Witness without End
-
Upload
jsapiro6552 -
Category
Documents
-
view
15 -
download
1
description
Transcript of Witness without End
Witness without End?Eric J. Sundquist
In Norma Rosen’s Touching Evil (1969), one of the strangest
Holocaust novels on record, two American women, one pregnant
and the other preoccupied with her own fertility, neither of them
Jewish, watch the televised trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. Each
identifies obsessively with the testimony of survivor witnesses
brought forth in Jerusalem to name the crimes of the Nazi regime.
The narrator, Jean, identifies with a “corpse-digger” (43) who clawed
her way to freedom from within a pile of dead bodies, while the
pregnant woman, Hattie, identifies with a survivor who gave birth in
the “typhus-infested straw” of an unnamed death camp (131). As
Hattie “sucks up the images” of the Eichmann trial, her companion
imagines the unborn child “slipping out, all pale and amniotized, to
get a better look at the screen, then slipping back in again” (68). In
Jean’s fantasy Hattie “bears the fetus that bears witness to the
witness on TV who is bearing witness at the trial” (68).
This passage is one of several that foregrounds Rosen’s pres-
cient dramatization of the ways in which “identification” and “wit-
nessing,” with their attendant problems of corrosion, voyeurism,
projection, replication, and the like, were bound to become key
themes in Holocaust studies in years to come—prescient not least
because “Holocaust studies” barely existed at the time Rosen
wrote her novel, while “the Holocaust,” as a term of art, so to
speak, barely existed at the time her novel is set. Not only that, but
in the scene in question, Jean, a woman in her late thirties, is
called back in memory to her own introduction to the Nazi geno-
cide in 1944, when her college psychology teacher, who deals in
symbolically freighted experiments with mice in mazes, shows
Jean newly revealed photographs of the liberated death camps—
“experimental cell blocks . . . piled-up stick bodies at the bottom
of a lime-pit”—and then takes her virginity (72). “Only joy can
cancel out that horror,” he professes afterward (73). “I seduced
Eric J. Sundquist is a Foundation Professor of Literature at UCLA. He is the
author, most recently, of Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust
America.
doi:10.1093/alh/ajl032Advance Access publication December 19, 2006# The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Forpermissions, please e-mail: [email protected]
Witnessing the Disaster:
Essays on Representation
and the Holocaust,
Michael Bernard-Donals
and Richard Glejzer.
University of Wisconsin
Press, 2003.
The Holocaust and the
Postmodern, Robert
Eaglestone. Oxford
University Press, 2004.
After Such Knowledge:
Memory, History, and the
Legacy of the Holocaust,
Eva Hoffman.
PublicAffairs, 2004.
Post-Holocaust:
Interpretation,
Misinterpretation, and
the Claims of History,
Berel Lang. Indiana
University Press, 2005.
The Holocaust and
Memory in the Global
Age, Daniel Levy and
Natan Sznaider,
translated by Assenka
Oksiloff. Temple
University Press, 2006.
Sounds of Defiance: The
Holocaust,
Multilingualism, and the
Problem of English,
you with dirty pictures”. However this experience marks Jean’s
subsequent “witness” to the Holocaust and launches one strand of
the novel’s overdetermined argument about post-Holocaust “repro-
duction,” Rosen confronts us with the disturbing probability that
the atrocities of the Judeocide are seductive, a kind of pornography
through which we lose our innocence, whatever the motive or epi-
phany, time and again.
Contemporary critics, including a number in the cohort under
review, rightly depict cultural productions of the late 1970s—specifi-
cally, the television miniseries Holocaust in 1978 and the establish-
ment of a commission to plan the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum in 1979—as propulsive events in the Americanization, and
hence the universalization, of Holocaust “memory.” Even so,
Rosen’s focus on the Eichmann trial is telling. She was responsive
not just to the pivotal role the trial played, by most accounts, in
breaking the postwar “silence” about the Holocaust, but also to the
redundancy of witnessing upon which our understanding of it would
come to be predicated as true witnesses, whether victims, perpetra-
tors, or bystanders, were replaced, generation by generation, by
those who witness only through acts of representation.
Insofar as it marked the convergence of global media cover-
age and pronouncements about the “lessons” of the Holocaust, the
Eichmann trial was also a key marker, argue Daniel Levy and
Natan Sznaider in The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age
(2006), in the “de-territorialization of [Holocaust] memory,” a
process that unfolded in coming decades significantly in English
and through American media (108). Whereas English must at first
have seemed inconsequential within the melange of languages
through which the Holocaust was experienced and subsequently
remembered, its very exteriority also meant it had avoided the cor-
rupting power of Nazism. “Lodged at the corners of the globe,
rather than in the midst of Europe,” as Alan Rosen writes in
Sounds of Defiance: The Holocaust, Multilingualism, and the
Problem of English (2005), English “escaped contamination”
(189). As the language of liberation, moreover, and soon the fore-
most language of technology, capitalism, and democracy, English
was an inevitable vehicle of Americanization in two senses—
making the Holocaust available to a distant American audience
and, over time, universalizing its message. By century’s end,
English had become the principal agent by which the Holocaust
was made not just a moral enormity but also, say Levy and
Sznaider, a “future-oriented memory” (185) on which to base a
cosmopolitan ethics: “all victims have become Jews” (188).
Although it could in no way compete properly with the testi-
mony of survivors and other witnesses that appeared in the initial
Alan Rosen. University
of Nebraska Press, 2005.
The Holocaust Novel,
Efraim Sicher.
Routledge, 2005.
Fantasies of Witnessing:
Postwar Efforts to
Experience the
Holocaust, Gary
Weissman. Cornell
University Press, 2004.
66 Witness without End?
postwar years, American literature, like American English, also
quickly became a major voice in the creation of Holocaust
memory and its dissemination. John Hersey laid out some of the
theoretical problems to come in his 1950 documentary novel about
the Warsaw Ghetto entitled The Wall, which took as its inspiration
clandestine archives such as Emmanuel Ringelblum’s diary, par-
tially published in English in 1958 as Notes from the Warsaw
Ghetto, and the collection of materials written secretly in Lodz
under the direction of Chaim Rumkowski (published in an
abridged English edition in 1984 as Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto).
Supposedly based on an archive compiled by the fictional Noach
Levinson and housed in Israel after being unearthed from the
ruins, The Wall presents itself as excerpts from Levinson’s Yiddish
documents, initially translated into Polish and then into English. In
making an imagined archive available in English well in advance
of the translation of Ringelblum’s and Rumkowski’s manuscripts,
argues Efraim Sicher in The Holocaust Novel (2005), Hersey
demonstrated that memory can be preserved only by being
encoded in a “narrating consciousness that makes sense out of the
confusion of history” (113). Precisely because it is imagined
memory, The Wall alerts us to key problems in the reconstruction
of the Holocaust world—the uncertainties of eyewitness
testimony derived from traumatic experience; the need for
corroborating evidence; the question of rightly interpreting acts of
resistance and non-resistance alike—while focusing, as Rosen
explores in detail, on the ways in which English translation, both
as fact and as trope, mediates our “capacity to imagine” the
Holocaust (A. Rosen 36).
If the role of English in making the Holocaust “witnessa-
ble” by an American, as well as a global, audience thus dates to
the immediate aftermath of the war, it still remains an open ques-
tion what we have been enabled to witness. In each generation
since, the problem of “knowing” the Holocaust has paradoxically
become more acute as various modes of second-order witnessing
have become normative. Before looking more closely at this
process, spelled out collectively in the books under review, it
will be useful first to orient ourselves to the contemporary
moment.
Today’s scholars of Holocaust culture typically take one or
another departure from Marianne Hirsch’s influential concept of
“post-memory,” in which the survivor generation’s memories—
what they recalled of their experiences and even what they are said
to have repressed—are encountered in the next generation
“not through recollection but through an imaginative investment
and creation” (22), what Lillian Kremer, borrowing from Norma
If the role of English in
making the Holocaust
“witnessable” by an
American, as well as a
global, audience . . .dates to the immediate
aftermath of the war, it
still remains an open
question what we have
been enabled to witness.
In each generation since,
the problem of
“knowing” the Holocaust
has paradoxically
become more acute as
various modes of second-
order witnessing have
become normative.
American Literary History 67
Rosen, has called “witness through the imagination” in her book of
that name. Although contention over what the Holocaust was and
how it can be known continues unabated—think only of the dozens
of books and articles speaking to problems of “representation”—
our interest now, say Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer
in Witnessing the Disaster: Essays on Representation and the
Holocaust (2003), lies in “representations of witness rather than
representations of the event itself” (13). However, the upshot of
such an evolution, contends Gary Weissman in his powerful and
incisive study, Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to
Experience the Holocaust (2004), is that non-witnesses today
strive to “convince themselves and others that they too occupy a
privileged position in relation to the event” by claiming to partici-
pate in, to have been imprinted by, its trauma, as though they have
“really faced the Holocaust, felt its horror and remembered its
victims” (21).
“No one becomes a survivor either by virtue of being a Jew
or by the intensity of their absorption in the history and literature
of the Shoah,” cautions Michael Andre Bernstein (90). Neither, it
might be stipulated, does one become a witness, even though
every effort by a non-participant to know the Holocaust necessi-
tates some kind of surrogate witnessing, but what kind—witness as
spectator, as testifier, or both—and to what end? No doubt rela-
tives and especially children of Holocaust victims belong to a
special category of witness. “The Second Generation will never
know what the First Generation does in its bones,” writes Melvin
Bukiet, “but what the Second Generation knows better than
anyone else is the First Generation” (14). The heirs of survivors
may well be survivors of a sort, just as the perpetrators have as
their heirs the apparently growing ranks of Holocaust deniers, but
perhaps everyone else might better be thought of as second- and
third-generation bystanders.
Nevertheless, those determined to “witness” the Holocaust
through literature or other media have plenty of theories from
which to choose. In Dora Apel’s “secondary witnessing” (12),
Susan Gubar’s “proxy-witnessing” (23), and Irene Kacandes’s
“co-witnessing” (Hirsh and Kacandes 18), to take just a few
examples, one finds inventive and often compelling evidence of
the special demands made upon the reader by Holocaust texts.
What one also finds, however, is a preoccupation with making the
trauma one’s own that verges at times on narcissism. “I did not
have the privilege of going through the Hitler holocaust,” Isaac
Bashevis Singer wrote in qualification of his authority in a prefa-
tory note to Enemies, a Love Story (1972), and one might take
Singer’s wry self-assessment as a critique of the ardor with which
68 Witness without End?
some scholars of the Judeocide pursue identification with the
victims and their memories (unpag.). “Memory envy,” Geoffrey
Hartman calls it, speaking of the strong undertow affecting artists,
characters, and audiences awash in an ever enlarging sea of
discovered, remembered, and invented testimony wherein the
boundary between the original and the surrogate experiences has
become elided (“Tele-Suffering” 120).
An acute instance, notes Hartman, is the case of Binjamin
Wilkomirski, who became first famous and then infamous when
his much-praised Holocaust memoir, Fragments (1995), was
discovered to be fraudulent.1 That Fragments elicited moving cor-
roboration from survivors, who recognized in it the fundamental
“truth” of their terrible experiences, underscored both the ambi-
guity of remembered witness and, among the reading public, a
seemingly insatiable passion for Holocaust testimony. It is no sur-
prise, therefore, that Wilkomirski’s bogus text features significantly
in recent scholarship. With its fragmented narrative and graphic
horrors, Fragments is a compendium of what has come to stand
for authenticity in Holocaust representation, writes Weissman, and
thus an extreme manifestation of our “fantasies of witnessing”
(213). Fragments is a parody of testimony, argues Robert
Eaglestone in The Holocaust and the Postmodern (2004), one that
feeds parasitically not only on the genre established by Primo
Levi, Elie Wiesel, and other survivors, but also on the principal
strategy of Holocaust fiction, which must steer a careful course
between “the demand of fiction that we identify and the demand
of the Holocaust that we cannot and should not” (132). For Levy
and Sznaider, the initial reception of Fragments proved that
the Holocaust has become “completely decontextualized and
turned into a personal trauma with which anyone can identify,” its
globalized code severed from history, while at the same time the
angry reactions to Wilkomirski’s hoax demonstrated that some
kind of boundary still exists between survivor memory and fictio-
nalized trauma (150). Or does it? In the view of Bernard-Donals,
what Fragments illuminates is the fact that the authority of
survivor testimony is “autonomous from history” (“Beyond” 198).
Because a survivor’s experience need not be attendant to or
congruent with historical events, except in a personal sense, false
testimony, no less than true, may produce in readers an effect that
“induces them to witness” by acting out a transference of the
trauma (“Beyond” 198).
Although far from resolved in theoretical terms,
Bernard-Donals’s distinction between the Holocaust as a set of his-
torical events and the Holocaust as a set of personal experiences is
unexceptional. More provocative is his view of the transferability
American Literary History 69
of trauma. To suppose that Fragments allows one to bear witness
may offer ammunition to Holocaust deniers, he acknowledges, but
insofar as “witnessing is a moment of forgetting, a moment of
seeing without knowing that indelibly marks the source of history
as an abyss” (214), there may be “a traumatic kernel wrapped
inside the narrative of destruction,” whether Wiesel’s or Binjamin
Wilkomirski’s, “to which neither we nor the writer has access”
(213). Such a view derives from the performative notion of “trans-
missible trauma” espoused by Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman,
among others—a notion, observes Amy Hungerford, purporting
that “survivors” (98) can be produced in the act of reading and
thereby creating “an atmosphere conducive to fraud” such as
Wilkimirski’s (111). Whatever trauma theory has contributed to
psychiatric or psychological conjecture about victims and survi-
vors (or, for that matter, perpetrators and bystanders), in the arena
of cultural studies it would seem mainly to have raised the stakes
of mystification. Now, what is unrecoverable, unspeakable,
unknowable—the authentic “kernel”—belongs not just to survivors
but also to everyday scholars, readers, and filmgoers. In this
respect, Fragments is a proof text of the voracious, but unfulfill-
able, post-Holocaust demand for new evidence of that which lies
hidden in the abyss of history, the black hole of memory. The
unimpeachable commandment “never forget” is thus transmuted
into the unimpeachable caveat “never remember.”
The rhetoric of “the unspeakable” and “the unknowable” has,
of course, a long history in Holocaust studies. “The unspeakable
being said, over and over, for twelve years,” wrote George Steiner
in 1959 of Nazi record-keeping (99). “The unthinkable being
written down, indexed, filed for reference” (Steiner 100). “By now
we know all there is to know. But it hasn’t helped; we still don’t
understand,” observed Isaac Rosenfeld in his 1948 essay “Terror
beyond Evil” (197). The fact that Elie Wiesel could say much the
same thing during his visit to Auschwitz with Oprah Winfrey in
2006—“What does it mean? . . . I have no answers”—tells us not
that Rosenfeld’s estimate was premature but rather that, despite
60 years of testimony, documentation, and interpretation, an
opaque incomprehensibility lies still at the event’s core (“Oprah”).
Despite all we know, it is not enough. “The people of the Book
[have] become the people of Holocaust books,” writes Thane
Rosenbaum in Second Hand Smoke (1999). “The canon of the
Shoah [is] now a loaded cannon, the fuse eternally counting down
with the firepower of memory and accusation,” and yet “the
mystery of madness and atrocity can never be found in books—or
even museums—because the questions themselves are unknow-
able, and the answers, even more so” (75–76).
70 Witness without End?
It is therefore useful to distinguish, as Saul Friedlander has,
between common or collective memory about the Holocaust,
which provides coherence and forms of closure, and “deep
memory” (254), which “will defy any attempt to give it meaning”
(255). The most acute and, philosophically speaking, irrefutable
expression of the latter appears in Primo Levi’s view that it is not
the survivors whose testimony is recorded who are “the complete
witnesses” (83), but instead the “drowned,” those “who saw the
Gorgon, [but] have not returned to tell about it or have returned
mute” (84). Silence is thus the only avenue by which to approach
that which can be neither communicated nor known. The question
of unknowability2 may also be thought of as a corollary of belief
in the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust, whether in relation to Nazi
intentionalism (unlike other victims, Jews—all Jews—were a
singular, non-contingent target) or other instances of genocide (the
Holocaust, and especially the Jewish Holocaust, was qualitatively
different from, say, Stalin’s regime of murder or that of Pol Pot).
Likewise, moral judgments about the susceptibility of the
Holocaust to analogy or comparison may cast in metaphysical
terms. “If the trememdum could be reduced to its causes or
folded back into its antecedents,” according to Arthur Cohen’s
formulation, “it would have a conditional reality which would
diminish its stature as trememdum” (30–31). An event so singular
must by definition be trapped for all time in the deep memory of
history.
By the same token, as Berel Lang points out in Post-
Holocaust: Interpretation, Misinterpretation, and the Claims of
History (2005), because similar avowals might be made regarding
states of mystical ecstasy, for example, the rhetoric of unknowabil-
ity can “obscure the basic features of that event which, notwith-
standing its moral monstrosity, are clearly—if anything, too
clearly—recognizable and describable” (76). What is now recog-
nizable and describable about the Holocaust, the collective
memory adduced from an avalanche of information, also derives
from the visual arts, museums and memorials, and above all,
perhaps, from literature. Indeed, as Sicher notices, by the early
1980s Yosef Yerushalmi could venture that, despite the
Holocaust’s “having engendered more historical research that any
single event in Jewish history,” its image was now “being shaped,
not at the historian’s anvil, but in the novelist’s crucible” (xxi).
Yet it must also be noticed that Yerushalmi presented the
historian’s task in terms no less revealing for our understanding of
what constitutes Holocaust literature. The historian does not
simply “replenish the gaps of memory” (Yerushalmi 94–95)
created by an ongoing process of winnowing and forgetting; he
American Literary History 71
also challenges “even those memories that have survived intact”
(Yerushalmi 98). He must question not only “false” witness such
as Wilkomirski’s, that is to say, but “true” witness as well.
“A novel about Auschwitz is not a novel, or it is not about
Auschwitz,” wrote Wiesel in 1978 (Jew 234). This much-cited
aphorism concisely illustrates the mystique of witness Yerushalmi
has in mind, and no one has more fully embodied it than Wiesel,
who, through continual, self-corroborating acts of witness, has made
himself a “living myth” of the Holocaust (Weissman 81). Both Lang
and Weissman take note of the argument that erupted between
Wiesel and Alfred Kazin in 1989 after Kazin expressed doubt that
Wiesel had actually seen the events related in the famous scene in
Night (1960) in which three prisoners are hanged and the agonized
struggles of the last to die, a young boy, provokes Wiesel’s
anguished cry that God himself is hanging on the gallows. The issue
is neither the basis Kazin had for questioning Wiesel’s account nor
Wiesel’s affronted rejoinder, remarks Lang, but rather the implication
that survivor testimony need stand no empirical test. “Historical veri-
fication, although not a sufficient condition of testimony, remains a
necessary one,” Lang argues, “required in broad outline if not for
each detail” (79). Wiesel’s insistence that Kazin’s skepticism may
give credence to Holocaust deniers, adds Weissman, tells us less
about the truth of Night than it does about the “Wieselization” of the
Holocaust, which is to say the sanctification of survivor testimony
and, what is more, of particular survivors (51).
It takes nothing away from Night as memoir and eyewitness
account to recognize that it is also a piece of imaginative literature,
one demonstration of which can be seen, as Weissman shows, in
Wiesel’s rather different account of the crisis of faith provoked by
Auschwitz in his later autobiography, All Rivers Run to the Sea
(1994). In demonstrating that Night is as powerful a “novel” as it
is a “memoir,” one could just as well point to the ways in which
the Days of Awe sequence replaces the binding of Isaac with the
binding of the Jews (“Praised be Thy Holy Name, for having
chosen us to be slaughtered on Thine altar” [Night 67]) and God’s
selection (“on Rosh Hashanah it is written, on Yom Kippur it is
sealed . . . who shall live and who shall die,” reads the liturgy
[Gates 108]) with the demonic selection by Josef Mengele, who
writes down the numbers of prisoners standing as though at “the
Last Judgment” (Night 71). Held to a rarified standard of experien-
tial authenticity, in fact, we would be required to ask if the new
English translation of Night adopted by Oprah’s Book Club, which
re-Judaizes the text in several key passages,3 does not prove that
Wiesel, in the previous translation, read by millions, witnessed
falsely in the interests of reaching a gentile audience.
72 Witness without End?
Of course, a decision to adopt a frame of reference familiar
to Christian, predominantly American readers made perfect sense
in 1960, just as it makes sense now to revert to what was presum-
ably Wiesel’s original intent and language in the far longer,
unpublished document in Yiddish from which Night, first in
French and then in English, was culled. Neither an overlay of
redemptive Christian symbology—a standard allegorical mode in
much American literature of the Holocaust—nor evidence that
some historical details of Night were altered for dramatic
effect falsifies Wiesel’s testimony. We need not go as far as
Bernard-Donals and Glejzer in speculating that “insistence upon
‘authentic’ memories . . . may replicate the [Nazi] logic that pro-
mulgated the Shoah by eliminating that which defies logic or
system” (11).4 Yet their formulation does usefully bridge the
distance between authenticity defined as incontestable testimony
and authenticity defined as the “holy grail” of unmediated witness
by those who come after (Weissman 131). The doctrine of
unknowability, it might be said, is the flip side of the Nazi coin of
zealotry achieved through prevaricating euphemism and gestures
of sacramental grandeur—and thus a means of relegating the
events to “an incomprehensible cosmos, of sacred and demonic
forces” (Hoffman 175), making us “faithful,” says Eva Hoffman in
After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the
Holocaust (2004), “to a terribilitas that we simultaneously declare
to be unimaginable” (177).
Hoffman’s critique of the cult of testimony coincides with
the approach of a “post”-post-Holocaust age when no living wit-
nesses will remain and the staggering project of collecting and
recording their first-hand testimony in memoirs and interviews
will come to a close. Already, perhaps, an anxious awareness of
this coming day has taken its toll on our sensibilities. The fre-
quency with which the Holocaust is, even today, described as
unknowable, notes Weissman, may have less to do with what the
victims suffered in the past than with our rising inability to feel
“horrified by ‘the horror’ in the present” (208). If a surfeit of
Holocaust knowledge has left us numb, however, it is also because
the globalization of that knowledge has merged the Holocaust with
other catastrophic events. If all victims are Jews, to recur to Levy
and Sznaider, then all the world is a witness. With Holocaust
images now embedded in a vast trove of global brutality, refracted
again and again in many media, we have all been made “involun-
tary bystanders of atrocities,” says Hartman, our experience of
“secondary trauma” derived not from events lost in the black hole
of deep memory but instead from the exhaustion of our capacity
for empathy (Hartman, Longest Shadow 152). It is ironic, but
American Literary History 73
surely inevitable, that such a crisis would be one byproduct of
late-twentieth-century “survivor culture,” in which intermingled
celebratory and psychiatric discourses arose to account for all
manner of trauma and “the act of testimony,” with which the
reader or viewer was invited to identify, was made heroic
(Greenspan 59). The exfoliation of victimhood has both enriched
and diluted the meaning of witness, just as it has both enhanced
and diminished the Holocaust. Collective memory, warns
Hoffman, is rapidly turning into “hypermemory,” leaving the
Shoah in danger less of “vanishing into forgetfulness” than of
“expanding into an increasingly empty referent” (Hoffman 177).
The very discourses of empathy and trauma that promise to
turn us into survivors, or at least witnesses, therefore make seduc-
tive what Susan David Bernstein refers to as “promiscuous identifi-
cation,” leaving us too little vigilant about “negotiating simulated
realities” and, in the case of literature, tempting us to assimilate
“the read subject into an untroubled unitary reading self” (142).
An arresting example of such problematic identification is drama-
tized in Emily Prager’s Eve’s Tattoo (1992), in which the gentile
title character invents various life stories for the Holocaust victim
whose identity she usurps by tattooing her camp number on her
own arm and through whose secondary impersonation she
proposes to keep the Holocaust alive by telling tales suited to the
individual needs of various interlocutors. “When the people who
experienced an event are no longer walking the planet,” she
declares, “it’s as if that event never existed at all. There’ll be
books and museums and monuments, but things move so fast now,
the only difference between fantasy and history is living people.
I’m going to keep Eva alive” (11). The predictable failure of Eve’s
project provides a salutary lesson in favor of what Bernstein calls
“dissonant” identification (S. Bernstein 158), a strategy for
approaching eyewitness or first-generation testimony that “unsettles
the fantasy of authentic mutuality” (S. Bernstein 159). Eve may be
an “anti-Icarus sucked into the dark, drawn by the lethal attraction
of a black hole” (181), as Sicher contends, but the fact that her
audiences identify not as one does with legitimate testimony but
rather as one does with “characters in novels,” Eaglestone points
out, makes Eve’s Tattoo an allegory of the allure, as well as the
risks, of spurious identification (111).
The prototype here would be Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young
Girl (1947), which prompted such an excess of identification on
the part of young Bernstein that she “kept late-night sentinels for
the return of Hitler” (S. Bernstein 147), but whose iconography is
now so entangled in stage plays, films, biographical studies, docu-
mentaries, critical editions, musical adaptations, and related
74 Witness without End?
memorabilia that the original text has been emptied of its capacity
to witness. (“About the only thing we haven’t seen so far is Anne
Frank on Ice,” remarked Ian Buruma after a 1998 Broadway
revival [4].) What needs to be added to Bernstein’s account is that
literature itself may provide us with “dissonant” readings, as we
may see in the burlesque of promiscuous witness found, for
example, in Philip Roth’s dissection of Anne Frank hagiography in
The Ghost Writer (1979) or Rosenbaum’s Second Hand Smoke, in
which the estranged wife of the Nazi-hunter protagonist is
portrayed as having come to her own brand of Holocaust envy, as
well as philosemitism, through adolescent addiction to the Diary,
which prompts her to have meals brought to her in the attic “in
solidarity with her heroine” (142).
Such self-conscious replication of Holocaust texts within
Holocaust texts, whether satiric or not, may be thought of as a
variation on what Norma Rosen has designated, to cite the title of
her essay, “The Second Life of Holocaust Imagery.” The pheno-
monon is not specific to English, of course—the genre of
Holocaust literature is definitively multilingual—but any preva-
lence of such representations in English might be ascribed to its
being, from the outset, a “second-hand” language of witness.
Specifically, Rosen means that certain words and images became
charged by the Holocaust with connotations that rise up unbidden.
“For a mind engraved with the Holocaust, gas is always that gas,”
she writes. “Shower means their shower. Ovens are those ovens.
A train is a freight car crammed with suffering children.” Of
course, this kind of contamination from memory does not
always happen, she adds, “but when it does come, this unwilled
re-experiencing, this ‘second life,’ must not be turned away from,
imperfect though it may be” (“Second” 52). Michael Bernstein
objects that such a “clinically excessive identification” offensively
justifies claiming special moral insight into “the suffering of one’s
people” (54), and to the extent that Rosen promotes the fantasy of
unmediated witness, as Eaglestone maintains, this is surely right
(Eaglestone 35). Without setting aside that worry, however, one
can find in Rosen’s argument a different lesson.
We may return here to the imperishable trope of unknow-
ability, elevated to a high artistic principle by filmmaker Claude
Lanzmann, for whom the Holocaust’s uniqueness lies in the
permanent “unrepresentability” of what happened. One consequence
of Lanzmann’s ascetic logic, says Weissman, is to make Schindler’s
List (1993), which showed things that Lanzmann’s landmark docu-
mentary Shoah (1985) left largely to silence and evocation, “a form
of Holocaust denial” (162). Be that as it may, Lanzmann’s high
moralism is factitious not only because he employs a variety of
American Literary History 75
devices to “show” the Holocaust, including the miniaturized plaster
model of people dying in the gas chamber on exhibit at Auschwitz,
but also because he can assume his audience’s familiarity with
many of those things he does not show. By the time Shoah
appeared, “trains” and “cattle cars,” even the mere railroad tracks
leading to the death camps, carried into Lanzmann’s film an
immense visual vocabulary, encoded by many narratives, photo-
graphs, and documentary films, so that his self-regarding circum-
spection was effectively a narratorial act by means of which the
fantasy of “second-life” witnessing was set loose.
In this respect, Weissman spells out a very useful relationship
between Shoah and Schindler’s List, in which Steven Spielberg,
on behalf of his audience, studied the line between witness and
fantasy, the most revealing instance being the controversial scene
in which naked women are herded into a “shower” room and
sprayed—not with gas, as we fear, but with water after all. If the
ultimate point of reference for the unspeakable (and therefore the
unknowable) is what transpired inside the gas chamber, to which
no victim can testify and which no artist will attempt to depict,
Spielberg’s cinematic suggestion that the horror will be shown to
viewers “peeping” into a gas-chamber—the camera literally looks
through the peephole—accompanied by unbearable tension amidst
darkness and screams, may be as close as we can come to feeling
the horror and making it “eyewitnessable” (Weissman 176).
Because Spielberg’s sleight of hand also carries with it perpetrator
testimony such as that of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoss
about the agony of his own “witness,”5 the “peephole,” like the
train, activates the second life of Holocaust imagery—what James
Young speaks of as its “after-images”—in viewers already pre-
pared to witness events without having seen them.6
Such replication of Holocaust tropes, along with arch self-
awareness of the vicissitudes of witnessing, is a defining feature of
the most recent generation of Holocaust literature and art. One may
see it as a way to assess generational differences, as when Leslie
Epstein returns in King of the Jews (1979) to the problem of docu-
menting Jewish life and resistance in the Lodz Ghetto, particularly
the controversial role of the Judenrat under the pompous leadership
of Chaim Rumkowski. In reproducing aspects of Rumkowski’s life
and episodes from the Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, including quo-
tations from Rumkowski’s now searingly ironic speeches—for
instance, his proclamation that “Work Can Save Us” or his heart-
breaking plea to parents to turn over their children for transport, lest
the whole ghetto be liquidated—Epstein rebuilds in fiction a world
of chaos and terror raised to a high pitch. Black comic inventions
such as the intertwining of the final orders for transport with a
76 Witness without End?
ghetto production of Macbeth, a penetrating reflection on
Rumkowski’s own blood-stained reign, allow Epstein to test the
moral fabric of authenticity by questioning the precision with which
eyewitness and historical accounts alone can provide the most com-
plete testimony. Whereas Hersey had to invent an archive, Epstein
can elaborate upon the real archive to demonstrate, as he noted in
subsequent commentary, that the Nazi effort to exterminate the
Jews, an attack on “the imagination itself,” on the people whose
“finite minds conceived of the infinite,” had failed (263).
Replication of the tropes of witnessing also provides a means
of delimiting the genre of Holocaust literature and, at least in
some key cases, the self-reflexive awareness of English as a trans-
lating medium. Alan Rosen’s analysis of Cynthia Ozick’s The
Shawl (1989), a work rich in attention to languages, memories,
and their intertwined representations, provides a useful example.
The “poison” of English on which the survivor Rosa Lublin, now
a madwoman living in Miami, “cracks her teeth” is set in the
novel against the Yiddish mocked by her cosmopolitan Polish
parents, who believed their veneration of Warsaw culture and
classical languages might save them from the ghetto and the death
camp (Ozick, Shawl 53). Not only is Rosa’s English, like her
Polish, now poisoned by the Holocaust, however, but the
Holocaust is conversely poisoned by English, as in the mock scho-
larly language of Dr. Tree, who views survivors as pathological
specimens best probed through his preposterous theory of
“Repressed Animation,” a Buddhist-inspired diagnosis of “non-
functioning” death camp inmates (Ozick, Shawl 37)—first of all a
“second-life” parody of the “drowned,” the musselmanner, but
also, by extension, of contemporary trauma theory. Yet, as the
only language available to Ozick, Rosen points out, English must
be added to the array of intertextual traditions (Yiddish, Hebrew,
German, Polish, Latin) on which she draws.7 As evidence he cites
a letter from Rosa to her niece Stella in which she—or, we might
rather say, Ozick—virtually quotes from Edgar’s desperate cry
upon encountering his blinded father in King Lear: “Once I
thought the worst was the worst, after that nothing could be the
worst. But now I see, even after the worst there’s still more”
(Ozick, Shawl 14). Allusions to Shakespeare serve effectively to
enlarge Ozick’s “vocabulary of suffering” (A. Rosen 137), even to
counteract “the parodic poison” of English, Rosen argues (138).
Yet, beyond the fact that “worse” following upon “the worst” is a
common motif in Holocaust testimony—in Night, for example—
there is a further allusion in Rosa’s quotation that must be taken
into account if we are to appreciate fully Ozick’s interlayering of
English texts and replication of Holocaust tropes.
American Literary History 77
As he enters his third summer in prison, charged with the
murder of a Christian child so that his drained blood can be used
for ritual purposes, Yakov Bok, the hero of Bernard Malamud’s
1966 novel The Fixer, suffers yet another in a long series of
torments and humiliations when a guard dumps a can of urine
over his head: “He thought that whenever he had been through the
worst, there was always worse” (264). Did Ozick think of King
Lear, or did she think of Malamud thinking of King Lear? The
point here is not that this comparatively minor scene in
Malamud’s careful fictionalization of the Mendel Beilis blood
libel case makes him the more proximate and relevant source.
Rather, the recuperation of The Fixer in The Shawl, a different
form of second-life allusion,8 stands as further proof of Rosen’s
compelling and original argument about the emergence of English
as a language in which the Holocaust, as well as its antecedents,
could be witnessed, even as it would also appear to testify to
Ozick’s appreciation of the earlier generation of American
Holocaust literature, The Fixer and Singer’s The Slave (1962)
being preeminent examples, in which indirection was a central
strategy for confronting the unimaginable.9
Indeed, that earlier generation should not be overlooked. Not
only did those writers provide the foundation for the postmodern
representations typically preferred by today’s critics, they also, at
times, anticipated the same intricacies of witnessing we are wont
to attribute to later writers. The prime exhibit is still Jerzy
Kosinski and The Painted Bird (1965), a novel that, it is easy
enough to see now, set forth many of the problems raised by
Wilkomirski and Fragments a generation later. Among other
things that he exploited, Kosinski took advantage of the fact that
English was still, by definition, something of a renegade language
in which to compose a narrative about the Holocaust—or, at any
rate, about the collapse of civilization under totalitarian rule.
Because English was still new to him, Kosinski claimed in a
revised edition of the novel, he could write “dispassionately, free
from the emotional connotation one’s native language always
contains”—an assertion that might appear naıve, rather than scan-
dalously calculated, had Kosinski not turned out to be a charlatan
of the first order (xii). But does that matter?
With confirmation that the book’s incidents were fabricated,
and moreover that Kosinski’s own family had hidden safely from
the Nazis and may even have acted as collaborators, the power of
his sadomasochistic fairy tale was wrenched into an altogether
different register. Where once endorsements by Wiesel and Arthur
Miller were taken to authenticate the book’s harrowing surrealism,
now discussion was required to treat it as a kind of anti-witness
78 Witness without End?
forever compromised by Kosinski’s duplicity. Although his study
is a superb encyclopedia of contemporary cultural theorizing about
the Holocaust and the postmodern, Eaglestone dismisses The
Painted Bird in a footnote as “exploitative, misogynistic, and
pornographic” (111n). Well, yes. The numerous scenes of the boy
“peeping” at acts of torturous violence and sexual abuse are a
catalogue of depravity, but are they more depraved, asks Sicher,
than “the greater horror of a cold, calculated, bureaucratic system
of industrialized murder?” (87).
Yet there is a more important reason to reject Eaglestone’s
view. In destabilizing the border between trauma and titillation,
witnessing and voyeurism, argues Sharon Oster, Kosinski’s
“sexualized aesthetics of authenticity” pinpointed early on our
anxiety about needing to “see” the events, needing viscerally to
experience the horror, again and again (96). Testimonial witness
could show some part of the horror, but perhaps only literature
could reveal the tangled array of motives—fear, shame, guilt,
desire, cathexis, catharsis—exposed by witnessing it repeatedly.
The novel’s famous scene in which the miller, in a fit of jealous
rage, gouges out the eyeballs of the plowboy, is in this respect a
tour de force in explication of the charged, precarious relationships
between surrogate witnessing and surrogate remembering. The
scene, Kosinski would later say, is analogously about the violence
of having to see the Holocaust.10 More specifically, one may read
the scene—another allusion to King Lear?—as a meditation upon
the inevitable waning, and one day the end, of survivor memory
(“I wondered whether the loss of one’s sight would deprive a
person also of the memory of everything that he had seen before”)
and hence its displacement into the trickier secondary witness
of fiction (“Who knows, perhaps without his eyes the plowboy
would start seeing an entirely new, more fascinating world”)
(Kosinski 40).
We are brought back, then, to Touching Evil, in which
Norma Rosen took an even more radical approach to the problem
of witnessing the Holocaust. Late in the novel, as Hattie
approaches the painful ordeal of childbirth, gorged on testimony
from the Eichmann trial, she is seized by a vision, which her
friend Jean comes to share, of magically sucking back into their
wombs, and thus protecting until the danger has passed, all the
children who will perish in the Holocaust. What is more, in
turning themselves into a “Great Suctioning Ingatherer” (225),
winning a “vaginal shell game with the Einsatzgruppen—six
million cats in a hat,” Hattie and Jean would not just revive all
Jewish victims, it seems, but end exile, ingathering the dead into
the Zion of their American wombs (237–38).11
American Literary History 79
Rosen’s fantasy, the culmination of the novel’s devotion
to witnessing by extreme acts of identification, what she calls
“sideslipping” (Touching 131) empathetically through the
“membranes” separating one life from another, is bizarre and
potentially outrageous (Touching 88; “Second” 53). Her theme in
Touching Evil, she would later say, was what might happen to two
women “who truly took into consciousness the fact of the
Holocaust,” one in “the precise moment of sexual seduction,
almost of intercourse itself, so that everything should be open and
the appearance of penetration complete,” and another for whom “it
is the blood and guts of childbirth itself that brings the horror
home” (“Holocaust” 12). Insofar as it seems to seek analogies for
the Holocaust in seduction, rape, and the pain of childbirth (not to
mention the heartlessness of male obstetricians), the novel, as
Sicher maintains, is tendentious (92). Yet it is not so much the
Holocaust per se but knowledge of the Holocaust, witness of it and
witness to it, that Rosen means to analogize, for as Jean replies
when Hattie asks if God sees them—in the agony of her childbirth,
in their mutual fantasy of rescue—“isn’t it enough that we see
each other? Witnessing and being witnessed without end?”
(Touching 238).
Rosen believed that, in choosing non-Jewish protagonists, she
was not diminishing the Jewish specificity of the Holocaust, sub-
merging it in a dreamy universalism, but rather “Judaizing” their
suffering by “imprinting certain universal experiences with the
pain of the Holocaust” (“Second” 51–52).12 That proposition,
doubtless very American in its presumptions, is debatable. What is
certain, however, is that in her self-conscious focus on witnessing
mediated by previous witnessing, Rosen was a generation ahead of
her time. Touching Evil may or may not successfully coordinate
its twin arguments about maternal and testimonial “reproduction,”
but it does forecast the likelihood that witnessing the Holocaust
nowadays will catch writers, readers, and critics alike in a net of
tropes and representations referring as much to themselves as to
the historical event.
Notes
1. Fragments recounts the story of Wilkomirski’s purported survival of the
Birkenau and Majdanek death camps and life in postwar orphanages. When it
was revealed that Wilkomirski is actually Bruno Grosjean, an illegitimate child of
no known Jewish ancestry raised in foster homes, his pen name borrowed from
the violinist Wanda Wilkomirski and his knowledge of the death camps picked
up from visits as a tourist, Fragments went from being a revelation to being a
80 Witness without End?
scandal. A thorough study, including the original English translation of the text,
is available in Stefan Maechler, The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical
Truth, trans. John E. Woods (2001).
2. In the term unknowable, I mean to include cognate terms such as unspeak-
able, unimaginable, indescribable, inexpressible, and so on. Sometimes, of
course, differences are detectable and intended by an author’s choice among
these terms, but quite often they are used interchangeably.
3. In the 2006 translation by Marion Wiesel (also, like that by Stella Rodway in
1960, based on the French original published in 1958), the “Exile of Providence”
becomes “the Shekhinah in Exile” (3), “Pentacost” becomes “Shavuot” (12), “if
he [Akiva Drumer] could have seen a proof of God in this Calvary” becomes “if
only he could have considered this suffering a divine test” (77), and “Because He
[God] kept six crematories working night and day, on Sundays and feast days”
becomes “Because He kept six crematoria working day and night, including
Sabbath and Holy Days” (67).
4. In this, Bernard-Donals and Glejzer appear to echo Giorgio Agamben: “If,
joining uniqueness to unsayability, they [those who assert the unsayability of
Auschwitz] transform Auschwitz into a reality absolutely separated from
language, they break the tie between an impossibility and a possibility of speak-
ing that . . . constitutes testimony; then they unconsciously repeat the Nazi’s
gesture” (157).
5. “I had to exercise intense self-control in order to prevent my innermost
doubts and feelings of oppression from becoming apparent,” contended Hoss. “I
had to appear cold and indifferent to events that must have wrung the heart of
anyone possessed of human feelings. . . . I had to watch hour after hour, by day
and by night, the removal and burning of the bodies, the extraction of the teeth,
the cutting of the hair, the whole grisly, interminable business. . . . I had to look
through the peep-hole of the gas-chambers and watch the process of death itself,
because the doctors wanted me to see it” (153–54).
6. It is possible, however, to go farther than Spielberg was willing to go. In the
filmed visit of Oprah Winfrey and Elie Wiesel to Auschwitz, when Wiesel avers
that he cannot enter the ruins of a crematorium and the vicinity of what was once
a gas chamber, he invokes unknowability by protesting, “I don’t want to see in
my mind what was going on,” and later, “the last minutes. I don’t want to know.
I don’t want to think about it.” Yet the film does want us to know, to think, and
to see. As we peer over the shoulder of an SS officer looking through a similar
peephole, this one drawn from actual documentary footage, Winfrey’s descriptive
voiceover proceeds to direct us through what is effectively a simulation of
gassing created through a photo and film montage of emaciated prisoners, simu-
lated Zyklon B gas filling a chamber, and Sonderkommandos working with
corpses in a crematorium (“Oprah”).
7. Rosen’s chapter must be read alongside the recent excellent interpretation of
intertextual, interlinguistic strategies in The Shawl by Hana Wirth-Nesher in Call
It English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature (2006).
8. Such “second-life” allusion is a central strategy in Second Hand Smoke,
a novel as much concerned with second-hand cultural effects as with second-hand
American Literary History 81
survivors and their memories. To cite just one example: when Mila offers her
breast to her baby Isaac, whom she has just tattooed with her camp numbers in
reminder of his ineradicable legacy, and he takes, along with her milk, the
“fateful kiss of second hand smoke” (Rosenbaum 240), the scene recuperates not
only the “black milk” of Paul Celan’s famous “Todesfuge,” which provides the
epigraph to The Shawl—“dein goldenes Haar Margarete/dein aschenes Haar
Sulamith”—but also, therefore, Ozick’s haunting inscription of it into Rosa’s
“dead volcano” of a breast, which gives “not a sniff of milk” and in which eros,
motherhood, and reproduction are extinguished (Shawl 4).
9. In The Fixer Malamud created an analogy for an American audience still
struggling to grasp the meaning of the Holocaust and answered the inexorable
logic by which Yakov Bok’s guilt is “inferred from the very frequency of the
accusations against the Jews” (121) with his commitment to resistance: “There’s
no such thing as an unpolitical man,” he thinks. “You can’t sit still and see
yourself destroyed” (299). Bok’s words are almost a quotation from The
Slave, (serialized in Yiddish in 1960–61 and translated into English in 1962),
where Singer employed a historical narrative set against the Chmielnicki
massacres of the seventeenth century to explore the millennial upheaval of the
Holocaust, substituting for the false Messiah, the Sabbatai Zvi, a nation created
through the force of Allied military prowess and American political
strength. Because The Slave, in its initial appearance, was coincident with the
Eichmann trial, Singer’s concluding invocation of militant Zionism also
added his voice to the swelling argument over the issues of Jewish resistance and
the “banality of evil,” while substituting for the messianic nation one created
through the force of military strength and political resolve: “Though for
generations Jewish blacksmiths had forged swords, it had never occurred to the
Jews to meet their attackers with weapons. . . . Must a man agree to his own
destruction?” (268).
10. “I remember a woman who told me she couldn’t read the book [once
she reached this episode]. And I said well, there are worse things, there were
worse things, there have been worse things in reality. Have you heard of
the concentration camps? Or gas chambers? And she said, gas chambers?
Certainly, this I understand very well, but gouging out someone’s eyes, how can
you explain something like that? And this is my point. The concentration camp as
such is a symbol you can live with very well. We do. It doesn’t really perform
any specific function. It’s not as close to us as eyesight is” (Kosinski, qtd in
Langer 175).
11. It is not clear why Rosen chose to represent the totality of the Nazi
genocide by the Einsatzgruppen, who employed firing squads and, eventually,
mobile gas vans to murder hundreds of thousands of Jews (as well as Gypsies
and Communist Party officials) in the occupied Soviet Union. The reference to
Dr Seuss also defies easy interpretation except that, just as the children’s
rainy-day boredom is relieved by the fantastic tricks performed by the cat in The
Cat in the Hat, so Hattie’s and Jean’s “ingathering” is a fantastic trick.
12. After first setting aside “The Second Life of Holocaust Imagery” for
reasons akin to Michael Bernstein’s, Cynthia Ozick came round to it when she
recognized that it is “not an argument for redemptive meaning, but rather for the
universalizing sanctification of memory” (“Roundtable” 281–82), a means of
“enlarging us toward mercifulness” (“Roundtable” 282).
82 Witness without End?
Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of
Auschwitz. Trans. Daniel
Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone
Books, 1999.
Apel, Dora. Memory Effects: The
Holocaust and the Art of Secondary
Witnessing. New Brunswick: Rutgers
UP, 2002.
Bernard-Donals, Michael. “Beyond the
Question of Authenticity: Witness and
Testimony in the Fragments
Controversy.” Witnessing the Disaster:
Essays on Representation and the
Holocaust. Ed. Michael Bernard-
Donals and Richard Glejzer. Madison:
U of Wisconsin P, 2003. 196–217.
Bernstein, Michael Andre. Foregone
Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic
History. Berkeley: U of California P,
1994.
Bernstein, Susan David. “Promiscuous
Reading: The Problem of Identification
and Anne Frank’s Diary.” Witnessing
the Disaster: Essays on Representation
and the Holocaust. Ed.
Michael Bernard-Donals and
Richard Glejzer. Madison: U of
Wisconsin P, 2003. 141–61.
Bukiet, Melvin Jules. “Introduction.”
Nothing Makes You Free: Writings by
Descendants of Jewish Holocaust
Survivors. Ed. Melvin Jules Bukiet.
New York: W.W. Norton, 2002.
11–29.
Buruma, Ian. “The Afterlife of Anne
Frank.” New York Review of Books 45
(19 Feb 1998): 4–8.
Cohen, Arthur A. The Trememdum: A
Theological Interpretation of the
Holocaust. New York: Continuum,
1993.
Epstein, Leslie. “Writing about the
Holocaust.” Writing and the
Holocaust. Ed. Berel Lang. New York:
Holmes and Meier, 1988. 261–70.
Friedlander, Saul. “Trauma, Memory,
and Transference.” Holocaust
Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory.
Ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman. Cambridge:
Blackwell, 1994. 252–63.
Gates of Repentance: The New Union
Prayer Book for the Days of Awe.
New York: Central Conference of
American Rabbis, 1978.
Greenspan, Henry. “Imagining
Survivors: Testimony and the Rise of
Holocaust Consciousness.” The
Americanization of the Holocaust. Ed.
Hilene Flanzbaum. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1999. 45–67.
Gubar, Susan. Poetry after Auschwitz:
Remembering What One Never Knew.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2003.
Hartman, Geoffrey. The Longest
Shadow: In the Aftermath of the
Holocaust. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2002.
———. “Tele-Suffering and
Testimony in the Dot Com Era.”
Visual Culture and the Holocaust. Ed.
Barbie Zelizer. New Brunswick:
Rutgers UP, 2001. 111–24.
Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames:
Photography, Narrative, and
Postmemory. Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1997.
American Literary History 83
Hirsch, Marianne and Irene Kacandes.
“Introduction.” Teaching the
Representation of the Holocaust. Ed.
Marianne Hirsch and Irene Kacandes.
New York: Modern
Language Association of America,
2004. 1–33.
Hoss, Rudolf. Commandant of
Auschwitz: The Autobiography of
Rudolf Hoss. Trans. Constantine
Fitzgibbon. London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1959.
Hungerford, Amy. The Holocaust of
Texts: Genocide, Literature, and
Personification. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 2003.
Kosinski, Jerzy. “Afterward” (sic). The
Painted Bird (2nd ed). New York:
Grove P, 2003.
Kremer, S. Lillian. Witness through the
Imagination: Jewish American
Holocaust Literature. Detroit: Wayne
State UP, 1989.
Langer, Lawrence. The Holocaust and
the Literary Imagination. New Haven:
Yale UP, 1975.
Levi, Primo. The Drowned
and the Saved. Trans. Raymond
Rosenthal. New York: Vintage, 1989.
Malamud, Bernard. The Fixer.
New York: Penguin, 1967.
“Oprah and Elie Wiesel at the
Auschwitz Death Camp.” Narr. Oprah
Winfrey. The Oprah Winfrey Show.
ABC. KABC, Los Angeles. 24 May
2006.
Oster, Sharon. “The ‘Erotics of
Auschwitz’: Coming of Age in
The Painted Bird and Sophie’s
Choice.” Witnessing the Disaster:
Essays on Representation and the
Holocaust. Ed. Michael Bernard-
Donals and Richard Glejzer. Madison:
U of Wisconsin P, 2003. 90–124.
Ozick, Cynthia. “Roundtable
Discussion.” Writing and the
Holocaust. Ed. Berel Lang. New York:
Holmes and Meier, 1988. 277–84.
———. The Shawl. New York:
Vintage, 1990.
Prager, Emily. Eve’s Tattoo.
New York: Vintage, 1992.
Rosen, Norma. “The Second Life of
Holocaust Imagery.” Accidents of
Influence: Writing as a Woman and a
Jew in America. Saratoga Springs:
SUNY P, 1992. 47–54.
———. Touching Evil. Detroit: Wayne
State UP, 1990.
Rosenbaum, Thane. Second Hand
Smoke. New York: St Martin’s Griffin,
2000.
Rosenfeld, Isaac. An Age of Enormity:
Life and Writing in the Forties and
Fifties. New York: World Publishing,
1962.
Singer, Isaac Bashevis. Enemies, a
Love Story. Trans. Aliza Shevrin
and Elizabeth Shub. New York:
Fawcett, 1972.
———. The Slave. Trans. Isaac
Bashevis Singer and Hemley Cecil.
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1962.
Steiner, George. “The Hollow
Miracle.” Language and Silence:
Essays on Language, Literature, and
the Inhuman. New Haven: Yale UP,
1998. 95–109.
84 Witness without End?
Wiesel, Elie. A Jew Today. Trans.
Marion Wiesel. New York: Vintage,
1978.
———. Night. Trans. Marion Wiesel.
New York: Hill and Wang, 2006.
Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim.
Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish
Memory. Seattle: U of Washington P,
1996.
Young, James. At Memory’s
Edge: After-Images of the
Holocaust in Contemporary Art and
Architecture. New Haven: Yale UP,
2000.
American Literary History 85