Within a year, however, the Nazis took power in Germany, making it impossible for Roth, or any German Jewish writer, to live and work in the country. Roth spent the next five years living hand-to-mouth in France, cranking out short novels at a terrific pace in an increasingly hopeless attempt to support himself. He died in 1939, a victim of alcoholism and of history, at the age of just 45—though to judge by photographs of his booze-ravaged face, he already looked like an elderly man. As it turned out, this premature death came just in time, for if Roth had still been living in France after the German conquest in 1940, he would surely have been sent to a concentration camp.

Several of Roth’s books were published in the United States in the 1920s and ’30s, but after his death his reputation nearly vanished here. Over the last decade, the translator Michael Hofmann has led a major effort to reintroduce Roth to America, translating many of his novels and stories as well as collections of his journalism. There is still no English-language biography; it would take a fearless biographer to disentangle the truth of Roth’s life from the many myths and legends he liked to propagate about himself. Instead, Hofmann has now produced Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters, a big collection of Roth’s correspondence, which allows us to trace the stages of his difficult life—and gives some unsettling insights into his understanding of Jewishness.

Unfortunately—but, given his harried existence, understandably—most of Roth’s letters are lost. Though A Life in Letters runs to more than 500 pages, it has, as Hofmann points out in his introduction, no letters to Roth’s parents, his wife, his lovers, or his best friends. The bulk of the correspondence before 1933 consists of letters to his editors and colleagues at the Frankfurter Zeitung, the prestigious liberal newspaper where he was a staff writer. After 1933, by far the most important recipient of Roth’s letters is Stefan Zweig, another German Jewish literary émigré, and the Roth-Zweig friendship emerges as the real drama of the book.

Still, the letters are enough to give a vivid sense of what Roth was like. As a very young man, writing from Vienna to relatives in Brody, he is precocious, haughty, and dandified: “What can I wish for you? Three kingly things. … The golden crown of imagination, the scarlet cloak of solitude, and the scepter of irony,” the 22-year-old tells his younger cousin. In 1917 Roth enlisted in the Austrian army, and over the next year he accumulated experiences that would shape his writing. Indeed, he deliberately blurred the line between his life and his fiction, often telling people that he saw combat and was taken prisoner by the Russians, when in fact he spent most of his time working on an army newspaper. Unfortunately, this crucial period is represented by just two brief letters.

When the correspondence really picks up, in 1925, Roth is already a well-established journalist, a star of the Frankfurter Zeitung. Not just a star, in fact, but a prima donna: Many of these letters involve Roth’s complaints that he is not getting the best assignments or the highest rates. “I am not an encore, not a pudding [i.e., a dessert—Hofmann writes British English], I am the main dish,” he lectures his editor. What remains constant, and significant for Roth the writer, is his deep discomfort with Germany, which leads him to idealize just about every other country as an alternative. In France for the first time in 1925, he is rhapsodic: “I feel driven to inform you personally that Paris is the capital of the world, and that you must come here,” he writes his editor Benno Reifenberg. “Whoever has not been here is only half a human.”

France especially gains by contrast with Germany: “Any chauffeur is wittier than our wittiest authors,” Roth writes, and later, “I don’t see the point in being a German writer. [Paris] is like being on top of a tall tower, you look down from the summit of European civilization, and way down at the bottom, in some sort of gulch, is Germany.” It was a bitter blow when he was denied a permanent Paris assignment and forced to come home. “I feel Germany right off the bat, and all of it at once,” he writes in 1931, after another trip abroad. “Every street corner expresses the awfulness of the whole country. It has the ugliest prostitutes. … The men are all scoutmasters on display. … The feeling as though your genitals were gone, nothing left!”

The 1920s were a boom time for German journalism, and for Roth. Yet even in these letters, we hear his constant complaints about money, and his stratagems for getting more of it. Often this involved what Hofmann calls a “scorched-earth” strategy with publishers: Roth had a habit of accepting more assignments and book contracts than he could possibly carry out, and he always had to work frantically to catch up. One story, which Hofmann tells in a footnote, is suggestive. Roth had promised to write a novel for serialization in a Munich newspaper. When he delivered the manuscript, he accidentally included a page on which he had written a dozen times: “Must finish novel in three days! Must finish novel in three days!” The newspaper, disturbed at the evidence of Roth’s working practices, rejected the novel. It is no coincidence that his masterpiece, The Radetzky March, was also the book on which he spent the most time—two years, an eternity by Rothian standards.

Continue reading: ‘The great wheel of bestiality’

I get it, believe me. I’d steeled myself to introduce Josie to the notion of the Holocaust when she was in third grade, when I planned to give her Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars. That book, a brilliant Newbery-medal-winning tale of a little girl in Denmark during World War II, introduces historical truths in a manageable way. It’s emotionally resonant, but not so horrifying that kids will wind up rocking, haunted, in a corner.

As I’ve written before, this brilliant plan failed miserably when Josie, in second grade, borrowed a book called The Night Crossing from the school library. It’s about a family fleeing Innsbruck in 1938. By the time I found it in her backpack, she’d already read it. (Baby’s first Holocaust book! And I wasn’t even there!) I asked Josie to tell me about the story. She explained that the Nazis were bad people who wanted to kill Clara and her family, and Clara’s family had to escape by sneaking over the mountains at night. They were worried that their Shabbat candlesticks would clank together and alert the Nazis, but Clara had the idea to hide them inside her dolls. And since the dolls had already made one night crossing, escaping from anti-Jewish violence in Russia years earlier with Clara’s grandmother when she was Clara’s age, the dolls wouldn’t be afraid.

I asked Josie whether she knew that the story was based on history. “I know that Clara isn’t real, but the Nazis were,” she said, pronouncing it “NaZEES.” She also thought Clara’s family was escaping from Australia. Still, she got the gist.

But that was no thanks to me, the mother who waited too long.

So, I ask you: How do we figure out what kids can understand and process, and when to let them try? How do we find the balance between letting them have a childhood and giving them history? How do we get out of our own way, putting aside our own defenses and anxiety to do what’s necessary to let our kids grow up? I’ve heard my friends say that kids should be innocent; they shouldn’t know about genocide at 8, 10, 12; they should be carefree and happy. Really? We are JEWS. Our history hasn’t exactly been all carefree and happy. Wishing it so, even for 12-year-olds, is willfully naïve. And frequently kids understand more than we give them credit for.

Of course kids vary; mileage varies. But if we try to protect them from everything, we turn them into cloistered idiots with messed-up worldviews. So, maybe you’re positive your 10-year-old isn’t ready for Maus. Fine. But if your kid is old enough to be interested, be wary of closing the door to awareness and leaning against it. Our decision to shield them is generally more about our needs than theirs. And as with sex ed, if you wait too long, you aren’t going to be the one doing the educating.

I was lucky that my daughter’s first Holocaust educator was Karen Ackerman. “An excellent fictional introduction to the Holocaust,” School Library Journal said of The Night Crossing. “Ackerman’s brief chapter book … gives younger kids a first look at the essentials of what it was like to be an ordinary child in danger at that terrible time,” wrote Hazel Rochman in Booklist.

But if your kid is interested, or older than 10, I’d encourage you to go for Maus. It’s a terrific book. As Ellen Handler Spitz, a professor of art at the University of Maryland who specializes in aesthetics and children’s literature, pointed out in the New Republic last year, most Holocaust books for kids and teens aren’t. “The Jewish protagonist may seem unrealistically virtuous, or merely a cipher; the plot overly predictable or trite; the tone heavy-handed or saccharine; the truth subtly distorted (as in Carmen Agra Deedy’s touching story, The Yellow Star, which alleges—despite a lack of historical corroboration—that King Christian X of Denmark wore a yellow star to show solidarity with the Jews of his country and asked his countrymen to do the same); or just an overload of data crammed between the covers of a book, so that readers feel bombarded and overwhelmed.”

As human beings we seek uplift. But Holocaust stories that try to be joyful generally ring false. Kids, like adults, deserve truth. Remember Angel Girl by Laurie Friedman, the memoir of Herman Rosenblat, who claimed to have fallen in love in the girl who tossed apples to him every day over the Buchenwald fence? It was a lie, and the book was withdrawn. As the publisher said, Holocaust books mustn’t “sacrifice veracity for emotional impact.”

But they also shouldn’t revel in unlimited brutality. Or, in my opinion, ungapatchka’d writing. (I realize I’m in the minority on this one, but The Book Thief? Hundreds and hundreds of pages of ungapatchka. “When Liesel left that day, she said something with great uneasiness. Two giant words were struggled with, carried on her shoulder, and dropped as a bungling pair at Ilsa Hermann’s feet. They fell off sideways as the girl veered with them and could no longer sustain their weight. Together, they sat on the floor, large and loud and clumsy.” Please. Less, Markus.)

There are books that I think are wonderful, but still wrong for most kids. I was in awe of Morris Gleitzman’s Once, which I put on my list of best Jewish children’s books of 2010, but it’s incredibly dark. The sequel, Then, is just as impressive from a literary standpoint, but it’s even bleaker, bloodier, and more harrowing. I didn’t include it on my 2011 list because I simply can’t imagine encouraging a child to read it. Similarly, Paul Janeczko’s young-adult poetry collection, Requiem: Poems of the Terezin Ghetto, is so grim I’m not sure it works for most teenagers as either an educational tool or a work of art. Here, for instance, is a snippet of a poem narrated by a Nazi officer.

We herded all the Jew swine
close to the gallows
where the old Jew stood on the wagon
noosed.
I ordered my Jews closer.
Close enough to hear
the twig snap of his neck.
Close enough to smell
when he shit himself in death.
Close enough to see his face darken,
his tongue poke from his mouth.

The speaker then forces a different Jew to throw stones at a boy until the boy dies. In another poem, the manager of the camp’s crematorium describes, in graphic detail, what happens to a human body as it burns. These scenes have the ring of truth, and Janeczko, a much-praised poet for young people, clearly did a great deal of research. It’s utterly respectful—but there are very few readers I’d recommend it to.

You’ve probably already gleaned what I’m getting at: Read children’s Holocaust books before you give them to your kid. And yes, you have to. Start thinking about it before you think your kid is ready. (And in our media-saturated world, if your kid is 8, she’s ready.) The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., offers some useful advice: Elementary school can be a good time to begin talking about diversity, bias, and prejudice. Strive for precision of language; steer clear of generalizations and stereotypes (such as “all Germans were evil”). Avoid comparisons of pain (this is not a “who is most oppressed” competition). Don’t romanticize history by overemphasizing heroic tales or the worst aspects of human nature, but don’t make it sound like there were as many heroic gentile rescuers as there were villains, either. Contextualize history, and make responsible methodological choices. (“Graphic material should be used judiciously—Try to select images and texts that do not exploit the students’ emotional vulnerability.”)

The museum offers a (somewhat dry and outdated) reading list; I prefer the one compiled by a former school librarian, Carol Hurst. She died in 2007, but her daughter has maintained the site, and Hurst’s list is both more current and more fiction-heavy than the museum’s. And among recently published books, I recommend the picture book I Will Come Back for You: A Family in Hiding During World War II, by Marisabina Russo (age 6 and up); The Champion of Children: The Story of Janusz Korczak by Tomek Bogacki (age 8 and up); and Terezin: Voices From the Holocaust by Ruth Thomson (age 9 and up).

And Maus? For for graphic-novel-loving tweens, you could do a lot worse.

• The top-ranking U.S. general called a military strike on Iran “premature.” [National Journal]

• Peter Beinart shows that the way to understand the Jewish vote is the same way to understand the vote of other religions: look at levels of observance. [The Daily Beast]

• There’s nothing Mel Gibson doesn’t deserve, but the southern California synagogue trying to shake him down for being an anti-Semite is gross. And as if shame would work on this guy! [TMZ]

• The Republican Jewish Coalition’s Matthew Brooks argues that last night’s debate showcased why Jewish voters may flock to the Republican nominee due to his staunch support for Israel. [RJC]

• James Fallows found the same exchange extremely troubling. [Atlantic]

• As Massachusetts governor, Mitt Romney nixed state funding for kosher meals at nursing homes. What won’t he do?? [NY Post]

• H&H’s obituary is officially written. [WSJ]

• “It’s the case of the missing mezuzahs.” [NY Post]

• At Jewish Theological Seminary, Justice Stephen Breyer presented a jurisprudence not unlike the Conservative movement’s driving philosophy. [JustASC]

• Evan Osnos updates us on Ai Weiwei’s status. [New Yorker News Desk]

• Leave your thank you to departing Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. [DNC]

• First in war, first in peace, last in good Jewish delis: the tragedy of D.C. (We miss you, Krupin’s!) [City Paper]

Birthright LOL.

Israeli parody of Taglit-Birthright Propaganda Trips from Eretz Nehederet on Vimeo.

Sauvage is a filmmaker of rare moral perception, whose fixation on the Holocaust is both deeply felt and deeply personal. He grew up in Manhattan and attended the French Lycée, an elite private school. His first film, Weapons of the Spirit (1989), told the story of the Huguenot village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, whose 5,000 inhabitants, led by their pastor, André Trocmé, saved an equal number of Jews from the Nazis. A testament to the goodness of an entire village, the film was also Sauvage’s attempt to understand his own life: At the age of 18, his parents told him that he was a Jew and that he had been hidden in Le Chambon as a baby before he and his parents escaped to America.

The revelation of his origins in a perilous time and place left Sauvage with a bewildering yet intense sense of injury that has greatly enriched his art. His films about rescuers are a means of addressing the foundational mysteries of his life. Who were the people who saved him? Why did they act as they did? Why did his parents act as they did? Over the course of our two-hour conversation, I have a strong perception of a man who is coping in a brave and well-balanced way with the refracted trauma of his childhood, a trauma that was actually repeated twice: In seeking to protect their son from a fate that he had already escaped, his parents condemned him—or the Jewish part of him—to remain a hidden child in the middle of Manhattan, long after the war was over.

The third in Sauvage’s trilogy of rescuer films, the upcoming And Crown Thy Good, tells the story of Varian Fry, the young Harvard-educated classicist who smuggled more than 2,000 of Europe’s leading intellectuals and artists, including Hannah Arendt and Marc Chagall, out of Nazi-occupied France and brought them to America.

Sauvage arrived at the Tablet offices on a cold afternoon in December with Astra Temko, the shy, soft-spoken, and beautiful daughter of Hillel Kook, aka Peter Bergson.

David Samuels: Pierre Sauvage, you make films about people who put their lives at risk to save others: André Trocmé (the pastor of Le Chambon), Peter Bergson, and Varian Fry. Do these men have anything in common, aside from being good?

Pierre Sauvage: People often say that there’s nothing to be learned from them, that their goodness is just a mystery. I hate that characterization. They were all very strong-willed individuals, who responded to their own intellectual and emotional and physical and religious needs. Who could not be dissuaded by nonsense. They were all extremely smart. I don’t sense that any one of them was necessarily the easiest person in the world. I certainly know in the case of Varian Fry that he was downright difficult and ornery.

One of the themes in my Fry documentary is going to be the fact that there are situations and times that are particularly suited for one type of person. The key is to be able to recognize that sort of time.

Another characteristic that they all three had in common—and [turning to Bergson’s daughter, Astra Temko] this might’ve made your father a little difficult, I suspect—is that they didn’t suffer fools gladly.

Astra Temko: I have memories I don’t want to share. (Laughs.)

David Samuels: I think one reason your film about Le Chambon, Weapons of the Spirit, made such an impression on me was that it told a story about an entire community of simple, deeply rooted people who followed the dictates of conscience in an uncomplicated way. I remember seeing the film in the theater and being very struck by the explanation that these were Huguenots and that their connection to the Bible was direct and their own history of persecution in France was very alive to them. Saving Jews was a natural and uncomplicated if also very dangerous thing for them to do. So, is this kind of heroic activity really the product of relentless and exceedingly intelligent individuals? Weapons of the Spirit suggested the opposite.

Pierre Sauvage: It’s always nice to make a film and have someone summarize it so accurately. I actually think that there were, in the broadest terms, two types of rescuers. There were people who had no intention of being rescuers. They got up in the morning, were faced with a particular situation, and responded appropriately. Then there were others who struck me as being more driven characters, out to embody or to prove something. What’s interesting about Le Chambon is that it had both types. Wherever there was a strong Huguenot presence in France, there was rescue—for the reasons you started to identify. It happened that Le Chambon was the most densely Huguenot area in France, so you had the most intensive rescue activity.

David Samuels: There is a criticism of stories about rescuers that goes like this: The Holocaust wasn’t about human goodness. It’s a story about the mass murder of women, men, and children, often with the passive or gleeful help of their neighbors. All those people are dead, and an entire culture was destroyed. You can go to all of those villages in Poland, or to Prague, and you will find only museum-like traces of what once was an incredibly vital world, whose Jewish inhabitants died in horrible ways. Giving people the feel-good stories of a handful of individuals who heroically rescued a few of these people is in the end a profound distortion of a catastrophe, which had no redeeming value.

Pierre Sauvage: Of course there is nothing redemptive about mass murder. But any aspect of any story can be distorted. One can distort the righteous as well. But if faithfully addressed, if honestly approached, every story of rescue is an act of accusation. It’s the opposite of an alibi.

Peter Bergson himself is an incredible example. Here he was, saying all this stuff and doing all this stuff. So we now know that it was possible to say that stuff and to do that stuff. If we don’t have examples of what was possible to do and say, then we will be giving future generations the greatest alibi of all: that it wasn’t possible to do anything.

But I can understand some of the criticism of Schindler’s List, for example. Schindler was actually anti-Nazi, but that didn’t work. Spielberg wanted to tell this more dramatic story. Any dramatist wants a transformation, wants big moments.

David Samuels: I think there is also something inherently comfortable for Jews about the stories of gentile rescuers. We get to say, “Oh, well, look, the goyim were not all bad. We remember the good ones. On the other hand, the rest of you are a bunch of bloody murderers.” And then we get to have these wonderful discussions: Why didn’t they, the world, do more to rescue us while we were being murdered and victimized? It’s a very easy place, I think, for American Jews to rest. However, the story of Peter Bergson, especially for the American Jewish community, is much less comfortable.

Continue reading: The biggest lies

Between 1940 and 1941, working out of a hotel room and later a small office in the French port city of Marseille, Varian Fry rescued hundreds of artists, writers, musicians, composers, scientists, philosophers, intellectuals, and their families from the Nazis, taking enormous personal risks to bring them to the United States. Fry was one of the only American “righteous Gentiles,” a man who voluntarily risked everything to save others, with no personal connection to those he saved. At the age of 32, Fry had volunteered to go to France on behalf of the Emergency Rescue Committee, an ad hoc group of American intellectuals formed in 1940 for the purpose of distributing emergency American visas to endangered European artists and thinkers. The U.S. Department of State, which initially supported the committee’s mission, slowly turned against it in favor of its supposed allies in the “unoccupied” pro-Nazi French government—to the point of arranging for Fry’s arrest and expulsion from France in 1941. During Fry’s 13 months in Marseille, he managed to rescue 2,000 people, including a hand-picked list of the brightest stars of European culture—Hannah Arendt, Marcel Duchamp, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and André Breton, to name a few. Until recently, I had never heard of Fry, even though it is arguably because of him—and because of his equally brave colleagues, including several other non-Jewish Americans—that these artists and intellectuals not only survived but reshaped the culture of America. But now I was driving through Los Angeles to see the former homes of some of these rescued luminaries—and to meet a filmmaker who is one of the few living Americans who has heard of Varian Fry.

“We pay tribute to the righteous in order to ignore them. There have been no high-caliber books written about the righteous, no rigorous, critical studies of what made these people do what they did.” This is what I was told by Pierre Sauvage, a filmmaker who has spent much of the past 14 years working on a documentary about Varian Fry. Bearded and bespectacled in a red polo shirt and looking less like a French cineaste than an American dad who had just dropped his daughter off at college, Sauvage is convinced that the stories of Holocaust rescuers like Fry should be not merely inspirational, but instructional—that by studying these exceptional people, we can learn to be more like them. It’s a surprisingly lonely point of view. In 1984, Sauvage helped organize an international conference on the righteous, chaired by Elie Wiesel. “We brought all these righteous Gentiles to Washington,” Sauvage recalled. “In the breaks between sessions, the righteous Gentiles were standing around being ignored by the scholars. No one spoke to them, no one engaged them. How can scholars not be fascinated by these people?”

Sauvage is the director (and proprietor) of the Varian Fry Institute, a nonprofit archive of “Fryana,” as he calls it. On a warm winter morning in Los Angeles, he welcomed me to the “institute,” which turned out to be a small office with floor-to-ceiling shelves of binders that revealed an obsession bordering on mania. Sauvage’s collection of Fryana included everything from copies of Fry’s letters to textbooks Fry wrote for a public-affairs think tank to a poem he composed in French not long before his death. But most of the Fryana was stored on computers containing video files of what was easily several months of Sauvage’s filmed interviews with nearly every person who ever worked with, talked to, knew of, or breathed near Varian Fry.

Sauvage’s fascination with rescuers comes in part because he owes his life to them. He was born in 1944 in Le Chambon, France, a Huguenot village in the south central part of the country in which the entire town, following the leadership of its Protestant clergy, formed a silent “conspiracy of goodness,” as Sauvage has called it, to shelter Jews from the Nazis. Sauvage’s parents were among the thousands of Jews hidden by the righteous of Le Chambon. His 1989 film Weapons of the Spirit is a documentary about the village; it has become an educational staple that I watched in my high-school French class. Sauvage’s parents went to Le Chambon, he later discovered, after being rejected for rescue by Varian Fry.

Fry was honored by Yad Vashem in 1997, 30 years after his death, as one of the Righteous Among the Nations; there is also a street named after him in his hometown of Ridgewood, N.J., not far from where I live. But to Sauvage, this kind of recognition is meaningless when we make no attempt to learn what motivated people like Fry. “Many years ago in New York, I read about a guy who had fallen onto the subway tracks, and another man had jumped down to rescue him,” Sauvage told me. “When he was asked why he did it, he said, ‘What else could I do? There was a train coming.’ For most people, that would be the reason not to do it. But this man’s response was automatic. Fiction and drama have given us a distorted sense of how rescuers think. Writers need a narrative arc, so they show these people wrestling with themselves, agonizing over what to do. But rescuers actually don’t hesitate or agonize. They immediately recognize what the situation calls for. When they say that what they did was no big deal, we think they are being modest. They aren’t. They genuinely experienced it as no big deal.”

From his research in Le Chambon, Sauvage developed his own theory about the righteous: that they are happy, secure people with a profound awareness of who they are. “I’ve never met an unhappy rescuer,” he claimed. “These are people who are rooted in a clear sense of identity—who they are, what they love, what they hate, what they value—that gives them a footing to assess a situation.” He described the inspiration the people of Le Chambon drew from their Protestant history and faith. Then he began showing me his interviews with Fry’s colleagues, introducing me posthumously to several exceedingly intelligent, colorful, and sincere Americans. All of them did indeed seem like happy people, with a deep sense of who they were.

The only person missing from his footage is Varian Fry.

I’ve long been uncomfortable with stories of Holocaust rescue, not least because of the painful fact that they are statistically insignificant—as are, for that matter, stories of Holocaust survival. But for me, the unease of these stories runs deeper. When I was 23 and just beginning my doctoral work in Yiddish, I barely understood the world I was entering. It is a very distant world from what we are taught to assume in American culture, where happy endings are so expected that even our stories of the Holocaust somehow have to be redemptive. In Holocaust literature written in Yiddish, the language of the culture that was successfully destroyed, one doesn’t find many musings on the kindness of strangers, because there actually wasn’t much of that. Instead one finds cries of anguish, rage, and, yes, vengeance. Stories about Christian rescuers are far more palatable to American audiences, because while they have the imprimatur of true stories, they also conveniently follow the familiar arc of fiction. The overwhelming reality of the unavenged murder of innocents—the reality one finds recorded in the culture that was actually destroyed—doesn’t play as well in Hollywood.

But unlike the humble peasants of Le Chambon, Varian Fry felt oddly familiar to me. Not just because he was young and American, but because he was very much the kind of young American I know best. Like me, he grew up in a commuter suburb in northern New Jersey; he graduated from Harvard in 1931, 68 years before I did. In photographs, he looks a lot like the guys I went to college with: thin, awkward, but handsome in a dorky way, his then-stylish glasses and carefully knotted ties a failed but endearing attempt at coolness. His personal letters, which I read in Columbia University’s Rare Book Room, are well-written and irreverent in a tone I recognize from my college friends—full of witty references to nerdy things ranging from the Aeneid (“I was surprised to find so many more/ had joined us, ready for exile …”) to Gilbert and Sullivan (“I am never disappointed in them [the rescued artists]—what never? Well, hardly ever!”). If he hadn’t been dead for more than 40 years, I might have dated him.

What felt creepily familiar about him, too, were his motivations.

To read Dara Horn’s full story in Tablet Magazine’s first-ever Kindle Single, see here. And remember: You don’t need a Kindle to read—Kindle Singles can be read with a free Kindle app for your iPhone, Android, or BlackBerry smartphone or tablet, or on your computer. The complete, 16,000-word version of The Rescuer costs $1.99.

The novel, Auslander’s first, is both entertaining and disconcerting and Auslander, a Tablet columnist, joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to discuss German tourguides, Palestinian cabdrivers, and the pros and cons of living with hope. (To buy tickets to see Auslander discuss the novel in person on January 25 in San Francisco, click here.) Warning: The interview includes explicit language. [Running time: 20:51.]

I had also chosen to reclaim my German citizenship under a law designed to restore the rights of families who fled Nazi persecution between 1933 and 1945. I was confident that my legal right to citizenship, paired with my taste for German food, language, and culture, would ease my integration into German society. I wasn’t looking to shed my American identity, but rather to give life to a dormant part of myself.

Days before I officially became a German citizen, authorities discovered a neo-Nazi terror cell that is allegedly responsible for the murder of at least 10 people over the past decade. The message seemed clear: The land that my German Jewish parents escaped in 1938 is still not safe; it is blighted by underground networks of violent, brown-shirted skinheads who easily evade detection by government officials. In my eagerness to teach our kids about their roots, did I overlook the risks of our German Jewish adventure?

***

On most days, we weave ourselves into the fabric of Berlin with ease. We belong to Ohel Hachidusch, a Renewal congregation where members radiate a deep sense of pride in carrying on the tradition of Jewish life in Germany. Our oldest son recently became a bar mitzvah in Berlin’s former Jewish orphanage—the first from our family to experience this rite of passage on German soil since the Holocaust. We take advantage of Berlin’s abundant Jewish cultural offerings and savor the great bagels, spreads, and falafel that surpass what is available in our hometown of Bozeman, Mont.

And Berlin is far from Zwickau, the East German city that was home base for the three core members of the neo-Nazi gang who called themselves the National Socialist Underground. In addition to the murder of nine men of Turkish and Greek origin and a German policewoman, the Zwickau terror cell is believed to be responsible for a number of bombings and bank robberies.

But even if the staging grounds for most skinhead groups are far from our city, neo-Nazis have a visible presence here too. Last fall, the far-right National Democratic Party plastered the city streets with campaign posters that sent chills down our spines. The most horrific of which showed Udo Voigt, the party leader at the time, revving up a motorcycle alongside the slogan “Gas Geben”: Step on the Gas. Another poster showed a caricature of three ethnic minorities sitting on a flying carpet with the slogan “Guten Heimflug,” or Have a Good Flight Home.

And daily life brings regular encounters with the Holocaust. We tread on death each day as we stumble across some of the 2,950 stolpersteine in Berlin. These brass stumbling stones are mini memorials that are placed in the ground in front of the former homes of Holocaust victims. Gathering in a football huddle, the five of us stop to read each of these testimonials to lost life when we come across them on family outings. Our children learned the words ermordet, murdered, deportiert, deported, and verhaftet, arrested, long before they learned many other everyday German phrases.

As we hurry to catch the U-Bahn or S-Bahn we often come face-to-face with a plaque or memorial to the victims who were deported from our specific location. We’ve toured the Topography of Terror, Holocaust Memorial, Jewish Museum, special exhibits about Hitler, forced labor camps, and more.

We’re so saturated in reminders of this country’s evil past that we sometimes pine for America—the land of tomorrow.

With all of Germany’s impressive efforts to confront the legacy of the Holocaust, one would expect government officials to show extra sensitivity toward families who seek to reclaim part of what they lost under the Third Reich. But this has not been my experience. Perhaps it’s just that the German habit is not to smile or display any warmth when conducting business. My fully documented citizenship application was first lost, then ignored, and finally subjected to last-minute demands for further proof of my ancestry. I spent months wrangling with bureaucrats whose answers to my inquiries seemed designed to intimidate. “They are just hoping you will go away,” said some of my German Jewish friends.

Even ordinary Germans seem to enjoy wielding authority over others. Many seem to take great delight in alerting us to our daily transgressions. We’ve been scolded for petting people’s dogs, making too much noise while recycling, breaking various subway rules, and so on. I’m not used to getting behavior lectures from adults, especially when they seem so eager to put us in our place. These encounters leave me disturbed by the German propensity to follow authority rather than question it.

I feel accepted here, but how welcome am I really? I’m sure some Germans feel I don’t belong here, and that could be true. But that decision will be mine, not theirs. I am now both an American and a German citizen, with many possibilities for where to live and work. The opportunities for my children, who have also become German citizens, are even greater.

Every day I ride the trains of Berlin, stare at my fellow passengers, listen to their conversations, and wonder. I wonder if they are a mirror image of me or a descendant of those who persecuted anyone who was not a pure Aryan. This is the paradox of being a German Jew, to share the ethnic heritage of a people who committed genocide, but to also belong to one of the groups that was the target of this genocide. This paradox haunts my time in Germany but does not deter me from staying here a little longer.

In honor and recognition of which, should you choose to observe the day, you should refrain from food and drink from sunrise to sunset (or, if you prefer, from Daybreak to Sundown). And indeed the 10th of Tevet, say some, should always be observed on, well, the 10th day of Tevet, because a phrase in Ezekiel suggests that this really is the exact day that the events it commemorates occurred. That means if the holiday falls on Shabbat, as it will in December 2013, then you observe it then; the only other fast day of which this is true is Yom Kippur. (As with all fasts, the ill, the elderly, the infirm, or the pregnant or nursing are exempt from fasting requirements.)

In recent years, many have looked upon the 10th of Tevet and its message of sorrow and utilized it as a day to remember the victims of the Holocaust. Indeed, since Yom HaShoah comes in Nisan, during which mourning is supposed to be prohibited, observant Jews tend to prefer today for remembering the 6 million.

Tenth of Tevet [Wikipedia]
10 Tevet [Chabad]

In the preface to the New York edition of Roderick Hudson, Henry James explained that the chief problem of the novelist is deciding where to stop his characters’ stories—at what point to give up tracing the development of relationships. “Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, a circle within which they shall happily appear to do so,” James wrote. But by telling a story about Jews in the Italian city of Ferrara during the late 1930s, the novelist Giorgio Bassani jeopardized this artist’s freedom: The circumference of his 1962 novel The Garden of the Finzi-Continis was determined for him by history. In 1943, after the northern part of Italy was occupied by German soldiers, most of Ferrara’s small Jewish community was sent to the death camps. (Out of 183 deportees, only one returned to the city.)

In a brief prologue, Bassani makes clear that the members of the Finzi-Contini family died in the Holocaust: “for Micol, the second child, the daughter, and for her father, Professor Ermanno, and her mother, Signora Olga, and Signora Regina, Signora Olga’s ancient, paralytic mother, all deported to Germany in the autumn of ’43, who could say if they found any sort of burial at all?” At this early point in the book, we do not know anything about these characters but their names, though they will go on to populate the narrator’s emotional universe. They are introduced under the sign of death, and we read about their friendships and enmities and love affairs knowing that all such complications will be annulled just a few years after the action of the novel ends.

But is death an annulment? That is the question raised by the novel’s prologue, which is set in 1957. In it, the narrator—who goes unnamed in the text, but who is conventionally referred to as “B.” just as Proust’s narrator is called “Marcel”—describes an excursion with friends to the coast near Rome. On the way back home, the small group visits an Etruscan necropolis, a complex of funeral mounds that makes “the area, really … nothing but an immense, almost uninterrupted cemetery.” One of the party is a young girl, Giannina, who sighs over the Etruscan dead. Her father explains these 5,000-year-old tombs are so ancient that it’s hard to feel any real grief for their inhabitants: “it’s as if they had never lived, as if they had always been dead.” But Giannina disagrees: “But now, if you say that … you remind me that the Etruscans were also alive once, and so I’m fond of them, like everyone else.”

It is not hard to make the connection between the girl’s affection for the ancient dead and the more recent dead who weigh on the narrator’s mind. (“Tell me, Papa: who do you think were more ancient, the Etruscans or the Jews?” Giannina asks her father.) What Bassani calls the girl’s “extraordinary tenderness” seems to release a blockage in his mind: It is possible, he realizes, to preserve the dead as they were when they lived, to refuse to allow death to invalidate life. “For many years I wanted to write about the Finzi-Continis,” he explains in the book’s first sentence, but it was not until this episode that “the stimulus, the impulse to do it really came to me.”

The gulf between the values of life and the manner of death is especially wide in the case of the Finzi-Continis, for as we go on to learn, the family was defined above all by its aloofness from the Jewish community of Ferrara. For one thing, the Finzi-Continis were much richer than their neighbors. Their ancestor, Moise—part of the first Italian Jewish generation to be emancipated from the ghetto—acquired a large tract of land near the city wall of Ferrara, and the family built a magnificent estate there, complete with a magna domus or “great house.” This is the “garden” of the title, which is not an ordinary flower or kitchen garden but a vast walled enclave. In effect, the Finzi-Continis have retreated into their own world.

To the young B., this withdrawal makes the Finzi-Continis an object of fascination. The family has children his own age—a boy, Alberto, and a girl, Micol—but because they do not attend the public school, he sees them only occasionally; above all, in synagogue. In a resonant image that haunts the whole book, B. describes being gathered under his father’s tallit for the benediction, and staring at Micol Finzi-Contini, hidden away under her own father’s tent-like tallit: “Below him, for the entire duration of the blessing, Alberto and Micol never stopped exploring, they too, the gaps in their tent. And they smiled at me and winked at me, both curiously inviting: especially Micol.”

It is not hard to guess that B. is destined to fall in love with Micol, or that the love will be unhappy. (In this sense, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis can be compared to Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, another novel about a middle-class boy who falls fatally in love with an aristocratic family.) The course of their adult relationship is foretold in an incident when they are about 12 years old. Micol invites B. to climb over the garden wall, but by the time he convinces himself to do it, she has disappeared back into the house.

If the Finzi-Continis’ wall is an invitation to B., however, most of their neighbors take it as an insult:

Oh, it still took very little to be offended by it! It was enough, say, to pass along the endless outside wall … or else … overlooking the park, to peer through the forestlike tangle of trunks, boughs, and foliage below, until you could glimpse the strange, sharp outline of the lordly dwelling, and behind it, much farther on, at the edge of a clearing, the tan patch of the tennis court: and the ancient offense of rejection and separation would smart once more.

Already in this early passage, Bassani begins to establish the paradoxical Jewishness of the Finzi-Continis. When we read of a people that has committed an “ancient offense,” that is blamed for “rejection and separation,” that is simultaneously envied and feared and despised by its neighbors, it is impossible not to think of the Jews among the Christians of Europe. The Finzi-Continis, Bassani suggests, are the Jews of the Jews themselves, embodying and raising to the second power all the ambiguities of the Italian Jewish condition. They are Jews who exemplify Jewishness by dissociating themselves from other Jews—as the narrator’s father notes with scorn:

Instead of giving themselves so many airs, they would have done much better … to remember who they were, where they came from, for it’s a fact that Jews—Sephardic and Ashkenazic, western and Levantine, Tunisian, Berber, Yemenite, and even Ethiopian—in whatever part of the earth, under whatever sky History scattered them, are and always will be Jews, that is to say, close relatives.

One might even say that the Finzi-Continis treat their fellow Jews the way the Jews themselves treat the Gentiles—whom the narrator’s father refers to, with anxious contempt, as “goyische blacks.”

Continue reading: The secret garden

The doctors said there were several options this time. We could do nothing and my father would die in a few weeks. He could undergo chemotherapy, and if it worked it would give him another few months. They could give him radiation treatment, but the chances were that that would hurt more than it would help. Or they could operate and remove his tongue and his larynx. It was a complicated surgery that would take more than 10 hours, and, considering my father’s advanced age, the doctors didn’t think it was a viable option. But my dad liked the idea. “At my age, I don’t need a tongue anymore, just eyes in my head and a heart that beats,” he told the young oncologist. “The worst that can happen is that instead of telling you how pretty you are, I’ll write it down.”

The doctor blushed. “It’s not just the speech, it’s the trauma of the operation,” she said. “It’s the suffering and the rehabilitation if you survive it. We’re talking here about an enormous blow to your quality of life.”

“I love life,” my dad gave her his obstinate smile. “If the quality is good, then great. If not, then not. I’m not picky.”

In the taxi on our way back from the hospital my dad held my hand as if I were 5 years old again and we were about to cross a busy street. He was talking excitedly about the various treatment options, like an entrepreneur discussing new business opportunities. My dad is a businessman. Not a tycoon in a three-piece suit, just a regular guy who likes to buy and sell, and, if he can’t buy or sell, he’s ready to lease or rent. For him business is a way to meet people, to communicate, to get a little action going. Just let him buy a pack of cigarettes at some kiosk, and within 10 minutes he’s talking to the guy behind the counter about a possible partnership. “We’re really in an ideal situation here,” he said, totally seriously, as he stroked my hand. “I love making decisions when things are at rock bottom. And the situation is such dreck now that I can only come out ahead: With the chemo, I’ll die in no time at all; with the radiation, I’ll get gangrene of the jaw; and everyone’s sure I won’t survive the operation because I’m 84. You know how many plots of land I bought like that? When the owner doesn’t want to sell, and I don’t have a penny in my pocket?”

“I know,” I said. And I really do.

When I was 7, we moved. Our old apartment had been on the same street, and we’d all loved it, but my dad insisted that we move to a larger place. During World War II, my dad, his parents, and some other people hid in a hole in the ground in a Polish town for almost 600 days. The hole was so small that they couldn’t stand or lie down in it, only sit. When the Russians liberated the area, they had to carry my father and my grandparents out, because they couldn’t move on their own. Their muscles had atrophied. That time he spent in the hole had made him sensitive about privacy. The fact that my brother, sister, and I were growing up in the same room drove him crazy. He wanted us to move to an apartment where we would all have our own rooms. We kids actually liked sharing a bedroom, but when my dad makes up his mind, there’s no changing it.

One Saturday a few weeks before we were supposed to leave our old apartment, which he’d already sold, my dad took us to see our new place. We all showered and put on our nicest clothes, even though we knew we weren’t going to see anyone there. But still, it isn’t every day that you move to a new apartment.

Though the building was finished, no one lived in it yet. After dad made sure we were all in the elevator, he pressed the button for the fifth floor. That building was one of the only ones in the neighborhood that had an elevator, and the short ride itself thrilled us. Dad opened the reinforced steel door to the new apartment and began to show us the rooms. First the kids’ rooms, then the master bedroom, and finally the living room and the huge balcony. The view was amazing and all of us, especially my dad, were enchanted by the magical palace that would be our new home.

“Have you ever seen such a view?” he hugged my mom and pointed to the green hill visible from the living room window.

“No,” my mom replied unenthusiastically.

“Then why the sour look?” my dad asked.

“Because there’s no floor,” my mom whispered and looked down at the dirt and exposed metal pipes under our feet. Only then did I look down and see, along with my brother and sister, what my mother saw. I mean, we’d all seen earlier that there was no floor, but somehow, with all my dad’s excitement and enthusiasm, we hadn’t paid much attention to that fact. My dad looked down now too.

“Sorry,” he said. “There was no money left.”

“After we move, I’ll have to wash the floor,” my mom said in her most ordinary voice. “I know how to wash tiles, not sand.”

“You’re right,” my dad said and tried to hug her.

“The fact that I’m right won’t help me clean the house,” she said.

“OK, OK,” my dad said. “If you stop talking about it and give me a minute’s quiet, I’ll think of something. You know that, right?” My mother nodded unconvincingly. The elevator ride down was less happy.

When we moved into the new apartment a few weeks later, the floors were completely covered in ceramic tiles, a different color in each room. In the socialist Israel of the early 1970s, there was only one kind of tile—the color of sesame—and the colored floors in our apartment—reds, blacks, and browns—was different from anything we’d ever seen.

“You see?” my dad kissed my mother on the forehead proudly. “I told you I’d think of something.”

Only a month later did we discover exactly what he’d thought of. I was alone at home taking a shower that day when a gray-haired man wearing a white button-down shirt came into the bathroom with a young couple. “These are our Volcano Red tiles. Direct from Italy,” he said, pointing to the floor. The woman was the first to notice me, naked and soaped up, staring at them. The three of them quickly apologized and left the bathroom.

That evening at dinner, when I told everyone what had happened, my dad revealed his secret. Since he hadn’t had the money to pay for floor tiles, he’d made a deal with the ceramics company: They would give us the tiles for free, and my dad would let them use our place as a model apartment.

The taxi had already reached my parents’ building, and when we got out, my dad was still holding my hand. “This is exactly how I like to make decisions, when there’s nothing to lose and everything to gain,” he repeated. When we opened the apartment door, we were greeted by a pleasant, familiar smell, hundreds of colored floor tiles, and a single powerful hope. Who knows? Maybe this time, too, life and my father will surprise us with another unexpected deal.

Translated by Sondra Silverston

I was giving a guest lecture on the subject of Primo Levi at a synagogue in Houston, presenting Levi’s masterpiece, Survival in Auschwitz, to a crowd of 50 or so. I spoke about the nature of Levi’s experience at Auschwitz: his relationship with fellow prisoners, the camp’s makeshift economy and pecking order, the reasons he thought he survived while so many others died, and the narrative strategies he adopted to describe something that could not be described. In particular, I dwelt on Levi’s notion of the “gray zone”—the ways in which death camps blurred the frontiers between guilt and acquiescence, persecutor and victim. By way of conclusion, I revealed to the audience that the title of the book in its original Italian was If This Be A Man. With that abrupt flourish, I slowly closed my lecture binder and looked down at my hands.

I was superb.

An elderly and energetic man in the audience, however, did not agree. He raised his hand, gave his name—I’ll call him Siggie—and announced he was a survivor. A respectful hush fell over the audience, and all heads craned toward the small figure. Siggie declared that Levi didn’t know what he was talking about. “Gray zone, schmay zone,” he declared, more or less. As I stared at him, Siggie then launched into a long and polished account of his own experience at Auschwitz, one that drew fast and sharp lines between victim and victimizer. Moreover, Siggie suggested, anyone who tried to offer a literary or theoretical account of Auschwitz was little better than an interloper. This applied not only to Levi, but even more so to academics like me, who had never been in a concentration camp.

I tried to respond but soon gave up; as a survivor, Siggie commanded not just the moral high ground but the ontological depths, too. What could I say? He was right: I had not been there. Normally, being “there” is not an issue for a historian. Only a lunatic would repudiate an account of, say, the fall of the Bastille or Battle of Marathon because the historian had been born one or one hundred generations too late to savor the sulfur or participate in a phalanx. In fact, historians have long assumed that not being there is a professional advantage. In an odd phenomenological twist, we have always claimed that the distance provided by time and space, along with the accumulation of documents and data, permits us to know the past even better than did an event’s contemporaries, who were stuck in the chaos as they happened. Anyone can make history, but it takes a historian to understand it.

But Auschwitz was different. This, at least, is what Siggie reminded me as he gesticulated with his branded forearm. The grim tattoo was an infinitely more powerful sign of authority than the leather patches on my tweed jacket. With a wince, I recalled Elie Wiesel’s claim: “Any survivor has more to say than all the historians combined about what happened.” As a historian, I knew Wiesel’s statement was nonsense; but as a Jew facing a survivor, I knew it was irrefutable.

Did I even dare suggest that, after nearly half a century and countless retellings, Siggie’s own experience had crystallized into a story—a story whose relationship with the event was perhaps even more problematic than Levi’s or my own? Where, I asked myself, did the scales tip between my doctorate and Siggie’s experience? As I looked at Siggie and the audience, all of these questions were no-brainers. Hiding my elbow patches as best I could, I ceded the floor to Siggie. Apologies to Adorno, but I concluded that, after Auschwitz, history—at least the sort where historians do what they are trained to do—was certainly possible, perhaps even necessary. But, most important, it was irrelevant.

***

There is a sense in which Emil Fackenheim was right to say that for Jews to forget Hitler’s victims would be to grant him a “posthumous victory.” But it would be an even greater posthumous victory for Hitler were we to tacitly endorse his definition of ourselves as despised pariahs by making the Holocaust the emblematic Jewish experience.

These are the concluding lines from Peter Novick’s The Holocaust in American Life. Published slightly more than a decade ago, shortly after my encounter with Siggie, Novick’s book provided me with an epiphany about the oddness of my vocation. A historian at the University of Chicago, Novick was attempting to explain how the Holocaust—an event that had happened more than a generation earlier on a different continent and affected a mere fraction of those living here—became by the late 1960s the central experience in the American Jewish historical narrative. Novick suggested that this sudden communal awareness of the Holocaust, far from being the result of deep trauma, instead resulted from a series of political events that prodded American Jewry to embrace the destruction of European Jewry as its defining narrative. The rise in racial tensions in the United States, the existential character of the Yom Kippur War, the growth in “identity politics” and its dark side of victim culture: These are some of the factors, Novick suggested, that led to American Jewry’s belated discovery of the Holocaust.

Continue reading: Seduced by being a Holocaust expert

At Commentary, Matthew Ackerman has the story exactly right: “The story’s conclusion reveals the gravitational pull the emotional drama of the Holocaust continues to exert on so many Jews, and how hard it remains for so many to find Jewish meaning in anything else.” He adds, “the challenges Jews the world over face are daunting, and it does not appear they can be successfully met without finding a core of Jewish identity that is not based in the European tragedy. We have no choice then but to make it a never forgotten piece of our collective past, but a piece only. Only then will we find the courage to meet the future with confidence and success and stop hiding in closets from imagined terrors.”

Englander’s story is a bit neat (as short stories probably should be) in that the two respective Jewish worldviews represented are Haredim from Israel and seculars from the States. For them, the Holocaust is, as Ackerman puts it, “the only point of strong Jewish connection they all share.” Which means the story does elide the other “strong Jewish connection” that most Jews share: Israel. (The Holocaust is stronger: a Jew can say he feels no affiliation with Israel; he cannot deny that he would have been on Himmler’s figurative list or on one of his many actual ones.) As with the Holocaust, too often, I think, Israel serves as an insubstantial point of connection among Jews rather than as an actually existing place; as a signifier rather than a signified. What we talk about when we talk about Israel is frequently our own pride in being Jewish (which can shade into chauvinism or forced victimhood, twin impostors that are really just the same). The good news is that untangling this need not require a cathartically horrific “game,” but rather the recognition that there many ways to be Jewish, and that being Israeli is only one of them and feeling a certain way about Israel only another.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank [The New Yorker]
This Week in Fiction: Nathan Englander [New Yorker Book Bench]
The Difficulty of Letting Go of the Holocaust [Commentary Contentions]

Last week, Tablet Magazine published our list of the 100 greatest Jewish films of all time. At the very bottom was Schindler’s List. In a brief blurb, I called it an “astoundingly stupid” movie, which, in turn, inspired some of our readers to call me a “piece of shit” and a “neo-Nazi”—all for casting an aspersion on what, if they are to be believed, is everyone’s favorite Holocaust movie.

Which makes perfect sense: More than just a regrettable film, Schindler’s List neatly reflects the Manichean mindset of many American Jews, for whom mythology trumps memory and nothing lies beyond good and evil. Those who howled at me weren’t expressing a mere aesthetic judgment; they were defending a worldview.

To understand this worldview, we need only look at Schindler’s List. The film’s two main characters are Liam Neeson’s Oskar Schindler and Ralph Fiennes’ Nazi officer, Amon Goeth. The first is a philandering and greedy German who sees a little girl in a red coat and has a nearly instantaneous epiphany, realizing that life is precious and that Jews should be saved. The other is a monster; it’s no coincidence that the American Film Institute ranked Goeth at number 15 in its list of the 100 greatest villains of all time, just one spot below the slimy creature who terrorized Sigourney Weaver in Ridley Scott’s Alien. Goeth, too, is an otherworldly sort. He is not, like the real-life murderer on whom he is based, merely a hateful, opportunistic, and cruel young man who relished the chance to play god. He is impenetrable, predatory, inhuman. We have little reason to fear him more than we fear, say, the Nazis in Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark or the shark from Jaws; all are terrifying, but all are the sort of baddies we’ll only ever see on-screen, not the kind of ordinary and crooked and all-too-human scum living quietly next door and waiting for a stab at power.

Intelligent filmmakers, like Marcel Ophüls or Claude Lanzmann, long ago forged a cinematic language with which to talk about evil. Its two great grammatical principles are the context and the close-up: Cobble together as many sources as is possible to make a mosaic of meaning, then train the camera on one specific detail and demand an explanation. When it works well, we get moments like Lanzmann’s interview in Shoah with Franz Schalling, the Chelmno guard, whose matter-of-factness about the killing process is more terrifying than any imperious expression Fiennes can conjure, particularly as it appears alongside testimonies by victims and bystanders who had lived through radically divergent versions of the same horror. This approach is superior from both ethical and artistic perspectives, giving every player in this brutal human drama a claim to agency and dignity.

Spielberg’s approach, on the other hand, does not. Schindler’s Jews do not matter. They’re abstractions, spiritual currency so that our “hero” can pay his way toward salvation. Like Goeth, Schindler, too, is busy scrubbing away everything that makes him human.

The film’s blunt simplification enraged the Hungarian-Jewish Nobel laureate Imre Kertész, himself a survivor. Schindler’s List, he argued, was kitsch. “I regard as kitsch any representation of the Holocaust that is incapable of understanding or unwilling to understand the organic connection between our own deformed mode of life (whether in the private sphere or on the level of ‘civilization’ as such) and the very possibility of the Holocaust,” he wrote in his 2001 essay, “Who Owns Auschwitz?” “Here I have in mind those representations that seek to establish the Holocaust once and for all as something foreign to human nature; that seek to drive the Holocaust out of the realm of human experience.”

Stanley Kubrick felt the same way. Abandoning his own Holocaust-themed project after Spielberg’s movie became instantly iconic, Kubrick complained that the prince of Hollywood forever simplified one of the most complex occurrences in human history by crafting, in essence, a competing narrative. “Think [Schindler’s List] is about the Holocaust?” he asked the screenwriter Frederic Raphael, a friend. “That was about success, wasn’t it? The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed. Schindler’s List is about 600 who don’t.”

One can argue, of course, that there are many Holocaust stories to be told, and that Spielberg merely chose to tell his (adapted, as it was, from Thomas Keneally’s book), and that his merely happened to have a hopeful ending. But that doesn’t absolve him of responsibility. Writing of the moral and aesthetic problems art runs into when it attempts to represent pain and suffering, the 18th-century German philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing theorized that visual artists follow a two-step process when creating their work: First they choose one moment out of an endless sequence of possible moments for visual representation, and then they submit that moment to the strictures of the artistic process. If the choices they make fit together nicely—the perfect moment represented the perfect way—the result is pleasing. If not, it terrifies. In choosing Schindler’s story, and in representing it as a collection of kinetic symbols swirling in succession on-screen, Spielberg turned an infinitely complex reality into something even worse than kitsch: a spectacle. It’s of little wonder that one of Seinfeld’s funniest plots involved Jerry making out with a woman in a screening of Schindler’s List; a similar joke involving Shoah would have come off as intolerably insensitive, but necking as Neeson and Fiennes duke it out is hilarious because it concedes, however implicitly, that Schindler’s List is just a flick, overrated and overblown, best viewed while heavily petting.

But the real problem isn’t Spielberg. He is an endlessly talented filmmaker who has directed a few of the works—from E.T. to A.I.—that I consider to be among the finest ever produced. The real problem is the culture that spawned Spielberg, the culture of so many of us in the American Jewish community.

There’s no way to quantify what I’m about to say next and many ways to dismiss it as inaccurate or subjective or untrue. But consider this: From a community that was, until three or four decades ago, not only emotionally equipped but also eager to hold difficult internal debates, we’ve allowed so many of our communal vistas to become splintered terrains of intolerance and mutual suspicion. Try talking about Israel to someone who sees the country in a very different light. Try bringing up conversion next time you run into someone from a different denomination. Chances are the conversation will soon descend into chaos, with each side claiming absolute moral validity for itself and casting calumnies at the other. Put differently, we used to see the world like Lanzmann, as a nuanced and complex place where even the greatest villains deserved a few quiet moments on camera to speak their mind. We now see it like Spielberg saw the Holocaust, in black and white, all feeling and movement.

It’s an attitude we must do everything in our power to resist in every way, from commemorating the past to debating the future. Our tradition is nothing if not a yarn of complications; as appealing as simple images of victimhood (the little boy in the sewer in Spielberg’s film) and redemption (the Israeli paratroopers at the Western Wall in the iconic photograph from the Six Day War) might be, it’s our moral, aesthetic, and historical obligation to choose the difficult, the subtle, and the obscure. This, if anything, is the life for which we’ve been chosen.

Der Nister is best-known for his epic family-saga novel, Di Mishpukhe Mashber (The Family Mashber), written in the 1930s and during the war. In 1943, Der Nister published a small collection of short stories on the Holocaust under the title Korbones (Victims). Most of his wartime stories, however, were collected in book form only after his death: Dertseylungen un eseyen (Stories and Essays; New York, 1957) and Vidervuks (Regeneration; Moscow, 1969). He was arrested in February 1949 for overt nationalism and died in a labor camp of an acute blood disease on June 4, 1950.

Faithful to Der Nister’s kaleidoscopic literary style, Butler’s translation prompts readers to consider literary responses to the Holocaust within the Soviet Union, a topic fraught with tension both in Soviet and contemporary Russia. Der Nister’s heroes were often orphans—either children orphaned by the loss of their parents or parents orphaned by their children—who went off to fight with the partisans. For the heroes and Der Nister himself, loss and destruction fueled a sense of nationalism, messianism, and a re-awakening of Jewish allegiance. This motif of national rebirth subverted the master narrative of wartime Socialist Realism espoused by the Stalinist Soviet State.

Der Nister’s vision of rebirth is perhaps most readily apparent in his 1945 short story “Vidervuks,” or “Regrowth,” which explores a re-awakened nationalism engendered by loss and death. More literally, “Regrowth” is about “a man without a wife, and a wife without a man” who live “with facing doors, on the same floor of the same building, in a Soviet capital city.” The heroes of the tale, Dr. Zamelman and Mrs. Zayets, “have grown estranged from their Jewish origins and all that occurred in the thicket of their people.” The man and the woman share similar fates as both their son and daughter leave their homes in order to fight the Great Fatherland War. From the very beginning of the story we know that Dr. Zamelman and Mrs. Zayets’ fate is intertwined: Their doors face one another, they live on the same floor, and they both lose their children in the war. Toward the end of the story, Dr. Zamelman’s reconnection with the kehilla, or Jewish community, motivates him to adopt a young boy.

The figure of an orphan was a literary favorite for Soviet wartime fiction. Losing his biological parents in the war, the child had the full potential to be reborn—to claim his new Soviet family with Stalin as father. Valentin Kataev’s 1945 novel, Son of the Regiment, which won the Stalin Prize in 1946, tells the story of a young orphan who, upon enlisting in a partisan group, goes through a process of re-awakening. By the end, the boy realizes his full political self-awareness as Stalin visits him in his dream. Kataev’s equally revealing 1951 novel, For the Power of the Soviets, tells a story about an orphan who joins a partisan group. The narrative ends with the young boy listening to Stalin’s Nov. 1943 speech on the radio. Unlike Kataev’s heroes, for whom loss stimulates the hero to gain political awareness, Der Nister’s orphans join partisan groups in order to avenge the deaths of their Jewish parents.

“Regrowth” ends with a union between Dr. Zamelman and Mrs. Zayets, which brings the characters closer not to their Soviet homeland but rather to their Jewish heritage. Throughout the story, Dr. Zamelman awakens from several dreams. We may read this literary trope as another example of revived nationalism.

The tension between the individual Soviet Jew and the collective is addressed in “Rive Yosl Buntsies,” a story about a woman who loses both her father and husband. Rive, we are told, “was a marvel—a kind of historical relic—to be displayed in a museum.” The author’s acute awareness of destruction haunts his characters. Rive’s appearance in the story is always in the context of the community. She is present at births, marriages, and deaths. Before dying, Rive’s father gifts her candlesticks, which “served her both as a remembrance of what she had lost and as a guide for her everyday thoughts.” So important are the candlesticks for Rive that, when her life is interrupted by the arrival of the Nazis, she takes them with her to the ghetto. The story ends with Rive being led by Nazi SS soldiers to her death. She walks alongside a group of women; recalling that it is Friday, Rive leads the women in a Sabbath prayer. The tale ends with a Nazi police officer relieving “himself on the candles—whether for the sake of his personal needs or in order to share something with others—it’s all the same.”

The image of light, which is replete with multiple meanings in the narrative, reaches its apex in this chilling moment of desecration. The Hebrew phrase, “or l’goyim,” or “light for all nations,” originated from the prophet Isaiah. Der Nister’s conscious allusion to this expression reveals the author’s grappling with the loss of an entire nation and by extension, a moment of darkness for humanity.

Der Nister’s wartime nationalism was accompanied by an equally powerful call for vengeance. Der Nister explores the theme of vengeance in stories such as “Heshl Ansheles” and “Flora.” In “Heshl Ansheles,” vengeance is packaged in moments of acute violence and rage. Humiliated by Nazi soldiers, Heshl Ansheles, who is respected for his immense knowledge and ability to abstract from the biblical canon, bites off the finger of a Nazi policeman. His mouth filled with blood, Ansheles, “full of contentment,” closes his mouth with satisfaction.

Unlike “Heshl Ansheles,” which recasts Jewish national revival through madness and rage, “Flora” reveals the power of language as a form of resistance. “Flora” tells a story about a young girl who, upon losing her father and being thrown into a ghetto, joins an underground group of partisans. Initially told by Flora herself, the narrative abruptly ends and is picked up by a professional narrator. “There ends Flora’s record,” writes this second narrator. “And it is also understandable why: she went off to where there was neither room nor time to hold a pen in one’s hands—just a chance for something better: a rifle.” The author here makes a conscious play using the sounds of the Yiddish word for book, “bukh,” and the word for gun, “biks.” The rifle is the logical extension of the pen.

The Hidden One makes occasional brief appearances in his texts in the guise of a man “hidden among a crowd.” Uncomfortable in any one circumscribed space, this figure finds solace in the space in between things. In the famed short-story “Under a Fence: a Revue,” the protagonist is lured by a “dustman,” who resides “within walls.” In “Flora,” the father gazes lovingly upon his daughter “as always, hidden in a crowd.” In his Holocaust works, we may discern the author in the character of the Messiah who lingers in the ghetto vicinities. There, he is present as “a rider on a poor donkey headed toward Jerusalem,” who imparts meanings into the world of destruction by ushering in the messianic epoch. Der Nister’s subtle yet bold process of articulating a difference by manipulating vocabulary, literary tropes, and dominant rhetoric forges a path between acceptance and resistance.

The author’s penname, “The Hidden One,” features an additional layer of irony: Since his death, he has remained virtually unknown to both the Russian and American reader. In Butler’s translation, the strength and importance of Der Nister’s work is clearly revealed.

The fact is I’ve been haunted for years by a line from Hotel Terminus, Max Ophul’s movie about Klaus Barbie, the infamous “Butcher of Lyon,” that went like this: “Only Jews and old Nazis are interested in Jews and old Nazis.” If this is true—and in large part I believe it is—then the audience for Holocaust films is even smaller than the audience for Ukranian imports, one that is yoked together by questionable motives. The pleasure principle, that is, is generally so absent from Holocaust cinema that the only impulse to see a new film is one of masochistic duty to the victims or sadistic reminiscence on the part of perpetrators—and there we are, bound together once again with our tormentors.

I was struck recently by these thoughts when I went to see a screening of Agnieszka Holland’s In Darkness, which has been nominated as the Polish entry for Best Foreign Film and is scheduled to open in wide release in January. More than two decades after making the much-acclaimed Europa, Europa, and after moving on to such disparate work as The Secret Garden, Washington Square, and the HBO production of Shot in the Heart (based on Mikel Gilmore’s memoir), Holland has returned to the theme of the Holocaust. In her director’s statement, Holland, whose father’s family died at the hand of the Nazis and who had an aunt who survived by being smuggled out of the ghetto in her sister’s coffin, observes in the press notes: “One may ask if everything has now been said on this subject. But in my opinion the main mystery hasn’t yet been resolved, or even fully explored. How was this crime (echoes of which continue in different places in the world from Rwanda to Bosnia) possible? Where was Man during this crisis? Where was God? Are these events and actions the exception in human history or do they reveal an inner, dark truth about our nature?”

The screening took place on a Wednesday night at the comfy Sony screening room at 550 Madison Avenue in New York, where the seats are widely spaced the better for you to stretch out your legs and pretend that you’re Irving Thalberg, chomping on a cigar, checking out the dailies. (Sony Pictures Classics—but who else?—has picked the movie up for American distribution, with limited release in New York and Los Angeles starting Dec. 9.) I could find no one among my friends who wanted to see the movie with me, although I imagine I would have had no such trouble with almost any other offering. No one explicitly said, “Not another Holocaust movie,” but they might as well have. There was a clutch of people waiting for the publicist to arrive when I got to Sony, and by the time we entered there were about 20 of us. I looked around anxiously: No old Nazis as far as I could make out, but no one appeared to be brimming over with anticipation either.

In Darkness is is based on a true story of a Righteous Christian, a sewer worker and petty thief by the name of Leopold Socha, who over a period of 14 months helps hide a small group of Jews, including men, women, and children, in the sewers beneath the Nazi-occupied city of Lvov, Poland. The film’s power derives in part from Robert Wieckiewicz’s brilliant, unsentimentalized performance as Socha, whose empathy is complexly formed and tenuously maintained until the very last moment when it overrides his conflicts, and in part from Holland’s underplayed directing, which includes deft contextual touches that bring the larger brutality taking place outside the netherworld of the sewers acutely home.

Agnieszka Holland. (Photo by Krzysztof Opaliński, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics)

The Monday after the screening I arranged to meet with Holland at the bar of the Regency Hotel, at 4 in the afternoon. The place was thronged with people who looked pleased with themselves in that way that successful people often do; at the table next to mine I spotted the literary agent Ed Victor, holding forth to an audience of one. Holland, who was born in 1948 in Warsaw, wore glasses, had a short haircut, and was simply dressed. She had been interviewed by Forward columnist Masha Leon right before me and looked a bit weary of the whole process, although she put on a welcoming smile.

Having read in the press notes that Holland had turned down the movie twice before the writer and co-producers, who had initially insisted that the film be in English, agreed to let her shoot it in the original languages (Polish, German, Yiddish, and others), I asked her what drew her so strongly to the story. “What interested me is that the Pole is not so good,” she said in heavily accented but excellent English. “This tension is my aim as a storyteller. You don’t know what he’ll do; he is walking on the wire. It’s not a struggle between good and bad—he isn’t conscious enough for that. This guy doesn’t know what he’ll do next. Everything is in the present. I tried to be behavioristic, not psychological. There is no moralistic issue or sentimental building up.” Holland went on to say that another impetus for her making the film at this moment was her irritation with many of the Holocaust movies that have emerged. “I’ve seen an incredible amount of bad Holocaust movies. Kitschy ones. Life Is Beautiful made me angry. It said, ‘If you really love your child you will save him.’ To try and take a moral lesson from the Holocaust is wrong.”

We moved on to talk of other things. Holland, who has directed episodes of television series like David Simon’s The Wire and Treme, is set to direct the premiere episode of the second season of the much-acclaimed detective drama series The Killing. She told me she divided her time between Los Angeles, France, and Poland. Inevitably, though, we returned to In Darkness and the subject of the Holocaust. Holland wanted the film to be seen by “as many people as possible” although she admitted it was not as “entertaining” as Europa, Europa. “Not everyone can go to such a painful place,” she said. She noted that the last 10 years had brought “unpleasant facts about Polish history post-Holocaust” to light that had shattered the Poles’ image of themselves as innocent victims of the Germans and “allowed Poles to grow up.” She thought Americans, on the other hand, had adopted the Holocaust as part of their history “because of movies and TV” but that they “haven’t done their homework yet, haven’t accepted their own guilt for doing nothing.” Holland attributed the growing power of anti-Semitism in Europe to Israeli politics, which “angers leftist intellectuals” and “allows them to feel that the burden of guilt can be thrown away.” Holland was also convinced that if ever there were a lesson to be learned from the Holocaust, its moment has all but passed: “We are at the point where people forgot it.”

Actually, the feelings might be even more negative. As Holland spoke, I thought back to the aftermath of the screening I had attended at Sony. On my way down in the elevator a Jewish literary agent I knew said to her husband and the couple with her: “Now, that was relentless.” I turned to her and asked her what other people—those who had nothing at stake—were going to think if this was her response. I felt like a schoolteacher, especially since no one had solicited my opinion, but I nevertheless added that I had found the film compelling and moving. The two couples looked dutifully abashed, but I had the feeling they couldn’t wait to get out of the elevator and leave me and my reprimanding tone behind them.

That night, I kept thinking of the last scene in the film, when the Jews make it out of the sewers, looking dazed in the light of the day as around them Polish passersby laugh uneasily to see these strange, forlorn apparitions suddenly appear in the middle of their street. “These are my Jews,” Socha says delightedly. “My Jews,” finally taking credit for his own unsung acts of heroism. There are no brass bands, no memorials, just an extraordinary Polish man who could not bring himself to see Jews as repugnantly Other. It is a deeply stirring moment that closes the human circle of warmth—bringing into focus the surprising sense of kinship that motivated otherwise ordinary people such as Socha—but I found myself wondering how many people will ever get to see it, or be receptive to it after two and a half hours spent in a dimly lit sewer.

For this is the hard (or maybe too-easy) truth: At some point, there will be no more old Nazis, and no more Holocaust films. Until then, I suggest that, come January, you elect to spend some time with Leopold Socha and his Jews, down in the darkness, with the rats, the stench, and the internecine bickering. At the end of the tunnel is a dazzling burst of daylight that is worth the wait.

Inevitably, however, we tend to create a generic Holocaust narrative out of the tales we hear most often, and find most easy to identify with. As Americans, we respond to stories of assimilated Western European Jews who are gradually shut out of their country’s life, like that of the German diarist Victor Klemperer. As city dwellers, our imaginations are compelled by Anne Frank’s experience of hiding out in a crowded apartment, invisible in the multitude. And as members of an advanced industrial society, we are compelled by the image of the gas chamber, which writers since Hannah Arendt have made the central emblem of the Holocaust—the ultimate reduction of human life to inanimate matter.

All of these are truths about the Holocaust, but they are not the only truths. As many Jews died by simple shooting as in gas chambers; far more died in Eastern Europe than in Western Europe; millions were killed almost as soon as their towns and villages were occupied by the Germans, with no chance to hide out or adjust in any way to life under Nazism. Statistically speaking, the representative Holocaust story might not feature concentration camps or hiding places or repressive laws at all; it might simply be the story of waking up one morning to find German tanks in your street and a month later being shot and buried in a mass grave. It might sound like this:

People carry on, Vitya, as though their whole life lies ahead of them. It’s impossible to say whether that’s wise or foolish—it’s just the way people are. I do the same myself. There are two women here from a shtetl and they tell the same story as my friend did. The Germans are killing all the Jews in the district, children and old men included. The Germans and Ukrainian police drive up and recruit a few dozen men for field-work. These men are set to dig ditches and two or three days later the Jewish population is marched to these ditches and shot. Jewish burial mounds are rising up in all the villages round about. …

Our turn will come in a week or two, according to plan. But just imagine—I still go on seeing patients and saying, “Now bathe your eye regularly with the lotion and it will be better in two or three weeks.” I’m taking care of one old man whose cataract it will be possible to remove in six months or a year. … Meanwhile the Germans burst into people’s houses and steal; sentries amuse themselves by shooting children from behind the barbed wire; and more and more people confirm that any day now our fate will be decided.

This is the voice of Anna Semyonovna Shtrum, writing her last letter to her son Viktor, in Vasily Grossman’s epic novel Life and Fate. Anna’s letter takes up a whole chapter of the novel, and it haunts the 800-page book just as it haunts Viktor, a Soviet nuclear physicist who is one of its half-dozen main characters. Viktor lives in Moscow, which never fell to the German Army, so he and his family survive the war. If only Viktor had allowed his mother to come and live with him, she would have survived; but his wife, Lyudmila, didn’t get along with Anna, so she remained in Berdichev and died. It’s a situation Grossman could have invented out of sheer authorial sadism, in order to burden Viktor Shtrum with the maximum amount of guilt—except that it was Grossman’s own story. Grossman’s mother never had a chance to smuggle a letter out of Berdichev before she died, so the son invented one for her, setting down the grief and guilt that defined his postwar life:

But my fate is to end my life alone, never having shared it with you. Sometimes I’ve thought that I ought not to live far away from you, that I love you too much, that love gives me the right to be with you in my old age. And at other times I’ve thought that I ought not to live together with you, that I love you too much. Well, enfin, Always be happy with those you love, those around you, those who have become closer to you than your mother. Forgive me.

Continue reading: The Jewishness of Soviet citizens

Synonyms are both logical fallacies—no two words can be identical—and artistically useful (expedient, practical); synonymic poetics furthers that paradox into history, or histories. Which is to say that though the genres of tragedy and comedy transcend borders, races, and creeds, specific tragedies and comedies do not. The event one people celebrate with a victorious ode another people commemorate with an elegy of defeat.

Poetry that’s old enough, that has justified its age, tends to be credited to that greatest of versifiers, “Anonymous.” Let’s summon that God, for a moment, to bless the following scraps, translated into the neutrality of English:

How will you fill your cup
On the day of liberation? and with what?
Are you prepared, in your joy, to endure
The dark howling heard
From skulls of days glittering
In a bottomless pit?

And:

We survived much death. We defeated forgetfulness and you said to me: We survive, but do not triumph. I said to you: Survival is the prey’s potential triumph over the hunter. Steadfastness is survival and survival is the beginning of existence. We persevered and much blood flowed on the coasts and in the deserts. Much more blood than what the name needed for its identity, or what identity needed for its name.

The first fragment is a stanza from How? written in 1943 in the Vilna Ghetto by the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever. The second is from In the Presence of Absence, one of the last collections of stray sentences in paragraphs by Mahmoud Darwish, perhaps the foremost Palestinian poet of last century (published in Arabic in 2006, and this month by Archipelago Books, in a translation by Sinan Antoon).

That these two texts spring from a shared poetics can be denied only by those who read prejudicially, who judge books by covers of their own creation: When you oppress a people, when you beat and rape and kill them, the literature they write will inevitably resemble the literatures of other peoples who’ve been beaten, raped, and murdered (unless you’ve stumbled upon a happy tribe of masochists). But this shock must be admitted: The same poetics has sadly marked the literatures of Jews—not just Israelis—and Palestinians, in the same century—a poetics that fled Europe and hid, until it found another shelter.

***

Al-Birwa was a tiny olive, grain, and watermelon village in Western Galilee, Mandate Palestine. Darwish was born there to a Sunni Muslim family in March 1941, the same month and year the Nazis’ extermination camps became fully operational. In 1948, with war ended, war began: Darwish’s family was forced from their orchards by the nascent IDF’s Carmeli Brigade; they fled to Lebanon, to Jezzine and Damour. Later, they illegally returned to Israel—insofar as one can return to a different country—settling in Deir al-Asad, which had been renamed, in Hebrew, Shagur. (Darwish spoke fluent Hebrew.)

In 1970, Darwish, then a communist, briefly attended university in Moscow before migrating to Egypt and then to Lebanon again. There he joined the PLO, for which he coauthored the Algiers Declaration. When the PLO was expelled from Lebanon, Darwish went to Cyprus. Stints followed in Tunis and Paris. For his work in the PLO, the poet was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize, originally the Stalin Peace Prize, which he accepted as idealistically as he’d later reject the Oslo Accords (which occasioned his break with Yasser Arafat).

It was Oslo, however, in its slight easing of restrictions in the Occupied Territories, that gave Darwish a temporary reprieve: In 1996, now a poet with an international reputation and a major cardiac condition, he finally received Israeli permission to settle in Ramallah. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, major infarcts had led to major surgeries. Though his literary heart was strong, his literal heart was weak—so went the global obituaries. In August 2008, while undergoing treatment at a hospital in Houston, he died. He’s buried in Ramallah, atop a hill called Al-Rabweh, “the hill of green grass”—a small snatch of his childhood Galilee transported to the dusty West Bank.

So do not reconcile with anything except for this obscure reason. Do not regret a war that ripened you just as August ripens pomegranates on the slopes of stolen mountains. For there is no other hell waiting for you. What once was yours is now against you.

And:

I am already quite scarce. For years
appearing only here and there
at the edges of jungle. My awkward body,
camouflaged by reeds, clings
to the damp shadow around it.
Had I been civilized,
I would never have been able to withstand.
I am tired. Only the great fires
still drive me from hiding to hiding.

Let’s avoid turning this survey into an exercise in perversity, a childish game: I’ve chosen to quote Darwish in his prose-poems, and the others, the original Others, enjambed. The man “already quite scarce” is the Israeli poet Dan Pagis. The source for the excerpt above is a poem called The Last Ones. The initial circumstance is the language, then the name and title, and only then, the poem. Bad poetry wants for forewords, good poetry, for afterwords, whereas Pagis’ poetry, like Darwish’s, needs a more encompassing apparatus—it necessitates experience.

Continue reading: A political coup

E.T.A. Hoffmann used to explain the wealth of imaginative figures that offered themselves to him for his stories by the quickly changing pictures and impressions he had received during a journey of some weeks in a post chaise, while still a babe at his mother’s breast.

What a child has experienced but not understood by the age of two he may never again recover, except in his dreams.

Many years ago I asked Aharon Appelfeld, the great Israeli novelist, why he did not write an autobiography—even though his best title, his only title, A Child of Our Time, had already been used.

“If I do,” he answered, “I will no longer be able to write my novels.”

The notion that the exploration of one’s own life, particularly one’s childhood, will drain the well of imagination is of course common enough. Call It Sleep and Midnight’s Children are among the greatest novels of the last century. That neither Henry Roth nor Salmon Rushdie, having re-experienced, having revivified, their boyhoods, could produce another work remotely as beautiful is enough to give anyone pause.

Nonetheless, the answer Appelfeld gave to my question—as he surely knows—is both true and insufficient. A more complex response lies in his small 1993 book Beyond Despair, which is as profound a meditation on the relation of memory to imagination as anything I know. Once, at Boston University, he gave a lecture based on one of its chapters. Afterward, my students stood together, not moving, not speaking, in the courtyard. “I can’t stop trembling,” said one of them, as I approached this little grove of human aspens. Holding the book now, I can’t help trembling myself.

Appelfeld, who survived a concentration camp as a child before immigrating to Palestine in 1946, begins by describing the equivocal relationship he and all survivors had with memory. The first task for all of them was not to remember. “Anyone who underwent the Holocaust will be as wary of memory as of fire. … People learned how to live without it the way one learns to live without a limb of one’s body.”

Naturally enough, among this remnant the need to think and write about what had befallen them could not be repressed. But how to do so? The disproportion between the events themselves and the means to express them was too great: “The sights were dreadful and immense, and words are frail and impotent.” The inevitable result was a kind of distortion, a falseness, a misemphasis. The testimonies and memoirs were written in haste, without skill, with no sense of proportion or introspection. In each a battle raged between revelation and concealment. Most were marked by “a search for relief” and not the search for truth. Moreover, in Israel there existed a sense of shame, a feeling of guilt, that exerted a constant pressure to celebrate brave Ghetto fighters and partisans and noble peasants who risked their lives to save Jews, rather than expose the overwhelming majority who were at best indifferent or actively tried to kill them.

But even worse than faulty or distorted recollections were those unfettered by personal experience at all. These writers of fiction were attracted to “the bizarre, to the exceptional, to the speculative and—far worse—to the perverted.” Appelfeld does not give an example, but I will: the Grand Guignol and inauthentic horror in The Painted Bird.

Do not think that Appelfeld exempts his own work from such criticism. On the one hand, “memory itself proved to be the enemy of my writing.” But when he turned to imagination, his poetry and fiction consisted mainly of sentimental excess and cries to God. Caught between a memory that failed him and an imagination he could not trust, he came to the turning point when he stopped writing about himself and instead focused on a Jewish girl with similar experiences. “Miraculously, as though with a magic wand, my compulsive memory was removed” and in its place came a redefinition of memory itself: not so much recollection, or thoughts that could be put in words, but certain sights, sounds, smells, colors, sensations, what, significantly, Hoffmann called “quickly changing pictures and impressions.”

Then, in the place of actual memory came the freedom to experience, or re-experience, what we can call privileged moments: something as simple, Appelfeld tells us, as a few twigs floating on the surface of a pond, the sun on them, the way they shiver in the wind and turn, and turn again, on the current. In such moments, and in their recollection, one may undergo a feeling of enchantment that Appelfeld calls “true memory,” or “inner memory,” or “a warm emotion.” (Here we should very much think of such moments, such recapturings—a madeleine in a teaspoon, an uneven paving stone, a few notes from a sonata—in Proust, who has been neglected as one of Appelfeld’s masters.) Once in possession of “inner memory,” Appelfeld was able to write not “what happened but what had to have happened.” That is say, his work, moved from history to art, not only to his Tzili, the Story of a Life but to all the other wonderful novels as well.

***

But we have yet to answer fully the question: why no A Child of Our Time? The answer may be in another Appelfeld book that, like Tzili, is called A Story of a Life. This is less an autobiography than what Appelfeld called it, “segments of contemplation and memory,” just as Beyond Despair is called “reflections and feelings,” or, elsewhere, “a series of sensations and images and above all emotions.” In that non-autobiography Appelfeld says what I think any sensitive reader might have deduced from his entire oeuvre: that, in fact, about those six years of war, “I don’t remember, and that’s the whole truth.”

Continue reading: Wonder

My first encounter with the real Poland took place a decade ago when I was invited to the Warsaw Book Fair. I remember feeling surprise when I walked out of the airport, a reaction I couldn’t account for at the moment. Later, I realized that I had been surprised that the Warsaw spread before me was alive in Technicolor, that the roads were full of cheap Japanese cars, not horse-drawn carriages, and yes, also that most of the people I saw were utterly clean-shaven.

Over the past decade, I traveled to Poland almost every year. I kept getting invitations to visit and, although I had generally been cutting down on flying, I found it hard to refuse the Poles. Although most of my family had perished under horrendous circumstances there, Poland was also the place where they had lived and thrived for generations, and my attraction to that land and its people was almost mystic. I went looking for the house my mother was born in and found a bank there. I went to another house where she had spent a year of her life and found that it was now a grassy field. Strangely enough, I didn’t feel frustrated or sad, and even took pictures of both sites. True, I would rather have found a house instead of a bank or a field. But a bank, I thought, was better than nothing.

During my last visit to Poland a few weeks ago, for a book festival in another part of the country, a charming photographer named Elzbieta Lempp asked if she could take my picture. I agreed happily. She photographed me in a café where I was waiting for my reading to take place, and when I returned to Israel, I found that she had emailed me a copy of the picture. It was a black-and-white shot of me talking to a tall, mustached man. Behind us, out of focus, was an old building. Everything in the photograph seemed to be taken not from reality, but from my childhood imaginings of Poland. Even the expression on my face looked Polish and frighteningly serious. I stared at the image. If I could have unfrozen my photographed self from his pose, he could have walked right out of the frame and actually found the house where my mother was born. If he were brave enough, he might even have knocked on the door. And who knows who would have opened it for him: the grandmother or grandfather I never knew, maybe even a smiling little girl who had no idea what the cruel future had in store for her. I stared at the picture for quite a while, until my 5-year-old son came into the room and saw me sitting there, eyes glued to the computer screen. “How come that picture has no colors?” he asked. “It’s magic,” I smiled and ruffled his hair.

Translated by Sondra Silverston

This kind of traumatic awakening comes to everyone, of course, but for a Jewish child learning about the Holocaust it comes early and in an especially personal form. In David Bezmozgis’ scandalous, compassionate story “An Animal to the Memory,” a Hebrew school student is punished for wrecking a display on Holocaust Remembrance Day; the story ends with the rabbi holding the child in a painful grip and shouting, “Now, maybe you understand what it is to be a Jew.” Not since Philip Roth’s “The Conversion of the Jews” has a writer so economically expressed the sense that initiation into Jewishness means the infliction of pain—a pain that can’t be rejected, like most parental impositions, as gratuitous or neurotic, but that history forces us to acknowledge is necessary and true.

To grow up into a world in which the Holocaust was possible is a difficult burden. No wonder, then, that readers have always been drawn to stories of children who grew up during the Holocaust itself. When it comes to exploitatively sentimental works like the movie Life Is Beautiful, the appeal of a child-centered story can seem cynical: The suffering of the innocent is a surefire way of delivering an emotional charge. But the most serious books about the Holocaust are also disproportionately about young people, from The Diary of Anne Frank to Imre Kertész’s Fatelessness to Louis Begley’s Wartime Lies. Even fraudulent memoirists like Benjamin Wilkomirski and Misha Defonseca pay a twisted tribute to the power of the genre by inventing Holocaust childhoods for themselves.

Two novels, above all, helped to establish the moral authority of the child’s perspective on the Holocaust. Night, by Elie Wiesel, was first published in France in 1958; seven years later, Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird appeared in the United States. Both writers were child survivors of the Holocaust—Wiesel was deported at 15 from Romania to Auschwitz, while Kosinski, born in 1933, lived in hiding with his family in Nazi-occupied Poland. Both men drew on these early experiences in their books, producing works that were widely read as factual autobiographies, even though they were technically novels and employed clearly novelistic techniques.

Yet as Ruth Franklin points out in her superb recent study A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction, the reputations of the two books, and of their authors, could not be more dramatically different today. Night marked the beginning of Wiesel’s long career as a public sage, a living reminder of the moral and political lessons of the Holocaust; in 1986, he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Thanks in part to its brevity and simplicity of style, Night has been a staple of high-school reading lists for decades. In 2006, the book won a new generation of readers when it was selected for Oprah’s Book Club, sitting atop the best-seller list for a year and a half.

Kosinski, on the other hand, fell dramatically from grace in the last decade of his life, dragging The Painted Bird down with him. Always a mysterious and theatrical man, he became embroiled in accusations that he had not lived the experiences in his book, despite his claims that “every incident is true.” What’s more, it began to be whispered that Kosinski had not even written his books, but employed teams of assistants to turn his Polish into stylish English prose. When Kosinski took his own life in 1991, it was seen less as a belated martyrdom—as in the case of another Holocaust writer, Primo Levi—than as the aftermath of scandal.

If someone handed you copies of Night and The Painted Bird and asked you to predict, strictly on the basis of reading them, which book’s author would end in sainthood and which in scandal, the answer would be all too easy. Wiesel’s book is lucid, convincing, heartbreaking, morally serious, and explicitly Jewish; Kosinski’s is shadowy, dreamlike, grossly exaggerated, bizarrely erotic, and leaves the Jewishness of its protagonist a standing mystery. Night, one might say, represents the superego of Holocaust fiction, while The Painted Bird is its roiling id. But this very difference is what makes it so revelatory to read the books side by side—and to discover how much they have in common as primers on a world defined by the Holocaust.

***

One of the chief ambitions of the modern novel was expressed by Stendhal, almost 200 years ago, in The Red and the Black: “A novel, gentlemen, is a mirror carried along a highway. Sometimes it reflects to your view the azure of the sky, sometimes the mire of the puddles on the road.” When he wrote this manifesto for realism, Stendhal was on the defensive; he was urging the reader who objected to his immoral story to blame not the novelist but the world he reflected, in which evil could flourish. When a survivor writes a novel about the Holocaust, however, the defense is no longer necessary: No one thinks to blame Wiesel or Kosinski for depicting the horrors they lived through. On the contrary, now it is the absolute, unblemished clarity of the mirror that becomes a moral imperative. The more detailed and unstylized picture a Holocaust novel presents, the more likely we are to trust it.

It’s unnerving, on a gut level, the juxtaposition of these accounts of survival (and, inevitably, also some stories of not surviving) with recipes for comfort food. Recipes Remembered includes traditional preparations of foods like kreplach, noodle kugel, and gefilte fish; dishes that were family favorites (Romanian survivor Gita Rothman contributed a sour cream strudel with loukoum filling), and recipes from lost homelands. Some of the foods featured became unforgettable because the people consuming them were starving; others didn’t become staples until long after the war.

From Hersh’s description of Polish survivor Regina Schmidt Finer’s recipe for kluskies, or potato dumplings, as “the little black dress of potato dishes” to former New York City Mayor Ed Koch’s blurb extolling, “All the recipes in this book are wonderful!” Recipes Remembered is characterized by a kind of generic uplift, familiar from other earnest attempts to balance the horrors of history with survivors’ astonishing fortitude and to translate that into hope for the future.

Hersh’s book is not the first to explicitly tie recipes to Holocaust remembrance. In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy From the Women of Terezin, edited by Cara de Silva, came out in 1996, and Holocaust Survivor Cookbook: Collected From Around the World, which Joanne Caras self-published, came in 2007. Both books turn to recipes as authentic artifacts from the same painful chapter, and they champion them as a means of remembrance and testaments to survival. De Silva contributed her own laudatory blurb to Recipes Remembered, while Caras has argued for the superior authenticity of her own book, which she describes as “a world mitzvah project.” (Like with Hersh’s Recipes Remembered the proceeds from Caras’ book went to Jewish charities.)

Hersh’s version certainly has the greatest reach, and its popularity is a sign that, amid no shortage of carefully packaged ways to Never Forget, people are hungry for something that offers tangible insight into the experience of Holocaust survival and fresh ways to consider their own relationship to it. And in some ways Recipes Remembered is a fitting tribute, making the point that memories live on through the senses and imbuing the storied experience of Holocaust survival with relatable specifics: Meeting a future spouse in a displaced persons camp. Being sheltered and ultimately saved by a kind priest. Poppyseed cookies. As Hersh explains in the introduction, putting together the book was a process of discovery. “They became ‘my’ survivors,” she writes, noting that she spoke to every contributor, creating “my connection to the past and my reason to optimistically embrace the future.” She explains that her project was driven by curiosity and a general desire to pay tribute to the survivor community, rather than a specific personal connection to the Holocaust.

There’s no question that there’s awkwardness to a book that celebrates food against the backdrop of a historical trauma in which millions of people were starving. But as I paged through it, I found the specific source of my discomfort harder to pin down. It’s certainly not that I’m worried about ruined appetites. Some of the meals we remember most vividly may not have been remarkable in and of themselves; it’s the experience of them that resonates and turns even basic flavors into the kernels of indelible memories. If anything, struggle sharpens one’s senses, and hardship, or even just stories about it, can actually make certain foods more palatable, deepening our experience of eating. Here, though, it’s hard to pay attention to the recipes in light of the heartbreaking stories being presented with them. In this complicated cookbook, is the food supposed to be beside the point?

Here’s Hersh, introducing a story of survival from Hanna Kleiner Wechsler, a preface to her recipe for strawberry-filled blintzes:

Those willing to share their stories have an amazing spirit, an outlook on life that inspires and a perspective we can all benefit from. Hanna began our conversation by saying, “If you overcome this, you can do anything. There are seven wonders in the world, I consider my survival the eighth.” After speaking with her, and getting to know her well, I would have to agree!

It’s also a little strange to find that the survivors’ stories, as Hersh imparts them, feel like recipes themselves. They follow a formula, each starting by taking stock of where a person has come from, moving on to account for his or her losses, and then concluding with a tally of how many children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren have resulted from that one survival. “From this sorrow that I went through,” says Polish survivor Sonya Oshman, leading into a recipe for spaghetti with onion and tomato sauce, “God compensated me with two wonderful children and four beautiful grandchildren.” It’s clear from these standard finishes that Hersh asked for that tally, which is poignant by definition, but frustrating in its blanket use as a happy ending to a rather grim equation. The aura of optimism here is genuine, and arguably necessary to make the pairing of stories and recipes at all palatable. But as an editorial voice, the life-affirming tone makes the book feel a little canned—and evasive.

Despite the book’s cheerfulness, it’s clear that the pleasure of its recipes is meant to be derived largely from their difficulty—not the level of skill required to prepare them, but the fraught histories that cling to them. As delicious as these dishes may be, they’re meant to be appreciated because of what the people who prepared them lived through. That readers will synthesize these threads of cooking and remembering is the not-so-subtle hope behind all the warm sentiment.

It’s hard to imagine an uplifting cookbook coming out of other historical traumas, ones perhaps less well digested by the culture at large. I suspect that a “Holocaust cookbook” (as I perhaps inevitably began to refer to Recipes Remembered) is only permissible after enough years have passed and we’ve moved through more straightforward kinds of reckoning and commemoration. But while the format of this act of remembrance is novel, its tone is not. The book’s earnestness makes me want to roll my eyes, not because I think we’re past the point of needing a push to remember the Holocaust but because we still need one badly, and Recipes Remembered seems to promise a kind of complexity that it doesn’t deliver.

Regardless of how carefully we outline the narratives for others, we don’t have full control over the stories and facts that stick to our treasured dishes, or the recollections that surface as we prepare and share and savor them. Though all of us survive in some way because of food, the stories that live on do so because we choose to keep telling them. And unlike the care and precision required to bake a perfect honey cake, those stories tend to hit harder when they don’t follow a recipe.

CORRECTION, October 18: In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy From the Women of Terezin was published in 1996, not 2006. This error has been corrected.

The real “end of the Holocaust,” he argues, is the transformation of it into a lesson about the “triumph of the human spirit” or some such affirmation. Rosenfeld, the founder and former director of the Jewish studies program at Indiana University, which has made itself a major center of Jewish publishing and learning, is a mainstream scholar who has seen the flaw in mainstream Holocaust discourse. He has made it his mission to rescue the Holocaust from the Faustian bargain Jews have made with history and memory, the Faustian bargain that results when we trade the specifics of memory, the Jewishness of the Holocaust, and the Jew-hatred that gave it its rationale and identity, for the weepy universalism of such phrases as “the long record of man’s inhumanity to man.”

The impulse to find the silver lining is relentless, though. Suffering and grief must be transformed into affirmation, and the bleak irrecoverable fate of the victims must be given a redemptive aspect for those of us alive. In fact it’s an insult to the dead to rob their graves to make ourselves feel better. One recent manifestation Rosenfeld has shrewdly noticed is the way there has been a subtle shift in the popular representation of the Holocaust—a shift in the attention once given to the murdered victims to comparatively uplifting stories of survivors, of the “righteous gentiles,” of the scarce “rescuers,” and the even scarcer “avengers,” e.g., Quentin Tarantino’s fake-glorious fictional crew.

Rosenfeld is not afraid to contend with the fact that, as he writes, “with new atrocities filling the news each day and only so much sympathy to go around, there are people who simply do not want to hear any more about the Jews and their sorrows. There are other dead to be buried, they say.” The sad, deplorable, but, he says, “unavoidable” consequence of what may be the necessary limits of human sympathy is that “the more successfully [the Holocaust] enters the cultural mainstream, the more commonplace it becomes. A less taxing version of a tragic history begins to emerge, still full of suffering, to be sure, but a suffering relieved of many of its weightiest moral and intellectual demands and, consequently easier to be … normalized.”

Normalized? The Holocaust as one more instance in the long chronicle of “man’s inhumanity to man”? Rosenfeld’s book offers a welcome contrarian take on the trend. Yes, we’ve had enough, as Rosenfeld points out, of museums that cumulatively obscure memory in a fog of well-meaning but misleading inspirational brotherhood-of-man rhetoric. We’ve had enough of films like the execrable Oscar-winning Life Is Beautiful and the well-intentioned but misguided Schindler’s List, with its sad lack of self-awareness that a happy ending, celebrating a Christian rescuer and some lucky Jewish survivors, is woefully off base. We’ve had enough of phony-memoir love stories, and we’ve had enough of the way a genuine tragic heroine and victim of Nazi death camps like Anne Frank is mendaciously turned into a spokeswoman for the “goodnesss of man.”

What we haven’t had enough of is a careful consideration of the implications of the Holocaust for the nature of human nature. As George Steiner told me (for my book, Explaining Hitler), “the Holocaust removed the re-insurance from human hope”—the psychic safety net we imagine marked the absolute depth of human nature. The Holocaust tore through that net heading for hell. Human nature could be—at the promptings of a charismatic and evil demagogue, religious hate, and so-called “scientific racism”—even worse than we imagined. No one wants to hear that. We want to hear uplifting stories about that nice Mr. Schindler. We want affirmations!

And the fact that it was not just one man but an entire continent that enthusiastically pitched in or stood by while 6 million were murdered: Doesn’t that call for us to spend a little time re-thinking what we still reverently speak of as “European civilization”? Or to investigate the roots of that European hatred? How much weight do the Holocaust museums give to the two millennia of Christian Jew-hatred, murderous pogroms, blood libels, and other degradations? Or do they prefer to focus on “righteous gentiles” in order to avoid offending their gentile hosts?

And for all their “reaching out” and “teachable moments,” how much do the Holocaust museums and Holocaust curricula connect the hatred of the recent past with contemporary exterminationist Jew-hatred, the vast numbers of people who deny the first, but hunger for a second, Holocaust? It’s a threat some fear even to contemplate—the potential destruction of the 5 million Jews of Israel with a single well-placed nuclear blast—a nightmarish but not unforseeable possibility to which Rosenfeld is unafraid to devote the final section of his book.

It’s something I speculated about in the Tablet Magazine excerpt from my book How the End Begins. It’s something spoken of eloquently by Imre Kertész, one of the writers Rosenfeld wishes to rescue from the “end of the Holocaust.” (Only two novels by this Hungarian survivor of Nazism and Stalinist oppression, a 2002 Nobel Prize winner, have been translated, a situation I would like to formally petition some serious-minded publisher to remedy forthwith.)

“Before Auschwitz,” Kertesz writes, “Auschwitz was unimaginable. That is no longer so today. Because Auschwitz in fact occurred, it has now been established in our imaginations as a firm possibility. What we are able to imagine, especially because it once was, can be again.” I wonder what our dedicated affirmationists who once disdainfully mocked concerns about a second Holocaust would say to Kertesz.

The best thing on MetaMaus I’ve read so far comes, unsurprisingly, from The New Republic’s Ruth Franklin, author of a fine study whose primary insistence is that a myopic obsession with getting the actual facts of specific Holocaust stories exactly right frequently gets in the way of appreciating the artful depictions of larger, more important, sometimes detail-immune truths about the overall event. (I wrote about Franklin’s book last year.) “What MetaMaus makes clear,” Franklin argues, “is that Maus, like the works of W.G. Sebald, exists somewhere outside of the genres as they are normally defined: We might call it ‘testimonially based Holocaust representation.’ But no matter what it is called, it gives the lie to the critics of Holocaust literature (as well as certain writers of it) who have insisted that either everything must be true or nothing is true.”

There’s also this great story:

The question of how truthful Maus can be is perfectly illustrated by the minor kerfuffle that broke out when the second section of the book was published in hardcover and promptly made its way to the New York Times best-seller list—in the fiction column. In a letter to the New York Times Book Review (reproduced, naturally, in MetaMaus), Spiegelman protested: “I shudder to think how David Duke … would respond to seeing a carefully researched work based closely on my father’s memories of life in Hitler’s Europe and in the death camps classified as fiction.” One editor reportedly responded, “Let’s go out to Spiegelman’s house and if a giant mouse answers the door, we’ll move it to the nonfiction side of the list!” But the Times, following Pantheon (which had listed it as both history and memoir), ruled with Spiegelman.

In a totally different context, I noted, “For all the artistic liberty Spiegelman takes, Maus is entirely faithful to what happened. The Jews are not anthropomorphic mice, as is frequently said; rather, they are Jewish men and women, who are merely drawn as mice. (They have tails, but they do not have a yen for cheese.)”

We reserve the highest place for artists who make us see things we think we know in a completely different way. Spiegelman literally made us see the Holocaust differently, and so the 25th anniversary of his achievement is something to celebrate.

Art Spiegelman’s Genre-Defying Holocaust Work, Revisited [TNR]
Related: Higher Truth [Tablet Magazine]

“We try to do the least amount of conservation on an object,” Bisaga, 31, says in Polish, describing how she approaches her daily work. “They are damaged, and their state is telling of their history.”

Bisaga, who lives in Oswiecim, Poland, is one of 11 conservators who work meticulously to preserve the past at the former concentration camp established by the Nazis in occupied Poland during World War II. Bisaga has been working at Auschwitz since 2003.

At the museum, and particularly in this conservation department, which handles fragile items like prisoners’ artwork and thousands of documents, shoes, and suitcases, preservation is seen as an ethical as well as a practical issue. But these conservators must also wrestle with questions about the proper role of restoration. “People who come here don’t want to see a replica of how something might have once looked,” says Ewa Cyrulik, another conservator. “They are looking for the original condition, as if the objects exist as guardians of history.”

Conservation work at Auschwitz is unique; while some basic rules of conservation do apply, others defiantly do not. And threading that needle is an ethical conundrum the conservators face daily. “It’s an experiment in doing something unbelievable, but we have to guide ourselves this way, and work in an orthodox way,” Cyrulik says. “Then we have a chance that these objects will affect the people who come here, that they’ll see these original, historical objects.”

A new conservation department, with new workshops, opened at Auschwitz in 2005. Its budget last year was 11.3 million euros, around $15 million. The Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation is seeking to raise an additional 120 million euros in a two-year campaign ending this year for an endowment to fund future preservation work. So far about 85 million euros, or $122.5 million, has been committed, according to Pawel Sawicki, a spokesman for the museum and a Polish radio journalist, including a subsidy from the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and a grant from the European Infrastructure and Environment Operating Program.

When Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet army in January 1945, it covered 40 square kilometers, with three camps, sub camps, and an additional area that was supervised by SS administration. “There were some voices [saying] that it should be completely dismantled because this memory is so difficult,” says Sawicki. But a group of former prisoners began talks with the local government to keep the former concentration camp intact as a memorial. The Polish government began initiatives to preserve the site, giving the Ministry of Culture and Art the authority to preserve parts of it. The ministry named former prisoner Tadeusz Wasowicz as the head of the Protection Board, and in 1946 work began on creating a museum.

Since then, the fragile future of artifacts in the museum’s possession has been constantly discussed. Among the artifacts are 110,000 prisoners’ shoes, 3,800 suitcases, 6,000 works of art, and, often most harrowing for visitors, the pile of hair collected from the heads of 30,000 murdered women.

Beyond the artifacts, one of the impending projects is the preservation of 45 brick barracks at Auschwitz-Birkenau’s former women’s camp. Environmental conditions are viewed as the biggest barrier to preservation. “This is very difficult because protecting a standing building is relatively easier than protecting a ruin from all-natural conditions, atmosphere, rain, and cold, which is the biggest threat here,” Sawicki says.

The foundations themselves are also fragile. “The structures in Birkenau were built by prisoners and were not built to last 70 years,” he says. “They were built from weak materials; these are weak constructions. And the fact that they are still standing today is a miracle, and this is more and more difficult to upkeep them and preserve them.”

For all the rigorous ethical standards that guide their everyday work, conservators believe they have a bigger mission than daily preservation. “We need to conserve objects that speak of the many histories of this place,” says Cyrulik. “We maintain that history for the future. Maybe in some way, with our work, this will protect someone, and in the future, these things won’t happen again.”

Suzanne Rozdeba, a freelance journalist and graduate student at New York University, was a 2011 participant in the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics.

On Watch the Throne, his new album with Jay-Z—which dropped on iTunes Sunday morning—one track, “Who Gon Stop Me,” begins with Kanye rapping, “This is something like the Holocaust/Millions of our people lost.” Like because of Hitler?

Kanye has played with overstating the tragedy of the black experience in America—or, some would say, with arguing that what are commonly taken as overstatements of that experience are in fact apt—before. “I treat the cash the way government treats AIDS,” he rapped on “Gorgeous,” the second track on last year’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. “I won’t be satisfied till all my n***as get it. Get it?” (Get it?)

Still, to compare yourself both to Hitler and to Hitler’s Jewish victims in the span of a few hours takes plenty of chutzpah. Maybe Drake isn’t the most Jewish member of his feud with Kanye after all? In a subsequent verse of “Who Gon Stop Me,” Kanye compares himself to the sportscasters Marv Albert and Howard Cosell, two extremely Jewish men. Drake, speak up!

How Hated? Kanye West Likens Himself to Hitler [ArtsBeat]
Earlier: Jewish Rapper’s Bickering Beef With Kanye

Commentary’s Jonathan S. Tobin has an excellent post defending them. “While Wagner’s anti-Semitic screeds are today read only by scholars, his life-affirming music dramas continue to be enjoyed by audiences around the world who know little or nothing of his politics,” he argues. “Those who seek to project the composer’s racial and political opinions onto the broad canvas of his myth-based theater works are inevitably reduced to strained analogies and symbolism that never holds up to scrutiny.” Besides, if Israelis playing Wagner in Bayreuth isn’t a wonderful f-you, then what is? “Wagner and his Nazi relatives must be spinning in their graves at the mere thought of it!” Tobin remarks correctly (it sure beats just eating smoked fish). As the orchestra’s director put it, “Every one of us has some relatives who were killed in the Holocaust. But to be here in Bayreuth is a victory for us.”

As for the choice of piece? Wagner wrote the Siegfried Idyll as a birthday present for his wife. It’s really quite lovely. It’s even been featured in popular culture recently. Can I resist? Can I resist posting the following? No, I don’t think I can.

Israeli Orchestra Breaks Taboo, Performs Wagner in Germany [AP/Haaretz]
Breaking the Taboo on Wagner [Commentary]
Earlier: Our Revenge on Wagner

Vilnius—“the Jerusalem of Lithuania,” and only increasingly central to Jewish thought during the 19th-century Haskalah—experienced its first pogrom in 1939 and 1940, when the Soviet Union’s secret police deported 21,000 political and social elites (including many Jews) and killed thousands more. Next was the 24,000 Jews killed by Polish and Lithuanian nationalists backed by the Nazis, who in 1941 invaded in violation of the deal they had inked with the U.S.S.R. two years earlier. Only then came the systematic slaughter of nearly 100,000 people from in and around Vilnius, including (and what the desecrated memorial stands for) roughly 72,000 Jews, by the Nazis and collaborating Lithuanians.

Today, the Lithuanian government has concerns other than publicizing the role of some of their ancestors in the Holocaust, or indeed in publicizing the Holocaust itself. Politically, it casts the U.S.S.R. as Lithuania’s ultimate historical enemy, and is currently after the ex-KGB officer Mikhail Golovatov, who famously commanded a group that killed 13 protesters in 1991; Golovatov was freed from Austrian custody two weeks ago, likely under the pressure of Russia, to which he fled and which wishes to protect its own and pit former Soviet republics like Lithuania against other members of the European Union. Moreover, as Dovid Katz has written in Tablet, “Holocaust obfuscation”—in which the Nazis’ crimes against the Jews are minimized and deliberately blended into the Nazis’ crimes against the Slavs and the Russians’ crimes against everyone—is in vogue in the Baltics; complicating matters is that a not-insignificant proportion of the secret policemen who carried out the first attacks on Vilnius, in 1939 and 1940, were Jews.

“But indubitable Western ignorance of Soviet crimes is no excuse for neglecting the historical record of the tragedy of Lithuanian Jews,” Snyder concludes. “Horrible as the Soviet occupation was, the largest group of genocide victims in Lithuania were the Jews murdered by the Germans with the help of the local population.” One more reason to tell your friends about the vandalism 70 years later of the memorial to the 72,000 Jews murdered by the Nazis in a forest outside Vilinius.

Neglecting the Lithuanian Holocaust [NYRB]
Related: The Crime of Surviving [Tablet Magazine]
Devastated [Tablet Magazine]

Two years later, this desperate and confused mood was given powerful literary expression in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. There had indeed been a plot against America not long before; but in Roth’s historical novel, the plot in question was not hatched by Muslim terrorists. It was the work of isolationists, right-wingers, and anti-Semites, led by Charles Lindbergh, whom Roth imagined winning the election of 1940 and launching America on a path to fascism and a domestic Holocaust. By rights, the book ought to have been called The Plot Against the Jews. But Roth, like Hentoff, had performed a strange inner displacement. The actual present threat to Jews, from Muslims and Arabs in the Middle East, had been translated into the old historic threat to Jews—the fear of Nazis and the Holocaust.

That fear was not reasoned or reasonable, and it received a timely rebuke from Leon Wieseltier, who noted in the New Republic that the only Jews actually gathered in Times Square were there to buy tickets to The Producers—that is, to laugh at farce Nazis. But the readiness of otherwise levelheaded people, in that post-9/11 world, to give in to the instinct of fear made clear just how deeply rooted that instinct remains in contemporary Jewish life.

Memories of that strange time came back recently as I read several new books dealing with the experience of “ordinary Germans” in the Holocaust. Reading about the Holocaust always involves a conscious patrolling of the inner boundary between fear and reason; that’s one reason why it is so taxing. Reading history of any kind requires a negotiation between the duty of empathy and the instinct of self-preservative withdrawal, all the more so when it is tragic history (and, as the celebrated British historian Edward Gibbon said, the history that gets written down is usually “the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind”).

But when the history in question is as recent as the Holocaust, and as threatening, and as overwhelmingly, unimaginably cruel, the negotiation can turn into a panicky tug-of-war. The claim of the dead on the remembrance and grief of the living is so vast that it puts us permanently in the wrong: Not only can we never rectify the past, we can never sufficiently attend to it or atone for it. One way of dealing with this guilt is to elide the difference between the Jewish situation today and in the past: to say that Times Square is a potential Drancy or Westerbork.

Yet simply to dismiss the possibility of a “second Holocaust,” to say confidently that it can’t happen here, is to court inner doubts and reproaches. What could be more shameful than to follow in the footsteps of those German Jews we read about so often, with their super-patriotism and super-assimilation—attempts at camouflage that were doubly disgraceful for being so totally ineffective? This dialectic of fear and guilt and suspicion makes it very difficult to see the Holocaust objectively—which is one reason, perhaps, why many Jewish scholars have devoted their careers to doing exactly that.

For American Jews, the problem of the “ordinary German” is especially troubling, because it brings us directly to the darkest, most unassuageable suspicions about Jewish vulnerability. The most controversial books about the Holocaust, from Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, have been the ones that try to explain how the Germans—citizens of an advanced society, famous for its culture and education—could be led in the space of a few years to commit a genocide of the Jews. For if this people could do it, the strong implication is that under the right (or, better, the wrong) circumstances, any people could. And the history of the world since 1945 seems to bear out this implication. Cambodians, Serbs, and Rwandans have all shown that people do not have to be Nazis, or anti-Semites, in order to slaughter their neighbors.

Yet nobody looks into his heart and sees an Eichmann lurking there. And this inability to match up our self-knowledge with our historical knowledge is the most disconcerting thing of all. Are we genuinely different from those millions of people, in the past and in other places, who did and do engage in mass murder? What justifies this moral self-confidence, and can we be sure that a majority of our fellow-citizens share it? And if not, if we are as blind to our own capabilities as any ordinary German, then might we ourselves, in the right circumstances, engage in exactly the same behaviors that we condemn in the Germans—their indifference, complicity, active participation in evil? In that case, how can any of us be guiltless, or safe?

***

The most concise and insidious way to pose this question is with a photograph. In The Druggist of Auschwitz: A Documentary Novel (Farrar Straus Giroux, $27), Dieter Schlesak reproduces a snapshot taken at a swimming pool in the Romanian city of Sighisoara in 1928. It shows a group of five people in bathing suits, including a stocky man named Victor Capesius and, sitting right next to him, a smiling, round-faced young girl named Ella Boehm, both of them there for swimming lessons. They knew each other slightly: Capesius, a pharmacist, was a sales representative for the pharmaceutical company Bayer, in which capacity he would call on Ella’s father, a doctor. Sometimes he would give the girl little presents: “Capesius was sweet to me,” she recalled later.

In May 1944, Ella and her mother Gisela were among the hundreds of thousands of Jews deported from Hungary to Auschwitz, after the previously safe country was occupied by German troops. When they reached the camp, having survived a four-day journey in a cattle car with no food or water, they saw that a group of SS officers was standing on the ramp making selections among the prisoners. Ostensibly, they were asking the prisoners “whether they could walk or not, in which case they would then go by car.” Of course, the selections were really for the gas chambers, and anyone who claimed to be too weak to walk was immediately killed. “Among the commission members,” Ella testified later, “I recognized Dr. Capesius, the pharmacist from Sighisoara, and I was so surprised to see him there.”

The Boehms were not the only ones to find their neighbor on the ramp at Auschwitz. Another prisoner, Adrienne Krausz, was another daughter of a doctor who recognized Capesius. “When my mother saw the officer carrying out the selection process,” she remembered, “she said, ‘Well, that’s Dr. Capesius … ’ I think he recognized my mother as well, because he waved at her. My mother and sister were sent to the left by him, into the gas, but I went to the right and I survived. Later I met a friend who had been with my father during the selection. He told me that father had said hello to Capesius and asked him where his own wife and 11-year-old daughter were. Capesius supposedly answered: ‘I’m sending you to the same place where your wife and daughter are, it’s a good place.’ ”

Stories like this suggest why Schlesak made a minor figure like Victor Capesius the focus of his “documentary novel” about the Holocaust. In order to be willing to send human beings to their deaths, it would seem necessary first to dehumanize them, to see them as enemies or statistics—or a problem requiring a final solution. That was the attitude of another doctor at Auschwitz, a fanatical Nazi named Fritz Klein. When asked how he could reconcile his actions at the camp with his Hippocratic oath, Klein replied, “Out of respect for human life I excise an ulcerated appendix; the Jews are the ulcerated appendix in the body of Europe.”

Continue reading: The Reluctant Accomplice. Or view as a single page.

Released this week, the film comes out 69 years, nearly to the day, after the Jews of Paris were rounded up and sent to the Velodrome d’Hiver, a former cycling arena, from which they would be transported to Auschwitz and other concentration camps. Novel and film alike revolve around the stories of two women. The first is the young Sarah Starzynski, a 9-year-old Jewish girl who locks her brother in a secret closet as French police remove the family from their Marais apartment. The other is Julia Jarmond, an American journalist living in Paris who, 60 years later, prepares to move into a newly renovated apartment owned by her French husband’s family. As Julia explores the Vel d’Hiv roundup as part of a work assignment, she realizes the notorious event’s legacy hits, quite literally, closer to home than she had ever imagined: The apartment in which she lives used to be Sarah’s. Fixated on her new home’s former tenants, Julia traces Sarah’s life journey, which eventually took her from France to America. With each secret Julia uncovers, another layer of a complex and devastating tragedy is revealed.

The film’s dark storyline is brought to life by the vivid images and moving scenes that transport the viewer from the velodrome, filthy and unsanitary and crowded, across France, and, finally to Brooklyn, where Sarah, having survived the Holocaust, ends up. Watching Julia trying to piece together the mystery of Sarah’s life, one can be excused for getting a bit frustrated. Even though the film takes place in 2002, there seems to be no Google in site—one or two quick consultations with the omnipresent search engine would have saved Julia, played by the majestic Kristin Scott Thomas, a few schleps around the world. But there is an additional—and emotional—layer to the film, that makes such unlikelihoods seem trivial, a layer that invites the viewers to shatter their own ignorance about the relatively obscure horrors of the Vel d’Hiv.

When her novel was published, in 2007, de Rosnay spoke to Tablet Magazine’s previous incarnation, Nextbook.org, about the shock of discovering the story of the deportation. “I said to myself: ‘I have to write about this, but how?’ ” she said. “I’m not a historian, I’m not Jewish, I don’t have any legitimate reason to write about this except that I’m French, and that I’m appalled.” This precise sentiment—the horror at discovering the depth of atrocities that are recent yet largely unmentioned—is what drives Julia, her modern protagonist, to seek more information about Jews that were rounded up. The shattering of innocence generates much of the film’s tension: What do you do once you learn of the monstrosity?

De Rosnay first heard of the Vel d’Hiv in 1995, when France’s then-president, Jacques Chirac, acknowledged his nation’s complicit accountability in the wartime fate of French Jews: Her response was to create a palatable-yet-horrific story of a child forced to confront adult truths. As with any cinematic adaptation, elements of the novel have been changed for the big screen. Most notably, while in the novel Julia had never heard of Vel d’Hiv before being assigned to report on the 60th anniversary of the roundup, in the film she lectures two young and oblivious journalists about this forgotten bit of history. It’s a significant shift: The movie is aimed mostly at young viewers, and Julia’s speech seems to deliver the poignant message that age does not preclude one from responsibility.

The film’s other protagonist, Sarah, learns this lesson all too harshly. When she decides to hide her brother in a closet, she is forced to make an adult choice, the consequences of which she is far too young to grasp. Her parents berate her for her foolishness, but as she is subjected to the terrors of her reality, it is soon she, and not the adults, who is equipped with what it takes to survive in a transformed world. Sarah has set into motion a course of events that will transform her life and the lives of so many around her, and though she is young, she ultimately controls the narrative. All who encounter the fiercely driven child are transfixed by her prescient understanding of the world.

Though 60 years removed from Sarah’s childhood horrors, the adult Julia, in her role as a journalist, is able to enter the girl’s warped world. But what had been for Sarah a personal drama, becomes for Julia a momentous historical event. Which, de Rosnay admitted, may be too much for some audiences to take. “I never thought it would be published,” de Rosnay said upon the publication of her novel. “I’m not sugarcoating the story. I’m shining this lucid spotlight onto what happened, how the people of Paris closed their eyes. Of course there were people who helped, there were children who got away because they were saved, but the truth is not very pretty to look at from the French side.”

And so many just don’t look. Surprisingly for such a frequently explored, if colossal, subject—the Holocaust—the Vel d’Hiv roundups remain largely unheralded. For young viewers in particular, then, Sarah’s Key is an important account of French Jewry’s recent history. Even as it veers toward more fantastical and implausible plotlines, it is the kind of film that first makes a viewer extremely uncomfortable, and then makes them start thinking. After all, it was a child who best understood how to navigate this dark world.

Glover might find even weirder the ways in which some Jewish summer camps address the Holocaust.

Camp Stone, a Zionist Orthodox camp in Western Pennsylvania, part of the Bnei Akiva movement, might be the most direct. It possesses an unusual set piece—a cattle car, constructed to look like a World War II relic, which the camp dedicated in 2009. The car was the brainchild of Yehuda Rothner, the camp director, and rests on train tracks built from German parts, circa World War II. Sitting on the periphery of the campground, the car contains exhibits created by campers 12 and older; one group hung butterflies commemorating the Terezin poem, “I Never Saw Another Butterfly.” The wooded area around the monument is designed for quiet introspection. The railway tracks, Rothner notes, lead off into the forest, into nowhere. “The lesson of the unit,” he explains, “is that senseless hatred leads into the abyss.”

Yet even if the tracks lead nowhere, the kids’ thoughts are guided in a specific direction. A sign leading to the railcar reads “M’Shoah L’Tekumah,” from Holocaust to rebirth. According to Rothner, that rebirth is the founding of the State of Israel. “Machaneh Stone has one of the highest aliyah rates of any camp,” Rothner says of his alumni. “That’s where they realize that [Israel] is where they need to be.”

At Camp Sternberg in Narrowsburg, N.Y., my summer home for nine years, the Holocaust was invoked on Tisha B’Av, a day of fasting that commemorates the destruction of the Temple. Many former campers recalled watching a Holocaust film to occupy us until the fast was over, but Sternberg’s purpose was not simply to pass the time; the camp leaders wanted us to cry. Specifically, they wanted us to shed tears for the widows in ancient Jerusalem that we hear about in Eichah, the scroll of Lamentations we read on Tisha B’Av. Since the destruction of the Temple was too distant an event for us to connect to, we were told to think about all the calamities in Jewish history, specifically the Holocaust. “If you can’t cry for the destruction of the Beit HaMikdash, then think about the Holocaust,” we were told by camp counselors as we sat on the tarred floor of the gym. “That wouldn’t have happened had the Beit HaMikdash not been destroyed.”

If Sternberg presented the Holocaust as a continuation of Jewish history, then Camp Shomriah takes the opposite tack, emphasizing youth action and responsibility. Shomriah, with locations in Perth, Ontario and Liberty, N.Y., is part of HaShomer HaTzair (“youth guard”) movement, founded in 1913. (Mordechaj Anielewicz, leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, was a member.) On Tisha B’Av, Shomriah campers watched reenactments from tragic eras in Jewish history, ending with the Shoah and the refrain, “Never Again.” Karen Isaacs, 25, a Jewish educator who attended Camp Shomriah into her teens, recalls being told to pretend that the campers were being held captive by the Nazis. “You’re in the Warsaw Ghetto, what are you going to do?” she says the kids were asked.

The campers sensed that one answer was preferred. “You know before you started the simulated conversation that the people who were right were the people who decided to fight back,” she said. At Shomriah, you didn’t want to be the camper who hid in an attic.

Some are skeptical of Holocaust education at summer camp. “It’s interesting that we’ve created these utopias where people belong,” says Rabbi Avi Katz-Orlow, education specialist at the Foundation for Jewish Camp. “But what Holocaust education is reminding people is that we don’t belong in a place.” He wonders if some educators are using the Holocaust because it can be “expedient to say how Jews died as opposed to working with you to figure out how a Jew can live.”

Camp Tawonga, in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains, takes a more integrated approach. The Torah scroll the camp uses during Shabbat services is originally from Czechoslovakia and was stolen by the Nazis. At the start of each camp session, the origins of the scroll are explained to the campers as they sit in an outdoor amphitheater, and the wide-ranging conversation opens up to talk about the history of the trees of neighboring Yosemite, and the Tuolomne River, which runs through the campus, and then back to the history of the bimah, on which rests the rescued scroll. “Using this Torah as a Torah was much more meaningful than looking at it as an artifact in a museum,” said former camper and staffer, Dave Castle, 30.

And, ultimately, what matters is what the campers take away from their summers. Akiko Yonekawa is the former director of Southern California’s Camp Alonim, which doesn’t teach about the Holocaust. “I don’t think Holocaust education asks campers anything about themselves. It asks them to identify with people from the past,” she said. “What does it mean to be 12 on the West Coast?”

This incident, recounted by Tara Zahra in her superb new book The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe’s Families After World War II (Harvard), is almost comic. But it hints at the profound challenges that faced the social workers and psychologists who made it their mission to help the youngest victims of the war. With the best will in the world, how could you gain the trust of children who had spent their youth in a place like Buchenwald? Even the experts, Zahra shows, despaired of the task.

One observer from the UNRRA—the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, the chief agency dealing with postwar displaced persons—noted that the young Holocaust survivors exhibited “poor work attitudes, cheating, lack of respect for personal property of others … extremes of aggressiveness and shyness, and abnormal sex behavior.” Another decided that the boys “were true psychopaths, cold and different by nature, and that this was the reason they were able to survive camp life.” In these inhuman-sounding judgments, we surely hear the desperate frustration of social workers—all Jewish themselves—up against a tragedy too deep to fathom or cure.

What to do about Jewish children after the Holocaust was one of the most intractable problems facing postwar Europe. The standard solutions for displaced children were family reunification, when immediate relatives could be traced, or at least repatriation. But the 175,000 Jewish children who survived the war—out of a prewar population of 1.5 million—had usually lost their entire families; and they had no desire to return to countries where anti-Semitism was still rampant. Jewish survivors congregated in Displaced Persons camps, forbidden to go to Palestine (where the British blocked all Jewish immigration) or America (where harsh immigration laws had the same effect). In the meantime, the birthrate in the DP camps skyrocketed, in a sign of the survivors’ determination to go on living.

Almost every one of those Jewish children had lived through events that the imagination can hardly grasp. Zahra draws on the testimony of Ruth Kluger, who was born in Vienna in 1931; she and her mother were deported to Theresienstadt and then to Auschwitz. On their first night in the camp, Kluger remembered, “My mother explained to me that the electric barbed wire outside was lethal and proposed that she and I should get up and walk into that wire. I thought I hadn’t heard correctly. … I was twelve years old, and the thought of dying, now, without delay, in contortions, by running into electrically charged metal on the advice of my very own mother, whom God had created to protect me, was simply beyond comprehension.”

After the war, Jewish children were not alone in their suffering. As Zahra makes clear in this wide-ranging, exceptionally well-researched study, there wasn’t a country in Europe—victor or vanquished, democratic or fascist or Communist—where children had not been displaced, starved, sickened, or killed in large numbers. In Germany, Allied bombing had destroyed millions of homes, and the invading Red Army had caused millions of civilians to flee; as a result, some 8 million German children were homeless by the time the war ended. So were 6.5 million children in the USSR and more than a million in France.

Even in Britain, which was never invaded by the enemy, half of all schoolchildren had been evacuated from cities during the war, as part of “Operation Pied Piper.” This step was seen as necessary to save children from German bombing, but as Zahra shows, influential child psychologists like Anna Freud and John Bowlby saw evacuation as a potentially life-changing trauma. Indeed, the process of evacuation, as Zahra describes it, sounds horribly ill-considered and unnecessarily cruel. Children, many of them from poor families in London, would arrive in a country town and stand in a group while host parents picked them out: “The scene which ensued was more akin to a cattle- or slave-market than anything else,” one schoolteacher observed.

In Anna Freud’s view, maternal deprivation was a far more serious trauma than bombing: “The war acquires comparatively little significance for children so long as it only threatens their lives. … It becomes enormously significant the moment it breaks up family life and uproots the first emotional attachments of the child within the family group.” In fact, one of Zahra’s claims in The Lost Children is that our current orthodoxies about child-rearing—above all, the emphasis on early “attachment” between mother and child, fostered by breast-feeding, co-sleeping, and constant physical proximity—can be traced to psychologists’ responses to such wartime traumas. Postwar Europe, she writes, was “a moment in which basic ideals of family and childhood were reinvented.”

But it would take a different book, one more strictly focused on cultural and social history, to prove such an ambitious claim. Zahra is really less interested in the history of child psychology than in the ways children, during and after World War II, became proxies for politics and ideology. This could be seen as early as the Spanish Civil War, when both the Republicans and the Nationalists sent children to France for refuge. After Franco’s victory in 1939, the Spanish government demanded that these children be returned, and the debate became a way of continuing the war itself: Leftists and labor unions opposed returning children to fascist Spain, while rightists and the Catholic Church insisted on it. (Imagine the Elián Gonzáles case, multiplied by tens of thousands.) Once France fell under Nazi occupation, Franco sent raiding parties to simply kidnap the children.

After 1945, this kind of ideological battle took place all over Europe. In Poland, the Nazis had made a practice of seizing children whom they deemed Aryan and handing them over to German parents. Naturally the postwar Polish government pressed for the return of these children, seeing the Nazi kidnappings as a tool of genocide. But what if a child had been seized as an infant, and grown up knowing no family but its German foster parents? Would it be in the best interests of the child to return it to Poland, where its biological parents might no longer be alive?

Take the case of Janina and Kazmierz Mackowiak, who were taken from a Polish orphanage during the war, renamed Johanna and Fritz, and given to a childless German couple named Coppenrath. After the war, the Coppenraths wanted to legalize the adoption, but the children were seized and sent back to Poland against their will. They immediately fled and spent two months walking back to Germany to be with the only parents they knew. Did justice require righting a Nazi crime, even at the price of wronging its victims? It’s a question fit for a Greek tragedy, and The Lost Children shows that thousands of similarly insoluble cases arose across the continent.

Every country claimed that it wanted to repatriate its lost children in the children’s own best interest. Many psychologists argued that a Polish child could only thrive in Poland, a Spanish child in Spain. Zahra quotes one relief worker insisting on “how much the children need a country of their own if they are to be psychologically normal and feel ‘like other people.’ ” At the same time, nations also saw children as a crucial geopolitical asset that they could not afford to forfeit. In a postwar Europe where Germany remained the most populous country, France and Poland and Czechoslovakia believed that rapid population growth was a matter of national survival.

Zahra shows that this could lead to bizarre ironies. A year after throwing off German occupation, for instance, the French were encouraging young Germans to immigrate to France, on racial grounds that the Nazis could have approved: “An addition of a reasonable quantity of German blood could be particularly precious … [to] compensate for the excessive flow of Latins and Slavs.” Postwar Czechoslovakia expelled millions of Germans from its borders, creating a huge population deficit, even though many of those expelled were actually the Czech-speaking children of mixed Czech-German marriages.

No people needed to reclaim its surviving children more urgently than the Jews, and this led to its own complications. When Catholic Poles who had sheltered Jewish children during the Holocaust discovered that Jewish relief agencies were willing to pay for their return, what Zahra describes a “a bidding war” broke out. One agency had to pay $1,000 to get the address of a hidden Jewish child. In France, there was the sensational Finaly Affair, in which a Catholic teacher forcibly baptized two Jewish boys under her care, then spirited them away to Spain rather than return them to their aunt.

Jewish children who were reclaimed had to be cared for and educated; and this too, Zahra shows, became a contested issue. Ordinarily, UNRRA social workers preferred to return all refugee children to their parents, when possible. But many Jewish activists argued that it was both psychologically and politically better to place surviving children in group homes or kibbutzim, where the education on offer was frankly Zionist. Zahra quotes one Jewish teacher defending this practice: “Indoctrination may not be good for normal children in normal surroundings. But what is normal here? … A crooked foot needs a crooked shoe.” In the end, Zahra writes, “many UN workers and American authorities came to embrace the Zionist solution for Jewish refugee children.” They were persuaded by the kind of harsh, irrefutable logic another Zionist teacher employed: “The children have nothing, nothing. What should we talk about—the blessings of Poland? They know them. Or the visas for America? They can’t get them. The map of Eretz [Israel] is their salvation.”

• Individual Holocaust survivors who are still seeking benefits from insurance polices find themselves at odds with major Jewish groups and the U.S. government, which considers Germany’s 2000 reparations the final word. [NYT]

• Laura Rozen reports on the Ofer Brothers case, in which a leading Israeli company has been accused by the United States of violating sanctions against Iran, and notes it carries “faint echoes of Iran contra.” [The Envoy]

• An interesting look at the technical advances Iran’s purported nuclear weapons program has made concludes that at some point Israel will likely intervene to stop it. [NYRB]

• Joshua Cohen (who will be joining us for Bloomsday) talks about his newest novel a novel of his that has been reissued. [Aspen Public Radio]

• Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, gives a great interview. [Jewcy]

Coldplay endorsed a song called “Freedom for Palestine,” and, like every other one of their songs, it could maybe have made it onto Pablo Honey, and no more.

Barber and Johnson went into hiding in the attic of [agent Mark] Lepselter’s house in New Jersey. “Lep’s Jewish,” says Barber, “and it was like a reverse Anne Frank thing.” (Here is Barber writ small: He has the wit and smarts to make an Anne Frank allusion and the artlessness to liken himself—an adulterer trying to elude gossip columnists—to a Holocaust victim.)

I, for one, am shocked. I mean, a Jewish sports agent???

Tiki Barber Gets Real [SI]

By the late 1930s, things had changed dramatically. Puerto Barrios’ indigenous charms had been all but eradicated, replaced by filth and destitution. It was inhabited mostly by Afro-Guatemalans and West Indians who worked on the docks for pitiful wages; those with means were advised to get out of town as fast as they could.

It is here that we meet Samuel Berkow, the well-to-do German Jewish bachelor at the center of The Price of Escape, a new novel by David Unger. Berkow arrives in Guatemala from Hamburg, where the Nazi noose had begun to tighten around him. Berkow expects his arrival to mark the beginning of a new and exciting life. Instead, in just three days, Puerto Barrios—with its demons, drunks, and thugs—nearly finishes him off.

Unger, a Guatemala-born, Brooklyn-based writer, speaks with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about the relationship of Samuel Berkow’s history to his own, about the appeal of creating only semi-sympathetic protagonists, and about why most of his relatives refuse to read his work. [Running time: 15:16].

• Turns out some Nazi war criminals remain at large. Maybe. [Slate]

• Michael Tomasky says it is past time for the Obama administration to take a harsher stance against Syria’s Assad regime. [The Daily Beast]

• Careful there, Professor West. [Truthdig]

• Check out Jeopardy! tonight to watch a New Jersey rabbi—and friend of New Jersey Jewish News editor Andrew Silow-Carroll (whom it’s good to have back blogging after a month-long absence)—defend her title. [JustASC/JTA]

• Fred Malek analyzes the GOP field, counts no Jews. [The Hill]

What with Armageddon coming Saturday and all, Jewcy’s Jason Diamond has some advice for the Jews.

III.

Israel Shamir is reported to have a handful of names. The Guardian noted that Magnus Ljunggren, a retired professor of Russian literature at Gothenburg University, claims that Shamir has at least six names: Shamir’s birth name was Izrail Schmerler; in 1992 he became a Swedish citizen and went by Jöran Jermas; and then after he was baptized in the Greek Orthodox Church in Jerusalem he took the name Adam Ermash.

I know one of your names is Jöran Jermas, right?

Yeah, well, I have so many names.

Where does that name come from? Because that’s on your Swedish passport, right?

Ah, eh, you know when people started to attack me I started to be worried about my freedom of movement. One wants to be able to move, so as not being stalked.

So, which is your real name?

Israel Shamir.

What about Izrail Schmerler?

What’s that?

Well, people said that’s your birth name.

That’s something that I really can’t say anything about.

Shamir is a chameleon. As we sat in Moscow last winter, and as he told me how he loved the snow and ice and liked to ice skate in Red Square, he looked Russian. In the picture on his website, where he appears to have a little darker skin and is wearing a red-and-white keffiyeh around his neck, he looks more Palestinian. And I am sure, if he were wearing a kippah while reciting verses from the Talmud in Hebrew that day, I’d think he was Jewish. It is hard to pin down the truth, but Shamir said he was born in Siberia to Jewish parents, moved to Israel in the 1960s, fought in the ’73 war as a paratrooper, and then became a journalist, living in London and working for the BBC. After that, he lived in Japan for a while and then returned to Israel to work for Haartez.

Shamir gave a speech at Tufts University in April 2001 about Arab-Israeli relations. The Tufts student newspaper reported that Shamir said: “Israeli people represent a virus form of a human being because they can live anywhere.” Shortly after, Palestinian rights groups, and two men in particular, Ali Abunimah and Hussein Ibish, sent out a mass email warning about Shamir’s anti-Semitic views disguised as leftist pro-Palestinian activism.

You once described Jews as a virus in human form.

I never did; no, that’s an invention of Jerusalem Post. Yes, I remember when they did it. That’s absolutely a silly thing. And then they quoted it so many times; I did not say that. People accuse me of everything, you know, so I’m used to it.

This goes back to the smear jobs. Why do you think you’re a target?

Well, you know, first of all some things that I say is complicated. And it’s easy for people to make misrepresentations. Maybe because people are unhappy with what I say and they want to smear me so I will look more awful. Why not to say truth, you know? I say things just how they are, you know?

In 2001, Shamir and Norman Finkelstein spoke at Columbia University. After the speech a Jewish man came up to Shamir and asked, “Are you Jewish?” Shamir told me that he was silent. He could not answer the question because he was in a transition from Judaism to Christianity. I asked him if he is Jewish, and he said quickly and assertively, “Now I am surely not.” I asked how he could not be Jewish if his mother and father were both Jews. He said, “It is a question of choice. I believe it is a question of choice.”

Being published on David Duke’s site, and having a regular gig writing for Russia’s anti-Semitic newspaper Zavtra, one would think Shamir wouldn’t have much Jew-loving company. He leaned back, itched his mustache, and said, “I met many people who are described as anti-Semites but I didn’t meet more than one who would be in real terms hating real human beings. They could hate the concept or hate an idea, but to hate Jews on a personal level, I never came across such thing.”

In Shamir’s eyes, being an anti-Semite is a good thing. If you are never called an anti-Semite, then it means that you support warmongering, brainwashing, and the subjugation of native people, in the name of Israel.

What if someone said: “I hate Jews and I wish Hitler killed all of them.”

People say such things.

Would that be labeled anti-Semitic?

Well, you know I’ve heard it very often from Sephardic Jews in Israel. I heard it quite a few times actually. [Laughs.] “Pity you didn’t burn in Auschwitz, a pity all of you didn’t burn in Auschwitz.” I heard it many times.

That’s awful.

Well, yeah. I don’t think that much about it.

Shamir had the poker player’s gift of never letting his guard down. He never committed to a concrete statement, no matter what the topic was. Once the questions got more controversial, he smoked contemplatively and stared out the window to the gray wall. At some point, though, he brought up Auschwitz, and I felt as though someone had just given me an ice pick. I chopped away.

That’s interesting you said “burn in Auschwitz” because your definition of Auschwitz is that it was a Red Cross internment camp. What is your definition of Auschwitz?

I’m not even interested in Auschwitz, you know? I have no interest in it. What I said there is something different. What I said there was that it was perceived as—internment camp.

By who?

By everybody. By Jews in Palestine, by Europeans, by English, by Russians, by Americans. You know when the rumors of mass annihilation came to Palestine they were strongly refuted by the Jewish authorities. It was reported by many publications that life was so awful. Things are so bad as it is and people come and bring such horrible stories … that was published in many newspapers in Israel in those times. The Jewish authorities were very strongly against this sort of rumor. And it was universally thought—yes, it was a deportation camp, nothing especially wonderful about it, nobody thought it was a resort, nobody did. People thought it was a deportation camp, quite awful place.

So, it was a concentration camp?

Yeah, but when I say concentration camp is a word that was used a long time before during the Boer War, when the English fought against the Boers in South Africa. There they built concentration camps; that’s how the word became coined.

This definition of concentration camp didn’t help Shamir’s point, for more than 26,000 women and children died in the South African camps from hard labor and starvation. Shamir stubbed his cigarette out as if tapping out an aggressive form of Morse Code, smashing the butt again and again. I put my butt in the ashtray and he stubbed it out, too, as if I hadn’t done a good enough job.

So, Auschwitz as being a place to exterminate Jews …

This idea came to existence only after the war.

So, it’s a rumor?

No, no, no. I don’t say that at all. No.

But you said, “the rumor of mass annihilation.”

I can repeat more clear. I am not all that interested in what was in reality. I am interested in perceptions. Something I am dealing with is perceptions. So, perceptions during the war was that it was quite awful deportation camp, where people were deported and kept, worked hard labor, this sort of thing. That’s how it was perceived. Only after the war, different perception came. And that was a perception of mass annihilation, and mass murder, and all that.

So, it’s not a fact that there was mass annihilation?

Shamir lost his relaxed demeanor, shifted in his seat, and contracted his shoulders. He covered half his face with his tanned, wrinkled hand and continued, trying to keep it together.

That’s, not, I did not say that at all. I didn’t even say that, I didn’t even intend to say this or other way. What I say is that there was no such perception during the war. This perception came after the war.

But so which one is true?

I am not even interested in this kind of question. That is something that is very much outside of my interest.

But can you comment about if these concentration camps were for mass murder?

Ah, I have really no knowledge about it at all. I was not interested in it because I reject the idea that it is important, you see?

IV.

The waiter arrived and placed a cappuccino in front of Shamir. He politely thanked him in Russian. Shamir added no sugar, sipped from his cup, and then quickly popped a sugar cube in his mouth. I could hear his tobacco-stained teeth crush it with quick staccato crunches.

How far along are we with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion?

Meaning?

Well, that the Jews have a goal of world domination.

Ah, well, well, well. That is kind of a very good and very complicated question. Basically the Protocols describe in this or another way some idea of creating impoverished world. A world where there is no spirit.

Do you think that is real? And that’s what’s happening?

Well, I do think that this process takes place. It’s the process of impoverishing the spiritual component of the world. This process surely goes on.

But are the Jews behind it?

Well, in total, I don’t think so.

So, you don’t think the Jews are behind that?

Not that much, not that much.

But a little bit?

Well, let’s say that it could fit some Jewish ideas. It could be explained by some Jewish ideas. For instance, the idea that there should be no religion, that the Gentiles should not have a religion: That is kind of an important Jewish concept. We should try to understand why people thought it is connected with Jews. That this kind of Kali Yuga process, the process of impoverishing the world. How come? Why people thought it is connected with Jews? Anyway that’s an interesting question. That’s what I say the possible explanation is that it is connected with the Jewish concept that non-Jews do not have direct access to God.

So, you write about how especially American goyim are brainwashed by Jewish media lords. Can you explain that a bit? How far are we? Do you think I am a brainwashed goy?

Well, first of all I don’t know. How would I know? That’s something I don’t know. It is very much impossible to know. There is a huge part of brainwash, for sure. That is what goes on a daily basis.

And what do they try to brainwash? What do the Mammonites—and what you say are quote-unquote the Jewish media lords—what are they trying to brainwash?

Well, they try to induce you with the feeling that Jews are very, very wonderfully special.

Are they not?

No.

They same as everyone, or worse?

The same, absolutely same. They try to induce with concept that whatever happens to Jews has some kind of special meaning for the world.

So, what are you trying to say? That Gentiles and Jews are the same?

Well, what I say is a little more complicated than that.

It was nearing the end of our interview. My smokes were dwindling quickly, and Shamir had already started on his second red-and-silver pack of Dunhills. I asked him: “And what’s the first word that comes to mind when you hear ‘Jews.’ ” His chin was in his right hand as his eyes looked toward the bar. He was silent for nine seconds. “Not again,” he said, punctuating his curt sentence with a long laugh. “Not again? What do you mean by that?” I asked. With no hesitation he replied, “That I am very tired of hearing this word.” He laughed heartily.

V.

On Tuesday, I sat staring out the window, watching the frozen trees and the frozen pond across the street. Every now and then large chunks of ice fell from the 12-story roof and smacked the street, or got buried in a pile of snow. This was my second-to-last day in Moscow, and I had a feeling the day before was the last time I would ever get to see my man. I called Shamir, but he didn’t pick up. I called two more times within a half hour, but no one answered. I reread certain sections of his work and tried to make sense of the man I’d been studying and the man I met. There were two different Shamirs, if not more: the anti-Semitic writer who unabashedly admits that Jews have used the Holocaust to benefit themselves and who believes that “Jewish Media Lords” have hijacked the newspapers and TV to brainwash readers into thinking that Israel is always right and Jews are the chosen people. Then there was the person I met: a gentle, polite man, who was not easily provoked and was frozen solid.

Then I received an email from Shamir. It said, “I am leaving Moscow for a stay in a monastery and will be unable to see you. I explicitly request you: Do not publish a single word without me checking the text first.” I realized that this man was afraid of what others said about him. He was discreet and controlling. He had different names for a reason. He had something to hide: a certain fear, a certain darkness, that had consumed him. Who knows what the origins of his fear are? “This time of certainty is over,” Shamir writes. He insists that Gentiles need to stand up to the elite Jews in government, the media, and anywhere else they’re hiding, or risk, he says, falling “into a New Dark Age, into a bleak anti-Utopia, and our children will not forgive us for our passivity. Or we still can pull and push, and hope for the best.” His hope is to transform his private darkness into a light that others will follow. In the meantime, he hides himself.

Two weeks later I received a Facebook message from Paul Bennett, Shamir’s editor and fellow writer on Counterpunch, a biweekly newsletter that describes what it does as “muckraking with a radical attitude.” The email started to outline how smart and misunderstood the “underdog” is and how we can learn a lot from a man with Shamir’s intelligence. But then it became a little bit threatening. “I’m sure you’re intelligent enough to understand why it would pay better to attack Shamir than to support him, but I think you may be young enough and still idealistic enough to appreciate his fine points,” wrote Bennett, a U.S. citizen, a proclaimed fan of Shamir’s, and the editor of the English versions of Shamir’s books.

Maybe he doesn’t mean it. Maybe he just wants to make a splash. But after five months following the man, I don’t think that is the case. Shamir has disguised his prejudice against Jews in the guise of a moral dilemma—to be or not to be a Jew­—and by making the right decision for other humans to follow. Reading Shamir’s work is like looking at a map of Moscow’s metro. The city and its metro system are built in circles: The innermost circle is Red Square and the Kremlin, and the outermost circle is the outskirts of the city, but they are all connected. From the center, you can easily go out to the edge. Shamir leads you to believe that you, as a reader, are getting to the epicenter of morality by admitting that elite Jews in power are evil Mammonites whose main goal is to make Jerusalem the spiritual capital of the world and to enslave the Gentiles. But the more you read, the more you try to analyze, the further away from morality you actually become.

In his Facebook message, Bennett continued to explain why as “a budding journalist” it would pay not to smear “our friend.” “When we speak to him we must realize that we are one degree away from global movers and shakers like Julian Assange,” he wrote. In the early 2000s, Shamir was nothing but a marginal anti-Semite and a prolific writer. But at that time one could write him off as a lunatic, or a self-loathing-Jew, or just a weirdo. But now, with Assange’s backing, Shamir has become a legitimate source of news and facts with a legitimate platform that is hard to ignore. His ideas may be heretical, mad, coming too fast to digest, but the Age of Assange has made Shamir less eccentric, more central—a dangerous man.

Will Yakowicz is a writer based in New York.

Outside my window in Moscow everything is frozen, the thick ice-coated ground, the wind whining through alleys between the gray apartment buildings that stick out from 5-foot bases of hard snow, the orange dump trucks full of snow chugging along the street. Seven floors down, men in blue and orange overalls and black snowcaps are smashing the 3-inch-thick layers of ice coating the sidewalks with wooden-handled-and-metal-ended ice picks. Then there’s me, waiting in my thermals for the supposed Russian representative of WikiLeaks, a man who says his name is Israel Shamir, but who is also known as Jöran Jermas, and Adam Ermash, and who spends his time between Sweden, Israel, and Russia.

I have spent too much time in the paranoid corners where Shamir’s articles appear, on websites that claim the Jews planned the attacks of Sept. 11, Jews convinced the George W. Bush Administration to go to war in the Middle East, Jews have nuclear weapons not to just destroy Lebanon and Iraq and Syria, but Europe, too. Shamir says he was born in Novosibirsk, Siberia, in 1947 to Jewish parents but in 2004 was baptized into the Greek Orthodox Church of Jerusalem. While he claims to be a Palestinian activist, a believer in the “One State Solution,” his work reads more like right-wing anti-Semitic propaganda. He writes and speaks about the existence of “Jewish Media Lords” who have hijacked newspapers and TV to brainwash Americans into carrying out “Judaic goals,” which include the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As he writes in one of his books, Cabbala of Power, “The Jewish ‘plan’ is no secret; there is no need to re-read The Protocols or to ask Jews what they want.” In addition to having accused Israel of all manner of crimes, he has also been labeled a Holocaust-denier by both Israelis and Palestinians.

Shamir and I first corresponded via email four months ago. After he canceled a planned interview in February, we began talking on the phone every week, but he still refused to schedule an interview. The most he would promise me is that if I come to Moscow and called him, he might meet me, but then again he might not. “Things are getting very complicated,” he explained. “All I might have is an hour.”

The day before I left New York for Moscow, I bumped into Norman Finkelstein, a scholar and Holocaust-doubter who was denied tenure at DePaul University because of his published work, The Holocaust Industry, which claims the factual account of mass-extermination has been exploited so Jews can “gain immunity to criticism.” I had emailed Finkelstein early in February, after Shamir told me they were friends. Finkelstein wrote back, “I want nothing to do with this article. [Shamir] is a maniac.” So, when on another day on Gravesend Neck Road in Brooklyn outside of a closed-down Russian Apteka, I saw a tall man with gray thin hair wearing a brown corduroy blazer with a Palestinian flag pin on his lapel, I recognized him as Finkelstein and approached. As two young boys ran past us wearing kippas, he elaborated on his email: “He’s sleazy—Shamir said we were friends because he’s sleazy, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” he stated while his nose ran in the February wind. “He has invented his entire personal history. Nothing he says about himself is true. And you won’t get this article published anywhere.”

One night before my trip, I realized that I started to believe this dark character who crawled out from the perverse nooks of the Internet to save my goy soul from the people he called “Jewish Media Lords.” I was sitting up on my couch at 4 a.m. reading a Shamir article about IDF soldiers who steal Palestinian organs and sell them on the black market. Then I read an article that called Jews “Christ-Killers” and another that said “a Jewish media lord—and one of the nastiest: Arthur Sulzberger Jr.” owns the New York Times. Hardly convincing, but then why was I starting to doubt the Times? I realized I had better get some sleep.

When the sun came up that first morning in Moscow, I called Shamir and told him I was in town. He told me that it’s “too hard to tell” if he would be able to meet. He suggested that if I called him at 2 p.m., he might have a better idea. If we met it would be at the Dom Zhurnalista, the Journalist’s House, off Arbatskaya metro station. While I waited and smoked, I re-read Shamir’s Cabbala of Power. Jews as a group, he argues, don’t know what they want, but at the very least they want war. Shamir quotes the Bible to explain, “‘The locusts have no king, yet they attack in formation …’ (Proverbs 30:27) and devastate whole countries as if by plan.” In Masters of Discourse Shamir writes, “There are no important media outlets in the US that are not owned or controlled by Jews.”

I was drifting in the silver smoke sitting near Red Square. I was there to meet a marginal weirdo and a notorious Holocaust-doubter. But I was also meeting a man who has real power in the newest form of journalism. Julian Assange, the founder of the whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks, had given Shamir access to cables and made him the organization’s representative in Moscow. Is Shamir crazy, or not? The question seemed important.

On March 1, 2011, the New York Times published an article about a report about a phone conversation that was never recorded. According to this article, Julian Assange told the British magazine the Private Eye that there is a Jewish conspiracy against WikiLeaks led by British journalists, including editors of the Guardian. The report, written by the publication’s editor, Ian Hislop, was based on a phone conversation Hislop had with Assange on Feb. 16, 2011. During the conversation, Hislop claimed that Assange stated the Jewish conspiracy to smear WikiLeaks was spearheaded by the Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, investigations editor David Leigh, and by Index on Censorship’s John Kampfner. Although Rusbridger is not a Jew, Assange stressed that he is “sort of Jewish,” because he and David Leigh, a Jew, are brothers-in-law. But what really bothered Assange was a different article by the same publication titled, “Man in the Eye: Israel Shamir,” which claims Shamir is a Holocaust denier. Assange said that the article was “crap”—one more example of the Jewish conspiracy against WikiLeaks.

At 2 p.m., I called Shamir. He said he would meet me in one hour. I pulled it together, drank one more cup of coffee, and jumped on the subway. I was close.

II.

I first became curious about Shamir when the original reports came out in December in Russian and Swedish newspapers, and then in Reason and on the blog of New York Magazine, which claimed that he was the Russian “content aggregator” for WikiLeaks, as well as a “Holocaust denier.” I became more curious when I read an excerpt of the aformentioned Private Eye article about Shamir’s alleged anti-Semitic and Holocaust-denying beliefs and his direct relationship with Assange. And I became very interested when I read WikiLeaks’ statement on its website: “Israel Shamir has never worked or volunteered for WikiLeaks, in any manner, whatsoever. He has never written for WikiLeaks or any associated organization, under any name and we have no plan that he do so. He is not an ‘agent’ of WikiLeaks.”

A spokesman for WikiLeaks, Kristinn Hrafnsson, confirmed this when I called to ask if Shamir was directly connected to the organization. “No, he is not,” said Hrafnsson. “He only worked on the Cable Gate release, like hundreds of other journalists.” Then the line went dead.

In Moscow, on my way to meet the man, I exited Arbatskaya Station and walked underneath the busy bul’var. I came out to see snow, ice, and a big black iron gate, behind which lay a courtyard and the Journalists’ House. In front of the big beige building was a set of stairs, which led down to a café. Through the window, I could see Shamir sitting at a table.

We said hello. Shook hands. “How do you like Moscow?” he asked me in fluent English, but with a Russian accent tinged with a Hebrew one, or possibly the other way around. I reached for my cigarette. He did the same. Shamir had recognizable human qualities, like a strong handshake and a fine smile. It felt nice to talk with someone, because I had been alone during my days of wandering and waiting around Moscow. Then I remembered that I was dining with a man who dedicated his life’s work to writing about why it’s wrong to be a Jew. And I knew from my reading of his work that there was something in his ice-hard anti-Semitic soul—be it anger, prejudice, or a reincarnation of an ancient darkness into modern anti-Israel sentiment—that genuinely scared me. I thought about an excerpt from Cabbala of Power: “In order to save the world from possible spiritual devastation, the Jewish state must be dismantled. … It can be done softly, without bloodshed, by creating a democratic state for all residents of Palestine, native and adoptive Palestinians. It won’t be a Jewish state, but Israeli Jews will eventually be absorbed by Palestinians, as the Jews of old were absorbed by Palestinians during the 2nd to 7th centuries.”

To me, it read like soft-core ethnic cleansing. But it was too late to analyze, as I was already studying his tan, wrinkled face and his thick, bristly mustache. Israel Shamir was a short man, neither fat nor skinny. His gray-and-black loose curls puffed around his cranium, and he sat with his elbows on the table after he fumbled to get his voice recorder to work. His hands touched, rubbed, and pressed his mustache, forehead, and temples incessantly throughout our conversation. He ordered the salad with sliced radish on top, and I ordered the borscht.

We talked about Julian Assange, of whom he said, “My acquaintance with him is so superficial. I have this very superficial view of the man.” He scratched the base of his nose above his lip. He turned his head and looked at the gray painted brick wall of the stairway out the window.

I know that when Assange was in Ellingham Hall in the Norfolk County that you went to visit him. He introduced you as “Adam.” I know you have a couple different names. Why were you introduced as Adam?

Well, Adam is my real name as well, Christian name as well. I actually use it quite often.

Yes, Adam Ermash, right?

Just Adam. Usually in many books I have it “Israel Adam Shamir.”

It was also reported that at Ellingham Hall, with Julian Assange and you were introduced as Adam, that you asked for cables about the Jews. Why did you ask for cables about the Jews and did you get any?

Oh, yeah, I have a lot of cables about the Jews. [He grins.] I have thousands of cables about the Jews.

And what do the cables say about the Jews?

Oh, it’s a very entertaining thing. I want to write about it, but I haven’t had time yet. But I think it is a very entertaining subject. A lot of cables about Jews.

Give me one example, what does a cable say?

One of them for instance that was published by me in a Russian newspaper a couple of weeks ago, there was a piece by the U.S. Ambassador in Moscow saying that Russia has no anti-Semitism.

And does Moscow have anti-Semitism?

No, surely not.

He finished his salad and put his napkin on his lap and pulled out one of the two packs of Dunhills he brought. He smoked cigarettes constantly, and he smoked with heart and vigor; he truly seemed to enjoy the act of smoking. The waiter stopped by, and Shamir ordered a cappuccino politely and nonchalantly. Our pasta did not look appetizing—noodles with chucks of tough meat in a brown oily sauce.

What is hatred?

That’s something I don’t, I’ve never experienced.

You’ve never experienced hatred?

Nuh-uh.

He was silent for 10 seconds until I asked the next question.

Well, on your site you say you’re a lightening rod for smear jobs. Do you think people hate you?

Well, they have a practical meaning also. I don’t think someone smears me because somebody hates me personally all that much. That would be very odd. I mean, provided I don’t feel hatred for others, would be strange to think someone hates me all that much.

Do you think you could be provoked to hate? What if you saw a murder?

Yaaaa …

As I understand you’ve seen terrible things that murderous Jews have done. When you were in the settlements you saw the hilltop youths—

One gets annoyed, you know. One gets annoyed. Ah, one gets annoyed. But I kind of personally don’t think I have ever felt such strong, passion as hatred. Hatred is very strong passion. I don’t think I’ve ever came close to it.

When you write about the IDF as SS soldiers in Gaza?

No, that’s not out of anger. That’s not even out of very strong anger. Or any way, that’s what I try, not to write … angrily. First of all, if one writes angrily, people do not read it. [Laughs.]

It would take days for the Moscovite ice pickers to chop through his ice. But every now and then, Shamir gets tired of smiling and laughing things off.

When I was in the West Bank there was definitely hostile feelings towards the Palestinians.

Yes. [Laughs.] Yes. Very silly, very silly. My mother lives in a settlement, called Eli.

Eli? I’ve been there.

Yeah, oh, you know. And she’s very much a settler. Very ideological. Very keen on all this stuff. She can speak forever about how awful everybody else is to them. I’ve tried many times to tell her why not kind of look at it differently, why not to see that people can live together? Basically to try to live together peacefully. That would be good enough. But kind of she didn’t really like it.

It must be hard for her to read your stuff.

Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes …

What does she say about your books?

Well, she doesn’t like it. [Laughs.] She doesn’t like it.

I think about how he described the Hilltop Youth once in his book Flowers of Galilee. “They seemed like nothing you ever saw. To their shaven heads, black boxes were strapped by narrow black belts; black belts crisscrossed their bare arms. The Jews put on the phylacteries … for a morning prayer, but on these young men they looked like the amulets of a warlike tribe. They wore dark trousers and dark tee shirts; white shawls with black stripes flew behind their backs. Their rifles were pointed at us. They looked possessed by some strange demon.”

Shamir continued talking about his Jewish settler mother. “Well, that’s the way with mothers. So we don’t have to worry about it all that much. We don’t have obligations of this sort towards our mothers,” he said casually. He rested his left arm on the table and held his chin in the cup of his right hand. It was getting dark outside, but our interview was far from over.

For the second installment of this article, click here.

Will Yakowicz is a writer based in New York.

And yet, Demjanjuk is not in jail—he was freed pending appeal, a process expected to take something like a year. How you feel about this probably depends on how felt about trying a wheelchair-bound 91-year-old in the first place. In Tablet Magazine in November 2009, Michael C. Moynihan argued this was the right thing to do; around the same time, in Esquire Scott Raab was not so sure; already, the Simon Wiesenthal Center has argued that failure to imprison him “is an insult to his victims and to the survivors, that after all of this they may see John Demjanjuk strolling in the park in Germany for having been complicit in the mass murder over 28,000;” at the very least, the Center’s Rabbi Martin Hier added, he could have been placed under house arrest. On the one hand, Demjanjuk is no longer even about “never forgetting;” it is about punishing an individual offender, who in fact served roughly five years on Israeli death row before he was freed. On the other hand, the thousands and thousands of Demjanjuk’s victims surely would have preferred to have made it to 91.

Demjanjuk Convicted for Role in Nazi Death Camp [NYT]
Related: Still Terrible [Tablet Magazine]
The Eichmann Trial [Nextbook Press]
John Demjanjuk: The Last Nazi [Esquire]

• Here is a remarkable story told by a Syrian lesbian blogger about her father. Spare some prayers for the people of Syria this weekend. [A Gay Girl in Damascus]

• An appreciation of Stanley Siegelman, a poet and longtime Forward contributor who died earlier this month at 87. [Forward]

• Don’t forget, never forget: Yom HaShoah is this Sunday, May 1. [ADL]

• A pregnant Israeli woman and her Jewish husband—both of whom lived in China—were among the dead in a terrorist bombing in Morocco. [Haaretz]

• Holocaust survivors traveled to Washington, D.C., to lobby congressional staffers to allow them to sue a French railroad. [JTA]

New Yorker film critic Richard Brody’s “DVD of the Week” is 1940’s The Great Dictator, a late Chaplin film (hear him talk!) that presciently confronted the Nazis and anti-Semitism head-on.

The series is ongoing, and much of it is a tick-tock of the years leading up to his capture, containing previously known facts that are also described in Nextbook Press’s brand-new tome by Deborah Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial.

However, Der Spiegel, which gained access to “formerly confidential, secret and top-secret documents” in a host of archives, did break some “news” over the weekend. Specifically, Eichmann did regret one thing about his actions during the Holocaust: That he didn’t finish the job. “We didn’t do our work correctly,” he told confidantes in a recorded conversation. “There was more that could have been done.” Was he just following orders? Er, no: “I was no ordinary recipient of orders,” he told them. “If I had been one, I would have been a fool. Instead, I was part of the thought process. I was an idealist.”

A Triumph of Justice [Der Spiegel]
Related: The Eichmann Trial [Nextbook Press]

Dojc, a commercial photographer who has lived in Canada since his family left Slovakia in 1968, returned to visit several towns, including his family’s onetime home, where he learned about the fate of its Jews during the Holocaust, a history his relatives refused to talk about. Dojc’s project shifted with the discovery, during a trip to Slovakia to interview survivors, of abandoned prayer books in long-empty synagogues and schoolhouses that had gone untouched since the Nazis deported Slovakia’s Jews to concentration camps.

The photography exhibit, which opened this week, moves from the hallway of portraits into a light-filled, six-sided room featuring breathtaking images of prayer books in various stages of physical decay and sustaining damage far greater than the wear and tear of everyday use. Katya Krausova, a London-based filmmaker, traveled with Dojc through Slovakia and her documentary plays in the exhibition space.

The layout of the exhibit reflects the genesis of the project and Dojc’s personal journey—the pair discovered a prayer book belonging to Dojc’s grandfather, whom he never met, among the unearthed volumes. The books star in the photographs, commanding attention while revealing layer after layer of abandonment by society and destruction by nature. Yet Dojc believes these books—and all books, for that matter—possess an enchanting, transcending quality. The photographs are about beauty and decay, he explained before the exhibit’s opening: “beauty in decay.”

Meanwhile, the talk of France (besides Libya) is a book by the grandson of a prominent minister in Marshal Pétain’s Vichy government that argues that most of the entire group of Frenchmen that did not actively resist Nazi occupation—including the book’s titular “Very Nice People,” and including the author’s grandfather, who is commonly seen as heroic—share responsibility for the deportation and eventual murder of thousands of French Jews. That individuals like his grandfather committed small, brave acts to save individual Jews is nearly beside the point, the author argues. “In the end it was not at all necessary to be a monster to participate in the worst,” he tells the Wall Street Journal. “There was an anti-Semitism of the state. Men like my grandfather were prepared to do absolutely anything to preserve a little fragment of national sovereignty.” Though most have criticized the book, some Frenchmen have come to its defense: Its detractors, said one such defender, are “right-thinking conformists,” parroting a “warmed-over couplet about the Pétainist-Resistant who with one hand sent Jews to the gas chamber and with the other, claimed to have saved a few.” The speaker is, of course, Lévy.

I’d submit this isn’t a coincidence, or even, entirely, unrelated. In his masterpiece, Power and the Idealists, Tablet Magazine contributor Paul Berman writes of a generation of Frenchmen, largely mapping on to the American Baby Boomers, who grew up wondering what they would have done during the Occupation. “The militants who had fought in Spain or in the Resistance were the Series A generation,” Berman explains.

The militants of their own generation, his and Kouchner’s, had to recognize that, by contrast, they were strictly Series B. They were the generation of the second rate—the less-than-Malraux, less-than-Camus generation. The students were résistants who had nothing to resist. They pretended to resist, even so, and pretending merely aggravated their self-doubts. They dreamed, therefore. They went to the movies.

For their knowledge that their parents lived in historical times, they compensated both by policing those among their parents who behaved incorrectly and by dramatically reenacting those times with whatever new struggle happened to be at hand.

The “Kouchner” in Berman’s paragraph is Bernard Kouchner, a charter member of this group of Boomer-era French intellectuals, as well as the founder of Doctors Without Borders. Until recently, he was also France’s foreign minister—which brings us back to Sarkozy, who appointed him; and who is himself descended in part from Greek Jews; and who now, as French president, perhaps wishes, with Lévy, to avoid again staining the French flag by associating it with mass slaughter. Thus concludes your occasional lesson that the past is neither dead nor past.

Man in the News: Nicolas Sarkozy [FT]
How Bernard-Henri Lévy Started the Libyan War [FrumForum]
Vichy’s ‘Very Nice People’ [WSJ]

• In the course of reviewing Los Angeles’s new Holocaust museum, Edward Rothstein essentially asks if there are too many such places. [NYT]

• Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the designated new head of Reform Judaism, talks about his movement’s rivalry with Chabad. From 2008. [New Voices]

• On Bo Belinsky, the California Angels pitcher from the 1960s who was the original athlete-playboy (at least publicly). His mother was Jewish. [Deadspin]

• Tablet Magazine contributor Daniel Estrin reports on Jerusalem’s brand-new light rail system. [Business Week]

• A small gallery in a small town in northern Israel has slowly grown into what will be a permanent museum of Arab-Israeli and Palestinian art. [NYT]

Here’s an epic Vanity Fair piece from last year about the even more epic marriage(s) of Richard Burton and the late, lamented Elizabeth Taylor. And here they are in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

• Israel launched around eight airstrikes at various Hamas sites in Gaza last night in retaliation for the weekend’s shelling. [NYT]

• The Obama administration’s Mideast policy, and particularly its varying reaction to different states, is dictated to a great deal by fear of Iran—one explanation for the seemingly inconsistent approach to Libya and, say, Bahrain, where it has let a regime repress protesters. [WSJ]

• Saturday’s vote in Egypt seems an indicator that political Islamists are gaining ground in the Egyptian revolution. [WSJ]

• There is tension in the West Bank, with, it seems, two rock-throwing Palestinians shot in response by an Israeli driver. [JPost]

• Hamas officials strongly protested United Nations plans to teach Gaza Palestinian children about the Holocaust. [AP/WP]

But Ya’akov Arbel, an Israeli tour guide and an old Poland hand, has been around long enough to know that hasn’t always been the case. “Before Spielberg made Schindler’s List,” he told me on a recent visit to the city, “there wasn’t a dog coming to Krakow.”

***

On a rain-soaked Friday morning late last year, Arbel led three dozen Israelis visiting Poland. He was in a rush—the group was headed to Auschwitz and Birkenau, the highlights of the tour—but some of the visitors were enjoying the rain, a refuge from the Israeli heat. One by one, they climbed aboard the bus. Arbel, counting and recounting, was still two people short. Finally, the stragglers arrived. It was an elderly couple, and the wife, an Auschwitz survivor, had gotten cold feet and had to be persuaded to join.

A few minutes after the bus pulled out, Arbel took the microphone and started talking. He talked about Jews and Nazis, Poland and Germany, concentration camps and death camps. To ease the tension, he spiced his speech with bits of trivia, even the occasional joke.

“I must do all the talking here,” Arbel told me during a rare moment of rest, sipping tea to soothe his throat. “One of the most important attributes for a tour leader to Auschwitz is the understanding that he should talk as little as possible inside the camps, because the eyes tell the story there.”

Arbel’s bus joined another 30 in the huge parking lot outside the camp, and some of the visitors wrapped themselves in Israeli flags as we headed toward the entrance. There, in accordance with Polish legislation aimed to protect the local workforce, the group was handed over to a Polish tour guide, one of the 250 men and women employed by the Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau. Arbel was there only to translate. Mostly silent, he followed his group, looking and listening.

***

Arbel was born in Germany. His parents, Holocaust survivors, fled to Israel when he was a year old. He is a banker by profession, and 10 years ago he decided to devote himself to his love of history and geography and become certified as a tour guide. “I love doing it,” he said, “and it’s a cheap way to go places.” In the last three years, he has mostly been accompanying groups headed to Poland, visiting that country three or four times a year. As we walked through the gate leading into the camp, Arbel paused for a moment. “Every time I come here I want to cry,” he said. “But I can’t cry. I must be professional and separate myself from the place, and one of the tools is to use humor. But you must be sensitive to the component of the group. Sometimes humor can’t fly here.”

The breakdown, he added, comes often after the tour. “When you are walking in Auschwitz, you are on a mission, a mission to tell the story of a foregone Jewish life. But once you are done, and you let it decompress, you get back to your hotel and just wrap yourself in depression. And since every tour is different, and unexpected things happen here, this depression goes home with you. I have many horrible flashbacks in my sleep long after I return from here.”

I commented that such a lifestyle, consisting of repetitive visits to this dark place and the bouts of depression that are bound to follow, was somewhat masochistic. Arbel shrugged. “It is the least I owe to my predecessors, to the history of Jewish life,” he said, before heading into one of the prison cabins.

***

Arbel is in the minority among Israeli tour guides specializing in Poland. Most of them are graduates of programs run by Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust museum and research facility, and sponsored by the Ministry of Education to train guides to lead groups of high-school students and soldiers.

There are 300 such guides currently working in Israel. To join their ranks, one must respond to a newspaper ad inviting people to enroll in the program. Each year, said Dorit Novak, the director of the International School for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem, 50 people apply. “We pass the names and résumés to the Ministry of Education, where the first selection is processed,” she said. “Then, we invite the final candidates to one day where we conduct interviews and psychological assessment, and we usually end up with 20 finalists.”

The Yad Vashem course lasts almost six months and includes many seminars and workshops. The candidates then go on a tour of Poland, followed by two more tours on which they serve as guides. If they receive positive feedback they must take one final test, which examines the depth of their knowledge of the Holocaust. The drop-out rate is 15 percent.

“The guide is a key figure in the educational experience young students and soldiers go through while traveling in Poland,” Novak said. “A good guide must have great knowledge and even greater sensitivity for the group as a whole and to every group member. He or she must deal with an age group where the people are very sensitive and about to be exposed to a shocking experience.”

The challenges are part adolescent psychology and part crisis management. (The museum makes an exception to its Polish guide policy for these specially trained leaders.) “A good guide shouldn’t tease,” Novak added. “He shouldn’t manipulate and move people from one experience to the other, but let every experience sink in with the kids. Understatement is the most important thing, because words can never match the visuals.”

This being a delicate undertaking, it calls for a certain sort of person. The average guide is between 30 and 50 years old, has another job or has chosen to become a tour guide as a mid-career change of vocation, and is committed and knowledgeable. While the guides vary in gender, socioeconomic backgrounds, and places of residence, many are children of Holocaust survivors, Novak said.

Hanni Efrimov, 40, graduated from the Yad Vashem program in 2003. In the last few years she’s been to Auschwitz 12 times every year. “It is not normal,” she said. “I must admit that I am a little bit addicted.” But, she added, the tours are not “a pornographic journey into the Holocaust. We deal mostly with Jewish life in Poland, because in order to understand what we had lost, we must first learn what we had. The death camps are not the most important part, and it’s also the shortest trip. It is more important to see how people lived in the ghetto, what choices they have made in a world with no choices, to learn about the thinkers and writers. We must teach about the forces, because suffering doesn’t teach you anything.”

Another important part of the guide’s job, Efrimov added, is to tailor the experience to suit the sensibilities of young men and women who are either in the midst of, or are about to enter, their mandatory military service. The Holocaust, she said, is the quintessential lesson of the dangers of using force and the importance of preserving one’s humanity. “We teach them about the thin line between being a human being and a monster,” she said, “but also about the inspiration of true friendship, where you are starving but still willing to share your 20 grams of bread.”

***

Ya’akov Arbel’s tour group is now midway through its tour of Auschwitz. Their Polish guide, Magdalena Adamczyknycz (pronounced adam-chick-nitz), is a 36-year-old local woman, married and the mother of a young girl. She first visited the camp in the eighth grade as part of a class trip. “It was the first time I heard about the Holocaust,” she told me when we were standing outside cabin 27. Like most Israeli groups, this one had decided to hold a small, private candle-lighting ceremony and to share their personal stories about Auschwitz and the Holocaust. Adamczyknycz was waiting for them to be done, standing in the chilly fall breeze.

“I traveled a lot after school,” she said as she waited, “and I realized that when I say in Polish the name of the place where I was born, Oswiecim, no one recognized it, but when I was saying the name in German (Auschwitz) then everyone knew about the tiny place where I come from. That made me realize about the history of my birthplace and of my history and how I am part of it.” Like her Israeli counterparts, Adamczyknycz, too, had to pass a series of exams to obtain her position. With 1.3 million people visiting the camp last year—a steep increase from 2004’s record of half a million visitors—the demand for tour guides is only growing.

Adamczyknycz got her certification in 2005. “I felt that it is my mission to try and tell the story of every person who perished here, more than a million stories,” she said. She used to work full time but now works only three or four months a year. This, she said, was a necessary step she had to take after becoming a mother. “It is a huge conflict,” she said, “because you are facing a trauma, sometimes live testimony of a survivor, and then you must go home and switch it off, play with your daughter, switch immediately from the complete gloom into a shining mother. It made me very pessimistic about life and about human nature, and that’s why I decided to decrease my rate [of work].” Instead, she found part-time employment as an English teacher in the local school, but the camp, she said, is always on her mind. “The ability to keep the memory alive,” she said, “to educate kids about Auschwitz and one year later see them coming back here with their parents, I miss that.”

Not, she added, that being employed by Auschwitz was without its downsides. Apart from the psychological toll of constant immersion in such grim subject matter, Adamczyknycz said, identifying oneself as an Auschwitz employee kills all chance of small talk and makes sharing work stories with friends deeply uncomfortable. “But it is still worth it,” she said, “especially when we get a group from Israel, where you really don’t know what will happen.”

Such impromptu outbursts of emotions are common with Israeli groups, and one occurred when the group I had joined visited the second floor of cabin 16. Walking between a glass-encased display of suitcases and another filled with hair and shoes, someone let out a terrible shriek.

It was Yehudit Barnea, 72, from Tel Aviv, the Holocaust survivor who earlier that morning had had her doubts about joining the tour. Shaking, she stood in front of a photograph on the wall, pointing at two little girls. “This is my sister and I on the day the Russians liberated the camp,” she said in a broken voice.

Barnea arrived to Birkenau in 1944. She was 6 years old. “Usually, they killed kids my age,” she said after we finished walking in Birkenau, where she had to revisit the memories she struggled to forget. “But we were twin sisters, and we were immediately led to Mengele’s cabin.” She has strange memory about the place. “I remember that everyday he was taking blood from us and he was experimenting with our lungs, and I remember that we were his favorite kids. I was actually very disappointed to see him in a movie, because I remembered him as a very tall and blond and beautiful man who had nicknames for us. But after walking here, I can’t believe that I was here, that I got out of here. It is just a story, it’s not really me.”

***

The drive back to Krakow was long and silent. At the hotel, a much-needed rest awaits, followed by Shabbat dinner. Outside the door of my room, someone had hung a silhouette of an old Jew holding a Bible. From my window, I could see the old Jewish cemetery. And yet there is no real Jewish life in Krakow. The reality of Jewish life here oscillates between the cemetery and that silhouette, a kitschy object the likes of which clutter many stores and cafés. Drivers for hire offer a tour of the Schindler factories or the ghetto. Even the toilets in Auschwitz are a commercial enterprise, costing 1,000 zloty (about 30 cents) per use.

I was musing about commercialization, memory, and authenticity as I walked to dinner, passing on the way a steakhouse that featured a klezmer house band. But as I reached the restaurant, I was dismayed to find the other members of the group in a decidedly different mood. They, too, could see the Holocaust business and the profits Krakow gathers from exploiting the memory of its dead Jews, but it was a price they were willing to pay.

They came here to look for something that is long gone, to run after a metaphor, to see and forgive and forget. They had come here hoping to get lost in the past. For that, they needed good guides.

“A guide in this kind of tour, he owns great power over the people he guides,” Arbel told me after we finished the emotional prayer for the wine and challah, and waitresses were serving traditional Jewish food to the table. “You don’t show them here tourist attractions, but you guide them through their past, their purpose, you go through what could have been their alternative life.”

Ze’ev Avrahami is a writer living in Berlin.

Deborah Lipstadt on The Eichmann Trial from Tablet Magazine on Vimeo.

The Eichmann Trial [Nextbook Press]
The Trial [Tablet Magazine]

These and other issues form the basis of The Eichmann Trial, a new book by Emory University historian Deborah E. Lipstadt from Nextbook Press. Lipstadt is no stranger to the courtroom or to the perils of anti-Semitism. In 1996, she was sued by David Irving, who’d accused her of libeling him by calling him a Holocaust denier. Lipstadt won her case at trial in 2000. She joined Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to talk about the importance of survivor testimony, about the controversy surrounding the 1961 trial, and about how her courtroom experience changed the way she thinks of Eichmann’s. [Running time: 21:26.]

• Kosher sex-ed. [Ynet/Failed Messiah]

• Henry Kissinger has called for Jonathan Pollard’s pardon. Great ammunition for those who oppose it. [Press Release/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Due to changing insurance rules, talk therapy will increasingly be the exclusive reserve of upper-middle-class Jews living in the capital of a great empire during its decline and fall. You know, like Freud’s Vienna. [NYT]

• Arnost Lustig, a Czech Jew who wrote fiction about Holocaust survivors, died at 84. [NYT]

• They’re going to be showing Shoah (say that ten times fast) on Iranian satellite TV dubbed into Farsi. [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]

A U.S. diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks calls Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the “George Steinbrenner of Iran.” Does this mean Larry David will play the Iranian president in the biopic?

On March 7th, Marc will be moderating a conversation about writing in the third generation since the Holocaust between Nathan Englander (For the Relief of Unbearable Urges), Ruth Franklin (A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction), and Rinne Groff (Compulsion) as part of a Public Theater forum on “Imagination and Memory: Anne Frank and the Writers Who Followed Her.”

The forum is hosted by actor Michael Stuhlbarg and will feature author Francine Prose discussing her latest book, Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife.

Marc reviewed Franklin’s first book, A Thousand Darknesses, for Tablet in December.

Buy tickets here!