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

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.

My high-achieving, second-wave feminist mother, who made a point of tuning into the pageant every year “to remind myself how much I hate it,” had a somewhat different take. I remember asking her when I was 6 or 7 why so many of the finalists seemed to come from the South. I’m not sure I realized this at the time, but, looking back, I think it was my way of wondering why there was never a girl who seemed “like us.”

My mother replied, with a rough edge of bitterness in her voice: “Because that’s where all the blonde Barbie dolls with too many teeth live.”

It was not always thus.

In 1945, the Miss America Pageant constituted a symbolic return to normalcy for the country; a promise that a still-smoldering Europe and a Japan about to face its first devastating nuclear winter could not keep patriotic Americans from leering at a bunch of lissome young beauties parading across a stage in flattering but modest swimwear.

Its winner, however, a leggy 21-year-old brunette named Bess Myerson, was decidedly unorthodox. Myerson represented New York City, a place that many still see as somehow un-American. (There have only been two other New Yorkers named Miss America, including Vanessa Williams, famously the first black woman to win the pageant.) Myerson was a college graduate—unusual for contestants at the time—who had entered the pageant on a lark when she heard of its offer of scholarship money, hoping to win enough to buy a new piano. She was also the first and as yet only Jewish girl to win the crown.

But that could change on Saturday, when Loren Galler Rabinowitz, the reigning Miss Massachusetts, becomes the first Jew to compete for the Miss America title since Myerson. Like Myerson, Galler Rabinowitz entered the pageant for practical reasons. The Harvard graduate and two-time national ice dance champion is about to start medical school, and she hopes to take advantage of the scholarships the program offers for women going into medicine. “A lot of my friends were taking a gap year in order to make money for school—taking jobs at banks and things,” Galler Rabinowitz says. “I wanted to spend a year doing public service, which I’ve always been extremely passionate about. And this year seemed like my last opportunity before jumping on the hamster wheel of med school.”

The pageant circuit remains a pretty Christianized affair, with so many contestant espousing their faith in Jesus (not to mention “opposite marriage”) that you’d think they’re planning a run for, well, the governorship of Alaska. Feminism, an atavistic sense of ritual modesty, the sense that there were more productive ways to spend one’s time (you might think Galler Rabinowitz would belong to the latter category): All may have conspired over the years to keep Jewish girls who were more than pretty from gathering in Atlantic City. Galler Rabinowitz believes part of the problem is simply geographical: “Pageants are biggest in the South, and Jews tend to be concentrated in the Northeast,” she says. “It’s just not part of the cultural purview.”

Bess Myerson, however, isn’t sweating the reasons, and she warns against attaching an unhealthy importance to this latest milestone. “I’m very excited to have another Jewish girl in the running, but there should be another Jewish girl in the running,” the 86-year-old Myerson told me via a representative of the Anti-Defamation League, with which she has been associated since her pageant days. “I’m very proud, but it shouldn’t be a big deal.”

Fair enough. But in 1945, her selection was a big deal, for Jew and Gentile alike. Weeks before the pageant, judges received phone calls from irate pageant watchers warning them not to choose “the Jew.” Hoping to stave off trouble, pageant officials pleaded with Myerson to change her name to the deracinated “Beth Merrick.” After her win, not a single official sponsor, from the notoriously anti-Semitic Ford Motor Company to Catalina Swimwear, requested that she endorse their products; she was barred at the last minute from a scheduled appearance at a restricted country club in the South. The Daughters of the American Revolution, it seemed, did not care to share crab salad with a Daughter of Israel. (Who says she would have eaten it anyway?)

Despite this ugliness, the Jewish community was understandably jubilant over Myerson’s win. One of the less discussed aspects of the Nazi regime, in both incipience and aftermath, is its lasting imprint on many Jews’ sense of physical self-image. (Someone calling you ugly seems rather trivial when that same person is also trying to kill you.) But even relatively trivial wounds can leave lasting scars: Primo Levi hypothesized that much of his crippling shyness toward the opposite sex was caused by the Aryanization laws and ubiquitous Nazi propaganda depicting the Jew as physically and sexually repugnant. His admission is instructive; it would take a self-confidence bordering on the pathological to avoid internalizing at least some of that crap.

A beautiful Jewish girl being named Miss America—“our ideal,” as Bert Parks would remind viewers—went a long way in helping to repair some of this damage. It’s an overstatement to compare the results of a beauty pageant with the U.N. resolution recommending the creation of Jewish state in Palestine, but Myerson’s historic win was nevertheless an important step toward the reinstatement of the status of “fully human” to the devastated Jewish people. Even if much of the world was not quite ready to see it that way.

Bess Myerson could have (and perhaps should have) ushered in a worshipful golden age of Jewish femininity. Unfortunately, this was not to be the case. As Jewish men began to shape American pop culture of the postwar years, they often asserted their independence from the painful (or embarrassing) history through less-than-flattering portrayals of their mothers and sisters and cousins, robbing Jewish women of their femininity and sexual power in the public imagination for generations. In the work of Woody Allen, early Philip Roth (although I believe that Portnoy’s Complaint is intended as a satire of these attitudes, not an endorsement), Paul Mazursky, Herman Wouk, and the like, male “Jewish” traits—intellectual sophistication, sensitivity, even neurosis—were portrayed as endearing and even sexually combustible to the right (Gentile) woman; Jewish women (as I scarcely have to tell you) were portrayed as loud, pushy, materialistic, emasculating, crass, and seemingly devoid of any complicated inner life. If they were at all attractive, it was in spite of their Jewishness, not because of it, or the attractiveness had come at great (often surgical) expense.

It doesn’t take a psychiatrist to uncover the seething self-hatred that is the flip side of the JAP stereotype; the furious suspicion that no matter how beautifully you dress, how vigilantly you starve yourself, how meticulously you carve up your body and your face, that you’re never going to be quite good or pretty or lovable enough. That on some level, that schlemiel you married is always going to be holding out for Mia Farrow (or, today, Leslie Mann). Even Ari Ben Canaan, the anti-Portnoy, winds up with the shiksa at the end.

I never wanted to be Miss America, even when I was 7. But I wanted to be pretty. I wanted to be loved.

It’s a feeling Galler Rabinowitz knows well. “I wish I could say it was something I’d never thought about,” she says, sighing. “I come from the world of competitive skating, which is even more aesthetically focused than pageants, and I didn’t fit the aesthetic there either. It took me some time to realize that beauty comes in all shapes and sizes. It’s about feeling comfortable and proud of who you are.”

It takes some time for all of us. Maybe it’s silly, but for the first time in years, I think I’ll be tuning into the Miss America Pageant this weekend, cheering on Miss Massachusetts in a frankly chauvinistic (and let’s face it, somewhat embarrassing) gesture of ethnic solidarity. I don’t care if she wins. I just care that she’s there. Bess Myerson is right; it isn’t (and shouldn’t be) a big deal. It won’t be for my generation’s daughters. But it still is for me.

Seroy no doubt had in mind some of TNR’s more legendary hatchet jobs, including former lead critic James Wood’s influential takedown of “hysterical realism” in novels by Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, and Salman Rushdie, and the notorious Dale Peck drive-by that began, “Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation.” But the practitioner who has best and most responsibly defended the high principles behind TNR’s house style has been Ruth Franklin, a younger critic who is a senior editor at the magazine and, as it happens, the author of the Franzen review.

Although it made the tabloids, Franklin’s take on Freedom is dog-bites-man: It is entirely coherent with the broader values she has stood for in her decade-plus of reviewing contemporary fiction. To begin with, there is the trademark TNR stubbornness. “We damn not with faint praise, but with hyperbole,” Franklin once wrote. As an antidote, she errs on the side of negativity, in part so that when she says she likes something—the novels of David Mitchell, for example—we know she likes it. Too many critics, she worries, are like the teenager who is friends with everyone and thereby ensures that no one knows exactly where one stands with him. In this thinking, the most popular kid in class is Dave Eggers and his “why-can’t-we-all-just-get-along approach to literary criticism,” as she put it, which he has enshrined in his journals, McSweeney’s and The Believer. These, according to Franklin, celebrate books rather than critique them, and thereby do writers and readers a disservice.

If Franklin was generally less likely to get caught up in Franzen-frenzy, Freedom specifically embodies literary priorities that she rates lower than most. It is, Franklin accurately observed, a “Way We Live Now novel, consummately of its moment,” intricately immersed in the details of current American life. For many critics, this was a selling point. For Franklin, the novel’s faithful rendering of superficial contemporary truths crowded out the deeper, more human truths that she most urgently seeks. Franzen’s realism is “just a transcription of reality,” she complained. “He substitutes the details for the big picture, a hyper-realistic portraiture for genuine psychological insight.” By contrast, she can love David Mitchell’s novels despite what may seem like their unharnessed gimmickry—his Cloud Atlas consists of six obliquely related stories that span from medieval times to the future—because, as she sees it, “on their most fundamental level all his books are concerned with the connections between human beings.”

Now, Franklin has published her first book, A Thousand Darknesses. It’s about Holocaust literature, which might at first seem odd; indeed, her extensive writings on Holocaust literature, out of which this book grew, might themselves have seemed odd over the past several years. For someone who picks fights with Franzen, Eggers, Nicole Krauss, Zadie Smith, Gary Shteyngart, and more of the most prominent contemporary literary novelists, publishing criticism and then a book about survivor memoirs and secondary works seems beside the point at best. But her Holocaust criticism has in fact been totally in sync with her other criticism, and A Thousand Darknesses is precisely Franklin’s attempt to advance her larger, hedgehog-like argument about what art and criticism should do. What seems on its cover almost a niche, scholarly work actually confirms Franklin’s status as one of our most important critics under 40.

* * *

Tim O’Brien, himself a witness-author (he is a novelist who served in Vietnam), once wrote, “That’s a true war story that never happened.” Franklin has the same sort of higher “true” in mind when she considers Holocaust literature. Against Theodor Adorno’s famous dictum that “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric,” she lays out why creating imaginative art—the sort of art that shows you why it shares its root with “artifice”—is exactly the response Auschwitz demands. And against A. Alvarez’s assertion in Commentary that Night is “certainly beyond criticism,” she demonstrates that respectful but honest criticism is our duty to Night and other books like it. (It turns out that Commentary’s unquestioning appreciation of Shoah lit shares much with The Believer’s unquestioning appreciation of hip lit.)

Franklin begins by proving that most of what we think of as objective, plainspoken, and truthful documentation of the Holocaust was actually consciously and artistically crafted by talented, imaginative authors to depict transcendent human truths at the expense of literal ones. This even goes for the two giants of the genre, Wiesel’s Night and Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man.

Levi’s first tome (frequently translated as Survival in Auschwitz) is, Franklin argues, “a fundamentally literary book, with a highly stylized use of language;” the Italian chemist’s very real experience in Auschwitz underwent a “process of fictionalization” on its way from real-life to the page. And why not? “Why should he not exploit his creative freedom to do with his characters what he will,” she asks, “to alter them intentionally—not unconsciously—in ways that will make his narrative more effective?” Late in life, Levi confirmed that he was aware that, even as he was living his extreme life, he hoped to turn that life into something more: “The idea of having to survive in order to tell what I had seen,” she quotes him, “obsessed me night and day.”

In contrast to Levi, in his later years Wiesel has appointed himself the High Arbiter of truth in Holocaust memoirs, “guarding the Temple against those who would desecrate it.” Yet Franklin shows that Wiesel’s first and most influential work certainly wouldn’t pass his own authenticity test. There is its style: “Every sentence feels weighted and deliberate, every episode carefully chosen and delineated,” she writes. “It is also disarmingly brief: It can be carried in a pocket and read in an hour. One has the sense of merciless experience mercilessly distilled to its essence.” There is its careful, learned, artistic construction: Franklin cites the critic Lawrence Langer’s ingenious insight that Night functions as a reverse Bildungsroman, in which “the youthful protagonist becomes an initiate into death rather than in life.” And then there are the details: According to Franklin, “Night balances unsteadily between fidelity to the events it portrays and the making of literature. The book’s poetic austerity comes at a cost to the literal truth.” Franklin documents that the narrator’s mentor, Moishe the Beadle, is a fabricated composite character, and that the narrator’s central interior struggle—his loss of faith in God—is made-up (Wiesel has attested that he believed in God even after the war); in short, Franklin proves that the narrator of Night is not Wiesel. Wiesel might take this as an accusation. Franklin intends it as a compliment.

The heart of A Thousand Darknesses is the chapter on Wolfgang Koeppen’s 1992 book Jakob Littner’s Notes From a Hole in the Ground. Here’s the story: Jakob Littner, a Polish Jew, had been a stamp dealer in Munich until being expelled in 1938; continually kicked eastward, he eventually had to hide for nine months in the titular hole in the ground in eastern Poland, from which he was rescued by Soviet troops in 1944. After the war, he submitted a memoir of his experience to a German publisher, but it was deemed of insufficient literary quality, and the job of adapting it was given to an exceedingly minor German novelist named Wolfgang Koeppen. Koeppen rewrote the manuscript, keeping its first-person voice, and the publisher brought the result out in 1948 as Notes From a Hole in the Ground, by Jakob Littner—Koeppen’s name appeared nowhere. The work was assumed to be a nonfiction memoir, a piece of testimony authored by the person who underwent the experiences depicted (much as Night is received). However, nearly a half-century later, in 1992, the book was published in a new edition, this time as a novel called Jakob Littner’s Notes From a Hole in the Ground, by Wolfgang Koeppen. “The reading public was being asked to accept,” Franklin explains, “that the novelist Wolfgang Koeppen”—by this time, he was a novelist of some notoriety—“was the true author of a book that had been believed to be an authentic Holocaust memoir and was now reclassified as a novel.” Most readers came to believe Littner’s story was fictional! It wasn’t until 1995, when an American professor pointed to Littner’s original manuscript (which had been published in 1985), that people understood what was going on. Koeppen’s 1992 work, Franklin concludes, “appears to be the first time that a text believed to be fiction turned out to be based on fact.”

This remarkable story is an immaculate microcosm of Franklin’s point. First, you have the uproar over whether Koeppen’s text is a novel or a memoir—a fictional or factual account—when the reality reveals how useless that dichotomy is. And then you have the question of who had his priorities right: Littner’s champions, committed to getting every last fact about Littner’s experience correct, or Koeppen and his champions, committed to best conveying what “happened,” in a broader sense? “His purpose,” Franklin writes in defense of Koeppen, “was to write an artistically coherent text, not a news report.” And here is the crux: Koeppen’s work, nearly all agree, is artistically superior to Littner’s. Some would say that doesn’t matter—that Littner’s fealty to what literally happened to him counts the most. But Franklin is persuasive that Koeppen’s more moving and beautiful work—his true war story that didn’t quite happen that way—is more valuable.

In 2006, in Slate magazine, Franklin considered Daniel Mendelsohn’s best-selling The Lost. This journalistic memoir found the author, a premier American literary and theater critic, retracing the steps and discovering the stories of his great-uncle, great-aunt, and four cousins, all of whom perished. Mendelsohn, Franklin wrote, was obsessed with uncovering all the facts and fetishized those facts, as if knowing the stories meant understanding the lives. The Lost was therefore an exact antithesis of Franklin’s program: “Mendelsohn goes too far,” she opined, “in his insistence on the primacy of factual evidence over all other ways of conjuring the past—particularly art.” Of Mendelsohn’s relations, she asks, “What is more important: That we know what happened during the Holocaust (whether Shmiel and his family were shot or gassed, for instance), or that we try, in whatever hopelessly limited way, to understand what occurred?”

If Mendelsohn is Franklin’s foil, Paul Celan is her prototype. In a 2000 New Republic essay, Franklin examined the work of the Jewish poet—who spent time in labor camps and whose parents were murdered by the Nazis—and argued that his verse teaches us no more nor less about suffering than that of a poet he translated, Emily Dickinson. It seems a remarkable claim: Dickinson famously rarely left her house; Celan’s knowledge of suffering came from some of the worst suffering of all. Yet “the recluse in genteel Amherst could teach the survivor of l’univers concentrationnaire something about death,” Franklin says. She adds, in what would have been a good epigraph for A Thousand Darknesses, “Art really is that strong.”

* * *

For Franklin, there is no frigate like a book, so long, like in Dickinson, as it “Bears a Human soul.” And like Dickinson’s stylized, unnatural verse, the hardiest frigates are artistic, because art, more than history or journalism or science or any other means of conveying information, invites what Franklin has called “imaginative empathy”—the ability to feel the human situations depicted rather than just know their basic information. So, Franklin thinks Piotr Rawicz’s unlikely, almost Roth-ian novel Blood from the Sky is valuable because of its insistence that its content is the opposite of unique: “The events that he describes,” Rawicz says of his narrator, who is only implicitly a survivor, “could crop up in any place, at any time, in the mind of any man, planet, mineral.” That insistence, according to Franklin, allows the reader “to empathize imaginatively, to engage with and accept the story on a deeper psychic level than is experienced by the reader of history.” On the other hand from Rawicz is the “totalitarian” (her word) insistence of Wiesel and others on total fealty to the facts and on the Holocaust’s uniqueness and universal centrality; on the other hand also is Mendelsohn’s factual overload; and on the other hand also is Franzen, who chronicles the facts of who we are without adding to our knowledge of who we are, and is therefore, in Franklin’s formulation, “all mirror and no lamp.”

You could argue that Franklin’s self-conscious focus on the Holocaust canon actually undercuts her central argument, which is that these books are like any other books, if perhaps more so. As she wrote of Celan, “The Holocaust did not make great artists out of ordinary Jews; it provided the impetus for those who were already great souls to express themselves in art” (one thinks here of Anne Frank). Franklin’s meditations on how “every act of memory is also an act of narrative,” and that “the very act of telling the story must falsify it because to tell it implies that it has some kind of internal logic” feel irrelevant, even trite. But Franklin’s focus on the Holocaust is nonetheless useful. She has traveled there to trumpet her argument about art for the same reason that Dante traveled to Hell and Heaven to trumpet his argument about human nature: It is the loudest, most extreme, and therefore most obvious stage.

Which is why it is good to know that Franklin will fight for the same values on more mundane stages, too. Earlier this year, she wondered why disagreements between critics over works of art are treated by everyone—the critics included—as polite and unimportant differences, rather than as seismic, bloody quarrels that result from a clash of vital first principles. “Few of us,” she pointed out, “when encountering an opinion of a work of art diametrically opposed to our own, are magnanimous enough to declare the merits of both positions and call it a draw. No: We believe that our position is right.” In the age of The Believer’s celebratory criticism and the Internet’s dominant “new niceness,” it felt quenching to read, “A taste judgment, after all, is a kind of value judgment, even if we can’t always articulate those values exactly.” Franklin was not discussing Holocaust literature, or even Jonathan Franzen. The “work of art” under examination was Come Fly Away, the new Frank Sinatra jukebox musical.

Indeed, the impossibility of reacting to Holocaust photographs “correctly,” spontaneously, or on the basis of ordinary human intuitions is a key to the most diabolical aspect of the Nazi project. It is a key, that is, to the ways in which the victims were shoved into an indecipherable world where normal human instincts became crimes; where the survival of one was predicated on the deaths of others; where previously unthinkable forms of degradation became common; and where the victims were offered maliciously brutal choices that, if made, would annihilate them spiritually before their physical destruction was complete. The Nazis aimed to destroy the victims prior to their deaths, primarily by eradicating the bonds of self-respect, empathy, and mutual dependence that make civilization possible if not always good.

The Nazi project, in short, was something new, something original, something that “did not conform to any model,” as Primo Levi observed. It had two goals: to create a super-man, and to create a sub-man; as such, it was an assault not only on millions of individual human beings but on the very idea of the human being. What is a normal, natural, or appropriate reaction to this?

Photographs from the Nazi period evoke—though obviously in attenuated form—this demented universe, which is why our typical reactions to suffering are frequently upended when we look at them. To see such images is radically disorienting, for it is often hard to decide which kind of Holocaust image is worse: the ones that reveal the horror, or the ones that hide it. A collection of photographs taken by a Polish Jew named Henryk Ross and posthumously published, in 2004, under the title Lodz Ghetto Album epitomizes this confusion.

Ross was born in 1910. Before the war he had been a sports photographer for a Warsaw newspaper, and after imprisonment in the Lodz Ghetto he was one of two photographers employed by the Department of Statistics; in this capacity he took official photographs for the ghetto’s Nazi administration. Surreptitiously, though, he also took thousands of photos that documented the real face of ghetto life and death. Ross and his wife, Stefania, were among the 5 percent of ghetto inmates who survived the Nazi onslaught; after the war they remained in Lodz and then, in 1950, moved to Israel, where Ross worked as a photographer and zincographer. (He testified at the 1961 Eichmann trial, where some of his photographs were entered into evidence.) He died in 1991.

Ross’ crisp photographs look carefully composed, as if the professional standards he had learned in Warsaw had to be upheld at all costs—even if the subject, now, was the destruction of human beings rather than feats of athletic prowess. In the section of the book the editors have called “Public,” Ross portrays the despair and degradation of the ghetto as it was lived in full view of its inhabitants and its occupiers: the filthy, barefoot people on the streets with their battered tin soup bowls; the unburied corpses strewn on the sidewalks; the public executions; the human mules straining as they lugged heavy wagons of excrement (soon the carriers would die of typhus); the mutilated faces, disfigured by deep and bloody gashes, of those killed in the deportation roundup of September 1942, which targeted the young, the old, and the sick. One especially ugly picture of this event shows Jewish policemen grabbing ill people who, slated for transport to the death camps, were desperately trying to escape through the windows of the ghetto hospital. And everywhere in Ross’ images the yellow stars appear, like crazy little sparks of hatred: We see them sewn onto armbands, and onto coats front and back, and hanging on pendants around children’s necks. (Did the Nazis worry that these children would forget they were Jewish?) Even the scarecrow guarding a scrawny plot of ghetto land wears one.

But it is another set of Ross’ photographs, called “Private” and previously unpublished, that cause the biggest shock, though at first one eagerly welcomes them. These photographs are filled with dappled sunshine, laughter, health, and love. Here, for instance, is a photograph of five children who sit on the floor while they eat. Unlike the other children we have seen—stunted, wrinkled figures draped in rags—these kids look like kids. They have smooth, unlined faces and ample skin on their bones; they wear clean clothes, including shoes and socks; they do not look cowed or beaten. One girl, a ribbon in her hair, impishly smiles as she opens her mouth wide for what looks—could it be?—like a nice soup dumpling. A later photograph shows a smiling woman in a polka-dotted bathing suit as she feeds her fat, naked child in a leafy backyard, while another introduces us to a shy little boy with a teddy bear almost as big as he is. Children do especially well in these pictures: They smile and play and are frequently kissed. The grownups seem fine, too. In one photograph we see a score of handsome, nicely dressed revelers at a wedding celebration; seated at a long table loaded with bottles, candlesticks, china, and silverware, they smoke, cheer, and smile.

At first glance these pictures seem wonderfully ordinary and might even suggest that the bad was not all bad. But, even apart from the omnipresent stars, something is terribly wrong. The pictures of happy children, we learn from the text, were probably taken in autumn of 1943: almost a year after most of the ghetto’s children had been deported for immediate gassing at Chelmno. It was primarily the children of the ghetto administrators, and those whose parents had agreed to round up others, who were spared. (What would you do?) Indeed, most of the people in these pictures, who still look healthy and human, were almost certainly members of the ghetto’s so-called elite: policemen, members of the Judenrat, those with money. At worst, they betrayed others, hastening the hideous deaths of their brethren; at best, they were protected from, and apparently inured to, the suffering around them. And one more thing: Within a year almost all of them, and their children, would be murdered too.

How are we to regard such pictures, or, rather, the people in them? Were they monstrously indifferent to others, or tragically ignorant of their own impending fate? Certainly they were victims; were they collaborators too? Do we exult that a few were saved, if only for a short time and at a terrible price? Is it a victory that some were able, almost to the end, to sustain a “normal” family? What does it mean to save one child’s life at the expense of another child’s death? (What would you do?) Do Ross’ photographs show something valiant or something repulsive? In short: How should we act in the “waiting room of Death” (as writer Jean Améry, a survivor of Auschwitz, termed the Jewish ghettoes)? To look at these pictures is to be twisted by such questions, and to know that the answers to them are necessary to seek and yet impossible to find.

Susie Linfield is the director of the cultural reporting and criticism program at New York University, where she is an associate professor of journalism.

Reprinted with permission from The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence by Susie Linfield. © 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

Hilberg’s pioneering work established a methodological orthodoxy with regard to survivor testimony that was long adhered to by historians looking to establish a credible and unassailable historical record of Nazi crimes.

Christopher Browning was still operating within the boundaries Hilberg had set when he chose to focus on the slow brutalization of a single battalion of German soldiers in his pathbreaking 1992 book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.

But, more recently, while studying a 1972 German court case that acquitted a Nazi police chief on all charges related to his role in the liquidation of a small Jewish ghetto in central Poland, Browning was outraged.

He was struck by the presiding judge’s chilling dismissal of some 100 eyewitness testimonies by the ghetto’s survivors who attested to the defendant’s memorable savagery. The judge dryly noted, “As a matter of principle … eyewitness testimony was ‘the most unreliable form of evidence’ with which the judicial process had to deal.” Compounding the insult was the fact that virtually no other documentary or evidentiary material existed in this case.

In his latest book, Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave Labor Camp, Browning offers a corrective—one that represents a shift away from the field’s long-held eschewal of survivor testimony. “The history of the Holocaust,” Browning has concluded, “cannot be written solely as either perpetrator history or history from above.”

Remember Survival offers an account woven out of 292 testimonies by survivors of the Starachowice slave labor camp, whose principal security officer, not coincidentally, was the same Nazi police chief exonerated in that 1972 decision by the German court.

In reflecting upon the 292, Browning remarks: “Among the survivors of the Starachowice camps, there is no Primo Levi or Elie Wiesel.” For the most part, these are ordinary survivors, some with limited verbal skills or disjointed narratives. But Browning is scrupulous in preserving the dignity and integrity, if not always endorsing the accuracy, of their accounts.

Complicating survivor testimony, Browning believes, are five discrete categories of memory, whose boundaries sometimes shift. The largest obstacle to their usefulness as judicial testimony is the tendency by some survivors to incorporate postwar Holocaust tropes into their personal narratives.

Thus, for example, although the historical record indicates that they were not subject to the usual selection process upon arriving in Auschwitz-Birkenau in July 1944, many of the Starachowice survivors vividly “recalled” a selection by Dr. Mengele, whose ubiquity and notoriety were largely nurtured in postwar Holocaust literature and film.

But Browning allows for “authenticity” as well as “factual accuracy” in the survivor testimony. He wisely notes that all evidence is problematic but rather than discarding evidentiary testimony wholesale the problems can be managed by a competent historian. In this case, he speculates that the survivors likely fused the memory of subsequent selections by SS officials, including Mengele, with their traumatic arrival at Auschwitz.

When I picked up Remembering Survival, my interest was not strictly academic. My late mother, Anna Perl Freilich, is among the 292 Starachowice testimonies, and I read the book closely, hunting for more pieces to the overwhelming and confusing jigsaw puzzle that had always constituted her wartime experiences. What I gleaned were not only more shards from a fractured story, but a vital context that endowed those fragments with new meaning.

Ironically, it is Hilberg whom Browning quotes in claiming that what he has attempted to do in this micro-history of the Starachowice factory slave labor camp is to “cast a bright light on a small stage,” and he has largely succeeded. Thrown into stark relief, in particular, are the internal dynamics of the camp and the moral matrix within which the survivors operated.

There were other camps that exploited Jewish labor vital to the German war effort, but the Starachowice labor camp was unusual in at least one respect, one that contributed to the relatively high survival rate of its inmates. Following the 1939 nationalization of the munitions factory on its site, the daily operation of Starachowice was conducted not by the SS, but by “bribable” civilian factory managers.

The Jewish slave laborers were the legal property of the SS, and the new German factory owners paid a per capita fee to the SS for their use. This afforded the SS a more limited day-to-day role in Starachowice than it had in other slave labor camps that used Jewish workers, notwithstanding the brutality of individual Nazis, who oversaw the camp’s security.

Starachowice’s atypical survival rate was rooted in another, more complex, circumstance. In its cynical attempt to “divide and control,” the Nazi administration that ran the security apparatus of the camp appointed a Jewish lagerrat, a parallel to the concentration camps’ infamous kapo system, placing “privileged” Jewish prisoners in charge of Starachowice’s internal affairs.  The lagerrat was supplemented by a Jewish-administered lagerpolizei.

Starachowice’s corrupt and often cruel lagerrat and lagerpolizei were as morally controversial as the ghetto-based Judenräte, or Jewish councils, but they were also paradoxically instrumental in the relatively high survival rate of the Jewish slave labor force.

Though collectively reviled in the survivors’ testimonies for abetting German policies, some credited their own survival to crucial and inexplicable acts of mercy by individual members of the lagerpolizei.

My mother, for example, fell victim to the typhus epidemic that raged in Starachowice during the winter of 1942-43. Too weak to leave her bed to attend the mandatory prisoner roll call, she had resigned herself to the consequences.

But in a story that I heard over and over during my childhood, and that is recounted in Remembering Survival, it was one of the lagerpolizei, a landsman from her hometown of Szydlowiec, Szmul Szczesliwy, who burst into her barracks, rallied her to her feet, yanked on her clothes, helped her to the roll call, and insisted that other landsleit carry her to work. Those who remained behind were massacred in their beds.

As Browning notes, a member of the lagerrat, Rachmil Wolfowicz, was “detested” by many. But he is recalled by my uncle, the Yiddish journalist Joseph Friedenson—another Starachowice survivor interviewed by Browning—simply as a cousin by marriage whose mother’s privileged job in the camp kitchen enabled Friedenson, his wife Gitele and my mother (Gitele’s cousin) to receive occasional life-saving supplements to their near-starvation diets.

This web of idiosyncratic stories helps to reconstruct the tortured ethical universe that reigned in Starachowice, where the Jewish prisoners were continually presented with what Lawrence Langer referred to as a series of “choiceless choices” in their struggle to stay alive and where they established a makeshift moral code in the face of a heartless and single-minded enemy.

The interdependence of this battered community of slave laborers, many of whom were fortunate to be imprisoned with relatives or townsmen, is vividly portrayed. Tragically, as one survivor notes, “if you helped one person, it was usually at the expense of another.”

But Browning cautions against moralizing; what he emphasizes is that it was almost impossible to stay alive solely through one’s own agency. He credits, among other factors, the Starachowice slave laborers’ desperate commitment to the lives of those closest to them by blood or geography for their unusually high survival rate. It also provided a way for them to unwittingly thwart the Nazi plan for total Jewish annihilation.

In one of the book’s most gripping chapters, Browning describes the 1944 cattle-car ride from Starachowice to Auschwitz-Birkenau. When the doors were opened on arrival, a preponderance of the labor camp’s surviving lagerrat and lagerpolizei—all of whom were concentrated in the first car—were found dead in a heap.

Had they perished from the hardships and privations of the cattle-car ride, or were they the victims of revenge killings by their fellow prisoners? Though it’s impossible to be sure, Browning is convinced that it’s the latter.

If fellow prisoners had killed them, it was likely a group of Lublin survivors who had arrived at Starachowice rather late in the game. Geographic outliers at the bottom of the camp hierarchy, they had systematically been denied the advantages of the veteran Starachowice slave laborers, and they may have decided to settle a score. To his credit, Browning neither flinches in exploring this scenario nor offers facile moral judgments about this tragic possibility.

Now, some 40 years after the scandalous verdict of a German court, not only has Browning proved that survivor testimony is “useful” to Holocaust historiography but that it is vital. It also grants survivors a degree of justice that they have long been denied.

In a measure of the emotional resonance his book has had among Starachowice survivors, my uncle, Joseph Friedenson, remarks of Browning, “For someone who didn’t see the Nazis in action, he manages to capture the tragedy as if he were there; as if he were a witness, just like me.”

In his sensitive and careful use of In his sensitive and careful use of their testimonies, Browning has not simply made a sentimental concession to these ordinary survivors, he has enriched the historical record. Even as he reinforces the evidence of Nazi crimes, Browning provides a critical window into the daily life and mores of the Jewish prisoners. Like any good historian, he sifts through and weighs conflicting testimonies and carefully contextualizes them. Above all, he listens.

Toby Perl Freilich is a freelance filmmaker in New York and Jerusalem currently completing a documentary about Israel’s kibbutz movement.

Productions of Oliver, the musical based on Oliver Twist, still provoke outrage as the Fagin stereotype is wheeled out yet again, and each time it is revived there are the predictable complaints. Shylock fares better, for it is possible, indeed almost de rigueur, to play him as tragic and misunderstood. Peter O’Toole gave a magnificent Shylock at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1960, an interpretation greatly admired by Jewish critics and the Jewish theater-going public, for O’Toole in the role was both dignified and heroic. He triumphed over the lesser actors. In those days he still had a noble nose, which he later modified (in my view unwisely) in order to play Lawrence of Arabia for David Lean. He looked much better before he had it fixed. I watched his performance many times, for my first husband, Clive Swift, played his friend Tubal, and their scene together was memorable. Tubal tells Shylock that his missing daughter Jessica has bartered her father’s ring for a monkey, at which Shylock cries out, “Thou torturest me, Tubal: it was my turquoise; I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor: I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys!” Who could not be on Shylock’s side? He has all the best lines.

O’Toole, of course, wasn’t Jewish, but my husband was. I saw this production with my parents just after Clive and I got married, and they were very impressed. This was just as well, as they had been somewhat apprehensive about our engagement, not because Clive was Jewish, but because we were both very young, and moreover he was an actor. This, I thought, was reasonable on their part. Acting is not the most reliable of professions.

Nobody in my family showed any sign of anti-Semitism, nor had I encountered it at school or at university. One or two of the more Orthodox of Clive’s family (notably his terrifying grandmother) were more hostile to me as a prospective in-law than anyone in my family was to him. Luckily this disapproval was kept from me, and to me, Jewishness wasn’t an issue. The two sets of parents got on well, pleasantly exchanging gifts at Christmas over the years, and I loved all the Swifts (apart from Grandma G.). One year my father made the mistake of sending a gift of smoked eel from the local fishmonger, as a change from the traditional smoked salmon, but nobody held it against him. But I was surprised when, at the time of my marriage, my father told me that he thought he ought not to accept an invitation to join the golf club because it had a Jewish quota, and it wouldn’t seem proper for him to appear to condone prejudice now he had acquired a Jewish son-in-law.

I didn’t know what a Jewish quota was, and he had to explain. My father was then County Count Judge of Northumberland, and apparently belonging to the golf club went with the job. He never played golf, so it was no loss to him, but it was an eye-opener to me. I had entered a new territory. I had never come across this sort of prejudice and wondered for a moment whether I had unwittingly embarked on a life of heroic struggle.

Jewish quotas are illegal in Britain now, and have been for a long time. But in those days, in the 1960s, they operated in several clubs and institutions, and I am sure some would tell you that, covertly, they still do. I wouldn’t know about that, as no one I know would want to join any of these discriminatory outfits, though some of my friends belong to the Garrick Club, which still doesn’t accept women members.

Having half-Jewish children and wholly Jewish in-laws has sensitized me to anti-Semitic attitudes and press coverage. I know that to the Orthodox my children don’t qualify as Jewish, because they are Jewish only through the paternal line, but they are half-Jewish to me and to themselves. Some of my Jewish in-laws and Jewish friends are more Jewish than others: Some do Friday nights, some won’t drink German wine or go to Germany, some won’t eat shellfish. Some make their own gefilte fish, others detest it. Some read Holocaust literature and fiction obsessively, others avoid it. (It was a Jewish friend who introduced me to the work of Primo Levi in the 1960s, long before he was well known outside Italy.) Some call one another (usually in the friendliest way, sometimes more acrimoniously) “Jew-hating Jews.” Some sing sacred music in Christian choirs, some prefer Fiddler on the Roof. Some go to synagogue, some haven’t been near one since their own bar mitzvah. But all of them, all of them think of themselves as English.

Margaret Drabble.
CREDIT: Ruth Corney

I don’t remember when I first became conscious of the Jews. As I was born in 1939, I was brought up in an England traumatized by war, and when I was a teenager I was aware that European Jews had been the victims of genocide, although we were not encouraged to look at Holocaust pornography. My father, as a young left-wing lawyer, had been involved with the placement of Jewish refugees in Sheffield in the 1930s, but I didn’t know that until much later. I don’t think I connected contemporary Jews with the Jews of the Bible, who seemed as remote from me as the Roundheads and Cavaliers, or the Ancient Britons who built Stonehenge. We read the Bible, but nobody at home or at school or during my university career ever suggested that the Jews were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus. If I thought anything, I thought it was all the fault of Pontius Pilate, and Pontius Pilate was a Roman. The Romans, I knew, went in for crucifixions. The notion of the collective guilt of the Jews would have appeared ludicrous to my Shavian mother and Quaker father, and ludicrous in the Nonconformist Protestant North of England where I was brought up. I have since discovered that some English and Irish children, educated in convents or Catholic schools, did have some anti-Jewish indoctrination, but this would have been utterly unacceptable in the world in which I was reared. I was spared any of that nonsense and only came across it, with some disbelief, in recent years.

We did, of course, study the Bible at school, though, as it was a Quaker school, we studied it less assiduously than most schoolchildren, for the Quakers are not very scripture-dependent. But we did learn a few verses every morning, most of them from the New Testament or the Psalms, but sometimes from Isaiah or Ezekiel or, if we were lucky, from the Book of Job. We loved the Book of Job—its gloominess, its poetry, its majesty. The passage about the horse particularly delighted us, although I now see that the horse is a warhorse, and therefore should have been forbidden us, as we were meant to be pacifists. “He paweth in the valley and rejoiceth in his strength … and oft as the trumpet soundeth, he saith, Aha!” Magnificent, but not very Quakerly.

Did we think of Job as Jewish? Not really. But we liked the Old Testament stories—Adam and Eve, Jonah and the Whale, Naomi and Ruth, Samson and Delilah, Joseph and his brothers. English literature is permeated by the prose and poetry of the King James Bible. The phrases linger on in the memory, and one of my most treasured possessions is a Biblical Concordance, which I keep by the bed. I know one can easily find quotations on the Internet now, but they seem more valuable when tracked down in a leather-bound gilt-leaf volume. The other night I dreamed about my younger son Joseph. “Behold, this dreamer cometh!” were the words to which I woke, and which I found at once in my Cruden’s Concordance. And I remember writing a poem at school about Joseph, of which I can remember only the last line, which went “this pit in Dothan, where no water is.” Maybe it was a dramatic monologue in iambic pentameter, in Joseph’s voice, or maybe it was a cry of adolescent misery. I was rather proud of it.

My Grandfather Drabble was called Joseph. He was a Yorkshire Methodist. The choice of name seemed to unite the families. All three of my children have Biblical names.

The debate about Jewish descent fascinates me, and it breaks out from time to time in England in a public storm, most recently about ethnic or religious criteria for pupils and teachers at a celebrated North London school, the Jewish Free School, or the JFS as it is always known. A lot of people want to send their children to the JFS, not because it is free (although, being a state school, it is) but because it is rated “outstanding,” and competition for good state schools is fierce. According to the National Secular Society (which opposes all Faith Schools), the controversial 2009 exclusion case “turned on whether the child in question was Jewish. It is generally recognised that a person is Jewish if his or her mother is Jewish. The mother in this case (who actually taught at the school) had converted to Judaism and regarded herself as Jewish. But her conversion had not been recognised by the Office of the Chief Rabbi and therefore also was not recognised by the school.”

A good deal of room for acrimonious debate and expensive litigation there, and at the U.K. Supreme Court in December 2009 it was ruled that the JFS admissions policy amounted to direct discrimination on the basis of race. That probably won’t be the end of the story.

My sons went to a North London state school (not the JFS), which because of its catchment area had a fairly large Jewish intake, with many children from academic and professional families. I remember one alumnus saying of this school, “No matter how clever you were, there was also some Jewish kid who was a lot cleverer than you, and he was always top of the class.” I don’t know if that’s an anti-Semitic remark or not.

The JFS understandably didn’t like being accused of racial discrimination. Jews have been discriminated against in British society for centuries and don’t like a counter-accusation. What constitutes anti-Semitism in Britain today is another matter. It’s not to do with golf clubs or dining clubs, for Race Discrimination Acts and Equality Acts have largely brought an end to that. It shouldn’t feature in educational establishments and on the whole doesn’t: The mirror-image JFS case became notorious precisely because it was exceptional. My instinct is to claim that it has diminished almost out of normal daily existence, although that may be wishful thinking on my part, or ignorance, or proof of a sheltered life. Accusations of anti-Semitism still abound, and the tabloid press loves to make the most of stories of swastikas on defaced synagogues—arguably, inflammatory coverage that is in itself a form of anti-Semitism. The tabloid press is not a trustworthy source of information. But the truth is that these episodes are rare.

There were several acts of vandalism after the conflict in Gaza in 2008, as there were in the United States and Canada. When we talk about anti-Semitism, do we really mean anti-Zionism? They are not the same, although some argue that they are. British academics who boycott conferences in Israeli universities may be anti-Zionist, but they are not necessarily anti-Semitic, although the two charges are often conflated. Most of them would deny hotly (and rightly) any tinge of anti-Semitism and insist that they are protesting against Israeli policy towards the Palestinians. Neither a nation nor a race should be identified with its foreign policy. A few years ago I protested vehemently against the illegal detention of so-called “illegal combatants” in Guantanamo (in which our British government was lamentably and supinely complicit) and said, provocatively, that Guantanamo filled me with a deplorable and painful sense of anti-Americanism. I did not say that I hated America or Americans, although many think I did. Nor does an acute distress at the deadly invasions of Lebanon or Gaza imply that a critic of Israel hates Jews. To suggest that anti-Semitism is the underlying cause of British protests about Gaza is offensive and unjustified.

Both anti-Zionism and a support for the Palestinian cause are perhaps more prevalent and more boldly expressed in the United Kingdom than in the United States. In 2002, Cherie Blair, a human rights lawyer and Prime Minister Tony Blair’s wife, let slip some words of what was interpreted as sympathy for suicide bombers. Although she got some flak for this from British rabbis and the Israeli embassy, she was not violently attacked across the board for racism or indiscretion. I doubt if she’d have dared to express herself so spontaneously and unguardedly in America. She later apologized for any offense. What she actually said, at a charity event to raise funds for MAP (Medical Aid for Palestinians) was this: “As long as young people feel they have no hope but to blow themselves up we are never going to make progress.” This does not strike me as an expression of support for Hamas, but it is easy to see how it could be misrepresented.

It is perceived, in Britain, that the U.S. pro-Israel lobby attempts, successfully, to censor criticism of Israel. I don’t know how fair this suspicion is, but it exists, and it was inflamed by a minor incident in October 2006 when Australian-born, British-based writer Carmen Callil was in New York promoting her remarkable account of Vichy France, Bad Faith. This gripping, carefully researched yet very personal book tells the harrowing story of the betrayal and deportation of French Jews during the Occupation, and on publication it was highly praised in Britain, and also by French and Jewish critics who rightly read it as a fierce indictment of the Vichy regime and an important contribution to our historical knowledge of the period. The problem arose when it was noted that in the last chapter Callil suggests that in recent times the Israeli treatment of Palestinians echoes the wartime persecution of the Jews. This is not a novel proposal, and the theory that violence begets violence is widely if not universally accepted. Callil does not go as far as Nobel Prize-winner José Saramago, who compared the conditions in Palestinian refugee camps to those in a concentration camp, but nevertheless her criticism of Israel annoyed some American Jewish readers, and, alerted to potential unpleasantness, the French Embassy nervously canceled a party in her honor. This was pusillanimous of the French, and understandably annoyed Callil.

It would be disingenuous to suggest that her book could in any way be construed as anti-Semitic. It is not.

I don’t think this specific incident could have happened in England. Here, these days, we are more sensitive to complaints from Muslims and other religious or ethnic minorities than to complaints from pro-Israel or agnostic Jews. There have been acts of official and unofficial censorship—plays closed, books burned, writers driven into hiding—and some cowardly decisions on the part of our government. Both Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Labor leader Michael Foot stood staunchly by Salman Rushdie in 1989 when the Satanic Verses fatwa was delivered, but I sometimes fear that since the London bombings of 2005 we are condoning censorship more easily than we did, in the name of multiculturalism. But we do not censor the Jews, nor do they censor themselves. It is Sikh and Muslim protests that exercise our consciences now. British Jewish writers can be as outrageous as they choose without unduly upsetting their own or the wider community. They are at home here, and have been for a long time.

Howard Jacobson, a Manchester-born novelist sometimes described as our own Philip Roth, returns again and again to deeply black Jewish comedy and to the sensitivities and particularities of British Jews. His 2006 novel, Kalooki Nights, is a fascinating compendium of information about Jewish life and Jewish urban folklore in Britain in the last half century, in turn affectionate, brutal, emotional, satiric, and tragic. It demonstrates that there are at least as many forms of Jewishness in Britain today as there are of Englishness, or Scottishness, or Irishness—there are Marxist, northern, London suburban, Oxford academic, secular, Zionist, anti-Zionist, rich, poor, tolerant, insanely intolerant, observant, card-playing, fell-walking, strictly kosher, bacon-devouring, lockjaw-fearing Jews. (We all feared lockjaw too, in our white suburban Yorkshire school: I think this was a 1940s thing, not a Jewish thing.)

His protagonist Max Glickman, son of a hard-line left-wing secularist, is a cartoonist, forever reworking his masterpiece, Five Thousand Years of Bitterness, a brilliant narrative device that gives Jacobson license to explore Holocaust jokes in the worst possible taste, and to caricature both extreme Orthodoxy and polite and impolite social anti-Semitism. He says things that we non-Jews would never dare to say. Spitefully presented by his grotesque non-Jewish mother-in-law with a nodding toy rabbi to hang in the back of his provocative Volkswagen (or Völökswagen, as he chooses to spell it), he wonders if it comes from a souvenir shop in Jerusalem. “You can never tell with tat; bad taste narrows the gap between the sentimental way you see yourself, and the scorn with which others see you. Half of what’s for sale in Israel you’d consider anti-Semitic if you saw it anywhere else.”

Recently I was on the judging panel for a National Short Story Award organized by BBC Radio 4. One of the five winning tales (“Other People’s Gods,” by Naomi Alderman) was set in the very traditional North London Jewish neighborhood of Hendon. The protagonist, a family man called Bloom, purchases on a whim a statuette of Ganesh, the Indian elephant god, which seems to bring him and his family good luck. The rabbi expostulates, accusing him of worshipping an idol, and destroys Ganesh. The mild-mannered ophthalmologist, in revenge, wrecks the synagogue. It is a good-humored multicultural story with an excellent Biblical punch line, and was brilliantly read on air by that fine actress Miriam Margolyes. Inoffensive as this little fable was, I was slightly anxious (how anxious we are these days!) that some might find it objectionable, and was reassured to learn that it had been cleared for broadcast by the higher powers of the BBC. I doubt if a similarly light-hearted yet literally iconoclastic story set in an orthodox Muslim neighborhood would have been passed as easily.

By Jacobson’s standards, Alderman’s tale was mild. Yet it raised questions of compliance, the new editorial fear word at the BBC. Novelists and story writers need not comply, but employees of the BBC must.

The BBC declined to broadcast Hanif Kureishi’s story “Weddings and Beheadings,” a not-at-all light-hearted prize-winner entered three years earlier for the same award. This controversial decision was made as “a courtesy” to the family of Alan Johnston, the BBC reporter on the Middle East who was kidnapped by Palestinian militants and was being held hostage at that time, in very delicate diplomatic circumstances. (He was eventually released after four months in captivity.) Kureishi’s story had been written before this grim episode, and did not refer to it, though it is narrated by a fictitious film maker who makes his living from news videos of violent death.

I should make it clear that Kureishi’s outspoken work has never been subjected to censorship, although he has been at times provocatively anti-Islamic in his writing—his mockery of extremists reading messages in a Koran-inscribed sacred aubergine in The Black Album (1995) was greeted with much praise. The circumstances in which the BBC decided not to broadcast his story in 2006 were wholly exceptional, and the story was published along with the other prize-winners in due course. The BBC treads a difficult path. I wouldn’t like to be its director-general. The decision not to broadcast was widely discussed and in some quarters much criticized. I do not know whether it was right or wrong.

If, as I have stated, it is perceived in Britain that there is a powerful pro-Israel lobby in America, I know from American friends that our press and some of our celebrities are perceived as pro-Palestinian. Reporter Robert Fisk of the Independent is cited as a Palestinian apologist, as is Vanessa Redgrave. (I went with Vanessa and her brother Corin Redgrave on a delegation to Washington for the Guantanamo Human Rights Commission, and it was clear that while Vanessa attracted media coverage, she also attracted hostility.) Pro-Israel Americans believe that the BBC is biased against Israel, but here, many on the left (including readers of the New Statesman) believe that the BBC is pro-Israel, particularly after its much-publicized refusal to broadcast a charity appeal for the victims of the Gaza bombardment. Attacked from both sides, the BBC probably gets it right, and its veteran reporter on the Middle East, Jeremy Bowen, is reassuringly reliable, rising calmly above the waves of partisan extremism. The BBC remains an independent voice. The reporting on the recent planned expansion of 1,600 new homes in occupied East Jerusalem seemed to me impeccably neutral. The settlements are considered by many (including President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and me) to be unlawful, and I cannot see how anybody could accuse the BBC of anti-Semitic or anti-Israeli bias in its coverage.

But we know that a crude political and racial anti-Semitism flourishes in some British constituencies where Muslim radicals campaign. This is a thousand miles away from the golf club quota or the launch party ban, and much more inflammatory. Sheffield born Oona King, formerly Labor Member of Parliament for Bethnal Green and Bow in East London, is of mixed race—Jewish on her mother’s side, African-American on her father’s—and has been subjected to hate mail and abuse from several directions by her political opponents and her (largely Muslim) ex-constituents. She lost her seat in 2005 to the maverick pro-Palestinian George Galloway, having herself initially supported the invasion of Iraq. Galloway’s new Respect Party illustrates a strange new alliance of multicultural Britain, founded, Howard Jacobson would argue, on a profound ignorance of the history of Israel and of British involvement in the Middle East. Peter O’Toole’s nose and Lawrence of Arabia have a lot to answer for.

In sum, my own conclusion is that old-style anti-Semitism in Britain today has largely withered away, although as long as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains unresolved there will always be flash points abroad to trigger outbursts of hostility at home. But these do not in my view reflect a deep-rooted underlying establishment antagonism to the Jews in England. The golf club snobbery of the past has gone. Of course Jewish people here are sensitive to and worried about perceived slights and off-color jokes—what else would you expect, after centuries of Shylock and Fagin and Svengali? Britain remains, whatever people tell you, a class-obsessed society, but anti-Semitism no longer features high on the prejudice agenda. Howard Jacobson wouldn’t agree with me and would no doubt label me a representative of what he calls “cosy old lazy old easy-come easy-go England.” But there are worse things to be than that.

Margaret Drabble is the author of The Sea Lady, The Seven Sisters, The Peppered Moth, and The Needle’s Eye, among other novels. She is the editor of the fifth and sixth editions of The Oxford Companion to English Literature.

(For more on this subject, listen to a Tablet podcast with Kalooki Nights author Howard Jacobson here.)

All this changed when he met the German. He doesn’t remember the man’s name, but still recalls the shock he felt when he learned his tall, genial neighbor was an escaped SS officer, wanted for crimes against humanity and living out his years working as a security consultant for various Arab governments. Sansal wanted to know more, to learn about the ghettos and the trains and the death camps, things he was increasingly convinced were not rumors at all. But in Algeria, there was no one he could ask.

As luck would have it, Sansal had an older brother studying in Paris, who, after some pleading, agreed to send over some books. Sansal read them all eagerly, but only one changed his life: Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man, the book commonly known in the United States as Survival in Auschwitz. He declared himself a disciple of Levi’s, and devoted much of his life to thinking and writing about the same questions that troubled his mentor, most notably the question of memory.

Now, Arab and Muslim readers wishing to follow Sansal’s lead no longer have to depend on contraband copies in foreign languages: thanks to a new initiative called Project Aladdin, Levi’s memoir, along with Anne Frank’s diary and two other Holocaust-themed works, are available in Arabic as a free download, alongside editions in Turkish and Farsi.

The project, according to its founder, Abraham Radkin, was conceived in response to a steep rise in the volume of anti-Semitic and Holocaust-denying literature distributed in the Arab and Muslim world—and the rhetoric of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. With hundreds of hateful tracts published each year, Radkin thought, the most effective response would be to provide reliable, informative, and evocative alternatives. The executive director of the British nonprofit Human Rights Foundation, Radkin had the necessary connections to attract high-level patrons to his project, putting together an advisory board that includes the president of Senegal, Abdoulaye Wade; Princess Haya al-Khalifa of Bahrain; Prince Hassan bin-Talal of Jordan; former French president Jacques Chirac; and former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. With some help from the United Nations and other international organization, the project was ready to launch.

Its first hurdle was deciding which books to publish. “We were looking,” Radkin said in a recent interview, “to publish four books that gave a general public basically unaware of the historical facts an idea of the scale of the horror, that gave personal testimony, and that provided accurate descriptions of what happened to people.”

Anne Frank was a natural choice, as was Shlomo Venezia’s Inside the Gas Chambers: Eight Months in the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz, a survivor’s account of the camp’s intricate machinery of death. Phillipe Burrin’s Hitler and the Jews: The Path to Genocide was added as a general, approachable primer on the basic historical facts of the Holocaust. This left room for one additional title; after much argument—some board members thought the book would prove too dense for a population with little education about the Holocaust—Radkin decided to publish Levi as well, the first time the author had been translated into Arabic or Farsi. In March 2009, all four titles were offered for free online.

While the project is still in its infancy, a few thousand copies of each book have already been downloaded, and the project’s staff received hundreds of encouraging emails from readers throughout the Arab world. Local publishers in Morocco, Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon, and France will soon offer the translations in paperback, and publishers in other countries are slated to join in the coming months. Other initiatives, from student exchange programs to outreach efforts, are also in the works.

“I think the project has the potential to bring about real change on the ground,” Radkin said. “I have great faith in the importance of education and cultural interaction with people who are kept in the dark by those forces who benefit from ignorance.”

Those very forces, Sansal agreed, are not to be underestimated. “The situation in the Arab world is absolutely catastrophic,” he said, calling the abuse of women in particular “another Shoah.” It’s a theme that Sansal pushes to its extremes: his recent book, The German Mujahid, tells the story of two Algerian brothers who discover that their German father was a fugitive war criminal, and makes bold parallels between Nazism and fundamentalist Islam.

Speaking in a recent conference on Primo Levi, where he was seated next to Radkin and other intellectuals, Sansal expressed his pleasure with the new translations. Just like Levi had once delivered Sansal from ignorance, the Algerian writer said he hoped and believed If This Is a Man would now open the eyes of a new generation of Arab and Farsi readers. “Levi provides a clear vision,” he said. “It’s a vision of remembrance and responsibility.”

Levi’s is also a vision likely to appeal to Muslim audiences, said Natalia Indrimi, the director of the New York-based Primo Levi Center, which organized the recent conference, because of its ability to portray the Holocaust in terms that are universally understandable.

“Levi speaks and writes as a man,” she said. “I trust very much that he’ll speak to people as people. If This Is a Man does not make suffering or the mechanism of genocide a Jewish property. It desegregates the Shoah. It teaches us how to come close to the other without putting labels on ourselves or on the other.”

Your title, Primo Levi’s Universe, makes a large claim for the scope and relevance of Levi’s writing. What makes him a figure of contemporary urgency?

Levi was a modest man but an ambitious writer and thinker. He confronted big questions—good and evil, life after religion—with a unique and modern perspective, both as an Auschwitz survivor and as a poet-scientist who had fully assimilated Darwin and Einstein but who knew that science alone could not give us a coherent view of the world and our place in it.

You have a novel, almost radical, approach to the reading of Levi’s work—you see it all as part of a single epic. Can you explain that?

The title of Levi’s first book, If This is a Man, encapsulates much of his quest. (It’s a shame the American version was re-titled Survival in Auschwitz.) Levi wanted to understand human beings, and he wanted, himself, to become a complete human being. He pursued both goals by writing—on an infinite variety of topics, but, most centrally, about his own experiences and his formation as a man, particularly in the inferno of Auschwitz but also as a university student, an aspiring chemist, a lovelorn youth, a mountain climber, and a writer.

Your book, though sensitive to the historical context for Levi’s writing, seems filtered through a deeply personal sense of connection to him.

I was writing a novel about a group of law students, and I decided to have one of them become obsessed with the mystery of Levi’s death in 1987—whether his fall down the stairwell was accident or suicide. I began reading more and more of his work and became obsessed myself, not with his death but with his life and his remarkable literary talent. I came to think that his depth and breadth were not yet fully appreciated. I started writing a short essay, and that mushroomed into a book.

Levi’s relationship to his Jewishness was complicated. How would you describe it?

Levi was ambivalent about being called a Jewish writer. He was never observant, he did not believe in God, and he lacked a sense of the mystical. He talked about the need for new decalogues, new testaments, new ways of understanding the world that incorporate modern science and history. At the same time, he understood that you cannot build a new cosmos from scratch. Thus, he based his most important poem, the “if this is a man” poem, on the Shema, wrote another poem called “Passover,” titled a novel If Not Now, When?, after a saying from Rabbi Hillel, and began his anthology of favorite texts with the Book of Job. As in almost everything, Levi is a hybrid, a man not equal to himself, both a Jewish and a non-Jewish writer.

There’s a way that Levi seems in your book like someone who transcended literature through literature and is almost the founder of a religion, something post-Jewish and post-Christian that’s nevertheless informed by elements of both. Am I wrong in sensing this?

Levi vehemently rejected the role of prophet, but with the vehemence, perhaps, of someone who was drawn to it. Part of his genius was to create a cosmos that is coherent and yet democratic, rather than dogmatic. He believed not in revelations but in reasoned conversations—he was a master of the interview. His pronouncements always included warnings that he himself is not to be fully trusted, that memory and imagination are indispensable but unreliable, and that everyone must think things through for himself.

Levi’s ethos draws strongly from Jewish and Christian sources in its emphasis on goodness and care for others, as exemplified in If This is a Man by the mason who keeps Levi alive by smuggling him soup, Lorenzo. But Levi combines that ethic of care with an equally deep yearning for excellence, knowledge, and adventure: the “virtue” of the ancient Greeks, personified by Levi’s hero, Odysseus. There is also a trace of religion in Levi’s very secularism—in the fact that, having concluded that there is no God, he felt that as a loss and perceived the universe not merely as neutral, but, in the absence of Providence, hostile. Revealingly, he described his lack of religion by comparing it to an amputation.

Levi understood the flaws of secularism even as he was a proponent of it.

Again, he is deeply ambiguous. In If This is a Man, he exhibits a certain scorn for the religious inmates, and for anyone who swallows someone else’s system whole, without acknowledging that no system can be adequate. But he also says that the devout “lived better,” a phrase which can suggest both that they were less despairing but also that they were more ethical. Levi thought that modernity had dissolved the old faiths and created a chaos, and that we needed new scientist-poets to “extract harmony from this obscure tangle” but also to make it “compatible, comparable, assimilable to our traditional culture.” Levi rejected the type of secularism that would simply throw out the old faiths; he understood that the Book of Job and Rabbi Hillel remain indispensable, even to atheists.

Levi’s split between the scientific realm and the imaginative realm—he was a writer-chemist—seems to have great relevance for our own age. Would you say he was a healer of the split or someone who felt these were incompatible realms?

Levi wrote great poetry, fiction, and non-fiction about topics such as chemistry, biology, and physics. From science he absorbed a respect for facts and a secular, “disenchanted” worldview. But most of his tales about science describe disasters, experiments gone awry, sometimes comically and sometimes tragically. From literature (and life) he gained a sharp sense of tragedy, human limits, and the dangers of hubris. He was deeply concerned about nuclear weapons and environmental problems, as well as attempts to re-engineer the human spirit. So I would say that he found science and poetry not only compatible, but also indispensable as complements to one another. In The Periodic Table, he has a beautiful passage comparing writing to distilling; both are ways to “obtain the essence,” to reach the “spirit” that inheres in matter, to find through multiple metamorphoses an ambiguous purity.

You are yourself a poet and a professor of law. Do you see the tension in Levi’s work, between the urge to bear witness and the need to invent, as in some sense a reflection of the tension in Judaism itself between halacha and agaddah, between law and story?

In the preface to Moments of Reprieve, Levi wrote that the temptation to round out the facts and heighten the colors is “an integral part of writing, without it one does not write stories but rather accounts.” The only way for his fallen comrades to survive was for them to enjoy what he calls “the ambiguous perennial existence of literary characters.” Levi combined a scientist’s devotion to factual accuracy with a poet’s sense that only imagination reaches the deepest truths of human experience. In all kinds of law, civil and religious, the same tension exists. Lawyers tell competing stories compounded of fact and imagination, and judges use their moral imaginations to compare those stories to the stories embodied in past decisions. Laws try to eliminate ambiguity, but laws can only be implemented through the moral imagination, which depends on the ambiguity of stories to give it substance and the freedom to operate.

I’m struck by the fact that although he was a father and a husband, in his writing these elements of his life are all but erased. How would you account for this act of suppression? And does it compromise your sense of him as a complete writer?

Also, despite living almost his whole life with his mother, he never wrote about her, or really about mothers in general. Although Levi was gentle and not macho, his worldview could be rather male, particularly in his youth. His favorite authors included Melville, Conrad, and Jack London. As he told Philip Roth, “Family, home, factory are good things in themselves, but they deprived me of something that I still miss: adventure.” He wrote beautifully about male friendship and male antagonism, but little about family relationships. His fear of women made him feel incomplete as a man, but, paradoxically, because he wrote about that sense of incompleteness quite honestly and well, I’m not sure that it compromised him as a writer; it gave him one of his great themes. That is a tangled answer, but Levi, for all his lucidity, was a tangled man.

Do you believe Levi killed himself?

Probably. He was in the midst of a terrible episode of depression. But no one can ever be sure whether it was intentional, accidental, or something in-between. As Levi wrote in an essay about a fellow Auschwitz survivor, “Jean Améry, Philosopher and Suicide,” “Each and every human action contains a kernel of incomprehensibility.”

Does it matter?

It does matter, but, for me, not as much and not in the same way that some have suggested. I disagree with the rabbi of Turin, who avoided the Jewish strictures against suicide by pronouncing it a case of delayed murder by the Nazis. Levi suffered from severe depressions, including thoughts of suicide, before Auschwitz. He did not attribute his chronic depression to the Nazis; he said he survived Auschwitz in a condition of “exceptional spiritedness” and that the experience, ironically, gave him a reason to live: to tell the story. I also do not believe that suicide robs a life of its meaning or marks it as a failure. Obviously, it is not identical to dying of heart disease, but it may be more similar than we sometimes believe. In the end, what matters to me is the miraculous writing from a beautiful soul.

Sam Magavern is co-director of the Partnership for the Public Good and teaches at the University of Buffalo Law School and Cornell University’s School of International and Labor Relations. His writing has appeared in Poetry, The Antioch Review, and The Paris Review.

Jonathan Rosen is the author of four books: Eve’s Apple, The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey Between Worlds, Joy Comes in the Morning, and The Life of the Skies.

Writing in Hebrew in the United States was never a particularly sensible way to reach a large audience. In his Yankee Talmud, published in Hebrew in New York in 1907, the satirist Gershon Rosenzweig noted wryly that “He who writes a Hebrew book in America . . . is a madman.” The sense that American Hebrew writers had of themselves as a tiny minority even within the American Jewish minority might help to explain why they devoted so much energy to their marginalized and dispossessed compatriots, particularly Native Americans and African-Americans. Stephen Katz recovers this fascinating body of literature in Red, Black, and Jew: New Frontiers in Hebrew Literature (Texas, July).

Why write in Hebrew in the first place? Yaniv Hagbi explores how the answers to this question present themselves in one major writer’s oeuvre in Language, Absence, Play: Judaism and Superstructuralism in the Poetics of S. Y. Agnon (Syracuse, June). Seeking out parallels and tensions between Jewish theological beliefs about language and those espoused by cultural theorists in the late 20th century, Hagbi, a professor at the University of Amsterdam, analyzes the works of a true master of the language and the sole Hebrew writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. All of which raises the question of what will be gained (wider audience?) and lost (precision?) in the translation of Hagbi’s study, originally published in Hebrew in 2007, into English.

While the difficulty of translating Agnon has reduced his chances for wide renown in the U.S., Primo Levi’s legacy seems secure. A trio of serious Levi biographies, by Myriam Anissimov, Ian Thomson, and Carole Angier, were published earlier this decade. The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi was released in 2007, placing the author of Survival in Auschwitz and The Periodic Table in the same hypercanonical literary league as Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Proust, and Rushdie. An international center for the study of Italian Jewry carries Levi’s name, suggesting he bests Immanuel of Rome and Amedeo Modigliani for the title of Most Prominent Italian Jew of All Time. This summer, two more volumes celebrate what would have been the chemist’s 90th birthday, on July 31st. In Primo Levi’s Universe: A Writer’s Journey (Palgrave Macmillan, July), Sam Magavern, an occasional poet and SUNY Buffalo law professor, admires Levi as a “Renaissance man”—a scientist who penned remarkable books in several literary genres—and weaves in readings of Levi’s writing along with reflections on his life.

Magavern’s book, with a preface by Nextbook Press’s own Jonathan Rosen, offers an intriguing contrast to another release from the same publisher. For while Magavern lauds Levi’s embrace of humanist values, Jonathan Druker’s Primo Levi and Humanism after Auschwitz: Posthumanist Reflections (Palgrave Macmillan, June) argues that “the acute blindness of [Levi’s] humanism reveals nearly as much about the origins of meanings of Auschwitz as do his penetrating insights.” For Drucker, in other words, even Levi’s intelligence and thoughtfulness cannot obscure the troubling fact that Germans’ embrace of Enlightenment thought failed to prevent, and to some degree led to, the Nazi genocide. Wasn’t humanism itself, Druker proposes, indelibly tainted by the Holocaust?

Along with the studies devoted entirely to Levi, his works and life continue to figure prominently in thoughtful reflections on the Holocaust, aesthetics, and testimony. For example, in Philosophical Witnessing: The Holocaust as Presence (Brandeis, June), which explores the ways in which philosophical inquiries complement other approaches to the study and memorializing of the Holocaust, Berel Lang cites Levi while explaining why he feels some literary works constitute “moral misrepresentation.” “Would it make no difference to our reading of him,” Lang asks, “if we learned that Primo Levi had spent the war years in an alpine village, and only upon returning to Turin imagined a year in Auschwitz?” This is a rhetorical question worth contemplating, at least briefly.

Levi’s a sensible example for Lang, because his accounts of the concentration camps, while undoubtedly literary, remain unimpeachable as testimony. Yet the question of how to handle witness accounts—which are as reliable or unreliable as the witnesses themselves, and as dynamic as all memories—applies not only to those who recorded their experiences in acclaimed memoirs. Edited by Jürgen Matthäus, Approaching an Auschwitz Survivor: Holocaust Testimony and Its Transformations (Oxford, August) focuses on one much less famous survivor, Helen “Zippi” Spitzer Tichauer, and presents the results of a handful of professional Holocaust scholars’ approaching her experiences through their own methodological and theoretical perspectives. As the number of living survivors dwindles, the challenges of interpreting testimony reliably and ethically, in the absence of the original witnesses, grow ever more consequential.

Whether Levi’s death in 1987 was suicide, as many have claimed, or simply a depressed man’s accident, remains unresolved, because the author left no note. André Gorz—conflicted son of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, intimate of Sartre, founder of Le Nouvel Observateur, and leading light of the French New Left—had no intention of fostering such ambiguity. Letter to D: A Love Story (Polity, June) is Gorz’s open love letter to his terminally ill wife of 58 years, published in French a year before the couple committed suicide together, knowing they could not bear to part even in death.

Charles Spivak, who immigrated to the U.S. from Russia in 1882, also could not stand idly by while his wife’s health deteriorated, but, as a doctor, he responded in an entirely different manner to her illness. Spivak relocated his wife to Colorado, and rose to national prominence as a leader of the American fight against tuberculosis, seeking a cure for the disease estimated to be responsible for 10% of all deaths in America at the turn of the 20th century. Jeanne Abrams tells Spivak’s story in Dr. Charles David Spivak: A Jewish Immigrant and the American Tuberculosis Movement (Colorado, July).

Given the challenges facing Jewish immigrants of his generation—recounted, among many other places, in M. E. Ravage’s 1917 memoir An American in the Making: The Life Story of an Immigrant, newly available in a reprint edited by the literary scholar and critic Steven Kellman (Rutgers, June)—Spivak’s medical accomplishments deserve our recognition.