And like other simple commodities in Auschwitz for which there is great
demand and little supply, its value rises astronomically.
Vladeks competence in English, as well as the association with the kapo
that it garners, enables him to achieve a meteoric rise in status. He obtains
not only food but also preference in clothing With everything fitted, says
Vladek, I looked like a million and secures privileges with which he can
help friends. 9 That Vladeks rise in status is so closely associated with his
competence in English is powerfully suggestive. For paradoxically, in the
midst of the deprivation of Auschwitz, Vladeks success fulfills his dream
of America a dream of transformation that presumably centered on the
acquisition of material abundance and that, we recall, originally motivated
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his own study of English. Even Anjas fate becomes yoked to Vladeks good
fortune with English: when Vladek later relates what he knows of Anja
after they were separated upon arrival at Auschwitz, the news that she is
alive in Birkenau comes while giving language lessons: This I found out
by workers from Birkenau what passed where I was teaching English.10
If teaching the kapo English may implicate English in the logic of
Auschwitz, it may also, however, continue to operate according to its own
laws. How long were you in quarantine teaching English? asks Art, trying
to account for Vladeks time in Auschwitz. 11 To do so, Art draws a timetable,
a kind of graph, with quarantine designating the two months between
March and May 1944 that he taught English to the Auschwitz kapo. Strikingly, Spiegelman uses this word rather than the occupation of teaching
English itself to designate the time period. To be sure, the kapo himself
used the word quarantine at the end of the episode to explain why he
couldnt have Vladek stay with him any longer: Ive kept you here in the
quarantine block as long as I can.12 As the etymology of quarantine
suggests referring to a forty-day period Vladeks reprieve too must
come to an end. But in the case of the graph, the word substitutes, as it
were, for the occupation of teaching English. It is as if the separation or
sequestering implied in the notion of being quarantined indicates the rarefied time and space where English could play a role in Auschwitz. As Arts
graph paradoxically implies, only being put in quarantine could English
determine survival in Auschwitz.
Yet English also gathers a momentum that has it show up in the most
unexpected places. Trying to iron out the details of his fathers time in
Auschwitz, Arts questions lead Vladek to report on the inner workings
of the killing process. Chosen by the soon-retreating Germans to help
dismantle the crematoria so as not to leave behind a sign of all what they
did, Vladek emphasizes that he saw what few could have seen. His grisly
task, moreover, gave him the chance to see exactly how the enemy deceived
the victims into thinking that nothing terrible was awaiting them: People
believed really it was here a place for showers, so they were told.
If the enemy wished to remove all signs, Art himself draws particular
attention to them. To accompany Vladeks report, Art diagrams the approach to the gas chambers, including the signs that instructed the victims
how to proceed and that conveyed the pretense of a normal shower room.
At first written in local languages disinfektion/dezynfekcie the signs
soon give way to English. 13 This turn to English clearly allows the reader to
quickly pick up on the mode of deception. It also replicates the representa-
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tional strategy that Spiegelman uses throughout Maus, whereby idiomatic

English substitutes for the Yiddish or Polish spoken by Polish Jews. Here,
again, English plays that role, the changing-room signs are meant to deceive the victim. Spiegelman thus moves from fidelity to the languages as
they appeared at Auschwitz to an English stand-in. Supplanting the camp
languages on the signs leading to death, English too becomes implicated
in the killing process: Please Tie Your Shoes Together, reads one sign;
Important Remember Your Hook Number reads a second. Idiomatic
to the extreme, even English at this moment submits to the wiles of the
persecutor, helping to create the illusion of normalcy when the situation is
anything but.
The power of English to transform circumstances continues even as conditions worsen. The next instance in which English figures centrally occurs
in the last stages of the war after Vladek tells of the death march that
he and the other prisoners in Auschwitz were compelled to endure. Ending up in Germany, in the concentration camp Dachau, Vladek registers
the new degree of torment that he underwent: And here, in Dachau, my
troubles began.14 It is this phrase, of course, that Spiegelman uses for the
subtitle of Maus II. On one level, the phrase is clearly ironic because it is
absurd: Vladeks troubles began significantly before this. The clumsiness
of Vladeks formulation is also emblematic of the problems involved in
telling a story of this kind. By emphasizing through the subtitle an idiom
inappropriate for the circumstances to which it refers, Art calls attention
both to Vladeks foreignness, his difficulty with mastering English idiom,
and to the foreignness of the experience, a degree of suffering that resists
idiomatic formulation.
On another level, however, it is clear that Vladek (or Art) wishes to
suggest with this phrase that a new dimension of anguish here enters the
story, anguish generated by conditions in Dachau at the end of the war that
bring Vladek closer to death than ever before they were, he says, waiting
only to die.15 Here then, when conditions have become most acute, English
once again determines survival. On the verge of starvation, Vladek meets a
Frenchman who in a camp filled only with Eastern Europeans is desperate
to find someone to speak to. Vladek and the Frenchman discover they
share a common language, English, and daily conversation relieves the
Frenchmans isolation. Grateful to Vladek, the Frenchman, a non-Jew who
benefits from extra rations mailed to him via the Red Cross, insisted, says
Vladek, to share with me, and it saved me my life.16
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165
Several aspects of this episode recall the earlier situation in Auschwitz:

Vladeks interlocutor is a non-Jew, a fellow prisoner, and English is a language foreign to both speakers. Again, Vladeks ability to speak English results in his receiving abundant food in a situation where others are starving
to death. The worth of English, however, is at least tacitly redefined. English
here is not valued primarily as a commodity but rather as a therapy, as a
means of countering the madness of isolation that the Frenchman suffers.
The salvific encounter with the Frenchman in Dachau also recalls, in
part, the original English episode with Anja. Here, too, Vladeks ability to
speak English provokes in the Frenchman the question: How do you know
English? Vladeks response, moreover, is virtually the same as the one he
gives to Anja, foregrounding the dream of America as the motivating
force for learning English.
Once in America, however, Vladeks dream of the future becomes transformed into a nightmare about the past, and this transformation is most
glaringly felt when Art Spiegelman refers again to the French benefactor,
and to the English that linked the Frenchman and Vladek. The two corresponded after the war, writing in English, an English that Vladek taught
him. But Vladek destroyed the letters at the same time as Anjas memoirs.
Up to the end of the war, the English that plays such a vital role in Vladeks
story is spoken only by non-native speakers, by those for whom English is
the other tongue. Though thus far in Maus II, knowledge of English has
meant the power to determine survival,knowledgerefers only to a relative
mastery, a timely, if partial, competence among those who have little or
none. But when the American army arrives, the real masters of the language
set the standard for competence. Thereafter, Vladeks knowledge of English
no longer needs to be the key to survival that it was in the previous episodes.
Nevertheless, English continues to play a vital, if altered, role in Vladeks
story. No longer the language of survival, English becomes the language of
the survivor. For in response to the armys command,Identify yourselves,
Vladek responds not by giving his name but by telling for the first time his
story of how we survived to here.17 While still in Europe, then, Vladek
first tells the story of the Holocaust in English, to an American audience, a
telling, moreover, that is linked to identity.
Even while English is playing a key role in negotiating the change from
survival to survivor and in constructing Vladeks postwar identity as a witness, the encounter with the native speakers of English ushers in another,
more problematic dimension. As the liberated Vladek settles in with the
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Americans, and English becomes the language of daily discourse, there is

something unsettling about the relations that are mediated by the English
that they speak. For, as it turns out, this English is spoken as much by
colonizers as by liberators. Initially, Vladek and his friend are permitted to
stay with the Americans only on the condition that they keep the joint
clean and make our beds.18 The condition, in other words, is that Vladek
and his friend serve as domestic servants for the soldiers. Spiegelman accentuates the imposition of servant status in exchange for protection by
drawing Vladek receiving gifts for shining shoes and being called Willie;
the stereotyping task and name recall the stigmatized position imposed by
white Americans on African Americans in this era. 19 Although the American soldiers conquer the Nazis and set free their victims, the liberators
are nevertheless primed, through gesture and language, to enact the role of
colonizer, even subjugating (while liberating) those for whom, presumably,
they have gone to war in the first place. 20 In this climactic episode, then,
when English as other tongue encounters English as mother tongue, English
becomes even more deeply associated with mastery and domination.
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Contending with the Sacred
Mastery is nevertheless at times hard fought, English vying for authority in realms in which it usually has little. This is the case, for instance,
in the domain of the sacred, an arena where in Jewish life Hebrew and
Aramaic take precedence. In Maus, the struggle between English and the
languages of Jewish ritual is most sharply drawn in The Prisoner on the
Hell Planet sequence. Mourning the wife and mother who has committed
suicide, Spiegelman shows his father and himself next to the coffin, his
father intoning Kaddish, the Aramaic prayer recited by mourners. Strikingly, the first panel showing this scene contains only the Kaddish drawn
in Hebrew script; English is literally out of the picture. For a moment
English relinquishes a place to Aramaic as the language that addresses the
fate of his mother and, in more general terms, the legacy of the war; it is,
after all, the losses incurred in the Holocaust that have driven his mother
to suicide. The second panel continues the Kaddish, but in this case, the
holy letters are sandwiched between the English commentary on top and
an English translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead beneath. Having
yielded its narrative territory, English quickly reclaims it. This give-andtake also occurs in terms of the directional flow of the narrative. In contrast
to English, Hebrew letters are read right-to-left. Their presence in an other-
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wise English narrative thus reverses the flow, signaling a kind of disruption.
But the overall movement of Spiegelmans panels in these two instances
as well as all others remains left-to-right. So in this respect as well, the
disruptive sanctity of Hebrew is swept along in the English.
To an eye used to looking at Hebrew letters drawn on parchment, the
Hebrew letters that Spiegelman draws in these panels appear natural, if
displaced. Hebrew letters are regularly written by hand. Indeed, this is
obligatory in the case of the lettering used in a Torah scroll, mezuza, or set
of tefillin. In the case of these ritual objects, the Hebrew letters must be
inscribed. If a press imprints them, the objects are rendered invalid. It is a
different story with the Latin letters of English. To hand-letter the English
narrative of a book is a novelty, of a piece with the drawings that define the
novelty of Maus itself. For a moment, Spiegelman becomes something of a
scribe, transferring into the arena of comics the hand-lettering of a sacred
Jewish document.
Perhaps this association accounts for the prominence of the hand inserted into The Prisoner on the Hell Planet in which the drawn Kaddish
appears. A hand holds the book; a hand also holds the photograph of Art
and his mother that occupies top left position on the page. The motif of the
hand is repeated in the photograph itself: Art is posed with a hand on his
knee; his mother with her hand on his head. To be sure, the repeated echo
of the hand reminds the reader that Maus is the work of a visual artist; the
distinctive nature of the book is that he drew it by hand. The hand motif is
self-reflexive in another sense: the objects that tell the story, in other words,
cannot stand by themselves. They require the hand of the author to bring
them into being. But viewed within the context of the Hebrew letters that
spell out the beginning words of the mourners Kaddish, the hand is the
hand of a scribe, writing out traditional words for ritual purposes. 21
Hebrew is mainly set off as the language of ritual. But on occasion it, too,
operates as a secret language, an undercover code that during the Holocaust
served to connect one Jew with another. As Vladek returns to the city to
try to get supplies for himself and Anja, he hears someone behind him call
out, Amcha, the Hebrew code word for our people.22 Frightened that
its a trick being used to expose him, Vladek plays dumb. But the Hebrew
speaker turns out to be a Jew after all. Even when circumstances prove to
be genuine, relying on a secret language to bind Jews together goes awry.
How much more are things apt to go wrong, then, when the circle
includes non-Jews. The attempt to use a Jewish language to act covertly and
escape arrest reaches a pinnacle when Vladek, on the run in Nazi-occupied
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Poland, arranges for Anja and himself to be smuggled into unoccupied

Hungary. Here it is not Hebrew but Yiddish which permits the Jews to
ostensibly confer in secret and judge whether the non-Jewish smugglers
can be trusted. The Jews conduct their negotiations in Yiddish so the
Poles dont understand.23 Drawn with a Pole waiting at the margin of the
frame, the panel depicting the Yiddish conversation the single example
of such a conversation in Maus shows the Jews relying on their language
to convey a series of life-and-death secrets.
This role of Yiddish in the escape attempt to Hungary is further complicated when a young friend who ostensibly has himself been smuggled out
of Poland writes in Yiddish from Hungary, proclaiming his well-being and
urging Vladek to go ahead with the smuggling operation. Importantly, it is
because the friends letter is in Yiddish that it can be trusted. For whatever
reason, Spiegelman holds back in this case, neither drawing the Yiddish
conversation in Hebrew letters nor having the contents of the letter read in
Yiddish. He reserves Hebrew letters only for prayer, as if the prayer book
itself erupts into the narrative. In this case, a conversation dedicated to
eminently pragmatic affairs avoids the sacred. Moreover, the covert conversation among the Jews, which Spiegelman underscores with English
translation, is meant to be transparent to all of Mauss readers readers
who, in other words, are meant to think of themselves as trustworthy, as
enjoined to overhear the words spoken by the Jews trying desperately to
find a haven. To draw the conversation in another alphabet would put too
much distance between victim and reader. In contrast, the Hebrew prayers
stand without translation, engaging those who can follow, distancing those
who cannot.
The Yiddish letter purportedly sent from Hungary has its own denouncement in Maus II. Once in Auschwitz, Vladek meets the letter writer, Abraham, who explains how a letter in a hidden language could have failed in
its task: The Poles who arranged our escape understood Yiddish (Spiegelmans emphasis]. . . . In Bielsko the Poles dictated that letter while the
Gestapo held a pistol up to my head.24 What is meant to be a language
of secrets becomes a language manipulated by strangers. Indeed, these
strangers the Polish smugglers not only understand but also dictate
letters. In a bizarre reversal, the Jew serves as the conduit for the Poles
speaking Yiddish; what are ostensibly his words are actually theirs.
If strangers can decode a presumably secret language, they can also find
things in it that remain opaque to Jews themselves. In Auschwitz, Vladek
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is about to give way to despair when a Polish priest gives him hope by
interpreting the numbered tattoo on Vladeks arm:
Hmm . . . Your number starts with 17. In Hebrew thats kminyan tov.
Seventeen is a very good omen . . . It ends with 13, the age a Jewish boy
becomes a man . . . and look! Added together it totals 18. Thats chai,
the Hebrew number of life.
The priest concludes that because the letters add up tothe Hebrew number
of life, Vladek will come through all this alive.25 Vladek takes the priests
comments to heart. The priests unexpected fluency in Hebrew and, for
that matter, in Jewish modes of numerological interpretation pulls Vladek
out of depression. In this case, the outsider was able to decipher the secrets
latent in Hebrew; for him it was clearly not a hidden tongue. Even more,
the secrets contained within the tattoo imprinted on Vladeks body were
beyond the ken of Vladek himself. What would seem to belong to Vladek
his own number, his own body, his own language can actually be best
understood by the stranger coming from without.
Hence, Maus shows Jewish languages as ultimately porous, available to
non-Jew as well as Jew. As Spiegelman shows, this availability goes against
the grain of what is expected. Indeed, Vladek and Anja were deported
because such expectations were violated. Had Vladek not presumed that
only a Jew would compose a letter in Yiddish, he would not have bought
into the smugglers plan. In wartime Poland, these languages were assumed
to be the property of Jews alone. And this was not only held to be the case
by Jews. The Polish smugglers, too, could count on the fact that the letter
written in Yiddish would serve as an affidavit of their trustworthiness.
They were aware that everyone took for granted that Yiddish was a Jewish
language. That outsiders could know it as the insiders did could sometimes
signal death (as in the case of the smugglers) or life (as in the case of the
priest). 26
Fractured English
How does this account of English as the language of survival inform the
story Vladek tells in English, the story told by the survivor? How are we to
understand the association of English with knowledge, with power, with
transformation, and eventually, with the capacity to attest to ones identity
on the one hand and the fractured English with which Vladek testifies on
the other? And how does the tension between English as the competent
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language of survival and English as the incompetent language of the survivor address the issue of representing the Holocaust in English and the
issue, more generally, of representing the Holocaust?
In one respect, the function of this incompetence is clear and forceful.
Vladeks accented English is mimetically appropriate for a Polish Jewish
immigrant to America, and critics have noted in this light that Art has a
good ear.27 But I want to suggest that Vladeks tortured visualized prose
(the phrase is Nancy Millers) 28 is not only meant to represent an Englishspeaking foreigner but is also meant to torture English into being a foreign
language. Indeed, this quality of foreignness is the means by which English
can become a language of testimony. By fracturing Vladeks English, and
by making it the most foreign language in Maus (a point to which I will
return), Spiegelman uses it to convey the foreignness of the Holocaust
itself.
That Vladeks tortured English does more than reveal Spiegelmans ear
for language can be appreciated by contrasting it with the way he represents
the language of the other survivors in Maus. These other migrs, Mala,
Pavel, and Anja, also European-born and arriving in the United States no
earlier than the end of the war, are candidates for an accent like Vladeks.
But Spiegelman presents them as fluent in English, speaking like natives,
virtually without accent. We know that these survivors are foreigners only
by what they say and what is said about them, not by how they say it. It
is for Vladek alone that Spiegelman reserves the distortions of syntax, the
malapropisms, the quirky idiom the stylistic correlates, as it were, of an
accent. 29
Although it is but the inflection of an individual voice, Vladeks accent
also shapes the aesthetic structure of Maus, providing Spiegelman with
the means to represent, and distinguish, present and past. For a time,
says Spiegelman, he entertained the possibility of drawing the episodes
depicting the past in black and white, those of the present in color, but
rejected such a blunt visual dichotomy as too simplistic. 30 Yet what resisted
visual coding yielded to an aural one: for episodes in the past, Spiegelman uses fluent, colloquial English to represent the languages of Europe
as spoken by their native speakers; for episodes in the present, Vladeks
broken, accented English serves as a constant marker. On the surface, this
strategy seems misguided; continental languages do not deserve an English
better than English itself. But within the terms Maus establishes, Vladeks
broken English becomes the means by which Spiegelman articulates the
incommensurability between present and past.
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Spiegelmans decision to place a distinctive burden on Vladeks English as

a vehicle to represent the Holocaust came only after experimentation with
other options. The earliest publication of the Maus project, a three-page
vignette appearing in 1972, already draws Vladek recounting his ordeal by
means of a tortured prose. 31 But for at least two reasons, Vladeks accented
narration in this earlier installment is less well defined and exceptional
than it becomes in the later full-length treatment. First, Vladek speaks with
an accent when he is recounting his story and also when he is shown in
his European past; the distinction that informs both Maus I and Maus II
between Vladek in America and Vladek in Europe, between Vladek in the
present and Vladek in the past, does not obtain. And second, and perhaps
even more fundamental, is that all European Jews speak with an accent.
The safest thing it would be that we kill him, says one of the Jews hiding
in a bunker with Vladek. A decade or so later, in a revised version of this
scene in Maus I, Spiegelman eliminates the accent, and now the Polish Jew
says simply: The safest thing would be to kill him.32
The contrast between the vignette and the books shows an evolution
in Spiegelmans representational vision of English. In the earlier version,
every victim speaks with an accent, a strategy that divides the linguistic
world of Maus between native speaker and foreigner, between American
and European. In the books, however, the erasure of group accent and
exaggeration of Vladeks individual one make Vladeks American English
singular. Paradoxically, it is not the representation of the events of the
Holocaust itself that is most foreign to the American readers of Maus; it
is rather the telling about the Holocaust the testimony that carries the
burden of everything foreign.
That Vladeks broken-English testimony is meant to carry immense authority is attested by the single instance in which Vladek speaks from a
different vantage point. On the way home with Vladek from the supermarket, Arts wife, Franoise, stops to pick up a black hitchhiker, whom
Spiegelman represents as speaking a highly inflected (and also visually
tortured) form of black English. Vladek condemns Franoises charitable
gesture, using degrading racial stereotypes to justify his own admonitions. 33
Inclusion of this unflattering view of his fathers bigotry Vladek himself,
according to Art, appears not to have learned the lesson of the Holocaust
is clearly meant to complicate the readers reaction to Vladek.
But the episode is made more remarkable by Spiegelmans deployment
of Vladeks language. For at the moment when the hitchhiker speaks broken English, Vladek relinquishes his own. Instead, he expresses his bigoted
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regrets in his native Polish (the only example of Vladek speaking Polish in
either Maus I or Maus II), represented here first in the original, then underscored with a fluent English translation. To be sure, Vladeks recourse to
Polish allows him to vent his bigotry without infuriating the other passengers in the car. But the movement from English to Polish also mobilizes a
set of representational values. No longer telling the story of the Holocaust,
but rather uttering racial slurs, it is as if Vladek has forgone the right to
the tortured English that is the vehicle for his testimony. In reverting to
his native Polish, he finally regains a fluency even the English translation
has overcome the foreignness that defines his usual American voice but
that fluency comes at the expense of, and suspends, the authority evinced
by his tortured English. Moreover, the episode witnesses a shift of roles
and voices. For the black hitchhiker himself, the victim of Vladeks bigotry,
speaks an English that, in its idiosyncrasy and visual effect, approximates
the foreign English that defines Vladeks authoritative voice as a survivor.
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English and Surviving Auschwitz
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For English to act as the language of survival in Auschwitz is of course

remarkable but not entirely new. As we recall, English played this role
in the case of Nelly Bundy, one of the dps interviewed by David Boder.
Bundys story was strikingly similar to Vladeks. Because of her knowledge
of English, she was moved from Birkenau to Auschwitz, from hard labor to
office work, and from severe deprivation to a life of endurable austerity. As
with Vladek, her facility in English meant that she was granted privileges
that others were not. The privileges that her facility in English garnered
better living conditions, more food, easier work meant the difference
between life and death.
The similarity does not end there. In the interview, Bundy periodically
showed that her English was not all that good. At times, she would draw
attention to the limits of what she knew. More generally, Boders verbatim
transcription attested to a lack of mastery. To be sure, Bundys occasional
lapses were not Vladeks fractured English; not every sentence bears the
mark of incompetence. But in both cases, the fact that knowing English
saved their lives stood in contrast to the less than competent English in
which they told their story.
For all the similarity, however, Vladeks story differs tellingly from that
of Bundys. In her case, we recall, she was chosen to tutor a Nazi pilot
and is thereafter taken to where she will carry out her assignment. But the
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pilot never appears. Nor was his failure to show up for his lessons ever
explained. Despite his non-appearance, Bundy remains in her privileged
circumstances, continuing to benefit by the English she never was actually
called upon to teach. In Vladeks case, he teaches English daily to the shrewd
Polish kapo. Additionally, the kapo spells out why learning English is worth
the trouble; learning language for him is a way of weathering the tides of
war, of making oneself useful to those in power. If Vladek learns English
because he dreams of going to America, the kapo learns it because he knows
that America is en route to him. In contrast to the mystery associated with
Bundys saga, where she actually never taught English nor knew why she
was being was requested to teach it, Vladeks story gives English a reason
and a role.
The contrast between the two obtains in the interviews as well. In Bundys
case, she enigmatically speaks English in France to a Latvian Jew. This runs
counter to what one might expect. Given that Bundy is Austrian, that the
interview takes place in Paris, and that Boder is fluent in German (we recall
that he conducts the majority of interviews in German), the factors point
to German as the most logical choice. But, for no apparent reason, Bundy
chooses English to be the language of the interview. To be sure, Boder
had lived and worked in America for years and thus had little trouble
interviewing in English. But that English had become Boders adopted
tongue plays little role in determining the language in which he conducted
the interviews; only three of them, we recall, feature English as the primary
tongue. With Bundy, then, there remained a question of why tell the story
in English a question that parallels the mystery in her story surrounding
the role of English in Auschwitz. With Vladek, in contrast, just as it was clear
how English played a role in aiding his survival in Auschwitz, so was it clear
why he should tell his story in his adopted tongue. Vladek tells his story in
English because he lives in America and, perhaps more importantly, tells
it to an American son (one wonders how Vladeks manner of telling the
story would have changed had the interviewer been a landsman). Even if
Vladeks facility with English is at times questionable, the situation itself
calls for the interview to be conducted in English. There is no enigma. In
spite of the broken, unmastered, estranged English that Vladek speaks, his
use of it in the interview can be explained. What for Bundy is opacity and
mystery, for Vladek is clarity and transparency.
On one level, then, Maus celebrates English. By displaying its heroic capacity to transform and pacify the most adverse conditions, Maus conveys a
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sense of the unlimited power of English, of its almost magical potency, even
of its harboring the secret of life and death. English can apparently master
anything it confronts, can dominate whatever demands subjection. This
celebration would seem to authorize English as a language of testimony,
investing it with the knowledge and power to chronicle the events of the
Holocaust with unparalleled eloquence. This glorification of English would
likely confirm what American readers of the late twentieth century believe
about the language they or their neighbors speak.
On another level, however, Spiegelmans graphic novel tells a story about
limitations, and particularly about the limitations of English as a language
of the Holocaust. Maus inscribes these limits ironically, designating fluency,
competence, and mastery as relative and questionable accomplishments.
The very capacity to use words well often becomes the ironic sign of blindness and coercion. Significantly, Maus enforces the limitations of English
by representing as authoritative an English that is uniquely broken, incompetent, unmastered. Indeed, the only English by which to tell a survivors
tale is one that is singularly foreign. Such a repositioning of English goes
against the expectations of an American audience, asking them, asking us,
to question the fantasy one that Maus itself rehearses that English can
know and master everything, even the Holocaust.
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chapter 11
Eaten Away by Silence

English as Elegy in Anne Michaelss
Fugitive Pieces
It would seem that Maus took English as far as it could go. Always at the
edge of the Holocaust, English in Maus claimed a place in the center. Rarely
playing a significant role, it did nothing less than keep Vladek, family, and
friends alive in camp after camp, even when his troubles really began.
Dreams turned into nightmares, but within the nightmares of Auschwitz
or Dachau, English was the source of what light there was to be had.
Anne Michaelss Fugitive Pieces picks up where Maus leaves off. Here, too,
English plays a dominant role. Different from Maus, to be sure, Fugitive
Pieces represents nothing of concentration camps and little of the ghettos.
Escaping from the massacres of Polish Jewry, the hero wanders, takes refuge,
and only hears of European Jewrys destruction indirectly. Yet in spite or
because of this indirectness, English has a significance far beyond what it
has had hitherto. 1 Whereas in David Boder and John Hersey English was a
source of anxiety, or in Ruth Chatterton ironized as a language that (as the
heroine fantasizes) everyone speaks, or in Eliach mocked as a language
of dollars, English here is a medium that can be celebrated. In Fugitive
Pieces English becomes the preferred language in which to write about the
Holocaust.
Published in 1996, Fugitive Pieces tells two stories: in part 1, Jakob Bier
recounts the murder of his Polish Jewish family and his subsequent flight to
the forest, where he hides. The boy is soon, however, discovered by a Greek
geologist who then smuggles him to the Greek isles, where they spend the
duration of the war. Afterwards, the boy and his foster father move to
Toronto, the father teaching at a university, the boy maturing to become a
poet and translator. He will also eventually write the memoir that is part
1 of the book Fugitive Pieces. Part 2 tells the story of Ben, who is able to
come to terms with his own parents fate as Holocaust survivors through
translating Jakob Biers poetry. The climax of Fugitive Pieces comes when
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Ben, in search of Jakobs lost Holocaust memoir, finds it, and, through it
arrives at a greater understanding of his role as a child of survivors.
The novelty of Fugitive Pieces, at least on one level, lies in the locale of
Greece. To be sure, Greece figures initially as a refuge; his life threatened,
the boy Jakob flees and ends up in there. But the safety of Greece turns out
to be illusory, as Michaels enfolds within Jakobs story a chronicle of Greek
Jewrys decimation (sixty thousand of a wartime population of seventyfive thousand Jews were murdered). Fugitive Pieces thus shrewdly expands
the boundaries of the destruction of European Jewry. 2 From The Wall to
The Pawnbroker to Rosa to Maus, Polish Jewry understandably has taken
center stage. And with a Yiddish-speaking protagonist hailing from a shtetl
in Poland, Michaels continues to emphasize the plight of Polish Jewry. But
what originates in Poland shifts to Greece; what starts in the center moves to
the periphery. Greece represents then both periphery and center, the place
that affords sanctuary is also the place from which very few survive. Yet this
Poland-to-Greece itinerary begets its own questions. Can, one wonders,
the story of Greek Jewry can be told only by telling that of Polish Jewry
first? Can the elegy to the Greek center of Sephardic Jewry only be sung by
a Jew whose first tongue was Yiddish? 3
Fugitive Pieces tells of languages acquired and those lost, languages
learned and those forgotten. Multiple languages and even alphabets Yiddish, Polish, German, Greek, Ladino, Hebrew figure importantly in the
plot of the novel as well as symbolically marking Jakobs tragic journey
and Bens parallel one. For our purposes, what is most astonishing is the
newly starring role of English. And in featuring English, Michaels gathers together the many strands that have marked its journey through this
study: global, neutral, therapeutic, heroic, and imperial. What English is
not is also important: the English of Fugitive Pieces is never broken and is
rarely represented even with an accent. In this respect, it is hard to imagine
that Fugitive Pieces appeared only after the medium of accent had become
increasingly central to Holocaust writing. But its premises are different:
learned English is always written with native mastery. Finally, Englishs
elevated status carries with it an elegiac component: hand in hand with the
mastery of English goes the erosion, loss, and devaluation of the primary
languages, particularly Yiddish. 4
Criticism on Fugitive Pieces often highlights language issues. The focus,
however, is not the multiple tongues spoken and written but the kind
of language deployed. Indeed, criticism on Michaelss novel demonstrates
the degree to which essentialist notions of language have overshadowed
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multilingual considerations, even (or especially) when the multilingual

issues are a crucial aspect of plot and narrative.
Meira Cook, for example, writes that Michaels wishes to bring to the
prose of the traumatic narrative the unruly compulsions of poetry, and in
so doing to restore to language what Adorno once mourned as necessarily
lost forever.5 By fashioning her novel as a prose poem, Michaels can restore
what has been lost, can, in Cooks phrasing, translate prose into the foreign
language of poetry. Strikingly, Cook uses the metaphor of language and
translation to speak of the stylistic strategies used by Michaels. But despite
the fact that languages play such a fundamental role in the novel and in
the life of its protagonist, Cooks assessment of Michaels strategy remains
in the realm of metaphor; not English (or Greek or German) but poetry is
the foreign tongue.
Nicola King, for her part, emphasizes how Michaels attempts to fashion
a language commensurate with traumatic memory. Strikingly, King even
enfolds in her analysis of traumatic absence Jakobs moment of discovery
of English as the suitable tongue: On Idra, writes Jakob,I finally began to
feel my English strong enough to carry experience. . . . The moment when
language at last surrenders to what its describing. This suggests a fusion
of word and image, but in the novel language, as I have suggested, is often
foregrounded at the expense of what its describing. 6 But King sees that
the discovery of the particular powers of English to chronicle the memory
of the Holocaust is part of Michaelss representational problems generally.
The discovery that English was strong enough concerns not English but
issues of meaning and rhetoric.
I do not bring the examples of Cook and King to highlight their inadequacy but rather to show how, even when commenting on a text in which
the significance of languages is so much in the foreground, the critical
questions lead one not to issues of multilingualism but in other directions.
What such readings of Fugitive Pieces overlook is how Michaels links the
chronicling of the Holocaust to the dynamic interplay of languages, how
in other words the loss of some languages and the finding of others shapes
when, how, and for whom the story will be told.
At the outset of Fugitive Pieces, English is not on the scene. But the initial
encounter between the boy, Jakob, and the geologist, Athos, hints at what
is to come:
I limped towards him, stiff as a golem, clay tight behind my knees. I
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stopped a few yards from where he was digging later he told me it was as
if Id hit a glass door, an inarguable surface of pure air and your mud
mask cracked with tears and I knew you were human, just a child. Crying
with the abandonment of your age.
He said he spoke to me. But I was wild with deafness. My peat-clogged
ears.
So hungry. I screamed into the silence the only phrase I knew in more
than one language, I screamed it in Polish and German and Yiddish,
thumping my fists on my own chest: dirty Jew, dirty Jew, dirty Jew. 7
Jakobs first moment of speech is thus emphatically multilingual, an urgent

attempt on the boys part to bring forth all of the linguistic resources at
his disposal. And yet the message transmitted by these primary tongues
is self-negating: dirty Jew, dirty Jew, dirty Jew one execration for each
language. These primary languages, including Yiddish, can do nothing but
speak the words of the anti-Semite, the Jew hater, to enable the hater and
hated to be the one and the same. 8
Intriguingly, Michaels attempts to have the identical English phase
(dirty Jew) convey three different utterances. This strategy combines
both a mimetic dimension, repeating the phase three times, and an overtly
fictional one, the English phrase masquerades as three languages. Michaelss
English here (representing Jakobs three tongues) cannot help but evoke
the figurative,dirty Jew characterizing someone as repulsive because they
are Jewish, even while alluding to the literal, dirty Jew as the boy whose
dirtiness (his mud mask) compels him to identity himself as human
rather than as monster.
Twisting Twins: The Languages of Antiquity

Conventionally, Greek and Jewish cultures are cast as opposing forces, two
currents of antiquity that fashioned different and mutually exclusive
priorities. Cultural criticism from Matthew Arnold on has further refined
this antagonism. But Michaels wants to undo the opposition, designating
them as twisting twins: He taught me, writes Jakob of his first lessons
with Athos, the Greek script, like a twisting twin of Hebrew.9 Indeed, in
Michaelss scheme, the two scripts so closely resemble one another that
when Jakob first sees Greek he mistakes it for Hebrew. Hailing from antiquity, the two are so alike that he cannot tell them apart.
Michaels implies that the shared antiquity makes them more similar than
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different: Both Hebrew and Greek, Athos liked to say, contain the ancient
loneliness of ruins, like a flute heard distantly down a hillside of olives, or
a voice calling to a boat from a shore. 10 Both languages signify something
from a distant past that continues to work upon the present. From this
perspective, it is natural that Greece should serve as Jakobs sanctuary.
Greece and its language are a second home, not opposing Hebrew but a
mirror of it.
And yet, despite this twinning, Greek also plays the annihilating role in
which it is traditionally cast, not a twin of Hebrew but its opponent:
Slowly my tongue learned its sad new powers. I longed to cleanse my
mouth of memory. I longed for my mouth to feel my own when speaking
his beautiful and awkward Greek, its thick consonants, its many syllables
difficult and graceful as water rushing around rock. 11
To learn to speak Greek is bound up with eradicating what came before.

Jakobs declaration of longing reads like the program of the immigrant who
wishes to overcome the impediments linguistic and otherwise that keep
him from experiencing himself as a member of the new culture. By means
of Greek, Jakob undertakes to refashion himself to forget and to cleanse.
From this vantage point, Jakob tells a familiar story: that of an Eastern
European Jew who migrates to Western Europe (here, recast as Greece),
sheds his outmoded cultural baggage, and continues on to the New World
and a new life.
In Jakobs case, to be sure, he complies with the program of assimilation
in order to overcome the painful memories of his familys destruction.
And this story of a childs recovery from trauma is how Jakobs chronicle
is meant to be read. But Jakobs story converges with that of other modern
Jews (or Jews of modernity), stories in which language plays a crucial role.
So Michaels joins a story of recovery from trauma to that of assimilation,
using the sad new powers of Greek as the medium. Greek then is the
language of assimilation and the twin of Hebrew, what weans him from
that which is Jewish and returns him to it.
Once Jakob and Athos are in Greece, English surfaces, serving as one of
two languages the other is Modern Greek in which Athos tells stories to
Jakob. From the first, Michaels implies the more crucial role of English: I
listened to Athoss stories in English, in Greek, again in English.12 To make
these stories twice-told in English establishes it as the preferred storytelling
language. But it also hints at English being the language that is difficult
to comprehend, hence the one that demands two tellings: At first I heard
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[the stories] from a distance, an incomprehensible murmur as I lay face

down on the rug, anxious or despondent in the long afternoons. But soon
I recognized the same words.
The stories are medicinal and help Jakob to distance himself from the
searing memories of Poland. But the English story sessions heal wounds
only at substantial cost:
Athoss stories gradually veered me from my past. Night after night, his
vivid hallucinogen dripped into my imagination, diluting memory. Yiddish too, a melody gradually eaten away by silence. 13
Michaels indissolubly links the fate of memory and language: just as stories
undo horrible memories, so does some equally potent force remove Yiddish
from the scene. To be sure, there is an initial attempt on Athoss part to
help Jakob retain his boyhood tongue: Gradually Athos and I learned each
others languages. A little of my Yiddish, with smatterings of mutual Polish.
His Greek and English.14 But Michaels almost immediately sets in motion
the possibility that this learn[ing] each others languages may come up
against insurmountable obstacles: Athos didnt want me to forget. He
made me review my Hebrew alphabet. Given that Yiddish is written in the
Hebrew alphabet, such review also attempts to preserve Jakobs facility in
Yiddish. As we will see, however, Michaels makes Athoss role ambiguous
in relation to memory and forgetting.
Once the therapeutic assault on memory begins, Yiddish also comes
under siege. What obliterates Yiddish is not the palliative stories that Athos
tells but silence, presumably the cultural silence, the absence of any Yiddish voice that makes Jakobs memory of, and thus facility in, Yiddish susceptible to erosion. But even if the agent here is circumstance, Michaelss
choice of a metaphor with geological associations (eaten away) to articulate the disappearance of Yiddish links the fate of Yiddish to Athos and
his geological vocation. The stories Athos tells, by replacing Yiddish with
other languages, do create a silence that eats away at Yiddish. Moreover,
the metaphor is not only geological but culinary and, as such, pointedly
reverses the process by which Jakob and Athos acquire, by tasting, new
language: We took new words into our mouths like foreign foods; suspicious, acquired tastes.15 Yiddish therefore is not acquired through eating
but rather disposed of by being eaten away.
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The Amnesiac Language

When Jakob and Athos arrive in Toronto, the process continues; only now
Jakob takes a more active role in acquiring English and burying the past:
with each mouthful, Jakob says, returning to the metaphor of eating and
learning language, the past was further silenced. I tried, he continues,
to bury images, to cover them over with Greek and English words.16 A
crucial moment comes when Jakob discovers that mastery of English can
enable him to write a memoir, to chronicle the events of my childhood
in a language foreign to their happening. The foreignness of English
what I have previously referred to as its neutrality or amnesia, an alphabet
without memory protects Jakob even while it allows him to draw close
to the memory of loss and flight. Michaelss conception is so powerful
because it, too, regards English as something marginal to the life of Polish
Jews. Only once the protagonist leaves Poland does English come to have a
place. And that place is in nowise taken for granted. For even as the refugee
from Poland has his story, so does English as well. Michaels documents the
emergence of English on the scene and its increasing significance in the
lives of the novels principle figures
Michaels casts English as elegiac by making it neutral. Having not been
in the thick of the events, particularly as a native language, gives to English
several attractions: a vantage point to chronicle the events and a power
to insulate the writer against the pain that recollection cannot help but
induce. Writing a memoir in English thus plays a role in Michaelss larger
view of language and trauma: traumatic events are ineluctably linked to
the languages in which they were first mediated. Whereas for many this
connection marks those languages for special regard in chronicling the
Holocaust, for Michaels the disconnection with those languages is a crucial
step toward healing the trauma and enabling the victim to write about
it. Michaels is not of course the first to suggest the benefits of a neutral
tongue in addressing the Holocaust. But her version of neutrality puts the
equation starkly. For the neutral language to achieve dominance, languages
saturated with the experience must be rejected. They are the languages of
pain, native (or acquired) languages spoken by the victim during the period
of the events. Associated directly with scenes of immense suffering, native
languages summon forth the suffering in an especially intense form. Hence,
the turn to neutral languages means a turn away from native ones.
Significantly, Michaels joins the discovery of English to a fleeting recovery of Yiddish. In a Toronto market, Jakob once again hears his native
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Yiddish, the ardent tongue of [his] childhood. This is apparently the

first time that he has heard Yiddish spoken since he fled his Polish home.
Michaels pictures the encounter with his native tongue in the setting of his
new life as overwhelming: I felt, he laments, a jolt of grief.17 Hearing
Yiddish summons forth the anguish of loss. Jakobs response thus parallels
the connection between Yiddish and trauma that Michaels has developed
through the novel. It is this connection that justifies the silent erosion of
Yiddish from Jakobs life and its replacement by a neutral English.
Yet while English comes to the fore, Michaels creates a scene from within
the market that makes English suspect:From wooden cages, chicken stared
with a look of snobby incomprehension, as though they were the only ones
who understood English and therefore couldnt make out the babble around
them.18 Understanding English implies that other languages cannot be
understood. Caged chickens here are a stand-in for the native who, unable
to understand, terms what cant be comprehended as babble languages
not worth understanding even if one could. First encountered when the
third person entered Eli, the Fanatic, babble here, too, dramatizes the
limits of English at the moment it wishes to render Yiddish an incomprehensible tongue. Yet in contrast to Roths story, English in Michaelss does
not submit. Jakob has just recorded the revelation of English as a language
in which to record the traumatic events of his childhood. So even at this
moment of discovery, whereby an amnesiac English enables a chronicling of
trauma, the turn to English represented here by the ridiculously snobbish
chickens bears within it a rejection of a lost yet more primal tongue.
Indeed, even as Jakob registers the grief, he refrains from naming the
language that he has lost. But this scene not only reinforces the association
of Yiddish to Jakobs childhood. It also extends the reach of Yiddish to
include a community of survivors:
I listened, thin and ugly with feeling. I watched old men dip their numbered arms into barrels of brine, cut the heads off fish. How unreal it
must have seemed to them to be surrounded by so much food. 19
Yiddish has a present life, indeed one associated with those who like Jakob
lived through the war. Yet unlike Jakob, these Jews did not survive the war
at a remove and hence Yiddish remains for them the language of choice.
Jakob, who survived at the edge of Nazi-occupied Europe, here confronts
those who couldnt flee. Strikingly, Michaels scripts the encounter in the
voice of speculation: how unreal it must have seemed to them. Even after
having gone through what he did, Jakob, according to terms of Michaelss
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fiction, could only enter their context of survival through the indirect path
of speculation. Associating this reencounter with Eastern European Jewry
with the discovery of English, Michaels suggests that English, lacking memory, can deal with the central phenomena of the Holocaust only by means
of speculation, a powerful but nonetheless hypothetical conjecturing of
what must be (and must have been) the case.
Linking the caged chickens to the status of English recalls an earlier
occasion where chickens played such a role. Sent to buy fish, Jakob enters a
store, places the order, and is answered by the word suspicions. Returning
home, he tells Athos what has happened, and they return to the store, where
Athos deciphers the word suspicions as chickens the store sells not fish
but chickens. Enlightened, Jakob is left embarrassed and Athos in laughter.
With one immigrant speaking to another, the medium, native to neither,
breaks down; what is chickens for one is suspicions for another and takes
a third to translate. Hence chickens becomes the stumbling block to
understanding and the catalyst of suspicions. 20
At this point in Michaelss story, English, lacking memory and drawn to
speculation, is hard put to do justice to events of childhood that Jakob
tries to render; English achieves, writes Jakob, only an awkward shrieking.21 But this awkwardness is temporary. Later, after Athos has died,
leaving Jakob again orphaned and bereft, Jakob returns to Greece, staying
for a time in Athoss family house. And now, paradoxically, the Polish Jewish
survivor discovers the full power of English. On the Greek isle of Idhra,
Jakobs English becomes strong enough to carry experience.22 Strong
enough, in other words, to write a lyrical memoir about the murder of his
family and his own unsteady path to survival; strong enough, furthermore,
to make a case for Michaels herself. For rather than wring hands anxiously
over the evident inadequacy of English, as was the case with Herseys standin editor, Michaels celebrates the singular capacity of English to write about
these events of childhood.
In part 2, devoted to the story of Ben, the son of survivors and student
of Jakob Bier, English continues to accrue power. As two episodes show,
this power comes by means and at the expense of other tongues. First, Ben,
retracing his mentors steps, also journeys to Greece in order to spend time
in the setting where Jakob plied his poetic trade. Entering Jakobs library,
Ben takes stock of its volume, immense in scope and size. He goes on to
note its holdings, the most vigorous collection of poetry Ive ever seen,
Greek, Hebrew, English, Spanish.23 Celebrating the librarys multilingual
reach, Bens inventory of languages is also noteworthy because of what it
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leaves out: Yiddish, the language of melody, but also Jakobs other native
tongues, Polish and German. Indeed, the triad of languages with which the
child Jakob, hungry and caked with mud, called dirty Jew, dirty Jew, dirty
Jew, have disappeared from the scene.
With the languages of childhood gone, English rises even more prominently to the surface. This is proclaimed one final time when Ben sees
the title of Jakobs last book, written in English, What Have You Done to
Time, posted on the wall, sandwiched between a translation of the title
in Greek and one in Hebrew. English is thus both primary and derivative:
primary because Jakob, the survivor, writes in English; derivative because
English draws its authority from its association from the great languages
of antiquity, Greek and Hebrew.
Hence, English replaces what is native, heals what is broken. A halfcentury after the Holocaust, English, the outsider tongue par excellence,
becomes the insider; indeed, in Fugitive Pieces it becomes the insider because
it is the outsider. The formula would read: the less intimate the connection,
the greater the possibility of eloquence. Michaelss own writing about the
Holocaust in English would stand in no need of justification; or, put differently, the story of English she tells justifies, even celebrates, the English
in which she writes.
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From Translation to Chronicle

Forty-five years later, then, Anne Michaels rewrites Herseys experiment
with English and the Holocaust. In both cases, the survival of Polish Jews
is at the center, indeed survival by means of escaping to a surrounding
forest. Both authors, furthermore, present their novels as a found manuscript, a recovered record of events that is exceptional when viewed against
the background of epidemic loss of written testimony from the period.
Jakobs memoir, penned decades after the events in the civility of postwar
Canada and Greece, would presumably not face the same vulnerability as
did writing from the era of the Holocaust. But by making the loss and recovery of Jakobs memoir a crucial facet of her narrative, Michaels imbues it
with vulnerability similar to that of Herseys ghetto creation. Significantly,
the opening sentence meditates on the perilous fate of wartime writings:
During the Second World War, countless manuscripts diaries, memoirs,
eyewitness accounts were lost or destroyed.24 The issues of loss and, in
exceptional circumstances, recovery of such writings thus frames Michaelss
work just as they do Herseys.
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Most importantly, while both authors link their own narrative to the
fate of a found one (specifically to manuscripts written by Polish Jews),
both Hersey and Michaels conceive of the found text as being published
originally in English. The editor of The Wall, we remember, believes that
the size and disorder of the Yiddish original and Polish translation held
back publication; it is only this unnamed but disciplined editor of English
who can fashion a shapeless archive of notes into a book. In Fugitive Pieces,
Jakob himself chooses to write in English (or, perhaps, it chooses him).
The languages neutralizing qualities make it most attractive. Both books
share the fact that the English that we read is the English in which the text
ostensibly first appeared. Sharing this fact, the two are nonetheless divided
by another: whereas Hersey can only premise the English of The Wall as
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a translation of one of the primary languages of Eastern European Jewry,
Michaels envisions Fugitive Pieces not as a translation into English but as
a memoir written in English. Emboldened to the premise that English is a
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primary language of the Holocaust, both authors nonetheless feel obliged
to chronicle how English has come to such a position. For Hersey, the
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novel, English is at least as important as the survivor Jakob himself.
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Conclusion
In the Thick of the Fray, or English
as the Third Tongue
The disappearance of Yiddish in Fugitive Pieces draws attention to the

thread of Yiddish running through this study. In Hersey, Chatterton, Wallant, Ozick, Eliach, Spiegelman, and Michaels, Yiddish, as spoken by Polish
Jews, plays a more or less consequential role. Even with Arendt, lurking in
the background of her desire to pen an alternative view of the trial, is the
specter of the Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jew. The Eastern European Jew conducting the trial in Hebrew (in this case, an ironic substitute
in Arendts linguistic catalog for the parochial sentimentality of Yiddish)
serves as the foil for her own celebration of German and English.
The story of English and Holocaust is thus ineluctably paired with that of
Yiddish and the Holocaust. I have been forced, in other words, to focus on
Yiddish almost as much as on English. One can see a version of this pairing
by working backwards through key points of my study. The elimination of
Yiddish in Michaels was preceded by the Yinglish through which Mauss
survivor told his story. That, in turn, came after Rosas despised Yiddish,
a Yiddish that not so much contended with as was parallel to English. In
Roth, Yiddish was triumphant, emerging surreptitiously as a language of
storytelling that, once unleashed, reformed English as well. In Chatterton,
Yiddish was emblematic of a child survivors fragmentary language. For
Hersey, the writing itself was ostensibly Yiddish, which, however, was so
chaotic that it could never be published.
If Yiddish ultimately yields to the encroachment of English, there is
occasionally a countermovement in which English itself yields. Indeed,
Schindlers List, seemingly an ostentatious purveyor of the capacity of English to range wherever it might, makes not Yiddish but English disappear
at a crucial juncture. To be sure, English serves as the dominant (indeed,
almost exclusive) language for both victim and persecutor through the
films early stages. No surprise here. But the turning point comes in the
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Conclusion
hellish scenes in which the Cracow ghetto is liquidated. Once the manhunt
is set in motion, English disappears, leaving the eruptions of dialogue into
the chaos solely to German and Yiddish, the languages of persecutor and
victim respectively. Tellingly, English cedes pride of place even though the
languages that take over remain opaque to most viewers. When the film, in
other words, turns to that which most approximates the murderous frenzy
of the Holocaust, English is, as it were, squeezed out, no longer part of the
brutal landscape. Though one might object to the attempt at verisimilitude at work in this linguistic shift, the choice to exclude English from the
scene, especially at a historical moment (the early 1990s) when English is
most commonly brought in rather than left out, reinforces the immensely
disturbing images unfolding in the ghetto liquidation sequence. 1
In the wake of a course dedicated to intense examination of the significance of languages in relation to the Holocaust, I assign my students a
concluding exercise: fantasize that you could write a story (or poem, or
drama) about the Holocaust in any language. Which language would you
choose and, given what we have read over the course of the semester, comment on why you chose this one? Their responses are inevitably searching:
Were I to write a story about the Holocaust, the most appropriate language
may be German, writes a native Israeli, fluent in Hebrew and English but
not German. She continues: After all, [German] is the language that created the Holocaust, the language whose phonetic qualities (harsh, metallic,
clear-cut pronunciation) correlate with the horrors inflicted by the Nazis.
Read aloud to the class, this fantasy, expressed in an accented English by
a native Hebrew speaker, dramatizes in an almost breath-taking manner
the issues upon which the course focused. Yet having apparently opted for
the language that created the Holocaust, the student was not yet finished:
Still, it would be impossible for me to use German. I would therefore
choose Hebrew . . . the language of Jewish history and its future.
Tellingly, my students even those who speak a native English rarely
choose it as the preferred tongue: I still feel sometimes, says a student,
drawing aptly on the idiom of host and guest, that the English language
tries to enter a lingual and cultural circle which does not welcome it. Students comment wisely on the virtues that English possesses (for example,
neutrality), but do not see it as the favored option. It is its remoteness,
its self-assuredness and arrogance even, that make me reluctant to consider
writing about the Holocaust in English, continues the student who spoke
of English as an unwelcome guest in the circle of Holocaust writing. Remoteness may in fact engender arrogance, one might well respond. Able
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In the Thick of the Fray
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189
to claim a home anywhere in the world, English may presume that being a
guest is exactly the most desirable position.
My study has considered the specific role of English in representing the
Holocaust. But there is the reverse side of the equation: the effect of the
Holocaust on English. To a degree, the Holocaust has played a role in
shaping English as we know it today. English is that language that, lodged
at the corners of the globe rather than in the midst of Europe, escaped
contamination. The Holocaust did not create a new English. To be on the
margins, pure, liberal were characteristics ascribed to English at various
times before the Holocaust, which confirmed what these images implied.
Thus if languages remember, English was a blank slate. Hence English
could stake out neutral territory, or the territory of neutrality. If neutrality
confers on English the possibility of writing in a amnesiac language, so
does this have the reverse affect. The Holocaust has helped English become
the neutral tongue.
The Holocaust offers support to both versions of the story of English:
the global and the imperial. In the wake of the Holocaust, the story that emphasizes the unique opportunity of English as a worldwide language fulfills
the need to rise above parochial interests. The closer the world appears to
be engulfed by apocalypse, by conflicts between cultures, nationalities, and
ethnicities that can lead to hugely murderous ends, so can the arrival of
English as a global language afford a way to negotiate problems rationally.
And yet the Holocaust intensifies the anxiety around the imperial dimension of English. The arrogance of English recapitulates many totalitarian
features, privileging conformity at the expense of difference. Behind this
general uneasiness may be one associated specifically with language. A
tragic consequence of the Holocaust was the virtual destruction of Yiddish
as a major language of cultural activity. Its audience profoundly diminished, only the last demon remains, in Isaac Bashevis Singers haunting
parable by that title, to scavenge amidst the ruins. 2 That English frequently
is said to usurp the place of native languages casts it in an especially pernicious role. Fugitive Pieces plays out the fantasy directly Yiddish is killed
again, this time by English.
Ideally, one comes to appreciate the force of Anyas question to Vladek,
Y you know English? The assumption behind this question was that
one didnt know English, didnt need to know it, and hence one could
be shocked to learn that a Polish Jew would know enough to pick up on
a conversation in English. Yet, in Spiegelmans hands, the marginality of
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Conclusion
English in Polish Jewish culture becomes a source of its power, of its ability
to communicate secrets, of its strange capacity to negotiate survival. When
we come to feel that the English they speak is in terms of the Holocaust
and the study thereof a foreign tongue, we, too, will perhaps be in a
position to harness its ambiguous power.
As we recall, English is the third language on the street sign directing
visitors to Yad Vashem, Jerusalems Holocaust memorial and museum. Situated on the sign beneath Hebrew and Arabic, Jerusalems lingua francae,
it guides those who cannot negotiate the other two tongues. As I hope
this study conveys, its position as a third term fits. On the sign as in the
literature, the outsider tongue addresses the outsider, the tourist or pilgrim
who comes to Jerusalem yet remains on its linguistic perimeter. This position nevertheless has salutary aspects here as elsewhere. Unlike the vandals
who, from one or the other side, believed Arabic had no right to emblazon
a sign with the name Yad Vashem, no one in the case of English has apparently thought to blacken it over. Its well-honed position of neutrality
keeps English out of harms way. Clearly, whereas the other two languages
are fraught with meaning in relation to the Holocaust (and much else, of
course), English seems to rise above the fracas. Yet, as I have argued in this
study, English, undesecrated though it may be, is in the thick of the fray.
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notes
p re face
1. The problem that representing the Holocaust attempts to address often
hinges on the inadequacy of language, a presumption that language any
language, under any circumstances fails in the face of these years of atrocity.
Elie Wiesel and George Steiner, for instance, have, in their respective postwar writings, emphasized the inadequacy of language when addressing the
Holocaust. Writing from the point of view of a survivor, Wiesel refers to it in
virtually every collection of essays (One Generation After, A Jew Today, Against
Silence, The Kingdom of Memory) as well as in most of his fiction. Writing
from the perspective of a cultural critic, Steiner referred to this inadequacy
in early remarks on the Holocaust and has thereafter often drawn attention
to the issue. See for example, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature and the Inhuman (New York: Atheneum, 1977). Inadequacy plays a
central role in most discussions of language and the Holocaust, including
postmodern responses, where it frequently appears under the rubric of the
limits of representation. See for instance Saul Friedlander, ed. Probing the
Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution (Cambridge ma:
Harvard University Press, 1992). In this study, I shift the focus from the failure of language to the divergent possibilities of languages, from presuming
the inherent limitations of language to examining the enabling (or disabling)
role of specific languages specifically, English in relation to the Holocaust.
2. In terms of poetry, Susan Gubars recent volume, Poetry After Auschwitz:
Remembering What One Never Knew (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2003) gives some attention to these questions. There is no comparable work
on drama. For drama that lends itself to such analysis, see Barbara Lebows A
Shayna Maidel (New York: New American Library, 1985).
3. I do not mean to suggest by this claim that previous critical writing
has been insensitive to historical context and to the evolution of Holocaust
writing. What I do mean is that generic, thematic, or national concerns have
structured virtually all such studies. (One exception comes to mind: Judith
Donesons The Holocaust in American Film [Philadelphia: Jewish Publication
Society, 1987] a study devoted not to writing but to film.) Structuring a
critical work according to chronology thus implies a different organizing
principle.
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Notes to Pages xi3
4. I am thinking here primarily (but not only) of Peter Novicks The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999).
introduction
1. Emmanuel Ringelblum, Writings from the Ghetto (Yiddish) (Tel Aviv:
Farley Y. L. Perets, 1985). The translation can be found in Emmanuel Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, ed. and trans. Jacob Sloan (New York:
Schocken, 1958), 67.
2. See Ringelblum, Writings, 157. On Zabludowskis relationship with Czerniakow, see Adam Czerniakow, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow, ed.
Raul Hilberg, Stanislaw Staron, and Josef Kermisz, trans. Stanislaw Staron
and Yad Vashem (New York: Stein and Day, 1979). Zabludowski owned a
pharmaceutical enterprise, had a background in real estate, and held several
positions in the ghetto, including being chair of the Personnel Commission
and of the Fuel Allocation group.
3. See for example Joseph Kermish, ed., To Live with Honor and Die
with Honor:! . . . Selected Documents from the Warsaw Ghetto Underground
Archives O.S. [Oneg Shabbath] (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1986), 300.
4. I am indebted to Samuel Kassow for information on the allrightniks.
5. Chone Shmeruk, Hebrew-Yiddish-Polish: A Trilingual Jewish Culture,
in The Jews of Poland Between Two World Wars, ed. Yisrael Gutman and others
(Hanover: University Press of New England, 1989).
6. On Jewish multilingualism, with emphasis on Ashkenazic Jewry, see Max
Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, trans. Shlomo Noble with Joshua
A. Fishman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Baal-Makhshoves,
One Literature in Two Languages, trans. Hana Wirth-Nesher, in What is
Jewish Literature? ed. Hana Wirth-Nesher (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication
Society, 1994), 6977.; Shmuel Niger, Bilingualism in the History of Jewish
Literature, trans. Joshua Fogel (New York: University Press of America, 1990;
Ruth Wisse, The Modern Jewish Cannon: A Journey through Language and
Culture (New York: Free Press, 2000); Hana Wirth-Nesher, Traces of the
Past: Multilingual Jewish American Writing, in The Cambridge Companion
to Jewish American Literature, ed. Michael Kramer and Hana Wirth-Nesher
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 11028.
7. David Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 200. Roskies
also addresses the centrality of Jewish multilingualism for the Holocaust
in David Roskies, Ringelblums Time Capsules, in The Jewish Search for
a Usable Past (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). The most re-
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markable multilingual primary source from this period is the four-language

(Yiddish, Polish, French, and English) diary written in the Lodz Ghetto by
an unidentified author. For a facsimile of the text, written on the margins
of a French novel, see Hanno Loewy and Andrzej Bodek, eds., Les Vraies
Riches Notizen am Rand. Ein Tagebuch aus dem Ghetto Lodz (Mai bis August
1944) (Leipzig: Reclam Verlag, 1997). For other critical studies that attend
to multilingualism and the Holocaust: Sidra Ezrahi, By Words Alone: The
Holocaust in Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1980); Sidra Ezrahi,
Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Sander Gilman, The Ashes
of the Holocaust and the Closure of Self-Hatred, in Jewish Self-Hatred: AntiSemiticism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1986); Sander Gilman, Introduction: The Frontier As a
Model for Jewish History, in Jewish Frontiers: Essays on Bodies, Histories, and
Identities (New York: Palgrave, 2003); and Shoshana Felman, The Return of
the Voice: Claude Lanzmanns Shoah, in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub,
Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New
York: Routledge, 1992). Asking a different set of questions than those that I
pursue, Anita Norich has nonetheless offered one starting point for looking
at English in relation to the Holocaust. See Harbe sugyes/Puzzling Questions:
Yiddish and English Culture in America during the Holocaust, Jewish Social
Studies 5 (1999): 91110. She examines how English and Yiddish language
writing differed primarily in its explicit reaction English, oblique at best;
Yiddish, engaged and impassioned to the decimation of European Jewry.
She argues that crucial to assessing Jewish cultural response is to take account
of English as an unthreatened language and to see the contrast between
the two tongues as two languages whose fates were also so radically different (92). While Norichs account is suggestive, she relies on a static view of
English in America and assumes, as many have done, that English language
writing about the Holocaust only came decades later. My study challenges
these assumptions. A less direct reckoning of the complex relation between
English, Yiddish, and the Holocaust can be found in Ruth Wisse, Language
as Fate: Reflections on Jewish Literature in America, Studies in Contemporary
Jewry 12 (1996): 12947. A latter section of Wisses formidable essay considers American Jewrys response to the Holocaust on the basis of language:
American Yiddish writers cared obsessively about the war against the Jews in
Europe while American Jewish [English-language] writers ignored it almost
completely (145). In Wisses account, as I read it, English is not simply benign
but rather a preserve of Christian values that tempts the Jew into believing
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that a neutral language can be possessed and shaped by all its speakers alike.
The notion of neutrality that Wisse touches on here is one that I develop in
what follows.
8. See Yitzhak Katznelson, Yidishe Ksovim fun Vashe, 19401943 [Yiddish
Writings from Warsaw, 19401943], ed. Yechiel Szeintuch (Israel: Ghetto
Fighters House, 1984), and Yechiel Szeintuchs monograph on Katznelson,
Yitzhak Katzenelsons Rescued Manuscripts From the Warsaw Ghetto and the
Vittel Concentration Camp (Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1990).
9. Peretz Opoczinski,The Jewish Letter Carrier, in Anthology of Holocaust
Literature, ed. Jacob Glatstein, Israel Knox, and Samuel Margoshes, trans. E.
Chase (New York: Atheneum, 1980), 59.
10. Primo Levi, Communicating, in The Drowned and the Saved, trans.
Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Vintage, 1989), 88104.
11. Levi, Communicating, 9192.
12. On German during the war, see Victor Klemperer, lti. Notizbuch eines
Philologen (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1947); Nachman Blumental, On the Nazi
Vocabulary, Yad Vashem Studies 1 (1957): 4966; Nachman Blumental, Action,Yad Vashem Studies 4 (1960): 5796, and Nachman Blumental,From the
Nazi Vocabulary, Yad Vashem Studies 6 (1967), 6982; Shaul Esh, Words and
Their Meaning: Twenty-Five Examples of Nazi-Idiom, Yad Vashem Studies
5 (1963): 13368; Haig Bosmajian, The Language of Oppression (Washington:
Public Affairs Press, 1974); Christopher M. Hutton, Linguistics and the Third
Reich: Mother-Tongue, Fascism, Race and the Science of Language (London:
Routledge, 1999). On Germans postwar literary legacy, see George Steiner,
The Hollow Miracle, in Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature
and the Inhuman (New York: Athenaeum, 1977); Alvin Rosenfeld, The Immolation of the Word, in A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980); Shoshana Felman, Poetry
and Testimony: Paul Celan, or the Accidenting of Aesthetics, in Testimony:
The Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York:
Routledge, 1992), 2542; Sara Horowitz,The Night Side of Speech, in Voicing
the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1997), 15780.
13. Levi, Communicating, 99. It is possible that Levi, intent on letting the
Bayer representatives know he was a camp survivor, overestimated the shock
value of the phrase. Werner Sollors has commented that the phrase Jetzt
hauen wir ab was (and is) regularly used in normal social discourse. Werner
Sollors, e-mail message to the author.
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195
15. See Israel Kaplan, Jewish Folk-Expressions under the Nazi Yoke (Yiddish),
2nd ed. (Tel Aviv: Beit Lohamei Hagettaot, 1987); Lucy Dawidowicz, ed.,
Introduction, in A Holocaust Reader (New York: Behrman, 1976), 1620.
16. Sander Gilman, Primo Levi: The Special Language of the Camps and
After, Midstream 35 (1989): 2230. A slightly different version of the essay,
with notes, appeared under the title:, To Quote Primo Levi: Redest keyn
jiddisch, bist nit kejn jid [If you dont speak Yiddish, youre not a Jew],
Prooftexts 9 (1989): 13960.
17. Gilman, Primo Levi, 23.
18. Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).
19. A question arises regarding English-language radio transmission to continental Europe, particularly under the auspices of the bbc and the Voice of
America. Both British and American broadcasts were transmitted by foreignlanguage service in the language of the respective country to which the broadcast was aired. The news heard generally by those in Europe was not in English.
Holly Cowan Shulmans study of Voice of America wartime broadcasting
dramatizes foreign-language transmission: The Voice of America broadcast to Europe twenty-four hours a day throughout the Second World War
from a building on West Fifty-Seventh Street. . . . In this cavernous building
renowned but underpaid European writers translated propaganda policy into
radio shows as they churned out stories on battles and American war production. Announcers retreated from the babble of languages into soundproof
rooms. See Holly Cowan Shulman, The Voice of America: Propaganda and
Democracy, 19411945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 3.
That said, various factors made for exceptions. Asa Briggs notes that although the foreign service provided foreign-language broadcasts to all European countries, there was considerable eavesdropping on British Home
Service English-language broadcasts, the incentive being a wish to hear the
news ostensibly free of Allied propaganda. The War of Words (New York and
Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1970), 48990. While Briggs implies that
the temptation to eavesdrop was substantial, it is not clear how significant was
the number of those who were able to take advantage of English-language
broadcasts.
Other relevant studies include Jeremy Harris,Broadcasting the Massacres:
An Analysis of the bbcs Contemporary Coverage of the Holocaust, Yad
Vashem Studies 25 (1996): 6598; Jean Seaton, Reporting Atrocities: The bbc
and the Holocaust, in The Media and British Politics, ed. B. Pimlott and
J. Seaton (Aldershot: 1987); Holly Cowan Shulman, The Voice of America,
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U.S. Propaganda and the Holocaust: I Would Have Remembered, Historical

Journal of Film, Radio and Television 17 (1997): 91105; and the in-depth case
study of Hungary, Gabriel Milland,The bbc Hungarian Service and the Final
Solution in Hungary,Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 18 (1998):
35373. Michael Stentons study broadens the canvas to France, Yugoslavia,
Poland, and Denmark. See Radio London and Resistance in Occupied Europe:
British Political Warfare, 19391943 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
20. Shmeruk, Hebrew-Yiddish-Polish, 289. In dealing with Polish Jews
and non-Jewish languages in an earlier period, Daniel Stone implies that
English had little currency in eighteenth-century Poland. To be sure, Jews
would learn foreign languages Polish, German, Russian, Latin, French. But
English doesnt seem to be among the list. Even Haim Solomon, Polish-Jewish
financier who traveled to America and supplied materials for revolutionary
forces, learned many non-Jewish languages before heading to America (Polish, German, French, Italian, and Russian) but remarkably English wasnt
among them. See Daniel Stone, Knowledge of Foreign Languages Among
Eighteenth-Century Polish Jews, Polin 10 (1997): 200218.
21. Ringelblum, Notes.
22. See my discussion of Nelly Bundy in the chapter on Boder and Vladek
Spiegelman in the chapter on Maus.
24. See, for example, Elie Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea (New York: Knopf,
1996), 98.
25. Jacob Glatstein, Israel Knox, Samuel Margoshes, eds., Anthology of Holocaust Literature (New York: Atheneum, 1980).
26. Glatstein, Knox, and Margoshes, Anthology, xiv.
27. Glatstein, Knox, and Margoshes, Anthology, xv.
28. Bruno Bettleheim, The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age (Glencoe il: Free Press of Glencoe, 1960); Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of European
Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1961); Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A
Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking, 1963).
29. Glatstein, Knox, and Margoshes, Anthology, xx.
30. Jacob Robinson, The Holocaust and After: Sources and Literature in
English (Jerusalem: Israel University Presses, 1973), 323.
31. Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution (London:Vallentine Mitchell, 1953).
32. Dan Michman accords with this judgment in his analysis of linguistic
cultures in shaping historical research on the Holocaust: One Theme, Multiple Voices: Language and Culture in Holocaust Research, in The Holocaust:
The Unique and the Universal. Essays in Honor Yehuda Bauer (Hebrew), ed.
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197
S. Almog, and others (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2001), 837. An English version
of the essay appeared in Dan Michman, Holocaust Historiography: A Jewish
Perspective: Conceptualizations, Terminology, Approaches and Fundamental Issues (London and Portland: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003), 35788.
33. These remarks appear in Yisrael Gutman and Avital Saf, eds., Discussion: The Holocaust and Concentration Camps in Literature, The Nazi
Concentration Camps: Proceedings of the Fourth Yad Vashem International
Historical Conference, Jerusalem, January 1980 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1984),
71517.
34. Eliach,Discussion, 716. Ruth Wisse believes this is the effect of writing
in Hebrew for Aaron Applefeld, who was born in Czernowitz and whose
native tongue was German: Applefelds Hebrew creates an atmosphere of
remoteness even when he later writes about people whose language is Hebrew.
The language of remoteness also insulates him from the past, as though the
Hebrew narrative were the closed scar over the wound. The Modern Jewish
Cannon: A Journey Through Language and Culture (Boston: The Free Press,
2000), 219. Wisses metaphor (closed scar over the wound) recalls Levis
association of language and tattoo.
35. Eliach, Discussion, 715.
36. Yaffa Eliach, personal communication with the author, July 3, 2000.
37. Yaffa Eliach, Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust (New York: Oxford, 1982),
xxiv.
38. James Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the
Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988),
160.
39. Sidra Ezrahi, By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1980), 12.
40. Cited and glossed by Ezrahi, By Words Alone, 12. Lind, an Austrian Jew
who spent the war years in flight, concludes his essay recounting his path
to English: Just to read and wish to speak English, even when we . . . didnt
understand much of it, was an act of defiance, a hidden armour, a breastplate
of steel: Jakob Lind, John Brown and His Little Indians, Times Literary
Supplement, May 25, 1973, 590.
41. Gerry Knowles, A Cultural History of the English Language (London:
Arnold, 1997).
42. David Crystal, English as a Global Language (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), 8.
43. Crystal, English as a Global Language, vii.
44. Dick Leith, The Origins of English, in English: History, Diversity,
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Notes to Pages 1421
Change, ed. David Graddol and others (London and New York: Routlege,
1996), 9697.
45. Domna Stanton,From Imperialism to Collaboration: How Do We Get
There? pmla 117 (2002): 1267.
46. Stanton, From Imperialism to Collaboration, 1268.
49. In addition to Foucault, Stanton draws explicitly on the cultural linguistics of Robert Phillips and Franz Fanon.
50. Werner Sollors sets forth this position in his introduction to a collection of essays that includes critical writing on American literature in these
languages. While guided by Sollorss work on these issues, I am not fully persuaded by hisEnglish Plusformula, presuming a harmonious fusion of English with non-English tongues in the study of American literature. In the aftermath of such a transformed canon, the ensuing position of English writing
seems to me much less stable than he envisions. See Werner Sollors,Introduction: After the Culture Wars; or, FromEnglish Only toEnglish Plus, in Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American
Literature, ed. Werner Sollors (New York: New York University Press, 1998),
113. The essays in the collection can be supplemented by the preceding 1997
interroads internet discussion on the topic of English and multilingualism.
An essay by Sollors (an earlier version of his introduction for Multilingual
America) initiates the discussion, followed by invited responses, list responses,
a counter-response from Sollors, and, finally, a postscript from Robert Allison. See http://www.georgetown.edu/crossroads/interroads/. Marc Shells
even more encompassing manifesto, arguing for a wholesale reconsideration
of American history that would take seriously its polyglot self-perception and
aspirations, appeared some years earlier. See Marc Shell, Babel in America;
or, The Politics of Language Diversity in the United States, Critical Inquiry
20 (1993). Sollors and Shell co direct the Longfellow Institute at Harvard University, an institute dedicated to reclaiming and publishing the non-English
contributions of American literature.
51. Shell, Babel in America, 112.
1 . ev i d e n ce o f t r au m a
1. Geoffrey Hartman has often noted Boders pioneering efforts in recording survivor testimony and doing so in their own language. See for instance
Geoffrey Hartman, Preserving the Personal Story: The Role of Video Documentation, in The Holocaust Forty Years After, ed. Marcia Littell, Richard
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Libowitz, and E. B. Rosen (Lewiston, Maine: Edwin Mellon, 1989). However,

no previous analysis of Boders interviews (or any individual interview, for
that matter) has taken place.
2. David Boder, Topical Autobiographies of Displaced People Recorded Verbatim in Displaced Persons Camps, with a Psychological and Anthropological
Analysis 16 vols. (Chicago, David Boder, 195057), 3161.
3. This assessment appears in Boders abridged version of Topical Autobiographies, published in 1949 under the title I Did Not Interview the Dead
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949), xiiixiv. This volume presents
eight (of the seventy transcribed) interviews. A second abridgment of Boders
interviews has recently been published under the title, Donald L. Niewyk, ed.,
Fresh Wounds: Early Narratives of Holocaust Survival (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). In light of Boders comments
and the overall thrust of his project, it is regrettable that Niewyk has chosen
to filter out what doesnt conform to standard English what Boder referred
to as the peculiar verbal structure. For Niewyks comments on his editorial
decisions regarding language, see page 6.
The seventy interviews of Boders Topical Autobiographies are now accessible on the Voices of the Holocaust website, http://voices.iit.edu sponsored by
the Illinois Institute of Technology, Boders former employer. While the site
indicates that at some point in the future it hopes to make available the aural
interviews in the original languages, it, too, presents exclusively the English
transcripts. The tapes in the original languages are available at the Library
of Congress and in the archive of the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum.
4. One the 1949 book, the other the monumental set of transcriptions.
5. Boder, Topical Autobiographies, 3160.
6. Udel Stopnitsky, chap. 2 in Boder, Topical Autobiographies, 1:13435.
7. See Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), 5.
8. A less common denotation,able to distinguish or discriminate in a high
degree (oed, 12, b), is perhaps most apposite here.
9. The Voices of the Holocaust website not only lists the language of each
interview but also diagrams the percentage of interviews conducted in every
language.
10. Boder, Nelly Bundy, chap. 33 in Topical Autobiographies, 9:15001580.
11. Boder, Nelly Bundy, chap. 33 in Topical Autobiographies, 9: 1533.
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16. Michael Rothberg has recently analyzed the iconic status of the tattoo
in relation to Holocaust representation. See Michael Rothberg, Traumatic
Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2000), 229, 26573.
17. Boder, Bella Zgnilek, chap. 53 in Topical Autobiographies, 14: 2572.
18. Boder, Bella Zgnilek, chap. 53 in Topical Autobiographies, 14: 2591.
19. Letter to Maurice Jacobs, November 13, 1948. Box 21, David Pablo Boder
Papers (Collection 1238). Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young
Research Library, ucla.
20. Letter to Francis and Maggie Coughlin, May 23, 1957. Box 22, David
Pablo Boder Papers.
2 . a n e n t i re ly d i f f e re n t c u lt u re
1. Boder published a number of scholarly articles that were based on the
interviews, including The Displaced People of Europe: Preliminary Notes
on a Psychological and Anthropological Study, Illinois Tech Engineer (March
1947); andThe Impact of Catastrophe: I. Assessment and Evaluation,Journal
of Psychology 38 (1954): 350. Whatever the limits of audience, Boder himself
as his correspondence in the Boder collection attests worked tirelessly to
send his articles or summaries of his work to whomever he thought might be
interested.
2. Indeed, The Wall has been listed as the fourth best-selling fiction book
of 1950, selling almost 330,000 copies. Alice Payne Hackett, Seventy Years of
Best Sellers, 18951965 (New York: R.R. Bowker, 1967).
3. Werner Sollors,Holocaust and Hiroshima: American Ethnic Prose Writers Face the Extreme, pmla 118 (2003): 57. On Herseys life and work, see
also David Sanders, John Hersey Revisited (Boston: Twayne, 1991) and Robert
Franciosi, John Hersey, in Holocaust Literature: An Encyclopedia of Writers
and Their Work, ed. S. Lillian Kremer (New York: Routledge, 2003), 52427.
While The Wall has been mentioned in major works on Holocaust writing, it
has nevertheless received surprisingly little sustained analysis. An exception
appears in Daniel Schwartz, Imagining the Holocaust (New York: St. Martins,
1999); Schwartzs interpretation, however, falls regrettably short of in-depth
analysis. On its shortcomings, see Alan Rosen, Review of Imagining the
Holocaust, by Daniel Schwartz. Holocaust and Genocide Studies 15 (2001):
52023.
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201
4. Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnaiss appropriation of sections of

Herseys essay for Hiroshima mon amour (text by Maguerite Duras for the
film by Alain Resnais, trans. Richard Seaver [New York: Grove, 1961]) attests
to the essays continued international influence. On the significance of this appropriation for looking at language and trauma, see Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed
Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1996),
5456, 130. On the implications for trauma theory of Herseys particular style
of chronicling the Hiroshima disaster, see Georges Bataille, Concerning the
Accounts Given by the Residents of Hiroshima, in Trauma: Explorations in
Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995),
22135.
5. John Hersey, The Mechanics of a Novel, The Yale University Library
Gazette 27 (1952): 3.
6. Hersey, The Mechanics of a Novel, 5.
7. It is worth noting Dawidowiczs recollection of her training for this
role. The events of the Warsaw ghetto burned into my consciousness. At
times they seemed to replace the placid realities of my everyday life. They
even pushed aside my real memories of Vilna. The Warsaw ghetto became a
constant part of my internal life. I used to imagine myself there, test myself as
to how I would have behaved. Would I have had the courage to fight? Would
I have had the stamina against despair? When I was cold and reached for a
sweater, I thought of winter in the ghetto. I developed a secret moral code of
human behavior that depended on options open only to those imprisoned in
the ghetto. A few years later, in 1948, when I was asked to do research for John
Hersey on a novel he was writing about the Warsaw ghetto, The Wall, I was
ready for the task. Lucy Dawidowicz, From That Place and Time: A Memoir,
19381947 (New York: Norton, 1989) 24344.
11. John Hersey, The Wall (New York: Knopf, 1950), 11. That Hersey uses
the word task to refer to the work of translation is strangely prescient of
the translated (by Harry Zohn) title of Walter Benjamins influential essay,
The Task of the Translator, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York:
Schocken, 1968). Benjamins original title is Die Aufgabe des Ubersetzers;
the German translation of The Wall, Die Mauer, fittingly translates Herseys
task with Aufgabe: Ihre Aufgabe war sehr schwierig . . . John Hersey, Die
Mauer, trans. Ernst Bucher and Edwin Maria Landau (Zrich: Diana Verlag,
1951), 13. Although not readily available even in German until the mid-1950s,
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Arendt notes intriguingly that Benjamins essay first appeared in 1923, when it
served as the introduction to his translation of Baudelaires Tableaux parisiens.
12. Hersey comments on The Walls debt to Ringelblum in To Invent a
Memory (Baltimore: Baltimore Hebrew University, 1990), 1618.
13. Hersey, The Wall, 10.
14. John Hersey, A Short Wait, New Yorker 1947, 27.
15. The modifications, however, may be more specific. Michael Kramer
believes that Hersey here refers to the Yiddish shtick phrases, words, jokes
that often passes in America for Eastern European Jewish culture but is
actually nothing of the sort. Personal communication with the author.
16. Zelig Kalmanovich, in Dawidowicz, ed., The Holocaust Reader, 227.
17. Lucy Dawidowicz, The Epic of the Warsaw Ghetto, Menorah Journal
38 (1950): 548. Nathan Blumenthal describes an evolution of the ghetto police
that parallels Herseys rendering: Initially, only young men of fine behavior
and with a flawless past were accepted to serve. The Judenrat chose only the
finest among the candidates.(6) Corruption thus came with time. Nathan
Blumenthal,The Judenrat and the Jewish Police: Preliminary Remarks.Yivo
Colloquium on the German-Imposed Jewish Representations before and during
World War II, December 25, 1967 (New York: Yivo, 1968). See also Isaiah Trunk,
Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation (New
York: Macmillan, 1972), 475569; Aharon Weiss, The Relations between the
Judenrat and the Jewish Police, Patterns of Jewish Leadership in Nazi Europe,
193345 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1979), 2017; and Kermish, ed., To Live and
Die, 30417.
18. The editor records the events under the date Events April 9, 1941. Entry
April 10, 1941.
19. See Herseys other Holocaust-based writings: his reportage, Prisoner
339, Klooga, Not to Go with the Others, and Tattoo Number 107, 907 in
his Here to Stay: Studies in Human Tenacity (New York: Knopf, 1963), based
on interviews with survivors that Hersey conducted soon after the war; Successors, New Yorker, December 16, 1974, reprinted as Children of Holocaust
Survivors, in Life Sketches (New York: Knopf, 1989); and his lecture, Hersey,
To Invent a Memory. Compare his essay,The Novel of Contemporary History, The Atlantic Monthly, 1949, 8084. I am indebted to Robert Franciosis
paper, A Blueprint for The Wall: John Herseys Reconstruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, delivered at the December 1999 Modern Language Association
conference in Chicago.
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203

26. Herseys implied connection between book and box is strengthened by
the fact that they share the same etymology: from beech tree. Elaborating
their connection in a different context, D. A. Miller refers to their secret
consubstantiality an affinity that Hersey clearly wished to evoke. See D.A.
Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988)
216.
33. Hersey, To Invent a Memory, 10.
34. Rothberg, Traumatic Realism, 130.
35. Alan Mintz, Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in
America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002), 62.
36. Mintz, Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust, 63.
37. For consideration of Herseys Hiroshima and The Wall under the rubric
of the extreme, see Sollors, Holocaust and Hiroshima.
38. Hersey, Here to Stay, 131.
3 . w h at d o e s h e s p e a k ?
1. The three novels that followed Homeward Borne were The Betrayers
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953), The Pride of the Peacock (Garden City ny:
Doubleday, 1954) and Southern Wild (Garden City ny: Doubleday, 1958).
2. Dorothy Bilik, Immigrant-Survivors: Post-Holocaust Consciousness in Recent Jewish American Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press,
1981), 9.
3. Bilik, Immigrant-Survivors, 24.
6. Ruth Chatterton, Homeward Borne (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1950), 16.
7. Chatterton, Homeward Borne, 34.
9. It is not difficult to find in this period pronouncements assuming the
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global spread of English:The roots of English, writes Mont Follick in 1946,

spread into the continent, and the influence of English spreads throughout
the world. There is no language anywhere in any continent of the world,
which has the importance of English . . . our language has spread more than
any other, and on top of the others. Quoted in Richard Bailey, Images of
English: A Cultural History of the Language (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press), 11920. What is striking about Chattertons rendering of this fantasy is
how cleverly she satirizes it.
10. See Deborah Lipstadt, America and the Memory of the Holocaust,
195065, Modern Judaism 16 (1996): 195214.
11. According to Shoshana Felman, Paul Celans Todesfuge sets forth this
mastery of German while also dramatizing the reprehensible consequences
of it. Whereas Celan works from within the tradition of German and German
romantic poetry, Chatterton, writing in English (or what Germans refer to as
Americanisch), positions German as the strangely favored foreign tongue.
12. See Lipstadt, America and the Memory of the Holocaust.
Those children who survived were of course the exception. But there gratefully were some. For discussion of the fate of children in general in the camps,
see Deborah Dwork, The Unrecognizable World: Death and Slave Labor
Camps, in Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1991). For studies of children in Auschwitz in particular,
see Helena Kubica,Children,and Nil Keren,The Family Camp,in Anatomy
of the Auschwitz Death Camp, ed. Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). Although she emphasizes the
difficulty of documentation, Kubica numbers children under age fourteen at
Birkenau in October 1944 at 2,510. Dwork, Kubica, and Keren do not, however,
touch on the issue of childrens languages in the camps. See also Lawrence
Langer, Damaged Children in Holocaust Fact and Fiction, in Humanity at
the Limit: The Impact of the Holocaust Experience on Jews and Christians, ed.
Michael A. Signer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 32942.
Langer refers to the role of languages in passing for non-Jewish. But he does
not explore the language issues special to childrens predicament nor to the
representation of childrens language in the few works of fiction on which he
comments.
14. Boder, I Did Not Interview the Dead, xiiixiv.
15. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 95.
16. Primo Levi, The Reawakening: A Liberated Prisoners Long March through
East Europe, trans. Stuart Woolf (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965), 2122.
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17. Benjamin Wilkomirski, Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood,

trans. Carol Brown Janeway (New York: Schocken, 1996), 3. Wilkomirski
brought out Fragments as a memoir of his childhood in a concentration camp;
the authenticity of the memoir, however, has been challenged, leaving open
the question of how to critically respond to Wilkomirskis powerful narrative
if it is indeed fabricated. On the books uncertain status, see Elena Lappin,
The Man with Two Heads, Granta 66 (1999): 965; Philip Gourevitch, The
Memory Thief, New Yorker, June 14, 1999, 4868; Susan Suleiman, Problems
of Memory and Factuality in Recent Holocaust Memoirs, Poetics Today 21
(2000): 54359; Stefan Maechler, The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Truth, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Schocken, 2001); and Blake Eskin,
A Life in Pieces: The Making and Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski (New
York: Norton, 2002).
21. Alternatively, Chatterton may have wanted to emphasize that such a
word would have limited circulation in, and little significance for, New England communities of this period.
22. In Fugitive Pieces (New York: Vintage, 1996) Ann Michaels has her
protagonist, also a Polish Jew transplanted to North America, link mastery
and punning:Puns were a kind of core sample: they penetrated into the heart
of comprehension, a real test of mastery of a new tongue. Each of my terrible
puns represented a considerable achievement. (100). For various angles on
the pun as a key figure of language, see Jonathan Culler, ed., On Puns: The
Foundation of Letters (Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1988).
4. please speak english
1. Murray Roston has forcefully made the case for understanding Eli Peck
in the context of the modern anti-hero. See Murray Roston, The Search for
Selfhood in Modern Literature (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 12731. In Rostons
reading, Eli, who parallels the antiheroes of Graham Greene and J. D. Salinger,
is a visionary who fails to come to terms with society because of his perception of its hollowness (129). In my reading, Eli discovers that the English
language is itself a symptom of this hollowness and thus to be rejected in
favor of an alternative medium.
2. Eli follows in the footsteps of a lineage of literary protagonists who
are lawyers. See David Weisberg, The Failure of the Word: The Protagonist
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as Lawyer in Modern Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984) and
Richard Posner, Law and Literature, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1998). Although neither Weisberg nor Posner comment on Eli, the
Fanatic, Posner does note Roths attention to legal issues in his 1993 novel,
Operation Shylock.
3. Philip Roth, Eli, the Fanatic, in Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short
Stories (New York: Bantam, 1970), 181. This is the third (and, as far as I can
determine, the accepted) version of the story to appear. Further on I characterize in greater detail the variants of the editions and specify how they play
a role in my analysis of the problem of English.
4. Vicky Aaron has emphasized the opacity of what Eli hears and how that
opacity disarms him: The childrens unintelligible language, foreign, that is,
to Eli, takes human form, is anthropomorphized into the outsider, a symbol
/of/ difference, a secret unbreakable code by which Eli feels himself threatened, persecuted, ironically, by a group of vulnerable children. Vicky Aaron,
Is It Good-For-the-Jews or No-Good-For-the-Jews: Philip Roths Registry of
Jewish Consciousness, Shofar 19 (2000): 11. What seems additionally significant is that the language is viewed in a bifurcated manner, initially appearing
as outsider and then as insider. Aarons formulation is nevertheless striking:
if the childrens unintelligible language is a secret unbreakable code, I
argue that the story is about how Eli cracks it, an accomplishment that leaves
English, as it were, in splinters.
5. Roth, Eli, the Fanatic, 181.
7. R. Robert Linowes and Don Allensworth, The Politics of Land Use: Planning, Zoning, and the Private Developer (New York: Praeger, 1973). On the
intricacies of American suburban life in this period, see Robert Wood, Suburbia: Its People and Their Politics (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959).Woods
volume was published the same year as Roths story.
8. Elana Gomel, e-mail to author, May 2002.
10. Hana Wirth-Nesher, Resisting Allegory, or Reading Eli, the Fanatic
in Tel Aviv, Prooftexts 21 (2001): 107. Many critics precede Wirth-Nesher in
designating the character as mute.
12. Tellingly, Henry Sperling Ankory links English (or lack of it) and being
mute:Ted says [the gentleman] is a regular greenhorn,a greenie, who knows
no English and never opens his mouth.Henry Sperling Ankory, Commentary
on the Story: Eli the Fanatic by Philip Roth (Tel Aviv: Afik, 1974), 27. I am
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tempted to read into Ankorys phrasing (it is his rather than that of the character Ted) that the gentleman never opens his mouth because he knows
no English; English would hence become bound up with the presumption
of muteness, a reading that would make it closer to my line of argument than
Ankory had probably intended (but had perhaps intuited?). Another opening
comes by way of Alan Coopers ambiguous formulation: Tzuref s assistant is
a Hasid in black coat, traditional broad-brimmed hat, and protruding tzitzit
fringes. He is otherworldly, almost mute [emphasis added]: Alan Cooper,
Philip Roth and the Jews (Albany: suny, 1996), 39. Cooper implies that the
gentlemans being mute is of a piece with his being otherworldly, a silence
cultivated by a mystic (if otherworldly connotes mystical) or perhaps an
angelic silence that distinguishes him from this-worldly creatures (the Woodenton Jews?). More intriguing is Coopers ascription to Roths gentleman
of being almost mute, the almost leaving an opening for some (but not
much) of a speaking role. I imagine that Cooper, whose analysis of the story
shows him a careful reader, felt responsible to factor in the talking about us?
that the gentleman does with fluency. His almost stops short, however, of
revising an assessment of muteness and hence of language(s) in the story.
14. See David Roskies, Inside Shalom Schanahs Hat, Prooftexts 21 (2001):
3956. My discussion of the deferred impact of Sholem Aleichems story is
indebted to Roskies. Sholem Aleichems story original appeared as Iber a
hitl, in Fun peseyh biz peysekh, Ale verk fun Sholem Aleyhem (New York:
Folksfond, 191725), 2:24154.
15. Sholem Aleichem, On Account of a Hat, in A Treasury of Yiddish
Stories, ed. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, trans. Isaac Rosenfeld (New
York: Viking, 1954), 11118.
17. See Eli, the Fanatic, Commentary (April 1959), 292309. As far as I
am aware, three versions of the story exist: 1) the Commentary version cited
above; 2) a first edition, which appeared in book form together with a number
of stories under the title, Goodbye, Columbus. This version modifies details of
the story as well as substantially revising the conclusion; 3) the version that
appeared in the paperback edition of Goodbye, Columbus sometime in the
1960s and that became the version of the story generally referred to by critics.
The version I cite maintains the modified details but restores the original
Commentary conclusion. The evolution of Roths various emendations in
these versions guides my discussion of accents.
18. Roth, Eli, the Fanatic, Commentary, 294.
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19. Roth, Eli, the Fanatic, Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories, 184
85.
20. Kathryn Hellerstein, Yiddish Voices in American English, in The State
of the Language, ed. Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 19396.
21. Jay Halio, Philip Roth Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1992), 35. In a note
on page 207, Halio extends the group who, to his eye and ear, invoke Yiddish
rhythms.
22. Bellows review of Roths collection, Goodbye, Columbus, appeared in
Commentary in late 1959 under the title, The Swamp of Prosperity.
23. Ted tries to convince Eli that half-measures will not be effective with
those who do not abide by the laws of common sense: Eli, youre dealing with
fanatics. Do they display common sense? Talking a dead language, does that
make common sense? (201). Suggestively, categorizing Yiddish as a dead
language not only proves a lack of common sense, but also associates it with
prestigious languages of antiquity, including Latin and Greek.
27. Shoshana Felman, Theaters of Justice: Arendt in Jerusalem, the Eichmann Trial, and the Redefinition of Legal Meaning in the Wake of the Holocaust, Critical Inquiry 27 (2001).
5 . f r o m l aw to o u t l aw
1. Edward Lewis Wallant, The Pawnbroker (San Diego: Harcourt Brace,
1961).
2. See John P. Caskey, Fringe Banking: Check-Cashing Outlets, Pawnshops,
and the Poor (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1994). Caskey lists increasing inner-city violence as one catalyst for the decline. He argues however
that the decline did not last; since the 1970s, pawnbroking has made a comeback but has shifted terrain, relocating from the Northeast to the South and
Southwest and from urban to rural locales.
On Jewish life in Harlem in the first half of the twentieth century, see
Jeffrey S. Gurock, When Harlem Was Jewish, 18701930 (New York: Columbia
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209
University Press, 1979); Jervis Anderson, This Was Harlem: A Cultural Portrait,
19001950 (New York: Noonday, 1981); Winston C. McDowell,Keeping Them
In the Same Boat Together? Sufi Abdul Hamid, African Americans, Jews and
the Harlem Jobs Boycotts, in Americans and Jews in the Twentieth Century:
Studies in Convergence and Conflict, ed. V. P. Franklin and others (Columbia
and London: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 20836.
3. Eichmanns trial was the first to be telecast. Israel, the location of the
trial, did not, however, have at that relatively early date a television network
and hence listened to the trial over radio. For response and commentary
on the events related to Eichmanns apprehension, trial, and execution, see
Randolph Braham, ed., The Eichmann Case: A Source Book (New York: World
Federation of Hungarian Jews, 1969).
4. This may be the reason that, even though many reviews of The Pawnbroker appeared as the trial was in session, not a single one referred to it. See,
for example, Lacerating, Newsweek, August 14, 1961, 70; Within a Tower of
Junk, Time, August 18, 1961, 75; Bitter Legacy of the Nazi Horror, New York
Herald Tribune Books, August 20, 1961, 8; Without Hope or Illusion, New
York Times Book Review, September 3, 1961, 14.
5. Both Eli, the Fanatic and The Pawnbroker highlight commemoration,
the preeminence of the calendar, in framing a response to the Holocaust.
Story and novel thus prefigure the featured place of the calendar in Holocaust
commemoration that dominates response decades later. In the case of Roths
story, however, the standard edition omits Elis declaring a day on which he
and his newborn son should don the black suit as a commemorative gesture.
This calendar-centered ending appears in the first edition of the story to
appear in the collection, Goodbye Columbus. Omitting this conclusion from
later editions, Roth heightens the sense of apocalypse. Wallants stress on the
calendars role is pervasive. His earliest novel, The Human Season, heads each
chapter with a (Gregorian) calendar date significant to the protagonist. On
the complex interplay between the Gregorian and Jewish calendars and issues
of narration, see Alan Rosen, August Implies Av: Strategies of Marking Time
in Wallants The Pawnbroker, paper delivered at the mla Convention, 2000,
Washington dc. For the role of the calendar in Wallants The Pawnbroker
in comparison with that of the film adaptation, see Alan Rosen, Teach Me
Gold: Pedagogy and Memory in The Pawnbroker,Prooftexts 22 (2002), 77117.
6. Wallant, The Pawnbroker, 10.
8. At least one critic noted the dissonance between the protagonists competent English and his immigrant status: Dorothy Bilik refers to the lack
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of accent but claims that Wallants strategy proceeds from not wanting to
detract from Nazermans dignity and culture: Immigrant-Survivors, 97. Yet
Wallant does not hesitate to risk detracting from his dignity in other ways,
including the illegal money laundering he takes part in, the abuse he doles
out to his customers and friends, and the callousness with which he responds
to human need in general.
In his review of the novel, Morris Gilbert (Without Hope or Illusion,
Time,August 18, 1961, 75) draws attention to Nazermans anti-mimetic English:
one doubts, he writes, that Nazerman, recently arrived in America, although
a learned man in his native Poland, would be able to express himself quite
so subtly and articulately as he does in the English language. To be sure,
Wallant keeps it vague exactly when Nazerman came to America. Yet the
routines of home and work life are meant to indicate he has been on the
scene for at least some years. Thus Gilberts recently arrived seems to put
the case too strongly. But I would say that Gilbert is nevertheless well-attuned
to Wallants complex representational strategy. I am indebted to Rachel Gwilly
for providing me with reviews of The Pawnbroker, including Gilberts.
9. Gilbert,Without Hope or Illusion, 31. This notion of accent as an intolerable mark, or even a pathology, is clearly a significant view in America life of
this period. In his study, Foreign Accent, speech pathologist Fred M. Chreist
begins his discussion with a section entitled, Foreign Accent A Speech
Defect. Chreist uses the term defect because such accents produce evident
interference with the communication process and bring about a temporary
maladjustmentfor the defective speaker. Fred M. Chreist, Foreign Accent (Englewood Cliffs nj: Prentice Hall, 1964), xxii, xxiii. My discussion of Cynthia
Ozicks work below elaborates the implications of accent as defect.
11. On Wallant as urban realist, see Leo Gurko, Edward Lewis Wallant as
Urban Novelist, Twentieth Century Literature 20 (1974): 25261.
12. Lillian Kremer argues that Wallants use of a survivor choir contemporaries whose comments and reflection serve as counterpoint to the
protagonist is the first example of what becomes a standard element of
American Holocaust writing: Lillian Kremer, Witness Through the Imagination: Jewish American Holocaust Literature (Detroit mi: Wayne State University
Press, 1989), 63. I want to say that the blacks that patronize Nazermans pawnshop, speaking with their own accents shaped by a legacy of suffering, provide
equally important choral accompaniment and counterpoint.
13. Wallant, The Pawnbroker, 4, 279, the second and the final pages of the
novel.
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14. On the controversies surrounding representing black dialect and the

resources latent within it, see Henry Louis Gates, Dis and Dat: Dialect and
Descent, in Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self (New York
and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
16. Wallant, The Pawnbroker, 157. Mechanization has hitherto played an
enabling role. Boder and Hersey recruited state-of-the-art mechanical devices as a means to enhance their storytelling powers. Wallant, for his part,
mechanizes Nazermans (and Murillios) voice, seeing this mechanization as
the objective correlative for their denatured voice.
18. Wallant takes the words from the nineteenth-century Italian opera, La
Gioconda.
19. In a striking parallel, Henry Louis Gates draws on the separation between face and voice to characterize Europes disenfranchisement of black
Africans from being creators of culture. See Gates, Figures in Black.
26. Edgar Allen Poe, The Philosophy of Composition, in The Poems of
Edgar Allen Poe, ed. Killis Campbell (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), 328.
This essay, in which Poe chronicles his process of composing The Raven,
was first published in 1846. Campbell notes that opinion has differed as to
how far Poes account is to be credited (250), a caution which does not blunt
the force of Poes viewing (even if in retrospect) mourning as central to the
poem.
27. Edgar Allen Poe, The Poems of Edgar Allen Poe, ed. Floyd Stovall (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1965), 95.
31. Betsy Erikka, The Poetics of Whiteness: Poe and the Racial Imagery,
in Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race, ed. J. Gerald Kennedy and Liliane
Weissberg (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 63.
32. A graphic artist by training and profession, Wallant in his own pursuits
combined the visual with the written word.
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33. This echoes (but does not carry the same meaning as) terms used by
Stanley Cavell in his autobiography, A Pitch of Philosophy (Cambridge ma:
Harvard University Press, 1994). Cavell titles the concluding chapter The
Pawn of the Voice, and focuses therein on the meaning of women, voice,
and death in opera. But the idiom of pawning informs Cavells reflections
regularly in the book, a choice set in motion by the fact that his father owned
a pawnshop. Indeed, several of the exchanges that Cavell considers crucial to
his development took place in his fathers shop.
40. Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, The Growth of the
American Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942), 47980.
41. Steven Vincent Benet, The Devil and Daniel Webster. Vincent Benet
initially wrote the short story and later adapted it into a play.
42. Kenneth E. Shewmaker, Daniel Webster, The Oxford Companion to
United States History (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2001), 822. See also
Craig R. Smith, Defender of the Union: The Oratory of Daniel Webster (New
York: Greenwood, 1989); and Paul Erickson, The Poetry of Events: Daniel
Websters Rhetoric of Constitution and Union (New York: nyu Press, 1986).
6 . l aw s l a n g uag e s
1. Arendts articles appeared in the February 16 and 23, March 2, 9, and
16 issues of the New Yorker in 1963. Randolph Braham, The Eichmann Case:
A Source Book (New York: World Federation of Hungarian Jews, 1969), lists
many of the responses that sought to correct Arendts assessment. Arendt
believed that the New Yorker, being a periodical not affiliated with a Jewish
group, would allow her to achieve a sense of distance: How great a distance
I want to put between myself and these very questions you can judge from
the fact that I will be reporting for a non-Jewish publication. Lotte Kohler
and Hans Saner, eds., Hannah Arendt/Karl Jaspers: Correspondence, 19261969,
trans. Robert and Rita Kimber (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1992),
41718. The concluding section of my analysis shows how important this
issue of distance was for Arendt. Jennifer Ring analyses the role of the New
Yorker audience, an analysis weakened, however, by the unconvincing contrast
proposed by Ring between the reception given Arendts work on the one hand
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and that of historian Raul Hilberg on the other. Jennifer Ring, The Political
Consequences of Thinking: Gender and Judaism in the Work of Hannah Arendt
(Albany: suny, 1997).
2. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt
Brace, 1951).
3. Arendts identification of herself as a refugee comes through strongly in
her essay,We Refugees(1943) in The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics
in the Modern Age, ed. Ron Feldman (New York: Grove, 1978), 5566. As Arendt
spells out in this stinging essay, loss of a German-language context is one of
key aspects of a her refugee predicament. The trauma produced by such loss is
deftly recast in Bernard Malamuds story,The German Refugee, in Complete
Stories, ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997). In
Malamuds story, the refugees shuttling between German and English uproots
him from fluency just at the point when he most needs it to order to elegize
his losses. Indeed, even his success with English leads to disaster. Set in the late
1930s, Malamud first published the story in 1963 the same year that Arendt
published her trial report. As we see below, Arendt was clearly more adept
(or fortunate) at negotiating between native and adopted tongues. But she
nevertheless intimately knew what German refugees faced. I am grateful to
Lillian Kremer for bringing Malamuds story to my attention in the context
of the Holocaust and the problem of English.
4. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,
rev. ed. (New York: Viking, 1965).
5. On the flippant tone, see Gershom Scholem, Letter to Hannah Arendt,
in Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, ed. Werner J. Dannhauser (New
York: Schocken, 1978), 302.
6. Shoshana Felman, Theaters of Justice: Arendt in Jerusalem, the Eichmann Trial, and the Redefinition of Legal Meaning in the Wake of the Holocaust, Critical Inquiry 27 (2001): 204n.
7. Felman, Theaters of Justice, 205n.
8. Hannah Arendt, A Reporter at Large: Eichmann in Jerusalem I, New
Yorker, February 1963, 40.
9. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 3.
10. Not once does [David Ben Gurion, the Israeli prime minister] attend
a session; in the courtroom he speaks with the voice of Gideon Hausner, the
Attorney General, who representing the government, does his best, his very
best, to obey his master. And if, fortunately, his best often turns out not to
be good enough, the reason is that the trial is presided over by someone who
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serves Justice as faithfully as Mr. Hausner serves the State of Israel (Arendt,
Eichmann in Jerusalem, 5).
11. Arendts letters from Jerusalem at the time of the trial to Karl Jaspers,
her friend and mentor, make clear that she did not have facility in Hebrew.
12. Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner, eds., Hannah Arendt/Karl Jaspers: Briefwechsel, 19261969 (Munich: Piper, 1985), 471.
13. The concluding sentence does not appear in the New Yorker version.
Adding it to the book, Arendt seems to emphasize the particular irrational
force of political intrigue. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 3.
14. Mary G. Dietz, Arendt and the Holocaust, The Cambridge Companion
to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana Villa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press:
2000), 87.
17. In addition to Hebrew and German, Yiddish, according to Lawrence
Douglas, also shaped the nature of the trial. Douglas helpfully notes that the
prosecutions first witness, Ada Lichtman, was permitted by Moshe Landau
to give her testimony in Yiddish. To Douglass mind, this practical gesture
had broader repercussions, erasing whatever distance might have separated
the Israeli court from the history of the final solution. . . . the language of the
exterminated Jewish population of Europe filled the courtroom. Lawrence
Douglas, The Memory of Judgment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001),
1023. Although I believe Douglas correct in drawing attention to the importance of Lichtman testifying in Yiddish, I think the associations of Yiddish
in the Israeli courtroom were probably more complicated than Douglass
comments imply. On a pragmatic basis, it is not clear who in the courtroom
(the German-born judges?) or in the country (listening to the broadcast of
the trial) would fully understand Yiddish. On a symbolic level, Yiddish was
clearly linked to diaspora Jewry; the designation of Hebrew as the official
language in Israel was meant to supersede Yiddish. Thus to cede to Yiddish
the task of testimony may well have prompted mixed emotions. I am indebted
to Liora Bilsky for directing me to Douglass work.
18. As an alleged expert on Jewish affairs, Eichmann apparently claimed
that he had some knowledge of Hebrew and Yiddish. See Arendt, Eichmann
in Jerusalem, 41. Gideon Hausner seems to date Eichmanns learning of Jewish
languages to around 1935, when Eichmann was appointed to the Jewish department of the SS. Gideon Hausner, Justice in Jerusalem, 4th ed. (New York:
Holocaust Library, 1977), 32.
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20. Christian Gerlach has recently pointed to Eichmanns peculiar use of

the German language, a problem that has yet to be researched adequately.
In contrast to Arendt, however, Gerlach believes Eichmanns language was
part of his strategy of self-defense. Christian Gerlach, The Eichmann Interrogations in Holocaust Historiography, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 15
(2001): 440.
22. Felman links the two different references to German-as-comic, but does
not spell out what comprises the essential connection. Felman, Theaters of
Justice, 204.
23. Generally, Arendt makes clear that she along with the judges is
struggling to preserve law and justice over against the Israeli governments
desire to make the trial into theater and show. Mark Osiel, however, believes
that Arendt wanted the trial to succeed as drama but it failed because the
protagonists were too mediocre. This reading loses sight of the opposition
between theater and court that Arendt frequently emphasized. See Mark
Osiel, Mass Atrocity, Collective Memory, and the Law (New Brunswick nj:
Transaction, 1997), 1718.
24. Terrence Des Pres, Holocaust Laughter? in Writing and the Holocaust,
ed. Berel Lang (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988), 232.
25. Hannah Arendt, What Remains? The Language Remains: A Conversation with Gnter Gaus, in Essays in Understanding: 19301954, ed. Jerome
Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 12. The German original appears
in Hannah Arendt, Gesprche mit Hannah Arendt, ed. Albert Reif (Munich:
Piper, 1976), 934.
26. Arendt, What Remains? 13. Pursuing what he refers to as reflections
on Jews of the Twentieth Century, the Mother Tongue and the Language
of the Other, Jacques Derrida has recently criticized Arendt for holding this
position: Arendt is not willing or able to think this aberration: in order for
the [German] subjects of a language to become mad, perverse, or diabolical,
evil with a radical evil, it was indeed necessary that language have a hand in
it: Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin,
trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 87. Leaving
aside that Derrida invokes a concept of evil that Arendt does not subscribe
to, he also seems to misjudge the context in which Arendt was responding
to Gauss question. Commenting in Germany in 1964, Arendt is addressing
her own continuing relation to German (the language in which the interview
is being conducted) while simultaneously acknowledging that she resides in
the United States and writes predominantly in English. The subtext to Gauss
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question thus seems to be, How can we be speaking German if they [the Nazis]
did? Should I abandon (or have I by writing in English abandoned] German as
a medium of cultural work? Can German in the aftermath of the Holocaust no
longer inspire productive thought and writing? What are the implications of
my writing not in my native German but in my adopted English? Stating that
it wasnt the language that went crazywas, I believe,Arendts way of accounting for the specific role that German continued to play in her life and thinking.
Although more in tune with the context of Arendts response, Julia Kristeva
follows Derrida in criticizing Arendts view of language and madness. See Julia
Kristeva, Hannah Arendt, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 217n, 23839, 272. Neither Derrida nor Kristeva considers
Arendts position in the broader context of Arendts multilingualism and,
specifically, of her relation to English.
27. George Steiner, The Hollow Miracle (1959), Language and Silence:
Essays on Language, Literature and the Inhuman (New York: Atheneum, 1977),
95109.
28. It may be that for Arendt the essential accomplishments of the Enlightenment also remained. As Steven Aschheim has noted, as early as 1945
[Arendt] declared that the Western, and especially the German, tradition,
Luther or Kant or Hegel or Nietzsche[,] . . . have not the least responsibility
for what is happening in the extermination camps. Nazism was about the
breakdown, not the realization, of tradition and culture; its sources were to
be found in nihilistic rupture, not continuity: Steven Aschheim, Scholem,
Arendt, Klemperer: Intimate Chronicles in Turbulent Times (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 51. The quotation from Arendt can be found
in Jerome Kohn, ed., The German Problem, in Essays in Understanding:
19301954, (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 111.
29. Arendt, What Remains? 13. On Arendt and her mother tongue, see
further Liliane Weissberg,In Search of the Mother Tongue: Hannah Arendts
German-Jewish Literature, in Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, ed. Steven Aschheim (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 14964; and Liliane
Weissberg,Introduction: Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, and the Writing
of (Auto)biography, in Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, by Hannah
Arendt, ed. Liliane Weissberg, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston
(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
30. Arendt, What Remains? 13.
32. Elizabeth Young-Bruehl also links Arendts clinging to German and
the effort to not fall victim to clich: [Arendt] clung to her European back-
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ground and particularly to the German language, never really exchanging

her mother tongue for English. The words we use in ordinary speech, she
explained in one of her Germanic-English sentences, receive their specific
weight, which guides our usage and saves us from mindless clichs, through
the manifold associations which arise automatically and uniquely out of the
treasure of great poetry with which the particular language . . . has been
blessed. Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For the Love of the World
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), xiv. Young-Bruehl cites as her source
Arendts unpublished address on receiving the Sonning Prize, 1975, Library
of Congress.
34. Young-Breuhl, Hannah Arendt, 16468ff.
37. Carol Brightman, ed., Editors Foreword, Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 194975 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995), xxxiii. Brightmans foreword and Introduction: An Epistolary Romance comment frequently on issues of language as well as on
issues connected to the Eichmann trial.
38. Brightman, ed., Between Friends, 2. The letter is dated 4/26/51.
39. Brightman, ed., Between Friends, 296.
40. Brightman, ed., Between Friends, xxiii.
41. It is worth pointing out that McCarthy is not quite accurate in how she
presents the oeds definition for thoughtlessness, attributing to it what the
oed actually gives for thoughtless.
42. Hannah Arendt, Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture, Social Research 38 (1971).
43. See Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Thinking, vol. 1 (London:
Secker and Warburg, 1978), 4.
44. Seyla Benhabib,Identity, Perspective and Narrative in Hannah Arendts
Eichmann in Jerusalem, History and Memory 8 (1996): 35.
45. Benhabib, Identity, Perspective and Narrative, 45.
46. Correspondence from the 1940s indicates both Scholems respect for
Arendt and also his frustration over what he considered her grievous misunderstanding of Zionism. See Gershom Scholem, A Life in Letters, 19141982,
ed. and trans. Anthony David Skinner (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2002).
47. The letters were originally published under the title, Ein Briefwechsel
u ber Hannah Arendts Buch Eichmann in Jerusalem, Neue Zurcher Zeitung
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20 October, 1963: 5. Translation into Hebrew and English soon followed. In

addition to the English translation cited above, another appears in Arendt,
The Jew as Pariah, 24051. The recent volume of Scholems correspondence
also includes Skinners new translation of the Scholem-Arendt exchange.
48. See Arendts 1964 assessment of the materials she drew on. Arendt,
Postscript, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 282.
49. Liora Bilsky, Between Justice and Politics: The Competition of Storytellers in the Eichmann Trial, in Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, ed. Steven
Aschheim (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 24041.
50. My words echo those of Daniel Bell: Arendt, notes Bell, writes from
the standpoint of a universal principle that denies any parochial identity.
Daniel Bell: The Alphabet of Justice, Partisan Review 30 (1963): 428. Quoted
in Lisa Jane Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy (Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 1994).
51. Felman, Theaters of Justice, 202.
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7. s ay g o o d b oy
1. Wallant, The Pawnbroker, 6. On the possible meanings of the threeball ugly pawnbroking symbol, see Alfred Hardaker, A Brief History of
Pawnbroking (London: Jackson, Ruston and Keeson,1892), 68; Raymond De
Roover, The Three Golden Balls of the Pawnbrokers, Bulletin of the Business
Historical Society 20 (1946), 11724; and Caskey, Fringe Banking, 15.
2. In its adaptation, The Pawnbroker, according to Geoffrey Wagners categories of fidelity or alteration, can be seen as a commentary on the novel:
where an original is taken and either purposely or inadvertently altered in
some respect . . . when there has been a different intention on the part of the
film-maker, rather than infidelity or outright violation: Geoffrey Wagner,
The Novel and the Cinema (Rutherford nj: Farleigh Dickinson University
Press, 1975), 222. Given that the loyalty or infidelity of Ortiz to Nazerman
(and vice-versa) is a crucial dimension of The Pawnbroker, it would be interesting to investigate how the issue of loyalty within The Pawnbroker might
be played off against the issue of loyalty in the process of adaptation. That
said, however, recent studies of adaptation advance models of characterizing
the relation between film and novel (or novel and film) that break free of
the fidelity-infidelity paradigm. See Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan, eds., Adaptations: From Text to Screen, Screen to Text (London and New
York: Routledge, 1999); James Griffith, Adaptations as Imitations: Films From
Novels (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997); Brian McFarlane, Novel
to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation (Oxford: Clarendon,
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1996). Several shorter studies focus some attention on issues of adaptation

in The Pawnbroker: Joseph Lyons, The Pawnbroker: Flashback in the Novel
and Film, Western Humanities Review 20 (1966): 24349; Graham Petrie,
A Note on the Novel and the Film: Flashbacks in Tristram Shandy and The
Pawnbroker,Western Humanities Review 21 (1967): 16569; and Gabriel Miller,
Screening the Novel: Rediscovered American Fiction in Film (New York: Ungar,
1980).
I emphasize certain aspects of adaptation. But there are others: the film has
omitted a number of important dimensions of the novel (including Nazermans violated body; the epic role of the river), modified others (Nazermans
sister becomes in the film his sister-in-law; he hails not from Poland but from
Germany; spinster Birchfield acquires and then loses a husband), and
added material of its own. Authorial responsibility for the changes can be
attributed to various screenwriters (David Friedkin and Morton Fine receive
credit, but earlier versions of the screenplay, according to Leonard Leff, were
crafted by Ted Allen, with assistance from Rod Steiger), the director Sidney
Lumet, and even the editor Ralph Rosenblum. Leff s account, based in large
part on the correspondence of and assessment by Roger Lewis, deviates at
points from both that of director Sidney Lumet and editor Ralph Rosenblum. Leonard J. Leff, Hollywood and the Holocaust: Remembering The
Pawnbroker, American Jewish History 84 (1996): 35376.
3. I base the quotations for the film on The Pawnbroker: Cutting Sound
Dialogue Continuity Sheets, dated April 30, 1965 (a film script has apparently never been published). Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University,
Bloomington in. Special thanks to Rebecca Cape for copying and forwarding
this material. I have checked the dialogue against the film and vice-versa. The
sheets are numbered according to reel and page. The page number for this
quotation 1:9. I use this numbering to refer to all subsequent quotations from
the film.
4. Pawnbroker Continuity Sheets, 1:9.
5. The scene and the Spanish dialogue are original to the film.
6. Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot (Cambridge ma: mit University Press, 1963), 127. For a comprehensive view of the
Spanish-English issues among New Yorks Puerto Ricans in this period, see
Joshua Fishman and others, eds., Bilingualism in the Barrio (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1971). On the struggle of this community in Harlem
during this period, see Patricia Cayo Sexton, Spanish Harlem: Anatomy of
Poverty (New York: Harper and Row, 1965).
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8. Lumets biography is relevant to note here. His career began as a child

actor in Yiddish theater, where his father who played the role of Mendel,
father of Nazermans friend, Rubin, in The Pawnbroker was an established
performer. The Pawnbrokers multilingual sensitivity, which I discuss here
and below, may be informed by Lumets non-English American lineage. I
am indebted to David Roskies for reminding me of Lumets beginnings in
Yiddish theater.
9. Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust (New York:
Vintage, 1983).
10. Several articles address the technique in relation to The Pawnbroker:
Lyons, The Pawnbroker: Flashback in the Novel and Film, and Petrie, A
Note on the Novel and the Film: Flashbacks in Tristram Shandy and The
Pawnbroker. Although Petrie focuses on the relation between film and novel,
he does note that The Pawnbroker derives the technique from Hiroshima mon
amour. Lyons, for his part, does not take up the origin of the flashback. For
a fuller discussion of The Pawnbroker and the issues of the flashback, see
Alan Rosen, Teach Me Gold: Pedagogy and Memory in The Pawnbroker,
Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History 22 (2002): 77117.
In spite of the legacy Hiroshima mon amour has bequeathed, Resnais claims
that the film does not deploy flashbacks: Je naime pas utiliser le flash back
pour moi, Hiroshima mon amour est toujours au prsent [I dont like
to use the word flash back for me, Hiroshima mon amour is always in
the present]. Quoted in Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 123. In terms of the
Europe-America conflict, it is striking that, when Resnais invokes what is for
him the unacceptable term, flash back, he shifts from French to English.
11. Commenting on the film in 1964, prior to its American release the
following year, Lumet tried to distance the films innovations from European
high culture and sketch instead an American pedigree: We did a lot of this
kind of insane cutting in the early days in TV, when often television technique
was far in advance of movies. Im always amused by avant garde critics wholl
probably sit down and say about this film Well, the two frame cuts came
from Last Year in Marienbad, and this came from . . . which is nonsense.
Theres one general premise: almost anything that any of us has done you
can find in a John Ford film. (Sidney Lumet, Keep Them on the Hook,
Films and Filming, October 1964, 20.) Last Year in Marienbad (1961) is a film
directed by Resnais a few years after he made Hiroshima mon amour. For other
sources that cite Lumets comments on The Pawnbroker, see 30 Responses
DAmerique, Cahiers Du Cinema 25 (196364): 5657; and Sidney Lumet,
Making Movies (New York: Knopf, 1995), 15861, 17577. Critical studies of
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221
The Pawnbroker in the context of Lumets oeuvre include Graham Petrie,

The Films of Sidney Lumet: Adaptation as Art, Film Quarterly 21 (196768):
917; Frank Cunningham, Sidney Lumet: Film and Literary Vision (Lexington:
University of Kentucky Press, 1991) 15785; Jay Boyer, Sidney Lumet (New
York: Twayne, 1993) 1729; and David Desser and Lester D. Freidman, Sidney
Lumet: The Memory of Guilt, in American-Jewish Filmmakers: Traditions
and Trends (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993).
12. Editor Ralph Rosenblum uses both flashback and flash cut to refer
to the technique used in the film. Ralph Rosenblum and Robert Karen, When
the Shooting Stops . . . the Cutting Begins: A Film Editors Story (New York:
Penguin, 1980). According to the oed, flashback first denoted a process
of combustion; thereafter it appears in association with cinema, only later
finding its way into the idiom of psychology and other fields. In more precise
film terminology, The Pawnbroker deploys exclusively external flashbacks.
See David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1985), 7879.
13. Indeed, the three sequences that open the film can be read as recapitulating in broad strokes one version of the history of Hollywood film: silent
movies, screwball comedy, and the urban problem film. Such a progression
accentuates the experimental sense of The Pawnbroker: having run the gamut
of style and technique that Hollywood has to offer, the film, confronting
difficult material, will try to do what is unprecedented.
14. Such a strategy perhaps carries other resonances. Primo Levi has commented that the first days in Auschwitz were like a black and white film, with
sound but not a talkie, Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 9394.
15. According to the oed, this connotation of trigger is of recent vintage;
even more so is the use of trigger as a verb (circa 1930). It is not a matter of clear
consensus in psychological literature on trauma that a trigger must be literally
analogous (whether for instance seeing a train triggers the recollection of
deportations in trains) or not. For one view of traumatic memory that takes
up some of these issues see Bessel A. Van Der Kolk and Onno Van Der
Hart, The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of
Trauma, in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 15882.
16. My remarks are indebted to previous scholarship and reflection on the
German language and the Holocaust.
17. Although pivotal to the film (and novel) in its own right, prostitution
also connects to the issue of illicit (and/or perverted) sexuality that both
versions of The Pawnbroker elaborate. As far as I can determine, only a single
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book-length work has to date addressed prostitution in the context of the

Holocaust. See Christa Paul, Zwangsprostitution: Staatlich Errichte Bordelle
im Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1994).
18. For another example in which English and German play off one another
to make a reader uncomfortably aware of the associations of the German, see
chapter 10, The Language of Survival: English As Metaphor in Spiegelmans
Maus.
19. One more flashback actually comes after the scene of the train deportation. But a conventional dissolve prompts this sequence, which replays
in a modified form the silent picnic scene that opened the film. Rosenblum
comments that The old-fashioned memory-device seemed appropriate for
this last reverie. We are too emotionally exhausted now to go the other route
[which is the flash cut?] and the dissolve suggests the coming end(162).
The reversion to what is old-fashioned thus sets this episode off from the
technique and issues with which Im centrally concerned.
21. Pamela Ballinger has argued that this surfeit of memory distinguishes
survivors of collective catastrophe particularly the Holocaust and Hiroshima/Nagasaki from those who have suffered situations of individual
abuse and who consequently repress the memory. She uses this distinction
between victims of collective and individual trauma to question the individual
victims appropriation of the authority of victims of collective violence. See
Pamela Ballinger, The Culture of Survivors: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
and Traumatic Memory. History and Memory 10 (1998): 99132. Ballinger
assumes, however, that survivors always suffer debilitating pathologies, an
assumption that has not always been made. To cite just one pertinent contrasting example: Stanley Kaufmann, reviewing The Pawnbroker in 1965, saw
Nazerman as the exception and not the rule: Why is Sol [Nazerman] still so
much in the grip of the past? Why is this particular survivor so specially paralyzed? Many of us have known people who have suffered similarly, suffered
so grossly that the fact of life thereafter seems (to us) incredible; yet there
they are living working, quarreling, remarrying, propagating deliberately
(in one case that I know) to refute the ovens. They are certainly not unmarked
or forgetful; yet they are certainly not numb like Sol. I do not argue that all
people must respond similarly to experience, only that, because Sol is such a
remarkable exception, we miss an explanation.Melpomene in Harlem New
Republic 152 (April 24, 1965): 24. Finally, it is also striking that while Ballinger
discusses various triggers that incite or intensify traumatic memory, she
does not refer to the provocation of anniversaries, the yearly date or season
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marking the occasion of loss the very pivot on which the plotting of The
Pawnbroker turns.
23. Melpomene in Harlem, 24.
24. Judith Doneson writes that The Pawnbroker reflects the Jew as a weak,
almost feminine figure, dependent upon the Christian/gentile as symbol of
maleness. See Judith Doneson, The Holocaust in American Film. Doneson
elaborates this, to my mind, unpersuasive argument in The Jew as a Female Figure in Holocaust Film. Shoah: A Review of Holocaust Studies and
Commemorations 1 (1978): 1113, 18. Viewing feminine attributes as negative
(weak) and opposing the Jewish and Christian protagonists seems a strategy
alien to both novel and film versions of The Pawnbroker. Wallant, for his part,
gives both Nazerman and Ortiz some conventionally feminine characteristics
that serve, among other things, to indicate the affinity between them.
25. This quality of inversion also suggests why, in contrast to the novel,
where Jesus dies inside the pawnshop, the film has Jesus death takes place
outside it, on the streets of Harlem.
28. Hilbergs The Destruction of the European Jews first appeared in 1961
and, arguing that a ghetto mentality dictated the inadequate response of
Europes Jews, was also greeted with some pointed attacks that focused on
Hilbergs assertions regarding the victims. A number of these responses
came in the wake of Hugh Trevor-Ropers glowing review that appeared in
Commentary in April 1962. See, for example, the Letters to the Editor in the
August issue by Isaiah Trunk, Saul Goodman, and Bernard Weinryb decrying
Hilberg and Trevor-Ropers claims, and Oscar Handlins full-blown response
in Commentary in November of that year (Jewish Resistance to the Nazis,
Commentary, November, 1962: 398405). Handlin does not mince words: By
defaming the dead and their culture, [Hilbergs] interpretation completes the
process of destruction begun by the Nazis, reducing two thousand years of
experience to ashes and adding Jewish history itself to the list of the destroyed
and forgotten. Similar responses in the American and British Jewish press
of these years include Maurice Rosenthal, The Murdered are not Guilty,
Jewish Spectator 9 (March 1962): 2427; A. A. Roback, A Modern Baalam in
Reverse: The Hilberg-Trevor-Roper Slur on Jewish Courage, Jewish Quarterly
18 (Autumn 1962): 68; and Yuri Suhl, Is This Responsible Scholarship, Dr.
Hilberg? Jewish Currents (June 1964): 1618. Two things should be pointed
out here. First, reviews of Hilbergs book as the reference to Trevor-Roper
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makes clear were not uniformly negative. Indeed, reviews in the scholarly
press, while often critical of certain aspects of The Destruction of European
Jews, were generally more appreciative than the popular press of Hilbergs
overall contribution. And second, I am concerned here with making a historical link between the intense debate around the issue of Jews-as-victims
that emerged in the period 19621964 in response to Hilbergs analysis on the
one hand and Lumets strategies of representing victim and persecutor in the
same period on the other hand. This is not the place to try to say more than
that regarding Hilbergs overall approach to this issue.
Arendt is clear about her debt to Hilberg: As can be seen from the text,
I have used Gerald Reitlingers The Final Solution, and I have relied even
more on Raul Hilbergs The Destruction of the European Jews, which appeared
after the trial and constitutes the most exhaustive and the most soundly
documented account of the Third Reichs Jewish policies. Arendt, Eichmann
in Jerusalem, 282. Thus both Hilbergs and Arendts studies appeared and
were crucial in arbitrating the discussion about the Holocausts victims and
persecutors during the period in which The Pawnbroker was in production.
29. The universal claim might of course go too far. A third model could
modify this claim to suggest that not all victims but only some (in this case,
Jews and African Americans) respond according to this pattern.
30. See Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattos, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, 3rd ed. (New York: Continuum,
1994), 207.
8 . c r ac k i n g h e r t e e t h
1. As Lillian Kremer notes, the originally title, The Blue Light, was changed
to The Shawl at Lumets insistence: Personal communication from the author,
2004. Kremer has also noted that the play is neither a dramatized adaptation of the original collection nor a sequel but incorporates matter from the
short story and the novella to denounce Holocaust denial. S. Lillian Kremer,
ed., Cynthia Ozick, in Holocaust Literature: An Encyclopedia of Authors and
Their Work (New York: Routledge, 2003), 906. Kremer here is using a more
conservative notion of adaptation than I am.
2. For discussion of The Blue Light, see Joyce Antler, Three Thousand
Miles Away: The Holocaust in Recent Works for the American Theater,
in The Americanization of the Holocaust, ed. Helene Flanzbaum (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 13639; and S. Lillian Kremer, Women
Holocaust Writers (Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, 1999). While they
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mention Lumet, neither critic refers to The Pawnbroker or the connections

between the film and the play.
3. Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl, New Yorker, May 26, 1980, 3334; Cynthia
Ozick, Rosa, New Yorker, March 21, 1983, 3871.
4. Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl (New York: Knopf, 1989).
5. Published separately in different issues of the New Yorker, the stories
appeared without an epigraph.
6. The note inside the title page on the page facing the Celan epigraph
reads: Grateful acknowledgment is made to Persea Books for permission to
reprint an excerpt from Todesfuge from The Poems of Paul Celan, a bilingual
edition, translated by Michael Hamburger.
7. John Felstiner, Loss and the Mother Tongue, in Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995) and Shoshana Felman,
Education and Crisis, in Testimony (New York: Routledge, 1992), 2628.
8. Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl (New York: Vintage, 1990), 57. All subsequent
quotations are cited from this edition.
9. See especially George Steiner, The Long Life of Metaphor, in Writing
and the Holocaust (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1989).
10. Felstiner, Paul Celan, xvii.
11. On Celan and other survivors writing in German out of generosity or
confrontation, see Horowitz, Voicing the Void, 17274.
12. Zygmunt Bauman, Assimilation into Exile: The Jew as Polish Writer,
in Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances, ed.
Susan Suleiman (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998), 347.
13. Bauman, Assimilation into Exile, 347.
14. Ringelblum, Notes, 289.
15. Ringelblum, Notes, 289.
16. In her otherwise admirable essay on ghetto writings, Sara Horowitz does
not make clear that Ringelblum views the love of Polish as a symptom not of
protest but assimilation. She gives the impression that the two views he cites,
rather than contesting the truth, comprise two complementary elements in a
larger whole. Voices from the Killing Ground, in Holocaust Remembrance:
The Shapes of Memory, ed. Geoffrey Hartman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 45
46.
17. Joseph Kermish, ed.,Answers to a Questionnaire by St. [sic] Stupnicki,
in To Live with Honor and Die with Honor:! . . . Selected Documents from the
Warsaw Ghetto Underground Archives O.S. [Oneg Shabbath](Jerusalem:
Yad Vashem, 1986), 739.
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18. Lucy Dawidowicz, ed., Evaluating the Ghetto: Interviews in Warsaw,

1941: Hillel Zeitlin, in A Holocaust Reader (New York: Behrman, 1976), 218.
19. Dawidowicz, ed., Evaluating the Ghetto, 218.
20. Michael Steinlauf,Mark Arnshteyn and Polish-Jewish Theater, in Jews
of Poland Between the Two Wars, ed. Yisrael Gutman, and others (Hanover:
University Press of New England, 1989), 399400.
21. Shmeruk, Hebrew-Yiddish-Polish, 286.
22. See Cynthia Ozick, The Phantasmagoria of Bruno Schulz, in Art and
Ardor (New York: Knopf, 1983), 22428. The review originally appeared in The
New York Times Book Review (February 13, 1977).
23. Hellerstein, Yiddish Voices in American English, 196.
24. Ozick, The Shawl, 53.
25. Arendt, What Remains?
26. Cynthia Ozick, The Question of Our Speech: A Return to Aural Culture, in Metaphor and Memory (New York: Knopf, 1989), 14672. The essay
originally appeared in The Partisan Review, Fiftieth Anniversary Issue, 1984
1985.
27. James is a abiding figure in Ozicks essays. See for example, A Lesson
of the Master, Henry James Unborn Child, also in Metaphor and Memory,
and Cynthia Ozick, What Henry James Knew, in Fame and Folly (New York:
Knopf, 1996). My analysis inverts the order of the two episodes Jamess
lecture and speech training that form the core of Ozicks essay.
28. Henry James, The Question of Our Speech/The Lesson of Balzac: Two
Lectures (New York: Haskell House, 1972), 3739.
29. Ozick, The Question of Our Speech, 148.
30. Ozick, The Question of Our Speech, 149.
31. James Stokesbury, The United States and the War, in A Short History
of World War II (New York: William Morrow, 1980), 11722. Stokesbury concludes his review of United States dogged embrace of neutrality by noting:
In the first week of December, 1941, the Wehrmacht was closing in for the
kill in Russia. Americans were concerned bystanders, but most of them still
thought it was not their war(emphasis mine). In this context it should be
noted that Stokesburys phrase, closing in for the kill, refers not, I believe, to
deathly work of the Einsatzgruppen, the Nazi troops who slaughtered Jews as
the Wehrmacht moved East, but solely to the progress of the German Army
in fighting their Russian counterparts.
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38. From a different angle, Ozick explores the interplay between Yiddish
and English in one of her most celebrated stories, Envy, or Yiddish in America, first published in Commentary in 1969. In Envy, however, the relation
between English and Yiddish is not so much analogous as it is contentious.
40. Cynthia Ozick, Toward a New Yiddish, Art and Ardor (New York:
Knopf, 1983). The essay originally appeared under the title, America: Toward
Yavneh, Judaism 19 (1970): 26482. For one skeptical response to Ozicks
proposal, see Ruth Wisse, American Jewish Writing, Act II, Commentary 61
(1976): 4045.
41. Elaine Kauvar argues the importance of Virgils Aeniad; see Cynthia
Ozicks Fiction: Tradition and Invention (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1993), 197200. Hana Wirth-Nesher, responding to the Celan epigraph, invokes the German Romantic tradition, particularly Goethes Faust:
see Hana Wirth-Nesher, The Languages of Memory, in Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature ed.
Werner Sollors. (New York: New York University Press, 1998). Both the classic
and romantic intertexts open the story out; the English ones refer back to
Ozicks own idiom.
43. The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: Norton,
1997), 4.1.25.
45. The Norton Shakespeare, 5.3.23135. Both Folio and Quarto editions of
Lear include the fourfold howl.
9 . t h e l a n g uag e o f d o l l a r s
1. Eliach, Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust, xxiii.
2. Leon Wieseltier, The Life Before the Death, New Republic 1983, 38.
3. Bonnie Gurewitsch, personal communication with author. Gurewitsch,
an associate of Eliachs at the Center for Holocaust Studies, is presently an
archivist at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, New York, the institution that
now houses the collection formerly at the center.
4. Eliachs attention to multilingual issues is also of a piece with the history
of Jewish writing. For reflections on this theme, see Baal-Makhshoves, One
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Literature in Two Languages,in What is Jewish Literature? ed. and trans. Hana
Wirth-Nesher (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1994), 6977 and
Shmuel Niger, Bilingualism in the History of Jewish Literature, trans. Joshua
Fogel (New York: University Press of America, 1990).
5. Michael Berenbaum, Review of Hasidic Tales and the Holocaust, Simon
Wiesenthal Annual 1 (1983): 237.
6. Kathryn Hellerstein does not however simply rule out such Yiddish
voices; she rather argues that some authors (Cynthia Ozick, for example) integrate them more authentically than those who, to her mind, exploit Yiddish
for sentimentality: Hellerstein, Yiddish Voices in American English.
7. Arthur Green, On Translating Hasidic Homilies, Prooftexts: A Journal
of Jewish Literary History 3 (1983): 67. Greens translation appears in Upright
[228], (38
Practices, The Light of the Eyes, R. Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl (New York:
Paulist, 1982).
8. To be sure, perception of accent is also in the eye (and/or) ear of the
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beholder: Bonnie Gurewitsch has communicated to me that she believes the
English of Hasidic Tales is clearly accented. For a searching analysis of the issue
* 23.9001
of perception of accents, see Mari J. Matsuda, Voices of America: Accent,
Antidiscrimination Law, and a Jurisprudence for the Last Reconstruction,

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Yale Law Journal 100 (1991): 13291407. While Matsuda particularly argues
* PgEnds: Ej
for legal reform with regard to cases that discriminate against accent for
example, the refusal to hire an otherwise competent candidate as a teller
[228], (38
because his (substantial or minimal) Philippino accent was perceived by his
Hawaiian interviewers as too great a liability she addresses general issues
and cites an extraordinary range of pertinent studies.
9. Eliach, Hasidic Tales, xvi. On the history and context of Hasidic tales,
including issues of audience and language, see Joseph Dan, Ha-Sipur haHasidi (Jerusalem: Bet hotsaat Keter Yerushhayim Mosad Byalik ha-Makhow
le-heker ha-sifnut ha-Hasidit, 1975); Mendel Piekarz, Hasidut Braslav (Jerusalem: Mosad Byalik, 1972); Gedaliah Nigal, Ha-siporet ha-Hasidit toledoteihah ve-noseeihah (Jerusalem: Hotsaat Mosad ha-Ravkuk, 1981); and Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim: The Early Masters (New York: Schocken,
1975).
10. For S. A. Horodezkys view, see Ha-Hasidut ve-ha-Hasidim, 2nd ed.
(Tel Aviv: Devir, 1953) and the abridged English version, Leaders of Hasidism
(London: Hasefer Agency for Literature, 1928).
11. Most trenchantly, Ada Rapoport-Albert disputes S. A. Horodezkys contention that Hasidism provided Jewish women with religious opportunities
Notes to Page 142
229
previously unavailable. See Ada Rapoport-Albert, On Women in Hasidism:

S. A. Horodezky and The Maid of Ludmir Tradition, in Jewish History: Essays
in Honour of Chimen Abramsky, ed. Ada Rapoport-Albert and Steven J. Zipperstein (London: Peter Halban, 1988). Nehemia Polen has, however, argued
that, while offering a necessary corrective, Rapoport-Albert takes things too
far. SeeMiriams Dance: Radical Egalitarianism in Hasidic Thought,Modern
Judaism 12 (1992): 121. In distinguishing different currents within Hasidism,
Naftali Loewenthal has recently suggested that the Habad movement, from
the outset but increasingly in the twentieth century, established a full-fledged
spiritual role for women in Hasidism. See his Women and the Dialectic of
Spirituality in Hasidism, in Within Hasidic Circles: Studies in Hasidism in
Memory of Mordecai Wilensky, ed. Immanuel Etkes, and others (Jerusalem:
The Bialik Institute, 1999), 765.
12. David Roskies, for instance, sees the Yiddish text of Rebbe Nachmans
of Breslovs bilingual Sippurey Mayses as specifically directed toward women:
Bilingual texts were always aimed at a differentiated Jewish audience. Because Hebrew remained the language of the learned Jewish male, the Hebrew
record of Nahmans stories, parables, and dreams was more complete and
reliable than the Yiddish original. The Yiddish was for proste mentsn, the
simple folk, especially women: David Roskies, A Bridge of Longing: The Lost
Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 30.
Sippurey Mayses was first published in 1815, virtually at the same time as
Shivhei HaBescht. Roskies reference to proste mentsn is taken from Rabbi
Nosons Yiddish preface to the Sippurey Mayses. In an influential study on
the relation between Yiddish and Hebrew writing in the nineteenth century,
originally published in 1973 but reissued in 1996, Dan Miron believes that
writing in Yiddish was directed toward women:True,Yiddish literature never
occupied a high position in the cultural hierarchy of traditional Ashkenazic
Jewry. It always addressed itself to the unlearned, particularly to women. He
goes on to link Hasidic tales to this tradition of earlier Yiddish literature: to
this tradition was added toward the end of the eighteenth century and at
the beginning of the nineteenth the immensely popular literature of hasidic
legend and hagiography, which was also written (in part) in Yiddish. Dan
Miron, A Traveler Disguised: A Study in the Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in
the Nineteenth Century (New York: Schocken, 1973), 2.
13. The first printing of the first collection of Hasidic tales Shivhei
HaBescht (In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov) was in Hebrew (in 1814). But
four Yiddish editions of the tales were soon published (between 1815 and 1817).
Yiddish editions thereafter appeared throughout the nineteenth century. See
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Murray Jay Rosman, In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov: A Users Guide to the
Editions of Shivhei HaBescht, Jews in Early Modern Poland, ed. Gershon David
Hundert (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1997) and see his
Founder of Hasidism: In Quest of the Historical Baal Shem Tov (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1996) for a list of earliest editions; for a list
that includes later editions, see Y. Rafael, Shivhei HaBescht, Areshet 23
(19601961): 35877, 44041 (Hebrew).
14. For a broader assessment of this controversy, see Iris Parush, The
Politics of Literacy: Women and Foreign Languages in Jewish Society of 19thCentury Eastern Europe. Modern Judaism 15 (1995): 183206; Shaul Stampfer,
Gender Differentiation and Education of the Jewish Woman in NineteenthCentury Eastern Europe. Polin 7 (1992): 6387; Miron, A Traveler Disguised;
and Roskies, A Bridge of Longing. As the titles of their articles indicate, Parush
and Stampfer emphasize the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; they
nonetheless address issues relevant to those of Eliach. Stampfer brings numerous examples to show the gender divide between men and women in
terms of reading and study in Hebrew and Yiddish. He argues however that
the linguistic divide did not necessarily translate into an inferior position for
womens study of tradition. Parush too emphasizes the gender divide between
Hebrew and Yiddish and, contra Stampfer, believes the divide operated (and
was designed to operate) to restrict womens engagement with tradition. But
her concerns lie in a broader view of the significance of languages for Jewish
women and modern Judaism.
15. Eliach, Hasidic Tales, xxii.
16. Eliach, Hasidic Tales, 2324.
17. The response of women during the Holocaust, as well as womens
postwar writing about the Holocaust, have received significant attention in
recent years. For a foundational study, see Madeline Heineman, Gender and
Destiny: Women Writers and the Holocaust (New York: Greenwood, 1986). For
a range of writing, narrative and analytical, that addresses response both during and after, see Carol Rittner and John Roth, eds., Different Voices: Women
and the Holocaust (New York: Paragon, 1993). More recently, see Judith Tydor
Baumel, Double Jeopardy: Women and the Holocaust (Portland, Ore: Vallentine
Mitchell, 1998); Brana Gurewitsch, Mothers, Sisters, Resisters: Oral Histories
of Women Who Survived the Holocaust (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama
Press, 1998) and S. Lillian Kremer, Womens Holocaust Writing: Memory and
Imagination (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999). This literature can
be viewed in the context of womens response to crisis and catastrophe in Jewish history. For a focus on womens special initiative, see Shlomo Noble, The
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Jewish Woman in Medieval Martyrology, in Studies in Jewish Bibliography,

History and Literature in Honor of I. Edw. Kiev, ed. Charles Berlin (New York:
Ktav, 1971), 34755, and Ivan Marcus, From Politics to Martyrdom: Shifting
Paradigms in the Hebrew Narratives of the 1096 Crusade Riots, in Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History 2 (1982): 4052. Finally, see David
Roskiess brief comments on the paucity of material detailing Jewish womens
responses to catastrophe. In Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe
in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984) and in
The Literature of Destruction (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1988).
One can find in this literature intermittent but suggestive references to the
role of languages in relation to women.
18. Eliach, Hasidic Tales, xxii.
19. Eliach has said that she made an initial agreement with the Bluzhover
Rebbe, the dominating figure in Hasidic Tales, that her male graduate students
would conduct the interviews with him, during which time Eliach would be in
attendance, listening. At an early meeting, however, Eliach had an opportunity
to demonstrate facility in traditional texts, and her facility prompted the
Rebbe to change his mind and permit her to conduct the interviews herself. I
am indebted to Nehemiah Polen for his initial reference to this incident and
to Yaffa Eliach for recounting it in detail in a personal communication on
July 3, 2000.
20. Eliachs task of chronicling the independent role of traditional women is
evident as well in her massive study, There Once was a World: A Nine HundredYear Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998).
21. An exception here is Jerome Mintz, Legends of the Hasidim: An Introduction to Hasidic Culture and Oral Tradition in the New World (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1968). Styled as an anthropological study, the interview for Mintz is field work. Although she implicitly shares some of Mintzs
anthropological strategies and clientele, Eliach is involved in a different form
of cultural mediation. In her foreword to Hasidic Tales, Eliach traces her
antecedents (I believe correctly) to Buber, Peretz, Kafka, and Agnon literary
(and in the case of Buber, philosophical) figures who collected Hasidic tales
and rewrote them for non-Hasidic, often secular, audiences. Among the vast
commentary on such projects, Sander Gilmans remarks on Aron Marcus,
Buber, Czech writer Jiri Langer, and Kafka come closest to paralleling my
own approach. See Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the
Hidden Language of the Jew (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 27186. David Jacobson terms such projects Neo-Hasidic
(he is not the first to do so); the issues that inform his discussion under this
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rubric, however, feel distant from those most crucial for considering Eliachs
collection. See David Jacobson, Modern Midrash: The Retelling of Traditional
Jewish Narratives by Twentieth-Century Hebrew Writers (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), especially chapter one, Neo-Hasidic Tales:
Micha Yosef Berdyczewski and Y. L. Peretz.
22. James Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the
Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press,
1988), 4043. Young comments on Hasidic Tales in the chapter entitled From
Witness to Legend: Tales of the Holocaust. Young presumes Hasidic Tales,
because it often features Hasidic Jews, to recuperate a traditionally conservative theological agenda justifying the ways of divine providence and he
interprets the tales accordingly (he actually refers only to a single tale, the first
in the collection). While some tales can be read in this way, however, many
(including those I focus on in this chapter) can be seen to challenge such a
view. Youngs subtext here, I would argue, is that legend, because unconcerned with the events themselves, bolsters divine providence, a view that
does not confront the cruelest dimensions of the Holocaust. Hence, Youngs
model leaves little room for the genre of interview to play a fundamentally
constitutive role.
23. As we have seen in relation to David Boders project, interviews are
among the earliest postwar written responses. But the 1970s appear pivotal,
due in part to be sure to the maturing of the field of oral history and to the
intensifying dissatisfaction with models of description and explanation of the
Holocaust based almost exclusively on Nazi documents. I develop this briefly
in the analysis that follows.
24. Center for Holocaust Studies Newsletter 3 (1991): 3.
25. Eliach also clearly articulates this polemical agenda on behalf of the
victims in the Discussion section that follows her 1980 lecture, Jewish Tradition in the Life of the Concentration Camp Inmate, in The Nazi Concentration Camps: Proceedings of the Fourth Yad Vashem International Historical
Conference, Jerusalem, January, 1980, ed. Y. Gutman and A. Saf (Jerusalem:
Yad Vashem, 1984), particularly pages 24347.
26. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, The Paradigm Challenged: Victim Testimony, Critical Evidence, and New Perspectives in the Study of the Holocaust, Tikkun 13 (1998): 4047. Goldhagen persuasively, if briefly, contrasts
Holocaust historiography with that of the Soviet Gulag. Goldhagens list of
historians includes Martin Broszat, Eberhard Jackel, Hans Mommsen, Raul
Hilberg, Christopher Browning, and Istvan Deak. In contrast, H. G. Adler,
Israel Gutman, and Hermann Langbein draw heavily on survivor accounts.
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Although Goldhagen does not refer to Saul Friedlander, Friedlanders recent

work, attempting to integrate his own perspective as a survivor with critical
history of the Holocaust, would seem both symptom and revision of the
trend Goldhagen takes to task. See Saul Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the
Jews: Volume 1, The Years of Persecution, 19331939, particularly Friedlanders
polemical comments on pages 2 and 5.
27. The archive at Yale has nourished interpretations by a number of important scholars. Geoffrey Hartman, long associated with the Yale Video Archive,
reflects on the contributions of oral history in The Longest Shadow (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). In Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of
Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), Lawrence Langer bases his
analysis on material from this archive as well. See also Shoshana Felman and
Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and
History (New York: Routledge, 1992), where material from the archives gives
rise to reflections pedagogic and psychoanalytic. This said, the success of the
oral history endeavor has also bequeathed its own set of problems. Dominick
La Capra, for instance, can refer to testimony and problematically assume
that what is meant is videotaped interviews of survivor accounts. While these
accounts rightly come under the rubric of testimony, they do not exhaust the
category; written memoirs and, of course, personal oral communication, antedate video accounts and constitute a major source of Holocaust testimony.
That a scholar as thoughtful and industrious as La Capra could inadvertently
make such an assumption suggests the potential extent of the problem. See
Dominick La Capra, History and Memory After Auschwitz (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1998), 1011. For a more extended critique of these issues,
see my essay,The Specter of Eloquence: Reading the Survivors Voice, in Celebrating Elie Wiesel: Stories, Essays, Reflections, ed. Alan Rosen (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 4156.
28. Hana Wirth-Nesher develops this evocative notion in commenting on
Henry Roths use of English in Call It Sleep. See Hana Wirth-Nesher,Between
Mother Tongue and Native Language: Multilingualism in Henry Roths Call
It Sleep, Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History 10 (1990): 297312.
Whereas Wirth-Nesher invokes this notion to refer to a presence that never
was, I draw on it to commemorate a phenomenon that once existed. That
said, the experience is similar.
29. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 88104.
30. This is the same Bronia referred to in the tale, The Vision of the Red
Stars. She is featured in a number of tales and cited regularly by Eliach as
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a interviewee. She appears both under the name Koczicki and, having later
remarried (to Rabbi Israel Spira), under the name Bronia Spira.
31. Eliach, Hasidic Tales, 26. Lenore Weitzman has recently discussed the
crucial role of language in passing during the Holocaust. See Lenore Weitzman,Living on the Aryan Side in Poland: Gender, Passing, and the Nature of
Resistance, in Women in the Holocaust, ed. Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 187222, especially 21112. Facility,
accent, and passive knowledge of a language particularly here German and
Polish were salient factors. Weitzmans premises regarding the facility with
languages of Polish Jewry are however impressionistic. A more detailed and
rigorous account can be found in Chone Shmeruk,Hebrew-Yiddish-Polish.
34. Parush, Stampler, and Shmeruk each address, with various emphases,
the intersection between language and acculturation in the different strata of
nineteenth- and twentieth-century Eastern European Jewish society.
36. Historically, however, it is a question whether the statue was ever geared
to the masses.As Higham has observed, however, the poem could come into
prominence only when the politics of immigration were receptive. Only when
immigration was no longer in significant numbers, were the connotations
Lazarus assigned it brought to the foreground. In Highams words, So long
as millions of immigrants entered the golden door, the Statue of Liberty
was unresponsive to them; it served other purposes. After the immigrant
ships no longer passed under the New Colossus in significant numbers, it
enshrined the immigrant experience as a transcendental national memory:
John Higham, The Transformation of the Statue of Liberty, in Send These
to Me: Jews and Other Immigrants in Urban America (New York: Atheneum,
1975).
37. The Hebrew reads: lakachti etchem echad meihr vshnaim mmishpacha, and continues vheveti etchem tzion [and I will bring you to Zion,
i.e. Israel] (Jeremiah 3:14). The verse in its entirety, then, prophesies a comprehensive redemption of all Jews, including transporting them to Israel.
Traditional commentaries emphasize that one of a city, and two of a family
implies that at the time of redemption God will not leave any one no many
how few or how remote may be the place where they reside behind. Seen
against this tradition of interpretation focusing on comprehensive redemption of every member of the Jewish people, the rebbes use of this verse to
dramatize the tragic plight of Holocaust survivors is that much more pointed.
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38. It may be that, after all, a similar prophetic vision guided Lazaruss
original formulation: Dan Marom has argued that the prophet Jeremiah
nourished the conception of Lazaruss poem. See his Who is the Mother
of Exiles? Jewish Aspects of Emma Lazaruss The New Colossus, Prooftexts
(2000): 25152. Even if so, however, the Rebbe (and Eliach) still play the
modern off against the ancient to articulate the legacy of the Holocaust.
39. Mary Louise Pratt,Comparative Literature and Global Citizenship, in
Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, ed. Charles Bernheimer
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 64.
40. That the words at issue are Lazaruss makes the issues of opacity and
translation apposite, for Lazarus was known for her gift for languages (she
was fluent in French, German, and Italian, and, according to her friend,
Sophia Hawthorne, perhaps was adept in Greek and Latin as well) and for
her accomplishments in translating these languages. Moreover, the postwar
moment appeared ripe for circumventing the opacity of the poem. For just
as, according to Eliachs rendering, the GI was translating for the Bluzhover
Rebbe the words (or some words) of Lazaruss Statue of Liberty poem, The
New Colossus, into Yiddish, so was I. L. Beilin celebrating Lazarus and The
New Colossus in his Yiddish monograph, Dos Lebn fun Ema Lazarus (The
Life of Emma Lazarus), published in New York in 1946. According to Beilin,
Lazarus had herself rewritten the message of the statue: she has given [to the
statue] the possibility of a deeper content than the sculptor has ever seen to
give (37, translation mine).
42. According to Eliach, her interviewees would also be moved by this
mimetic impulse and would quote in the original language. In contrast to
Tula, however, who narrates traumatic events mimetically but keeps ironic
distance, invoking the original language moved the speaker totally into the
past (personal communication with the author, July 2000). Noting a special way that this impulse played itself out, Gurewitsch emphasizes that her
interviewees would always mime the persecutors German commands in
the original German (personal communication with the author, November
1999).
43. Eliach Hasidic Tales, 2067. To be sure, dreaming of bread is not unique
to this story but is poignantly common in contemporary as well as postwar
accounts of the Holocaust. What is special to this story is the way the dream is
played out many years later and, most interesting to me, the link to languages
and storytelling.
44. Born in Tomaszow, in southeastern Poland, Lerman was a partisan
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fighter from 1942 until the end of the war. Having settled after the war in the
United States, Lerman has been an important figure in efforts to memorialize
the Holocaust, particularly in his association with the United States Holocaust Council (of which he served as chair, 19932000) and the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum. Even given his prominence, his interruption
of the commemoration was likely viewed as provocative.
48. For an excellent survey of the images of English associated with commerce, see Bailey, Images of English. To know that such associations go back
centuries does not, however, take the sting out of the Cracovians caustic
expression, the language of dollars.
1 0 . t h e l a n g uag e o f s u rv iva l
1. It is, I think, fairly clear that by deploying the German word for the title,
Spiegelman is asking the reader to view the Jews (mice) through the Germans
(cats) eyes, a strategy that emphasizes Jewish weakness and vulnerability
on the one hand and German power and ruthlessness on the other. The
strategy of the title parallels and reinforces the visual animal metaphor. The
appropriateness of this metaphor has been the subject of substantial critical
contention.
That said, I believe the reading that I give the title, focusing on the interplay between English and German, can be further supported by noting that
whereas Spiegelmans choice of the singular,maus, enables the play between
English and German, the choice of the plural, mause, would not. And yet it
is probably more fitting that the title (like the image of the mice on the cover)
be in the plural. I suggest, therefore, that at least in part Spiegelman opted for
the singular, maus, to sound the echo between the two languages. I would
like to thank Jorg Drewitz for drawing my attention to the singular/plural
issue.
2. Art Spiegelman, Maus I: A Survivors Tale: My Father Bleeds History (New
York, Pantheon, 1986), 16.
3. Spiegelman, Maus I, 159.
4. On the significance of this alternative version, see Marianne Hirsch,
Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-Memory, Discourse 15 (1992
1993): 1922 and her book, Family Frames; Rothberg, Traumatic Realism; and
Rosen, Specters of Eloquence.
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8. As Vladek makes clear in the transcripts, his English was merely good
enough: And I, I was a teacher in English. Here I couldnt be, of course.
But there I gave lessons. Art Spiegelman, The Working Transcripts, in The
Complete Maus, cd-rom (New York: Villager, 1994), 71. The gap between
here and there that Vladek refers to encapsulates the tension between
incompetence and competence and much else that I focus on in this
chapter.
9. Art Spiegelman, Maus II: A Surviors Tale: And Here My Troubles Began
(New York: Pantheon, 1991), 33.
10. Spiegelman, Maus II, 51..
11. Spiegelman, Maus II, 68.
13. Spiegelman, Maus II, 70. According to Franciszek Piper, the signs leading to Crematoria IV and V actually read Zum Desinfektion. At least in
Crematoria II and III signs in languages other than German played a beguiling role: After selection for death, writes Piper, the Jews who could walk
were marched from the loading ramp to the crematorium. The weak, the
invalid, and the sick were transported on trucks. In the crematorium yard,
the ss men told the prisoners that they would undergo a disinfection that
consisted of delousing and bathing. The victims were led down the staircase
to the dressing room in the basement, where they could see the signs (in
German) To the Bath and To Disinfection. Similar signs were posted on a
portable board in the native language of the victims (169). Piper also cites
the testimony of Yehuda Backon, who had heard a description from members of the Sonderkommando: When a transport arrived, they had to climb
down. Outside were signs Bath and Sauna. Then they were brought to the
Entkleidungskammer [dressing room] (173). Once inside, rather than dupe
with beguiling signs, the SS, says Backon, told the victims, Remember your
clothes hook number.See Franciszek Piper,Gas Chambers and Crematoria,
Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Yisrael
Gutman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1994). In the same volume,
see also Jean-Claude Pressac, with Robert-Jan Van Pelt, The Machinery of
Mass Murder at Auschwitz.
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19. Spiegelman, Maus II, 112.Vladek notes in the transcripts that Willie
properly translates as the Polish Vladek. Clearly, then, Willie was not a name
chosen by the Americans simply in order to signal superiority. But since
Spiegelman does not make the reader of Maus aware of the conventional
connection between the English and Polish names, the context, gestures, and
language suggest the racial overtones.
20. It is important to note that, historically, the American army generally
did not have as a military objective the liberation of concentration camps and
of Jewish prisoners. See for example Robert Abzug, Inside the Vicious Heart:
Americans and the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1985). The logic of this sequence in Maus, however, not only
shows the actions taken on behalf of Vladek and his friend but also suggests
that the rescue of the Jews was an aspect of the American armys mission. This
may accord with the gratitude that some survivors feel, ambiguously or not,
toward the Allied soldiers who liberated them. I wish to thank Alan Berger
for calling my attention to the relevance of these issues here.
21. Spiegelman, moreover, emphasizes the hand in his drawing throughout
this section. For instance, the image of a hand on a hand precedes the Prisoner on Hell Planet insert (99); the insert itself features Spiegelmans hand
shown holding the book in which it first appeared.
26. Hence, I remain unpersuaded by Michael Levines thoughtful account
of Spieglemans representational strategy, based on a contrast between nonJews (speaking a single national language) and Jews (speaking a variety of
idioms). Michael G. Levine, Necessary Stains: Art Spiegelmans Maus and
the Bleeding of History, in Considering Maus: Approaches to Art Spiegelmans
Survivors Tale of the Holocaust, ed. Deborah R. Geis (Tuscaloosa: University
of Alabama Press, 2003), 6869. As I argue in what follows, Spiegelman divides
his speakers along lines other than Jew and non-Jew.
27. As Alice Yaeger Kaplan phrases it, one of the many extraordinary
features of Maus is that Spiegelman gets the voices right, he gets the order
of the words right, he manages to capture the intonations of Eastern Europe
spoken in Queens, in Alice Yaeger Kaplan, Theweleit and Spiegelman: Of
Mice and Men, Remarking History, ed. Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani
(Seattle: Bay, 1989), 155. It is striking that, in commenting on a text that
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is revolutionary in drawing a fable of the Holocaust, Kaplan argues for a

thoroughgoing mimetic dimension to the dialogue, as if Spiegelman wanted
thevoicesto go in a direction 180 degrees from the visual. As I go on to argue,
however, Spiegelmans rendering of Vladeks voice uses distancing strategies
of its own.
28. Nancy K. Miller, Cartoons of the Self: Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Murderer, Art Spiegelmans Maus, M/E/A/N/I/N/G 12 (1992): 58. Millers
phrase does nicely, of course, at showing how Spiegelman incorporates the
substance of Vladeks tortured testimony into the language in which he relates
it.
29. While significant in its own right, Spiegelmans representation of
Vladeks accent thus falls within the conventions and contexts of Yiddish
voices in American literature a point apparently overlooked by most critics.
For a review of these conventions, see Hellerstein,Yiddish Voices in American
English.
30. Spiegelman, Art on Art, in The Complete Maus. In 1955, Alain Resnais
employed this strategy in his important documentary film on the Holocaust,
Night and Fog.
31. First published as Maus, Funny Aminals [sic] 1 (1972); reprinted in
Comix Book 2, ed. Denis Kitchen (New York: Magazine Management, 1974);
included in the appendices of The Complete Maus. In Maus, Spiegelman
also deployed accent unevenly: some adult Jews accent thickly (Psst . . . you
vant a potato to buy?) while Jewish children have no accent at all (Next
time I want to play the cat). Does the child/adult dichotomy reproduce
how Spiegelmans perceives his relation to his father, transporting the schema
as lived in America to wartime Europe? Or does the dichotomy imply a
developmental aspect, whereby one grows into an accent? In either case, the
gap here between speech with an accent and speech without is greater in this
earlier installment than virtually anywhere in the later books.
1 1 . e at e n away by s i l e n ce
1. Michaels, Fugitive Pieces.
2. As Steven Bowman, scholar of Greek Jewry in this period, wrote close
to the time Fugitive Pieces was published: The tragedy of Greek Jewry is
relatively unknown, and is generally underappreciated within the wider context of European Jewry. See Bibliographical Essay, in Michael Matsas, The
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Illusion of Safety: The Story of the Greek Jews During World War II (New York,
Pella, 1997).
3. Strikingly, a Polish Jew was historically at the center of the fate of Greek
Jewry. Rabbi Zvi Koretz served as the Jewish communitys leader at the time of
Nazi occupation and deportation. His role in this position was (and continued to be) controversial: The Jewish leader, Chief Rabbi Dr. Koretz, writes
Raul Hilberg, was an Eastern Jew with a Western education: Hilberg, The
Destruction of European Jews, 444. Hilberg follows an early negative appraisal
by Cecil Roth that viewed Koretz as believing in unquestioning compliance.
Cecil Roth, The Last Days of Jewish Salonika, Commentary 10 (1950): 4955.
Natan Eck presented a more charitable view of Koretz in New Light on the
Charges Against the Last Grand Rabbi of Salonika, Yad Vashem Bulletin 17
(1965): 915 and Yad Vashem Bulletin 19 (1966): 2835. Michaelss Polish-Greek
Jew thus has an eerie historical shadow behind him.
4. Most commentary on Fugitive Pieces alludes to issues of language
even to multilingual issues but does not develop a context for considering
these issues. See D. M. R. Bentley, Preface: Anne Michaels Fugitive Pieces,
Canadian Poetry 41 (1997): 520; Annick Hillger, Afterbirth of Earth: Messianic Materialism in Anne Michaels Fugitive Pieces, Canadian Literature
160 (1999): 2845; Meira Cook, At the Membrane of Language and Silence:
Metaphor and Memory in Fugitive Pieces, Canadian Literature 164 (2000):
1233; Nicola King, Memory, Narrative, Identity: Remembering the Self (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 14049; and We Come After:
Remembering the Holocaust, in Literature and the Contemporary: Fictions
and Theories of the Present, ed. Roger Luckherst and Peter Marks (Essex:
Longman, 1999) 94108; Susan Gubar, Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering
What One Never Knew (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003)
5. Cook, At the Membrane of Language and Silence, 29.
6. King, Memory, Narrative, Identity, 147.
7. Michaels, Fugitive Pieces, 1213.
8. Sander Gilman analyses the intersection of multilingualism and hatred
of Jews in Jewish Self-Hatred.
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21. Michaels, Fugitive Pieces, 112. Awkward, we recall, was Boders word for
the kind of sound that he sought to preserve in his verbatim translations.
c o n c lu s i o n
1. Even those who have chastised Schindlers List generally have voiced
respect for the ghetto liquidation sequence. See for example, Leon Wieseltier,
Close Encounters of the Nazi Kind, New Republic, January 24, 1994. Neither
Wieseltier nor other critics, however, draw attention to the role of languages.
2. Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Last Demon, [Mayse Tishevits], in Selected
Short Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, ed. Irving Howe, trans. Martha Glicklich
and Cecil Hemley (New York: Modern Library, 1966), 300311.
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s o u r c e ac k n ow l e d g m e n t s
A version of chapter 7, Say Good Boy: Legitimizing English in Sidney
Lumets The Pawnbroker, originally appeared as Teach Me Gold: Pedagogy
and Memory in The Pawnbroker in Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary
History 22 (2002): 77117. Copyright by the Jewish Theological Seminary
of America, New York.
A portion of the introduction appeared in YYou Know English?: Multilingual English and the Holocaust, in Teaching the Representation of the
Holocaust, ed. Marianne Hirsch and Irene Kacandes (New York: Modern
Language Association, 2004). Copyright by Alan Rosen.
[First Page]
Portions of the introduction and chapters 1, 2, 3, and 11 appeared as Strong

Enough to Carry Experience: The Holocaust, Multilingualism, and the Problem of English, in Jewish Culture and History 7, no.1 (2005), in press.
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A version of chapter 9, The Language of Dollars: English as Intruder in

Yaffa Eliachs Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust, originally appeared as The
Language of Dollars: Multilingualism and the Claims of English in Hasidic
Tales of the Holocaust, in Witnessing the Disaster: Essays on Representation and
the Holocaust, ed. Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 4674. Reprinted with the permission
of the publisher.
A version of chapter 10, The Language of Survival: English as Metaphor
in Spiegelmans Maus, originally appeared in Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish
Literary History 15 (1995): 24962. Copyright by the Jewish Theological
Seminary of America, New York.
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index
Aaron, Vicky, 206n4
accent: Bronx, 132; compared to tattooing, 5, 22, 28; eliminating ones,
37, 7172, 7982, 103, 17071, 176; and
narrating the Holocaust, 17072; preserving, 1034, 13035
Adams, John, Websters oration for, 91
America, wartime neutrality of, 65,
226n21
American army, 16566
Anthology of Holocaust Literature (Glatstein, Knox, Margoshes), 910
Antler, Joyce, 224n2
Arabic, ixx, 1, 190
Aramaic, 2, 166
Aschheim, Steven, 216n28
Auerbach, Rachel, 3
Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration
camp: gas chamber signs in, 163
64; and Levis view of language, 57;
teaching English in, 2531, 16263
Baal Shem Tov (the Bescht), 229nn12
13
babbling: in Eli, the Fanatic (Roth),
66, 73, 77, 81, 94; in Fugitive Pieces
(Michaels), 182
Ballinger, Pamela, on trauma, 222n21
Baumen, Zygmunt, 12627
bbc radio, 195n19
Bedzin, Poland, 2224
Bell, Daniel, 218n50
Bellow, Saul, 72, 130
Ben Gurion, David, and Eichmann
trial, 213n10
Benhabib, Seyla, on Arendt and English, 1089
Benjamin, Walter, 14, 36, 201n11
Berenbaum, Michael, 14041
Bettleheim, Bruno, 10
Bilik, Dorothy, 5153, 209n8

Brightman, Carol, on Arendt and English, 106, 217n37
broken speech, 85, 8788, 92, 134, 174,
176
Bundy, Nelly, Boder interview of, 2531,
17273
Cahan, Abraham, 130
Celan, Paul, 12426, 225n5
children, 5253, 5658, 204n12
class relations, in Maus, 16061
Clendinnen, Inga, 24
cliche, Arendt on, 103, 121
Cold War, 13, 56
concentration camps, 57. See also
Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration
camp; Dachau concentration camp;
Drancy concentration camp (France);
lager jargon; traumatic realism; Treblinka death camp
conversion, in The Wall, 4043
Cook, Meira, 177
Coughlin, Francis and Maggie, Boders
correspondence with, 32
Cracow, Poland, 15052
crisis of identity, in Eli, the Fanatic
(Roth), 70, 73
Crystal, David, 1315, 153
Czerniakow, Adam, 2
Dachau concentration camp, 157, 164
Dawidowicz, Lucy, 3537, 201n7
deculturation, Boder on, 56
Derrida, Jacques, 215n26
Des Pres, Terence, on comic response
to the Holocaust, 102
Dietz, Mary, on Arendt and the Holocaust, 99
diglossia, 3
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3
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5
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7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
Index
discourse of death, 57, 133. See also

lager jargon
displaced person(s) camps, 21
Doneson, Judith: chronological approach to Holocaust film, 191n3; on
The Pawnbroker, 223n24
Douglas, Lawrence, 214n17
Drancy concentration camp (France),
25
Eichmann trial: coverage in The New
Yorker, 7475, 78; in Eichmann in
Jerusalem (Arendt), 78, 94111; media
languages of, 9698; official language
of, 9697; translations at, 96
Eli, the Fanatic (Roth): babbling in,
66, 73, 77, 81, 94; crisis of identity in,
70, 73; law and art in, 75; versions of,
7172, 7879, 94
Eliach, Yaffa, 1112
English language: awkwardness of, 31
32, 183; of blacks, 8081, 8889; colloquial, 7172, 79; global, 11, 1315, 17,
55, 61, 189; idiomatic, 71; as imperial,
15, 17, 60, 189; neutrality of, 12, 111,
181; and mastery of through puns, 59,
205n22; unnatural, 143
Ezrahi, Sidra, 12, 131
Felman, Shoshana, 7475, 9596, 111,
204n11, 215n22
Felstiner, John, on Celan and mother
tongue, 12526
flashback, and multilingualism, 11621,
220nn1011, 221nn1215
Ford, John, Lumets debt to, 116
found text motif, 18485
Fugitive Pieces (Michaels): babbling in,
182; Meira Cook on, 177; and Yiddish,
18081
Gates, Henry Louis, 211n14, 211n19
Gaus, Gnther, interview of Arendt,
1026
Gerlach, Christian, 215n20
German language: at Eichmann trial,
96102; in epigraph to The Shawl

(Ozick), 12426; as the language of
persecutors, 14647, 158, 161, 188; used
in concentration camps, 4, 14647
Germany, 5556
Gilbert, Morris, 210n8
Gilman, Sander, 57, 11, 76
Glazer, Nathan, 113, 219n6
Goldhagen, Daniel, on victim testimony, 145, 232n26
Great Deportation (Warsaw Ghetto), 3
Greek Jewry, 176
Greek language, 16; and Hebrew, 179
Green, Arthur, 141
Gubar, Susan, 191n2
Gurewitsch, Bonnie, 14445, 228n8
Halio, Jay, 72, 225n6
Hamburger, Michael, 125
Handlin, Oscar, 223n28
Harlem, 79, 12223
Hausner, Gideon, 110, 213n10, 214n18
Hebrew language: at the Eichmann
trial, 9698; as a Jewish language,
2, 167; and Greek, 17879; as sacred,
16667; and writing about the Holocaust, 188, 197n34; on direction sign
to Yad Vashem, ixx, 190
Hellerstein, Kathryn, 130, 141, 228n6
Hilberg, Raul, 10, 110, 123, 213n1, 223n28
Horodezky, S. A., 142
Horowitz, Sara, 225n11, 225n16
Idhra, Greece, 177
immigrants, 5153
Insdorf, Annette, on The Pawnbroker,
115
interviews of Holocaust victims: by
Boder, 1733, 61, 139, 17273; by Eliach, 12, 13946; in research on the
Holocaust, 145, 232nn2326, 233n27
James, Henry, on threat to English, 131
Jaspers, Karl, 9798, 110, 214n11
Jeremiah the prophet, 148
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Index
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
Jerusalem, and multilingual direction

signs to Yad Vashem, ixx, 190
Jewish police, 3841
Jewish Publication Society, 3132
Judenrte (Jewish councils), 12, 3940
Katznelson, Yitzhak, 3
Kaufman, Stanley, 120, 222n21
Kauvar, Elaine, 227n41
King, Nicola, 177
Knox, Israel, 910
Kosinski, Jerzy, 52
Kramer, Michael, 202n15
Kremer, S. Lillian, 210n12, 224nn12
Kristeva, Julia, 216n26
Kubica, Helena, 204n12
Ladino, 2, 176
lager jargon, 57
Landau, Moshe, and German at Eichmann trial, 100, 104
Langer, Lawrence, 67, 204n12
language of dollars, 151, 153, 175
Lanzmann, Claude, 7475
law, 65, 7477, 111; in Eli, the Fanatic,
75
laws of kashrut, and languages, 85
Lazarus, Emma, 148
Leff, Leonard, 219n2, 234n36, 235n38,
235n40
Leith, Dick, 14
Lerman, Miles, 15052
Levi, Primo, 48, 22, 5657
Lewin, Abraham, 3
Lewis, Roger, 219n2
Lichtman, Ada, 214n17
Lind, Jakob, on defiance, 13, 197n40
Lodz ghetto four-language diary, 192n7
Loewenthal, Naftali, on women in
Chabad Hasidism, 229n11
madness, and language, 8788, 103,
215n26
Malamud, Bernard, 130, 213n3
mastery, 5860, 160, 173
247
Matsuda, Mari J., on perception of

accents, 228n8
McCarthy, Mary, and Hannah Arendt,
1068, 217n41
The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare),
74, 93
Mintz, Alan, 48
Miron, Dan, on women and Yiddish,
229n12
mother tongue: and adopted tongue,
1112, 166; Arendt on, 99106; Celan
on, 125; in Rosa (Ozick), 12527
muteness, 6874, 133
New Yorker magazine, 9495, 124
Norich, Anita, 193n7
Nowogrodski, Marc, 35, 37
On Account of a Hat (Sholem
Aleichem), 7071
Oneg Shabbes underground archive, 1
Opoczinski, Peretz, 34
oration, and mourning, 8692
Ossiel, Mark, 215n23
pawnbroking, 78, 208n2
perplexity, 2324
Poe, Edgar Allen, 8691
Polen, Nehemia, on women in Hasidism, 228n11
Polish language: and Polish Jews, 129;
and postWorld War II writing, 126
27; in Rosa (Ozick), 12627; Vladek
Spiegelmans reversion to, 17172; in
the Warsaw Ghetto, 24, 42, 12729
Pratt, Mary Louise, on U.S. foreign
languages, 14
privacy, 8384, 88
prophetic lamentation, 148
prostitution: in The Pawnbroker
(Lumet), 11718; in the Holocaust,
221n17
puns, and mastery of English, 59,
205n22
Radom, ghetto in, 1
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17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
Index
Rapoport-Albert, Ada, 228n11

Reitlinger, Gerald, 10, 110, 228n11
re-reading, in Wallant, 8284
Resnais, Alain, on flashbacks, 116,
201n4, 220n10
Ring, Jennifer, 212n1
Ringelblum, Emmanuel, 1, 8, 3637,
12729
Robinson, Jacob, 1011
Rosenblum, Ralph, on editing The
Pawnbroker (Lumet), 221n18
Roskies, David, 3, 133, 207n14
Rothberg, Michael, 4748, 200n16
Schindlers List (Spielberg), 18788
Scholem, Gershom, 109, 217n46
Sened, Jonat, 1112
Shakespearean tragedy, 13738
Shell, Marc, 16, 198n50
Shmeruk, Chone, 2, 8, 129
Sholem Aleichem, 7071
A Short Wait (Hersey), 3738, 50
Shultz, Bruno, 12930
Sollors, Werner, 34, 194n13, 195n19
Spencer, Herbert, 83
Stanton, Domna, 1415
Steiner, George, 103, 147, 191n1
Stokesbury, James, 226n31
Stopnitsky, Udel, Boder interview of,
2225
Stryjkowski, Johan, 12627
suburbia, 65, 78. See also zoning laws
tattoo(s): Levis view of language and,
5; and Nelly Bundy, 2729; in relation
to accent, 135; Michael Rothberg on,
200n16
third person, 71, 73
Todesfudge (Celan), 12426
Topical Autobiographies of Displaced

People (Boder), 3233
Tower of Babel, 53, 133
traumatic realism, 4748
Treblinka death camp, 45
Trevor-Roper, Hugh, 223n28
A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (Howe
and Greenberg), 70
verbatim translation, 21, 31
Voice of America, 195n19
Voices of the Holocaust Web site,
199n3, 199n9
Wagner, Geoffrey, on adaptation, 218n2
Warsaw Ghetto, 14, 8, 3449, 12729
Webster, Daniel, 86; and commemorative oratory, 8992
Weissberg, Liliane, 216n29
Wiesel, Elie, 52, 191n1
Wieseltier, Leon, 140, 241n1
Wilkomirski, Benjamin, 57, 205n17
wire recorder, 21, 35
Wisse, Ruth, 1934n7, 197n34
Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, ix,
113, 190
Yiddish: in Fugitive Pieces (Michaels),
18081; as theme, 187; translated into
English, 36; as victims language, 9
10; in Warsaw Ghetto, 24
Young, James, 12, 232n22
Young-Bruehl, Elizabeth, 216n32
Zabludowski, Benjamin, 12,
192n2
Zeitlin, Hillel, 12829
Zgnelek, Bella, 30
zoning laws, 6768, 7577
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University of Nebraska Press

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rosen, Alan (Alan Charles)

To Ruth with love, admiration, and gratitude

1950: English in the Aftermath

2. An Entirely Different Culture: English as

3. What Does He Speak?: English as Mastery in

1960: Laws Languages, Eichmann, and After

4. Please Speak English: Babbling in Philip

5. From Law to Outlaw: Borrowed English in

6. Laws Languages: Hannah Arendts Mother

7. Say Good Boy: Legitimizing English

8. Cracking Her Teeth: Broken English in

9. The Language of Dollars: English as Intruder

1990: Two Generations After

11. Eaten Away by Silence: English as Elegy

Finally, my teacher Elie Wiesel nourishes my life and work constantly.

The Jewish Council of Warsaw, writes Emmanuel Ringelblum, shows

Adam Czerniakow (indeed, so close that he was known as Czerniakows

Everything is All Right

According to Levi, an absolutist linguistic chauvinism fueled this policy:

Everything is All Right

created only in the camps themselves.16 As the concentration camps gave

Everything is All Right

Langer, too, believes that conventional narratives insulate readers, letting

Y You Know English?

for instance, Chone Shmeruk quotes a memoir that comments on what

Everything is All Right

There were, to be sure, some who by inclination or default chose to write in

Everything is All Right

As Eliachs phrasing suggests, survivors who attempt to recollect their

Everything is All Right

Everything is All Right

According to this view, works written in America in Spanish, French Creole,

Everything is All Right

1950: English in the Aftermath

Of Divergent Tongues: English as Perplexity

1950: English in the Aftermath

In Boders next comment he unexpectedly switches from Yiddish to English:

1950: English in the Aftermath

Perplexity is Boders way of describing the force of Stopnitskys account,

particular, as a kind of screen, a kind of not having heard registered in the

as an unsolicited response to perplexity and also as a medium strikingly

Somebody Who Knew English

1950: English in the Aftermath

Because of her proficiency which, at points in the interview, she belittles

That English could wield such power in Auschwitz is difficult to imagine,

they (presumably the Nazi camp administration) need English there

1950: English in the Aftermath

compelled to spend time in Birkenau, under dreadful conditions. But her

jewelry. She wanted it not so much for ornament as for concealment;

1950: English in the Aftermath

Awkward as They May Sound

1950: English in the Aftermath

An Entirely Different Culture

Engaged in a heroic effort to salvage memory through an acute sensitivity

An Entirely Different Culture

Intensely Moving English

It is because the translators were between linguistic worlds are so

1950: English in the Aftermath

The Task of the Translator

This cautionary reflection comes at the conclusion of the editors prologue

An Entirely Different Culture