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Johanna Baum Other Voices, v.2, n.1 (February 2000)
Copyright © 2000, Johanna Baum, all rights reserved
Israel has often been called the phoenix that rose from the ashes of the Holocaust. While some would argue against drawing such a monolithic connection between the founding of the Jewish State and the catastrophic mass murder of the European Jews during World War II, it cannot be denied that Israel has had to confront the memory of the Holocaust in a way that no other country has.1 Whether or not one accepts the connection, the coincidence of the founding of the Jewish State with the greatest tragedy of the Jewish people could not fail to have had a tremendous impact on the Israeli national identity and consciousness. The Zionist movement had been well underway for roughly fifty years by the time the persecution of the Jews of Europe began. Ironically, sympathy from the community of Jews then living in Palestine was not overly forthcoming. At the heart of Theodor Herzl's Zionist ideology was the belief— said to have been kindled by his witnessing of the Dreyfus trial in France—that Jews would not be able to live as a free people until they were secure in their own land. This belief bred a complex attitude among Palestine Jews towards their brethren in the Diaspora. The Zionists had made an effort to distance themselves from the Jews of the Diaspora by cultivating an image of the "Zionist pioneer who would be a new kind of Jew in a new kind of society—'a new man' out of choice and ideology rather than necessity and flight."2 By and large, they looked upon the Diaspora Jew as a weak, marginalized and unattractive character—quite similar in some respects to the Nazi image of the Jew. As critic Naomi Sokoloff writes, "Israel saw its role vis-à-vis the survivors of Nazism as one of rescue and rehabilitation, not of identification."3 This discomfort with the past they had quite deliberately left behind, both physically and mentally, was to define the way the first generation of Israelis would later incorporate both the survivors and the memory they represented into the collective psyche of the nation. The ambivalence of the Zionists in Palestine toward the unfolding disaster in Europe was largely dictated by self-interest. While the Zionist movement "had not envisioned the furnaces of Treblinka...their ideology assumed that, in the long run, Jews would not survive as Jews in the Diaspora; they would disappear, sooner or later, in one way or another."4 Furthermore, "Zionism suffered its own defeat in the Holocaust; as a movement, it failed. It had not, after all, persuaded the majority of Jews to leave Europe for Palestine while it was still possible to do so." 5 In some way, the Diaspora Jews were blamed for not having seen the danger and taken action, as had the Zionists. Many believed they had gone to their deaths like sheep to the slaughter. Moreover, the Zionists "identified rescue almost exclusively with immigration to Palestine,"6 seeing it as a way of building up their tiny settlement; when the majority of potential settlers were murdered, they saw it as a blow to the growth of the movement. Finally, the settlement in Palestine was simply unable to do much to help: they themselves were poor, relatively few in number, and still struggling to survive. The self-image of the fragile settlement clearly took precedence as a collective response to the Holocaust. They wanted neither to identify with the Diaspora, nor to face the fact that they—the "new, heroic Jews"— were too weak to help in any meaningful way.7 This complicated response to the Holocaust and its survivors continued and intensified after the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. While celebrating their heroic military victory over the British during the War of Independence, the Israelis found themselves face to face with refugees arriving from the displaced persons camps in the years following World War II. The survivors made up no insignificant part of the population of the young state.
The response was, from both sides, overwhelmingly one of silence. As is well known, survivors were unable and/or unwilling to articulate their experience. Aharon Appelfeld, who arrived as a refugee in Israel in the spring of 1946, has written of those first years that "Everything that had happened during the long war years was enclosed within us, silent and blind: an oppressive mass of mystery, which had no connection with consciousness."9 The Israelis, for their part, were unable and/or unwilling to listen. This silence reigned for the first decade of Israel's existence. The Kasztner trial of 1955 began to break the silence as it "opened the wounds of Jewish self-reckoning."10 But it was not until Adolf Eichmann was captured and brought to Israel to undergo trial for crimes against humanity in 1960 that the trauma began to emerge from the depths of the social unconscious. Haim Gouri has written of the period that "The trial legitimized the disclosure of one's past. What had been silenced and suppressed gushed out and became common knowledge."11 As the Israelis watched the televised trial and listened to the survivors testify publicly for the first time, the repressed trauma began to rise to the surface. In Moses and Monotheism, his work on the trauma underlying the birth of the Jewish people, Freud elucidates a framework for the way trauma affects not only an individual, but by analogy, the group or community. According to Freud, the psychological situation of the survivor of a traumatic experience is as follows:
Just as an individual may display symptoms resulting from a trauma and its repression, so a nation or a people can collectively display symptoms of a prior traumatic experience which lives on in its memory. Just as a person must undergo a process of healing, so must a people.13 Freud's framework applies astonishingly well to the situation in Israel after World War II. Freud contends that there were Jews who had been in Egypt and retained the memory of the Exodus and of the figure of Moses, as well as Jews who joined the tribe after this experience. "Both parties were equally concerned to deny that there had been an earlier religion [read: traumatic experience] and especially what it contained." 14 For the Exodus Jews, the motivation was the self-preserving "repression" of the traumatic experience they had endured; for the "newer" Jews, the motivation was the glorification of their new God and the desire to deny his foreignness. Quite similarly in Israel, Holocaust survivors who had come from Europe tended to repress their experiences in order to function, while native Israelis were concerned with the glorification of the Zionist enterprise and making themselves at home in Israel— which involved denying, to some extent, their connection with the Diaspora Jews and their horrible story. In his innovative and imaginative novel, See Under: Love, Israeli author David Grossman makes an attempt to communicate the misunderstandings and difficulties that arose when Israelis and survivors began the process of living together with the memory of the Holocaust in the Jewish State. As the Israeli critic Gershon Shaked writes, Grossman "asked how the second and third generation of survivors, the mental and spiritual inheritors of their parents' anxieties and traumas, can and will come to terms with a trauma that for them was not personal experience but an inherited psychological neurosis. The trauma was no longer repressed or expressed; it has become part of what Jung called the collective subconscious of the group." 15 Significantly, Grossman himself is not a survivor, nor the child of survivors. It is perhaps this personal distance which allows him to take what Shaked has called "a revolutionary approach to the subject."16 As Dori Laub and Nanette Auerhahn have written in their article on post-Holocaust generations, "Those not directly affected by the event may be precisely the ones capable of having the distance necessary for the use of metaphor." 17 The novel is divided into four sections, each of which can be read alone, but which are linked by the protagonist, Shlomo Efraim Neuman, known as Momik. The first section, also called "Momik," begins in 1959, one year before Eichmann was captured. Momik himself is nine years old but spends most of his time in the company of Holocaust survivors. He has grown up entirely within the "latency" or "incubation" period of the 1950's in Israel. The community suffers from what Freud calls a "traumatic neurosis" which "may be regarded as a direct expression of a 'fixation' to an early period of their past."18
Everyone in Momik's Jerusalem neighborhood of Beit Mazmil 20 is a victim of the traumatic neurosis in one way or another, whether having personally suffered the trauma or having experienced it secondarily, through its aftereffects, like Momik. The reaction of the people in the community can be separated into two responses, corresponding to Freud's "positive and negative" effects. There are those who, like the more marginal survivors, who are fixated to the trauma and those, like his parents, who attempt to avoid the issue entirely. Together they form the "compromise" of which Freud speaks, and which characterises the illness of the community as a whole. Momik is truly a victim of this compromise– "the neurosis proper"–for he sees the effects of both responses, but understands the reasons for neither. This situation produces the conflicts which he is unable to resolve. Freud describes the phenomenon of latency as "the appearance of inexplicable manifestations which call for an explanation, and the strict condition of an early, and subsequently forgotten, experience."21 This phenomenon precisely describes the world into which Momik was born. Himself the child of survivors, Momik is aware that he is different from other children his age, but he does not understand why. As critic Anthony Winner has written, "It appears to him that somehow, sometime, in the incomprehensible place named 'Over There,' something did something that has turned all those he knows—parents, relatives, and acquaintances—into stricken, fractured beings."22 His days are riddled with strange rituals and behaviors which he takes part in without receiving any explanation – for example, he has listened to the "special radio program Greetings from New Immigrants and Locating Lost Relations" every day at lunch since he first learned how to read "in case they called out one of the names on the list Papa wrote down for him on a piece of paper."23 Only, Momik doesn't realize that the names he "knows by heart" have any meaning beyond his understanding that there are "a lot of lost Neumans wandering around Over There."24 However Momik does realize that there is something going on which has not been revealed to him—which it is, in fact, forbidden to ask about. Momik makes it his mission to find out the secret because "whatever it was that happened Over There must have really been something for everyone to try so hard not to talk about it."25 The only person who will tell him anything at all is his neighbor Bella.
Thanks to his own persistent gathering of clues (Momik records them all in a special notebook) and Bella's meager additions, Momik has managed to formulate a hypothesis about what exactly went on Over There. Unfortunately, his information is faulty and what he does know is laden with holes and misconceptions. One day Momik succeeds in getting his father to tell him a bit about his childhood, Over There. He has just read some Sholem Aleichem stories in school and the memory prompts his father to speak. "with your own eyes you could see the Beast open its mouth a little, to let Papa tumble right out to Momik."27 But when Momik tries to recreate one of the experiences his father has shared with him, how he used to "walk home from cheder all by himself on snowy nights, lighting his way with a special lamp made out of a radish with a candle stuck inside it,"28 Momik is surprised to find that his father reacts not with love, but with anger.
Psychoanalyst Ilany Kogan has written of the second generation's characteristic "need to live out their parents' past."30 Momik's sad attempt to connect with his parents is an utter failure. The brief access his father allowed him into the past is cut off entirely, leaving him more bewildered than ever. This passage testifies not only to the father's "avoidance" response, but to the gap of experience between the first and second generation, and their inability to communicate across the divide. Though Momik's parents make every effort to shield him from the story of their past, their repressed experience returns in distorted symptoms and behaviors. Momik is quite aware of his parents' seemingly strange needs, but does not understand the reasons behind them. On a typical day when they return home from work (they own a lottery kiosk), "their eyes devoured him, and even though Momik could actually feel himself being devoured, he just stood there quietly and let them do it because he knew that was what they needed."31 Supper is an equally voracious episode because "Mama and Papa chew with all their might. They sweat and their eyes bulge out of their heads and Momik pretends to be eating while he watches them carefully.... He only tastes what's on the tip of his fork, but it sticks in his throat because he's so nervous. This is just how it is—his parents have to eat a lot of food every night to make them strong. Once they escaped from death, but it isn't going to let them get away a second time, that's for sure."32 Momik wonders how his father's fingers would feel when they touch you, but doesn't know, "because they don't."33
This bedroom scene highlights the fact that appearances are valued by the survivors as they attempt to hide not only their past, but the symptoms which continue to plague them. Their attempts fall short, however, as Momik is quite aware of their secret needs and the behaviors which mask them. As critic Naomi Sokoloff writes of Momik's parents, "The word 'always' is frequently associated with them, suggesting that they are governed by habit or automatized behavior inappropriate to present circumstances."35 They are ritualized and compulsive, hiding behind a facade of normality which anyone, even Momik, can see through. The latent situation is brought to the forefront and Momik's efforts are intensified when a relative, thought to have perished in the camps, is dropped off to live with them in 1959. Like the presence of Eichmann in Israel, this new addition in Momik's neighborhood (and home) triggers various events and the release of information. Anshel Wasserman personifies the "return of the repressed" which, "after a long period of latency...came to life again and created phenomena similar in structure and tendency to neurotic symptoms."36 Instead of welcoming the survivor in, the community receives Anshel with shock and ambivalence. Even Bella, the strongest among them, "suddenly turned as white as this wall and everybody knows she isn't scared of anything, but she wouldn't go anywhere near the ambulance, she only edged closer to Momik, who was doing Bible homework at one of the little tables, and said, 'Vay iz mir,' a relative now?"37 Momik's father turns red in the face and his mother passes out, while Momik quietly takes his hand, intrigued by the fact that "there was a number on the new grandfather's arm, like Papa's and Aunt Idka's and Bella's."38 The hysteria greeting Anshel's arrival reflects the fragility of the neighborhood's apparently calm atmosphere. The wounds are just under the surface, and Anshel's presence is an unwanted reminder of the past that they are all struggling to bury. Anshel quickly finds himself at the center of the entourage of broken people living in the neighborhood, all of whom are survivors like himself. In his work on trauma and community, Kai Erikson has found that such a "gathering of the wounded" is common among survivors because the experience of trauma creates a "sense of difference...where people are drawn to others similarly marked."39 Each member of the peculiar group displays a different compulsive behavior. Among them are Ginzburg and Zeidman, an inseparable pair also known as Max and Moritz after the children's storybook characters. "Max and Moritz never talked to anyone outside of each other. Ginzburg who was filthy and smelly always walked around saying, Who am I who am I, but that's because he lost his memories on account of those Nazis, may-their- name-be-blotted-out, and the small one, Zeidman, just smiled at everyone all the time and they said he was empty inside. They never went anywhere without each other..."40 Yedidya Munin sleeps in the empty synagogue and is considered obscene, Mr. Aaron Marcus (Bella's father-in-law) has a condition where his face "was twitching and cracking into a thousand and one faces you wouldn't want to see," and then there is Mrs. Hannah Zeitrin, a widow whose second husband deserted her and who runs naked through the streets at night, daring God to show her His face. Bella is the protector—the "healthy" survivor41 who keeps Ginzburg and Zeidman from being kicked out of the storeroom which serves as their home, and takes the frantic Hannah Zeitrin in at night. Despite the fact that Momik calls him Grandfather, Anshel Wasserman is actually his Grandma Henny's brother. Anshel had been at a home for the insane for the past 10 years (since 1949). Though he had been silent and no one knew his story, as the hospital worker who delivers him recounts, Anshel has suddenly begun to speak.
Anshel continues to speak for the duration of his five month stay with the Neumans. After following him around for several days with a notebook and pen, using his "systematic approach" to record Grandfather's gibberish in Hebrew letters,"43 Momik notices that "what Grandfather was saying wasn't all gibberish, in fact he was telling somebody a story, just as Momik had thought all along."44 Anshel's arrival also prompts Momik to go searching in the cellar of his house—a site which is clearly a metaphor for the family's unconscious. Momik had always been afraid to go down there, but now feels it is necessary to begin digging through their subterranean, subconscious reservoir of memory. After digging through piles of things Grandma Henny brought with her from Over There, Momik finds "a notebook with Grandma's Yiddish notes, all her memories like from the days when she still had a memory."45 This trip to the cellar spurs Momik's own memory and he recalls that
As if confirming his mother's fears, entering the cellar triggers the symptoms of Momik's obsessional neurosis. Confronted with the memories it holds, "he wanted to get out fast but suddenly he had an idea that was so strange he just stood still and forgot what he wanted to do next, but his thingy knew and he made it out just in time to piss under the stairwell, which is what always happens to him when he goes down to the cellar."47 Momik adds reciting the story from memory to his repertoire of compulsive behaviors which include memorizing the numbers on the survivors' arms, collecting hints about "Over There" and hunting the "Nazi Beast." In a role akin to that of the Freudian psychoanalyst, Momik pieces together the fragmented stories he is able to retrieve from those around him, attempting to form a coherent and sensible narrative whole. He spends hours in the public library researching the Holocaust, but cannot reconcile the facts he reads with the clues he has gathered from his relatives and neighbors. The problem is that the very nature of what happened Over There resists such coherent narrative, which is precisely the reason why the tale is both so difficult for the survivors to tell and for Momik to interpret. Surrounded by the collective neurosis the Holocaust has wrought on the society in which he lives, Momik struggles to conquer the Nazi Beast and save himself and his loved ones. Momik embodies the difficult reconciliation which plagued Israeli identity during the post-World War II years. As Haim Gouri has written, "The Eichmann trial, 'historic' in the fullest sense of the term, compelled an entire nation to undergo a process of self-reckoning and overwhelmed it with a painful search for its identity. Who are we? On the one hand Israelis, free in our homeland, speaking our national tongue, served in an army that had not known defeat. On the other hand we belong to the slaughtered Jewish people. This dual identity was not without its complexities, and had to be properly nurtured not to cause further suffering."48 At once a victim of Jewish memory (and in particular, his own family's past) and a native- born Israeli, Momik takes an aggressive role in fighting the past which obsesses him and everyone he knows. Identifying with the "partisan" fighter figure, Momik favors the Israeli approach to conquering weakness and resolves to "fight for his parents and for the others too."49 Frustrated with Grandfather Anshel's inability to fight his own inner demons, Momik scorns his weakness and retaliates with his own powerful plan of attack.
Momik displays what Israeli psychoanalyst Rafael Moses has called a "countershtetl mentality" produced by "the current Israeli need to actively defend oneself, to not allow oneself to become the passive object of the Gentiles' cruel and barbaric assault, as had been wont to happen in the shtetl of yore during the pogroms in Greater Russia and Poland."51 The Israeli need to maintain an active defense has also been termed the "Masada Complex," referring to the Jews who decided to commit mass suicide rather than surrender the Masada fortress to the Romans in the year 73 C.E. In his hunt for the Nazi Beast, Momik has assembled a veritable haunted house in the cellar of his family's home. The day Grandfather arrived,
In it are found all of the markers of the event which stands at the center of the collective neurosis. He has covered his father's overcoat with yellow stars and taped the pictures of the Holocaust he'd copied from library books onto the walls. Bella unwittingly gives Momik his most valuable clue as to the origins of the monster when "she let it slip out that the Nazi Beast could come out of any kind of animal if it got the right care and nourishment."53 With this in mind, Momik captures a hedgehog, a turtle, a toad, a lizard, a kitten, and a young raven, all of which he locks in cages in the cellar. He tries all kinds of tricks to get the Beast to come out, but nothing works. Momik is convinced that the Beast won't emerge in his presence because he isn't "Jewish enough."54 As his delusion grows, he begins to think that what he really needs to do is "get hold of a real Jew, someone who actually came from Over There."55 He brings Anshel down to the cellar several days in a row where they "would sit on the floor together, eating pieces of dry bread, as Momik softly sang partisan songs, in both Hebrew and Yiddish, and recited prayers from Papa's High Holiday prayer book."56 This having failed to conjure the Beast, Momik decides to enlist the help of the other survivors. Momik has, in distorted form, recreated a version of the Holocaust as he understands it. While he is unable to bring out the Nazi Beast, the gruesome experience of being locked in a dark basement with other survivors, Holocaust paraphernalia and several putrid, dying animals does bring out the stories of the survivors. Momik
Momik's forgetting of the story as soon as it is told is a defense mechanism designed to repress what cannot be integrated. Unfortunately, the Beast is stronger than he is, and Momik's symptoms increase and intensify until the shocking final scene of the novel's first section, when he suffers a sort of nervous breakdown. While his family is aware of the psychic damage they have inflicted—his mother comments to Bella, "I don't need a doctor to see what this is, Bella, I should be a doctor, a doctor of tsuris, and what Shlomo has, no doctor can help, I tell you, we brought it with us from Over There, and it sits on us here and here and here, and only God can help..."58—they are equally unable to help him. As Freud wrote, if "the sovereignty of an inner psychical reality has been established over the reality of the outer world; the way to insanity is open."59 Momik is saved from this fate by escaping his environment: he is sent to boarding school the following fall. The remaining three sections of See Under: Love constitute various approaches to the process of working through the trauma. The year is 1983 and Momik is now thirty-three years old. He has married and become a writer; the three sections entitled "Bruno," "Wasserman," and "The Complete Encyclopedia of Kazik's Life" are the works he has been struggling for years to produce. Clearly, his childhood obsession has not abated—Momik calls himself "a regular Holocaust homing pigeon"60—but has been sublimated into artistic productivity. Despite his own unhappy childhood, Momik has been compelled to repeat his parents' mistakes. He communicates his fear of the future to his wife and raises his son Yariv cautiously and without love, in order to make him strong and prepare him for the inevitable disaster which is to come. The three remaining stories are fantasies which speak to the possibility of healing through artistic endeavor. Ilany Kogan writes of the "complex interplay between fantasy and reality" at play in the lives of the children of survivors. She sees this as due to the fact that "their minds were permeated with traces of their parents' experiences, they lived in a double reality—their own and that of their parents."61 Through literature, Momik writes himself into the Holocaust narrative; he accomplishes this by way of transferential relationships with two victims —the writer Bruno Schulz and his Grandfather Anshel. Furthermore, through "transposition," a concept which refers to the "second generation's fantasy of living during the Holocaust and rescuing the victims,"62 Momik can actually resurrect these two lost figures by merging with them and thus giving them the ability to tell their stories. This identification allows him to metaphorically realize and integrate the alternate realities which make up his personality: writer, "survivor," savior, and victim. In "Bruno," Grossman balances the narrative of Momik's own struggle to live and write with a fantastical scene in which Momik merges with the Polish writer Bruno Schulz, who was murdered in the Drohobycz ghetto in 1942. This mingling of the characters is facilitated by the sea, who is personified as a woman—for, in this alternate reality, Bruno did not die in the ghetto, but escaped and fled to the sea, who becomes his lover/protectress. Under her loving care, he turns into a salmon. Momik is in search of Schulz's major work, "the lost novel titled The Messiah, in which the myth of the coming of the Messiah would symbolize a return to the happy perfection that existed in the beginning—in Schulzian terms, the return to childhood."63 Momik sees Bruno as part of "a fragile network of weak links across the world,"64 which includes Munch, Kafka, Mann, Durer, Hogarth, Goya, and others whom he believes to have been in contact, at least momentarily, with "the truth."65 As Shaked writes, "Life in the world of imagination is a refuge from life in grotesque reality."66 Sadly, however, Momik finds Bruno's version of the Messiah's coming—a world in which people exist without memory—sorely lacking in redemptive value, and life cannot be lived wholly in the imagination. "Wasserman" tells Momik's version of the story his grandfather Anshel was "locked inside of," as reconstructed from the bits and pieces he was able to decipher as a child. The symbiotic relationship between Momik and Anshel seemingly benefits them both: it gives Anshel a chance to "heal" through returning to the concentration camp to tell his story and allows Momik to enter the abyss with a guide who "knew the way out."67 But this surrealistic Anshel, who is incapable of dying, does not merely tell his story. In an inversion of his pen-namesake Scheherazade's bargain to save her life through telling stories, Anshel bargains with the Nazi Herr Neigel to tell him stories nightly in order to earn his death, and thus release from the hell of the concentration camps. This deal turns into an attempt to prove the power of narrative, for Anshel eventually succeeds in destroying the Nazi with his story—a small triumph for both himself and Momik. Finally, in "The Complete Encyclopedia of Kazik's Life," the story which Anshel told Herr Neigel is revealed in fragmentary, encyclopedic form. The story's disintegration into encyclopedia entries signifies the need to redefine the most common of terms, such as "love" (to which the novel's title refers), in the post-Holocaust era. Each of the survivors from Momik's neighborhood makes his appearance in the encyclopedia, where the symptoms which plagued him as a survivor are explicated by the revelation of the particular trauma which each endured during the war. The story which destroyed Neigel was truly their collective wish and creation; the birth of a child named Kazik, whose life is compressed into a span of twenty-four hours. As Anshel tells the Nazi in the final lines of the book, "All of us prayed for one thing: that he might end his life knowing nothing of war. Do you understand, Herr Neigel? We asked so little: for a man to live in this world from birth to death and know nothing of war."68 As Kazik's life attests, this too, is impossible. While Anshel may be able to force one Nazi to do away with himself as a result of touching the remnant of humanity which survives in him, the horror which the Nazis unleashed into the world cannot be escaped or avoided. And thus, it may be said that like Kazik, in this day and age we all have to learn of war, and experience the trauma in some small way. David Grossman's novel, See Under: Love, is a rich case study for Freud's theoretical framework of traumatic neurosis on both the individual and the group. Momik, "an offspring of victimization and silence,"69 may be said to stand as the representative of an entire generation—the children who grew up in the silence which overwhelmed the subject of the Holocaust in 1950s Israel. As evidenced by Momik's childhood and later preoccupation, the "violent self-repression"70 which characterised the defense mechanism of many of the survivors was no more successful in preventing the transmission of the neurosis to the younger generation than the compulsion to remember which characterised Anshel Wasserman and the strange group of survivors surrounding him. The collective neurosis is as powerful as its hold on each of the individuals in its midst. As Kai Erikson has written,
In Israel, "the Holocaust was nowhere and everywhere." 72 Though the way to memory and healing was opened in the 1960's, and the Holocaust has become a topic of open discussion—one might even say obsession—in Israel, as Momik's adult endeavours indicate, the process of healing is continuous, and there is no certain path. Momik's role as writer forefronts the role of narrative in the working-through of traumatic experience. In See Under: Love, the writing process is interconnected not only with the possibility of the individual to work through trauma as Momik does, but also the power to destroy one's enemies, if only in fantasy. Finally, writing is indicative of the possibility for collective healing; the very appearance of this novel on the Israeli literary scene testifies to the shift in the nation's ability to articulate and reflect on its past and present experience.
Endnotes:
1. As Gershon Shaked writes, "The Holocaust is not just one of the many subjects of life and literature in Israel; it is, to a certain extent, the subject in and through which the society justifies its existence. Holocaust literature has a different function in Israel than elsewhere. Perhaps only two peoples, the Israelis and the Germans, must grapple with this material as a social entity; they cannot ignore it, for it is part of their national identity." Shaked, Gershon. "The Children of the Heart and the Monster: David Grossman: See Under: Love, A Review Essay." Modern Judaism 9: (3) October 1989, (311). 2. Segev, Tom. The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993, (98). 3. Sokoloff, Naomi, "David Grossman: Translating the 'Other' in 'Momik.' IN: Yudkin, Leon I. Israeli Writers Consider the "Outsider." New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press in conjunction with the International Center for University Teaching of Jewish Civilization, 1993, (39). 4. Segev, 97. 5. Segev, 98. 6. Segev, 98. 7. They were still under the control of the British and were unable to bring in a large number of refugees legally. Illegal efforts were made, but the numbers of refugees brought in this way remained low. 8. Segev, 154. 9. Appelfeld, Aharon, "The Awakening." IN: Hartman, Geoffrey H., ed. Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1994, (149). 10. Gouri, Haim, "Facing the Glass Booth." IN: Hartman, Geoffrey H., ed. Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1994, (154). Israel Rudolf Kasztner, a prominent Hungarian Jew was accused by another survivor of collaborating with the Nazis in order to save Jewish lives. 11. Gouri, 155. 12. Freud, Sigmund. Moses and Monotheism. New York: Vintage Books, 1939, (84). 13. See also Henry Rousso's psychoanalytic interpretation of post-World War II France in The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. 14. Freud, 85. 15. Shaked, Gershon. "The Children of the Heart and the Monster: David Grossman: See Under: Love, A Review Essay." Modern Judaism 9: (3) October 1989, (314). 16. Shaked, 312. 17. Laub, Dori and Auerhahn, Nanette C. Reverberations of Genocide: Its Expression in the Conscious and Unconscious of Post- Holocaust Generations." IN: Luel, Steven A. and Marcus, Paul, eds. Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Holocaust: Selected Essays. Holocaust Awareness Institute, Center for Judaic Studies, University of Denver and New York: Ktav Publishing House, Inc., 1984. (155). 18. Freud, 96. 19. Freud, 95-96. 20. Said to be a fictional name for the Jerusalem neighborhood Kiryat HaYovel. 21. Freud, 90. 22. Winner, Anthony. "Story's Gamble with History." Kenyon Review, 19: (2), Spring 1997, (161). 23. Grossman, David. See Under: Love. New York: The Noonday Press, 1989, (4). 24. Grossman, 37. 25. Grossman, 29. 26. Grossman, 13. 27. Grossman, 60. 28. Grossman, 61. 29. Grossman, 63. 30. Kogan, Ilany. The Cry of Mute Children: A Psychoanalytic Perspective of the Second Generation of the Holocaust. London: Free Association Books, 1995, (148). 31. Grossman, 48. 32. Grossman, 48-49. 33. Grossman, 50. 34. Grossman, 51. 35. Sokoloff, 42. 36. Freud, Sigmund. Moses and Monotheism. NY: Vintage Books, 1939 (101), my italics. 37. Grossman, 3. 38. Grossman, 6. 39. Erikson, Kai. "Notes on Trauma and Community." IN: Caruth, Cathy. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, (186). 40. Grossman, 6. 41. In Moses and Monotheism, Freud writes of the possibility that "with one constitution something produces a trauma whereas with another it does not." (92) 42. Grossman, 5. 43. Grossman, 19. 44. Grossman, 19-20. 45. Grossman, 8. 46. Grossman, 8. 47. Grossman, 8. 48. Gouri, Haim, "Facing the Glass Booth." IN: Hartman, Geoffrey H., ed. Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1994. (155). 49. Grossman, 30. 50. Grossman, 85. 51. Moses, Rafael. "An Israeli Psychoanalyst Looks Back in 1983." IN: Luel, Steven A. and Marcus, Paul, eds. Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Holocaust: Selected Essays. Holocaust Awareness Institute, Center for Judaic Studies, University of Denver and New York: Ktav Publishing House, Inc., 1984. (61). 52. Grossman, 30. 53. Grossman, 13. 54. Grossman, 78. 55. Grossman, 78. 56. Grossman, 80. 57. Grossman, 84. 58. Grossman, 76. 59. Grossman, 96. 60. Grossman, 151. 61. Kogan, 149. 62. Kogan, 154. 63. Schulz, Bruno. The Street of Crocodiles. New York: Penguin Books USA, 1963, (18). 64. Grossman, 91. 65. Grossman, 91. 66. Shaked, 318. 67. Grossman, 188. 68. Grossman, 452. 69. Winner, 161. 70. Appelfeld, 151. 71. Erikson, 190. 72. Gouri, 154. Works Cited: Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Freud, Sigmund. Moses and Monotheism. Trans. Katherine Jones. New York: Vintage Books, 1939. Grossman, David. See Under: Love. Trans. Betsy Rosenberg. New York: The Noonday Press, 1989. Grossman, David. Ayen Erekh "Ahavah." Israel: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1987. Hartman, Geoffrey H. Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1994. Kogan, Ilany. The Cry of Mute Children: A Psychoanalytic Perspective of the Second Generation of the Holocaust. London: Free Association Books, 1995. Luel, Steven A. and Marcus, Paul, eds. Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Holocaust: Selected Essays. New York: Ktav Publishing House, Inc. and the Holocaust Awareness Institute, Center for Judaic Studies, University of Denver, 1984. Schulz, Bruno. The Street of Crocodiles. Trans. Celina Wieniewska. New York: Penguin Books USA, 1963. Segev, Tom. The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust. Trans. Haim Watzman. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993. Shaked, Gershon. "The Children of the Heart and the Monster: David Grossman: See Under: Love, A Review Essay." Modern Judaism, 9: (3) October, 1989, 311- 323. Winner, Anthony. "Story's Gamble with History." Kenyon Review, 19: (2) Spring 1997, 148-169. |
