|
From lepers to Brahmins
By Shimon Redlich
Eva Hoffman's new book
Haaretz.com
6 October 2004
In the idealization of the Holocaust
survivor, Hoffman cautions, lurks the danger of turning
the horrific into the fashionable
In his office, Major General Eliezer
Shkedi hung a photograph that he brought with him when
he took over as the new commander of the Israel Air
Force: a fly-by salute by three Israeli F-15 warplanes
over Auschwitz. In an interview with journalist Alex
Fishman, Shkedi explained: "My father's stories,
not even the verbal ones, consciously and unconsciously
influenced what happened to me over the years."
Shkedi placed great emphasis on the existential threats
Israel faces and the need to thwart them. This, then,
is the lesson of the Holocaust that was internalized
by a survivor's son, who rose through the ranks of the
Israel Defense Forces to a very senior position.
Eva Hoffman's new book presents reflections and attitudes
that are related to the fact that she is the daughter
of survivors from Poland who immigrated to Canada. The
personal and cultural worlds of Hoffman and Shkedi are
very different, but at the same time, the Holocaust
experience of their parents largely shaped their identities,
albeit in different ways. Despite the criticism that
is sometimes voiced about the use of the term "second
generation," it has gradually entered into widespread
use since the 1980s and has been discussed in numerous
studies, mainly in the realms of psychology and literature.
Hoffman proposes that we refer to the second generation
as such as an "imagined community," which
is characterized by a common system of symbols and meanings
deriving from the Holocaust past of their parents.
The author was born in 1945, in Krakow, to parents
who came from a town in eastern Galicia. Their entire
families were slaughtered in the town and they themselves
survived with the help of Poles and Ukrainians. For
years, Hoffman, like many members of the second generation,
suppressed the Holocaust as a conscious and formative
experience of her life. It was only while writing her
first book, "Lost in Translation: A Life in a New
Language," in the late 1980s, that she took notice
of this aspect of her existence. In time, she began
to examine her family's specific story within broader
historical contexts. Indeed, nearly all her books deal
with those contexts in one way or another. Her book
"Shtetl" traces the history of Polish Jewry
through the annals of one particular town.
In her present book, Hoffman emphasizes the need to
locate the intimate family stories relating to the Holocaust
within a historical framework and not only contemplate
the fates of the near and dear, but also to consider
the nature of comprehensive developments and structures
that fashioned those fates. Thus, in her opinion, if
we want to understand the Holocaust better, we need
to study not only the history of anti-Semitism but also
the patterns of religious and ethnic hostility in general,
and the causes of violence between neighbors. Her book,
for example, devotes a relatively large amount of space
to her reactions and reflections in the wake of the
uncovering of the Jedwabne episode, involving the murder
of Jews in a town by their Polish neighbors.
Return to origins
The desire to remember the family past, especially
the period of the war and the Holocaust, is reflected
in the phenomenon of returning to one's place of origin.
The collapse of the communist regimes across Eastern
Europe made possible a heightened physical and mental
return to concrete sites, which until then may have
seemed to be on the dark side of the moon. I myself
underwent this experience, returning after many years
to the town of my birth, which lies not far from the
birthplace of Hoffman's parents.
Hoffman is not enthusiastic about the organized and
stylized mass returns such as the "March of the
Living." She prefers the private, intimate return
within the family framework. Indeed, she herself recently
went on such a journey with her younger sister. In her
parents' town, southeast of Lvov, she meets aged men
and women who remember her parents and their families
well, among them members of a family that helped her
parents. In the wake of their recall of "those
days," the author becomes more sensitive to those
"others" who once formed the close surroundings
of her parents. In her view, despite the formal acknowledgment
of "righteous gentiles" and the few studies
in this sphere, we lack sufficient insight into the
acts of rescue. As Jews, the ultimate victims of the
Nazi evil, we are incapable of standing in the shoes
of those Polish and Ukrainian neighbors.
Hoffman devotes a major place to the attitude of the
second generation toward their survivor-parents. She
remembers vividly her own childhood years in Krakow,
which she described at length in her first book. She
was especially impressed by the tenacious clinging to
life demonstrated by her parents and by other survivors
in the immediate postwar years. Talk about the Holocaust
was confined to the close circle of survivor friends.
The story was transmitted to the children in the form
of fragmentary flashes, in what Hoffman terms the "family
language," more rich and more cruel than the official
external language.
Hoffman draws a distinction between the direct memory
of the Holocaust on the part of adults who are capable
of situating the traumatic past on the time continuum
that preceded the war, in the normal years - whose events
they are capable of understanding - and the second generation,
the children, who lack conceptual ability and for whom
the Holocaust is largely a frightening legend accompanied
by emotional power.
'Holocaust heroes'
As for the public status of Holocaust survivors (which
became increasingly and concretely clear to me, as a
survivor, during my life in Israel), they were transformed
from lepers into Brahmins, in the author's terms. With
time, those whose wartime past had been almost totally
ignored became "Holocaust heroes." However,
within that idealization of the survivor, Hoffman cautions,
lurks the danger of turning the horrific into the fashionable.
In my opinion, this phenomenon is particularly visible
in American society, which tends to superlatives and
exaggerations.
A different type of perception and insight touches
on the losses that were caused in the wake of the postwar
mass migration. The consequences of this phenomenon
for the lives of the survivors and the second generation
have not been sufficiently discussed, Hoffman says.
In comparison to the events of the Holocaust, the geographic
and cultural transition which followed it is perceived
as being of secondary significance. The new beginnings,
whether in North America or Israel, were usually considered
positive and characterized by hope. In fact, the author
argues, these processes were accompanied by loss of
landscape, language and culture. She described this
dimension cogently in her first book, which she divided
into three sections: paradise (the happy childhood years
in Krakow after the war), exile (the first years in
distant and foreign Canada), and the new world (in which
the Jewish-Polish girl constructs her new identity and
situates it in the Anglo-American language, literature
and culture).
Hoffman's life and her intellectual and cultural existence
completed a certain circle when she moved to London,
closer to her old homeland. Her ties and contacts with
Poland became more intensive than they had been. She
feels a closeness and empathy for Israel, but is not
sufficiently knowledgeable about life in this country.
In Israel, she writes, the total separation between
Diaspora history and Israeli national history, and the
fact that large sections of the population do not share
the Holocaust past, means that the Holocaust could not
become a cornerstone of the national myth. Yet anyone
who is acquainted with day-to-day life in Israel knows
that the very opposite is true.
In the introduction Hoffman describes her book as an
extensive essay on the Holocaust, in which her personal
history and that of her family are examined within a
broad context of reading and writing about the Holocaust.
The discussion is based on historical, psychological
and literary approaches. The book is an attempt to observe
the traumatic past of the Holocaust from both private
and general angles alike. Even though it is spread over
too many spheres, it merits perusal by everyone who
is interested in the Holocaust and its consequences.
After Such Knowledge: Memory,
History and the Legacy of the Holocaust" by Eva
Hoffman, Secker Warburg, 301 pages, $25
|
